There must be something in the water in Leicestershire. It’s the only explanation I can think of. A decade ago, when I first got involved in organised skepticism, one of the most notorious promoters of pseudoscience in the country was Conservative MP David Treddinick – the friend of the friends of homeopathy, the Honorable Member for Holland and Barrett, and a constant advocate for the use of alternative medicine on the NHS. He was, between 1987 and 2019, the Member of Parliament for Bosworth, in Leicestershire.
So, when he stepped down in 2019, you might have thought the Leicestershire area could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing they would no longer be represented by someone who spent the majority of their time in parliament advocating for useless treatments.
However, it seems when skepticism closes a door, pseudoscience opens a window – in this case, in the form of Andrew Bridgen, the Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire, the neighbouring constituency to Bosworth.
Bridgen came to his seat in 2010, and has been no stranger to the headlines. In 2014, he was criticised for using his time in parliament to formally ask a colleague if he would agree that:
Given that the political system of the world’s superpower and our great ally the US is very susceptible to well-funded powerful lobbying groups and the power of the Jewish lobby in America, it falls to this country and this House to be the good but critical friend that Israel needs?
When some people (quite reasonably) pointed out that alluding to a powerful Jewish lobby that prevents American politicians from criticising Israel was propagating an antisemitic trope, Bridgen defended the remarks, saying:
It was alleged to me that no American politician would be remotely critical publicly of anything Israel does because as they put it, if they do, their opponents in the elections or in the primaries would have millions of dollars dropped into their campaign fund, without even asking, to get rid of them.
A few years later, in 2017, Bridgen was further criticised after complaining about the National Trust commissioning an artwork at Kingston Lacy in Dorset, commemorating the lives of 51 men who were executed for being gay. Bridgen claimed that it was totally inappropriate for the charity to give space over to the memorial, despite the property being formerly the home of William John Bankes, who was forced to abandon his restoration of the site and flee the country when authorities discovered that he was gay.
Bridgen is clearly an MP not afraid of speaking his mind, even if (and possibly, especially if) his opinions are controversial or touch on issues within the culture war. And while August 2022 saw the end of a long-running legal battle with members of his own family, culminating in his eviction from a property owned by the family firm and an order to pay legal costs of £800,000, just a few months later he was making headlines again with a new preoccupation.
COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Debate
In early 2022, a public petition was added to the government’s website, calling for an inquiry into the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine, claiming:
There has been a significant increase in heart attacks and related health issues since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines began in 2021. This needs immediate and full scientific investigation to establish if there is any possible link with the COVID-19 vaccination rollout.
As is customary for petitions from the public that pass 100,000 signatures, a parliamentary debate was arranged for October 24th, 2022, to discuss the merits of the issue. Bridgen was one of the MPs to speak in favour of launching a public inquiry into vaccine safety, complaining that “people who have questioned the efficacy or safety of the vaccines have generally been cut down and cancelled”.
During the debate, Bridgen cited evidence from a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which he explained found that one in 500 children under the age of five who received a Pfizer mRNA vaccine were hospitalised with a vaccine injury, and one in 200 had symptoms ongoing for weeks or months afterwards. That equated to 40 of the 7,806 kids studied who had symptoms that were still ongoing and of unknown significance by the end of the trial, suggesting that 0.5% of vaccinated children would develop a serious adverse effect that would last for weeks, or even months.
“Given that evidence”, he asked, “perhaps the Minister could explain why we are vaccinating healthy children who are at minimal risk from Covid. Surely that is in breach of the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.”
“Where is the cost-benefit analysis by age group for the vaccines”, he continued, “given the risks that they carry, especially as the pharma companies are now admitting that vaccination does not impact on transmission? Did the Government know, when they mandated vaccines for care and NHS workers, that the vaccines had not been tested to find whether they prevented transmission?”
Bridgen clearly was well-versed in the talking points of those who question the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, including this oft-repeated gotcha that the vaccines were not tested to find whether they prevented transmission (given the urgency at the time, they were tested as to whether they successfully prevented hospitalisations and deaths – which they were proven to do, safely). It isn’t hard to see why, Bridgen has such familiarity with those talking points, given the apparent source of his information on the topic. Later in the same speech, he cited Florida’s surgeon general, Dr Joseph Ladapo, as having said:
Studying the safety and efficacy of any medications, including vaccines, is an important component of public health. Far less attention has been paid to safety and the concerns of many individuals have been dismissed—these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians.
