The Blame Game & Child Vax Part I
Polio outbreaks lead to finger pointing
Counter Disinformation Project shows how coordination between disinformation groups, media and politicians undermined trust in vaccines.
Concerns were raised near the end of June when polio was detected in London’s wastewater samples. Of course this led to debate, with accusations of alarmism and minimalisation.
Ladhani is a paediatrician who works with the UK Medical Health Security agency (Public Health England’s replacement).
However, the rest of Eric Feigl-Ding’s short thread did explain the UK uses an inactivated virus vaccine.
We were reassured there were no cases of polio in the UK, it was not spreading.
Just over a month later UK authorities were urging all parents in London to come forward to vaccinate their children. When it became apparent polio wasn’t a non-story, then the blame game began.
Robert Dingwall is a former member of the UK’s authority for immunisation the JCVI, he was also a NERVTAG member advising the government on its covid response. In March 2020 he controversially called for covid to be allowed to spread through the population, suggesting dying of covid may be preferable for the elderly and vulnerable than waiting for them to die of other causes.
Dingwall said he wasn’t arguing for a cull, while advocating for a voluntary cull.
More Dingwall examples in the thread below.
Dingwall has argued consistently against measures in schools, in an interview on BBC’s Newsnight he also claimed long covid was predominantly psychosomatic. The #HARTleaks reveal Dingwall was in contact with the conspiracy theorist and antivaxxer Michael Yeadon who is claiming covid vaccines are a New World Order plot to depopulate the world, he is also now refuting the existence of viruses.
Dingwall was also a signatory of a letter in September 2020 published in the Spectator calling for the removal of measures as Alpha spread through schools at the start of the UK’s deadly second wave. This coincided with the UK government meeting with GBD author Sunetra Gupta, her Collateral Global colleague Carl Heneghan and the architect of Sweden’s strategy Anders Tegnell.
More details regarding concerns about disinformation inside the UK government.
Is the approval of covid vaccines the cause of polio outbreaks due to lower vaccination rates? Jonathan Howard MD argues in a recent article that while the pandemic did disrupt childhood vaccinations, there hasn’t been a huge drop off in vaccination rates compared to pre-pandemic.
Full article here on polio vaccination rates https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/space-and-time/
The Brownstone Institute’s latest author Molly Kingsley, founder of the well connected Us For Them group which has campaigned against all measures in schools and vaccination because children should be allowed to “enjoy the benefits of natural immunity”, argues that parents against vaccination are being demonised.
Lucy Johnson who retweeted this is the Health Editor of the Daily Express, #HARTleaks reveal she is actively working with the disinformation groups. Tweet from summer 2021.
From #HARTleaks, HART member Jemma Moran is now the secretariat of the Covid Recovery All Party Parliamentary group sponsored by Collateral Global. We believe “Ellen” is Ellen Townsend, Pandata member and at this time a HART member, she is now a member of Collateral Global and has been advising Us For Them since their inception. More on Collateral Global below,
Sections from Kingsley’s Brownstone article.
Molly Kingsley is writing from the UK, there are no vaccine mandates for children in our schools, not for covid, or any other infectious diseases. Vaccine mandates for schools have never been suggested by the UK government, education unions, school leaders, or independent experts who might be described as covid cautious.
It appears the only people who suggested there would be mandates for child vaccination was Kingley, members of HART and elements of the right wing media close to them. In fact it went further than this, with them claiming children could be vaccinated in school without parental consent.
Where did the idea children would be vaccinated on mass without parental consent come from? #HARTleaks reveal that once the vaccine roll out began in older age groups, they began thinking about child vaccination.
Anne De Buisseret also leads Lawyers4Liberty. More on them in the Counter Disinformation Project’s Lawfare series
#HARTleaks reveal the coordination to use the idea of parent consent being bypassed to sow distrust. Ros Jones also works with Us For Them and went on to set up multiple organisations campaigning against child vaccination.
Julia Hartley-Brewer of TalkRadio is shown to have attended at least one Pandata meeting in the #HARTleaks
A couple of months later after a coordinated campaign in the media by HART, Us For Them, Collateral Global, the CRG MPs etc combined with attempts to bombard school leaders with threatening letters via groups like Lawyers4Liberty, HART celebrated the belief that they had created a hostile enough atmosphere that school’s wouldn’t be used as “jab centres” knowing this would lead to lower take up rates. Some members also asked how they could build on this to discourage other vaccines such as for flu.
“How do we persuade a parent who believes that their child is vulnerable (for whatever reason) is not vulnerable?” Yes you did read that right.
Kingsley continues in her Brownstone article.
Eulogising covid vaccines has apparently cause hesitancy, "insidious” “myopic vax evangelism” is the problem. This is typical of Kingsleys language around child vaccination in regular articles in multiple publications and broadcast interviews. Is this the kind of language that encourages or discourages trust in other vaccines?
I haven’t yet found an example of a UK school that kept masked and un-masked children segregated.
Kingsley brings up the MMR, which was surrounded by considerable controversy which turned out to be misplaced due to the actions of the disgraced Andrew Wakefield. #HARTleaks reveal many members are acolytes of Wakefield.
It is worth noting that Lucy Johnson of the Daily Express was one of the journalists who originally promoted Wakefield’s false accusations.
A few years later Johnson also promoted false claims about the safety of the HPV vaccine. She has her own podcast that only hosts sceptics.
