Telegraph political editor promotes attacks on Covid inquiry by rejected antivax groups

Here is the start of an article in the Telegraph, the latest in a long list of attacks on the Covid Inquiry and covid vaccines.

Sounds serious? Evidence submitted by doctors and medical professionals has been suppressed? Having been fed a drip drip diet of anti-vax narratives for over five years many Telegraph’s readers will probably feel quite concerned and uneasy about this headline.

I also feel quite concerned and uneasy about the headline for entirely different reasons, the group of experts in question are an antivax astroturf organisation, a spin off of the HART group whose internal chats were leaked to me in 2021. The leaks revealed that the author of this article, the Telegraph's political editor Camilla Turner, had been working with the group UsForThem since the group was founded in 2020 to oppose all covid measures in schools before moving on to oppose covid vaccines for children. The founder of UsForThem, Molly Kingsley, who had a weekly column in the Telegraph during the acute phase of the pandemic has described covid vaccines as a crime against humanity, backing conspiracy theorists like Andrew Bridgen who was thrown out of the Conservative Party for likened the vaccines to the Holocaust. His timeline is now filled with rants about chemtrails and pro-Putin propaganda.

Having previously accused me of defamation and threatening academics with legal action for accusing her of being antivax, Kingsley is now promoting claims from the infamously antivax HighWire questioning the safety of every single vaccine.

It was Ros Jones who said that Turner had been great for UsForThem, and its Ros Jones who Turner quotes on behalf of the Children’s Covid Vaccine Advisory Council. Ros Jones was a member of UsForThem, is a member of HART and worked with Pandata. She led the SaferToWait campaign for UsForThem that produced leaflets packed with disinformation, including suggesting parents could give their children ivermectin as an alternative to vaccination. There were two versions of the leaflet, one for adults and the other written to be given to children. Jones has also been involved just about every HART spin off , collaboration and open letter such as the Perseus Report, the Hope Accord and the North Group. Jones told me she's proud parents have told her she’s the reason they decided not to vaccinate their children against covid.

Jones founded CCVAC, and a look at some of the “experts” on the list should be enough for any respectable journalist to consider that the Inquiry might have good reason not to publish their evidence. Most are members of HART or the antivax UK Medical Freedom Alliance.

David Cartland, removed from the medical register for serious professional misconduct in a wide range of areas, from abusive behaviour towards doctors to providing fake vaccination certificates. The CCVAC site lists Cartland as Dr David Cartland, General practitioner.

Ahmad K Malik, resigned his medical resignation after coming under scruitiny for antivax comments, including those made on GB News.

Zac Cox, dentist, homeopath, and very concerned about 5G and Wi-Fi.

Angus Dalgleish, one of the main voices in the UK claiming covid vaccines cause cancer.

Tess Lawrie, founder of BIRD and the World Council for Health, her work with Pierre Kory was instrumental in ivermectin becoming falsely viewed as a wonder drug by the disinformation ecosystem.

Liz Evans, HART and founder of the antivax UK Medical Freedom Alliance, was one the board of RFK Jr’s European chapter of the Children’s Health Defense.

Clare Craig, nicknamed online as WrongAgainClare due to her predictions constantly being proven wrong, involved with many covid disinformation initiatives. Said in the HARTleaks “We need to seed the idea vaccines cause covid”.

Will Jones, director and editor of the Daily Sceptic, Toby Young's disinformation rag.

Renee Hoenderkamp, HART member, works for GB News and TalkTv as a medical expert. An expert who didn’t see an issue with her HART colleagues thinking covid vaccines made people magnetic, contained nanotechnology, or even would make people's bodies Wi-Fi enabled.

These are the kind of people the Telegraph’s political editor wants its readers to trust as experts.

The message from Jones is that there is a deliberate cover up going on, this is despite the inquiry explaining why CCVAC's statement wasn’t published.

Camilla Turner also quotes Liz Evans, failing to mention that Evans and other members of UKMFA are also part of CCVAC. The two statements would have been written in tandem.

The HARTleaks revealed Kingsley was part of a group including Jones and Evans that coordinated a campaign against covid vaccines for children. All the sources quoted by Turner are in the same WhatsApp groups. Much of the evidence base they will have quoted will have been produced by the networks they are involved in.

Kingsley's claims of government censorship come from a Subject Access Request, but all it revealed was that her articles for the Telegraph had been used in the government media grid. Kingsley also had the support of the CRG group of Conservative MPs, Robert Halfon chair of the Education Select Committee, the Children’s Commissioner and had bragged in letters to her supporters of contact with ministers. She had much more access to politicians and media coverage than the grassroots groups worried about transmission in schools.

