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.
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?
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.
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.
After the horrific attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, all the people you'd expect immediately blamed Islam and called for Muslims to be deported en masse for one man's crime. Just one problem... Apparently the suspect isn't a Muslim. 🧵
The apparent suspect in the attack on the Magdeburg market is a Saudi refugee who denounced Islam, accuses Germany of a "secret project to Islamize Europe", and regularly shared posts by far right accounts using similar language to the people who assumed he was an Islamist.
Even after the suspect's identity and beliefs were reported, racists and bigots on X were still blaming Islamists for the attack, or even claiming it was an attempt to "gaslight us" and "we all know why the terrorist carried out the attack".
Proving once again that he'll do anything that gives him an opportunity to promote himself, Aseem Malhotra is appearing at an online "Long COVID masterclass" .. run by a homeopath and featuring several notorious anti-vaxxers, quacks and conspiracy theorists. 🧵
The online event which Aseem Malhotra is taking part in and helping to promote is hosted by an American homeopath and "expert in silver and copper therapeutics", who claims he can cure diseases with herbal medicine and "belief in the Holy Spirit"!
Or in layman's terms, a quack.
Speaking alongside Aseem Malhotra:
1) Judy Mikovits, who's spent the last decade blaming everything from ME and autism to cancer on a retrovirus which she falsely claims is found in vaccines. More recently she starred in the Plandemic series, promoting covid conspiracy theories.
Good start to Nigel Farage's life as an MP, as he claims that he gave incorrect information to the Register of Interests. 🤦♂️ His first entry in the register says he's paid "£97,928.40 a month" by GB News. But now he claims that sum was for "several months of work". 🤷♂️
Nigel Farage is also the only employee of the "company" that GB News pays him through. So the whole setup is just a tax dodge, and any "significant expenses" it generates are likely to be Farage's own personal spending.
The other highlight of Farage's first Register entry is the £32,836 of travel costs a donor paid for him to fly to America to "support a friend who was almost killed". He is, of course, talking about Donald Trump.
It's not clear how this "represented Clacton on the world stage".
Racist thug Tommy Robinson and racist mug Laurence Fox held an ironically named "unite the kingdom" rally in London this weekend. Unsurprisingly lots of conspiracy theorists turned up to support them. 🧵
Alan Miller interviewed Laurence Fox. In the clip Miller defended Tommy Robinson, and claimed that him almost causing a trial to collapse by breaching reporting restrictions was a "free speech" issue. 🤦♂️
Miller leads a group of anti-vax and climate change conspiracy theorists.
In another Miller interview, Norman Fenton described former football hooligan Tommy Robinson as a "great heroic patriot", and said he's been "following him for years".
Fenton is a member of anti-vax misinfo group HART, and has accused the ONS of lying to cover up vaccine deaths.
Conspiracist X went into overdrive after the attempt on Trump's life yesterday. Within minutes they'd already misidentified the shooter and blamed everyone from the CIA and Mossad to the "Deep State" for the shooting, which sadly claimed the life of a bystander at the rally. 🧵
Conspiracy theorists quickly identified the shooter as "antifa extremist" Mark Violets, saying he posted a video before the attack and had been arrested. None of which was true.
The photo is of an Italian football blogger, and the real shooter was dead.
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. 🧵
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". 😳
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.