Bartholomew's Notes

From The Times:

A Conservative MP was applauded by a group of antivaxers that included Piers Corbyn, brother of the former Labour leader, as he questioned the safety of coronavirus vaccinations during a Commons debate.

Sir Christopher Chope, the MP for Christchurch, claimed that the vaccines were “not perfectly safe” and that there was a question about “whether they are effective”.

…Chope, who was criticised by the UK Statistics Authority in June for making baseless claims in parliament about the safety of coronavirus vaccines, used his speech to encourage those present to watch a film he took part in produced by Oracle Films, an antivax conspiracy group that had their account suspended by Paypal last year after claiming that vaccines could alter DNA.

The debate (which occured on 24 October) was triggered by a petition, which the paper noted had been promoted online by GB News’ Bev Turner and Richard Fairbrass of the pop-duo Right Said Fred.

The full debate can be read here; it came in the wake of the launch of Chope’s “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Damage” a few days before, and is the latest publicity stunt by which false and misleading claims are gaining currency in the UK despite failing to achieve genuine scientific recognition.

Along with Chope’s buffoonery, the familiar tropes of vaccine alarmism were aired by Danny “Dunning” Kruger and, inevitably, Andrew Bridgen. Kruger, parroting a recent claim by Dutch MEP Rob Roos, complained that Pfizer had not tested for whether the vaccine prevented transmission (dealt with here), and repeated Aseem Malhotra’s misleading claim about the risk reduction of Covid vaccination (dealt with here). Bridgen also commended Malhotra, and cited Florida Department of Health – an example of how the baleful influence of Joseph Ladapo (dealt with here) has an international dimension.

It was perhaps inevitable that The Times would lead with Chope’s sensationalist claims, but it is a shame that the paper of record barely noted how some other MPs present – primarily Elliot Colburn, Andrew Gwynne and Caroline Johnson, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care – answered claims about safety and effectiveness in some detail.

Bridgen’s involvement has also now itself sparked a conspiracy theory: for some months he has been under investigation by Parliament’s Standards Committee over failing to declare an interest, and compounded matters by suggesting that the Commissioner, Kathryn Stone, had targeted him at the behest of Boris Johnson in return for a peerage. The Committee has now finished its work and recommended that Bridgen be suspended from Parliament.

The conspiracy milieu has interpreted this outcome as Bridgen being punished for participating in the debate: a Tweet by Turner (RTed by GB News’ Neil Oliver) asked “WHO is shutting everyone down?!”, the capitalised “WHO” seemingly implying the World Health Organization; while blowhard Maajid Nawaz’s opinion is that “there are no coincidences in war” and that we must “RESIST”.

Bridgen’s allegation against Stone seems to reflect a worldview in which his working assumption is that people always act out of self-interest rather than according to duty or responsibility. Last year he claimed that the British Medical Association was “hand-in-glove” with PPE manufacturers, although he later backed down, claiming in the face of the plain meaning of his own words that he never intended to suggest improper influence.

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From MailOnline:

The NHS should launch specialised clinics to people who have suffered long-lasting illness after getting a Covid jab, an MP said today.

Sir Christopher Chope, Tory MP for Christchurch in Dorset, called for the health service to ‘take seriously’ the need to help the unlucky few who’ve become seriously unwell after getting the life-saving vaccines.

…Sir Christopher made the comments at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the victims of vaccine damage, which he chairs.

The article goes on to discuss the “extremely rare side effect of AstraZeneca’s jab” that led to 45 confirmed deaths due to clotting. However, we then get the following detail:

…Sir Christopher also invited Dr Aseem Malhotra, an NHS-trained cardiologist, to give a talk on ‘curing the pandemic of misinformation on Covid through real evidence-based medicine’.

…Dr Malhotra argued that Pfizer’s Covid vaccine should be immediately suspended until all of the raw data on the vaccine’s effectiveness is made available.

There’s also a photo of Malhotra, which forms part of how the article is previewed when shared on social media.

Although Malhotra is only introduced about halfway into the article, his appearance wasn’t just some sort of appendage – originally, the launch of the APPG was supposed to have been a showcase for Malhotra’s recent review paper, but due to the launch being postponed after the Queen’s death he instead held his own press conference elsewhere.

John Bye has assembled some details about what happened at the APPG meeting – his Twitter thread can be seen here. According his account of an audio recording, “attendees who have actually been affected by adverse reactions often had to shout over MPs to be heard, while cranks from Aseem Malhotra to Mark Sexton [blogged here] had a field day”; Malhotra spoke for 45 minutes; and attendees who spoke from the audience included Tess Lawrie of HART (see below) and Mohammad Adil, who was suspended by the General Medical Council in 2020 for calling the Covid pandemic a “hoax” – Chope reportedly said that his suspension was “outrageous” (I blogged about Adil here).

According by Bye, one attendee said they felt “let down” by all this, eliciting an “indignant” response from Chope. Given this context, it is reasonable to suppose that AstraZeneca victims are being used to give spurious credibility and moral standing to Malhotra’s unrelated claims (1), and much else besides. Indeed, when a doctor named Alastair McAlpine dismissed the event on Twitter as “nonsense” and expressed unguarded satisfaction that only a few MPs had attended (“Lol”) he was immediately accused of mocking the victims and has now had to lock down his Twitter account due to a pile-on (encouraged by the anti-vax pop duo Right Said Fred).

The APPG has been variously called the “All-Party Parliamentary Group for the victims of vaccine damage” (Mail Online) and the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Vaccine Damage” (Malhotra’s press conference blurb), although the formal name is the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Damage”. Christopher Chope is the chair; other MPs listed as officers are the Conservative MPs Edward Leigh, Desmond Swayne and Greg Knight, along with Graham Stringer from Labour. According to James Freeman Wells, who appears to be Malhotra’s impresario, Malhotra’s invitation was “supported by Sir Jeremy Wright MP, Andrew Bridgen MP, Sir Desmond Swayne MP & Danny Kruger MP”.

