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Profile

Dr Alexandre De Figueiredo

Dr Alex de Figueiredo is the statistics lead at the Vaccine Confidence Project – an organisation dedicated to “ensur[ing] sustained confidence in vaccines”.

His work focuses on tracking the confidence of the public in vaccination programmes in order to improve public health, and he holds a research fellowship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

By February 2022, Dr de Figueiredo had some reservations about the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s decision to vaccinate all healthy children.

“People who think we should be mass vaccinating children against Covid-19 poorly understand at least one of the following,” he tweeted, followed by a list of factors including “risk, including absolute risk,” ethics, vaccine confidence and long Covid.

The tweet mirrored debates happening inside and outside the Government about the long-term strategy of Covid vaccination, especially with respect to non-vulnerable people and levels of immunity in the population at large.

The policy was limited to six months, and was not renewed in August, with the effect that a cohort of five to 12-year-olds were jabbed but some of their younger peers were not.

A subject access request to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, seen by The Telegraph, shows that post was flagged as possible disinformation.

The department was originally alerted to the comment by Logically, an AI-powered tech startup hired by ministers at a cost of £1.2 million to hunt for disinformation online.

In reality, the firm flagged comments like Dr de Figueiredo’s – expressing legitimate and mainstream concerns about the Government’s lockdown and vaccination strategy.

Like most of those who have asked DCMS for their personal data relating to the Counter Disinformation Unit, Dr de Figueiredo has no idea what happened to the flag.

The Government has “Trusted Flagger” status with Twitter and other social media sites, which allows it to point out content it believes breaches the platform's terms of service.