It is worthy of mention that while Dr Ladapo is indeed the man hand-chosen by Republican governor Ron DeSantis to be his surgeon general, he has spent the bulk pandemic promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as cures for COVID-19, claiming lockdowns and masks were useless, and signing the Great Barrington Declaration in favour of building ‘herd immunity’ by letting the vast majority of people get infected with the virus. Dr Ladapo had previously called vaccination programs in general a “fear-driven cult”, and he’s currently spending most of his time trying to stop gender-affirming care in Florida. This is the respectable source of vaccine information chosen by a sitting MP, and one that felt worthy of raising in Parliament.
Bridgen concluded his speech by explaining that he:
also had the pleasure of meeting Dr Aseem Malhotra at the APPG launch last week. He made a very strong case for the idea that up to 90% of adverse vaccine reactions are not even being reported.
Dr Malhotra himself is likely worthy of a full article in his own right, though the extensive analysis elsewhere in this publication by Danny Bradley amply demonstrates the celebrity consultant cardiologist’s insight and accuracy with regards to COVID-19. That said, for reasons I will come back to, if it were true that only 1 in 10 reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine were reported, it would be neither shocking nor indicative of an untold tsunami of vaccine-related injuries and deaths.
Given that Bridgen has referred to one particular study – and has returned to his analysis of the same statistics on numerous occasions since – it is worth a digression to understand whether his understanding of the reported harms of the Pfizer vaccine accurately reflect those of the study’s authors.
Toepfner et al, October 2022
The study “Comparative Safety of the BNT162b2 Messenger RNA COVID-19 Vaccine vs Other Approved Vaccines in Children Younger Than 5 Years”, by Toepfner et al, was indeed published in JAMA on October 18th, 2022 – just six days before Bridgen’s first speech on vaccine safety. And it does indeed look at 7806 kids under the age of five, who had been given one of a series of doses of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, at various doses: 3 micrograms, 5 micrograms or 10 micrograms. In the results, they report that ten of the children in the study required inpatient treatment, and that 40 had ongoing symptoms at the time of submitting the study, of unknown severity. So is Bridgen right?
I don’t believe he is, and a closer examination of the results of the study – and, indeed, the conclusion drawn by the authors themselves – illustrates why. Firstly, by “ongoing and of unknown severity”, what the authors effectively mean is that at the time of the study finishing, some participants were still experiencing symptoms. But this is to be expected – there are more than 7,000 children involved, each of whom were vaccinated at different times, some of whom are onto their third dose of the vaccine. If the researchers had to wait until, say, at least 90 days after any of the children had a received a vaccine, they’d never have been able to publish the study, as waiting for one group of kids to hit that milestone would inevitably see a different group of children receive their next booster.
Instead, a cut-off date was chosen, even if that meant including children who had, for example, received a booster merely days before that date. The only stipulation was that enough time had elapsed since their first dose of the vaccine.
Perhaps of importance is that those 7000+ children included lots of kids who were suffering from a variety of underlying health conditions prior to vaccination:
Among 684 of 7806 responding participants (8.8%) with comorbidities, the most common diseases were pulmonary (190) or cardiovascular diseases (90) and chromosomal aberrations (166).
Given that COVID-19 is a disease that affects the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and that some of the fears around potential side effects of the vaccine included cardiovascular symptoms, awareness of prior conditions in these areas among the studied population is certainly prudent.
From there, the study looked out for symptoms following vaccination, and categorised those symptoms by duration and severity.
We retrospectively defined postvaccination mortality (0 of 7806 [0%]) and symptoms requiring inpatient treatment (10 of 7806 [0.1%]) as SAEs [Serious Adverse Events].