Another thread by Bye, from October 2021, is useful as background to how the APPG has come about, highlighting the likely involvement of the anti-Covid vaccination group HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team). His account is pieced together from HART’s leaked chatlogs, extracts from which are included as screenshots.

As he explains, “HART’s strategy (set by founder Narice Bernard and political fixer Bernie de Haldevang) was to work as a ‘scientific partner’ to the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee and Covid Recovery Group, providing them with evidence to use to sway government policy”. Bernie de Haldevang apparently had the confidence of Andrew Rosindell MP, and he used ” Rosindell as a gateway to Liam Fox and the CRG’s Mark Harper and Steve Baker.” HART members later had a meeting “with Graham Brady, Andrew Bridgen and other MPs”. After that, the “Brady connection” was useful “when William Wragg and Christopher Chope ask questions in Parliament about post-vaccination deaths.”

Those questions were about vaccine effectiveness rather than adverse reactions, but HART’s view was that they could be pointed “in the right direction”. Brady then conveyed a letter to Chope from HART (written by Jemma Moran, who was also at the APPG meeting), and a few months later Chope put forward a “Vaccine Damage Bill” in Parliament. This new APPG is the natural follow-on from that.

UPDATE: John Bye adds:

Also attending the APPG meeting were conspiracy theorists Maajid Nawaz and Matt Le Tissier, and HART’s Ros Jones, Clare Craig, Norman Fenton, Martin Neil *and* Tony Hinton.

Meanwhile people who actually suffered adverse reactions struggled to find seats.

As evidnce for the latter, he notes a Tweet from a vaccine injury support group (CV1) stating “No one listened to us yesterday because the focus was not on us. We are very dissapointed that we all made the effort to come to a meeting where we had to fight for seats and shout to make our voices heard”.

Footnote

(1) Malhotra’s allegations have become increasingly extravagant as his media profile has grown: he now claims that Covid vaccination likely explains “all unexplained heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias, & heart failure since 2021”; that Pfizer knew that their vaccine would cause the effects he alleges; and that the pharmaceutical industry is a “psychopathic entity” with control over governments and medical guidelines. He also uncritically endorses social media narratives alleging vaccine deaths, and he has done a right-wing media round involving GB News, Russell Brand, Fox News (Laura Ingraham) and, erm, a shock jock from Tucson named Garret Lewis. Acting as a gateway into the conspiracy milieu, he also Re-Tweets supportive comments from the likes of John Mappin (UK QAnon enthusiast) and Maajid Nawaz. Attempting to convince his professional peers, though, appears to be less of a priority.

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From AFP Canada:

A cardiologist from the United Kingdom says Covid-19 vaccines should be suspended because they pose a greater threat than the virus itself…. Cardiologist Aseem Malhotra appeared September 27, 2022 in a press conference with the World Council for Health — a group that has previously spread vaccine misinformation — to call for the “immediate and complete suspension of Covid-19 vaccine.”

…Following the press conference, Malhotra tweeted about his paper, titled: “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on Covid-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine.” Published in Insulin Resistance — an open-access journal where Malhotra serves on the editorial board — the article received thousands of interactions on social media, according to CrowdTangle, a monitoring tool.

….The findings were further amplified in articles and posts from organizations that AFP has previously found to spread vaccine misinformation, including Children’s Health Defense, The Epoch Times and the Gateway Pundit. On October 3, 2022, Malhotra appeared on an online program hosted by Del Bigtree, CEO of the anti-vaccination Informed Consent Action Network.

We can add an online appearance with Russell Brand to the list. The AFP article goes on to fact-check Malhotra’s work in some detail. I discussed the press conference and provided some links here.

As has been widely discussed, Malhotra’s paper was a review article that sifts through other studies for evidence – and despite Malhotra’s expertise being in cardiology, it makes forays into areas such as the effectiveness of Covid vaccination, based on a reassassment of statistical information already published elsewhere.

Malhotra’s supporters have made made a big deal about the fact that the paper was peer reviewed; the journal editor, Caryn Zinn, says that the process was “rigorous”, although given the number of errors and misrepresentations that have been identified since publication some have doubts have been raised. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that Malhotra is on the editorial board, but the paper contains only a token reference to insulin to fit the scope of the journal’s title, and as such it is reasonable to suppose that the journal was chosen because Malhotra had reason to believe he would get an easier ride. Malhotra and Zinn could put such speculation to rest by publishing the reviewers’ comments so that we could judge for ourselves.

Malhotra’s paper includes a reference to Zoë Harcombe, an “obesity researcher” who is involved with the anti-Covid vaccination group HART – Malhotra describes her as having “investigated” the possibility that the UK Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation may have been “biased” due to members working for organisations that have received funding from Bill Gates. Malhotra, Harcombe and Zinn have actually been networked since before Covid – along with a high-profile sports scientist in South Africa named Tim Noakes they have advocated together against sugar and carbohydrates, and in favour of fat, and against the use of statins. In 2016, Zinn and Harcombe provided testimony in support of Noakes when he was being investigated by the Health Professionals’ Council of SA over a complaint lodged by the president of the Association for Dietetics in South Africa. The hearing found in Noakes’ favour, and Harcombe and Zinn are associated with his Noakes Foundation. Noakes has praised Malhotra’s paper as a “brilliant, brilliant article”.

In 2019 Harcombe and Malhotra featured in a story in the Mail on Sunday on “the deadly propaganda of the statin deniers”. Harcombe and a third person discussed, Dr Malcolm Kendrick, are currently suing the paper for libel. The paper’s critical perspective was perhaps unexpected, given that novelties in health and diet advice are a perennial Mail favourite – indeed, Malhotra and Harcombe have both written pieces that have been published under the Mail banner (although it’s not clear for which paper). A possible explanation is the detail that Harcombe and Malhotra had been “invited to brief deputy Labour leader Tom Watson” – this, then, was another line of attack against Watson, already under pressure due to his disastrous investment in the “VIP abuse” hoaxer Carl Beech.

