Special Report: How the UK media embraced anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists
Mapping HART's media network, GB News, talkRADIO, Telegraph, Spectator, Daily Express, BBC etc
When covid struck in 2020, much of the world looked at China implementing lockdown and thought that this wouldn't happen in their countries.
In the UK there were plenty of voices in the media who thought China was over reacting, this would be like swine flu all over again. As covid spread with explosive exponential growth the arguments against lockdown grew, the UK media spent most of March selling a strategy of herd immunity via mass infection. Even once it became hard to ignore reality there was a slew of articles including from Toby Young, Charles Moore and Robert Dingwall arguing that sacrificing the lives of vulnerable people was a price they were willing for others to pay in order to protect the economy.
After the first lockdown began there was a rush to find alternative points of view to argue for measures to be dropped as soon as possible. Those with appropriate credentials claiming the pandemic was effectively over already and that there wouldn’t be a second wave were in high demand by the media. Soon there was a small ensemble of alternative experts, then came the campaign groups and legal challenges quoting these experts, all championed by the usual journalists and commentators who are fixated on the culture wars.
Misinformation, disinformation, false equivalence, cherry picking, wild thin end of the wedge hypotheticals, those elements of the media and commentariat ideologicaly opposed or protecting financial interests deployed all the tools to turn covid as a topic into another theatre of the culture wars.
The hasty hunt for an alternative scientific viewpoint led the media to embracing anti-vaxxers, grifters and conspiracy theorists. The tidal wave of disinformation across the globe, particularly in the Western world created an intensely radicalising moment in history as conspiracy culture wormed its way into the mainstream. Vaccine hesitancy has soared and vaccination rates in children is tumbling downwards, and yet those media outlets who ended up aiding anti-vaxxers to build their follower base, take no responsibility for the fall of confidence in vaccines.
Through 2021 the HART group became the UK's hub of alternative experts, but when their chat logs owere leaked, it revealed them to be a collective of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers working as part of a wider disinformation network. It also revealed how certain journalists and commentators had worked closely with this group to mainstream their arguments and narratives.
When these media characters were challenged with screenshots of the HARTleaks, the most common response was to ignore them, or to accuse their challengers of attempting to smear good people, they never engage with the content of the leaks.
Examples from HART include claiming that vaccines caused covid, this is the root of the spike shedding nonsense.
Deliberate infection is ethical but vaccination isn't, they specifically targeted pregnant women ignoring the evidence that this was a high risk groups. Members believed in secret vaccine ingredients, nanotechnology and magnetism, and even explored the idea vaccines were going to make people WiFi enabled. Members would also go off on rants about the Great Reset, conspiracies to depopulate the world through vaccination and the need for “Nuremberg trials”.
What does it say about the likes of Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Lucy Johnston, Sarah Knapton, Claire Fox etc that they continued to platform HART members after having been shown the HARTleaks?
The HARTleaks show how easy it was for them to access the mainstream and gain the ears of politicians simply because HART were saying what they wanted to hear.
This report will provide evidence and map the network showing how this occurred.
In the begining
Owned by the Barclay Brothers, the Spectator had backed a herd immunity via infection strategy, and published Robert Peston's article on 12 March announcing the government's herd immunity strategy. Carl Heneghan was a favourite expert of the publication which spent the summer of 2020 explaining why there wouldn’t be a second wave in the winter.
Sunetra Gupta claims at the start of lockdown that herd immunity had been reached or was very close to being reached was splashed across the UK media, described as a report from Oxford University Gupta's claims rapidly crippled across the world’s media, however her paper had bizarrely been released via Dropbox and Oxford University released a statement confirming Gupta's claims had nothing to do with the University. This information was ignored by most the media who continued to quote Gupta's “Oxford Report”. Gupta never produced the evidence she said her claims were based on, but its likely she was basing this on a questionable ad hoc data collection in the US by John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, who has since taken a senior health post in the Trump administration.
One of the Spectator's most popular claims was that T-cell cross-immunity would protect the population. It was via the Spectator that the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration published their response to criticism from David Gorski and Gavin Yamey, and an investigation by Nafeez Ahmed.