So, there were indeed 10 children who required inpatient treatment. However, the paper comes with a supplemental table explaining what symptoms precipitated that inpatient treatment – of those, one was hospitalised for a headache, which began the day after vaccination and was gone before the next day. Two had dizziness, that lasted for around half a day. One fainted, and was kept in hospital for a day before being released. Two had coughs, that were gone after around a week. Two developed irregular heartbeats that were gone after one day and 2.5 days, respectively.
This is not to downplay the seriousness of a child being admitted to hospital – I’m sure it was a worrying development for these children and their parents. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that, firstly, this study does not allege causation, and so all we can say is that of 7,608 children who were vaccinated, 10 of them went to hospital for a day or two, within a few months of vaccination.
It’s also important to remember that, as the study highlighted, some of these children had underlying medical conditions. It may well be the case (and it is not possible to tell either way from the data provided) that the child who was admitted to hospital with a cough was one of the children with pulmonary disease; their cough could therefore have been unrelated to the vaccine, or their admission to hospital could have been a mere over-precaution given that they were in an already at-risk group. The same can be said of the two children who had minor cardiovascular symptoms.
What we can be absolutely sure of, however, because it is explicit in the data, is that none of the symptoms that resulted in those 10 children requiring inpatient attention lasted for more than five days.
There were, however, some children whose symptoms were described as of unknown duration, because they persisted past the endpoint of the study. Are those, then, a fair basis for Bridgen’s calls to suspend the vaccination program pending a full inquiry? Again, in my opinion, they are not. Of the 40 children whose symptoms were of unknown duration, the supplementary table explains that for 10 of those kids, the ongoing symptoms were “redness or swelling at the injection site”, and for another 12 it was “pain or discomfort at the injection site”. Further, one had pain in “the limbs generally”. Sore arms after an injection account for 23 of the 40 children Bridgen is citing as vaccine injured.
Of the others, two had abdominal pain, one had dry skin, one had a nonspecific “other complaint”, and the rest don’t appear to be recorded. It is not impossible that symptoms more severe than “sore arm and funny tummy” were left out of the analysis, but that would represent a baffling decision by researchers explicitly looking for serious side effects. It is far more likely that the remaining symptoms were equally mild. It is also deeply unlikely that, as Bridgen characterises, these symptoms persisted “for weeks or even months” – far more likely is that these were symptoms of children whose most recent vaccination occurred shortly before the study’s end date.
To be clear, unlike Bridgen (who opened his speech by talking up his degree in genetics, behaviour and biochemistry), my degree is not in a scientific-related field, and I am an amateur at reading papers like these. However, the conclusion I’ve come to having combed through the data tables has one key advantage over Bridgen’s characterising of this study, in that my conclusion matches that of the paper itself. Indeed, the paper concludes:
This study revealed a similar overall safety when compared with existing non–SARS-CoV-2 vaccines administered in the same study population, with minor differences in the probabilities of injection-site symptoms, fever, musculoskeletal symptoms, or otolaryngologic symptoms [swelling of lymph nodes] compared with non–SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations. An increased frequency of injection-site symptoms was detected in children older than 24 to younger than 60 months who were administered 10 μg of BNT162b2, which should be taken into consideration in future dosage-finding strategies in this age group and be carefully weighed against potential improvements in immunogenicity at higher dosage…
…no SAEs were reported for children administered the low dosage of 3 μg, which is currently evaluated in the BNT162b2 licensure study.21 In addition, no mortality was reported.
So, the compelling evidence that Bridgen presented to parliament as proof that the vaccines were leaving children incapacitated and injured for weeks or months at a time was nothing of the sort, and his conclusion directly contradicted that of the researchers who carried out the study.
Equally, returning to his other key claim – that vaccine-related adverse events are underreported by as much as 90% – this, too, seems unremarkable, given that the list of things that count as adverse vaccine reactions includes sore arms, headaches, fatigue, flu-like symptoms, and swollen lymph nodes. It’d be surprising if readers who are vaccinated haven’t experienced a few of those adverse reactions, yet it’s almost certainly the case that they didn’t report those symptoms to the Yellow Card scheme. But, of course, if you had been left paralysed or permanently harmed, or even dead, as a result of the vaccine, you’d be likely to report that more often than one time in 10. The bias against reporting side effects significantly lessens the more severe those side effects are.