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From Reuters, last week:

A COVID-19 vaccination centre in Bristol was temporarily closed on Oct. 1 following a demonstration by protesters. It reopened as scheduled on Oct. 4. A video being shared on social media misleadingly claims the centre was “closed for the foreseeable future”.

…In the footage, which was recorded on Saturday, Oct. 1, a man in military uniform tells viewers that he and other protesters had “closed” a vaccine centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE).

…Similar posts can be seen on Facebook (here, here and here), Twitter (part one here and part two here), where together the videos have been viewed more than 118,000 times, and Instagram (here).

The “man in military uniform” (more specifically, combat gear) has been identified by John Bye as a former soldier named Dale Vincent. Vincent was reportedly arrested.

The action was led by Mark Sexton, a former police officer who got into the news last year after lodging a police complaint against vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi. Sexton also spoke at a protest in London around the same time, as discussed by Reuters here (and noted by me at the time).

Sexton was not deterred by Vincent’s arrest, and there was a further disruption at a vaccination centre in Windsor a few days ago. Videos show several individuals telling security staff that they will be issued with “caution notices” in relation to a series of crimes – typical sovereign citizen pseudo-legalese babble. A distinctive figure dressed in red (and the only black man apparently involved) was one Dave Murphy, a urine-therapy enthusiast who goes by the name “Allegedly Dave”.

This time Sexton himself was arrested, along with his associate Steve Forsythe and Mikey P. Mikey P was featured in the Mail on Sunday last year, after the paper infiltrated a group called “Veterans 4 Freedom”, which was plotting to target vaccination centres – following the group’s exposure (one “cell” was so inept that it held a planning meeting in a pub garden), it reformed as “Global Veterans Alliance”. Videos from Windsor show a number of the disrupters were wearing berets, indicating their status as ex-military. They also all appear to be middle-aged – it is reasonable to suppose that these are men who have not adapted well to civilian life or status, or to the passage of years.

One detail from the Bristol protest noted by John Bye is that Sexton brandished his phone at police and told them that Aseem Malhotra was on the line and wanting to talk to them. Bye attempted to ask Malhotra about this on Twitter:

Given Mark Sexton’s claim that he had him on the phone during this incident, will @DrAseemMalhotra confirm whether:

1) He has been in contact with Mark Sexton
2) He asked Mark Sexton to let him talk to the police
3) He condones Mark Sexton and his group’s violent behaviour

No reply so far. More on Malhotra here.

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A much discussed press release from the law firm Hamlins:

Today a group of people have launched a legal action against Associated Newspapers, publishers of The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and the Mail Online.

The group behind this legal offensive are: Baroness Doreen Lawrence of Clarendon OBE; Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex; Sir Elton John and David Furnish; Elizabeth Hurley; and Sadie Frost.

These individuals have become aware of compelling and highly distressing evidence that they have been the victims of abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy by Associated Newspapers.

The allegations include bugging, corrupt payments to police officials, impersonation to gain medical details (Hamlins declines to use the word “blagging”) and accessing financial records illicitly. Further:

It is apparent to these individuals that the alleged crimes listed above represent the tip of the iceberg – and that many other innocent people remain unknowing victims of similar terrible and reprehensible covert acts.

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From the website of South African academic publisher AOSIS:

…Writing in the peer-reviewed Journal of Insulin Resistance (JIR), one of the UK’s most eminent Consultant Cardiologists Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who was one of the first to take two doses of the vaccine and promote it on Good Morning Britain, says that since the rollout of the vaccine the evidence of its effectiveness and true rates of adverse events have changed.

In a two-part review article entitled “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine,” he writes that real-world data reveals that in the non-elderly population, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one death from Covid-19 runs into thousands and that re-analysis of randomised controlled trial data ( that first led to approval of the vaccines for BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna) suggests a greater risk of suffering a serious adverse event from the vaccine than to be hospitalised with Covid-19.

The review article makes only passing reference to “insulin” as a nod to the journal’s stated purpose, and the journal appears to have been chosen simply because Malhotra is a member of the editorial board. The editor, one Caryn Zinn, is a nutritionist.

Assuming that the peer review process was as rigorous as claimed, publication means that a couple of academics looked the paper over and decided that the issues it raises are worth airing. It’s a baseline for the start of an academic discussion. However, Malhotra and his supporters appear to believe that publication is a landmark event that establishes widespread vaccine injury as confirmed scientific fact. Malhotra has even given a lengthy press conference about his paper in the Upper Hall at the Emmanuel Centre – chosen due to its Westminster location – under the auspices of the World Council for Health, an organisation described by Vice in February as “an umbrella group for purveyors of COVID misinformation”.

Malhotra was previously profiled by the Guardian in 2018, when Sarah Boseley noted his views on statins:

Malhotra urges a low-carb, high-fat diet. His book, The Pioppi Diet, has the distinction of being named by the British Dietetic Association as one of the five worst “celeb” diet books in Britain…

…[In 2016] Malhotra was expressing strong views about statins, claiming in a BMJ article that was later partially retracted that they caused side-effects in 20% of patients. On BBC radio, he went further. “It was actually probably an underestimate,” he said, and questioned the benefits of the drug for any patient, citing the cholesterol sceptic Michel de Lorgeril.

He was accused by Prof Rory Collins at Oxford University of endangering lives. Collins said scare stories about statins could do as much harm as Andrew Wakefield did when he claimed that vaccines caused autism.

Malhotra’s father died of an unexpected heart attack last year aged 73, six months after being vaccinated. In his review article Malhotra explains that his father had been in good health, and that vaccination must therefore be the reason for his death.

It remains to be seen how academics respond to his paper formally, although engagement on social media has been scathing: on Twitter, James Neill has a handy “Master list of debunks” thread that includes threads by Viki Male, Frank Han, John Bye, Dr Barrett, Medlife Crisis, Demian Tresch, Health Nerd, Carol Jasper and David Robert Grimes. Wider context has also been provided by the Counter Disinformation Project.

