The Rutherford Institute | February 17, 2022
FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — A Virginia public school system has announced its plan to adopt what has been likened to a precrime surveillance program in order to monitor and deter social media threats, hate speech, bullying and harassment by students. Pointing out that the social media monitoring program being developed and considered by Fairfax County Public Schools (“FCPS”) raises significant concerns about government surveillance and its chilling effect on the lawful speech of students, parents, and other community members, The Rutherford Institute also warned that such a program could give rise to one-size-fits-all zero tolerance policies regarding expressive activity that is misconstrued as negative, critical or hateful.
“While it may appear commendable at first glance, this school-sponsored social media monitoring program is problematic on multiple fronts, not the least of which is the message it would send students that they have no rights: to privacy, free speech, or the freedom to explore different ideas and think for themselves. Indeed, this program is tantamount to an Orwellian precrime program complete with thought police,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Where such an endeavor runs into trouble is when those overseeing this kind of pre-crime program get overzealous and overreach, targeting students for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the school’s precrime sensors. In such an environment, students learn to self-censor, critical thinking dissipates, and the schools become breeding grounds for compliant citizens, rather than raising up a generation of individuals with a dynamic understanding of what freedom and tolerance mean.”
In November 2021, Fairfax County Public Schools (“FCPS”) issued an Informal Request for Proposal to solicit and establish a contract for social media software which would seek to detect and collect data from social media, classify aliases and usernames, identify connections between persons, set alerts for active listening, and produce high-level summary reports. FCPS intends to use the software for “social media listening” in order to monitor “threats, harassment, hate speech and bullying” which “may be directed to racial groups or any student or teacher within FCPS.” Yet as The Rutherford Institute warned in its letter to members of the Fairfax County School Board, by reportedly subjecting students, parents, and other community members to constant surveillance, the Social Media Monitoring Program lays the groundwork for a broad range of constitutional violations. Specifically, Institute attorneys point out that the social monitoring precrime program threatens to chill lawful First Amendment activity, undermines parents’ rights, could lead to viewpoint discrimination and a troubling expansion of school zero tolerance policies, and may exceed the scope of the Board’s statutory authority. Denouncing the program as an ill-advised plan that could expose FCPS to legal jeopardy, The Rutherford Institute has asked the Fairfax County School Board to reconsider its adoption of a Social Media Monitoring Program and offered to advise and assist the County in striking a better balance between school safety and the rights of students and parents.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
The Rutherford Institute’s letter to the Fairfax County School Board
RT | February 17, 2022
Police have started to erect fencing around the Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa, Canada, and have brought in extra officers in a push to clear the demonstration. The move comes after the truckers were threatened with arrest under emergency powers enacted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Video footage captured on Thursday showed busloads of police arriving in downtown Ottawa, and officers purportedly holding crowd control drills. Meanwhile, workers were seen putting up metal fencing near the demonstration, which has brought traffic in the center of the Canadian capital to a standstill for nearly three weeks now.
Shortly after these videos surfaced, Ottawa Police announced that “residents are seeing a major increase in the number of police officers on our streets.” The force also stated that barriers and fencing are going up around the “core” of downtown Ottawa, cutting the protest off from the rest of the city. Only those who live and work within this area will be allowed to pass the barriers.
“The unlawful protesters must leave the area and will not be provided access,” Ottawa Police stated on Twitter.
Cops on Wednesday began handing out fliers to the protesters, warning them that they could face arrest if they refuse to leave. The notices also said that, thanks to emergency powers enacted by Trudeau on Monday, those traveling to Ottawa to join the protest are now also breaking the law, and face the risk of having their vehicles seized.
“We’re going to take back the entirety of the downtown core and every occupied space,” interim police chief Steve Bell told city councilors on Wednesday evening, adding that his officers would “remove this unlawful protest” and “return our city to a state of normalcy” in the coming days.
The emergency powers invoked by Trudeau also allow the government to order bank accounts linked with the protest frozen, and to suspend the trucking licenses of participants.