More on Johnson in the thread below
Kingsley says authorities need to stop shaming these parents and ask why so many parents are refusing the vaccines citing the low take up in ages 5-11 which has been available since April 2022. The numbers are low, however the JCVI did not recommend vaccination, they just made them available as non-urgent, this meant there was no school vaccination programme unlike eventually there was for 12-15 first doses, parents had to book through their doctor.
This proved problematic, 5-11 have a smaller dose and the correct vials were not being delivered to many areas. The guidance also states children cannot be vaccinated after being infected with covid until 12 weeks after recovery. Since April there has been no infection control measures in UK primary schools and infection rates were high. In March almost 30% of children between the ages of 2-11 were infected reaching over 8% in a single week. At the end of January it had been 14% in a single week. From the start of 2022 to April younger children were the most infected cohort.
Due to the 12 week wait after infection very few children were allowed to be vaccinated. The lowest infection rates have reached is around 2% in a week, and with reinfections coming in less than 12 weeks some parents who want to vaccinate their children have been unable to.
So vaccination rates in 5-11 lower aren’t lower entirely because of wide scale hesitancy, lack of public health messaging and ineligibility due to recent infection are important factors to be considered.
Nuance matters as Kingsley correctly states earlier in the article. There is a difference between a parent choosing not to have their child vaccinated and campaigning to remove that choice from other parents, which is precisely what Us For Them, HART, UKMFA, Collateral Global, C19Assembly, Lawyers4Liberty, Law or Fiction, Brownstone Institute, Pandata and all of these interconnected organisations have done.
Collateral Global’s membership
In September 2021 after 12-15 vaccination had been approved, Westminister Hall had an emergency debate triggered by two petitions, both organised by members of HART. Miriam Cates read out Us For Them’s statement which had been prepared mainly by members of HART, quoting members such as David Paton who the Spectator have decided to have as a writer on covid. A couple of weeks later Cates would become vice-chair of the APPG sponsored by Collateral Global. Westminister Hall was packed with sceptic Conservative MPs who all spoke against vaccination, many are members of the Covid Recovery Group of MPs who received part of their funding from Luke Johnson, who also has provided funding to Collateral Global and appeared as a speaker at a Pandata event in 2021.
Full reporting of the debate in the thread below
A few days later Robert Halfon chair of the education select committee called an emergency meeting to quiz the UK’s Chief Medical Officer if vaccination was necessary. Halfon has praised Us for Them as heroes campaigning alongside them and even introduced a private members bill on their behalf calling for schools to be re-classed as essential infrastructure to make it almost impossible for them to be closed under any circumstances. This was one of the first measures Us For Them called for in June 2020, the same demand is being made in Germany by a campaign which is almost a clone of Us For Them. A consequence of the bill not discussed would be that it would effectively outlaw union members taking strike action for any reason.
Full details of the debate in the thread below
The bill is also being supported by the UK’s Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza who it would give the power to veto any school closure in the country for any reason. De Souza has been a vocal supporter of Us For Them.
De Souza is demanding a 100% attendance in September at the start of term, however she has opposed measures in schools such as masks, asymptomatic testing and didn’t oppose the decision to allow covid positive students to attend school. She has regularly been in the media discussing the 100,000 “ghost children” who have been lost during lockdown, however these are children with severe absence who the DfE’s own data says the majority of has been due to sickness from covid. Absence rates have been higher in schools since measures have been removed, when it was argued that measures had to be removed because they were the cause of disruption.
It appears the virus is actually the cause of the disruption.
More on “ghost children” and how it was the product of discussions between Us For Them and former Conservative Party Leader Iain Duncan-Smith on how they needed to make their claims on the harms of lockdown “harder hitting”. The consequence is a huge increase in data collection powers by government. (Those calling for freedom from the tyranny of things like the wearing of masks and the choice of vaccination have been silent on this power grab.)
The Covid Recovery APPG continues to call for the halt of vaccination in under 16s, coming from parliamentarians and parliamentary groups doesn’t just impact debate on vaccination in the UK where it is promoted in right wing news outlets like TalkRadio and GBnews who are close to HART, or Lucy Johnson who is actively working with them, or the Telegraph who Kingsley of Us For Them writes for.
Considering the general public’s opinion of these MPs and our understanding of parliamentary groups being little more than private interest groups with no power, the co-opting of these politicians may actually have more persuasive weight abroad, however Halfon and the education select committee does have authority within the parliamentary system.
It should be a matter of public inquiry in the UK how our parliamentarians are being accurately quoted in antivax literature in many countries. For instance RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense.
The letter was signed by members of the APPG and members of HART, Collateral Global and signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration.
We have MPs from the Covid Recovery Group sponsored by the opaquely funded Recovery Alliance and Pandata linked Luke Johnson, speaking on an APPG funded by Collateral Global which is funded by an opaque fund, Luke Johnson and the Georg & Emily Opel Foundation, an APPG that also has a HART member as secretariat, quoting members of HART and Collateral Global being used to argue against child vax by people in the media working with HART, Collateral Global, Pandata, Us For Them etc which is then used as evidence of the validity of their argument by HART, Us For Them, Collateral Global, and many more linked groups in the UK and beyond.
Of course, I should conclude by saying the groups deny there is close coordination behind the scenes.
