Unsafe Schools: Who are Us For Them?
The campaign for the mass infection of children
Founded in May 2020, of all groups campaigning against covid measures, Us For Them have been the most successful groups in building a mainstream presence, meeting regularly with Conservative MP’s behind the scenes they have had considerable influence over schools policy in the UK. Policies which has resulted in high infection rates in our school children and an education system that faces considerable ongoing disruption.
While children are on average at lower risk than older age groups from covid, the risks aren’t negligible as Us For Them have consistently claimed. Even at lower risk, when large numbers are being repeatedly infected this leads to serious consequences for many thousands of children.
We also have seen the impact on those working in education.
While claims were made that measures were the main cause of disruption in schools not the virus, once all measures were removed in England’s schools, including the need for a student to isolate if they test positive, absence rates have remained high.
DfE data provided to the JCVI estimated 60% of cases of severe absence in primary school children were due to absence from covid illness.
If the best place for children is in school, then allowing unmitigated transmission is counter productive. Those who have opposed measures in schools, have opposed all measures, including ventilation and air filtration which can’t be described as restrictions, they have also refused to acknowledge the children who have been impacted by covid.
Us For Them
For instance in November 2021 Us For Them’s founder Molly Kingsley claimed
The study was conducted by Russell Viner, who has produced many of the studies informing the UK Government’s approach to covid in schools.
The study only went up to March 2021, however Kingsley’s article suggested this includes the months up to November. During the time of the study England’s schools had been through two periods of partial school closures with a six week summer holiday in between and the Delta variant had yet to sweep through schools.
The graph above shows eight children died in the week the study was published. Viner has consistently argued against measures in schools and questioned the need for vaccination. As he assumes all children will be infected at some point, his personal calculation of mortality risk of covid being 1 in 500,000, means that with around 10 million students in the country he believes the deaths of 200 children is worth not having measures in schools.
That will be 200 dead “healthy” children. Of course what counts as a health condition for covid is itself a matter of debate when it comes to government policy. Viner acknowledged the children of certain communities were being disproportionately impacted.
Questions have been raised regarding the methodology of Viner’s study regarding how the details of the review process managed to whittle down the official 61 deaths to 25, leading to accusations of intentionally trying to reduce the perceived harm of covid in children.
A detailed look at the study from a senior epidemiologist can be found here.
Its worth noting that Viner was responsible for the original paper published in April 2020 that claimed children were less likely to be infected, and would rarely be infectious to adults. The paper was still be quoted in some official UK documents well into 2021, it has also been quoted around the world to justify lack of mitigations in schools. The messaging from a small group of paediatricians from RCPCH working with the UK government has often been in lockstep with Us For Them with several individuals supporting the group’s work directly.
Kingsley’s article where she quotes the study (not the only time she has relied on this statistic) demonstrates a campaigning strategy build on misrepresentation.
Her attack on the NASUWT in the article misrepresents the teaching union’s policy on remote learning, they had released guidance stating live online lessons shouldn’t proceed unless certain measures to ensure safeguarding were in place, the measures required were simple, such as recording lessons to prevent false allegations. This is after some students superimposed the images of teachers onto offensive imagery that was distributed on social media. Schools complied with the simple measures, the NASUWT and NEU which had similar policies didn’t prevent any live lessons going ahead.
At the time of the article South Africa had reintroduced masks and other measures, and they did close schools, choosing to extend the Christmas holiday period.
Disinformation based campaigning
There is a rhythm to Us For Them’s campaigning, a study or case example minimising the harms of covid or exaggerating the impact of measures is reported on by sympathetic media, often the details are misrepresented or selectively quoted. Us For Them are well connected in the media, they are asked for comment then write their own comment piece which then sees them invited to be interviewed in the media on the subject.
Conservative MPs and interconnected groups working with Us For Them behind the scenes then amplify the disinformation cementing this as an “alternative fact” which goes on to be quoted far and wide, warping the debate. Often union leaders would find most their time in interviews were taken up getting the record straight regarding misrepresentations in the media meaning they had less time to get their own message across to the public.
In the Summer of 2022, Us For Them continue to be praised as heroes by Conservative MPs including Robert Halfon chair of the Education Select Committee, Rachel de Souza the current Childrens Commissioner and her predecessor Anne Longfield, and sections of the right wing media. Fortunately it appears some broadcasters like the BBC, Sky News and LBC have recently ceased platforming them.
A look at some of their current views, quoting twice banned from Twitter conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf who claimed she’d overheard Apple employees talking about time travelling nanoparticles in vaccines prior to the pandemic. Wolf works for the AIER that launched the Great Barrington Declaration, Kingsley is currently promoting Wolf’s latest book of conspiracy theories which is where this quote comes from.
Despite the data not supporting her views, Kingsley continues to claim the vaccination programme is a crime that will kill more children than covid.
Claiming the WHO organisation and Bill Gates are in control of the UK’s medical regulator MHRA.
She has made many calls for those who supported masks and vaccines to be imprisoned for crimes against humanity.
Leilla is another member of Us For Them’s team.
Us For Them claim accusations of disinformation and spreading anti-vax narratives are defamation, they are just asking legitimate questions. Calling for people to be imprisoned for masks and vaccines suggests they’ve already decided what the answer to these questions are.
Who are Us For Them?
How did this group founded in May 2020 come to be praised in parliament, influencing the Education Select Committee, having debates in their name in Westminster Hall, supported by the Children’s Commissioner and the Covid Recovery All Party Parliamentary Group, and the Department for Education appears to respond in almost real time to their complaints, for instance writing to schools which they had discovered were considering reintroducing masks? They have been called to provide evidence to committees, had behind the scenes meetings with ministers and MPs and have already successfully altered the terms of the UK’s upcoming Covid Inquiry which they are being considered as potential core participants for.
Surprisingly for a supposedly grassroots campaign group it all begins with legal threats against the UK government by a multi-billion dollar US law firm.
Us For Them Vs The UK Government
On 31 May 2020 the Daily Mail ran a story claiming school closures breached human rights laws, reporting that three mothers Molly Kingsley, Christine Brett and Liz Morris were considering suing the government because children were being “treated like they are germs” despite “overwhelming evidence lockdown is having a devastating impact on children's well-being, draconian social distancing rules will cause long term mental damage.”
