Outraged by Matt Hancock’s claim the UK never experienced a national PPE shortage, Shadow Health Minister Rosena Allin-Khan took to Twitter yesterday to disprove him; armed with a photo of a nurse dressed in improvised protective equipment fashioned from bin bags. It wasn’t long before multiple users pointed out the image was actually from a Spanish hospital last April. Allin-Khan is yet to delete the glaring error…
Dr Rosena ended up apologising after her last bout of viral Twitter fake news. This is becoming a pattern…
Not only was her photo error mistaken in geography, it served to undermine her political point too: showing that at the start of this pandemic every country around the world was facing an overwhelming surge in PPE demand and struggled to keep up. Guido points out Spain is currently run by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – Labour’s sister party. Very uncomradely criticism from Dr Rosena…
UPDATE 13.30: The Tweet is now gone.
Top vaccine scientist and member of the government’s vaccine committee, Adam Finn, has diplomatically condemned the British Medical Association for their anti-scientific scaremongering over the government’s single vaccine dose policy. Responding to last week’s warning by the BMA that the 12-week gap between doses is “difficult to justify”, Finn told the Today programme:
“I must be careful what I say about the BMA but I would, I suppose, say that it would be a good idea to really understand the issues before making public pronouncements.”
His condemnation of fear-mongering also extended to the Mirror Group’s Sunday People for misleading readers over their editorial “Boris Johnson gambles with lives by ignoring vaccine science”:
Nick Robinson: “Over the weekend some newspapers – the People, the Mirror and others – were suggesting that the government was going against the science in this in order to get more first doses into people and make the figures look better, actually in a sense am I rightly understanding you’re saying the opposite; the science is actually what the government seems to be following?”
Finn: “Yes, absolutely, and I think people are being misled in the sense that it’s half the story, this absence of evidence story ignores the fact that there’s absolutely rock-solid evidence that if you give a dose of the vaccine to more people you give them protection and save lives. There’s no real question about that.”
How many times throughout this crisis has the Mirror attacked the government for supposedly not following the science?
There have been some eye-opening revelations from an American Europhile correspondent Dave Keating this afternoon, who claims that if you manipulate Europe’s vaccine data to ignore the UK’s rapid start – or incredibly rapid growth of daily vaccination doses recently – Britain’s lead isn’t as impressive as some “British Conservative politicians” would have you believe. Truly ground breaking analysis…
I went ahead and fixed that misleading red-green vaccination map being spread by British Conservative politicians.
— Dave Keating (@DaveKeating) January 18, 2021
This shows the number of doses per 100 people after the first 20 days of the vaccination campaign in each European country. A more logical way to compare. pic.twitter.com/FTHU3fMWm9
Unsurprisingly, Keating was one of the now-humiliated Remainers who back in March 2020 predicted Britain’s decision not to participate in the EU’s drug procurement programme would make it “difficult and expensive” for the UK to get vaccinated. Now he’s having to desperately back-peddle…
If a vaccine for #CoronaVirus is developed next year, it will be difficult and expensive for the UK to get it because it will have left the EU's drug procurement mechanism on 1 January.
— Dave Keating (@DaveKeating) March 10, 2020
That is, if Johnson chooses not to extend #Brexit transition period. https://t.co/rf6RVTEo8S
Dave’s laughably twisted statistics are manipulated, in reality proportionately twice as many Brits have been vaccinated as any other EU country. 
It is a bit like saying that “If you compare space programmes from when they started their moon programme, you’ll find that actually China reached the moon before America did.” It doesn’t make sense in reality.
The second story on the BBC News website this morning had the headline “Problems Grow at UK Ports With Backlogs and Delays” accompanied by a picture of trucks in long queues. This is what media studies students would describe as “fake news” from the BBC.
The picture was taken by Andrew Aitchison. It shows long lines of lorries lining up at the frontier control barriers for departure inside the Eastern Dock of the Port of Dover where the cross channel port is situated with ferries departing to go to Calais. The only problem is that it was taken four months ago on the 29th of September 2020 when ferry crossings were disrupted by strike action in French ports. Not today, nothing to do with the new trade deal, inexcusably misleading BBC news consumers.
If you won’t take Brexit supporting Guido’s word for it, why not take a look elsewhere on the same website at BBC Reality Check (published today) filed by the BBC’s Simon Jones in Dover:
In many ways, it’s been business as usual at the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel. A steady stream of lorries has been boarding ferries and trains to France.
So why use a picture of lorries backed up?
UPDATE: The BBC has since made some not-so-subtle changes to the article. Time for a game of spot the difference:
Along with significant changes to the text of the article, the image and the headline, one other thing – or, rather, name – has vanished in the last hour. Can Guido’s readers spot it?
This morning, Labour Women’s Network tweeted an obviously fake photo of NBA players wearing “lace collars to honour Ruth Bader Ginsberg”, saying that is “how you be a good ally 😍“. Jess Phillips lapped it up, claiming she was “shedding a happy tear at this. Boom!”.
She was so moved, in fact, she even uploaded the obvious edit – originally seeing the NBA players in Black Lives Matter shirts – to her Instagram (yet to be deleted). And Guido thought Labour were pretty strait-laced about rejecting fake news…
A writer for The Canary describes himself as a columnist for a widely proscribed Russian left wing disinformation site on his own Twitter account. Steve Topple is a staff writer for The Canary, yet also lists his work as “columnist” for Peace Data, a left-wing fake news outlet created by Russia and banned by Facebook. Left-wingers doing Putin’s work for him…
On Tuesday Facebook released a statement saying it had detected and removed a fresh influence operation from the Kremlin, attempting to steer left wing voters away from Joe Biden. Thirteen Facebook accounts and two Facebook pages were run by the Kremlin’s ‘Internet Research Agency’, boosting a left-wing news site set up by Russia, but hiring real left-wing freelancers, called Peace Data. Despite Peace Data being found out early this week, Topple is keeping them in his bio…
