Andrew Bridgen doubles down on false claims about vaccine trials

Bridgen persists with a blatant lie about covid vaccine trials

It’s somewhat depressing to notice Andrew Bridgen spout blatant falsehoods about vaccines and then watch as they are lapped up by a tribe of very online ‘truth seekers’. Bridgen seems to be enjoying his five minutes of fame and continues to rattle off the greatest hits of anti-covid vax falsehoods whenever he gets near a camera.

He seems to be getting a fair amount of airtime over at GB News. I recently wrote about his debate with Fraser Myers on the news channel and cleaned up the mess he made on that occasion.

So, I was pleased to see GB News presenter Nanaa Akua push back when Bridgen once again repeated the false claim that the vaccines “never went through stage three trials”.

You can watch the clip of this exchange below:

https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1657403619790970883

“Where are the results?” asks Bridgen when Akua informs him that the vaccines did in fact complete all 3 phases of clinical trials. The very results Bridgen is demanding were published in December 2020 could be found by a child.

The falsehood that the Covid vaccines did not go “through stage three trials” is designed to imply the vaccines did not complete the standardised safety checks before being rolled out to the general public. Ergo, the vaccines are dangerous.

The great thing about Bridgen’s claim here is that it is very specific and it’s either true or false. And whether it is true or false takes the tiniest amount of effort to reveal. And it is categorically false.

Given the ease with which one can discover that Bridgen is telling porkies here, I assumed he may have the good sense to desist from repeating this claim. Yet Bridgen has actually taken to Twitter to demand an apology from Nanaa Akua and Fraser Myers for attempting to correct him:

Bridgen thinks he has somehow found a smoking gun in the attached document, yet all the document does is confirm that the vaccines have commenced stage 4 of clinical trials. This is the standardised monitoring stage for all medicine. And you can only enter stage 4 of clinical trials when all 3 phases of clinical trials have been completed. Put short, despite Bridgen claiming the vaccines have not completed ‘stage three trials’, he has simply just shared a document proving they have. All you need to make sense on this aspect of vaccine trials is the ability to count to 4.

The below graphic demonstrates the various stages of clinical trials:

Whether the vaccines completed all 3 phases of clinical trials isn’t a grey area. It’s not a difference of political opinion. It’s an objective fact of reality that they did—and if Bridgen cannot accept that he got this one wrong, why should he be trusted to make sense on any of his other vaccine claims?

Nanaa Akua was right to correct Andrew Bridgen live on GB News. The fact that Bridgen still believes he is correct reveals the credulous echo chamber from which he operates.