The many projects of HART founder Narice Bernard
The "behind closed doors" strategy of coordinated groups, MPs & "key broadcast allies"
Another organisation set up to campaign for the end of testing in midst of the second wave was PCRclaims. The website when it first appeared had many familiar names.
Patrick Fagan of Cambridge Analytica, Pandata, Covid19Assembly, and later HART
Clare Craig of Pandata, Covid19Assembly and later HART and Children's Covid Vaccination Advisory Group
Ellen Townsend, Pandata and later HART and Collateral Global, also working with Us For Them since their creation.
Nick Hudson, founder of Pandata
Michael Yeadon, Pandata, Truth for Health Foundation, Doctors for Covid Ethics, and later HART and an advisor to America’s Frontline Doctors
Jeffrey Peel, former area vice-chair of the Conservative Party, spokesperson for Vote Leave, Northern Ireland chairman of Brexit campaign group Business for Britain, and an advisor to the Department for International Trade from 2017 to 2020
Emma Kenny, TV presenter/psychologist
Kevin McKernan, Pandata,
Thomas Binder, a Swiss cardiologist with a pre-pandemic track record of promoting conspiracy theories from 9/11 to pro Putin propaganda. In April 2020 Binder was detained in a psychiatric clinic after becoming mentally unstable, seemingly in relation to covid and 5G conspiracy theories.
Christine Padgham, former Pandata member, founded Inform Scotland (formerly Recovery for Scotland) with Cllr. Linda Holt, of George Galloway's Alliance 4 Unity party.
Anna Rayner, an anti-vax homeopath who believed she could "cure" autism and later HART
The final member of the early PCRclaims team Is Joanna Rodgers. Over time members' names were removed from the website until by 2022 Rodgers was the only name listed on the website. Besides the initial efforts to cease testing for covid the website quickly became a sight offering to take legal action against the government for various financial loses and psychological harms caused by covid. Rodgers represents PCRclaims via her company Navistar Legal, however she is also involved in an anti-lockdown legal organisation, Lawyers for Liberty.
Private Eye reported on PCRclaims in 2021
While Covid19Assembly focused initially on undermining public health by claiming the majority of covid deaths had in fact been due to other causes, PCRclaims claimed the pandemic was over by the summer of 2020 and that any rise in cases were due to false positives. False positives can occur however the rate of false negatives was recognised as being considerably higher.
Clare Craig who seems to be either a member of cited by every anti-lockdown and anti-vax group in the UK explained the reasoning underpinning PCRclaims in a piece for Toby Young’s Lockdown Sceptics.
“The contradictions in the data have no biological explanation, especially the absence of the number of severe cases which would then explain the current increasing death rates ascribed to Covid.”
She suggests rising cases and deaths were an artefact of false positives, claiming PCR tests were beset by an astounding amount of cross-contamination.
“There is a general assumption that the false positive rate can be calculated and assumed to be constant. Comparing results from different tests alongside each other only tells you the false positive rate due to the test kits. False positives can be caused by mistaken diagnosis of other viruses; human DNA; contamination of the sample with viral RNA that is not causing disease as well as from laboratory errors. The error rate of the test kit rate is usually the least of our problems. Laboratory error rates vary day to day and a laboratory under increasing pressure is likely to have an increasing error rate. False positive rates can even be seasonal where there is another seasonal virus that cross-reacts in the testing resulting in a misdiagnosis. The crucial point is the idea that the false positive rate must be a constant is a myth in the real world.”
PCRclaims began to fizzle out by March 2021 as members began to leave the group and other sceptic groups such as Corona Ausschuss in Germany warned against involvement with PCRclaims as they “looked fishy.”
Narice Bernard
Although his name doesn’t appear on the website, PCRclaims was set up by Narice Bernard, in the HARTleaks he told the other members that PCRclaims that he was responsible for creating the group. Bernard is listed in Pandata’s internal document as a “collaborator”. In December 2021 he founded HART, and was also responsible for the failed groups Yeadon Campaign, China Files, Liberal Spring and Liberal Places.
The Yeadon Campaign was created to promote his HART colleague Michael Yeadon in December 2020, when the Yeadon Campaign encouraged their followers to film inside hospitals, they recommended contacting PCR Claims if they were arrested. China Files never got going beyond a half constructed website with no content, however it seems likely that the aim was to build on a letter that was sent to the FBI and MI5 claiming that lockdowns had been imposed around the world as part of a conspiracy by the Chinese Communist Party to implement a global social credit system. The ten signatories included Pandata members Clare Craig and Francis Hoar.
HART
The HARTleaks reveal the groups early planning before their official launch. Bernard explains that the main focus should not be on persuading the general public, but to focus on decision makers and those who influence them.
The HARTleaks demonstrate how there was an inner core of 10 people, coordinating a larger operation, all of which would occur behind closed doors.
It was deemed of vital importance that the public were kept completely unaware of what the inner core were up.