By Guy Hatchard | February 15, 2022
A remarkable trove of documents has been created in New Zealand by an organisation called Te Punaha Matatini—Covid-19 Modelling Aotearoa hosted by the University of Auckland but funded directly by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Covid-19 Modelling Aotearoa is headed by the wildly inaccurate Covid modeller Dr Shaun Hendy who once predicted 80,000 imminent New Zealand deaths (currently at 53 in NZ) and includes the participation of academics from universities across New Zealand.
The documents are remarkable because they indicate the genesis of the unique and blinkered pandemic perspective of our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern which has diverged from that followed among other countries and from that found in global science publishing.
The documents in some cases exhibit in their referenced material, a lack of awareness of the extensive content of global science publishing on the pandemic.
One paper of particular interest is entitled:
Evaluating the infodemic: assessing the prevalence and nature of COVID-19 unreliable and untrustworthy information in Aotearoa New Zealand’s social media, January-August 2020
It is hardly remarkable that the New Zealand government uses sophisticated computer systems to closely monitor the social media content of its citizens (what government doesn’t?), but the methods used and the starting point of evaluation are highly indicative of where the repressive and controlling New Zealand Labour government Covid policy began:
The push to introduce the censorship of scientific information and discussion that characterises the Ardern government is evident throughout the paper. Specific individual scientists tied to the government by both ideology, and in some cases by financial support, are picked out as people who should be the public’s sole sources of reliable information. These include: microbiologist Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles, physicist Professor Shaun Hendy, and epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker.
The paper says the aim of government messaging should take the form of ‘branding’ designed to teach the public to trust the government alone. Something so close to propaganda as to be almost indistinguishable.
Emphasis in social media on ‘individual rights’ is described as an undesirable import from America. Ardern’s more recent rejection of protests as ‘imported ideas’ echoes Trudeau’s recent dismissal of protestors as ‘taking up space’, both of which hint at exclusionary agendas to come.
In conclusion the paper hints that ‘simply relying on the successful multi-faceted science and public health communication approaches of the government earlier in the pandemic will not be sufficient to debunk’ what it describes as ‘increasing prevalence of conspiracy theories about state control and individual rights’.
And continues:‘a wide-ranging response to the increasing discussion of unreliable sources, untrustworthy narrators, and conspiracy narratives in media, political, and civil society discourses is required’.
It further reports that a computational methodology and process for on-going monitoring of the prevalence of mis- and dis-information, and conspiracy narratives, within Aotearoa New Zealand’s social and mainstream media ecosystems has been established. It describes public access to a plethora of social media platforms, as a problem that needs to be addressed.
The very limited scientific outlook of Covid-19 Modelling Aotearoa is evident in the many other papers it has produced for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. In particular, their narrative has diverged in content from trends now well-understood through published data analysis around the world, including:
Obviously, the paper and others may have fuelled and validated Ardern’s limited understanding of science. Science is a global, rational, empirical endeavour to arrive at truth, not a process tailor-made to support ideology.
Perhaps its most frightening consequence is Ardern’s rejection of the notion of individual health rights which has obvious historical parallels.
Guy Hatchard PhD was formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID a food testing and certification company (now known as FoodChain ID)
By Richie Allen | February 16, 2022
Experts who spoke out against lockdowns were labelled as pseudo-scientists who possessed fringe ideas, because pro-lockdown scientists had more followers on social media, particularly Twitter.
Data Science expert Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, has compared the expertise of the experts who signed The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) with those who signed The John Snow Memorandum.
The GBD argued that vulnerable people should be shielded and that everyone else be allowed to get on with their lives in order to build natural immunity against the virus. They warned lockdowns would be devastating for public health and the economy.
The signatories of the Snow Memorandum argued that it would be unethical to let the virus rip, therefore lockdown was essential.
According to The Telegraph :
In an article published in BMJ Open Research, he (Professor Ioannidis) found that both letters were authored by very influential experts, but that the John Snow Memorandum authors had a far greater reach on social media, which made it appear that their view had more support.
By November 2021, just four key signatories of the GBD had more than 50,000 Twitter followers, compared with 13 of the key authors of the JSM.
Prof Ioannidis concluded: “Both the Great Barrington Declaration and John Snow Memorandum include many stellar scientists, but JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.
“GBD is clearly not a fringe minority report compared with JSM, as many social media and media allude.
