Tuesday 21 April 2020

What a strange world we are in at the moment

The coronavirus pandemic has certainly turned our world upside down. There are some really strange things happening just now, the oddest perhaps coming from America, the land of the bizarre. Oil prices have turned negative, falling as low as -$37 a barrel at one point. In what must be the ultimate in environmental insanity, producers are paying distributors to take oil off their hands as storage capacity becomes full.

The massive drop straight through zero was described as "off-the-charts wacky" by Stewart Glickman, an energy equity analyst at CFRA Research. And it was.  Demand has fallen so low that nobody wants oil any more. In Britain Brent crude was still trading at $26 dollars a barrel but I assume may turn negative here unless we all start driving again very soon.

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Another strange affair which has not yet reached the mainstream media as far as I know is the allegation (I put it no stronger than that) that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has been involved in disseminating fake news.  Before going further I ought to say they deny it but then they would, wouldn't they?

Someone named John O'Connel who describes himself as founder/editor at FRW Anti-Racism Group and claims to be a journalist and coder among other things, tweeted this on Friday after noticing what he says was a fake account.

He asked West Hertfordshire NHS about what he says was an account purporting to be that of an NHS nurse, but created by the DHSC Communications Team, and not in fact, one of the staff on Starfish ward.
The picture used in the original tweet comes in fact from the UNISON website HERE where her namebadge reveals her real name as Mia but the Twitter account handle is NHS_Susan and she tweets as NHS Susan #FBPE.  The namebadge on her Twitter picture is cropped out.  All very odd.

O'Connell claims this was just one of at least 128 Twitter accounts that were tweeting originally in support of herd immunity up until the lock down was announced but later began tweeting to get restrictions lifted as quickly as possible.

Yesterday at 5:03 pm he tweeted again with a long thread about these accounts, now all mysteriously taken down "simultaneously" by the account holders, which he says were set up either by the DHSC or their marketing agency.
Note herd 'mentality' is a typo I think, it should be 'immunity'. The accounts were all linked back via a mass posting tool to a single person who it is suggested, is a  a "contracted Government employee temporarily assigned to this [DHSC] department"

Apparently, 43 accounts used pictures of actual NHS staff.  O'Connell managed to contact seven all of whom confirmed their identities were being used without consent.

In one tweet, he says:

"The accounts have now mostly gone, not suspended by Twitter but deleted by the account holder(s) in one simultaneous mass cull a few days ago ... At the click of a button.

 "Which itself, goes to prove the singular control of all the accounts."

I have absolutely no idea if any of this is true or not and I hesitate to spread fake news but it has the potential to become a very big story indeed. The DHSC denial is here:


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