I will try to me restrained in my language, but these the people who wrote, edited and published this for the Daily Mail are utter, utter fucking arseholes. 1/13

I won't give a link to the whole thing as just one click to their adbait is one too many and it's easy to find if you want to purse. In as brief as I can make it..... 2/13

The vaccine is safe. It has passed rigorous testing at stage 1 of the trial. What is now being tested is effectiveness against Covid-19. The suggestion that it is not safe is the same promotion that the Daily Mail gave to the struck-off Andrew Wakefield 20 odd years ago. 3/13

That promotion of what became a worldwide anti-vaxx movement, the first great experiment in the mass internet lie, has cost thousands of lives and will cost more. The Mail is now on the same course, potentially with deadlier consequence, for as clicks. Twats. 4/13

To be specific, the vaccine is now under test in South Africa (and Brazil), following 18,000 tests (9,000 if you taken into account the 9,000 meningitis jabs given as the blind control measure) in the UK. 5/13

South Africa and Brazil are being used because of high transmission at the moment. The ONLY way you can tell if the vaccine works is to see if those who don't get the Covid vaccine do get Covid, and those who do get it are don't. That how trials work. 6/13

So running the trial in a country with high transmission speeds up the results process. That's why it's being trialled in South Africa. Getting quick results may save millions of lives. 7/13

Similarly, that's why people in poor areas are being asked to take part. The idea that the poor are guinea pigs for this safe *possible not effective) vaccine is utter shit. It's because transmission is higher in these areas. 8/13

This is why, in the UK, the trail has been directed at healthworkers and other frontline staff e.g. cabbies. Ir's because transmission is higher amongst this group. 9/13

I'm sure the Daily Mail reporters, editors & publishers know this. Yet 20 years on from their success in peddling anti-vaxx myths by the promotion of Wakefield's money-grabbing quackery, they are using that anti-vaxx 'community' to double down and make it worse. Much worse. 10/13

Much worse, indeed, because what this pandemic offers by way of long term solace is the proospect of the anti-vaxx movement being overtaken by the actual truth that vaccines save million lives, and thus withering away. 11/13

And yet the Daily Mail, to sell ads, want to foster the anti-vaxx movement just at the moment it might fade away. Contemptible. 12/13

And, you know, if this vaccine works, another Mail writer will be long to extol the Britishness of scientists working in Britain. This will be from the same paper right now now suggesting are unethical racists keen to infect a nation because it is predominantly black. 13/13

12/ Fucking arseholes.

I think that was quite measured.

END 12/12