Advance news of Malhotra’s paper was given to John Bowe, a retired actor who runs a self-styled “vaccine injury” advice line (discussed here). The fulfillment of prophecies that vaccination would cause widespread death and harm is not self-evident, and so the faithful have taken to scouring the media for anecdotes about sudden deaths and attempting to discern signs and proofs by sifting through published statistics. Malhotra does a bit of both.

On 12 September Bowe announced “something massive is coming next week”, and he warned “DONT GET JABBED”. On 23 and 24 September his associates Neil Oliver and James Melville also indicated that they were in the know, and Melville explained that there had been a delay due to the mourning period for the Queen. Followers were thus kept in eager anticipation for two weeks – by the time of the big reveal, many of them may have already declined booster jabs and invested personal credibility in exhorting friends and relations to follow suit. As such, they were primed to accept Malhotra’s paper uncritically.

Invitations to the press conference were apparently handled by one James Freeman Wells, a former Brexit Party MEP, and he is currently complaining that “the UK press” did not attend. Wells has also recorded a video with Malhotra, available on his “Freeman Reports United Free Press” website and the conspiricist video-sharing site Brand New Tube (discussed here). Wells’ previous subjects have included the New Zealand web show Counterspin (“labelled far-right by legacy media”, according to Wells) and Australian Senator Alex Antic. The video of the press conference, meanwhile, was handled by “Oracle Films”, which specialises in interviews with Covid vaccination sceptics such as Matt Le Tissier and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In other words, Malhotra is deeply embedded within a conspiricist milieu and online media network, and this is his target audience/congregation. This is also reflected in the paper itself – he is listed as the sole author, but his acknowledgements include references to “Dr Clare Craig for edits and data analysis, and Alex Starling for comments and suggestions”. Some deleted Tweets that undermine Craig’s general credibility have been helpfully preserved by Neil O’Brien MP, and can be seen here. If she did the data analysis, one wonders why she was not listed as a co-author.

Last October, John Bye noted that Alex Starling had had an online exchange with one Paul Yowell about how the MPs William Wragg and Christopher Chope could be furnished “with the right information” so that they would start asking questions about adverse vaccine reactions rather than just vaccine effectiveness. That may explain why there is now an “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Damage“, chaired by Chope. According to the World Council for Health, the original plan was that Malhotra’s presentation would be at a launch event for this APPG (which they misname as the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Vaccine Damage”).

UPDATE: A former broadcast executive named Mark Sharman attended the press conference and complains:

Rows of empty chairs stood testimony to the indifference as a senior physician presented his findings at a press conference in London today (Tuesday September 27th). Only GBNews and a Polish crew attended.

Meanwhile, John Bye has posted an account to Twitter. The original thread is the best place to access this (he includes screenshots from various sources), but as a bit of future proofing here is the text:

Within a minute of starting, Aseem Malhotra managed to crowbar in a reference to the Holocaust. Talking about “wilful blindness”, he implied that people “ignoring” covid vaccine injuries, which he falsely claims are common, are comparable to Germans ignoring Nazi atrocities.

He also confirmed that anti-vax disinformation group HART helped him write his paper, saying he asked Clare [Craig] and HART to estimate how many people they think would need to be vaccinated to prevent one covid death. Needless to say, their estimate is wildly inaccurate.

HART’s estimate is based on UKHSA data which a) specifically says it shouldn’t be used to judge vaccine efficacy, b) has confounding factors re: who got vaccinated, and c) is widely acknowledged to overestimate the unvaccinated population (and so underestimates their death rate).

Later on Malhotra cited HART again, saying “the HART group are very good”. Er .. no. “They’ve looked at ambulance data, and after the vaccine rollout we found there were an extra 14,000 out of hospital cardiac arrests that are unexplained.” Many are likely to be covid related.

Bizarrely, Malhotra pointed at high rates of cardiac / respiratory arrest call outs in 2021-22 and said they “should have stopped” after the first wave in March 2020. Er .. why? The second wave was even bigger, and we’re still dealing with the long term impacts of covid.

HART aren’t the only anti-vax group Malhotra name dropped. He said “I spoke to [RFK Jr] for the very first time yesterday. He called me and was congratulating me on the paper.” RFK Jr is founder of Children’s Health Defense, which campaigns against routine childhood vaccines.

Earlier Malhotra had dismissed concerns about the MMR vaccine, saying “traditional” vaccines are amongst the safest treatments. So why is he chumming with RFK Jr and the WCH when both promote the work of Andrew Wakefield, who falsely claimed the MMR jab causes autism?!?

After Malhotra finished, Ryan Cole made even wilder claims about covid vaccines, and Tess Lawrie wrapped up by claiming “there’s no longer any doubt among independent experts who have no conflicts of interest that what are called covid-19 vaccines are neither safe nor effective”.

Lawrie then told anyone worried by the nonsense they’d just heard to check the World Council for Health website “for information on what may help reduce the impact of the covid injections on your health”. This includes everything from ivermectin (of course) to .. potatoes?

Things got really wild in the Q&A session though. Responding to a question from unemployed actor John Bowe, Ryan Cole suggested the only reason vaccinated people aren’t all dying is because most of us got “duds” due to “poor manufacturing”. Malhotra didn’t challenge this idiocy.

Malhotra did compliment fellow low carb diet fan turned covid crank Ivor Cummins on his “documentary” though. He also did a separate interview with Ivor after the main event, which is now being teased with a clip in which (hilariously) Malhotra doesn’t get a word in edgeways.

Responding to a question from former Brexit Party MEP James Wells, who seems to have setup the press conference, Malhotra also said he thinks “big pharma” is funding studies linking excess cardiac deaths to covid to divert attention away from their vaccines.

