Tom Barnett - The Covid19 video (debunk)
Facebook account - where it was also taken down for similar reasons. His YouTube channels About section is devoid of any information (at time of writing anyhow, and I strongly doubt this will change) and it doesn't link to any other channels.
So what I have been able to determine outside of that is he has been active in Australian politics to the degree that he he stood for election in 2019 for the Involuntary Medication Objectors Party, and failed. And even then the only way I could find that information on him was with the search term "who is "Tom Barnett" anti vax" as just looking up "Tom Barnett" brings up far too many results relating to far too many people that are clearly not him, he is literally lost in a sea of people with the same name as himself. But his Facebook stated his is a manger of Mystery Illness Support Centre, of which he is the only listed member of staff. It's stated mission is: To provide much needed support to those suffering from 'mystery illness,' such as CFS, Lyme, heavy metal toxicity (and environmental toxins), viral/bacterial/fungal infection and more.
Also a quick search on Twitter shows no profile for him that I can find, but there are links to his video there, some with favourable comments and support, others, not so much.
But with his video down that hasn't stopped numerous people copying it before hand and re-uploading it to their own YouTube channels. In one such mirror, his video he spends time discussing the current corona virus or Covid19 situation the world is in and tries to dispel a lot of widely known information that has been made available to the public about it.
That video is clearly a textbook example of a conspiracy theorists dream. He spends a small amount of time at the start to establish his intelligence and credentials, even going as far as to mention he took an IQ test, but then states he was taken into a room to check if he cheated on said test. I find this to be very unlikely. I've taken these kind of test before (under medical supervision as part of study in the effort of anaemia on concentration levels) and the questions used were randomised, therefore impossible to cheat on. Granted that randomisation might not be true of every test ever produced, and testing may vary from country to country, but the fact that he mentioned his results were so good as to garner suspicion he had cheated, does beg the question, if his IQ results are so good, why didn't he state what his IQ is supposed to be? Given the large amount of different IQ tests available, and what differing areas each test is meant to look at, he never mentions any details about the kind of IQ tests he took. It's possible he might not remember what the tests were like, but I can recall what kind of tests I took in a hospital appointment some twenty years ago, and doing so might help add a bit of credibility to his statement.
For the record, I should point out I am not in any way a medical or science expert, nor am I a journalist. I have no qualifications in any of these areas, I'm simply a man with a blogger account who likes to write every now and then and occasionally makes videos on YouTube. However in this same video, he does not state what his occupation actually is. He goes into his background and a bit about his training in medicine and science, but never mentions what branches of medicine or science, or what his occupation or former occupation is or was.
Which just raises more questions. Is he a doctor? Is he an ex doctor? What are his actual qualifications in? Where did he train? By bringing up what seems to be an edited version of his credentials he actually raises a few questions about himself that are not answered unless you do some research of your own. Of course since watching that video I’ve found his Facebook page for Mysterious Illness and the link to it’s own website which is under the name Global Dynamics which mentions that it utilises holistic methods and that it has treated, amongst others, athletes and Royalty but only features Tom again as it’s sole team member.
But let’s get to the subject of the video itself. In it Tom makes some statements about Viruses that are quite different from what you may have heard about the Covid19 on any media, be it the TV, radio or internet in general, be it a digital newspaper or the blog of a medical doctor or other professional in the field. But one of his statements is that a virus is not a living thing and that it can only be transmitted to a person if it is injected into you. In other words, person to person infection is impossible, as if a virus jumping species, according to Tom.
I can not recall ever hearing any one claim that a virus is in any way alive. Be that during this crisis or before. Not once, so why he feels he has to address this is beyond me, unless of course the Australian media has been misreporting it as such, if that is the case, then why not state why he brought up that very point?
While a virus may not be a living thing, and I've no doubt that it is possible to inject a virus into someone, that's basically what vaccination is in the first place, something he is against as well as he states this is how you actually the only real way to transfer viruses into someone. What he's saying about them not being transmittable from person to person is easily debunked by every known source that has studied these issues. Someone with the virus breathes out, coughs, sneezes and sends the droplets containing the virus outwards. Someone else breathes it in, touches something that's covered in the germs and then touches their face, or has an open wound that the germs get in and hey presto, you have another person with the virus, regardless of whether they ever show symptoms or not.
