Reform UK Candidate Claimed COVID Was 'Pentagon-Led Plot' in Conspiracy Theory Journal

Read our Monthly Magazine

And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

A Reform UK candidate is listed as the author of a conspiracy theory article which suggests the Covid pandemic was actually a conspiracy led by the US-military and global elites.

Writing in the Journal of 9/11 Studies in September last year, David Booth, who is standing for Nigel Farage’s party in Croydon, refers to the Covid pandemic as a “staged event” that was designed by “powerful forces” to control the population.

“It is increasingly clear that the so-called Covid-19 pandemic was a staged event, designed to enable profound changes desired by powerful forces at the expense of majority populations around the world” he wrote.

He claims the harm from Covid was actually caused “by the policies” including vaccinations, “not by any observable impacts of the virus.” The publication was founded by 9/11 ‘Truthers’ who believe the 2001 terror attacks in New York were an inside job.

Booth, a retired researcher who focused on development and politics, also refers to the spread of Covid-19 as a “pandemic” using scare-quotes throughout the paper.

Booth has been contacted for comment but did not respond. The revelations come the day before the release of the Covid-19 inquiry’s report on vaccines, which is expected to be scathing about the role of misinformation on vaccine uptake.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

The Paper

The article, titled ‘Covid-19 as a Structural Deep Event: Cutting to the Chase on Perpetrators and Motives‘ overwhelmingly cites blog posts, self-published books and fringe advocacy websites in its bibliography. There are 55 citations for Substack posts in the piece, from non-peer reviewed sources.

In the piece, Booth accuses what he calls the “Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership” (GPPP), essentially Western military, intelligence and biosecurity establishments, of staging the pandemic, even suggesting it was fabricated through staged imagery, statistical fraud or possibly deliberate “seeding” of pathogens by military actors.

Booth also bases his article on Occam’s Razor, discounting rival conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic that require too many assumptions to hold true at the same time.

But his own theory assumes that military and intelligence agencies across dozens of countries coordinated a fake pandemic in real time, tens of thousands of clinicians and scientists were either deceived or complicit, and that mortality data were fabricated or misattributed on a global scale.

In other words, every major medical institution in the world was in on the supposed Pentagon plot, with no ‘leaking’ by any of the (presumably thousands of) professionals in the know.

Don’t miss a story

SIGN UP TO EMAIL UPDATES

David Booth writes: “The likely extent of the Covid-19 fraud continues to be underestimated by the most widely accepted critiques of the mainstream narrative. It does not seem to be true that the virus associated with Covid-19 symptoms spread by itself from a single point of origin…This raises a further set of research issues regarding who did exactly what to give the impression of a perilous pandemic.”

“However, it also adds force to the main finding of this review about the perpetrators and their motives, as only forces embedded at some depth in the Western bio-security apparatus could have pulled off the scale of fraud indicated by the data.”

On X/Twitter, the account @DavidBoothODI – which uses his Journal of 9/11 Studies profile picture – features extensive anti-vaccination content alongside pro-Reform posts.

He has reposted material claiming that Pfizer mRNA injections contain a cancer-causing agent (SV40), that pharmaceutical companies are “pure, pure evil,” and that Covid vaccines are responsible for increased cancer rates. Sources he has amplified include “Wide Awake Media,” Andrew Bridgen MP (who has focused on alleged vaccine ‘harms’), and an account called @B[ill]GatesIsaPyscho.

BREAKING

Reform-Run Kent Council Sells Off Antony Gormley Sculpture After Raising Taxes

Nigel Farage’s flagship council quietly sold Two Stones, one of the sculptor’s earliest commissions, as part of a wave of publicly owned art disposals that critics call “shameful”

Josiah Mortimer

Bereaved Families Respond

A spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice told Byline Times the story was “absolutely shocking,” adding: “These dangerous and offensive conspiracy theories are an insult to all of us who lost loved ones to Covid-19 and witnessed its deadly impact first-hand. They are dangerous, they put lives at risk, and they have no place in public life.

“Reform should immediately remove Mr Booth as a candidate and make clear, without any ambiguity, that it rejects these views.

“Anyone who promotes dangerous falsehoods about a pandemic that took so many lives should be nowhere near elected office.”

Byline Times asked Reform UK if the party was aware of his apparent views on vaccines and the pandemic before selecting him, what vetting procedures Reform UK carries out on prospective council election candidates, and if the party viewed the promotion of Covid-19 conspiracy theories as compatible with representing Reform UK as an elected councillor but have yet to receive a response.

BREAKING

EXPOSED: How Viktor Orbán Bankrolled the Network Around Reform UK

As Hungary’s Prime Minister suffers a historic electoral defeat, Byline Times maps out how his government’s funding arm channelled hundreds of thousands of pounds into organisations at the heart of Britain’s hard right.

Karam Bales

Reform’s Track Record on Vaccines

After the controversial doctor Aseem Malhotra addressed the Reform Party conference last September, and suggested that the Covid vaccine was a ‘significant factor in the cancer of members of royal family’, the party soon distanced itself from him. Malhotra’s speech was the only health-related address on the main stage of the Reform Party conference that year.

Prof Brian Ferguson, Professor of Viral Immunology, University of Cambridge, said at the time that the speech made “many incorrect claims and narratives about mRNA vaccines and medical research, along with sweeping claims about the pharmaceutical industry.”

“There are repetitions of often used anti-vaxx tropes that have been extensively disproven…There are numerous high quality studies that prove the covid vaccines, including mRNA vaccines, saved millions of lives. Evidence that mRNA vaccines have done more harm than good just does not exist, and claims that they did do not stand up to scrutiny.”

In October, Reform UK received an unwanted award for being the organisation that engaged in the “most prolific promotion of pseudoscience” during 2025.

Each year the UK’s long-running publication for analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal, The Skeptic magazine, names their pseudoscientist of the year, and awards them the ‘Rusty Razor’ prize.

The Rusty Razor that went to Reform UK in recognition of “their widespread embrace of climate change denialism and antivaccine misinformation.”

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com

holding farage to account #reformUNCOVERED

While most the rest of the media seems to happy to give the handful of Reform MPs undue prominence, Byline Times is committed to tracking the activities of Nigel Farage’s party when actually in power