Recap and Response

Follow on to "It's been a minute..."

Several of you asked after the house situation and others expressed sympathy with my eye issues. To all of you I send a heartfelt thank you - especially to those of you who commented, DMed or emailed me after the “It’s been a minute” post last weekend.

Let’s Recap…

There were many people for whom the Covid-19 situation just didn’t ring true. Whether it was the way in which what we were told about the virulence and deadliness of the virus didn’t match with our lived experience. Whether it was the way the so-called variants spread everywhere in exacting lockstep, even in countries after lockdowns had been initiated and all international travel had been shut down. Whether it was the way in which the mainstream media preached, proclaimed, nudged and admonished across nations and all while reading from the same script - often verbatim. Or whether it was how we were told magical vaccines developed in, if you followed the timeline, as little as days to weeks were supposed to free us from the draconian lockdowns and yet somehow the safe and effective vaccines didn’t seem to be either and the lockdowns continued in some places almost without end. Anyone who questioned these “facts” faced public derision, professional admonishment, and in some cases even criminal prosecution.

Academics like myself who questioned and pushed back against the Covid-19 situation were ‘dealt with’ in a variety of ways. Some were publicly ridiculed while others were either sacked or constructively dismissed from their university employment. While I and others in the research groups of which I am a member were made to feel uncomfortable and shunned by our colleagues, I unexpectedly faced personal attacks that eventually led to the loss of not one… or two… but four academic posts in about a year.

After the infamous Gates-run Event 201 tabletop exercise, and after the manipulative dead drop videos from Wuhan, I was to find myself locked down at home and completing work on two projects. One was Professor Fenton’s, which the EPSRC gave a small extension to so as to enable us to complete write-up of several academic publications that were being delayed due to Covid-19. That project, known as PamBayesian, was all about improving risk assessment and decision making for chronic health conditions. PamBayesian ended it’s 3 year funding period and extension with more than 55 publications - an astounding number when compared to other funded academic projects of the time that sometimes saw as few as 5 or 7 publications during a similar period. The other project, a very short project and more practical piece of work funded by Horizon with one of the UKs more recognised Law Schools, resulted in only two publications from me for my couple of months input, but was considered to be a very successful property law-based adaptation of the health-based expert elicitation and process mapping approach I developed during my time with Prof. Fenton. It was at this point, as both projects were closing out for me that I was offered some research work at another of the UKs preeminent Law Schools, specifically to investigate the law of AI and whether there were ways in which legislation and legal process could be described, implemented and validated within the design and operation of AI. The case study? ML and AI in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and semi/autonomous vehicles. Yes, it was outside my PhD and initial postdoctoral areas of health AI and learning health systems, but when generalised, the issues and methodologies were actually the same.

It was also at this time that the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) informed Prof Fenton and I that my application for a fellowship, which we had both forgotten about in the crazy world of Covid-19, had been successful. The Academy, along with their funding partner for the project - the UK Home Office, had reviewed my project brief and found it worthy of their prestigious funding. Over two years they agreed to provide a sum of £200,000 to support my exclusive undertaking of this research, around half of which the university would retain; as is standard practice for research funding. All of a sudden I found myself one of a small number of Intelligence Community Research Fellows. I was actually quite passionate and knowledgeable about the topic, and looking forward to two years of embedding myself in it. I immediately began to undertake additional training relevant to the research I would be doing, and spent money I didn’t have purchasing specialised equipment and software that I already knew was going to be necessary to testing and validating my hypotheses.

Cry “havok!” and let slip the dogs of war…

Not long after I started the Academy fellowship we began to see otherwise irrelevant and strangely opinionated people taking over sites like Twitter. There were those of us, like myself and the core group I conducted Covid-19 research with, who would investigate a policy response or health outcome using data and statistics from which we would present research papers. Initially, we got a few of these papers published in academic journals (for example: here, here and here). However, just as Twitter and other social and mainstream media platforms began to be taken over, the journals and preprint servers became captured as well… and they started rejecting our work too. Prof. Fenton describes our experience of escalating academic censorship best here:

While the actions of groups like The 77th Brigade and the UK government’s disingenuous war against what politicians vacuously called mis-, dis- and mal-information have become notorious (here and here), it was the animus of pro-Covid (measures and vaccines) academics against fellow academics who weren’t 100% toeing the line that was truly shocking and disgusting.

