Despite repeatedly being proven wrong by subsequent events, covid disinformation groups like HART have constantly been given a platform on TV and radio throughout the pandemic.
Even after #hartleaks revealed many of their members to be anti-vax conspiracy cranks.
🧵2: broadcast
One of the most prolific spreaders of misinformation over the last two years has been @talkRADIO's @JuliaHB1.
When she asked someone "what disinformation" she had spread, it didn't take me long to find plenty of examples involving prominent HART members:
In 2020, @JuliaHB1 and other @talkRADIO hosts gave airtime to future HART members like Michael Yeadon, Clare Craig and Anthony Brookes. They predicted there wouldn't be a second wave (there was), it wouldn't be as bad as the first (it was), and we had herd immunity (we didn't).
Despite this appalling track record, after HART launched in January 2021 @JuliaHB1 regularly gave members a platform to speak out against testing, masks, and vaccination.
And their predictions didn't get any better either, as they consistently underestimated the Delta wave...
Even after #hartleaks showed HART to be a bunch of cranks, @JuliaHB1 continued to platform the group's members. Including Ros Jones falsely claiming that children were more at risk from vaccination than covid, and Tony Hinton comparing vaccine passports to the holocaust!
Earlier in 2021, @JuliaHB1 was still using Michael Yeadon as a source weeks after he was exposed as a racist and started ranting about plots to depopulate the Earth!
Yeadon admitted he was "no longer broadcast-able". But JHB still came to him for background info for her show. 🤨
It's not like @JuliaHB1 can feign ignorance either. Yeadon tells a HART colleague that @talkRADIO "know what I fear but they can't broadcast it".
What Yeadon feared was that covid booster shots might be programmed to kill billions of people! 🤪 Hardly a credible source then...
But the most worrying episode was in January 2021, when @JuliaHB1 is reported to have got "a sympathetic Cabinet minister" to ask the Chief Whip to tell @NeilDotObrien MP to stop "smearing" HART members ahead of the group's launch! A shocking abuse of democracy.
Ironically though, HART don't even like @JuliaHB1. Members constantly complain about her talking over them, and call appearing on her show "a waste of bloody time".
One called her "a huge help to the cause but quite annoying", saying she likes to "deliver a lecture".
And anti-vax HART members were *really* upset when @JuliaHB1 got vaccinated. Members said she "crumbled" and was "another huge disappointment".
When she spoke favourably about others getting vaccinated, Harrie Bunker-Smith asked "can we get a HART member on to correct her?" 🙄
More popular with HART members is @JuliaHB1's former @talkRADIO colleague @mrmarkdolan. They call him "a strong ally" who gives "HART the respect we deserve" [sic] and is "as anti-mask as we are".
They even joke that he "gives more opportunity to speak than Ms Hartley-Brewer".
They aren't kidding. Barely a week went by without @mrmarkdolan giving HART members a platform, sometimes two in one day!
Members used it to demand that children "must not" be vaccinated, claim lockdowns would kill more people than covid, and call the Delta variant "over hyped".
When @mrmarkdolan jumped ship to @GBNEWS he soon picked up where he'd left off. On his second week he and HART's Gary Sidley ganged up on Dr David Strain in a debate on masks (on which Mark's own views are very clear), and the next week HART's Rev William Phillip was on his show.
Even months after #hartleaks revealed the group's true colours, Christys had Gary Sidley and Clare Craig on his GB News show.
HART and UsForThem's Ros Jones has also frequently appeared on @GBNEWS, even after the channel asked "how I can possibly say that children will die of vaccine damage who would not die from covid".
She can't, but other members gave her various false figures and claims as "proof".
And @GBNEWS invited Ros Jones back several times after that to make increasingly wild attacks on the idea of vaccinating children.
This continued until at least September, long after we knew she'd spent all year secretly working with anti-vaxxers to stop kids getting vaccinated!
Indeed, @GBNEWS tried to get Ros Jones back just a couple of days after her first appearance, this time inviting her to their studio. But this required a PCR test and, hilariously, she was so paranoid about false positives she turned them down! One member suggested faking a test.
Not everyone's a fan of @GBNEWS though. Liz Evans described them as "fake alternative media", and suggested Del Bigtree's anti-vax show The Highwire instead!
Clare Craig called them "worse than the BBC in many ways", despite them putting her on the channel multiple times.
Meanwhile back at @talkRADIO, presenters like @TVKev O'Sullivan, @cristo_radio Foufas and @thejamesmax have also kept putting Ros Jones on air to talk nonsense about covid vaccines, even letting her falsely claim that vaccinating children is somehow against international law!
Another of @TVKev's favourites seems to be Clare Craig, who told HART friends they should "seed the thought that vaccines cause covid". She's been on his show several times, and even tried to scare pregnant women off getting vaccinated by falsely claiming that it may not be safe!
Both @talkRADIO and @GBNEWS have a terrible track record of platforming quacks. Their one-sided and often demonstrably false coverage of the pandemic has even included letting anti-vax campaigners make unfounded claims about vaccine safety unchallenged.
UPDATE: It seems @GBNEWS' other resident crank @thecoastguy didn't get the memo. Almost a year after Michael Yeadon was exposed as a racist and started raving about plots to depopulate the Earth, he's STILL platforming him.
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.
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. 🧵
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...
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. 🤦♂️
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. 🧵
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. 🙄
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.
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. 🧵
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".
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. 🤔
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. 🤦♂️
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.
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. 🧵
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.