They said “Many parents are now too scared to admit they want to send their children back to school after unions opposed the reopening of classrooms”, suggesting unions were bullying parents into silence and were driving government policy. After meeting on Twitter in the replies of Telegraph writer Alison Pearson the three mothers had decided to set up a group called Us for Them to campaign for a full reopening of schools without measures such as social distancing or masks.
Despite having only formed a few days before they claimed Us for Them had already been “deluged” with messages from parents, teachers and even psychologists thanking them for their bravery in starting the campaign. They already had a legal team including a top QC to look at whether the Government’s actions and social distancing rules had been unlawful and had written an open letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson claiming the support of over 2,000 parents stating “The risk of transmission between children is minimal, according to the experts, whereas the risk of the damage to their well being is high.”
As with Simon Dolan’s Keep Britain Free legal action represented by Francis Hoar of Pandata, Us for Them’s threat of legal action grabbed the attention of the press, particularly those outlets pushing for an end to lockdown that were promoting Sunetra Gupta’s “Oxford Report” claiming herd immunity had already been reached, Philip Thomas’ J-Value calculations claiming lockdown would kill more people than covid and then president of the Royal College of Paediatric Care and Health Russell Viner’s systematic review on the infectiousness of children that claimed children wouldn’t play a significant role in covid transmission. Later in the year the paper would be subject to complaints to the UK’s statistics authority regarding its selective methodology.
The “overwhelming evidence” base referenced by Us for Them was Viner’s systematic review and a paper by Esther Crawley of Bristol University titled “Wider collateral damage to children in the UK because of the social distancing measures designed to reduce the impact of COVID-19 in adults” which states “School closures may have a limited impact on preventing deaths in adults” assuming lower risk in children means negligible risk. The source for this assumption? Viners systematic study. This occurred time and time again in many countries, additional papers quoted as supporting Viner's findings were in fact using Viner’s assumptions for the foundations of their own work.
Esther Crawley was the subject of controversy before the pandemic due to a series of research papers treating chronic conditions in children such as CFS/ME as psychological rather than pathological. These include a 2011 study published in the BMJ that came under sustained criticism due to Crawley failing to undergo ethical review in identifying previously undiagnosed patients, and the BMJ also came under criticism for seeming to have published the paper without the expected review process.
In 2016 CFS/ME campaigners won a court victory to release data from the PACE trials published in the Lancet which Crawley had produced the paper for. Run by Queens Mary University London and part funded by the Department for Work and Pensions the PACE trial was assessing the value of biopsychosocial interventions at the same time the DWP was using the biopsychosocial model of disability to help justify cuts to disability spending. The trial claimed to be a decisive success however repeated FOI requests by campaigners worried the trial was providing justification for the government to replace expensive medical treatment and research with cheaper talking therapies. The PACE trial was considered a scandal by members CFS/ME community, the design of the trial and the way in which it was conducted meant that results were always likely to produce results that matched the researchers preferred approaches. Factual inaccuracies were left uncorrected even after being reported to the researchers.
Grassroots?
A “grassroots” organisation is created, claiming a huge support base within days of forming, despite no one in the education sector having heard of them. The 2,000 members Us for Them claim to represent is the number of followers on their Facebook page, which is just a fraction of the membership of established groups such as those campaigning for appropriate SEND provision who have spent years being ignored by politicians and the media. Even now Us For Them’s evidence they claim to speak for a large number parents is based on the membership of their private Facebook page. The page rapidly gained followers up to 10,000 then grew at a consistent rate for months before growth suddenly halted, in August 2022 they had just over 12,000 accounts following them on Facebook. For comparison a petition for the government to rethink its proposals for schools had attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures within a week.
In just over a week since their creation Us For Them had secured the services of an expensive legal team including a top QC and were threatening the Government with legal action against school closures (which were partially open not closed) and getting national press coverage and invites for interviews on broadcast media.
How did they accomplish this? Even a well funded grassroots campaign takes time to cut through into the mainstream media, and Us For Them have always claimed they are only funded by small donations from concerned parents, how could they afford the legal team when the donations hadn’t even started rolling in yet? Moving from a registered organisation on 19 May 2020 to an incorporated company in 2021, by mid 2022 Us For Them had yet to release any financial records with the deadline for the 2021 and 2022 financial year due in January 2023 at the latest.
Perhaps this grassroots organisation whose public origins story is three disgruntled mothers who met online and decided to take on the government all on their own had managed to secure the services of a whole legal team willing to take on a potentially expensive and protracted battle with the Government for free.
Molly Kingsley
One of Us for Them’s founders and the main face of the organisation, Molly Kingsley (real name Michelle) was formerly a corporate lawyer at Slaughter and May, and her husband is financial services lawyer and a partner at the same firm although at the start of the pandemic he was working as an adviser to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on a scheme to support TV and film production companies facing the impact of covid. By coincidence Francis Hoar, lawyer of choice for sceptic legal challenges, is a member of Lawyers for Brexit which was founded by a senior figure in Slaughter and May.
Kingsley set up two businesses after leaving Slaughter and May, Inkling Search and an online retail platform called Showroom Network, her business partner Chloe Ross had previously worked in the Cabinet Office when Cameron was in Downing Street. Ross is also vice president of Class Pass, a fitness app based in New York it was estimated to have lost more than 95% of its $1billion value in the first year of the pandemic.
Just before the pandemic Kingsley appears to have been dabbling as a columnist, producing a few comment pieces for a blog site, the travails of an upper middle class mum juggling work, children and social life. As the founder of Us for Them and off of the back of the publicity her threat of legal action received she was soon quoted and writing articles across right wing media, becoming a regular columnist in the Telegraph and one of the leading faces of its “Campaign for Children” which supported the work of Us For Them.
She first appeared as a writer in the Telegraph with a comment piece about Christmas in 2019. Her second article on 22 April, about a month before she founded Us for Them was titled.
“Does lockdown mean the return of the ‘Trad Wife’?
With cleaners and carers no longer coming in to lighten the load, many women are buckling under the stress.”
The piece is about the strain on working mums, “Covid-19 presents a clear threat to the gains made in the hard, 5,000 year battle that women still hadn’t decisively won,” she goes on to exemplify the “laptop class”, those who work in safety at home without health or financial impact from covid, “With cleaners and carers no longer coming in to lighten the load and “home schooling” casually being lobbed into the mix, many are buckling under the stress”.
