On Monday the 16th of January, William Crawley of the BBC’s Talkback programme devoted 39 minutes to a segment of his show which he titled:
What is the truth about excess deaths?
Public health experts combat a new wave of misinformation.
On the show, he had the Chief Scientific Advisor for Northern Ireland Ian Young along with regular BBC commentators GP Alan Stout of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland and Belfast political activist Amanda Ferguson.
The title of the segment asks the question – ‘What is the truth about excess deaths?’ whilst the subheading sets the scene – ‘Public health experts combat a new wave of misinformation‘. So before the show aired, the conclusion had been reached. All that was left was to make the facts fit with the predetermined conclusion and the host of the show did just that. When he struggled, he just told lies.
We all make mistakes. However, when these mistakes are pointed out, you rectify them, issue a retraction and move on. If the mistakes are pointed out and you leave them standing, untouched, then it becomes clear that your motives are questionable and your intentions are not honourable.
Crawley’s Crew
Let’s take a quick look at Crawley’s ‘expert panel’ of guests.
Ian Young – Northern Ireland’s CSA
Ian was previously part of an advisory group for Astrazeneca. He also often makes absolute statements that are verifiably false, such as…
“In terms of the science it’s clear – wearing face coverings in spaces that aren’t well ventilated protects from infection and everyone else from infection,”
Professor Ian Young on face masks
In response to a Freedom of Information request for the evidence Ian Young used to support his statement, the Department of Health supplied us with an article from Nature magazine that, in fact, doesn’t support his statement at all but rather uses language such as “Face masks could offer” and “Evidence supporting their potential effectiveness“.
That’s very far from…
That’s the science, it’s not going to change it hasn’t changed and minsters will be informed by that when deciding what’s best in terms of policy in Northern Ireland.
Professor Ian Young on face masks
Back and forths between CJs and the DOH concluded with no further progress being made on the matter. That was the evidence they offered up to support Ian Young’s absolute statement on masks.
He also claimed in a November 2021 press release that,
…most vaccinated people do not become infected in the first place
Professor Ian Young on Covid injection efficacy
We sought an interview with Professor Young in the hope we could ask him to supply evidence of this claim given that we knew at the time the Covid injections did not stop infections or transmissions but after the DOH Press Office learned the purpose of our request the ex-BBC Nolan Show’s Davey Gordon would respond with,
Your interview request is declined.
DOH Press Office response to CJs request to interview Ian Young
Then there is the hyponatraemia trial where a public enquiry found that Ian Young had given “misleading” evidence to the inquest into a young girl’s death. Young then set out to try and have a High Court bid to look into disciplinary action for his actions stopped – but he failed in his attempts.
So not the most reliable or trustworthy of sources.
Dr Alan Stout
Alan is a fabulist and a propagandist who often attempts to distort what people say in order to support his false allegations against them. He is also prone to deliberately misrepresenting the data and making false claims to support his agenda.
He would take to the BBC’s Nolan Show on the 8th of November 2021 and claim that Northern Ireland had the 2nd worst infection rate for COVID-19 in the whole of Europe.
Nolan would press him on this statement several times and each time Stout confirmed that what he said was true. Only it wasn’t. He was lying.
Above is a screenshot from FT.com and was current as of 8th November 2021 at 23:09 GMT. This website only allows for 5 comparisons to be made at a time, but this example in itself rubbishes the claims made by Dr Alan Stout. Even Ireland had surpassed the cases per 100k of Northern Ireland.
We forced Nolan to remove the clip after proving that Stout was spreading dangerous disinformation. To this day, he has never retracted the statement or apologised for his lies, which further points to him not being interested in the truth but rather more interested in controlling the narrative.
In another investigation into a Mater Hospital registrar who tweeted about young unvaccinated people on ventilators at her hospital, we proved beyond any doubt that she had lied and given the BBC aired these lies we forced their Editorial Complaints Unit to uphold our complaint that due diligence and basic fact-checking had been ignored in a rush to use Keelan’s message to spread fear in the community. Alan Stout, however, would take Keelan’s side and come out against us. Here again we see evidence of Stout defending lies and attacking the truth. Stout even thanks Keelan for her lies!
Good luck Emma and thank you.
…ignore all the ridiculous nonsense that is being said and tweeted.
When we proved that Keelan was lying, Stout made no attempt to apologise to us or distance himself from her discredited, and quite dangerous, claims. To be people like Stout, it’s the narrative that’s important, not the truth.