When HART launched they already had an organised faction of support in the Conservative Party due to the creation of the Covid Research Group (CRG) led by European Research Group (ERG) stalwarts Mark Harper MP and Steve Baker MP, and advised by Ed Barker who has worked with UsForThem, Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, Vote Leave and GB News owners Legatum.
The inner core starting with lots of political and media links allowing HART to have access to parliament before they even launched, and yet HART and associates constantly claim they were censored and silenced.
In another exchange regarding the developing strategy of engaging with MPs Bernard reveals that other work was going on in the background that he was not privy to beyond understanding that other things were in the pipeline.
This supports the idea that Bernard wasn’t part of the initial wave of disinformation and had gravitated to those involved in Pandata. It also demonstrates that HART was created as an addition to an existing network, Bernard founded HART but he was being guided by others to fill a role.
There are others in the HARTleaks who appear to be more involved in higher level coordinating with other groups such as Jennie Bristow of the Academy of Ideas and Spiked Online, a member of the Living Marxism crowd, and Ellen Townsend a member of Pandata, Collateral Global and working with Us For Them.
Another is Jemma Moran, who is now employed as a parliamentary staffer by Esther McVey. Moran provides a lot of media contacts for HART, her brother Bob is also a HART member and was the Telegraph cartoonist before he was sacked for being abusive online. He now produces violent anti-vax cartoons which have become the artwork of the movement.
Moran was the HART member coordinating with highly connected PR man Ed Barker who works with the CRG MPs and UsForThem.
The HARTleaks demonstrate how disinformation stories are coordinated, this is the same for other issues as well. A chorus of voices organised through chat groups and meetings behind closed doors, including allies in the media.
Considerable time was spent in the early days of HART discussing how to keep quiet the overlapping members and coordination between a number of groups.
UsForThem was seen as the most successful group in this UK based cluster with considerable media and MP links, these were passed onto HART.
By the time HART was launched, UsForThem's links to lobbyists like Ed Barker had been revealed by the Byline Times. Those that continued to support and platform them were fully aware of the groups connections. There are a number of discussions regarding how to protect UsForThem's public image, and how to keep secret the coordinated support they were receiving.
Entryism
However HART struggled to gain support from the Labour benches besides Graham Stringer MP whose membership of the CRG has been publicly ignored by the Labour leadership.
This explains why the reader in the Private Eye report was asked by PCRclaims to aim to mobilise brexit supporters in Labour strongholds. The principle here being that Brexit supporters were more likely to sympathise with the “freedom” narrative against lockdowns. As former Labour voters who supported Brexit are the constituency of voters Labour were focused on winning back it would have been hoped that with the right political pressure in the right places some Labour MPs might be persuaded to take a more sceptic approach, in turn applying pressure on Labour leader Kiers Starmer and creating the impression that the movement spanned a wide political spectrum.
Liberal Spring was an offshoot of PCRclaims that hoped to align with the Liberal Democrats Party, an effort to create a sceptic faction within the party through a form of entryism. The strategy appears to have been to create what appeared to be a groundswell of Liberal Democrat supporters passionately opposed to measures to control covid in the hope of applying enough pressure to MPs that they would reconsider their covid cautious positions. The narrative was that all covid measures were fundamentally illiberal and went against the basic principles of the party. Large sceptic social media accounts promoted the campaign which had adopted the cherry blossom emoji that was already in use as a replacement to the star that had initially been used by anti-lockdown groups to liken the enforcement of covid measures to the treatment of Jewish people by the Nazis.
March 2020 PCRclaims post
“If you want to restore liberty you must use the tools we have democratically. Pick a mainstream party that purports to represent liberty that will never repeat the evil of the last year. Join it on mass and shape it into a government for the people.
We said Momentum achieved their long standing aim of electing a left leader by taking over the Labour Party. We also said that Brexit is over and irrelevant and the battleground is now liberty. We also said that without a mainstream voice you’ve nothing!
The Liberal Spring Telegram account was then started.
“What then is the solution? In our view the 11 LD MP’s can be educated, lobbied and persuaded publicly to repent of all their previous mistakes or misunderstandings on COVID-19. If they do so and firmly take the hand of trusted prominent scientific skeptics they will enjoy massive support throughout the country.”
While Liberal Spring got a reasonable amount of support from sceptics, it didn’t get much support from Liberal Democrat members and MPs, leading to the group dropping the efforts to woo Liberal Democrats to become simply a liberally minded campaign. HART’s website provided a link to sign up to Liberal Spring’s website, the privacy policy stated that they consented to the collecting of personal data. The initiative might have been a flop but the gathering of such data will have been useful to the network of groups such as HART and Pandata considering Fagan of Cambridge Analytica’s involvement.
One Liberal Spring post listed a number of anti-lockdown disinformation groups as being part of their network and friends demonstrating the interlinked nature of these various campaigns.