Campaign of vaccine scaremongering
Bridgen finished his October 24th statement by saying he wished he had longer to speak about this – which is probably why he returned to this topic several more times in parliament. Like when, during Prime Ministers questions on 7th December, he claimed that
There have been more reported deaths and adverse reactions following mRNA vaccination in 18 months than there has been to every conventional vaccine administered worldwide for the last 50 years.
There is a sleight of hand here, even if inadvertent: while deaths are rare, as demonstrated above, adverse reactions are not rare… they’re just, predominately, not often serious. Given that over 151 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the UK since 2020 – and more than 13 billion have been given out worldwide in the same time – it may be little surprise that the number of (almost always extremely minor) adverse reactions to this vaccine is quite large. But if the overwhelming majority of side effects are, as documented in Bridgen’s JAMA report, primarily headaches and sore arms, they do not add up to an urgent health crisis that necessitates halting the vaccine program.
Later in the same session, Bridgen went on to say:
Given that mRNA vaccines are not recommended for pregnant women or those who are breastfeeding, would my right honourable friend overturn the Big Pharma-funded MHRA’s recent recommendation that these experimental vaccines are administered to children as young as six months of age?
Note that the MHRA has now become the “Big-Pharma funded MHRA”, in an attempt to remove the credibility of the official agency of the Department of Health and Social Care tasked with ensuring the safety and efficacy of medicines, by tainting it with the language of ‘Big Pharma’ conspiracies. This particular claim of Bridgen’s was picked up by Full Fact, who pointed out that it is untrue to say that the vaccines aren’t recommended for people who are pregnant or breastfeeding. In fact, the NHS says:
It’s strongly recommended that you get vaccinated against COVID-19 to protect you and your baby… It’s safe to get the COVID-19 vaccine if you are breastfeeding.
This was actually something that Bridgen acknowledged in the October 24th debate:
The hon. Gentleman may not be aware, but contradictory evidence was issued on two separate days. One piece of advice said that pregnant and breastfeeding women could have the vaccine, and then another Government body said that that was not safe and that it did not recommend it.
However, what Bridgen paints as haphazard and confused policy making that changes from one day to the next was actually far more straightforward: in December 2020, guidance was released advising that the vaccine was not yet recommended to be given to anyone who was pregnant. Five months later, in April 2021, that advice was updated based on the latest evidence, which advised that the vaccine did not pose a safety risk, and should be recommended to anyone who was pregnant or breastfeeding. This is precisely how science is supposed to work: a precautionary principle initially, but then advice gets updated as the evidence base becomes more established and robust.
Bridgen returned to the subject in a debate on December 13th, repeating the claim he inherited from Dr Aseem Malhotra, about adverse effects being underreported by 90%, as well as restating the statistic of one in 200 kids being hospitalised by the vaccine. He went on to claim that mRNA vaccines are experimental and unsafe, and that mRNA vaccines are a form of gene therapy – all of which ranges from wildly misleading to wholly untrue.
Bridgen even claimed that a senior figure in the British Heart Foundation was involved in “covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries”, which led the charity to categorically deny the allegations. Claims made in parliament have parliamentary privilege, of course, and are therefore not subject to libel proceedings, even if the charity were minded to explore their legal options.
Redpilling in real-time
What’s been especially interesting to see is that, alongside this misuse of parliamentary time, Bridgen has become increasingly prolific on this topic on Twitter. In October, a cursory scan of Bridgen’s Twitter usage (tweets, not replies) revealed an unremarkable mix of tweets of support for Prime Minister Liz Truss, and then tweets of support for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, plus announcements of various media appearances on GB News and TalkTV, plus criticism of the HS2 project. Only a couple of tweets in amongst that standard fare, around the time of the vaccine debate in parliament, mentioned COVID-19 or the vaccines.
Similarly, in November, Bridgen could be seen (somewhat ironically, all things considered) calling for Matt Hancock to be expelled from the Tory party for appearing on I’m A Celebrity, and sharing more appearances on GB News and TalkTV, with just one tweet calling for an investigation of the vaccines.