Also owned by the Barclay Brothers the Telegraph has been the most egregious paper in attempting to rewrite the history of the pandemic. Allison Pearson helped launch the lobby group UsForThem via the Telegraph. A member of the Free Speech Union with a track record of promoting many astroturf groups, its likely Pearson secured UsForThem the support of right-wing PR guru Ed Barker and free legal support from top lawfirm DLA Piper.
It was Pearson who organised a celebration dinner for the self-titled Brexit Media Corps after the referendum result in 2016, this group of journalists and commentators peddled the myth of “sunlit uplands” and the nature of their celebration suggests Pearson believes they played a pivotal role in the leave result, which they likely did. It shouldn’t be a suprise that most the group came out in opposition of lockdowns, supported the GBD, claimed most measures were ineffective, and opposed vaccination for children.
The photograph below was posted by one of those who attended the dinner.
Also at the start of lockdown Toby Young launched Lockdown Sceptics (Now Daily Sceptic) which has served as a disinformation hub.
GB News
GB News launched in 2020, the UK equivalent to Fox News, the channel has become the broadcasting arm of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. The channel is a platform for disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theorists, and several of its tin foil hat presenters appear to have gone down the rabbit hole over the course of the first year and a half of the pandemic as they were drawn to the alternative experts from groups like Pandata and HART.
GB News is owned by the right-wing activist billionaire hedge funder Paul Marshall, and Christopher Chandler, a Dubai-based New Zealander who made his fortune through Russian fossil fuels founded the influential Legatum think tank, which is registered as a charity. Following a Charity Commission investigation, it was determined that the Legatum Institute’s research, particularly a report titled "Brexit Inflection Point," did not provide "balanced, neutral evidence and analysis". Ed Barker worked for Legatum and the think tank has funded Paul Marshall's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. In 2025 Marshall bought the Spectator to add to his growing media empire which also includes Unherd.
HART's Launch
As I'm focusing on the media I’ve stripped back the network map and removed PCR Claims because while the falsehoods about false positives persisted they did not have the same media presence in 2021.
At the start of 2021 Jemma Moran of HART organised a behind closed doors pre-launch meeting for selected journalists. Ellen Townsend (HART, Pandata, Collateral Global and UsForThem supporter) was also involved in organising.
Allison Pearson is described as the most supportive contact they have, this was closely followed by Lucy Johnston of the Daily Express who organised HART's launch meeting.
Some of the journalists mentioned above did end up proving useful to HART, using their talking points and providing them a platform.
Allison Pearson went straight to press to celebrate the creation of HART.
It’s worth noting that disinformation groups always seem to be described as eminent, top, leading etc, as though there is some kind of academic league table. It’s quite ridiculous of Pearso complained about dubious science and dodgy predictions while promoting a group whose members predicted there wouldn’t be a second wave.
Camilla Tominey attended the HART launch meeting with MPs including Graham Brady, Steve Baker, John Hayes and Andrew Bridgen. While maintaining her position at rhe Telegraph, Tominey spent a while presenting on LBC before moving to GB News.
The claim of only one healthy child having died from covid is one i’ve debunked in the past. It comes from the work of Shamez Ladhani where healthy is defined as having no underlying conditions which includes the likes of asthma and diabetes, there are also issues with the way deaths were counted in this series of studies.
Camilla Turner has been working with UsForThem since their launch, and was responsible for a particularly irresponsible article regarding child vaccination. (More on that in a bit.)
Bob Moran - Telegraph
Bob Moran's defenders have made out that he was the victim of cancel culture for standing up for his morals, but his behaviour on social media was extremist, and he was sacked for saying Dr Rachel Clarke ( author of Breathtaking book and ITV series) should be verbally abused for having encouraged people to wear masks on public transport.
Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic and Free Speech Union has been very supportive of Bob Moran, despite him having been sacked for attacking someone for using their freedom of speech to offer public health advice as a doctor. Instead Young claims Bob Moran lost his job for being outspoken.
All those talking heads are well known for disinformation. If you aren’t aware of Bob Moran's work, here is an example from his website.
But don't dare call him an extremist or an anti-vaxxer, that would be cancel culture.
Where the map stands now.
To prevent the map becoming too cluttered as I continue to add to it I'm removing most the non media individuals. It’s worth noting that the CRG MPs comments were appearing across the media amplifying the network’s messaging.