“If knowledgeable scientists can have a strong social media presence, massively communicating accurate information to followers, the effect may be highly beneficial.
“Conversely, if scientists themselves are affected by the same problems (misinformation, animosity, loss of decorum and disinhibition, among others) when they communicate in social media, the consequences may be negative.”
Prof Ioannidis also said signatories of the JSM had contributed to the vilification of authors of the GBD through their tweets and op-eds.
John Ioannidis is right on when he says that social media skewed the debate in favour of the lockdown evangelicals, but he has missed one very important point. He seems to have overlooked shadow banning.
It shouldn’t have really mattered that pro-lockdown scientists had more followers on Twitter than their Great Barrington Declaration counterparts.
Twitter and Facebook worked in tandem from the outset of the scamdemic to amplify the posts of academics who supported lockdowns while at the same time limiting the reach of experts who opposed the tyrannical measures.
This meant that users were many times more likely to read pro-lockdown propaganda than they were to read the opinions of sceptics. The social media firms use not very sophisticated algorithms to ensure that their users read what they want them to read.
It’s happening today. The Welsh government has announced plans to give covid jabs to children over five years-old. England will announce later this week.
There are tens of thousands of doctors and scientists who are horrified at the prospect of jabbing young children with an unproven medicine that they do not need.
You and I know who they are, but the majority of people do not. This is because they will never see these experts in their news feeds. Free speech has no greater enemy than social media.
RT | February 15, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday they have agreed to think of a solution to the broadcasting dispute, after Berlin banned RT DE and Moscow responded by banning Deutsche Welle (DW).
Putin and Scholz made their comments at a joint press conference in Moscow after discussing the subject during their Tuesday talks.
“We agreed that we will think about how these problems can be resolved,” Putin said.
Scholz insisted that Germany is a state of laws and that RT DE never applied for a broadcasting license there, saying it was banned by the appropriate regulator using the applicable laws.
“In a state of law, there are procedures, and the requirements created by laws,” he said.
RT DE Productions GmbH has repeatedly told German authorities it was a production company based in Berlin and not a broadcaster. All the broadcasting was done from Moscow, via a satellite frequency licensed from Serbia, and operating under the European Convention on Transfrontier Television (ECTT), which both Serbia and Germany have signed.
Germany has not only refused to recognize the Serbian satellite license, but the Media Authority of Berlin-Brandenburg (MABB) declared that RT DE Productions was in fact a broadcaster and had to be shut down. The Commission on Licensing and Supervision (ZAK), the central organ of Germany’s Medienanstalten agency, agreed with MABB on February 2. RT is now appealing the decision.
It was unclear whether Scholz was aware that MABB had repeatedly told RT DE it was “not subject to approval” for broadcasting in Germany. The formal reason for that is that RT DE is a subsidiary of ANO TV-Novosti, which is financed from the state budget of the Russian Federation and therefore ineligible under existing German law.
This is why RT DE sought to obtain an ECTT license in Luxembourg in 2021, which was denied. German media reported that pressure from Berlin was a factor in the decision, though then-Chancellor Angela Merkel denied any such thing.
Following the ZAK decision to ban RT DE, Russia responded on February 3 by blocking Germany’s state broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) from broadcasting in Russia and stripping its Moscow staff of all press credentials. Moscow said further actions might be taken as well.
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2022
National media regulators are hoping the upcoming speech laws will give them power to censor “misinformation” on Spotify.
Spotify has been attacked heavily in recent months, mostly for hosting the Joe Rogan Experience, which doesn’t always go along with the mainstream narrative.
“We should hold them accountable not as a publisher but just like any other online platform in the Digital Services Act,” Frédéric Bokobza, deputy director general of France’s media regulator, Arcom, told POLITICO.
The EU is finalizing the Digital Services Act (DSA), a law focused on content moderation on online platforms. The bill might also empower national media regulators to regulate a broader list of tech platforms, including Telegram and Spotify.
“As of now, we do not have regulatory tools in the French law which would enable us to oversee audio streaming companies, on top of the fact [Spotify] is not based on our territory,” said Roch-Olivier Maistre, president of France’s audiovisual regulator.