She goes on to explain the issue for her “For the first few days there were some teething issues. We agreed a schedule for split work and childcare and we’d built into a few days a single sacrosanct hour, 6pm, for family time, the four of us. Day one, at 5:45pm, I received an email from hubb, newly resident in what had been until the day before, ‘my’ study: ‘I’m sorry but I’ve had to agree to a call at 6pm so I can’t be about for bedtime. I should still be able to look after the kids tomorrow afternoon though. Is that OK?’
I sat and fumed. Tomorrow afternoon was my work slot, so no, it was NOT OK.
The next day from my ‘new’ study (which until a few days before, had been a clothes cupboard), I caught a glimpse of Bert in the garden.” She explains how her husband is struggling with a work call and the children and considers going to help “But then I thought back to all the times I’ve been the one chasing them around while juggling work commitments and I thought to myself, “No. Sorry darling, but this is what equality looks like.”
“Second, as harsh as this new world has been, it has given us a chance to look again at the way we were working, full-stop. Gruelling commutes, long hours and minimal midweek contact with the kids. I'm not sure that ever, really, worked for us. How many, I wonder, does it work for? In these dark times we need to find silver linings and here, then, is ours: we have a chance for a reset. The Second World War birthed the second wave feminism of the 1960s. Now, like then, if enough of us reassess who is really doing what, there is an outside chance to create a more positive gender paradigm; a chance, as Rosemary Morgan of the Gender and Covid-19 Working Group puts it, "to build back better".
This was in April as healthcare workers died without appropriate PPE and covid literally decimated care homes, I was in school every week in classrooms of 5 - 15 students without access to testing while students and staff were still going absent with sickness. Low paid workers furloughed on 80% wages and those who slipped through the gaps of Sunak’s financial support staff were struggling to pay the bills.
I’m reminded of the criticism of the work of Emily Oster in the US, a hyper-individualistic attitude to the pandemic. What I do find interesting is the silver linings Kingsley highlights, spending more time with the children, cutting down on commuting, and how we shouldn’t just return to the way things were before lockdown. Kingsley has claimed to have opposed school closures and lockdowns right from the start arguing it was a crime against children that should never have occurred, saying we shouldn’t have sacrificed children’s education to protect the elderly and vulnerable. All this article focuses on is someone who usually works from home getting frustrated with her husband getting under her feet and the inconvenience of having to support her children’s homeschooling.
24 May Kingsley appears in another article for the Telegraph “Should you send our kids back to school? Two parents argue for and against. As the back to school debate heats up, our writers outline why they’ve decided to take different paths.”
The article is used to put Us for Them into the mainstream, “launched only a few days ago and has already seen overwhelming response.” Kingsley explains “It calls for a return to school at the earliest opportunity with Covid-19 precautions that are proportionate.
“We are not arguing against sensible precautions, but we believe the extent of distancing measures proposed in some quarters is unnecessary and disproportionate and deprives children of interactions that are so vital for their learning, personal development and health. We point to the clear overwhelming evidence now emerging on the damage social distancing causes to children.”
The overwhelming evidence was Crawley and Viners papers. This was all they could find at the time, not exactly overwhelming, also on the subject of social distancing in schools, it was never viable or properly enforced in schools. Primaries used bubbles instead, keeping students in groups of 15 or 30 that didn’t mix with other groups while DfE guidance for secondaries said “social distancing where possible” and it generally wasn’t possible so year groups were kept separate.
Kingsley claimed Us for Them supported sensible precautions, however a check of their website currently shows how they have opposed every single measure and promoted disinformation to support their views, examples include claiming masks would deprive children of oxygen damaging their mental development, that testing psychologically damaged children and that the swabs used for testing were carcinogenic.
They even opposed hand washing posting pictures of red flaky hands claiming this was the impact of hand sanitisers in schools, a reverse image search revealed they were using a stock image of an adult with dermatitis. Deep into the autumn of 2020 they continued to claim children were practically immune to infection and if they did catch covid children couldn’t infect adults there was “not a single case in the whole world” of this happening.
One of the members in an LBC interview even claimed teachers were safer surrounded by children as it would help them develop immunity. Their website still cites a paper based on the common cold that claims that “higher levels of social engagement represent a protective effect against the inflammatory immune response to respiratory viruses”, eg being more social reduces stress and improves the immune system, of course this is flipped on its head when being in large groups with a higher risk of infection is likely to increase stress.
So we have a woman writing about her frustration in April with the inconvenience of lockdown interfering with her work life, her husband is working for a government department and Kingley also has friends who have worked for the Conservative Party who have been financially impacted by lockdown.
Her article is for the Telegraph, Johnson’s former employer and the paper closest to the Prime Minister whose editor Moore argued we should let 250k elderly and vulnerable people die to protect the economy and had heavily promoted Sunetra Gupta’s “Oxford report” on herd immunity, Thomas’ J-value calculations and Viners systematic review.
A month later Kingsley has been signed up as a writer to launch a campaign for all students to return to school without any infection control measures based on a flimsy evidence base that's described as “overwhelming”. Only a few days old the campaign already has a fully fledged legal team with a top QC and is making headlines and getting interviews across the national media. Could this level of coverage have been achieved so rapidly without the story hook of the legal challenge?
Kingsley says the inspiration for Us For Them came from a chat on Twitter in the replies of a tweet by Alison Pearson of the Telegraph. Pearson had been a vocal supporter of herd immunity, she suggested people had a duty to go out and get infected and encouraged parents to have covid parties for their children. Kingsley having already written for the Telegraph, seems to have disappeared from the origins story, however praise is given to Pearson being instrumental in the founding of Us For Them.
The #HARTleaks shows Pearson also played a role in also helping the disinformation group HART establish a media presence.
Perhaps the creation of Us for Them was organic, perhaps Kingsley became aware of the issues faced by those in less privileged positions than herself, perhaps this is just an example of how those with the right connections find it much easier to influence political debate. The group’s extraordinary connections don’t stop there.
Us for Them never publicly revealed who their top legal team was, however a Freedom of Information request by the Byline Times obtained a copy of the pre-action protocol letter, showing Us for Them has been represented by DLA Piper, a multinational law firm, the third largest in the US with revenue in the billions. Their team consisted of partner Paul Stone, senior associate Jonathan Blunden and associate George McLellan. Stone had advised the Department for Transport on Heathrow expansion in 2019 and Blunden also worked for the same department on rail franchising.