This is so well documented and accepted by medical science all over the world, every medical source you care to check online will tell you the same thing. If there is any medical evidence to back up his claims about viruses there should be some research published somewhere to back up his claims, to allow him to show where he is getting his information from. But he never provides any such links or references to the names of books or research papers on the subject so that we can verify it for ourselves by trying to find the same materials ourselves.
As a video editor myself, I can tell you it's the work of about 30 seconds to put up just one subtitle of any kind on a video you upload to anywhere on the net. This could the name of the researchers, their institute, or the name of a textbook he’s researched form or even the URL of a website containing the information he's referring to. Even if you don't add the URL as a working link, just putting in the URL on screen so people can type it themselves later does not take much effort.
He does provide references he reads out from a card for patents he claims relate to the Covid19 Coronavirus. us2006257852 and ep3172319b1, and after only a few minutes of checking.... well, they have nothing to do with Covid19 at all.
This link ought to provide a clue as to how wrong his information is there. It makes reference to another video by KenGee Ehrlich, a California chiropractor making the same claim as Tom about the "connection" between Covid19 and these patents. Now admittedly this article is about a video by someone else, but Tom does reference having seen a video by someone else making the same claims, but he never names them. Possibly it might be this KenGee, but I can’t confirm that. But both Tom’s video and the video referenced in the link make reference to these patents as if they have anything to do with the current coronavirus, when in fact they do not. They refer to earlier coronaviruses that have nothing to do with the current situation at all.
Now that is spreading false information on the part of Tom and KenGee purely because they claims these patents are directly linked to Covid19. More worryingly Tom seems to be under the impression that coronavirus is a totally new thing, when in fact it isn't. I'll admit I had never heard the term before the current outbreak, but when I first googled the term I found the wikipedia page which informed me that coronaviruses are a family of viruses.Including the common cold. And that page has now been updated to link to a separate page about the current 2019/20 outbreak of Covid19 which is simply the shorthand used for the full term of Corona Virus Disease 2019.
So how long have we had coronavirus as a term? It turns out they were officially recognised in the 1930s with the human variants starting to be discovered in the 1960s. And just to clarify that basically means we just determined their existence officially at that point, not that they first appeared out of nowhere in the 1930s and 1960s. After all, people had been coughing and sneezing thanks to the common cold long before the 1930s.
And that leads us on to his talk about the patents themselves.
In fact you can find the second patent details for ep3172319b1 straight away on google, it's right here and it's patent relating to Bronchitis.
But that first patent he refers to? us2006257852 is a reference to a patent relating to the SARS outbreak of 2002. Again, the very first result on google is the breakdown for the patent itself. While it is true that the current pandemic is a related, it is a recent development and has nothing to do with either of the patents Tom or KenGee has mentioned. This could just be confusion on their parts as reading through the articles does bring up a lot of similar terms and references to the same details, but even if that is the case, the end result is two false claims being made about patents that have nothing to do with the current, very different virus we are dealing with. I don't know if either of them are just hoping no one bothers to do any of their own research, or if they just made honest mistakes with their own, but just a few minutes of googling provides accurate information that discredits these two points alone.
I've spent a fair bit of time on this article in just a few hours by just looking over his video in full at least five times by now, and looking over so many of the things he's brought up, but I’ve only touched on some of what he has said. And I could spend even more hours decimating the rest of what he's said and finding evidence to the contrary on those items as well, but I don’t feel the need to. What I do find bizarre is how people are treating what he has said as if it all true, when he has not provided any shred of evidence to back up his claims, beyond two patents, which I’ve already shown have no bearing or connection to what he is claiming they do.
But people do believe him, even if it is just a small amount of people which is why his video has been copied and mirrored on other YouTube channels. I’ve no doubt in time these copies of the video will be removed at some point too, but the only reason they have gotten this level of support is because the people who have copied it share his beliefs. He's clearly intelligent, even if he'd not gone to great lengths to "prove" that in this video alone he comes across as articulate, well spoken, even knowledgeable on the subject of viruses, to a certain degree at least, not everything he says about viruses is wrong after all, he gives just enough correct information and speaks in a calm manner to avoid looking like the typical crackpot, tinfoil hat wearing loon. And he obviously believes what he is saying, all of which would attract other believers in this kind of conspiracy to his cause and encourage him to make other videos on the same or similar subject matter. And these beliefs are incredibly dangerous as they are not based on facts, just misrepresentation.
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