Nafeez Ahmed reveals how COVID pseudoscience and anti-lockdown groups have morphed into a sophisticated, well-funded global network
The former lead psychologist of Cambridge Analytica – the notorious digital analytics firm which disseminated fake news on behalf of the Brexit and Donald Trump election campaigns – is advising some of the leading pandemic disinformation platforms in Britain and is connected to COVID-19 conspiracy theory groups in the US, South Africa and elsewhere, Byline Times can reveal.
Many of these platforms and groups have direct ties to hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Patrick Fagan, a behavioural and consumer psychologist, was head of psychology at Cambridge Analytica from October 2017 to May 2018. He worked on “local and presidential political campaigns in Europe, Africa and North America”, according to his own website.
He is currently the chief scientific officer for Capuchin Behavioural Science, which claims to “apply a range of scientific behavioural methods including psychometrics, implicit testing, eye-tracking, facial coding, EEG, and more to deliver measurable commercial results”.
In late 2020, Fagan joined the advisory board of an obscure website called the ‘COVID-19 Assembly’, quietly set up in August 2020 to serve as a “centre point for all anti-lockdown groups worldwide”.
The project is run by David Fleming, who has worked as a consultant environmental health officer for Dacorum Borough Council in Hertfordshire as part of its food, health and safety team, among other local authorities. Fleming incorporated the project as a profit-making company in November.
Patrick Fagan is listed on the COVID-19 Assembly website as an “advisor” to the project. This is alongside Professor Martin Kulldorf, a principal co-signatory to the Koch-backed Great Barrington Declaration drafted by a MOD contractor; Toby Young, fake news publisher of pseudoscience blog ‘Lockdown Sceptics’; and Francis Hoar, a leading junior barrister at Field Court Chambers who represented the failed legal challenge to social distancing measures by multi-millionaire Brexiter Simon Dolan.
Dolan holds the distinction of having executive produced Renegade, a feature film promoting its co-producer – the conspiracy theorist David Icke. The film also features the latter’s son Gareth Icke, who is linked to Save Our Rights UK Ltd.
Last year, Gareth Icke spoke at an anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxer, anti-mask, anti-5G protest in Truro, Cornwall, organised by Save Our Rights UK Ltd. The same group interviewed Conservative MP and chief whip Sir Desmond Swayne.
One in Five Believe there is A Government Conspiracy to Present COVID as ‘Much More Dangerous than It Is’
Hardeep Matharu
The Alt-Right Lawfare Brigade
Francis Hoar was among 10 signatories (including Simon Dolan) to an open letter to the FBI and other Western security agencies released in January 2021, titled ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown Fraud’.
Apart from working with conspiracy theorists and cranks, Hoar has received some attention as a credible voice, being interviewed by the New Statesman and writing op-eds in the Telegraph.
Patrick Fagan was lead psychologist for Cambridge Analytica – the firm which appropriated the personal data of millions of people from their Facebook profiles. Yet, since August 2018, Hoar has acted as sole counsel advising Facebook on its compliance with UK electoral law. He is also advising Sean Bailey and the Conservative Party’s (postponed) campaign for the London Mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections.
In 2019, Hoar provided legal representation defending hard Brexit stances for the English Democrats – a nationalist party which nibbles “at the fringe of the far-right”, according to anti-racism watchdog Hope Not Hate – as well as for the Leave Means Leave campaign run by Richard Tice and Nigel Farage.
Cambridge Analytica’s Patrick Fagan admitted that he subscribes to a range of ‘tinfoil hat conspiracy theories’ about the pandemic.
Hoar sits on the committee of Lawyers for Britain, set up to support the Brexit campaign. There is also connection back to UsforThem, the ‘parents’ pressure group receiving PR support from a top Conservative Party lobbyist who also manages the ‘COVID Recovery Group’ faction of Conservative MPs from the hard Brexit European Research Group.
When Lawyers for Britain was first set up in 2016, one of its founding committee members was Slaughter and May lawyer Eric Phillips. Slaughter and May partner Ben Kingsley, a financial services lawyer, is married to former corporate lawyer Michelle (‘Molly’) Kingsley, who previously worked at the firm, and who founded UsforThem in May 2020. Her husband is currently an advisor to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on its scheme to support film and TV productions impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Patrick Fagan is also on the advisory team for PCRclaims.co.uk – a project claiming to offer legal support for claims that result from PCR testing. Although no longer listed on the website, the affiliation is evident from deleted archived web pages identifying “Our Spokespeople: PCRclaims is proud to officially represent and rely upon the most eminent spokespeople and their expertise. They are all agreed that the inappropriate use of Pillar 2 PCR & LFT testing must end immediately”. Patrick Fagan was listed as an expert under its ‘Public Health’ section.
Represented by solicitor Joanna Rogers via her company Navistar Legal, PCRclaims.co.uk links to websites actively purveying disinformation – including Dr Clare Craig, who denies that there is a pandemic. On her LinkedIn profile, Craig describes herself as “between jobs but working full time on the COVID false positive problem”. As Conservative MP Neil O’Brien has documented, Dr Craig has deleted the entirety of her tweets from 2020 which had spread “dangerous disinformation”, disproven by actual events. PCRclaims.co.uk’s Twitter handle has similarly deleted previous tweets discredited by the real world.
PCRclaims.co.uk, too, has links to the Conservative Party and the Government.
One of its ‘experts’ on economics is Jeffrey Peel, previously an area vice-chair of the Conservative Party, a business spokesperson for Vote Leave, Northern Ireland chairman of Brexit campaign group Business for Britain, and an advisor to the Department for International Trade from 2017 to 2020 – where he led a team on getting overseas start-ups to invest in the UK.
The South African Strain
Both COVID-19 Assembly and PCRclaims.co.uk are working with a separate COVID-19 pseudoscience platform: Pandata19.org (PANDA: Pandemics Data and Analytics).
PANDA is run by Nick Hudson, founding CEO of the South African private equity fund Sana Partners. His PANDA co-founder is Peter Castleden, a senior executive at another South African financial services giant, Sanlam – the largest insurance company in Africa.
PANDA’s team largely consists of people from finance and industry: Russell Lamberti, managing director of ETM Macro Advisors, a financial advisory firm based in Cape Town inspired by the Austrian school of extreme market economics; Carey Haynes, sales manager for Delta Air’s South Africa branch; Vincent Anthonyrajah, managing director at financial advisory firm Differential Capital; Rowan Burger, head of strategy at Momentum Investments; Samantha Bailey, a doctor in New Zealand who spreads fake news about PCR tests; Janet Schuiling, former lead geophysicist with Tullow Oil, which has lost half of its market value since early 2019; Joel Smalley, a former JP Morgan Chase derivatives trader turned chief technology officer at blockchain start-up Supermoney Ltd; among others.
PANDA’s scientific advisory board is made up primarily of the founding signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration – which advocated for a natural ‘herd immunity’ approach to the Coronavirus pandemic.
It includes Patrick Fagan’s colleague at the COVID-19 Assembly, Dr Martin Kuldorff; and Donald Trump’s former COVID-19 advisor Dr Scott Atlas, who systematically spread misinformation about the pandemic that was even condemned by the Stanford Faculty.
In December 2020, PANDA published a pseudoscientific report denying the efficacy of vaccines by Dennis Rancourt, a disgraced physics professor who had been sacked by the University of Ottawa. Rancourt, who is also a climate science denier, claimed in his PANDA report that “vaccines are inherently dangerous”.