In 2020 Blunden was working within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) “to provide contentious and non-contentious public law advice in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.” The evidence provided in the letter relied on evidence from the Royal College of Paediatric Care and Health (RCPCH) and one of its paediatricians Sunil Bhopal, a key foundation for the evidence was based on the work of the RCPCH’s then president, Russel Viner, other evidence came from Ellen Townsend, a supporter of Us for Them’s future campaigns she would go on to be a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, and be involved in various groups including HART and PCRclaims.
The #HART leaks show Bhopal has been working with Us For Them, when questioned he confirmed this in a series of tweets that has now been deleted.
Bhopal and another RCPHC paediatrician Michael Absoud are included in the acknowledgements of the Us For Them book.
This wasn’t the only surprisingly high level support for this new organisation, in January 2021 the Byline Times revealed Us for Them were receiving PR support from Ed Barker.
Ed Barker
A former Conservative Party candidate Ed Barker isn’t a well known public figure, however he is considered an influential and valuable fixer in right wing politics. His company SW1 Group manages the offices of many senior Conservatives, he has provided PR support for many Conservative MPs including Home Secretary Priti Patel, Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Fallon when he was Defence Secretary, Ed Baker also played a key role in Johnson's campaign to become leader of the Conservatives and Prime Minister. Very well connected SW1 Group has received praise for its work from the editors of the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and The Sun.
Ed Barker also does communications for Blue Collar Conservatism, a grouping of Conservative MPs relaunched for the 2019 Conservative leadership campaign by former minister Esther Mcvery. McVey would go on to become the Chair of the All Party Parliamentary group sponsored by the opaquely funded Collateral Global whose members include the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The APPG only platforms members from disinformation groups like Collateral Global and HART, and supports Us for Them’s repeated attempts to halt the offer of vaccines to children, arguing that children shouldn’t be prevented from gaining the benefits of natural immunity through infection. Many members of Blue Collar Conservatism became vocal supporters of Us for Them, of particular note is Robert Halfon Chair of the Education Select Committee who described Us for Them as his heroes of the pandemic, convened Select Committee meetings at their behest and even tried to pass a bill produced by Us for Them to have schools reclassified as essential infrastructure. Blue Collar Conservatism is a large grouping with around 160 MPs, and many of them would go on to promote disinformation, two of the most influential being Andrew Rosindell and Graham Brady Chair of the 1922 Committee who were influential in facilitating meetings between MPs and prominent members of disinformation groups.
Ed Barker also provided PR for Richard Tice and Nigel Farage’s Leave Means Leave campaign and for Global Britain and StandUp4Brexit
When Steve Baker relaunched the Conservative group Conservative Way Forward in 2022 it was again Ed Baker they turned to for PR support, the group is being funded by Institute of Economic Affairs’ chairman Neil Record. Both founded by the British businessman Antony Fisher, the IEA is directly connected to the Atlas Network, part of the Council for National Policy and Koch network. Conservative Way Forward has a long history and connections to the Council for National Policy via its executive director and vice chairman Paul Simon Osborn who is also the longtime vice president of Cherish Freedom Foundation which received funding from hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. The Mercers are one of a collection of billionaire foundations that bankroll the CNP, and were the main funders of the controversial Cambridge Analytica which is still the subject of vast legal cases in the US.
Founded in 1980 the Council for National Policy merged white nationalist fundamental Christianity with the corporate interests of industrialist billionaires with vast financial interests in fossil fuels and natural resources. The CNP was responsible for creating US militant disinformation group America’s Frontline Doctors.
As evidence of the intentionally elaborate ecosystem of interconnected right wing organisations that have taken such a hold over the Republican Party, the Conservative Party and is growing its influence in other countries via dark money and culture wars, Paul Simon Osborn is also director of strategy for the Young Britons Foundation, a member of the Heritage Foundation’s Young President’s Club and a member of the American Conservative Union which organises CPAC, all of which come under the influence of the CNP.
Cherish Freedom Foundation in itself appears to have its own constellation of interlinking organisations and Ed Barkers companies are registered at the same address used by a company part owned by Temple Secretaries which appears to be a holding company linked to thousands of shell companies.
Ed Barker also provides PR for the Legatum Institute and the Legatum Group, both funded by Legatum Limited a Dubai based private investment firm owned by New Zealand born Christopher Chandler who made his fortune in markets undergoing political transitions. He is a man who knows how to profit from sudden political upheaval and turmoil, by coincidence the Legatum Institute headed by Conservative peer Philippa Stroud is considered to be one of the most influential pro-Brexit think tanks with incredible access to ministers and the media.
Mathew Elliot, Senior Fellow of Legatum Institute was CEO of Vote Leave employing Dominic Cummings, was the co-founder of the Taxpayers Alliance with Telegraph editor Allister Heath, and is involved in Big Brother Watch with Mark Littlewood of the IEA.
Shanker Singham headed the Legatum Institute “Special Trade Commission” to present a roadmap for post-Brexit trade talks. Whilst International Trade Secretary under Theresa May’s leadership, Liam Fox, an MP with his many of his own links to the transatlantic think tanks appointed Singham to an expert committee to advise on “matters related to trade and environment”, however he was forced to quit after attention was drawn to the conflicts of interests surrounding Singham as a lobbyist. After Johnson replaced Theresa May as prime minister Liz Truss as International Trade Secretary reappointed Singham to a key advisory role on trade despite being in the running for a £200million contract regarding checks down the Irish Sea, a decision that brought condemnation from the Parliamentary Select Committee on International Trade. Singham is also a major driving force behind the Free Ports/Special Economic Zones project via his financial interests in DP World which seeks to create deregulated onshore tax havens controlled by private contracts. Rishie Sunak’s billionaire father in law Narayana Murhy’s company Infrosys is also heavily involved in the project laying the foundation stone of the first Special Economic Zone in India in 2014.
The Legatum Institute has over 40 donors but its finances are opaque as a result of offshore funding and it has previously been found to have breached the Charity Commission's rules on impartiality after producing literature on post Brexit trade deals.
The Legatum Group was founded by Chandler with money made as large shareholders of Gazprom, the state owned Russian gas giant, via Sovereign Global, a company he jointly owned with his brother Richard. In June 2020 a new channel GB News was launched with £60million of initial funding from organisations including Legatum Group, GB News holding group is All Perspective Ltd controlled by Christopher Chandler, Legatum Group CEO Mark Stoleson and Alan McCormock, Chairman of Legatum Institute Foundation, founder of Legatum Institute and a Legatum Group Partner.