Malhotra admits that severe covid (which hundreds of thousands of people in the UK have had) can lead to heart attacks, but that “it’s complete and total nonsense” that mild covid can also cause complications. “Show us the data”, he said. Here you go: [Link]

Things went off the rails at the end of the Q&A though, when a member of the audience asked “if you still believe in airborne viruses”. Amidst nervous laughter from the panel, Malhotra refused to take the microphone. Sadly these are the kind of people he’s associating with now.

Tess Lawrie however said that while “I think our current understanding is that [viruses do exist], there’s a lot that needs to be discussed now in terms of our understanding of disease causation and so on, so let’s start asking these questions and having these conversations”.

GBNews (which has a history of promoting Covid vaccination scaremongering) also invited Malhotra onto the channel, where he was interviewed by Dan Wootton.

UPDATE 2: Also at GB News, Mark Dolan has declared Malhotra to be the UK’s “Greatest Briton”, based on a nomination from Dominique Samuels. In Dolan’s view, “we need to have a grown up conversation about vaccine mandates, vaccine safety and victims of injuries from the vaccine”.

UPDATE 3: Malhotra’s paper is discussed in depth by David Gorski here. A more general critical overview of his career and self-presentation is provided by Christopher Snowden here.

UPDATE 4: Malhotra is now giving his imprimataur to any social media claim about vaccination harms. In one Tweet, for instance, he amplifies someone calling themselves “Jabby Dodger Bex”, who claims that a “friend at work” had phoned her up to narrate her own demise just minutes after being vaccinated. Malhotra’s assessment of this anecdoate is that “this is just awful”.

UPDATE 5: Malhotra was a guest at a birthday party for Covid conspiricist influencer James Melville. He’s been part of the Melville crowd for some months.

UPDATE 6: A critique of Malhotra’s study has appeared on Health Feedback.

UPDATE 7: A long factcheck from the AFP.

UPDATE 8: Further discussion by me.

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From a Sunday Times article about former BBC radio presenter Alex Belfield, who last week received a long jail sentence for stalking several individuals:

While he was tormenting his victims with online abuse, Belfield, who has nine employees, was estimated to be making £528,000 a year from his YouTube channel, The Voice of Reason — although Google has now stopped his channel carrying advertising. It carried nasty and sometimes misogynistic, racist or homophobic content, but he also interviewed famous names such as Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, and had defenders including the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who wrote to the then home secretary Priti Patel last year about Belfield’s treatment.

Last weekend, Belfield — by then a convicted stalker — performed alongside the right-wing controversialist Katie Hopkins at the Joe Longthorne Theatre in Blackpool, at a gig titled Two Gobshites Live, which promised to be “not PC but totally LOL”.

Brigden wrote to Patel in May 2021, stating:

It appears that the source of all of the unsubstantiated allegations made to Nottingham Police against him emanate from staff or former staff of the BBC.

Quotes from the letter were published in the Sunday Express as an anti-BBC story headlined “Broadcaster Alex Belfield arrested FIVE times and strip-searched in ‘BBC witch-hunt'”. This was shortly after Belfield had been questioned regarding a hoax bomb threat to the BBC that apparently remains unsolved to this day. It is unclear whether Belfield was able to corroborate his claim of a strip-search, although the Express treated it as fact. Bridgen also commented on Twitter:

As I’ve been warning for years, the BBC has huge power and authority without adequate accountability, which led to many scandals including Jimmy Savile Martin Bashir and their ongoing attacks on Alex Belfield, we’re all forced under threat of criminal prosecution to pay for this

Belfield’s highest-profile victim was the TV presenter Jeremy Vine; there were also seven other complainants, although in four cases the jury did not not convict. This leaves the regrettable impression that it is easier for a celebrity to achieve protection and justice than ordinary people, although without fuller details we can only speculate. I certainly would not hestitate to regard all of the complainants as being Belfield’s victims, as well as other individuals he has been accused of targeting, such as the broadcaster Iain Lee.

The judge’s sentencing remarks can be read here. The judge told Belfield that he accepted that “in certain limited respects you were acting as a form of media commentator in stating views on matters of public interest when you made some of your communications.” However, he added, “even accepting the latitude our laws give to those exercising free speech rights, on the jury’s verdicts you exceeded the generous margins.”

Belfield sent one victim “repeated abusive communications directly”, made “the false and scandalous accusation” that he “had regularly had sex in public on gay beaches with strangers”, and also made “false allegations that he had mental health issues”. In another case, he used images of his victim’s wife and child, and “attached an image of a foetal scan to an email and attempted to contact his wife”. In the third case Belfield “made false representations as to intended legal action”, “went as far as calling his mother” and “sought to in effect blackmail him by revealing details of a long spent conviction”. As regards Jeremy Vine, Belfield falsely alleged fraud, and “actively encouraged others to contact Mr Vine during his broadcasts to pursue the baseless allegation of theft of public money”.

It is interesting to see here malicious false allegations dealt with not merely as civil libel causing loss of reputation, but as criminal harassment causing alarm and distress. It should be noted that this was all done openly by Belfield under his own name; beyond the court case, however, there is also reason to suspect that he engaged in harassment via sockpuppeting and trolling. As Iain Lee writes:

for the last few weeks I’ve been getting the most obnoxious responses to my YT videos from someone calling themselves SarahEverardsRapists – you’d be hard pushed to make up a more offensive name

Alex Belfield goes to prison. Those posts stop
Obviously him

Presumably Andrew Bridgen was unaware of all this when he advocated on Belfield’s behalf last year, but he called in to Belfield’s YouTube channel as recently as three months ago (on the subject of “Is Boris Finished?”), which was some time after Belfield had been charged. If Bridgen now regrets his association with a man whose unreasonable conduct has been a matter of undisputed public knowledge since long before his conviction, there is no public evidence of it (1). One wonders if other recent high-profile callers also wish they had been more circumspect.