For long, Spotify escaped public scrutiny as it mostly hosted music. But in recent years it has become a popular podcast platform, with more than 400 million users globally and a new avenue for ideas that the establishment wants censored.
Despite the backlash, Spotify has refused to cut ties with Joe Rogan, whose show is the most popular podcast on the platform.
In lockstep in multiple countries
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | February 12, 2022
As with so many things that are happening at the moment, the attack on free speech is happening in multiple countries at the same time.
Firstly in the UK.
A draft Online Safety Bill was first presented to Parliament in May 2021 but has been strengthened in the last few weeks. Originally the draft Bill focussed on large web companies but the government has recently announced that more changes would be made and new criminal offences added.
One of these new offences would be spreading Covid-19 disinformation under a crime of sending a false communication. This offence would be committed if a person sends a communication they know to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm. The maximum sentence is 51 weeks.
The average person might think it is reasonable to imprison somebody for communicating something they know to be false with the intention to cause harm. However, what is “false” and what is “harm”? The last few years have shown us that these are now very subjective topics. Information that was true in 2019 became false in 2020 and is starting to be true again in 2022. A truth that is communicated to somebody who believes it to be false may cause them emotional or psychological harm. Intention is necessary for the crime to take place but if something is deemed to be false and deemed to cause harm then it could be argued that if the person who communicated the information, knew the information was on the “harmful list” then intention was there.
And who is deciding what information is false? The government? That almost sounds like a punchline to a joke. We’ll just end up with news articles such as the one below – Sponsored by the UK Government (see the text in blue).
The Bill was already censorial enough, making online companies remove content which was deemed to be harmful but not illegal. As we have seen in recent times, corporations’ misinformation policies have been arbitrary enough, which will only worsen with governments deciding what is true and what is false. Now, in a step one-removed from pre-crime, these companies will be made to proactively “prevent people being exposed in the first place”.
The government press release on the strengthening of this bill says that “to proactively tackle the priority offences, firms will need to make sure the features, functionalities and algorithms of their services are designed to prevent their users encountering them and minimise the length of time this content is available. This could be achieved by automated or human content moderation, banning illegal search terms, spotting suspicious users and having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts”.
In almost Orwellian double-speak the press release says the Bill “will better protect people’s right to free expression online”. What this means is, it will better protect people’s free expression of government approved material. It continues by saying “it will have to be proven in court that a defendant sent a communication without any reasonable excuse and did so intending to cause serious distress or worse, with exemptions for communication which contributes to a matter of public interest”. So the government says something is a matter of public interest (e.g. vaccines) and suddenly intention doesn’t have to be proven.
Please sign this online petition to remove requirements that specifically target lawful speech from the Bill.
Next to the US.
At almost the same time, the US sent out a bulletin “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland”.
This states that “the United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence”.
According to the bulletin, “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” has “increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment”.
Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19”.
Furthermore, “as COVID-19 restrictions continue to decrease nationwide, increased access to commercial and government facilities and the rising number of mass gatherings could provide increased opportunities for individuals looking to commit acts of violence to do so, often with little or no warning. Meanwhile, COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures”.
So in a step up from the UK’s response, the US is labelling individuals who produce any MDM as terrorists. Obviously, any language that incites violence is unacceptable but to confuse people encouraging unrest with those discussing whether Ivermectin could help save lives is completely unacceptable.
And finally in Canada.
Again, as if in lockstep, Justin Trudeau is trying to revive his controversial Internet legislation bill. Once known as Bill C-10, to fool those unintelligent Covid deniers, it has been changed to Bill C-11.
There are concerns that the legislation could be used to censor social media. The government have denied this but experts hold the opposite view. Who to believe, hmmm? The Toronto Sun reports that Trudeau is using the current national tensions as a smokescreen to let them slip in unpopular pieces of legislation. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
When we remove freedom of speech and censorship of controversial topics becomes common place, we turn into a dangerous society. Not only can authors be imprisoned for airing their views but, just as importantly, debate becomes restricted resulting in truths being hidden and novel and radical ideas supressed.
But if they can’t censor you, maybe they’ll just give you a morality pill so you don’t produce the stuff in the first place!