Despite claims to the contrary, GB News has become the UK’s equivalent of Fox News, with many presenters linked to opaquely funded organisations, the purpose seems to be predominantly focused on stoking culture wars and advancing a CNP/Koch style agenda. The HARTleaks revealed how discredited anti-vaxxers have found a warm and welcoming reception from GB News, presenter Calvin Robinson even advocated Ivermectin, and it’s also hosted the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a Koch linked group set up to question climate change which Steve Baker is a trustee, the group has now changed to an anti Net Zero Group supported by Nigel Farage who became a GB News presenter alongside Esther McVey. When Russia invaded Ukraine presenters were accused of taking a Putin apologist stance, also arguing against sanctions.
It’s quite remarkable that Ed Barker, a man who must be incredibly busy advising a multitude of opaquely funded lobbying groups, foreign billionaires and senior Conservative politicians found the time and inclination to provide extensive support to a few plucky mums who say they met by chance in the replies of a Tweet by the Telegraph’s Alison Pearson.
Ellen Townsend
Ellen Townsend, a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration has been working with Us For Them since they were founded. She organised an open letter of professionals to support the original legal challenge against schools having being included, and was praised in Us For Them’s book for her constant help and support.
Townsend has been involved in multiple disinformation groups, being a member of Pandata’s Scientific Advisory Group alongside the Great Barrington Declaration’s (GBD) authors. Other Pandata members include former Trump advisers Scott Atlas, Paul Alexander and Republican politician Scott Jensen, anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorists such as Michael Yeadon and Sucharitt Bhakdi, and other individuals with interesting connections such as Stacey Rudin of the AIER, Francis Hoar and Patrick Fagan who was Cambridge Analytica’s head psychologist.
Pandata formed in April 2020 a month before Us For Them to promote herd immunity as a strategy. A key element of the strategy has always been to allow uncontrolled transmission in schools as shown by this description of a section of “The Making of the Great Barrington Declaration” produced by the AIER and hosted on their YouTube channel.
Many of their statements are shocking considering this is pre-vaccine, Gupta is talking about just letting kids get covid so they develop immunity.
In regards to high risk teachers Gupta said “the sooner the students become immune the sooner these people can return to teach in the classroom.”
What about teachers? Bhattacharya explains it’s fine if teachers get covid because most of them won’t die, consider 1000 teachers at the age of 40 he said “you know 998 of those 40 year olds will survive.” (There are around 360,000 teachers and teaching assistants in their 40s in the UK, a portion of these will be in higher risk groups, but without taking this into account Bhattacharya is saying over 700 UK education workers in their 40’s dying didn’t justify even the most basic of protective measures)
“It doesn’t matter if they are infected.”
Gupta wondered aloud “why teachers wouldn’t accept that risk” of death in order to teach students.
In her book Kingsley thanked GBD authors Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya for their support over the pandemic and their aid in helping her to write the book. She has described Gupta as an incredible and inspirational woman who it was a privilege to know.
From the Us For Them book
The herd immunity lobbyists have denied accusations of eugenics, however their attitude to older year groups is the same as with education workers, they should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of keeping children in school. Schools that they argue should have no mitigations because the quicker most children are infected the better.
Kingsley has made the same argument in letters to the Prime Minister.
Ellen Townsend has also worked extensively with conspiracy theorist Michael Yeadon, being a member of PCRclaims that formed in October 2020 to promote the “plandemic” narrative that the vast majority of covid cases were the product of inherently flawed PCR tests producing false positives. This was of course untrue, false positives do occur, but at a very low rate, lower than the rate of false negatives the test produces. Other members of PCRclaims included Pandata members Patrick Fagan, Joel Smalley, Clare Craig and its founder Nick Hudson. Essentially PCRclaims appears to be a Pandata project designed to support the GBD.
Yeadon and Smalley are now also advisers to America’s Frontline Doctors.
Townsend was also a member of HART group, who despite claiming to be independent unbiased scientific experts, were revealed by the #HARTleaks to be a hub of disinformation, providing resources for a range of groups including the anti-vax UK Medical Freedom Alliance, Lawyers4Liberty, and Us For Them. Having already developed political and media connections via the likes of Ed Barker and the Telegraph, Townsend organised HART meetings with Conservative MP’s and journalists.
Note Allison Pearson’s involvement in HART’s behind closed doors launch meeting.
Townsend has left HART and is now a member of Collateral Global which includes the GBD authors and Carl Henghan whose Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) is now affiliated to Pandata. The CEBM has previously done work for the WHO that questioned the airborne transmission of covid.
Collateral Global advertises itself as a research charity but less than a quarter of its spending was on research while the majority was spent on media and consultants. The only research Collateral Global has conducted has been meta-analysis of other people's data, however the organisation has managed to raise a cash surplus of £250,000. The organisation funds the Covid Recovery All Party Parliamentary group and acts as its secretariat via Jemma Moran of HART. The APPG has become a platform for disinformation that is being quoted by anti-vax and conspiracy groups around the world, it’s currently in breach of APPG rules, with no minutes from its meetings publicly available. Initially it did comply but has since removed the minutes of the first few meetings.
Ros Jones
The most prolific member of Us for Them after Kingsley is Ros Jones, who also goes by the surname Maidment. Initially she was a regular public spokesperson for Us For Them and joined HART when the group formed, for a while she was promoted as a member of both groups, but after the #HARTleaks revealed her extremist anti-vax views she is now only introduced as a member of HART. Kingsley has failed to answer repeated questions if Ros Jones is still a member behind the scenes for Us For Them. The integrated nature of HART and Us For Them is apparent in the '#HARTleaks.
For instance in coordinating a campaign against child vaccination in May 2021 months before the JCVI made a decision and before detailed data from other countries was available.
Ros Jones has founded a number of anti-child vaccine campaigns including the Safer to Wait Campaign. This is from one of their leaflets still available on their website at the time of writing.
More on Ros Jones failed legal challenges to child vaccination can be found here.
#HARTleaks also demonstrates the international nature of the disinformation network as Yeadon and Smalley working with America’s Frontline Doctors coordinate through Ros Jones to influence Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who appointed Surgeon General Ladapo who is linked to America’s Frontline Doctors.
See how the connections just keep stacking up. The coordinated covid disinformation network is real, and it has contributed to the preventable mass infection of children not just in the UK.
