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Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
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21 Sep, 8 tweets, 5 min read
Miriam Cates, at today's Westminster Hall debate on vaccinating children 'paying tribute to UsForThem', a lobby group that's has consistently spread misinformation & lobbied against mitigations in schools and vaccinations for kids. How much influence does this grp have on govt?🧵
This should worry us all. #HARTlogs reveal UFT looking for 'expert witnesses' to pressure the MHRA to not approve vaccines for kids. One of their signatories has discussed 'seeding the idea that vaccines cause COVID-19'. This is dangerous. Yet, this group has been quoted by MPs.
This group sent a pre-action letter to Gavin Williamson last year, pressuring DfE to open schools without mitigations in Sept, despite SAGE warning government about the devastating impacts of this on the pandemic. We all know what happened after.
Worryingly, there are links between HART, UFT and JCVI as well, with Dingwall mentioned in #HARTlogs as a 'friendly' person working from 'the inside'. Adam Finn, a member of JCVI recently thanked them for support on his statement that parents should wait before vaccinating kids.
This should seriously concern us all.

UFT, unlike other parent groups features prominently in the media - BBC, Talk Radio, GMB. #HARTlogs show several media outlets and journalists are sympathetic and platform them and their misinformation repeatedly. Why?
It's very clear that our govt hasn't been following evidence on school policy. So who have they been listening to? And why?

bylinetimes.com/2021/03/30/gav…
And how does this group have so much influence on our MPs? It shouldn't be normal for MPs to pay 'tribute to' an anti-mask and anti-vaxx group that's been associted with the sort of misinformation and anti-mitigation lobbying UFT have. @NafeezAhmed @carolecadwalla
I've written a bit about them here based on what I've learned, which is probably quite limited, but very worrying.

For more info follow @karamballes @NafeezAhmed @_johnbye @Aw_what @JordanWildon @jneill @BoxOFroggies

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More from @dgurdasani1

Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
23 Sep
Gladly.

Study published in Science on 500K parents where mitigation measures, most of which were *inside* classrooms correlated with risk of infection in their parents. So transmission in classrooms not only leads to infected kids, but infected parents.
science.org/doi/full/10.11…
CDC study on masks and ventilation *inside* classrooms reducing transmission:
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…
But don't even believe these. How about genome sequencing? Where the same virus is found in a cluster in school among people who never came into contact outside school? Hard to explain that through transmission outside, isn't it?

wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27…
Read 4 tweets
Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
22 Sep
It's 'inevitable' we'll import new variants,
It's 'inevitable' many more people will lose loved ones
It's 'inevitable' children will get infected

It's NOT inevitable.

It's only inevitable if you don't even bother putting in the most basic public health measures in a pandemic.
How on earth can they stand up and say it's inevitable, when so many countries have managed to protect their public from all of this. And their children. After 18 months we have almost no mitigations in schools. We're keeping infected children in classrooms fuelling spread.
And we could've at the very very least offered vaccines to adolescents when they became available. Did we?
No, we didn't- we decided to do this after almost every other country in Europe, and much of the rest of the world.
Read 4 tweets
Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
22 Sep
Very glad to see @bmj_latest correct their previous piece to highlight the problems with the Hoeg preprint on vaccine myocarditis. The methods of the study- using vaccine adverse event reporting data in the way they have make the results invalid.

bmj.com/content/374/bm…
All global data suggest vaccine associated myocarditis is a rare and typically mild side effect of vaccines in adolescents, and benefits from vaccines *far* outweigh risks even at much lower incidence rates than we have currently in the UK.
Lot's of data now to suggest myocarditis is strongly associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, and recent work also suggesting COVID-19 related myocarditis is far more common than vaccine associated myocarditis (in 16+ adults at least). Image
Read 8 tweets
Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
22 Sep
No, it doesn't say that- it says VAERS data isn't meant to be used this way, and this msg is being co-opted by anti-vaxx groups. Which it is - and has done *huge* damage. Many have gone through the reports in detail & pointed out issues. Can the authors correct what they said?
Given the *huge* influence the platforming of this problematic study on media has had - putting out messaging that is incorrect, and encouraging vaccine hesitancy, I think the authors have a responsibility to correct this.
There are detailed rebuttals:
sciencebasedmedicine.org/dumpster-divin…
The authors need to read and respond to this. It's unacceptable to put out a study based on cases that clearly weren't vaccine associated myocarditis and make claims about risks.
Read 5 tweets
Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
21 Sep
It's incredibly painful listening to people talking about 'toxicity on both sides of the debate' or 'scientific disagreements that are undermining pubic trust' when my experience on this platform is largely being bullied by, not 'disagreed' with on evidence by other scientists.🧵
Most people I challenge on the evidence don't respond to me on arguments I make at all. They attack me personally with sarcastic or snide remarks or subtweets - almost never clear and evidenced arguments. They never accept or acknowledge errors. This is not 'academic debate'.
This 'both siding' creates a sense of false equivalence between scientists who are being subjected to coordinated bullying just putting out well-evidenced information and those who are either putting out damaging misinformation in a pandemic, and/or bullying other scientists.
Read 9 tweets
Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
20 Sep
Important point here- given JCVI has said the benefits of vaccinating 'healthy' adolescents was 'marginal'. We've had ~9000 hospitalisations with COVID-19 in children so far. These docs show 80% of hosp were directly *due to* COVID-19 with the *majority* in 'healthy' children.
There have been 3,400 COVID-19 hospitalisations in under 18s since 4th June, when MHRA authorised Pfizer for adolescents- 1700 of these have been in 6-17 yr olds. Based on recent docs, the majority of these would've been in 'healthy children'.
Of course we didn't even offer vaccines to children with 'pre-existing conditions, who JCVI say have 50x the risk of ICU admission until 19th July, *6 weeks later*. How many were preventable had we started vaccinating all kids earlier? And who is accountable for these delays?
Read 5 tweets

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