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John Bye Profile picture
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7 Feb, 9 tweets, 9 min read
Covid crank Michael Yeadon has left Twitter in disgrace after being outed as a racist.

He wasn't banned.
He wasn't hacked.
They're his own words.

From hundreds of awful tweets, automatically archived on Wayback Machine a year or more ago, before anyone knew or cared who he was.
In fact, before covid, one of Michael Yeadon's main themes was .. er .. rampant Islamaphobia.




There are anti-immigrant posts citing Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech and calling an old French novel about immigrants taking over the west "a good approximation of reality".




He also has a Tommy Robinson style obsession with gangs grooming underage girls.




These posts aren't out of character.

They are his character.

Crude, rude, racist and sexist.



After Corbyn quits and Brexit "gets done" (the main topics of his oldest tweets), most of his output is racist drivel until covid hits the UK.

He just hid it well when he started posting nonsense about covid and became unexpectedly "Twitter famous".
These posts aren't fake.
His account wasn't hacked.

These posts were archived when they were first posted, over a year ago, before he had even mentioned covid, and are mixed in with posts that clearly are from him (about his past, pharmaceutical patent laws etc).
If you don't believe me, copy and paste this URL into your browser (including the * on the end that Twitter doesn't recognise as part of the address) and look for yourself -

web.archive.org/web/*/http://T…*

January and February 2020 were particularly bad. I stopped after that.
To make it easier, here's the archive URL as a bit.ly link:

bit.ly/2N8uCkY

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
31 Jan
Sceptics make wild claims about the number of deaths caused by lockdown, but there's no evidence to support them.

The vast majority of excess deaths last year were directly caused by ("from", not "with") covid-19.

So what do ONS and PHE data and academic studies actually show?
Removing covid deaths, you can see more clearly that despite 10 months of varying levels of restrictions, the only time there have been large numbers of non-covid excess deaths was during the first wave.

Mostly elderly care home residents registered as dying from dementia.
We now know that many elderly people suffering from covid experience confusion and delirium, often without a cough or fever.

This is obviously easily mistaken for other, pre-existing conditions.

The same thing is thought to happen with flu each winter.

bbc.co.uk/news/health-54…
Read 29 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
1 Jan
The latest Test & Trace report is out, covering the week before Christmas.

Cases in London and the South East were soaring, and an outbreak of coronavirus at the Lighthouse Lab in Milton Keynes caused further issues in the testing system as demand for tests rapidly increased.
There was another big increase in testing as demand rose, with increasing numbers of quick but less sensitive Lateral Flow Tests being used to screen asymptomatic people.

In total 2.6 million tests were done. But a higher percentage than last week were positive.
If you separate Lateral Flow (which are ONLY used on asymptomatic people) and PCR (which are used on both symptomatic and asymptomatic people) tests, positivity for PCR is back to the peak last seen at the beginning of November, while positivity for LFTs is rising fast now too.
Read 15 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
28 Dec 20
It's sad we still need to say this, but false positives are NOT driving rising cases.

In the summer the False Positive Rate (FPR) at lots of labs was below 0.1%.

For example, Milton Keynes' FPR for the ONS Infection Survey was less than 0.04% in July.

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati… Image
In fact, when prevalence was low, labs all over the world had less than 0.1% of tests give a positive result.

So their FPR (the % of people they tested who didn't have the virus but got a positive result) must also have been less than 0.1% at the time.

So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with PCR. It doesn't conjure up lots of false positives out of thin air when nobody has the virus.

Any false positives would mostly come from cross contamination or errors, either when the sample is taken or at the lab when it's processed. Image
Read 27 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
26 Dec 20
This week's Test & Trace report covers the week to December 16th, when cases in London and the South East were surging and falls in the North and Midlands levelling off.

There were also issues in the Lighthouse Lab system, apparently caused by a shortage of reagents. Image
As demand soared, almost 2 million tests were done in a week in England, which is amazing when you consider we struggled to test a few thousand people 9 months ago.

Despite this, the number of positive results rose much faster than testing, with positivity rates climbing again. ImageImageImageImage
Breaking it down by type of test done:

The new Lateral Flow Tests are still only being used on people without symptoms, so positivity is very low but rose sharply this week.

Some (but not all) PCR tests are used on people with symptoms so have higher positivity. Over 10% again. Image
Read 19 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
24 Dec 20
The interim report on the Liverpool community testing trial is now out, with more complete results for the sensitivity of the tests, as well as lots of additional information and data about the trial.

h/t @angelaraffle and @scb909

liverpool.ac.uk/coronavirus/re…
Firstly, more results have been released, showing the Innova LFTs only found 40% of people who were PCR positive.

More relevantly, they missed 17.6% of people positive at Ct 20 or lower, and 45.5% at Ct 20-25.

So overall they missed a third of people with "higher viral load". Image
Interestingly though, when they went back and reassessed test results based on photos of the devices (with a third person checking if the result differed from the initial one), their performance improved significantly. Finding 83% of PCR positives at or below Ct 25. Image
Read 13 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
22 Dec 20
2,800 lorries are now stranded in Kent, with many drivers not even having access to basic facilities. The government appears to have done nothing to help them.
Meanwhile a Sikh charity that's more used to aiding victims of wars and natural disasters is stepping in to provide bottled water and hundreds of hot meals for stranded drivers.

The good news is France has agreed to reopen the border.

The bad news is this only applies to EU nationals and residents, and they must have had a negative PCR test within the last 72 hours.

So it may be a couple of days before things get moving.

Read 6 tweets

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