How the Covid Disinformation Ecosystem was established

Network mapping the international network's development in 2020, with a particular focus on the UK.

When covid first emerged into our consciousness at the start of 2020 information was limited, guess work was rife but educated guesswork was the best we had. Then the data started coming in, small scale with many factors and variables to consider. Calculating fatality rate, incubation time, infectiousness, hospitalisation rate, proportion of asymptomatic cases etc, became vital in predicting the trajectory of the pandemic and what measures were needed. January featured fear and disbelief, February proved covid couldn’t simply be ignored, March was when governments realised the hospitalisation rate could overwhelm healthcare.

But as the science got clearer, disinformation and the development of an alternative narrative became more coordinated, the media platformed these contrarian voices with false equivilence and created a space for conspiracy theories to thrive. Its important to understand that there was a coordinated campaign to undermine public health in the midst of a pandemic even when the bodies were piling high in January 2021, and it has led to antivax sentiment becoming a fixture of the radical right.

In the US a group of academics had emerged as the media's choice of anti-lockdown expert with many holding positions at top universities, this group included John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Scott Atlas, Michael Levitt and Joseph Ladapo.

April 2020

Toby Young announced the founding of Lockdown Sceptics (now Daily Sceptic) at the start of the UK lockdown having argued that letting up to 250,000 vulnerable people die from covid was a price worth paying to protect the economy. Lockdown Sceptics became a media hub for alternative experts and was thanked by the AIER in their defence of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Besides Young, Lockdown Sceptics directors were Noah Carl, who along with Young wrote for the Thiel funded Quillette.

Luke Johnson is a businessman who donated to several other anti-lockdown initiatives and is also a director of Toby Young's Free Speech Union that was founded with the support of Thiel.

Will Jones, a conservative Angligan Reverant who would later join the antivax HART group.

The hub of alternative experts, Pandata was founded in April 2020 by Nick Hudson. In 2021 I received a leaked copy of Pandata's membership database and work streams. The membership read like a whose who of disseminators of covid disinformation and conspiracy theories from around the world. Hudson and Pandata chair Jonathan Engler now claim they believe there was no pandemic. Scott Atlas and Paul E Alexander were both members of the advisory board while working for the first Trump administration. The GBD authors Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Gupta, and Peter McCullough were also members.

The legal challenge against lockdown by Keep Britain Free was represented by Francis Hoar who was a Pandata member. In 2021 Toby Young, Luke Johnson and Will Jones were speakers at a Pandata event.

May 2020

The Council for National Policy (CNP) has operated as the hub for the US radical right since its founding in 1980. It’s a coalition of what has become Christian Nationalism, raw resource industrialists, financiers and the newer addition of tech-bro oligarchs, and has been a driving force behind the culture wars. Billionaires such as Koch, Thiel, and the Mercers are involved.

A leaked recording of a CNP meeting at the start of May 2020 revealed a plan to create an organisation of “doctors for Trump” who would argue against covid restrictions. The CNP were worried that unless the economy was fully reopened soon then Trumps chances of re-election would be severely harmed, many members also had personal financial interests that were being impacted. For instance furlough and working from home had a dramatic global impact on oil demand; Rotterdam dam port, the largest in Europe had queues of oil tankers.

The CNP recruited from members of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) and America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD) was born, led by Simone Gold who would end up in prison for participating in the storming of Capitol Hill on Jan 6th.

An already established offshoot of the AAPS is the Truth For Health Foundation led by AAPS members Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Peter McCullough, who became a key character in the covid disinformation ecosystem leading to the Trump 2.0 relying on him as an expert to justify RFK Jr’s attacks on vaccines.

For the sake of clarity these network maps are simplified.

In May the UK group UsForThem was founded by Molly Kingsley with the help of Allison Pearson of the Telegraph, their campaign was against all measures in schools, with Kingsley saying we “should allow children the benefit of natural immunity” ie let the kids gets infected. Somehow this supposedly grassroots group had almost immediately gained the support of Ed Barker, the PR guy for the Legatum think tank of Christopher Chandler co-ownerof GBNews, several factional groups like Conservative Way Forward, he ran PR for multiple senior Conservative MPs, Boris Johnson’s campaign for Conservative leader and Leave Means Leave.