Belfield’s output also included conspiracy content on subjects such as 5G and Covid vaccination, and even now he retains some support among conspiricists. The pop-music duo Right Said Fred are of the view that is it a “mistake… to think hurty stuff said online is a ‘crime'”, and commentators such as David Kurten and Paul Joseph Watson similiarly deploy ironic quote marks around “online stalking” and “online harassment”.

UPDATE: The following posts on Twitter come from a pseudonymous account, but there is no reason not to take them at face value:

The fact is @ABridgen MP had every opportunity to be aware of all this. I emailed him on 25th March 2021 at his parliamentary email address with very extensive notes on Belfield’s public activity AND the bullying troll accounts he denies links to, but operated from his home & admin’d his YouTube phone-in. There’s pic proof Belfield lied re links. Homo/transphobia, mental health slurs, suicide goading all listed to Bridgen. I wrote again 31/3/21: “I am sorry that Alex Belfield is continuing to associate himself publicly with having your support”.

UPDATE 2: A Katie Hopkins parody Twitter account claims that it was approached by Anna Brees (see note below), Brees apparently believing that that the account was controlled by Hopkins. According to a screenshot, Brees wanted to know where Belfield was imprisoned, and wrote “I’ve messaged asking his barrister and I’m asking you. Ive asked Andrew Bridgen”. Brees remains supportive of Belfield (albeit with some caveats), and perhaps unwisely she appears to have replied to Tweets by Belfield’s victims with links to his videos.

Note

1. Bridgen also has other links with the conspiracy milieu: in 2021 he was criticised after giving an interview to Anna Brees, and her former associate Jon Wedger previously claimed in 2018 that Bridgen had “made contact” with him. There is also a photo of Wedger and fellow Satanic Ritual Abuse conspiracy fanatic Jeanette Archer sitting at an outside café table with an unidentified man whose appearance from the rear is consistent with Bridgen. He has also previously advocated on behalf of disgraced former chief constable Mike Veale.

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A Tweet from Donald Trump Jr, self-styled “Future Leader Ministry of Truth”:

There’s something seriously broken in federal Law Enforcement if they’re going after Mike Lindell, but not the people on Jeffery Epstein’s list.

“Jeffrey Epstein’s list” here does not mean Epstein’s famous address book [1], which appeared online in redacted form in 2015, and which it was agreed would not be made public during Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, nor it is his flight logs.

Instead, the phrase refers to a speculative “client list” that either Epstein supposedly kept himself or that was compiled by investigators who asssed the evidence of his crimes. Elon Musk mused in June that it was “odd” that the media didn’t care about “The Epstein/Maxwell client list”, and his Tweet was picked up by Tucker Carlson in August as a supposed contrast with coverage of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. The American Spectator even speculated that the raid occurred because Trump has a copy of the list.

The implication is that the list consists of powerful people, and that federal law enforcement are failing to “go after” them due to their status. This dovetails with concerns over the leniency and discretion with which Epstein was treated following his original conviction in 2008, his attempts to restore his reputation before his final fall (not least by being photographed with Prince Andrew [2]), and conspiracy theories about the circumstances of his death in prison.

After so many failed prophecies of Pizzagate and QAnon, the Epstein scandal seemed at last to offer concrete proof that “elites” are despicable sex criminals who act with impunity, even if the details are hardly comparable to bizarre claims about infants being tortured for adrenochrome and so on. The purported existence of a hidden list of names, and speculation about who features on it, is likely to become part of the mythology of conspiricists for years to come, continually stoked by the political rhetoric of rival elites who want us to believe it is inherently unfair for them to be investigated for anything.

Notes

1. The address book is a mundane list of contacts of the sort that you would expect any well-connected public figure to have built up. However, individuals featured in it have been subjected to accusations and denunciations based on wild interpretations of its significance. The British broadcaster Andrew Neil is currently suing Boris Johnson’s former lover Jennifer Arcuri for libel over one such instance of this.

2. I find it odd that Virginia Roberts Giuffre does not appear to accuse Prince Andrew in her 2011 correspondence with the journalist Sharon Churcher (a point I’m surprised hasn’t been made much of anywhere). However, Andrew’s explanation for meeting Epstein and being seen with him in public in 2010 is also odd.

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From a New York Magazine long-read by Andrew Rice and Olivia Nuzzi about the Hunter Biden laptop story, referring to the activities of Steve Bannon’s associates Jack Maxey and Rudy Giuliani:

[Jack] Maxey tried to turn up the volume, describing in a public speech an allegedly indecent photo of a teenage girl that he had seen on the computer. At the time the original laptop stories were published, Giuliani had advanced a similar claim, driving down to Delaware to urge the local police to investigate whether one of the photos on the laptop amounted to child pornography. The Delaware authorities showed no interest, and others who examined the laptop suggested a more innocent explanation: The photo belonged to a teenage Biden family member whose photo roll had been backed up on the laptop. Still, the insinuation, which resonated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, seeped into the cultural groundwater.

The article also includes interview material with John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repair man who says that Biden’s laptop had been brought to his shop:

As much as he disapproved of Hunter, he added, his sense of honor compelled him to say that the child-porn rumors were untrue and that some widely circulated images attributed to the laptop were phony.

Mac Isaac also said that the FBI seemed to have been primarily interested in the possibility of evidence of sexual offences, from which we can reasonably infer that no evidence was subsequently discovered.

Rice and Nuzzi’s article is extensive, but the above is an angle that has been explored in more detail in pieces by Dan Friedman for Mother Jones. In April, Friedman recalled how false claims about the laptop were promoted by another Bannon associate, Guo Wengui, and like the New York Magazine authors he notes the affinity with QAnon:

On September 25, 2020, Wang Dinggang—who at the time was a Guo ally with a YouTube channel called Lude Media that was featured on GTV—announced, falsely, that Chinese sources had sent US officials “three hard disks” of material related to Hunter Biden. That was the first public indication that Trump allies had obtained Hunter Biden’s private material.