Ros Jones and her HART colleagues have also supported the promotion of ivermectin. Edmund Fordham and Tess Lawrie mentioned below are the founders of the British Ivermectin Research Development group. The screenshot shows Richard Tice of UKIP/Brexit Party/ Reform UK is also involved in covid disinformation.
Supporting cast
Other members of Us For Them include
Marta Kotlarek their web administrator has a track record of tweeting disinformation tropes, for instance in October 2020 tweeting the claims about PCR testing promoted in particular by Michael Yeadon. “If there was no PCR testing, there would be no pandemic.” The Welsh Us for them Twitter account also played to these claims “The inaccuracy of the PCR test is well documented.” Marta has also questioned the covid death toll, and I had my own bizarre run in with her online after asking who produces the evidence for Us for Them alongside screenshots from the HARTleaks.
Christine Brett, representing Us for Them was interviewed on 28 May 2020 by the Alliance for Natural Health an anti-vax group that still promotes Andrew Wakefield’s discredited claims about the MMR jab, and believes all vaccines are inherently dangerous.
The Alliance for Natural Health was originally fund a legal challenge against the EU food supplement directive. It is now affiliated to the World Council for Health that promotes the use of unproven treatments like ivermectin and the World Freedom Alliance that promotes Nuremberg 2.0. Writing for Conservative Woman, a hot bed of climate change denial and covid disinformation, Brett promoted Michael Yeadon’s paper on PCR testing which was the basis of PCRclaims.
More on the World Council for Health and America’s Frontline Doctors and their links to HART can be found here.
Leila Bybordi of Us For Them has taken to sharing Qanon style conspiracy theories, which could be classed as extremist in nature.
More of these conspiracy theories can be found here
Liz Morris/Cole has recently started writing for the Brownstone Institute alongside Kingsley.
The Brownstone Institute is a product of the Great Barrington Declaration and the AIER.
Brownstone Institute appears to be seeking to rewrite the history of the pandemic, the writers portraying themselves as being the silenced victims of the pandemic, despite considerable media support and meetings in Downing Street and the White House. They question the effectiveness and need of every measure including vaccination, overselling the “benefits” of infection they minimise the harms of covid and claim measures are responsible for considerably more harm than the virus.
Brownstone are also targeting individuals who they blame for unnecessary measures, and even published a list.
This was followed up with calls to hold these people to account. The choice of language and imagery of guillotines led to some people on the list receiving abuse and death threats. At the same time members of America’s Frontline Doctors were sending pictures of nooses with the message “Nuremberg 2.0” to those who supported vaccination. The Counter Disinformation Project has received these messages.
The consequences of abuse due to disinformation groups has severe consequences.
Full article here by Devi Sridhar who is on the Brownstone list
A few days after Kellermayr’s suicide, Nick Hudson founder of Pandata that has an overlap of key members with Brownstone was interviewed saying he hoped there would be more suicides.
These are the people and organisations Us For Them have chosen to align themselves with, so how have they become a favourite of Conservative MP’s who are promoting their book in Parliament?
Other advocacy groups calling for children to be protected from mass infection such as those representing children harmed by PIMS and long covid, and clinically vulnerable families have campaigned relentlessly and failed to secure a single meeting with government ministers, the education select committee or the Children’s Commissioner. They are the real silenced victims of the pandemic.
Influencing Government Policy
September 2020 Schools Guidance
Us For Them's threats of legal challenge against the Government received repeated coverage in press columns and broadcast interviews. 9 June Us For Them's founder Molly Kingley wrote in the Telegraph "social distancing is harmful". The article says
“While many of the new rules in place are sensible - more handwashing, cleaning, good hygiene things even young kids can follow easily without distress - I've felt deeply uneasy about the distancing measures now in place"
It starts off trying to sound reasonable, however elsewhere like on Twitter Kingsley and Us For Them's official account were sharing stock pictures of dermatitis saying children were suffering from too much hand washing. Robert Dingwall of NERVTAG has also quoted in the press as saying handwashing caused more harm to children than covid.
Kingsley goes on to describe her child's primary school with children permanently separated two metres apart at all times. We tried this in secondary but the vast majority of primaries used bubbles of around fifteen students instead of social distancing. Pictures in the press of school children were often from other countries, for instance small children in separate squares on a playground that were taken in France, discussions about the possibility of masks in secondary schools were accompanied by nursery school children wearing masks in China. At one point later in the pandemic Us For Them were sharing a picture demonstrating the horrors of zero covid policies which consisted of primary school children in full body “hazmat suits”, they were actually astronaut costumes on a fancy dress day to celebrate China’s space programme.
Other pictures were simple socially distanced seating with all the students in masks, a combination we never had in UK schools, however it served a dual purpose, both enraging the sceptic base while giving other readers without children in school the impression the government was taking safety seriously.
On 26 June Us For Them submitted their letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, calling on the Government to return pupils of all year groups to schools without social distancing or protective measures as they claimed schools make negligible contributions to transmission and that the overall risk from COVID-19 to children is too small to worry about, concluding that “the evidence cited for these arguments has serious limitations”.
This included a “letter before claim pursuant to the pre-action protocol for judicial review”, prepared by the top-ranking multi-billion-dollar global law firm DLA Piper – the third-largest in the US by revenue.
Through FOI requests the Byline Times obtained documents revealing Government officials were concerned over the threat of a judicial review on behalf of UsforThem. The pre-action protocol letter prepared by DLA Piper was said to be “ a contingency”. The letter noting the group “had originally anticipated serving this letter” but did not do so due to “some cause for hope that the Government is working towards a more directive policy to require schools to re-open… However, we are prepared to pursue such a course if the need to do so persists”.
As Byline Times reports,
“On the same day the correspondence from USforThem was received, Gavin Williamson forwarded it on to a Government email account – Sec-OF-STATE.PS@education.gov.uk – the identity of which was redacted. This account then further forwarded the correspondence onto the Department for Education’s operations centre and several other advisors stating “urgent response required please”.
On 26 June, the day after the letter was received, a Government official in the Department for Education – whose name has been redacted – expressed concern about the threat in an email to colleagues: “I’ve just today become aware that they’ve sent the attached letter notifying us that they intend to use the attached pre-action letter for a judicial review, depending on the outcome of next week’s announcement.”
On 27 June Boris Johnson was interviewed by The Mail on Sunday, the article exemplifies how authorities, press and astroturf groups came together to attack the unions and oppose the notion of meaningful infection control in education. The whole piece requires dismantling, first of all the headline and subheadings.