Amanda Ferguson
Amanda is a political activist and BBC-NI regular. An unrepentant supporter of the Chinese Communist Party style lockdowns in Northern Ireland and one of NI’s loudest mask zealots.
In July 2021 Ferguson made the following unsubstantiated claim on Twitter.
Our sources advised us at the time that her statement was not true so we reached out to her privately asking if she could substantiate it. Given that Amanda touts herself as a “journalist” one would assume she appreciates the importance of backing up the claims she makes with evidence. However, this is something she fails to do regularly and because we dared to ask her for the evidence, she responded by blocking all of our followers on Twitter (around 15K at the time). She would then go on to insult us.
In this YouTube video, she intentionally misrepresents our approach to her by stating that we ‘demanded to know her sources’ when we simply asked if she could share the evidence with the public to support her claim. She couldn’t, because what she said was untrue, instead, she blocked us and all of our followers in order to shield herself from being held to account.
She loathes being challenged. Silences those who disagree with her. Believes that she isn’t answerable for the claims she makes and makes up stories claiming that she’s amazing, all of which are narcissistic traits.
So that should give you a fair idea of the calibre of “journalist” that Amanda is. Indeed, that should give you all a good idea of the calibre of people that Crawley lined up in an attempt to take down the only MLA in Northern Ireland that cares about the large numbers of non-COVID excess deaths we are experiencing, especially in the young. He is also the only person in the public sphere in N.I. that is seeking help for the Covid-vaccine injured. However, these were good enough reasons for Crawley to gather his crew together in an apparent attempt to cancel the MLA.
Background
In a previous article, we highlighted how an Environment Correspondent named Shauna Corr (@ShaunaReports) cropped a tweet from the DUP MLA Paul Frew with the intention of removing context so that the new decontextualised tweet could be used to attack him.
Briefly, Paul was asked a question by this guy James. Here is the full context…
Pretty straightforward. Paul said he was assisting people hospitalised due to Covid and also due to the Covid-vaccine. He was asked for numbers. He replied, “probably around same number for both.”
Corr cropped out the first tweet, thus removing context, and made the conversation look like this:
So the stage was set. Frew had seemingly tweeted that overall in Northern Ireland the same number of Covid-vaccinated ended up in hospital as did those infected with Covid.
Not to miss an opportunity to attack Frew, William Crawely got in on the action. (Given that either Paul has blocked Crawley or vice versa the retweeted “remarkable claim” tweet doesn’t appear so I have added it to the slideshow).
Crawley, aware that Corr had decontextualised the tweet, decided he would help assist in the pile-on against Frew by claiming that his claim was “remarkable” when it was anything but. How do we know that Crawley was aware of Corr’s conversation doctoring? Minutes after tweeting the cropped tweet Crawley then added that there was missing context.
Given that the missing context was critical to the point being made – so critical in fact that by removing it the conversation took on a whole different meaning – the correct thing for Crawley to have done would have been to delete his first tweet (the one missing the context) and replace it with the contextualised one. So why didn’t he do that? Because the contextualised tweet couldn’t be used to fit with his desire to attack the author – Paul Frew.
Crawley would ignore all concerns highlighting that his actions seemed questionable and that his intention appeared to be intended to purposefully mislead.
Political activist Amanda Ferguson again tag-teams with Crawley in oxygenising the decontextualised tweet in order to go after Frew.
It is quite fitting that Ferguson would claim to be ‘Fact Checking’ Paul Frew by using a purposefully decontextualised tweet to do so. This pattern of using lies and disinformation to attack Frew is replicated many times by Ferguson, Crawley and Stout, as documented in this report.
To this day none of the above has retracted or apologised for their deliberate attempts to target an elected representative using a purposeful and deceitful decontextualisation of a Twitter conversation. We have reached out to the above actors several times for an explanation as to why they did what they did and none has ever been forthcoming with an explanation.
CJ’s own Alan Chestnutt would go back and ask Corr what her journalistic role was at the time or if she was just looking for attention. She would respond to Alan with a lie. She told him she was the health correspondent at the time.
How do we know she lied? Because at the time she had actually tweeted to Paul Frew telling him she was the “environmental correspondent” and that she would ‘happily ask a colleague (a health correspondent) to contact those he was advocating for’.
What Corr did was intentionally strip a Twitter conversation of its context and then use it against an elected representative who was trying to help Covid-injured and Covid-vaccine-injured constituents. She then lied about her journalistic role at the time. Why would she do this? We asked her and she declined to explain her highly questionable motives.