…While he orchestrated the publication of the Hunter Biden material, Guo encouraged supporters to make a false, vile claim. He instructed them to say the laptop included videos that showed Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls, according to messages he sent and people who communicated with him. Guo also asserted, baselessly, that the Chinese government had created or obtained the compromising videos and images and used them to blackmail the Bidens… These lies dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that many prominent Democrats are pedophiles and that Trump was working to stop them.

In a follow-up article published in July, Friedman further notes:

In that video and subsequent rants, Wang falsely asserted that the material included videos showing sexual abuse of children. Those claims were repeated on another Guo site, GNews; by other right-wing publications and figures; by Giuliani; and after the election by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Friedman’s July article includes references to leaked audio in which Bannon appears to express approval of promoting false claims in order to increase the news value of the story:

“We hammered this guy every day for 10 days with the worst pictures in the world, drug addict, taking money from CCP,” Bannon said. “No response. Nothing. And the negatives just keep going up.”

…“That’s why when people tell me, ‘Lude’s stuff’s getting crazy,’ I go, ‘Not crazy enough,’” Bannon said, drawing laughter from others in the meeting.

As quoted by Rice and Nuzzi, Bannon now says “A lot of stuff I do, I don’t feel great about… But we’re in a war”. However, it looks to me that in their greed to hype potentially damaging disclosures about Hunter Biden’s business dealings into something devastating for Joe Biden, Giuliani and Bannon botched their own scoop and destroyed the credibility of the whole story – an outcome that is now being framed as the mainstream media and intelligence services working together to suppress a scandal.

The early involvement of Guo in promoting stories about Hunter Biden was also noted at the time by ABC News in Australia, in a story focusing on two Chinese dissidents living in Brisbane and New York who had previously had dealings with Guo and then been targeted after falling out with him.

Guo has also been involved with spreading Covid conspiracy theories: his “Rule of Law Society” and “Rule of Law Foundation” published Li-Meng Yan’s claim that the the coronavirus was obviously a manufactured hybrid bioweapon, and there is a striking photo of Lude posing with Giuliani, with Bannon in the background and Yan’s reflection caught in a mirror. Yan has since fallen out with Guo.

Excursus

The sexual offences smear against Hunter Biden does not appear to feature in My Son Hunter, a new movie produced by Breitbart that has not been well received by critics. The film has been widely noted in British media due to the involvement of actor-turned-activist Laurence Fox in the role of Hunter Biden. The story is by Phelim McAleer and the screenplay is by Brian Godawa, author of self-described “Biblical novels” such as a series called Chronicles of the Nephilim, as well as a book called End Times Bible Prophecy.

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“It’s not the BBC, you know, you actually get your facts right!” – Liz Truss on GB News, 20 August

Journalist and cultural historian Matthew Sweet writes an open letter to GB News’s Mark Steyn, declining an invitation to appear on his show:

When I agree to make a media appearance, I need to be reassured that the host and the show meet proper journalistic standards. I do not believe that you or GB News are currently meeting these standards. Moreover, I think that GB News is becoming a space though which conspiracy theories are being introduced into the British media.

As an example he cites Naomi Wolf, whose 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love was withdrawn by the publisher after a disastrous Radio 3 interview in which Sweet raised issues of accuracy that destroyed her entire argument. In his letter, Sweet describes her as

as person who believes, among other things, that the Pfizer vaccine is a Chinese bioweapon with which the CCP is assassinating community leaders across America.

Further, in conversation with Steyn she

made false claims about the rise in neonatal deaths in Ontario. She suggested that Bill Gates had bribed the BBC into suppressing the facts about this. Then she made similar false claims about neonatal deaths in Scotland. You might have challenged her on these matters, but instead you nodded them through and congratated her.

Steyn wanted Sweet to come on his show for a debate after Sweet had criticised him on a Twitter thread (here), which Sweet summarises thus:

I said that you had insinuated that several young atheles had died from the effects of the Covid vaccine. On your sarcastically-titled “Nothing to See Here” segment you made these insinuations about the recent tragic deaths of the cyclist Rab Wardell, the rugby player Ben Benn, the footballer Molly White and the boxer Dominic Oscar. There is no reported evidence that vaccines had any bearing on their deaths… I would suggest that material like this is beneath serious notice.

Sweet goes on to note how Steyn had misinterpreted mortality data [1], citing a fact-check by Iria Carballo-Carbajal of Health Feedback here.

Sweet has now expanded his case on Twitter, judging

that it is reasonable to conclude that @GBNews is engaged in the promotion of anti-vax conspiracy theories, and perhaps ought to be considered part of that culture itself.

I dislike quoting too much of someone else’s content simply to for its own sake, but given the ephemeral nature of Twitter and its inaccessibility to non-users I think a record outside the platform might be useful to some. Readers should preferably view the original. I also prefer treating Tweets as normal quotes rather than as embedded text, although links are included below.

Sweet starts with a discussion of another Steyn guest, a certain Dr Guy Hatchard [here]. Hatchard was brought on to discuss mortality statistics; Sweet points out that he is not an epidemiologist or statistician, but that he instead “has a PhD in Psychology from Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa – a private college founded by the yoga guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi” [here – be sure to check out the “Yogic flying” gif] and is a member of Voices for Freedom, a New Zealand anti-vax group “recently censured for handing out misleading leaflets about Covid” [here, citing source here].

Hatchard also claims that the Covid vaccine “isn’t really a vaccine” [here], a view “shared by other people on your show. People like your fellow @GBNews stalwarts Matt LeTissier and Neil Oliver” [here]. Sweet then turns to Oliver on LeTissier’s Gettr channel as “a good study for anyone interested in how people can be radicalised by online conspiracy theories” [here]:

Here, @thecoastguy [Neil Oliver] says he’s not an anti-vaxxer because he doesn’t think the vaccine is really a vaccine. It’s a “procedure” and part of a plot to create a one-world government. These beliefs, I’d suggest, are the unfiltered versions of views he expresses on @GBNews. [here]

Sweet could have added that Oliver’s quest for confirmatory views recently led to him interviewing Peter Sweden, in a segment that GB News has deleted after Sweden’s history of far-right comments was highlighted.