Boris Johnson says he WILL make it compulsory for parents to send children of all ages back to school in September
The British Prime Minister admitted closure of schools is 'a massive problem'
Children will be required by law to go back to their classrooms in September
Warned teaching unions to 'take their responsibilities seriously' amid opposition
In June many parents had chosen not to send their children back to school due to safety concerns, unsurprisingly this was much more common for families with a high risk household member. The decision to force these families back into schools without addressing families concerns about safety did lead to parents who chose to protect family members who were going through chemotherapy, had organ transplants or were otherwise immunocompromised being taken to court for refusing to send children into unsafe schools. A cynic might wonder if this decision was made to ensure high compliance, lots of gaps in registers would have demonstrated a lack of confidence in the government’s proposals.
Telling the unions they need to “take their responsibilities serious” and accusing them of opposition is typical of the misrepresentation they faced, they weren’t opposing the government’s plans as they were still waiting for the September guidance to be published and were campaigning to ensure schools were made safer rather than opposing full opening outright, and were also seeking concrete plans for how the government would respond to rising cases in the event of a second wave.
“In a message to the unions, Mr Johnson said: ‘It’s the kids from the poorer families who aren’t going back, and so you are entrenching social injustice.’
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has come under particular fire for his handling of the issue, having performed a U-turn on plans to get all primary school pupils back to the classroom before the summer break.
It forced him to pledge last week to Tory MPs to end the ‘softly, softly’ approach to dealing with the unions.
He promised to get children back to school in September by doubling the 15-child limit on class sizes in primary schools and ditching requirements for teachers to enforce the new ‘one metre plus’ social distancing measure.
Mr Williamson – tipped to be moved in an autumn reshuffle – told the backbench 1922 Committee that the National Education Union was the ‘No Education Union’.
Critics say the loss of teaching is causing disadvantaged children to fall further behind their peers and leading to an increase in bored youngsters engaging in feral behaviour.”
In the autumn term disadvantaged communities generally faced greater disruption to education from covid outbreaks and also suffered greater levels of death damage to health. While claiming to care about social justice, Johnson with the aid of the media added to inequality.
Whilst failing to represent the views of parents with safety concerns the Mail found space for an interview with Kingsley from Us For Them.
“Last night, the parents’ pressure group Us For Them gave Mr Johnson’s words a cautious welcome.
Co-founder Molly Kingsley said: ‘Our 10,000 supporters now urgently need more clarity from the Prime Minister.
We call for an explicit statement that there will be no social distancing in schools and we want a return to normalised full-time education for all year groups, and all schools.’
The group, set up six weeks ago, is considering suing the Government on behalf of children whose education has been blighted and wants social distancing for children in schools to be scrapped.
Referring to the chaotic and patchy restart of primaries earlier this month, Mrs Kingsley added: ‘The Government must be prescriptive in its instructions to local authorities and schools.
'Deferring all risk assessments to local authorities and schools is resulting in huge inconsistency of approach.’
She called for far more detail from the Government: ‘We need to urgently understand the arrangements for all of the things that go alongside school, including late-stay and breakfast clubs, school transport and extra-curricular activities.
‘We would like to see summer holiday camps opened now for children across the country so that we can give them back some of their summer and support to parents who’ve been struggling to juggle work and childcare for too long.
‘This is now the greatest emergency facing our country and our members will be watching the Government’s next moves closely.
'It is imperative that before MPs break for the summer there is a clear and executable plan in place, and that all parties have agreed to it.’
Us For Them were campaigning for no measures in schools, no bubbles, no hand washing, they didn’t even want infected children to isolate, claiming they should only stay at home if they were too sick to come into school.
Us For Them used stock images of adults with dermatitis in their claims that hand washing was harming children.
Their demands for central control from Government came from a fear that some school leaders, particularly those in areas which had maintained higher transmission rates, might choose to introduce a measure like mask wearing which Us For Them have always described as child abuse citing duff studies about oxygen deprivation and bacterial infection. While highlighting Us For Them’s threats to sue the government they seemed distinctly incurious how the six week old group had the means for such action, instead promoting them by providing a direct link to their website.
It also fails to understand that risk assessments can’t be done centrally as they must be personalised to the setting and its grounds. The call for summer camps to support “parents who’ve been struggling to juggle work and childcare” reminds me of Kingsley’s first Telegraph article of the pandemic prior to forming Us For Them where her concern wasn’t for children but for the strain on working mothers.
I think part of the government’s thinking was that they couldn’t get adults to return back to normal economic activity whilst there were measures in schools, and the idea of allowing mass infection in schools in hope of chasing herd immunity persists even today among some professionals and academics working with the government.
On 1 July, the Government sent an official response to UsforThem one day before the rest of the country was informed of the new re-opening plans: “We are working to ensure that all schools can re-open fully in September. We believe that it is vital for all children to return to school to support their education and wellbeing.”
The Government’s guidance was published the following day.”
The Government guidance was for a full return of students, unlike Us For Them the education unions weren’t briefed prior to the public announcement. The unions represent around a million education workers and leadership elections are covered by the Electoral Commission, and we were kept in the dark while a group a few weeks old with a handful of members and a facebook group that hasn’t reveal its funding but has a top legal team get notified beforehand by government. Yet much of the media and Us For Them have regularly called for action against the unions who they accuse of having too much power and dictating policy.
The lockdown was going to occur anyway as education was running out of staff and transmission was out of control, and the June return for all students was rolled back due to advice from SAGE and strong opposition from many councils who came out publicly in opposition to the original proposals, including Conservative run councils in the Education Secretary and Schools Minister’s constituencies.
Misrepresentation and Threats
21 July The Times published an article titled, “No known case of teacher catching coronavirus from pupils, says scientist.” It was an interview with SAGE member Mark Woolhouse who told The Times “it may have been a mistake to close schools in March given the limited role children play in spreading the virus.
“One thing we have learnt is that children are certainly, in the 5 to 15 brackets from school to early years, minimally involved in the epidemiology of this virus. They are probably less susceptible and vanishingly unlikely to end up in hospital or to die from it.
“There is increasing evidence that they rarely transmit. For example, it is extremely difficult to find any instance anywhere in the world as a single example of a child transmitting to a teacher in school. There may have been one in Australia but it is incredibly rare.”
The article concluded with the obligatory attack on the unions with the usual misrepresentation that we opposed outright any students returning in June.
