John Bye Profile picture
May 20, 2021 7 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Update on the situation in Bolton, courtesy of the covid dashboard.

First up, cases are still rising rapidly. Daily case numbers are almost back to the peak they reached during the second wave that hit the North West hard in the autumn.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?… Image
This is despite 65% of Bolton's adult population now having had one vaccine dose and 37% having had both.

Not far behind the national average (70% / 40%).

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccin… Image
Probably at least in part thanks to vaccinations, infection rates are still relatively low amongst the over 60s.

But they are now clearly rising.

Note: this data is a few days older than the raw case numbers, so the rates will be even higher now.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?… Image
Zooming in shows more clearly how cases in the over 60s have accelerated recently.

As cases usually work their way up the age groups over time, this is something to keep an eye on. Is vaccination enough to stop them rising much further, despite the more transmissible variant? Image
Meanwhile patient numbers in hospital with covid at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust (including Royal Bolton Hospital) remain very low, but are now rising too.

Again, as they always lag behind cases we have to hope vaccination keeps them from rising as steeply as last autumn. Image
The rise has prompted the hospital to open up an additional ward for covid positive patients, with the expectation that the recent surge in cases will inevitably result in more people arriving in hospital over the coming weeks.

And at the other end of the scale, infection rates amongst school age children are currently higher than for any other age group, and higher than they've been in any previous wave.

1 in 135 children in Bolton aged 10-14 tested positive last week alone.

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More from @_johnbye

Jun 29
Last week Andrew Bridgen claimed Ukraine might be working on a dirty bomb to use in a "false flag" attack in Europe. Unsurprisingly his comments have now been amplified by the Russian military and state media, and echoed back by Russian assets and useful idiots here in the UK. 🧵


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Andrew Bridgen had an "incredibly productive" meeting with the Russian ambassador in London earlier this year.

Since then he's claimed Rishi Sunak called the election to avoid being a wartime PM, and that Ukraine's planning a "false flag" nuclear attack in Europe "like 9/11". 😳

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Meanwhile Russian assets and useful idiots here in the UK have been amplifying these claims of false flag attacks and dirty bombs.

John and Irina Mappin at least are known to have visited the Russian embassy recently, and all frequently share Russian propaganda on social media.


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Read 4 tweets
Jun 28
Reform's manifesto (or "contract") panders to conspiracy theorists, falsely linking covid vaccines to excess deaths and pledging to "reject" the WEF, WHO and digital currencies.

Unsurprising, given many of their supporters and candidates have rather odd views on these topics. 🧵


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Nigel Farage and his Reform Party recently got an endorsement from Laurence Fox of the similarly named Reclaim Party.

Farage even recorded a video with Fox, who has repeatedly compared the Pride flag to the Swastika and promoted Islamophobia.

With friends like these...
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Laurence Fox's fiancée also took selfies with Farage while out supporting him in Clacton.

She's recently claimed (amongst many other things) that the pandemic didn't happen and that "they" manipulate the weather to rob us of vital Vitamin D. Right before a heat wave started. 🤦‍♂️

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Read 8 tweets
Jun 27
Reform's candidate in Edinburgh South West, Ian Harper, was a vocal backer of ivermectin, and the grifters and frauds who promoted it as a cure for covid. In his bio for Reform, he talks about a "globalist agenda" seeking to "collapse society".

Not the worst thing he's said. 🧵

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Ian Harper's first Twitter account was suspended, and he's now locked his second (presumably to stop voters seeing it). Luckily the internet (and its archives) remembers.

Most of his pandemic posts seem to consist of vastly exaggerated claims about the wonders of ivermectin. 🙄


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Unsurprisingly Reform's Ian Harper was an enthusiastic supporter of Tess Lawrie, founder of a British group called BIRD which promoted the dewormer ivermectin as a miracle "cure" for covid, much of it based on flawed or outright fraudulent studies.





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Read 11 tweets
Jun 25
Reform's candidate in Twickenham is a member of anti-vax misinformation group HART. In leaked chat logs, Alex Starling called vaccinating children "a perverted abomination", and talked about sneaking HART content and campaigns into articles he wrote for UK news site Reaction. 🧵

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If you've not come across them before, HART identify as "a group of highly qualified doctors, scientists and other experts" who just "question the narrative". But many of their members believe covid vaccines were designed to depopulate the Earth! 😳

Alex Starling fit right in at HART, calling wearing masks at school "depraved cruelty" and vaccinating children against covid "a perverted abomination". He also repeatedly suggested covid vaccines work in the same way lions "work" on a herd of zebras, "by taking out the weakest".


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Read 4 tweets
Jun 18
John Mappin appeared on Russian TV at the weekend, claiming the British public doesn't support Ukraine. Because he spoke to a few friends, and they all love Russia too. 🤷‍♂️

Mappin often retweets Putin's propaganda, and last year claimed he could instantly end the Ukraine war. 🤔
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Russian asset / useful idiot John Mappin has also been out campaigning for Nigel Farage in Clacton-on-Sea. Haven't they suffered enough already?

Mappin previously backed Andrew Bridgen, after the MP compared covid vaccines to the Holocaust. Just the man you want on your side. 🤦‍♂️
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John Mappin rather optimistically claimed afterwards that Nigel Farage is going to be Prime Minister, hailing him for "one of the most brilliant and sanest speeches in this island's history". 🤪

But then he's already fallen for Scientology, QAnon, and covid conspiracy theories.

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Read 4 tweets
Jun 6
The BMJ has had to issue a statement after everyone from The Telegraph and former Brexit Minister David Davis to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists claimed that covid vaccines may be responsible for excess deaths, based on a dubious study published in @BMJPublicHealth. 🧵



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The Telegraph's @sarahknapton has a history of this. Two years ago she tried to blame excess deaths (including some covid deaths!) on lockdowns, with a clickbait headline that the article (behind a paywall) failed to support. This is more of the same.

As for the BMJ article that inspired all of this, it simply takes excess death data from 47 "western" countries (ranging from the US and UK to Australia and New Zealand to Bulgaria and Moldova), adds them all up, then engages in a lot of vague arm waving.

bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e0…
Read 7 tweets

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