Professor Norman Fenton: On How He Was Cancelled and What Climate Science Does Not Want You To Know About

Cancelling an acclaimed scientist has become easy. Professor Norman Fenton shared his story with us recently. He also pointed to how “climate science” lies for “the greater good”.

The article is a short summary of our recent podcast with Professor Fenton which you can listen to here.

Norman Fenton is the Professor Emeritus in risk at Queen Mary University of London. He is a leading expert in his field and a widely respected scientist. As a researcher, he is the author of seven books and more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles. His current research focuses on critical decision-making and quantifying risk and uncertainty using probabilistic models (Bayesian networks).

In 2020, he and colleagues started mapping the risks associated with Covid. Early on, they calculated, for example, that the risk from the disease was overstated by the government as well as by some of their fellow researchers. Together with his colleagues, he made research and published articles on vaccine efficacy and safety, reported on the still high excess mortality figures in various countries unrelated to Covid, repeatedly pointed out the flawed statistics shared by the governments on the pandemic, etc. We have also written about their work in an article based on an interview with Fenton's colleague Professor Martin Neil in April this year.

Some time ago, we also shared an article on how Fenton was invited to a National Health Service health and care analytics conference as an expert on the use of Bayesian network risk models for a range of chronic diseases. This conference was held in July and the organisers even tweeted about his participation. However, Fenton's presentation was cancelled soon after. The reason given was “a controversy around vaccinations” on his Twitter account.

Full-scale cancellation of a professor

Of course, this was not the first time Fenton had been punished for pointing out the errors of the so-called Covid science. "I was well respected in my field, but as soon as I started, in early 2020, to show that the Covid narrative, including the lockdowns, was driven by flawed and sort of easily manipulated statistics and data, I was immediately called a conspiracy theorist and I was also called publicly a rabid misinformation merchant," Fenton says, noting that such labels were pasted by some of his colleagues, other researchers.

Fenton was at the top of his field, involved in medical research that had nothing to do with the Covid issues. These concerned, for example, the risks of chronic diseases, which he and his colleagues estimated on the basis of their models. Now, however, a number of his scientific colleagues in the medical field demanded that his name be removed from the articles they had been about to publish together. Or if his name stayed, they wanted to remove theirs.

Professor Fenton has shared a letter informing him that his presentation oatn the NHS conference is cancelled. Photo: screenshot.

Fenton also cites that he had never had any problem with the publication of his research and articles before. Now, however, his and colleagues' articles on Covid topics were not wanted. "As soon as we started writing and attempting to publish papers which challenged this particular narrative, they were actually being rejected even from the pre-print servers," he explains, adding that in the end, they could only use one lesser-known server to upload their research.

Prior to the pandemic, Fenton was a valued speaker at the prestigious Queen Mary’s Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, also known as Barts, but after 2020, he was not invited there any more. Still, in November 2021, after Fenton and colleagues had begun publishing research on the safety and efficacy of vaccines – questioning both – an invitation arrived. Then, at the last minute, it was withdrawn. “They told me quite openly that it was because an internal campaign had been mounted to de-platform me," Fenton says. He was portrayed as a Covid denier and an anti-vaxer, someone who should not be allowed to speak.

Fenton's Wikipedia page was also changed to include the claim that he is a misinformation merchant. Until 2021 he was a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute as were several of his colleagues, but the fellowships were discontinued. This happened even to those who had nothing to do with his Covid research.

In addition, Fenton was one of those secretly under surveillance by the British Ministry of Defence's special information operations unit, the 77th Brigade. "They're supposed to be a counter-intelligence unit, but for the last three years they were basically engaged in the whole business of spying on and delegitimising all the people who were pointing out problems or countering the prevailing Covid narrative," Fenton says.

Climate science: Lie for the sake of the greater good

Fenton stresses that he is not a climate scientist or not even an expert on statistical models of climate change. But at the same time, he has a direct connection to the so-called climate science. In 2015, he was one of the presenters of a BBC documentary on climate change. The film was called Climate Change by Numbers and the idea was that three mathematicians would look at three figures about climate change and try to explain them in simple language.

Professor Fenton was one of the presenters of a 2015 BBC documentary about climate change. Photo: screenshot.

Looking back, Fenton calls the piece a 90-minute propaganda film. He explains that when he set out to make it, he had indeed hoped to point out, among other things, the problems behind the climate numbers, but his suggestions were ignored and critical parts were edited out of the final version of the film. He recalls that he was worried about a specific fact that was written into the script, because it did not ring true. The climatologist who consulted on the film assured him of its accuracy. When the film had already been broadcast, he discovered that the same professor had in fact published a scientific article a few months earlier, in which he claimed the exact opposite of the fact presented in the film. "So I got on the phone with him and told him that he had said it was okay to say this, but as can be seen he doesn't even believe in it himself. And he said to me essentially that we have to lie for the greater good," Fenton notes.

Fenton has other similar experiences as well. He says that after the BBC film aired, the 'fanatical climate science' circles, which predict the doom of the planet due to man-made global warming, thought he was one of them. He was invited to various conferences where the subject was discussed. At one of them, the professor presented his study on how life would be affected by a 1.5 degree rise in the Earth's temperature. The presentation clearly showed that hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by cold weather would not occur. “I was really pleased to hear this, I'm like, my God – this is, this is really good. This is positive that these people are not such nut cases after all,” he remembers thinking. “And then what happened is that at the end of the talk, that person said: but of course, whatever happens, we must never let this type of message go out publicly, we must always suppress this type of message,” he adds.

Fenton points out that there was also a recent study published in a prestigious scientific journal The Lancet, which also tried to suppress such info. The study showed that 10 times as many people in Europe die from cold compared to heat. "The authors actually tried to suppress that information with a graphic where they changed the scales from the deaths from the heat to the deaths of the cold to make it look like there were more deaths from heat than cold. Even though the paper was very clearly saying that ten times more people die of cold than heat," Fenton says.

A post on X presents how the authors of the article in The Lancet manipulated their graph. Photo: screenshot.