Next up: Leilani Dowding [2]:

And here, I think, is the weirdest of them all. Actually, I think a stronger kind of language must be used in the case of your @GBNews colleague @leilanidowding. Here she is on your show in April. [here]

And here, on an an online show by the conspiracy theorist Gareth Icke . She is laughing and doing air quotes as she says that she doesn’t believe that her friend’s mother died of covid, because she thinks covid isn’t real. [here]

@Leilanidowding is an enthusiast for 9/11 conspiracy theories. She appears to think the Moon landings were faked. She tweets extracts from a book that claims the vaccine is a hoax and that NHS ambulance crews were only pretending to be on emergency calls during the pandemic. [here – includes screenshots]

I look at this stuff and I feel I’m seeing into a very dark place. She is often featured on @GBNews. [here]

So I wonder, did you and your producers book guests like this in spite of their being conspiracy theorists, or because of it? [here]

In the case of @thecoastguy and @mattletissier, we might be generous. They have histories in legitimate broadcasting. As for @LeilaniDowding – she seems a much more worrying example. [here]

I wonder how you know of her, without being engaged with the sphere of anti-vax conspiracist websites and youtube channels where she seems to do her work? To me this suggests you may be actively recruiting commentators from that culture. [here]

Finally:

As for the bigger problem of the sympathy between @GBNews and online conspiracy culture, that is a matter for the regulator, and, I’d suggest, requires the urgent attention of the @CommonsDCMS. [here]

UPDATE: GB News has responded to Sweet by letter. The text, which is attributed to “GB News” rather than a specific individual, frames his complaint as being that “GB News should have been more supportive of government policy”. It states that Steyn’s programme has “featured families how have lost a loved on to Covid vaccination”, and draws attention to an article in the BMJ from June 2022 about the government’s vaccine damage payment scheme. It adds that there “would appear to be several thousand” vaccine deaths.

Sweet has posted the letter to Twitter, noting that it “fails to answer any of my substantive points about inaccurate reporting and the use of conspiracy theorists and crackpots to comment on gravely serious matters”.

UPDATE 2 (19 September 2022): On the day of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, Sweet notes a Twitter exchange between Dowding and another user:

Dowding: Wow the nurse who gave the 1st vaccine out is walking with the queens coffin. This is mad. They will never admit it… . This is doubling down.

Reply: At least we’ll have their name for future reprisals.

The reply has been “Liked” by Dowding, which amounts to approval.

UPDATE 3 (27 Septmber): Sweet has responded to GB News, in a letter that he has also partly posted as a Twitter thread. He writes:

In a statement you seem to imply that I have argued that it is impossible for the vaccine to cause harm or death. Clearly that is not true and I have never expressed such a belief… I think most reasonable people would agree with your assertion that there should be proper reporting on deaths caused by the Covid-19 vaccines.

In your statement you insist that @GBNews does not disseminate vaccine misinformation. Unfortunately, there would seem to be vaccine misinformation in the paragraph in which you assert this.

…The most recent @ONS figures suggest that your assertion of “several thousand” is inaccurate. In the UK 43 deaths have been caused by the Covid vaccine. Each one a tragic loss [link added].

I suspect your figure of “several thousand” comes from raw data relating to numbers of people who died after receiving the vaccine. This includes death from any cause, so those succumbing to any illness, or hit by a bus, would be included.

Now, I am no expert on these matters. Nobody should be booking me to talk about vaccine side effects or mortality statistics. But I did what journalists do: I asked several reputable experts in this field and took advice.

He then contrasts reputable experts with with GB News guests:

Naomi Wolf, who thinks that the Chinese Communist Party is using the Pfizer vaccine to assassinate community leaders in her Hudson Valley neighbourhood… Guy Hatchard, who asserts that meditation groups can lower the crime rate with psychic energy and that the Covid vaccine is not really a vaccine… Tony Hinton, who says that the vaccine rollout was a plot to introduce a digital ID system and a “world government”… @leilanadowding [Leilana Dowding], who spent part of the day of the Queen’s funeral agreeing with one of her followers that the vaccine nurse who accompanied the royal coffin should be subject to “reprisals”… former Emmerdale actor John Bowne [John Bowe], who said on @GBNews that “close to 3% of all people that have been vaccinated have been badly adversely affected by the vaccines or dying” @MarkSteynonline agreed that the NHS was “trying to suppress the story.”… Robert Kennedy Jnr, whose book – endorsed by @MarkSteynonline on your channel, claims a “powerful vaccination cartel” have exaggerated the seriousness of the virus for financial gain. He’s also the source of the Bill Gates vaccine microchip conspiracy theory… suspended NHS doctor Sam White, who says that the vaccine is like “a toxin … a bioweapon” and now works for Robert Kennedy… @GBNews presenter @thecoastguy [Neil Oliver], who says that the vaccine is not a vaccine, that it has killed “uncounted numbers” and that through it, Bill Gates and the CCP have a plan for “nothing less than global governance through the WHO.”… @marksteynonline [Mark Steyn], who has said on @GBNews that the Covid vaccine does not “meet the definition of a vaccine” and that the vaccine “does not work”.

Notes:

1. A good thread on cardiac risks to atheletes by a molecular cardiologist named Glen Pyle can be seen here. He points out that “sudden cardiac death is a leading cause of non-traumatic death in athletes”.

2. I previously discussed Dowding in March. She is also part of a crowd associated with the conspiracy influencer James Melville, having apparently made up with him after criticising Melville’s interview with Matt Hancock. Melville in turn has moved even closer to the Icke milieu, appearing on a show co-hosted by Dowding and Gareth Icke and downplaying David Icke’s claims about transdimensional lizards as “previous opinions”. He writes:

…

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