Better late than never. 🙄 Clare Craig spent most of 2020 claiming we were in a "false positive pseudo epidemic", deleted all her tweets when it became clear she was horribly wrong, then moved on to talking rubbish about vaccines.
She's produced a never-ending stream of wrong...
Given Clare Craig's spectacular ability to misinterpret data (all too often because she just hadn't bothered to read the footnotes), it would be easy to chalk this up to incompetence.
But thanks to #hartleaks we know that at least some of the time she was doing it on purpose...
But after two years of spreading mis- and disinformation about the pandemic and vaccines, Clare Craig has finally joined fellow HART members such as Tony Hinton, Michael Yeadon (his alt account) and Joel Smalley (twice) in getting kicked off Twitter for breaking their rules.
Unsurprisingly Clare Craig's fellow HART members can't understand why she was removed from Twitter for repeatedly breaking the rules, while their friend Bev Turner inadvertently makes a good case for why Twitter should have banned her much earlier.
Meanwhile the fact that Aseem Malhotra and Jay Bhattacharya think Clare Craig has "impeccable scientific integrity" and that her removal somehow "impoverishes the discussion" probably says more about them than her.
Clare Craig's "contribution to the discussion" included false claims about trials of covid vaccines for children, amplified by notorious anti-vaxxers Children's Health Defense.
This video explains how, as usual, she had misread or misrepresented a study:
Aseem Malhotra is calling for a global end to vaccine mandates (after most have already ended), backed by Karol Sikora (HART) and Jay Bhattacharya (Collateral Global). They warn that mandates "hand propaganda to anti-vaxxers". Like .. er .. their own friends and colleagues. 🙄
Aseem Malhotra keeps retweeting anti-vaxxers and conspiracy nuts, often just tweeting "THIS" above some nonsense from a hive of utter crankery.
Epoch Times and Maajid Nawaz? Really? 😞
He also seems to enjoy partying with them. Here he is with QAnon fan John Mappin in February.
Karol Sikora has spent the last year and a half as a member of anti-vax disinformation group HART. Given he quit PANDA over their stance on vaccines, it's baffling that he stuck with HART, a group of conspiracy nuts co-founded by an anti-vax homeopath. 🤷♂️
Collateral Global's first accounts published today show the covid contrarian charity raised £371,926 in its first year, and has since amassed a £250,000 cash surplus!
CG was founded by the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and has links to covid disinfo group HART.
Much of Collateral Global's initial funding came from large donations by foreign charitable foundations, including one linked to a billionaire Tory donor, on top of an ongoing crowdfunding campaign that has so far raised £110,322.
Swiss billionaire Georg Von Opel gave Collateral Global co-founder Sunetra Gupta £90,000 in April 2020 to research "prevalence of COVID-19 in the population".
She was wildly wrong, but he still gave her new group £130,000 to continue the bad work!
It's no surprise to see anti-vaxxers, far right groups, covid conspiracy theorists and "sovereign citizens" harassing people at Drag Queen Story Hour events.
For many this is just returning to their home territory, after running out of lockdowns and vaccines to protest against.
Take HART member and Daily Sceptic editor Will Jones, for example. Before the pandemic, much of his output consisted of attacks on "trans madness" and same sex marriage.
Many of Will Jones' articles ranting about "trans madness" were published by Conservative Woman.
During the pandemic the site pivoted to covid crankery and anti-vax conspiracy theories, platforming the likes of Michael Yeadon and Andrew Wakefield supporter Sally Beck.
"You believe everything you say is true, but it isn't". Quite a put down here from the poor judge who has to deal with US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones apparently repeatedly lying under oath at his trial.
This comes after he found out in court that his own lawyers had (apparently accidentally) sent the entire contents of his phone to the prosecution, including years of emails and text messages proving he was lying. Oopsie.
Soon after HART launched, co-founder Anna Rayner warned members that "cyber security will doubtless become an issue" (one of the few things she got right!), and to "make sure anything controversial, or even whiffing of conspiracy isn't posted here".
Of course, nobody listened...
The origin of HART's security problems was arguably before the group even launched when, worried that it "wasn't the right message", they took a donation button off their website, having apparently raised only £1,434.99.
They then seem to have struggled to raise any other funds.
Founder Narice Bernard initially covered HART's Slack Pro license out of his own pocket, but apparently members wouldn't pay £13 each a month to keep it.
Instead they opted to deploy a free Rocket Chat install on their own server. Which turned out to be a false economy...
While many HART members love a good conspiracy theory, it's founding member Michael Yeadon's wild claims that there's a global plot to depopulate the Earth using covid vaccines that has come to define the group. So where did it all go so horribly wrong?
As HART launched in January 2021, Michael Yeadon was already by his own admission struggling with mental health problems and depression.
Soon afterwards he deleted his Twitter account when people noticed he'd posted lots of highly offensive, racist content before the pandemic.
Meanwhile Yeadon and other HART members were already sharing crazy conspiracy theories on the group's chat channels. Eugenics, depopulation, Bill Gates, the WEF and the infamous Georgia Guidestones were all mentioned.
This is the echo chamber Michael Yeadon was living in.