Lucy Johnston - Daily Express
Lucy Johnston is the Daily Express’ Health Editor, she promoted Wakefield's claims about MMR, got the Daily Express into trouble for an article about HPV vaccines and works closely with HART members and its various interlinked and offshoot groups. She set up her own podcast Sketchnotes which only features these alternative experts, and now also writes for Collateral Global and GB News.
Johnston organised HART's closed doors launch to selected MPs and journalists.
David Rose - Daily Mail
Peter Doshi - BMJ
Peter Doshi, an editor of the British Medical Journal has faced considerable criticism for publishing a number of papers, responses and letters about vaccines that lack the academic rigor the BMJ used to be associated with. The HARTleaks reveal Doshi was in contact with HART member Anthony Brookes.
Sarah Knapton - Telegraph
Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph's Science Editor is mentioned in the HARTleaks.
Knapton's reporting on covid often relies on the same handful of experts from within the disinformation ecosystem, Collateral Global reports are often treated as though they are high quality independently peer reviewed papers. For example quoting Heneghan and Jefferson's Collateral Global report on deaths which said it was unlikely covid on its own could kill care home residents. Instead they suggested lockdown measures had been the real cause of many covid deaths in care homes.
Knapton is one of those who has tried to rewrite the narrative of the pandemic.
Many of the most high profile lockdown sceptics were given high level jobs in the Trump administration. In the UK Sunetra Gupta was given over £90,000 by the Von Opel Foundation.
Scientific concensus is re-labelled groupthink, and the idea the narrative was controlled by a small group of politically driven “pro-lockdowners” is ridiculous considering how much of the predominantly right wing media backed the Great Barrington Declaration, and how many of the most high profile voices from the US now have politically appointed roles within the Trump administration.
Her coverage of covid vaccines has been particularly poor, she even platformed Aseem Malhotra's woeful anti-vax paper which she failed to mention had been published by a journal that Malhotra had set up himself. No credible science reporter would take Malhotra seriously.
Authored with the aid of HART's Clare Craig, Malhotra's paper was a clear mangling of data to create the impression of correlation. Christopher Snowden of the opaquely funded free market Institute of Economic Affairs has been a vocal critic of Malhotral, and Snowden is the opposite of some lefty liberal, showing that critisism of Malhotra isnt simply a matter of political tribalism as his defenders might claim.
Gordon Rayner - Telegraph
Gordon Rayner is an Associate Editor for the Telegraph, and the HARTleaks reveal he tapped into HART for stories, publishing the work of Laura Dodsworth on the government's “covert psychological strategies”. Dodsworth worked closely on this with Patrick Fagan who is an expert on this topic having worked as Cambridge Analytica's lead psychologist. However, HART's working group against child vaccination was built around exploiting parents’ protective instincts.
Rayner also worked with HART to attack Susan Michie, one of the government's more covid cautious scientific advisors who was also a member of Independent SAGE which the Telegraph targetted repeatedly.
HART and UsForThem were fully embraced by the Telegraph, although they did have some writers who were more objective and evidence based, Paul Nukki being the best examples.
There are so many Telegraph links I'm replacing the node with a category and taking away a few others.
The BBC
Deborah Cohen was previously Science Editor of ITV News and was UK and Health Correspondent for BBC Newsnight leading their Covid-19 coverage. Newsnight generally seemed quite dismissive of the idea that transmission was an issue in schools, there was one particular episode in the autumn of 2020 that is still staggering. PHE weekly surveillance reports showed that primary and secondary schools were the most common source of recorded outbreaks, and yet Newsnight produced a graph that entirely omitted schools.
Cohen previously held a Research Fellowship in Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford where the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) run by Heneghan and Jefferson is located. Cohen has worked closely with the CEBM on a number of occasions.
Cohen's output pleased HART members and they spoke of Cohen influencing others such as her BBC colleague Nick Triggle.
Triggles output on covid, particularly in regards to children has been heavily criticised by many of the academics I know who have published numerous reputable papers on covid. For instance in one month he claimed many children were already protected through natural immunity via infection while in the next month he explained that we should expect repeated waves of mass reinfection.
Julia Hartley-Brewer
Another member of the “Brexit Media Corps” Julia Hartley-Brewer of talkRadio is also a member of the Free Speech Union.