However, during December, Bridgen tweeted 50 times, 41 of which were about the alleged dangers of the vaccine – including retweeting a GB News video in which consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra praised Bridgen for speaking up in parliament, and retweeting a GB News interview in which he and Dr Aseem Malhotra were both interviewed by Lawrence Fox about how dangerous they all agree the vaccines are. 82% of this sitting MP’s social media usage was to spread baseless conspiracy theories about a life-saving intervention.
So far at the time of writing, midway through January, Bridgen has tweeted 70 times – incredibly, only one tweet was about something other than vaccines (the outlier was a warning about getting NHS care during the various strike actions taking place). In doing so, he’s shared Neil Oliver of GB News, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, 2021 Rusty Razor winner Mike Yeadon, notorious antivaxxers Del Bigtree and Robert F Kennedy… and, of course, his good friend, the celebrity cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra.
In fact, technically, Bridgen has tweeted at least 71 times so far in January, because on the 11th January he shared a post from the far-right blog “Zero hedge” titled “CDC Finally Releases VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses For COVID Vaccines”, written by someone going by the name “Tyler Durden”. Rather than reflecting reporting and analysis from the CDC, as the headline might suggest, the blog post actually cites analysis published on the Epoch Times – the far-right media company operated by the Falun Gong new religious movement. That’s the level of quality sources this sitting politician was relying on by this point.
Uncritical of the data, or of its source, Bridgen shared the post, tweeting it with the comment “As one consultant cardiologist said to me this is the biggest crime against humanity since the holocaust”.
This was the point that, after months of misinformation, Bridgen was deemed to have crossed the line, and he was suspended from the Tory party by Rishi Sunak. As a result of the suspension, Bridgen will remain as MP for North West Leicestershire, but will be forced to sit as an independent pending a formal investigation. That investigation looks set to be a formality, especially given that Bridgen responded to his suspension by releasing a video statement in which he doubles down on his claims about the alleged dangers of the COVID-19 vaccine.
As he says in the video:
There are reasonable questions about the side effects of mRNA vaccines, especially when we know categorically that the current risk of harm to most of the population – and especially young people – from COVID-19 is minuscule.
Of course, what he’s missing here is that if indeed COVID-19 is only of minsicule risk to the people of the UK – a point that, with the threat of Long Covid still looming, is highly debatable – part of the reason for that relatively lower risk is the success of the vaccination program he’s working so hard to halt.
In the video, and in subsequent interviews, Bridgen also denies that it was antisemitic to compare the vaccine rollout to the Holocaust, telling the BBC:
I completely refute any allegations of anti-Semitism and it was ludicrous when you think that the actual person I was quoting, via top cardiologist, actually was an Israeli doctor of criminology and sociology at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem.
There’s much in here to unpack: firstly, the “some of my best sources are Jewish” argument, which does not absolve the offence of comparing public health to genocide; secondly, a doctor of criminology and sociology is hardly best placed to judge the merits or efficacy of a vaccine rollout program, however Jewish he may or may not be and thirdly, while it’s true that Bridgen described the Holocaust as heinous, going on to use it as a point of reference for the rollout of a vaccine entirely undermines his point.
Bridgen has threatened legal action against anyone who has called him antisemitic for the use of his analogy, but what he fails to understand is that, while he may genuinely feel that he holds no antisemitic views, he has on at least two occasions now engaged in arguments that involve antisemitic tropes. It is entirely possible to unwittingly repeat arguments without recognising them as antisemitic, but at the very least it suggest Bridgen needs to take more care around what could arguably be described as a blindspot of his.
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Bridgen explained that he was quoting an Israeli sociologist via a top cardiologist. It seems almost certain that the cardiologist in question, and the recurring character in this radicalisation journey, was Dr Aseem Malhotra. From Bridgen’s first public comments on the vaccine, to his repeated statistics and talking points, right up to his non-pology video, Dr Malhotra seems to have been a constant advisor and guide down the rabbithole.
Looking back at Bridgen’s journey over less than four months, we can clearly see him get increasingly radicalised over time; starting with a dripfeed, and building until the barrier burst. His story is a perfect illustration of the point that even politicians can get ‘pilled’, and that even the wealthy and powerful are no more capable of avoiding rabbitholes than the rest of us.
