UK Parliament platforms anti-vax disinformation, again
CRG MPs add veneer of credibility to disinformation
Last week’s round up covered the anti-vaxxers current favourite poster boy Aseem Malhotra’s appearance at the UK’s All Party Parliamentary group on Vaccine Injury. The APPG is chaired by Christopher Chope who has been working closely with the disinformation group HART, as revealed by the #HARTleaks.
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APPGs are essentially MPs hobby groups, they receive no central funding and have no powers, there are hundreds of them on all sorts of subjects, and they are often used by lobbying groups. As predicted this isn’t how disinformation media chose to interpret the session.
Last week there was also a follow up to the APPG in Parliament called for by Christopher Chope. Chope was quoting disinformation given to him by HART members, which was then quoted in the Daily Sceptic whose writer Will Jones has always failed to mention that he is also HART member. They are quoting their own words from the mouths of MPs to back up their own words. This is how a few cranks can create the veneer of respectability.
MPs Danny Kruger speaking in the debate.
These are Conservative MP who pushed Boris Johnson to speed up the removal of all covid measures.
Kruger claimed the risk of death is 1 in 2 million, and called for the halt of vaccinating children.
The 1 in 2 million comes from JCVI minuted from summer 2021, a statistic which was queered at the time. A paper produced by UKHSA last week claimed only 81 children had died of covid, this is debatable as the authors decided to discount 100 death certificates with covid listed as a contributing cause. Even at 81 deaths, the 1 in 2 million stat would mean 162 million children had been infected. The UK has around 10 million school children.
Christopher Chope continued what appeared to be a competition in who could squeeze the most antivax talking points into his speech.
“Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion” is an anti-vax film released to coincide with Malhotra’s antivax paper. It had been viewed around a million times around the world.
Andrew Bridgen quoted a questionable interpretation of statistics that was covered in last week’s round up. Bridgen is also a member of the CRG sceptic MPs group who receive weekly briefings from HART with all the latest disinformation talking points.
He then goes on to quote Florida’s Surgeon General Ladapo who was widely criticised for publishing an anonymous anti-vax paper, also covered in last weeks round up. He also quotes Malhotra and suggests excess deaths are due to the vaccine.
The APPG and now the Parliamentary debate is all across anti-vax channels and social media, of course its also been covered by the UK’s GB News channel which is now under investigation for its promotion of disinformation including conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf.
It demonstrates how disinformation produced by a relatively small number of people working through a number of interlinked groups can have a large international impact. Malhotra gets quoted in the states by Ladapo who released his own paper, this is followed up in the UK Parliament and will now be used by Ladapo to provide confirmation bias to his statements. All it took was for a few MPs to set up a powerless forum group.
Its worth noting that John Hayes who interjected with,
had been in the UK news this week for another reason. There are growing calls for the Home Secretary Suella Braverman to be removed from post, this is regarding her using personal email accounts and Whats App to share confidential government documents with people who weren’t authorised to see them. She had been reappointed to the position by new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after she had been forced to resign from the position by then Prime Minister Liz Truss 6 days beforehand for the same reason. Such is the chaotic state of UK politics.
Hayes is an influential member of the hard right faction of the Conservative Party and the Common Sense Group of MPs which argues for social conservatism which looks very similar to the Council for National Policy’s agenda.
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Disinformation promoter Mark Sexton, who attended the APPG (despite being arrested for assulting a police officer a few days before) then took to the streets using Malhotra’s appearance as justification to bring a mob to a vaccine centre in an attempt to shut it down. Malhotra has been upgraded from being referred to as a “top” cardiologist to being the best in the country.
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As a sign of the scale of the grift going on, attendance to the APPG was offered by James Freeman as a perk of being a donor to his Patreon account. Rather than vaccines its the UK’s APPG system that needs halting until further investigations are conducted.
The Brownstone Institute in the US also used the APPG to continue their campaign of anti-vax disinformation which is accusing authorities of covering up mass deaths. As signs of the cross border nature of the disinformation network the article was written by Molly Kingsley, founder of Us For Them and executive board member of the Together Declaration, the UK’s equivalent of Defeat the Mandates. Us For Them is supported by the CRG MPs responsible for the APPG, and the #HARTleaks revealed how Kingley alongside members of HART, UK Medical Freedom Alliance, Lawyers for Liberty and RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense set up a group to campaign against child vaccination in April 2021 before safety data had even been looked at by the UK regulator.
So she is quoting MPs quoting members of her What’s App group.
In line with Brownstone messaging she accused the UK government of breaching medical ethics.
Kingsley claims voices have been silenced, after her argument has been made in parliament and has appeared across social media. None of the coverage has been flagged or removed. She writes for the Telegraph, the mainstream newspaper with the closest links to the government, and has used this position to call repeatedly for the halt of vaccines. She had a debate in Westminister Hall last year in response to her calls, and an emergency meeting of the Education Select Committee was called the same week for the same reasons.
Alongside joint campaigns with the current and former Children’s Commisioners and Robert Halfon chair of the Education Select Committee, freedom of information requests also reveal Us For Them have been in regular correspondence with the Department of Education. In their own newletters they have also spoken about meetings with ministers.
The Brownstone article continues quoting the MP’s statements including accusations regarding the UK’s regulatory agency MHRA.
These claims about the MHRA’s funding have been previously explained, the regulator received funding to conduct several specific short term projects, its general work is not funded by pharmaceutical companies.
The harm these disinformation groups are doing is real, and the role MPs have played should be investigated by the UK’s covid inquiry.
Its worth noting that Brownstone’s Paul Alexander was accused of political interference with the CDC in the most recent Oversight committee report.
The Brownstone Institute and affiliated individuals have also been promoting the false idea that covid patients were killed by ventilation.
This is now being repeated on the US mid-terms campaign trail.
It should be notes Republican candidate Scott Jensen was listed as a member of Pandata’s advisory board last year, alongside a number of key Brownstone people. He was also a member of the World Doctors Alliance which included Dolores Cahill founder of the World Freedom Alliance.
The dangers of this rhetoric to incite violence are highlighted by the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the attacker is said to have believe the covid disinformation that’s been promoted by Jensen, Brownstone, Malhotra and unfortunately Conservative MPs.
Further Reading