By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson | The Daily Sceptic | February 10, 2022
Ever since I realised the devastating effects lockdowns would have all over the world, I have actively fought them. My first task, in October 2020, was hosting an interview with world-renowned epidemologist Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argues for focused protection instead of blanket lockdowns.
Incidentally, Kulldorff was involved also in my first really memorable encounter with the so-called fact-checkers. Last summer the Icelandic Chief Epidemiologist said in an interview he believed herd immunity would never be reached by vaccination, only through infections. I posted a link to the interview on LinkedIn. Kulldorff shared my post, and the next thing he knew his reshare had been removed. Clearly a fact-checker hadn‘t liked what our Chief Epidemiologist said, and decided the public shouldn‘t know.
Part of my activities as an active lockdown sceptic has been managing a large and fast-growing local Facebook group, dedicated to providing a broad view of the Covid situation, including negative effects of lockdowns, and later on, growing concerns with the effectiveness and safety of mass-vaccination. This is a difficult task as we must always be very careful not to accept posts that for some reason contain material that doesn‘t comply with the worldview of the fact-checkers. We get a few strange conspiracy theories of course, but mostly the material we have to reject is simply inconvenient facts or well-argued opinions, even by respected scientists, that just happen to go against the official narrative.
Fact-checking is nothing new, and until recently it was just that, checking for facts. But since very early in the pandemic, fact-checkers have become less concerned with facts, but more, and in some cases exclusively, with censoring anything that goes against their own opinions. Every day, hundreds of such articles are published and then used to justify censorship. The following example is a typical one.
Recently, official Scottish data has shown COVID-19 infections, hospitalisations and deaths are becoming more frequent among the double-vaccinated than the unvaccinated. The latest report shows the infection rate among the double-jabbed is now double the rate for the unjabbed, and 50% higher for the triple-jabbed. Hospitalisations are higher among the double-jabbed than the unjabbed and the death rate is double. This is a concerning development and has garnered some attention from those who follow such statistics. I wrote a short Facebook post on this the other day, quoting an article discussing this development. A few days later the familiar warning of ‘false information’ had been slapped on my post.
I decided to follow up on the ‘fact check’ referred to in the warning, an article by Mr. Dean Miller, managing editor at Lead Stories, one of the agencies that frequently publish articles used to justify censorship. Mr. Miller holds an undergraduate degree in English and seems to have no science training whatsoever.
Mr. Miller begins by claiming there is a consensus among health statisticians “working independently” that vaccination reduces the probability of hospitalisation and death, and that as the vaccinated tend to be older than the unvaccinated, “amateur statisticians” often reach false conclusions based on official data. Mr. Miller then quotes an epidemiologist who suggests various factors that “may” affect the numbers. First, that the vaccinated are more likely to get tested, quoting test and trace data but providing no reference. Second, that the vaccinated tend to be older than the unvaccinated and therefore more vulnerable in general. Third, that the vaccinated may behave differently from the unvaccinated when it comes to social interactions. Fourth, that the unvaccinated are more likely to have been previously infected by the virus.
None of this is necessarily untrue. But the article provides no references showing that vaccinated people behave differently from unvaccinated people, which would make them more likely to come into contact with infected persons. We also have no way of determining if the opposite is true. In other words, this is pure speculation, for which no evidence is provided. Whether vaccinated people are more likely to get tested is speculative also and there is no data provided to back up this claim. The same goes for the claim that the unvaccinated are more likely to have been previously infected. In fact, as numerous studies have already demonstrated that infection provides strong and lasting protection, this suggestion seems highly unlikely.
So, three of Mr. Miller‘s arguments are pure speculation, unquantified and not supported by any evidence. But what about the last argument, that the vaccinated tend to be older and therefore more likely to be hospitalised or to die? This certainly looks like a valid point, since we know it is primarily the elderly who become seriously ill with COVID-19. But how valid, or relevant is this really?
To start with, being vulnerable to serious illness or death if infected has nothing to do with the probability of infection. Rather than increasing it, it might rather decrease it, as a vulnerable person might be more likely to avoid situations where they are likely to get infected. As for hospitalisation and death, the data presented in the Public Health Scotland reports is in fact age-standardised. This means the age-related probability of death is already accounted for in the statistics. Mr. Miller‘s key argument, and the only one that isn‘t purely speculative, is therefore simply invalid. It seems he either failed to familiarise himself with the methodology used, or did not understand what it entails.