Hartley-Brewer burnished her free speech credentials by apparently going to a Conservative Minister to shut down the free speech of a Conservative MP who had been highlighting flaws in HART members arguments.
Its worth noting that HART member Will Jones is a director of the Daily Sceptic set up by Free Speech Union founder Toby Young.
Hartley-Brewer also attended a Pandata meeting. HART member Jonathan Engler is also Pandata's chair and now claims there was no pandemic, all the excess deaths were caused by protective measures. Hartley-Brewer was a “huge huge help” to HART.
Its also worth noting that HART were on touch with former footballer Matt Le Tissier who has also gone completely down the rabbit hole to entertain all sorts of conspiracy theories, notice a pattern forming?
talkRADIO
Many other talkRADIO hosts provided lots of airtime to the disinformation ecosystem. After GB News went on air a number of the worst culprits on talkRADIO moved over to the new channel. Now there were two broadcasters whose editorial line appears to have been based in disinformation and playing to the growing conspiracy culture. Growing in part due to the media proving a veneer of credibility to the cranks.
In one post Gary Sidley remarked how much easier interviews were when the interviewer was a strong ally.
Ros Jones responded to one of my recent pieces telling me with pride that parents had thanked her for persuading them not to vaccinate their children. She is a true believer not a grifter.
Renee Hoenderkamp of HART was hired by talkRADIO to present a show, her co-presenter was David Bull before he took up the role of Reform Chairman. Hoenderkamp also writes and reports for GB News.
Neil Oliver - GB News
Before the pandemic Neil Oliver was a TV historian best known for talking about coasts, Oliver fell completely down the rabbit hole and is now known for raving about conspiracies going on monologues that could have been taken from the antisemitic Protocols of Zion. Naturally once he started his public descent into conspiracy GB News signed him up in April 2021.
In 2021 Oliver led the People's Lockdown Inquiry alongside Claire Fox and Lawrence Fox (no relation). The initiative was a collaboration between Fox's Academy of Ideas and Lawrence Fox's fringe Reclaim Party that was bankrolled by businessman Jeremy Hosking with £4.2 million in donations. Claire Fox is also part of the Free Speech Union and a core member of the RCP/LM crowd.
Oliver has appeared as a speaker at various conferences and events alongside other conspiracy theorists. One example is a Together Declaration event where he appeared alongside Bev Turner. The Together Declaration was founded by a combination of HART members, Alan Miller of the RCP/LM crowd and Francis Hoar.
Bev Turner - GB News
Bev Turner is a TV and radio presenter who prior to the pandemic, the closest she had come to controversy was accusing several former employers of sexism. The pandemic appears to have radicalised Turner, it appears she bought entirely into the counter narrative of the disinformation ecosystem as she moved from anti-lockdown into anti-vax messaging and through to QAnon level conspiracy theories.
By July Covid19Assembly were preparing their legal challenge against MHRA approval for 12-15 year olds and Bev Turner was to be the campaign’s public face. 22 July Stephen Jackson of Law or Fiction sought HART's help in providing risk comparisons likely to increase parental vax hesitancy. Alongside Francis Hoar (Pandata, Covid19Assembly), Jackson was part of the contrarian legal group that mounted legal challenges on most elements of the pandemic response.
Covid19Assembly was led by Toby Young and Clare Craig, and also had Patrick Fagan of Cambridge Analytica as a member.
Hodkinson and Malone were also involved.
Turner descent down the rabbit hole also seems to have coincided with her involvement with the disinformation ecosystem. Although she burnt her bridges with other channels such as ITV, GB News offered her a job, and she is now their Washington reporter providing Trump with sycophantic questions and interviews.
Maajid Nawaz - LBC
Various LBC radio presenters interviewed members of the disinformation ecosystem, but Maajid Nawaz, who has been linked to what has become known as the intellectual dark web, went from arguing for the Swedish approach to being removed by LBC on 7 January 2022 with immediate effect. In October 2020 he fully backed the Great Barrington Declaration and a herd immunity via infection strategy and after the 2020 US Presidential Election Nawaz gave credence to Trump’s claims he won the election.
At the start of 2021 Nawaz was one of ten signatories to a rabid letter to multiple security agencies claiming lockdowns were the results of a global conspiracy by the Chinese Communist Party.