Despite there being plenty of evidence to the contrary, Woolhouse’s “No known case of teacher catching coronavirus from pupils”, comment was regularly quoted for months becoming a fact as far as some were concerned. Woolhouse has since written a book claiming lockdowns were a mistake and appeared as an expert on the Covid Recover APPG funded by Sunetra Gupta’s Collateral Global.
Not content with threatening the government with legal action, Us For Them's DLA Piper legal team were now offering to pursue individual school leaders through the courts. The story was first covered in the Telegraph and spread across mainstream media.
The legal threats against individual schools allowed a stream of publicity for Us For Them, and the media created the impression of wider opposition than polling suggested. The legal threats were designed to bully school leaders into not implementing additional protective measures and there has been a steady stream of them into Head's inboxes from Us For Them and other groups opposing all measures including opposition to enforced testing (also always optional), and vaccination.
The headline of "at least ten schools" is the number of schools members of Us For Them had heard of, that they had only heard of ten schools considering increased measures shows how small their supporter base in the real world is. There are over 22,000 schools yet the Telegraph thought ten schools was enough to be worth for a headline. The story was written by Camilla Turner who regularly features Us For Them in her articles, in the #HARTleaks Ros Jones said on 18 May 2021 that Turner had been working with Us For Them since they were founded in May 2020.
This is how a scrap of a story, a few schools recommending masks but without the authority to enforce a mandate is used to deliver a threat of legal action in the national media to every school leader in the country, the same story recycled for days by other media turning it into an attack on the unions while creating a platform for other sceptic narratives.
We know major newspapers were being paid millions by the government at this time by the All Together media policy whilst the Back To School campaign funded advertisements and paid TV and social media personalities to tell the public schools had been made safe and wouldn’t be hubs of transmission. Imagine if the same effort had been spent on explaining airborne transmission and the benefits of clean air as I was seeing in clips from Japanese news channels, a country with almost twice the UK’s population but with only 10% of our death toll, a country which had avoided long national lockdowns.
While Us For Them, politicians and the media focused on measures in state schools they didn’t print their disapproval of those private schools like Eton which were investing in additional safety measures such as £45,000 to access regular PCR testing for asymptomatic cases, schools that already had the benefit of smaller class sizes and spacious rooms.
Who wrote the September School Guidance?
It wasn’t the Department for Education
The Government wasn’t following SAGE’s advice, so whose advice were they following? It took a while but eventually campaigners received answers to their FOI or more specifically a lack of answers.
The FOI asked for “minutes of all meetings Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, Schools Minister Nick Gibb or Education Select Committee Chair Robert Halfon attended where the Department for Education guidance to schools document was discussed prior to its release in August 2020”, the same request was made regarding the June 2020 guidance.
The response read
“Following a search of the Department’s paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by the Department. Specific discussions or meetings did not take place on the guidance for schools. However, discussions took place on wider education issues which civil servants used in their policy formation.”
The DfE didn’t write the guidance, they didn’t even discuss it. Where did it come from? Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the Treasury or perhaps the secretive Joint Biosecurity Centre? Someone must have written it, it didn’t just emerge from the ether, however it does show that DfE policy was being produced elsewhere and the department wasn’t in control of its own policy.
Us For Them celebrate their wins
In August 2020, Us For Them sent out an update to their supporters to mark their three month anniversary, my commentary is in brackets.
The “much valued, non-public adviser” who told them them what would count is “public discretion, private agitation” is Ed Barker. None of the parent groups campaigning for infection control in schools had the option of “private agitation” and behind the scenes meetings with ministers as this newsletter shows were occurring.
A number of FOI requests regarding the number and timings of meetings between Us For Them and the DfE, Education Select Committee and Children’s Commissioner have been refused under the grounds they would take too long.
The letter also shows that the Mail article on proposals by some schools was the product of direct coordination between Us For Them and a team at the paper.
It also lays out that attacking the unions is an integral part of their strategy, the calls to made schools essential infrastructure would make strikes for any reason by education workers illegal. Its a policy previously proposed by right wing think tanks prior to the pandemic. The proposal is now a backbench bill being steered through parliament by Robert Halfon, once again demonstrating Us For Them’s remarkable influence over MP’s and Policy. The German equivalent to Us For Them is lobbying for exactly the same policy.
This concludes Part I of the Counter Disinformation Project’s report on Us For Them.
Part II will demonstrate the coordination between Us For Them, the Covid Recovery Group of Conservative MPs, HART and Collateral Global in influencing public debate and government policy with the aid of elements of the media.
More details on are already available in the threads below.
The conversation that resulted in the “Ghost Children” report by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice think tank which is included in the new Schools Bill.
Evidence of how different interlinked groups working together are designed to appeal to different audiences to advance the same agenda.
Several times Robert Halfon has invited Us For Them submit evidence to parliamentary committees. An offer not made to other parent campaign groups.
Us For Them’s outrage at the roll out of vaccines to 12-15 year olds led to them having Conservative MP’s debate on their behalf in Westminister Hall. Many MPs directly quoted Us For Them and HART, these MP’s comments can now be found in antivax propaganda in the UK and abroad.
A few days later Halfon had an urgent meeting with CMO Chris Whitey who was quizzed with Us For Them’s questions via Halfon for over an hour.
More details on how the “Ghost Children” narrative was created, misrepresenting ongoing disruption caused by covid to exaggerate the impact of lockdown on long term attendance.
Miriam Cates vice chair of the APPG sponsored by Collateral Global uses GBD' author Jay Bhattacharya’s article for Brownstone Institute on the “harms of masks” to lobby on Us For Them’s behalf with then Secretary for Education Nadim Zahawi.
Masks were removed from secondary schools shortly afterwards.
Examples of Us For Them’s disinformation campaign against child vaccination can be found here
Details on an almost identical campaign group to Us For Them in Germany, FidK, with comparisons made to Moms for Liberty in the US. Both have links to libertarian think tanks in the same network that Ed Barker works with.
Just partly read second article from this obviously biased substack that is purportedly countering disinformation. There is so much I could say if I had time. But I’ll ask you one question on your quote in this article.
“ his personal calculation of mortality risk of covid being 1 in 500,000, means that with around 10 million students in the country he believes the deaths of 200 children is worth not having measures in schools.”
Where do you get 200 child deaths from? Most people would make it 20!
Is that not disinformation?🤔🤦🏻
Just in case you can’t work it out, there are two lots of 500,000 in one million. So that’s 2 times 10. 🤷🏻♂️