John Bye Profile picture
Dec 11 7 tweets 4 min read
How disinformation works: HART's Clare Craig posted a Swiss graph showing covid hospitalisation rates by vaccination status. It suggests people who had a booster shot were more likely to end up in hospital with covid. But here's what she's not telling you... 🧵
1) The reason Clare Craig is only showing you 3 months of data is that hospitalisation rates were MUCH higher for unvaccinated people for the rest of the pandemic. Overall, you're much more likely to have ended up in hospital with covid at some point if you *weren't* vaccinated.
2) Booster shots in Switzerland were mostly given to older and more vulnerable people, as they're more likely to get seriously ill from covid. That means the graph she shared is seriously skewed - the vast majority of the oldest people are boosted and most young people aren't.
3) What makes this particularly dishonest on Clare Craig's part is that the page she shared actually breaks down hospitalisation rates by age group. And throughout the last 2 years hospitalisation rates for each group are higher in unvaccinated people and lower in boosted people.
4) Even if we cherry pick the data like Clare Craig did in her graph, and only look at the last 3 months of data available, people who had a booster shot (6+ months earlier) were *still* doing far better than the unvaccinated in the most boosted age groups.
5) Even if we drop down to younger groups, where booster shot uptake is lower and more focused on people with conditions that may make them particularly vulnerable to covid, people who had the booster were still doing slightly (50s) / much (60s) better than the unvaccinated.
So Clare Craig cherry picked a period that fit her narrative, hid the fact that the unvaccinated have far higher hospitalisation rates overall, and used data that's heavily skewed by age, when more detailed data on the same page shows the truth is the opposite of what she claims.

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More from @_johnbye

Dec 10
Collateral Global's Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are complaining that the UK isn't learning the lessons they want it to from lockdown, in an article attacking a recent "technical report" that offers advice to future public health officials based on learnings from Covid-19. 🧵
Heneghan and Jefferson's article gets off to a flamboyant start by comparing the technical report's authors (including the likes of Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance) to the Chinese president "marking his own homework", and describing lockdowns as "catastrophes".
Heneghan and Jefferson find it "hard to reconcile the report's contents" with their own work. Unsurprising, given much of their own work is garbage. The bit about "misuse of PCR tests", for example, may be a reference to this dumpster diving study by them:
Read 7 tweets
Nov 29
Unsurprisingly HART are unhappy about the recent BMJ article on misinformation that I worked on. Equally unsurprisingly, their responses are at best highly misleading, and in some cases downright lies. 🧵

bmj.com/content/379/bm… Image
First up is HART co-chair Clare Craig, who says that they haven't "made any claims about" a variety of common conspiracy theories that we mentioned in a separate section of the article to the one in which HART are (briefly) mentioned. But as she brought it up... Image
While they don't call them "miracle cures", HART *have* published articles that claimed vitamin D in high doses "would protect almost entirely against death" and that cocktails of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics and vitamins are effective but suppressed by big pharma. ImageImageImage
Read 12 tweets
Nov 25
Apparently the UKMFA really didn't like the BMJ article about Covid-19 misinformation that I contributed to. But their open letter (in which they call themselves a "respected and recognised organisation") doth protest too much... 🧵
In particular they're upset that the article says that they've "opposed vaccination", and any implication that they're anti-vaxxers. But their CEO Liz Evans is on the European advisory board of Children's Health Defense, probably the most notorious anti-vax group in the world. 🤔
As early as February 2021, UKMFA co-founder and CEO Liz Evans was describing the covid vaccine programme as "a genocide taking place", and asking fellow HART members "how do we stop this madness?
Read 8 tweets
Nov 21
Not Our Future, the latest project from Covid-19 Assembly founder David Fleming, has finally gone public. Signatories include a who's who of cranks, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and Z-list celebs, from Michael Yeadon to Right Said Fred... 🧵
Not Our Future's "pledge" warns of a "bleak future .. dark, coarse, and devoid of any hope or humanity". This and the "digital control grid" stuff sounds like Michael Yeadon's work, but it also covers everything from net zero to "identity politics".

It's cheery stuff.
Many HART members signed up to stop this apocalyptic conspiracy theorist's vision of the future, including Clare Craig ("seeding the thought vaccines cause covid"), Gary Sidley (anti-mask campaigner), Michael Yeadon ("depopulation agenda") and Patrick Fagan (Cambridge Analytica).
Read 14 tweets
Nov 19
NHS100k has done an interview with funeral director turned covid conspiracy theorist John O'Looney, in which he claims covid vaccines contain nanotech that reacts to 5G, that we'll all be dead within 5 years, and that first wave covid deaths were actually caused by midazolam. 🤦‍♂️
In the interview with NHS100K, John O'Looney falsely claims that "there wasn't no pandemic", that excess deaths in spring 2020 were caused by midazolam not covid, that NHS and care home workers murdered the elderly, and that the government is guilty of genocide.

It's wild stuff.
John O'Looney also uses the NHS100K interview to promote daft claims that covid vaccines contain nanotech that's "influenced by 5G or WiFi", and enough graphene oxide to make you magnetic (including fun stories about their mutual friend David Cartland sticking magnets to people).
Read 6 tweets
Nov 16
The latest meeting of the APPG on Pandemic Response and Recovery will hear from Piers Robinson, long time conspiracy theorist and frequent guest on Russian state media.

Thanks to Esther McVey and HART, who run the APPG, he'll now be talking to MPs about pandemic "propaganda". 🤦‍♂️ ImageImage
Piers Robinson left his job at Sheffield Uni under a cloud in early 2019, after students and fellow academics complained about his promotion of conspiracy theories on everything from 9/11 to the Syrian civil war and the Salisbury novichok poisonings.

google.com/amp/s/www.huff…
Robinson runs a group devoted to denying that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in its civil war. They later branched out into denying that Russia poisoned former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. A view which proved popular with Russian government owned RT and Sputnik. ImageImage
Read 6 tweets

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