The other signatories include; Rudin of the AIER think tank where the GBD was written. Claire Craig (Pandata, HART, Covid19Assembly), and Francis Hoar (Pandata, Covid19Assembly, Together Declaration) who represented Simon Dolan in his May 2020 failed legal challenge against lockdowns.
Late February 2021 Nawaz attended a Pandata meeting.
It was platforming and becoming an advocate of Aseem Malhotra that spelt the end for Nawaz. These days he is just another online conspiracy theorist, but once again it was trusting the same group of “alternative” experts that led him down the rabbit hole.
The Spectator
The Spectator's experts of choice were Heneghan and Jefferson, and in 2020 it firmly took the no second wave stance which proved so disastrously wrong. Herd immunity on the horizon, T-Cell cross-immunity, false positives, the Spectator came up with all sorts of reasons to argue against most measures.
The Spectator has backed a number of Collateral Global reports which included claims a large proportion of covid deaths were due to lockdowns and other measures.
Several HART members have written a number of articles for the Spectator, John Lee, Karol Sikora and David Paton, Brexit Central author and Director of Centre for Brexit Policy; other directors include DUP MP Sammy Wilson, and Labour MP Graham Stringer, two of a few non Conservative CRG members, and Owen Patterson.
Spiked Online
Spiked Online is the successor to the Revolutionary Communist Party's Living Marxism, edited by Mick Hume who is a fellow of Viktor Orban's MCC think tank. Former RCP members include Frank Furedi (leads MCC Brussels for Orban), Claire Fox (Academy of Ideas, former Brexit Party candidate) and Jennie Bristow.
Bristow was former commissioning editor for Spiked and is on Collateral Global's board. She was a member of HART from its begining and left around the same time the HARTleaks went public.
Unherd
The online magazine Unherd is owned by GB News cofounder Paul Marshall, while it does allow more variety of viewpoints than GB News, it still slanted towards the sceptics with many familiar faces, for instance Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewed Clare Craig for Unherd in April 2021.
The Critic
The Critic is owned by Jeremy Hosking, the businessman who bankrolled Lawrence Fox's Reclaim Party and Andrew Bridgen.
Molly Kingsley of UsForThem wrote a series of articles for The Critic opposing covid vaccines for children. As in most her articles she relied on hypothetical scenarios that hadn’t been proposed by anyone, for instance claiming that unvaccinated children would be permanently segregated and ostracised. Kingsley also accused teaching unions of producing “emotionally manipulative” pro-vaccine propoganda when the unions didn’t produce any materials for schools, they did share with members materials produced by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Stephen Hawkin Foundation. “Once jabbed, we cannot unjab. It does not take much imagination to see the darkness of the place that leads”, Kingsley warns, concluding “This is not hell to unleash on children”.
The Critic also published Kingsley's defense of Andrew Bridgen, claiming he was a victim of the “Establishment” seeking to silence him, and that he shouldn't be punished for comments comparing vaccines to the holocaust because he might be proven right. (He hasn't been.)
While The Critic has provided a platform for the disinformation ecosystem it has also published sensible pieces such as Christopher Snowden talking about “Malhotra’s trademark blend of pseudo-science and conspiracy mongering.”
The Network
The map of HART's media influence is a tangled web, and this is a simplified version, particularly in regards to GB News and talkRADIO. This doesn’t include HART's various spin offs like SaferToWait or the Together Declaration, and for a couple of years UsForThem were more successful at being in the media than HART ever were. Other groups such as Collateral Global will have their own lists of friendly journalists, Heneghan for instance will appear across the media, as did Sunetra Gupta.
What the HARTleaks reveals is the active coordination between the group and journalists and commentators. This combined with the CRG MPs meant that a sizable slice of the media reporting on covid was being generated by disinformation ecosystem. Some will have genuinely believed HART’s disinformation, and they went right down the rabbit hole, others I dont think care if HART are right or wrong, their approach to the culture wars is a win at all costs mentality, even if the cost is facts and lives.
Disinformation campaigns require an infrastructure of think tanks, campaign groups and media. Some of those pushing the nonsense in NZ will be connected to the international hubs, others will be copying
The ignorance of some of these examples is shocking.