On 9 August The Sunday Telegraph published the following correction.
In an article headlined “Watchdog keeps Covid vaccine death data secret”, published on 16 November 2025, we reported that the UKHSA had refused to release data that could link the Covid vaccine to excess deaths, as it argued that “releasing the data would lead to the distress or anger’ of bereaved relatives if a link was found.”
This was inaccurate: the UKHSA did not argue that the data could lead to the distress or anger of bereaved relatives if a link were found. In fact, it argued that the data could lead to “the families of the deceased being subjected to unsolicited approaches by the media and anti-vaccine campaigners”. This correction has been published following a partly upheld complaint to the Independent press Standards Organisation.
The Telegraph article by Sunday Political Editor Camilla Turner reported on legal action by the group Us For Them who took the UKHSA to an Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) tribunal in an effort to force the release of data on deaths stratified by when the deaths occured.
The article said the public health watchdog has been accused of a “cover-up” after refusing to publish data that could link the Covid vaccine to excess deaths.
Ben Kingsley, the legal director of UsForThem, said the way the UKHSA had handled the case “reveals a desperation that this data should not, in any form, see the light of day”. He added: “It is perverse for UKHSA to argue that this data should not be released because the public could feel distressed or angry if patterns or correlations were to be identified.
“The infected blood inquiry published its report while this case was under way,” he said. “We learnt that for years and years the government didn’t think the public could handle the truth, so they kept it from us.”
“Now we are seeing very similar behaviour from the UKHSA - we don’t know if the data would reveal any evidence of correlation, let alone causation, but we can see they are desperate to avoid having to answer that question in public.”
What Ben Kingsley did was replace the UKHSA’s justification with Us For Them’s own thinking and apparently tried to pass this off as the UKHSA’s own wording.
Did the Telegraph’s Camilla Turner take Us For Them’s version of the UKHSA’s words as factual without checking the tribunal’s records?
The HARTleaks revealed Turner has been taking stories from Us For Them since the group formed in May 2020 with the aid of the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson to oppose school closures in the first lockdown. With many of the symptoms of an astroturf campaign Us For Them were platformed across the media gaining access to MPs and Minister, so it was unsurprising when the Byline Times reported how Us For Them quickly gained the legal representation of DLA Piper, a top US law firm and Ed Barker, a PR strategist who had worked on Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign. Molly Kingsley was given her own weekly column in the Telegraph which ended once all covid measures were removed from schools.
Us For Them’s founder Molly Kingsley has become increasingly extreme in her stance against vaccines. She has gone from accusing people of smearing her as an anti-vaxxer and far-right to now praising RFK Jr, questioning the safety of all vaccines and supporting Rupert Lowe’s Restore, which is further to the right than Farage’s Reform. Kingsley has called the covid vaccine roll out criminal and has repeatedly said the likes of CMO Chris Whitty should be in prison.
Considering the Kingsleys' accusations of a cover up by the UKHSA, comparing the covid vaccine roll out to the infected blood scandal, its remarkable if Turner didn’t check to see what the UKHSA had said.
Us For Them’s challenge was almost identical to a previous effort fronted by Clare Craig who has been involved with a multitude of organisations in an anti-vaxxer network that includes Us For Them, Pandata, PCR Claims, Covid19Assembly, and HART that she chairs.
John Bye highlighted this and provided the evidence against Ben Kingsley’s claims when Turner’s article was published. The handy phrase “Sane washing” comes from John, he's a good researcher but if it didn’t take him long to check the facts you’d think the political editor of a mainstream newspaper could do the same.
The issue with correction is always the same, they come many months after the original article and won’t get anywhere near the same scale of audience. Whenever the Telegraph or another mainstream outlet puts out an article potentially linking vaccines to deaths its picked up by antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists, and these kind of articles sowing doubt about vaccines, generally through misreprentation are now common particularly in the Telegraph but also the Daily Express and the Daily Mail.
A misrepresentation of the UKHSA in the Telegraph becomes a smoking gun in conspiracy world. Its worth noting that those who claim to have been censored and silenced are the only ones that Turner listens to. There is a clear narrative in her reporting to imply there was something sinister about the covid vaccine roll out, this ignores the huge evidence base showing the child doses of mRNA vaccines are incredibly safe.
The same is the case with the data Clare Craig and Us For Them tried to obtain, the idea that this particular data set would reveal a wave of vaccine deaths that hasn't been seen in all the other data released around the world just isn't grounded in reality.
I took a look at Turner’s articles, mainly from this year.
Heneghan and Jefferson, who predicted there would be no second wave, tried to delegitmise the whole covid inquiry because they felt the estimated number of lives saved by covid vaccines was incorrect. They have regularly tried to claim that excess deaths caused by covid were attributed to other causes.
This story came from Us For Them, and tries to accuse the Royal College of GPs of only supporting child vaccination due to funding previously received for another purpose.
This story comes from HART, Us For Them and UK Medical Freedom Alliance complaining that the Inquiry didn't make use of their submitted witness statements. All three statements had the same group of authors, whi have been found in multiple legal challenges to not be reliable experts. UK Medical Freedom Alliance is run by Elizabeth Evans, a HART member and former board member of RFK Jr's Children’s Health Defense Europe. It only takes a quick look at the UK Medical Freedom Alliance website to see that they are a fanatically anti-vax organisation.
Big Brother Watch and Us For Them were behind this story. There is no evidence the Counter Disinformation Unit censored lockdown critics, Us For Them’s Subject Access Request which has been held up as proof only showed that Molly Kingsley's articles in the Telegraph were included in the Cabinet Office media grid.
Another reiteration of the Counter Disinformation Unit being accused of censorship when the evidence provided to the inquiry provided no evidence of censorship.
This was Clare Craig of HART's original effort to gain the data that could be misused by anti-vaxxers. These efforts were supported by a group of MPs who have been collaborating with HART since the group was founded at the start of 2021.
This wasn't as big a story as the headline suggests. Us For Them trawled through the personal social media feeds of Pfizer executives and found five tweets along the lines of saying that their vaccine was safe and effective for children, however this was just before the vaccines were approved by regulators and therefore was ruled to be a breach by the watchdog. Us For Them have done a lot of this, looking for examples like this to try to create the impression offering vaccines to children was immoral and potentially criminal. This of course ignores the huge quantities of data that shows the child doses of mRNA vaccines are incredibly safe.
Every now and then other Telegraph writers publish articles lamenting the fall in child vaccination rates without ever asking if the output of their colleagues like Camilla Turner, Sarah Knapton, Allison Pearson and Camilla Tominey is in part response for this growing hesitancy. In my day job of safeguarding, when I have spoken with parents who are now choosing not to vaccinate their children against various diseases its normally the likes of HART, UK Medical Freedom Alliance, UsForThem and the Together Declaration that they quote to me.
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