The weakness of Mr. Miller‘s argumentation does not however stop him from categorically denying that comparison of infection rates is a valid indicator of vaccine effectiveness. And of course it does not prevent the media and social media using his claim, based on speculation and lack of basic understanding of the data, to censor the discussion of a disturbing development that most certainly calls for thorough investigation.
When I showed the data to a Scottish friend recently, he suggested it was of no relevance for other nations, as the Scots were genetically different from other people due to a long-standing diet of nothing but chips, Marlboros and Irn-Bru. I can only say his explanation makes just as much sense as Mr. Miller‘s do.
But Scotland is not the only country experiencing this disturbing trend. A couple of weeks ago I published an article in the Daily Sceptic discussing a similar trend in Iceland: early January data showed the double-vaccinated to be twice as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated. This undermines the aforementioned dietary explanation, as in Iceland we boil our potatoes, smoke Camels rather than Marlboros and Irn-Bru has never been available. No ‘fact check’ has yet been published trying to invalidate this data. However the already published infection rate for the unvaccinated suddenly rose by 20%, without explanation, soon after this development was pointed out.
Unfortunately Mr. Miller‘s article is not the only example of a ‘fact check’ that ignores or distorts the facts, or counters hard data with pure speculation. This sloppy kind of reporting seems to be the fact-checkers’ standard way of working when it comes to the pandemic. Some have even admitted their fact-check labels are nothing but opinion. And the general press is no exception. For example, the Scottish Herald recently published an article on this subject, also failing to acknowledge the fact that the data is age-standardised.
It is a noble endeavour to try to make sure facts rather than fiction influence public opinion. But unfortunately, it looks as if the champions of ‘fact-checking’ have little respect for facts. Most of the material they produce consists of low quality, highly opinionated articles, lacking not only references, but more importantly the clarity of thinking that must be required of anyone who takes upon themselves the important and difficult task of deciding what is true and what isn‘t.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson is an economist who lives in Iceland. Find him on his blog.
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 11, 2022
Less than a week after the UK proposed criminalizing the posting of some types of “knowingly false” information online, England’s National Health Service has taken down a social media video over inaccurate information.
Last week, NHS England posted a video on its Twitter account with more than half-a-million followers to promote vaccination in kids.
The video claimed that 1% of children will be hospitalized because of Covid, 136 kids in the UK had died because of Covid, and 117,000 children have “long Covid.”
The video went viral attracting comments and retweets from some of the most popular influencers in the health category.
But some, including Dr. Robert Hughes, a clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, questioned the accuracy of the data.
“As both a parent and scientist who has been involved in research on symptom duration and severity of covid in children, the cited statistics didn’t make sense to me,” Hughes wrote in an article in UnHerd. “The idea that 1% of children with Covid are hospitalized for it didn’t pass the ‘sniff test.’”
The video also shared the story of a kid aged 11 that was suffering from long Covid. According to Hughes, the story contradicted the vaccination guidance in the UK, as it does not even recommend vaccination for that age group.
Additionally, there is not yet any substantial evidence to support that the vaccine prevents long Covid.
Hughes also notes that NHS England was silent when he and others questioned the accuracy of the data.
“Several people agreed with me, sharing their working for why these numbers are at best long outdated, may be orders of magnitude out, and risk undermining confidence in vaccine communications and uptake.
“But others seemed to dig in, praising both the content and tone of the messaging when challenged, and directing the discussion into an important, but different, one about the merits of extending Covid vaccination to children rather than the need for accurate and honest communication about vaccination,” Dr. Hughes wrote for UnHerd.
Hughes contacted the Office of the Statistics Regulator about the numbers. The Statistics Regulator agreed that it was important that the NHS provides accurate figures.
“It is important that figures provided by NHSE&I are accurate and reliable,” the Office of the Statistics Regulator said. “In this case the claim made in the video fell short of these expectations – we contacted NHSE&I and it acknowledged that the data were historic and had methodological shortcomings. We are therefore glad that the content has now been removed from Twitter.”
Before its removal, the video had already been widely shared.
or go to
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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