Like many other Britons I have had a number of questions about how the Government has handled the Covid situation. Questions such as how many lives were lost to covid because of the government’s incoherence and panic? Did the NHS screw up so badly that there have been possibly more deaths than there should have been in care homes? Were the lockdowns as effective as they should be? Why didn’t Britain have a proper pandemic plan that set out what was to happen if there was a novel respiratory virus, a plan that was communicated to the public in a similar manner to how the government has communicated in the past about potential problems?

There are lots of questions not just ones that need to be aimed at government but about covid itself and in attempting to find answers to them I looked to as wide a variety of sources as possible. I looked around and unfortunately found information out there, from people who I sadly once thought relatively credible in general, about such matters as death rates, that sounded plausible but turned out on closer examination to be complete bullshit.

Eventually I found many of the claims made by covid sceptics such as about Britain’s death rate being 0.2% were wrong. More solid, traceable and accurate information from places like Johns Hopkins University, told a different story. I found from these more accurate sources of information Britain’s infection fatality rate was more like 2.5% at tops than 0.2%. 2.5% is a much more difficult number of deaths to accept than 0.2% if Covid spread across the whole population of the United Kingdom and everyone contracted it, as was originally envisaged in the Government’s Herd Immunity plan, it would represent 1.7 million people dying of Covid.

A lot of people, including myself, have to one degree or another been conned by elements in the Covid sceptic movement. I’ve not fallen down the rabbit hole as far as some have, a lot of people have dropped down the rabbit hole much further and ended up in la la land, but I got conned on certain issues, such as IFR which is for me something to be a bit ashamed of. Often we’ve taken information on trust from individuals that have shown themselves to be trustworthy in other areas only to find out later, when their claims about covid in general or vaccines against covid in particular are more closely examined, that these previously trustworthy individuals are purveying bullshit.

For me the increasing involvement of the crazies of the anti-vaccination movement in the covid sceptic community was the big red flag that made me go ‘something not quite correct here’ and step back from what was starting to become a tin foil hat dominated environment. Seeing the deep involvement of anti vaxxers in a covid sceptic community that should have been asking intelligent questions about how the pandemic was being managed, changed my views. I still believe that the UK government has messed up much but the vaccine procurement and distribution programme is not one of the things that I feel I cannot honestly criticise too much. Vaccines were always the only real way out of the covid issue, just as vaccination was the only way that humanity was able to rid itself of the scourge of Smallpox. I no longer pay that much attention to the screaming voices of those who have been deranged by dangerous anti vaxxers and the influence of the tin foil hat brigade but instead criticise them.

Thankfully I’m not the only one online who are looking at the crazies of the covid sceptic and anti-vaccination communities and deciding to criticise and expose them. There have been recently two magnificently done pieces that have not only exposed the greed and vanity of one of Britain’s most high profile anti vaxxers but have also exposed the covid sceptic ‘Health Action Recovery Team’ (HART) as being a nest of anti vaccination vipers.

The first exposure article concerns one of Britain’s most high profile anti vaccination advocates Piers Corbyn. He was approached by some internet pranksters and readily agreed to take a cash donation for his movement of £10k, which was later switched for Monopoly money when Corbyn’s vanity got the better of him and he posed with the girlfriend of one of the pranksters for a selfie.

Here’s the video

The other bust of anti-vaccine headcases, that of those involved in HART, has been reported by the tech magazine The Daily Dot. In this story there are claims that a person who was once involved with the political consulting company Cambridge Analytica is also quite deeply involved in HART. The Daily Dot article also shows considerable involvement in HART of both anti vaxxers and tin foil hatters as well as what looks like a group of anti vaxxers using ‘nudge’ tactics to try to persuade people not to be vaccinated against Covid. The Daily Dot story, based on leaked chats between HART members who were expressing their true views and not self censoring in order to protect their public image, do show HART to be extremely hypocritical.

In public HART promote themselves as being sensible medics, academics and scientists and others, but in private it appears that it is tin foil hat and anti vaxxers all the way down.

The Daily Dot said:

The chat records, provided to the Daily Dot by the activist collective DDoSecrets, detail efforts by HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team), a self-described “group of highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts,” to influence politicians on issues related to COVID-19.

The leak, as first reported by Logically on Tuesday, involves tens of thousands of chat messages stretching back to January before the group’s official launch. Held over the messaging platform Rocket.Chat, the communications highlight a stark contrast between HART’s public attempts to portray itself professionally and some of its members’ conspiratorial views.

The Daily Dot described how some of the chats related to using some of the much criticised, when they’ve been used by governments, ‘nudge’ tactics to dissuade people from being vaccinated against Covid. However the chats also reveal that HART were quite happy to consider the idea of putting out public messages that whilst not full on anti vax, subtly dissuaded Britons from being vaccinated against Covid.

Patrick Fagan, the HART member who formerly worked for Cambridge Analytica was involved in a discussion about pushing anti vaccination messages to the young and especially to teenagers in order to exploit some teenagers need to be seen as ‘cool’ or ‘autonomous’. He said that pushing anti vax messages to children would make them seem like child murderers but that ‘teens and young adults’ are a different story.

Here’s the relevant screenshot of the messages as relayed by the Daily Dot.

According to the Daily Dot the internal culture of HART is an absolute mess. Scientifically disproven claims such as that the covid vaccine can spread covid are routinely shared in the HART group. Also, as expected, HART members are privately sharing information similar to that publicly espoused by disgraced ex nurse Kate Shemirani at a rally of anti vaccine moonbats in London’s Trafalgar Square recently, which completely misreads the Nuremberg medical experimentation code and calls for doctors and nurses to be ‘punished’. Unsurprisingly HART members are also well into Bill Gates tin foil hattery and continue to push the false claim that the covid vaccines cause the body to become magnetic, an idea that has been heavily pushed by a major anti vaccine quack called Sherri Tenpenny.

Without a doubt the public whether in the United Kingdom or elsewhere needs to hold our governments to account with regards the way that they’ve handled the covid disaster. We need to ask why our governments were so badly prepared for a novel virus, why so many died, why measures such as closing the nation’s borders were not undertaken at a suitably early time and so on and so on. However it does the cause of getting answers to these and other questions no favours when high profile individuals and high profile groups are mired in the anti-scientific nutbaggery of anti-vaccination or the wilder shores of conspiralunacy. The involvement of such people and groups discredits those who are asking intelligent questions because it tars us with the same brush filled with crap that can be legitimately applied to those who reject vaccination as vaccination is probably the medical intervention that has had the greatest positive impact on the health of humanity for the least cost either in lives or money.

If we want to be taken seriously when asking the awkward questions of government that need to be asked then there is a need to expose the manipulative nutcases whose views both public and private, are not rooted in reality. I applaud the exposing of fraggles like Corbyn and those involved in HART as they’ve shown the true faces of these individuals and groups and they are not exactly pleasant or even honest faces. Everyone needs information but we need to be careful of what information that we take seriously. The venality and vanity of Corbyn and the out there fraggles involved in HART should tell us all that we should examine much more carefully whether claims made about either covid or the safety of the covid vaccine are coming from a credible scientific source or from those with troubling agendas. Ho