John Bye Profile picture
7 Aug, 14 tweets, 13 min read
While @hartgroup_org pull their punches in public, in private they share crazy stories from notorious anti-vaxxers and conspiracy nuts.

Including claims that covid doesn't exist, the vaccines are bioweapons, and other treatments are being sabotaged by governments.
For starters there's Anna Rayner, named in documents seen by logically.ai as HART's coordinator, but choosing to stay "in the shadows" because of her work "in a maligned area of healthcare".

More specifically, "treating" autism and "vaccine damage" with homeopathy.
Unsurprisingly she's a follower of Andrew Wakefield, the discredited former doctor who helped spark the anti-vax movement with claims that childhood vaccines cause autism.

Here she is praising Wakefield's "bravery" on her blog, and in HART's chat group suggesting he was smeared.
And she's not alone. One of HART's public facing members, education adviser Val Fraser, says she "did the research" on childhood vaccines when "it was all freely available", before it was "censored after the Wakefield reports".

Does she too believe the MMR jab causes autism?
Another public member, Harrie Bunker-Smith, cites Tomas Cowan, a former doctor who claims viruses don't cause diseases, vaccines don't stop them, and that covid is caused by 5G.

Oliver Stokes asks if "there is anything in" Cowan's claim that the SARS-COV-2 virus doesn't exist.
Public member Liz Evans shared a video (twice!) titled "5 Doctors Agree Covid-19 Injections Are Bioweapons".

She says it's a "very sensible and informed discussion" despite the "dramatic title".

It's really 5 notorious anti-vaxxers saying covid vaccines are "designed to kill".
The five doctors are long term anti-vaxxers Sherri Tenpenny, Larry Palevsky and Christiane Northrup, QAnon nut Carrie Madej, and Lee Merritt of far right extremists America's Frontline Doctors.

That's the group whose founders were arrested for taking part in the Capitol riots.
A week later Liz Evans shares a video claiming covid itself is a bioweapon.

In it Dr Richard Fleming (a convicted fraudster who believes covid was engineered and intentionally released in Wuhan) is interviewed by Del Bigtree (producer of Andrew Wakefield's "Vaxxed" documentary).
Physician Sam McBride is another prolific poster of nonsense from questionable sources.

Here he is sharing an article by Operation Rescue, an American anti-abortion group implicated in the murder of a doctor. Their co-founder spent 2 years in prison for her part in a bomb plot.
He's also a big fan of Medical Kidnap, part of Brian Shilhavy's anti-vax Health Impact News network, frequently sharing their stories on alleged adverse reactions to covid vaccines and other topics.

Shilhavy "explains real health from a biblical, non-Darwinian perspective".
Basically Shilhavy's a quack, who got in trouble with the FDA for claiming coconut oil can cure anything from dementia to rashes.

He thinks covid is a plandemic, freemasons are taking over the world, and you can cure "vaccine injuries" with pineapples.

Sounds credible.
Meanwhile pretty much the whole of HART seems to be glued to Children's Health Defense, RFK Jr's anti-vax site.

The group claims everything from vaccines and fluoride to wireless signals and paracetamol cause autism, ADHD and other issues.
Highlights from Children's Health Defense that HART seem to consider credible include claims that alternative treatments for covid such as hydroxychloroquin are being sabotaged by governments, and that Bill Gates is trying to "control the food system" and "own everything".
The fact that so many of HART's members follow anti-vax and extremist groups, and seem to take their often bizarre claims seriously, suggests their public caution due to fears of being labelled anti-vaxxers is just a fig leaf to cover what many of them really believe in private.

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More from @_johnbye

31 Jul
While HART try to look respectable in public, behind closed doors they believe vaccines killed more people than they saved.