People like Prof. Fenton and others, including myself, dared to question - and even demonstrate using the government’s own facts and figures, that the Covid responses were either unnecessary or worse, harmful. And for that, we were repeatedly attacked. Things came to a head for me when one morning I noticed on Twitter that a member of staff at the very university where my Fellowship was going to be run from, Queen Mary University of London, was attacking a senior (in age and status) professor from an American university who had researched and published an article demonstrating that some element of the Covid response was harmful. That member of staff, a test-tube fondler from an underground Lab that was part of QMUL’s Wolfson Institute, venomously rebutted the American professor’s work not in a scientific and academic style (that is, not with data, evidence and citations as he had done in his research paper). Rather, Ms Test-tube Fondler attacked him instead of his work with simple statements that really amounted to: “You are wrong because I say you are wrong. So there!” I dared respond to her tweets and point out the polemic nature of her rebuttal and omission of evidence, which resulted in her (i) using the now all-too-familiar approach of misdirection by claiming that my reasoned response to her was somehow racist and misogynstic and meant I was against brown women in science; and (ii) calling her fellow academics and followers to arms…

Against me.

Complaints by her Twitter followers were made against me to QMUL claiming, as mentioned above, that I was racist and misogynistic. Some of those complaints, it has been suggested to me, were made by Ms Test-tube Fondler’s closest colleages and Twitter friends. Certainly, one of these people, a professor at another central London university, had herself made comments in later Twitter posts that could be inferred as an admission that she had been somehow involved - but that is speculation and little more than a technical digression at this point. The way in which QMUL responded however, is not.

QMUL, not wanting to give the appearance of doing nothing about it, appointed first someone from their Equality and Diversity Office to oversee handling of the complaint, and then a mathematics professor with no legal or investigatory training but quite well known within the school for his woke and feminist leanings. That professor would get the result QMUL’s EDI, Report and Support and Complaints Committees wanted. He conducted what in Australia we call a Kangaroo Court hearing where he levelled five patently ridiculous accusations against me that all centred around these claims of racism and misongyny in my Twitter response to Ms Test-tube Fondler and, when in rebuttal he was asked to identify what in the supposedly offending tweet/s could be so labelled he all-but admitted there was nothing directly evident in anything I had ever posted - before also falling into the all-too-familiar approach of claiming these negative things were somehow present in the intent, or the tone of the written word (whatever that means), or could somehow be inferred from whole cloth by anyone with any degree of sensitivity and diversity training. It was little more than him saying: “it must be so because someone has written a complaint email saying it is so.” Needless to say, his report from this Kangaroo Court process proclaimed my guilt to all five woke crimes, and all-but called for the severest of punishment at the earliest opportunity.

From that point on I was being handled in a way that was clearly intended to constructively dismiss me from my new Fellowship post, even before it was truly getting off the ground. The Head of School (HoS) of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science school, another professor seemingly captured and enamoured with the new diversity and inclussion ideology, had initially said he agreed there was nothing racist or misogynistic in the Tweets that had been the subject of the complaint. However, very rapidly in the face of the math Professor’s vacuous and clearly biased report, he too seemed to cave in and had what could only be described as a Pontious Pilot moment of resignation.

It was at this point, and even as the contracts and formation of the Fellowship was getting into full gear, Prof. Fenton and I tried to move the Fellowship to that Law School I had been doing the autonomous vehicle law research with. Even though the Academy gave their assent to move the fellowship, QMUL seemingly deliberately were dragging their heels to release the project and contracts. And strangely, so were the receiving university. Questions began to be asked as a few weeks turned into a few months, and still nothing was happening. In the meantime QMUL’s own administrative team conducted a formal hearing and review of the math professor’s report and his ‘found guilty’ accusations against me - and resolved to dismiss almost everything arising out of his report. They had to be seen to castigate me for something, and simply seemed to suggest that I might have been harsh in my rebuttal of Ms Test-tube Fondler’s polemic attack on the senior American academic. No real punishment, and no academic censure. The net result was that all of the math professor’s woke sting and sheer insanity was completely removed from the tail of the scorpion and the whole affair was to become little more than one more bad memory in a sea of bad memories.

