My God. This lede.

‘Britain’s early handling of the Coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history’
This parliamentary report is embargoed until midnight. But its contents is utterly devastating
‘PM could have saved thousands by locking down earlier’

Pretty much every single person who made such an obviously deadly & flawed decision is still in power now.
‘Groupthink, British exceptionalism & a deliberately “slow & gradualist” approach meant the UK fared “significantly worse” than other countries’

If the UK media had any collective integrity, we’d also have a report into what happened. Every single word of this also applies to it
‘Despite being one of the first countries to develop a test for Covid in January 2020, the UK “squandered” its lead & “converted it into one of permanent crisis’

The report is utterly damning. But will there be any actual consequences?
If you want to understand import of today’s devastating report, please please do not rely on @NickTriggle’s BBC report.

It’s a stark illustration of how the govt’s failures were facilitated by a press that failed - & still fails - to hold it to account
bbc.co.uk/news/health-58…
‘Herd immunity “group think” led to “public health failure”

- Covid strategy cost lives

- Scientific advice not challenged

- Ministers accused of fatalism
Read @IndependentSage’s @martinmckee & his response for @bmj. ‘Darkness’ ‘secrecy’ data supplied only on a ‘need to know basis’, the government’s corrosive lack of transparency a key factor in our catastrophic response

blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/10/12…

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More from @carolecadwalla

8 Oct
I’m so incredibly DELIGHTED for @mariaressa but I also want to explain why this decision by @NobelPrize is so important at this moment (& why it’s more very bad news for Facebook)
More perhaps than anyone, @mariaressa has explained how ‘a lie told a million times becomes a fact’.

She’s watched how her country became a brutal dictatorship & understood first hand how this was done through control of the information space

theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
She’s spent much of the last 5 years trying to warn the west what is coming for us.

How the firestorm of lies & distortions & fake news are a dictator’s best friend.

And how Silicon Valley’s failure to deal with it is a fundamental danger to democracy

Read 12 tweets
8 Oct
OH MY GOD, @mariaressa!!! You’ve only gone & won the Nobel Prize!!!!

This is AMAZING! I am so unbelievably proud to be friends with this amazing woman who has stood up for journalists everywhere. 👏👏👏
Maria is facing prison in the Philippines for the outrageous charge of ‘cyberlibel’ & she has shown such courage in standing up to Duterte. If you’re new to her work, this is an interview I did with her for @observer in April:

theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
Here’s the citation.

‘For their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression which is a precondition for democracy & lasting peace’

Congrats to Dmitry Muratov also.

A GOOD day for journalism.
Read 4 tweets
6 Oct
This is a totally extraordinary story. A London court finds PM of the UAE to have hacked his ex-wife & her lawyers phones using NSO spyware.

But where my jaw hits the floor is here:

‘Cherie Blair, who works with the Israeli NSO Group’

WHAT?

theguardian.com/world/2021/oct…
Ok. There’s more here.

Cherie Blair is an ‘ethics advisor’ to NSO spyware group.

I just cannot..what the?!?!

Ethics advisor to a company implicated in MURDER?

thetimes.co.uk/article/cherie…
Totally normal for a leading human rights lawyer & ex-Labour PM’s wife to be advising a spyware firm accused of facilitating horrific abuses of human rights.
theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
Read 6 tweets
5 Oct
Hey Andy! Your tweet just got read out & you’ve been invited to testify to Congress under oath! Congrats
Pitching this in as the first question you might like to ask, @MarshaBlackburn @SenBlumenthal
Oh boy. G'luck, @andymstone
Read 4 tweets
4 Oct
Ok. Here’s a thought. Could someone at @facebook tell us what’s happening?
It’s like ‘Here’s a news story we didn’t like, have a 5,000-word blog post from @nickclegg.’ But wipe out half the planet’s ability to communicate &:
Last observed sighting of Mark Zuckerberg yesterday as a whistleblower accused his company of ‘moral bankruptcy’:
Read 4 tweets
4 Oct
Congrats & bravo to the Facebook whistleblower @FrancesHaugen_.

8 complaints to SEC.

Documents handed to 5 state attorney generals

Evidence to Congress on Tuesday

Scheduled to appear before UK parliamentary committee this month
Read @wsj piece by @JeffHorwitz who broke the story.

What’s staggering is that she found these docs on Facebook’s ‘Workplace’ forum accessible to any of its 63k employees.

She methodically & systematically copied them & approached a whistleblowing lawyer
wsj.com/articles/faceb…
‘I believe in truth & reconciliation,’ she says. ‘We need to admit reality. The first step of that is documentation.’

I 💯agree with this.

(It’s why I’ve banged on forever about necessity of getting access to the data from EUref. Facebook simply buried it.)
Read 5 tweets

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