So it all begins to look a bit like a concerted campaign to target the one MLA who is daring to ask uncomfortable questions regarding the large numbers of non-COVID excess deaths and who is raising awareness of the Covid-vaccine injured.
William Crawley’s Disinformation
Crawley is no stranger to spreading disinformation either but what is more concerning is that whilst doing so he also claims to be tackling disinformation.
In the below example, he wrongly informs a caller to his show that, “…we know that the vaccine provides greater protection than natural antibodies.”
To support his statement he tells the caller, a man named Sean, that he will tweet out the evidence later.
When William does tweet out “the evidence” he lies by claiming it is peer-reviewed.
He links to a CBS News article that itself points to a CDC paper that Crawley claims is “peer-reviewed evidence”. Only it isn’t peer-reviewed and even when we pointed this out to William he refused to correct his claim, and to this day his dishonest tweet remains posted.
Interestingly Crawley often dismisses studies for not being peer-reviewed when others point to them to support their arguments.
This is an example of someone trying to control the narrative by making up the rules to suit themselves and not being afraid to throw in lies as and when they are needed.
You see, William can use non-peer-reviewed papers to support his claims and even lie about them being peer-reviewed but if someone else attempts to use a non-peer-reviewed paper to support their claims, Crawley dismisses it for not being peer-reviewed.
Crawley tackles “misinformation” with disinformation
Now fast-forward to 16th January 2023 and William again goes after Paul Frew, again with his anti-Frew sidekick Amanda Ferguson and again does so using disinformation.
And no one has ever said if you take the Covid vaccine you can’t get Covid…The pitch was that if you take the vaccine you’re less likely to get seriously ill.
William Crawley 16/01/23
Well of course this is an outright lie as the video I attached to the tweet attests to. From Biden to Fauci to Canada’s Justin Trudeau, they all said that if you take the vaccine you won’t get Covid.
I asked William why he lied about this and he declined to answer. I asked if he would, for the sake of honesty towards his listeners, correct his false claim and again he declined to answer.
Given that Paul Frew has been calling for an investigation into the significant number of post-pandemic non-COVID excess deaths in Northern Ireland, William’s agenda is clear. He is seeking to minimise these excess deaths by claiming that other non-pandemic years had a worse excess-death rate – which they hadn’t. He lied about this.
Crawley invited Adele Groyer of the COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group to his show to help support his narrative. William would go on to spout more disinformation claiming that 2015 and 2017 saw greater excess deaths than the pandemic years and when Adele contradicted him, rather than acknowledge his error, he simply ignored what she said and deflected. This is good evidence that his intentions were not honourable and that he isn’t making mistakes but is in fact spreading lies to control the narrative, again.
He would then go on to make the astonishing claim that “Informed Consent” was given to everyone who received a Covid jab. I have never heard that claim being made before by anyone, regardless of what side of the Covid jab debate they come from. Yet here was Crawley just rolling this off his tongue in a concerningly effortless fashion, on live radio to the nation.
The aim in saying this is obviously to downplay any injury from the Covid vaccines because by claiming that people made an ‘informed choice’ you are passing responsibility for any injuries to them as it was they who made the decision having been given all the information on potential side-effects. The trouble with his claim is that it is a lie. Informed consent was not routinely given during the Covid vaccine rollout.
I struggle to comprehend just how easily and effortlessly William can lie. We must call it what it is. This is lying in order to bolster a narrative which is that ‘Covid jabs are safe and effective’ and anyone in public office who questions their safety must be targetted. I would argue, however, that if the Covid jabs are as safe and effective as Crawley insists, then surely he could have easily found mountains of evidence to support his claims rather than being forced into making up facts and spreading lies.
What is clear is that there is a concerted campaign involving Crawley, Ferguson and Stout to have Paul Frew cancelled or at least to have him silenced. We have provided proof of their lies and just how far they are prepared to go in the spreading of their disinformation to achieve this aim.
Why they have targetted Paul specifically can only be because he is the sole MLA that has been critical of the CCP-style lockdowns, has been opposed to mandatory vaccinations and opposed to coercion – he is for informed consent, freedom of choice, medical privacy and an independent enquiry into the significant number of non-COVID excess deaths. He also calls for help for those injured from the COVID-jabs. He is a lonely voice and therefore an easy target.
It is also apparent that given how easily Crawley, Ferguson, Stout and Young spread disinformation that they do so assuming that they will not be fact-checked, likely due to a self-held belief that they are above reproach. Let this article serve as a warning to these disinformation peddlers — if you spread lies and we learn about it, we will be holding you to account. Make no mistake about this.