Her threat of legal action against the covid inquiry came after her own joint application to be a core participant was rejected.

As the Inquiry has explained, CCVAC and UKMFA are entitled to publish their statements themselves. No one is trying to shroud them in secrecy. I know people who submitted statements that weren’t published, they were disappointed but they didn’t start shouting conspiracy in the mainstream media.

What will happen next is that CCVAC will publish their statement and go back to Turner hoping for a headline along the lines of “The evidence the inquiry tried to suppress”. They could have published their statement to go alongside the Telegraph article quoting their evidence, they didn’t because they wanted to use the article as a promo before they do publish, with another article to go alongside it.

This network of overlapping groups had launched multiple legal challenges against covid vaccines for under 18s, all of which failed. CCVAC's challenge was thrown out and judged as “totally without merit”

A statement Ros Jones, who ran the campaign against vaccinating children, was described as "not expert evidence" and "strays into opinion", while the case itself was "lacking in realism" and "bound to fail".

A group works with a network, mangling data to produce a dodgy evidence base, the evidence is used by the same individuals in a series of statements submitted by different named groups run by the same people. The inquiry took lots of statements that it didn’t publish for various reasons. Perhaps in this case they encountered an evidence base built on data mangled into correlations, cherry picked quotes from peer reviewed papers, misrepresentation, and opinion.

The CCVAV website hasn’t been updated for more than four years, its should be noted that they have quoted The Children’s Union as supporting them, their website is dead and appears to have been set up simply to support CCVAC, it shows all the symptoms of being another astroturf group. All of CCVAC's open letters and published correspondence relied on the same talking points, its likely these will make up the core of CCVAC and UKMFA's statements. It's worth noting that these groups believe all mRNA vaccines should be halted immediately. This is from February 2022.

They begin by claiming a rise in excess deaths in 15-19 males correlates to vaccine roll out. They might be able to get this to fit on a graph but they haven’t looked at the cause of these deaths, the UK authorities have, these deaths weren’t linked to vaccines.

NIHR research shows that child mortality fell during lockdown levels, rose back to pre-pandemic levels in 2021-2022, but then increased through to 2024, in 2025 there was a 2% decrease.

The introduction of covid vaccines didn’t lead to an increase in mortality, mortality continues to increase after access to vaccines had been removed from 5-11 in 2022 and under 18s in 2023.

It could be that lockdowns protected children from covid, that while the risk to children is generally lower, the risk isn't zero and some children do die from it. As measures were withdrawn and children faced more infections the mortality rate began to increase, vaccine take up wasn’t particularly good (in part due to coordinated disinformation campaigns), and this has contributed to rising mortality. This is supported by a CDC report that’s actually been suppressed by Jay Bhattacharya in the Trump administration. Bhattacharya has worked directly with the groups mentioned in this piece, with Kinglsey describing him as a friend.

“Infection rates are now higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated”, has been one of the most common claims of antivaxxers, using raw figures while not looking at rates as a percentage of population. Its a crude misuse of statistics, and if they used this in their statements then its no wonder the inquiry didn’t make use of them.

Infection acquired immunity isn’t widely considered to be superior to vaccination, as for claiming 80% of children were immune at the start of 2022, the DfE data for 2022-2023 showed that covid was the most common cause of absence due to illness.

They talk of CDC information, but they are actually referring to data from VAERS, the US’ reporting system, which states that its data data is unverified and can't be used to draw correlations. As verified data doesn't back their talking points, using VAERS is a favourite trick of antivaxxers, the idea VAERS is a gross underestimate is one of those questionable quotes that’s been repeated enough times in some circles that its treated as a fact, but there has never been solid evidence to back this up. The data of course is unverified and so isn’t even an estimate.

Myocarditis is another example, vaccines are less likely to induce myocarditis than a covid infection, and vaccine induced myocarditis is generally mild with no long term harm while covid induced myocarditis is often more severe and more likely to cause long term harm. This is part of the reason why the CDC had recommended vaccination for children aged 6 months and older.

If this is the calibre of evidence they brought to the table it seems pretty obvious why the inquiry didn’t take CCVAC and UKMFA seriously, an evidence based inquiry can't listen to an alternative viewpoint just because its an alternative, it needs to bring real expertise, not this kind of scientific slight of hand, it might fool a captive audience which chooses to ignore all the other availible evidence.

Why are so many Telegraph writers seemingly determined to platform this network of disinformation groups who seek to sow distrust in covid vaccines and health authorities? The result of this is increased hesitancy for all vaccines, something that the Telegraph blames on the distrust of covid vaccines that they helped foster.

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