Liberal Places is another failed group from the spring of 2021, Bernard, Michael Yeadon and Yeadon’s wife Joanna set out to create a “freedom estate”, a commune for conspiracy theorists. This enterprise appears to have gone nowhere, however a group linked to the World Freedom Alliance started a similar project in Spain and have begun to enroll students in their alternative school which teaches children survivalist skills and has a curriculum focused on “freedom”.
Narice Barnard’s spree of founding different campaign groups demonstrates how disinformation and lobbying ecosystems develop. A number of Bernards groups failed to make an impact while HART with greater support from the wider network has been more successful in becoming the UK hub of alternative covid “science”. The method of extending the network following a similar pattern in other countries and in other theatres of the culture war. Members of existing groups; in this case Pandata, branch out to establish new groups to recruit new members and activists.
What we end up with is a lot of organisations with the same agenda featuring many of the same individuals. Those that sprout from the hub groups will usually focus on a particular aspect of the narrative they wish to advance, for instance PCRclaims focused on questioning the reliability of testing, China Files sought to attract conspiracy theorists who wished to blame China and by extension all governments of engaging in a cover up to use the pandemic for nefarious purposes to permanently take away people’s freedoms and introduce what they believe is an unnecessary vaccine. Meanwhile Liberal Spring sought to put forward the liberal case for opposing public health measures, with an aim of entryism into the Liberal Democrats.
While the majority of those I know running grassroot campaign groups and charities have to juggle their campaigning with their day job, being a successful culture warrior appears to be a full time occupation, though how exactly such lifestyles are funded are often unexplained.
The growth of such groups is semi-organic, the start up is supported by other existing groups providing mailing lists and media links, however if an initiative doesn’t build adequate support and impact then supporting efforts will move elsewhere, this creates a form of market with different organisations competing for a niche in the ecosystem. An example of this is efforts to create an umbrella organisation for “freedom lovers” who advocate for alternative treatments while advancing an anti-vax narrative. The first effort was the World Freedom Alliance which came out of the World Doctors Alliance which shared links with Pandata, however this was usurped by the World Council for Health set up by Tess Lawrie of Pandata, HART and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development group. Due to her work in promoting ivermectin with Pierre Kory of FLCCC in the US, Lawrie was much more successful than the World Doctors Alliance in bringing together a wide range of groups who had adopted covid conspiracy theories.
By 2023 the WCfH had become an umbrella group with over 210 coalition partners in over 50 countries, and had gained the support of many of the highest profile names of the growing movement including Andrew Wakefield, Robert F Kennedy, Peter McCullough, Aseem Malhotra, and Pierre Kory. The World Freedom Alliance failed to gain the same level of support and has become part of the supporting cast rather than a leading actor. Having become a hub the WCfH then began to support its own spin off initiatives such as Reigniting Freedom which focuses on building an international base of street protestors.
Once HART established itself as a UK hub, there was a succession of spin off groups such as Safer to Wait, Smile Free, Children’s Covid Vaccine Advisory Group, David Cartland’s Doctors For Patients UK, and the Perseus Group.
The Together Declaration founded in 2021 including members such as Molly Kingsley of UsForThem, Francis Hoar of Pandata, Alan Miller of the Living Marxism/Spiked crowd and a number of HART members switched its attention in 2022 to opposing Net Zero measures, making reference to the right wing conspiracy theory the Great Rest by 2023 it was involved in organising anti-ULEZ protests.
Besides its Stop ULEZ coalition spin off, the Together Declaration was also involved in the launch of NHS100k which opposed proposed and then dropped vaccine mandates in the NHS, the initiative was also linked to the Workers of England Union which was founded by the far-right English Democrats. Workers of England Union was promoted by Together Declaration, Toby Young and former Brexit Party candidate Claire Fox of Living Marxism and the Academy of Ideas.
The constant churn of new groups being created can create the false impression of a movement gaining momentum when in reality what all there is, is a recycling of the same individuals with the same arguments. As David Gorski, who is well known for many years spent combating anti-vax disinformation, has pointed out in his writing during the pandemic that arguments against covid vaccines are simply recycling old anti-vax tropes that were in use a couple of decades ago when the movement had a resurgence due to Andrew Wakefield’s false claims regarding MMR vaccines causing autism.
It's worth considering how the impact of Andrew Wakefield’s claims early on in the age of internet and social media paved the way for what has come during covid. The HARTleaks revealed a number of the members cited how Wakefield was the spark that ignited their distrust in the medical community. The lavish lifestyle Wakefield has made for himself off the back of his false claims will also have provided an incentive for the opportunists who have flocked to covid conspiracies, by the end of 2020 some high profile online characters had established lucrative followings through podcasts, channels and blogs while the Wellness industry that had been increasingly overlapping with the anti-vax movement since before the pandemic was already a billion dollar industry in the states. While alternative treatments for covid had been peddled since February 2020 by the likes of Peter McCullough, claims about hydroxychloroquine followed by ivermectin near the end of 2020 led to an explosion of groups promoting unproven treatments in 2021.