Last week I told the story of the confusion caused by the apparently conflicting advice offered to pregnant women about vaccine safety, with this document that was "updated on 16 August 2022" appearing to contradict the document with the latest advice that had the earlier date of 11 April 2022. TracyK2017 on twitter (who has now been suspended) concluded - not unreasonably - that the Government was now advising that the vaccine was not safe for pregnant women. Her tweet went viral - as did my tweets and article discussing it (for example, Russell Brand in this video around the 11 minutes mark reads from my article and uses the 'compare and contrast' graphic I created for it).
Of course, the usual twitter blue ticks, vaccine junkies, 'fact checkers', the BBC as well as the UK government itself went into overdrive to assure the public that this was all misinformation because the 16 August document had 'been unchanged' since Dec 2020 and simply summarised the original Pfizer study. But, while it is true that the specific text on pregnancy was unchanged, and that only minor changes had been made to the document, the fact remains that the document had been updated with small changes many times, the last (at that point) being 16 August 2022 (see also NellyTells tweet at bottom of this page). So those saying it had never been changed and that it was 'obviously not the document with the latest recommendations' were the true spreaders of misinformation, since any lay person searching the Government website would reasonably have concluded that document as the most recently updated. At the very least those screaming 'misinformation' and demanding (successfully) that TracyK2017 be suspended from twitter should have had the decency to admit that the Government website was the cause of the confusion (incidentally, they also tried to get me suspended from twitter but only managed to get me temporarily locked out of my account).
I thought that was the end of the story, but this morning I saw this tweet by Dr Susan Oliver attacking John Campbell for discussing it in his latest video.
I was shocked by this because, having investigated the story extensively, I was pretty sure that the text in the grey box which says the report is unchanged since Dec 2020 (and that links to a different report with 'latest advice') was NOT there when I had been looking at it. Yet, now Oliver was accusing Campbell of deliberately not showing it in his screenshot. Thanks to some some anonymous mouse helpers we were able to find an archive of all the previous versions of the document and discovered from this that, indeed, the grey box WAS ADDED AFTER 2 SEPT 2022. I tweeted a response to Oliver - asking her to apologise to Campbell - with the relevant links proving the grey box was added after Campbell's video and with these screenshots:
This new development is important for several reasons:
It provides proof that the Government changes these crucial websites and documents without any indication of what and when the change was; note that, despite the FACT that the website was updated after 2 Sept 2022, it still shows 16 August 2022 as the date it was last updated.
Because of the previous absence of text like that in the new grey box, it provides proof that those who assumed the document was a 'live' document and not an unchanged report from Dec 2020 were not deliberately spreading misinformation; they were making perfectly reasonable conclusions based on what was said on the Government website. At the very least an apology is due to TracyK2017 and her twitter account reinstated.
It demonstrates the hypocrisy and nastiness of those who are quick to call people out for not thoroughly checking facts before spreading 'misinformation' about the vaccine.
This is likely not going to be my last word on this subject. We are currently working on exposing the extent of genuine misinformation there has been in the subsequent deluge of posts and reports assuring pregnant women that the vaccine is not only safe and effective but also reduces risk of miscarriages and still birth.