But it wasnt to be the end of it.

Lost: The first two academic posts

Given I had already spent a couple of months in an environment of constructive dismissal, I had already tendered my resignation at QMUL and was simply awaiting the transfer of my Fellowship to that other academic institution. What I didn’t know was that in order to make sure I couldn’t pick up, brush myself off and carry on - someone inside the department office at QMUL had leaked the math professor’s report (absent the administrative team’s dismissal of his critical findings) to HR at the other university. I was then called to meetings with HR and the various academic review teams at that university too. The same process I had just been through at QMUL was going to be repeated at the new university, and this had been the primary reason for the delay (sure, they tried to say something else was the reason - but that something else made no sense in that it was the claim I was working for QMUL and the new university at the same time even though they knew the Fellowship had a fixed start date and therefore QMUL had started running the fellowship while we were awaiting the transfer. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey nonsense actually resulting from their culpability in the delay in transfer and not some nefarious act on my part). At this point I gave up on them too. This other university had unfortunately been exposed several times in the mainstream for misapplication of woke ideologies that had recently seen them first censure and stand down, and then after a significant backlash in the media, reinstate another academic. Feeling constructively dismissed for a second time in weeks I tendered my resignation there and, even though that meant I had no job at the time, I walked away.

As luck would have it I was almost immediately offered a Senior Lectureship post in the Law School of another Liverpool-based university. Sure, my fellowship was lost and I was presently living 4.5 hours away, but the latter at least seemed a solveable problem. I rented a house in Liverpool, gave notice on the rental in East London, and spent quite a bit of time and money moving north.

Lost: The third academic post

Within weeks of starting at the Liverpool university the same thing, involving the same document and the same Twitter posts started again. I cannot say for certain that it was leaked by someone at QMUL for the second time, but I saw a copy of it again as I was being reproached for the same (now deleted, I might add) decidedly non-racist and non-misogynistic Twitter posts. Yet again I was being questioned in the same manner as the math professor’s Kangaroo Court. Yet again the woke ideology yardstick was being used to beat me. And yet again it was made clear that I could accept constructive dismissal and resign immediately, or undergo the same intrusive and disingenuous process and get sidelined for promotion and have KPIs held against me as unbending absolutes (fail to get £xxx in funding this semester, lose your job for cause). The difference here was that they simply wanted me out as quick as possible and in the end dropped money (a final cheque for over £12,000 before tax, nearly £10,000 after tax) to make me ‘go away’. It barely covered the costs I had incurred moving from East London to Liverpool and otherwise getting set up there, didn’t really come close to supporting the costs to move back south, and possibly wouldn’t keep me and my family going until I secured a new posting. But it did show me that I wasn’t in the wrong. Rather than fight it, I accepted the money.

I started applying and interviewing for new posts, and within about six weeks was offered a short term (<1 year) research post on a project that whilst I didn’t really agree with the Professor in charge’s hypothesis and premise for the work, I could do it from home largely, as they say, with one hand tied behind my back.

Lost: The fourth academic post

Long story short, they took umbrage to my involvement with Prof. Fenton and others in which we had challenged the Covid-19 narratives, and withdrew the offer and contract the day before I was supposed to commence in the role.

About two moths later I walked into my current posting. It wasn’t easy - and the HoS was clearly concerned that I might be outspoken given, again, my involvement with demonstrating the flaws and falicies of the Covid narrative. However, for the moment it seems to be working and I mostly look forward to the next teaching session - which is valuable given that it would be so easy in the current academic climate to repel from it.

I initially worked mostly remote from Liverpool with days where I drove to North London and took the tube into the office, and it took almost 18 months in the current post before I had the resources to move closer to London - made more difficult by the issues experienced with the house once I had taken vacant possession of it.

In response…

Your well wishes in response to my It’s been a minute post were very warmly received and certainly made what had been an otherwise emotional morning seem brighter. I thank those of you who went out of your way to respond. I especially thank one subscriber whose kind generosity and good heart allowed me this week to replace four dysfunctional light fixtures, two of which had worrying electrical wiring issues that meant even attempts to change their blown bulbs caused shorting and tripped fuses across the house. These have now been replaced and the drop wiring above the fixtures has been repaired.

To that subscriber, you have my deepest thanks.