Members share anti-vax conspiracy theories, talk about hanging nurses, and believe that vaccines make you magnetic or are a plot to depopulate the Earth!
Back in January they were discussing ways to put people off getting vaccinated, from "asking concerned questions" and playing up disinformation about fertility, to ignoring reports of vaccine wastage and suggesting they "find a way to help them get [the rollout] wrong" instead.
HART were worried about being branded as anti-vax right out of the gate though, and decided to keep quiet in public.

Even Michael Yeadon, who a couple of months later was claiming covid vaccines could kill millions of people, warned of the danger of "looking like anti vaxxers".
Read 19 tweets
27 Jul
This is quite an exposé of HART, who try to look respectable in public but behind closed doors are working with cranks like Michael Yeadon and Anna Rayner, seriously discussing crazy conspiracy theories, and describing MPs they were lobbying as "lemmings" and "not too bright"! 😆
In one exchange, HART member Liz Evans says she doesn't want to "sound like a conspiracy theorist", but she believes the government is "very happy as things are" because it has "nefarious plans" to use covid to further some "malign agenda".

Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me! Image
Elsewhere members discuss recruiting a Swiss cardiologist / serial conspiracy theorist who had been sectioned over mental health concerns.

They were worried about how it would look but admitted "some of us may have those views as well", apparently referring to the "Great Reset". Image
Read 5 tweets
26 Jul
This is a disingenuous claim. Cases in England peaked a few days BEFORE the last stage of opening, and mobility data shows the biggest changes in people's behaviour came after Step 2 in April and Step 3 in May, since when average cases rose from under 2,000 to over 40,000 a day. Image
Visits to Retail & Recreation (covering everything from restaurants and non-essential shops to museums and theme parks) rose after Step 2 in April, as shops reopened and outdoor hospitality returned.

And again after Step 3 in May, when indoor entertainment reopened. Image
Usage of public transport follows a similar pattern - a rise at Step 2 in mid-April and another smaller, slower rise after Step 3 in mid-May.

As with recreation, there's little or no immediate change visible in people's behaviour in the first few days after Step 4 on July 19th. Image
Read 6 tweets
25 Jul
After covering the pandemic for more than a year, apparently Robert Peston has just discovered the UK definition of a case. 🙄

I mean, it's right there on the dashboard, just above the graph.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
Whether this means the daily case count "seriously understates" infections seems doubtful though.

An ONS study shows (up to June 5th) less than 1% of participants had been reinfected. Most cases detected at a high Ct, suggesting fairly mild infections.

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati…
Of course, this data is from before the current surge in cases.

But even with 3.7 million people who first tested positive for covid over 6 months ago, it's unlikely that any reinfections would make a significant difference to the 1 million new cases counted in the last month.
Read 4 tweets
24 Jul
"At the Nuremberg Trials the doctors and nurses stood trial. And they hung. If you're a doctor or a nurse, get off that bus."

Just a normal day for conspiracy nut Kate Shemirani, as a crowd of anti-vaxxers cheers her comparison of hardworking NHS staff to Nazi war criminals. 😳
Her Wikipedia entry is eye opening, displaying pretty much an A to Z of far right conspiracy theories and anti-semitic tropes.

Scary to think this woman used to be a nurse, until she was suspended for spouting nonsense about covid and 5G last year.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Shem…
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, her comment about hanging doctors and nurses apparently wasn't even the craziest thing she said today:

Read 4 tweets
24 Jul
Clare Craig claims that 10% of all respiratory samples in England are positive for RSV, more than covid.

Needless to say she's wrong on every count, because she didn't understand or sanity check the data she was looking at before posting. As usual.
For starters it's 8.9%, not 10%. And that's of samples that were tested for RSV, not all the samples logged by Respiratory Datamart.

The vast majority of the 100,000 samples will have been tests done for covid. Only a handful would be from RSV tests.

That's because hospitals routinely screen all admissions for covid, whereas patients (mostly infants) are only tested for RSV if a doctor specifically asks for it.

Hardly surprising then that positivity is much higher for RSV tests than for covid tests.

Read 7 tweets

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