UsForThem launched via the Telegraph and then appeared across the media. They also had the support of Ellen Townsend, who was named as being on Pandata's advisory board in September 2020, and UsForThem’s Ros Jones (a fan of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield) worked with Pandata and many anti-vax organisations and initiatives. Kingsley became a hero of the anti-lockdown and then the antivax community, in her book she gave her thanks to many stalwarts of the Covid disinformation ecosystem including Bhattacharya who she describes as a friend.

The Free Speech Union (FSU) was founded in February 2020, and has fought against measures to tackle misinformation. Luke Johnson is a director and Allison Pearson sits on the FSU board.

The same handful of anti-lockdown voices were constantly across the UK media in 2020 included Karol Sikora and Carl Heneghan. Sikora ran a private health company and had a history of campaigning against the NHS, even appearing in a Republican advert against publicly funded healthcare. Sikora was named on Pandata's advisory board in September 2020.

Heneghan and his academic partner Jefferson were commissioned by John Conly to produce systematic reviews that concluded that aerosols were not a significant mode of covid transmission (they are). Conly was at the centre of a cover up of airborne transmission inside the WHO. Heneghan leads the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University and for a while it was officially listed as a partner organisation to Pandata.

I have also added in Peter Thiel, the pandemic proved particularly profitable for his Palantir company. Palantir offered to create digital dashboards for governments for the nominal cost of £1 or €1, many governments took up the offer allowing the health data for entire countries to be fed into Palantir's platform. Since then Palantir has been able allowed to embed itself into many healthcare systems with dozens of contracts just in the UK. In the US it was a Thiel company that created the data hub used by Emily Oster to claim that covid wasn’t impacting schools and children.

Thiel is also an old friend of Bhattacharya since their students days at Stanford when they were college buddies.

We can see how Toby Young, Allison Pearson and Ed Barker are integral to the development of an organised anti-lockdown movement. The covid inquiry revealed how right wing media editors were lobbying Boris Johnson hard behind closed doors and between them. Young had Lockdown Sceptics, Pearson via the Telegraph launched the Planet Normal podcast that exclusively platformed lockdown sceptics, and Barker marshalled political support, the CRG MPs had a large overlap with the Brexit ultras’ European Research Group of MPs with many ties to the US right.

Pandata's role as a central hub making ties in the UK can already be seen. In 2022 Pandata claimed to have links to over 40 countries, and many members were involved with multiple groups in their own countries. Fully covering the links of Pandata members requires a spreadsheet not a diagram, just starting to try covering the basics of mainly the UK turned into this.

Another character of note is Patrick Fagan, former lead psychologist for Cambridge Analytica, the election influencing company at the centre of the illegal data harvesting scandal on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016. MAGA strategist and CNP member Steve Bannon led the company, the Mercers funded it and Thiel’s Palantir provided support.

Patrick Fagan was also part of Pandata's data team.

In August 2020 Covid19Assembly was established in the UK and registered with Companies House under David Fleming's name. This is one of around a dozen companies under Fleming's name that has been dissolved without ever filing a financial account. Covid19Assembly's initial aim was to run a campaign against the official death statistics, they collected donations to run a death audit to review every covid death certificate which they claimed would show deaths had greatly been exaggerated, a foundational pillar of covid conspiracies. The audit had no legal powers and was to be conducted by Clare Craig, a Pandata member and a leading UK figure in the covid disinformation ecosystem. In fact most of those involved in Covid19Assembly were Pandata members: Patrick Fagan, Martin Kulldorff, Roger Hodkinson and Francis Hoar. Toby Young and Ros Jones was also a member.

Removing a few nodes to stop it getting too messy.

Removing CNP, AAPS, Peter Thiel, Quillette, Noah Carl, Cambridge Analytica, Karol Sikora and Scott Atlas.

Every element of the pandemic response came under attack from this astroturfing campaign. Next up PCRclaims, which built on the work of the likes of Heneghan claiming rising covid cases in the late summer of 2020 were an artefact of false positives. Another popular voice in the media in 2020, Michael Yeadon was introduced as an ex-Pfizer chief, Yeadon was a key voice in questioning the reliability of PCR testing and quickly descended into conspiracy theory. The HARTleaks show that by the start of 2021 he was ranting in private chats about global conspiracies to depopulate the world. Yeadon was a member of many groups including PCRclaims, Pandata, Truth For Health, Doctors for Covid Ethics, and Liberal Spring. In mid 2021 Yeadown and fellow Pandata/HART member Joel Smalley had taken up roles as advisors to America’s Frontline Doctors.

Other PCRclaims members: Patrick Fagan, Clare Craig, Ellen Townsend and Anna Raynor.

A web with Pandata in the centre with the campaign groups sprouting off of it. This is of course just a selection of UK based groups, the same was occurring across the western world, however the infrastructure to wage culture wars was more developed in the UK than in most of Europe. In the US, the powers for implementing covid measures mainly sat at state level requiring considerable resources to wage a culture war, but in the UK all it takes is a relatively small group with strong media and political connections.

At the start of October there was the Great Barrington Declaration, authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are on the map, Sunetra Gupta is also a member of Pandata and a director of Collateral Global. The GBD was a focus point to rally behind for the entire covid disinformation ecosystem that had been established in just over half a year.

November saw Collateral Global established in the UK in the name of Gupta's partner Alex Caccia as a continuation of the GBD. Luke Johnson donated to the start up of CG a did the “dark money ATM” the Donors Trust, but the bulk of their funding comes from foundations such as the Von Opels and the King of Belgium’s Foundation. Bhattacharya donated a $250,000 award from the US right wing Bradley Foundation to Collateral Global.

Every aspect of the pandemic was targetted by this network. Heneghan's work undermined airborne transmission and masks, UsForThem focused on keeping schools free from mitigations, Covid19Assembly claimed the death toll was greatly exaggerated, PCR Claims questioning testing cast doubts on infection rates and deaths. Collateral Global produced pseudo-academic papers to reinforce these narratives. The Free Speech Union fought against efforts to counter disinformation and misinformation, Francis Hoar and a group of other lawyers; Law or Fiction, Lawyers for Liberty, Steve Jackson launched legal challenges against the government and drafted template legal warning letters for public bodies, hospitals and schools.

All of this garnered media attention, often on the front pages of right wing newspapers in articles written by journalists who were supporters of these groups. The CRG MPs comments on points raised by the campaign groups would then generate a second round of articles.

And the main initial target for the UK section of the ecosystem was Boris Johnson who was meeting privately with newspaper owners and editors. Enough doubt was put into Johnson's mind that he dithered and delayed when cases began to rise, leading to a private meeting with Heneghan, Gupta and Sweden's Anders Tegnell in September before he chose to ignore his scientific advisors calls for a circuit breaker lockdown. In the run up to the deadliest weeks of the pandemic the papers were calling for Johnson to “Save Christmas’. The full role of the media requires its own series.

Another group I didn't have space to add is Time4Recovery/the Recovery Alliance. Founded by Jon Dobinson the group donated to the CRG MPs and ran a PR campaign against school closures on behalf of UsForThem in the winter of 2020. There is no record of where Time4Recovery received its funding from, but Jon Dobinson was previously involved in World4Brexit with Steve Bannon and Pamela Popper, who in 2020 was raising funds for legal challenges conducted by Thomas Renz, America’s Frontline Doctors lawyer of choice. Popper and Renz both appeared as speakers at a Truth For Health event in 2021.

The end of 2020 was the start of two new waves of disinformation. With HCQ proven to be ineffective the alternative treatments grifters had turned to Ivermectin as their new wonder drug, and with covid vaccines being rolled out the covid disinformation ecosystem merged with the antivax movement, although there was already considerable crossover 2021 allowed anti-vax narratives to break into the mainstream.

The final addition to the map is HART founded at the very end of 2021. Containing almost all of Pandata's UK based members, HART's leaked chat logs revealed members to be anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, entertaining crazy ideas such as vaccines being used to make people “WiFi enabled”, and yet this group established themselves as the “scientific” advisors to the CRG MPs, providing evidence to All Party Parliamentary Groups and were platformed across the right wing media with some ending up as presenters and regular commentators on the likes of GB News and TalkTv.

HART is effectively the UK's Pandata, coordinating across different disinformation groups and spawning many offshoots, members include: Patrick Fagan, Clare Craig, Michael Yeadon, Ellen Townsend, Ros Jones and Will Jones of the Daily Sceptic. The GBD authors were participants in the leaked private chats logs, and the leaks shows how HART were collaborating with the CRG MPs and various journalists.

An incomplete map just of HART's links.

The covid disinformation ecosystem started as an astroturfing campaign constructed at speed, willing to recruit and collaborate with anyone who would reinforce the alternative narrative

Further Reading