After writing a lengthy 109 page paper analyzing and critically reviewing/debunking most of Tim Noakes’ anti-vaccine misinformation online (see below), this misinformation has continued, but it seems to have spilled over into other topics such as COVID-19 and now more recently, US politics.
Anti-Vaccine Misinformation Summary:
- See Here: “Understanding and Quantifying Anti-Vaccine Misinformation Online: A Critical Report and Social Media Analysis About Emeritus Professor Timothy Noakes”
- And Here: “2020 UPDATE on the Critical Report and Social Media Analysis About Emeritus Professor Timothy Noakes”
Upon analysis of Tim Noakes’ social media, there is a substantial amount of evidence for concern. From June to December 2019 there was a statistically significant increase in the number of followers Noakes gained that also aligned with anti-vaccine views. As for the content that Noakes himself has shared and expressed, 90% were Anti-Vaccine in nature, while only 10% were Pro-Vaccine. The potential maximum number of exposures to this anti-vaccine misinformation and rhetoric are in the millions, with approximately 3 million exposures in 2019 alone and 4 million in total from 2014 to 2019. The claim that Noakes “is not anti-vaccine” and has not shared anti-vaccine misinformation is terribly weak and not based on the evidence.
The first four months of 2020 led to a 3% increase in Anti-Vaccine tropes and no change in Pro-Vaccine tropes. 93%(207/223) of Noakes’ shared expressions were Anti-Vaccine in nature, while still only 7% (16/223) were Pro-Vaccine. In the first four months of 2020, Tim Noakes generated a maximum of approximately 7 million (7,213,804) exposures to vaccine misinformation and or anti-vaccine rhetoric and narratives. Across all tweets from 2014 to May 7th, 2020, this number adds up to a staggering 11 million (11,393,749) maximum exposures.
His Response:
Originally, the papers were posted on Research Gate (RG); however, Noakes requested that they be removed. They were. I now, on January 9th 2021, see that The Noakes Foundation released his letter to Research Gate back in July 2020. That can be found here. I might write a longer response, but I’m not sure it is worth it — here are ten of my first thoughts:
(This is drama from the past, it is kind of long so you can skip this part.)
- In short: HE CLEARLY DIDN’T READ THE ENTIRE PAPER.
- He claims that I did “not ‘review’ vaccine-related ‘misinformation'”. I did. I don’t always go into detail; however, there are several sections that discuss common misleading vaccine claims.
- Noakes claims that I take his tweets out of context, I’d like to know how. If he shares a link to an anti-vaccine video, then we can conclude that he shared a link to an anti-vaccine video. Going through the tweets also requires that we look at the context as a whole before the original tweet was posted. The subtext here also matters. Again, I do not claim to know his exact opinions; however, through the consistent behavior and written text online, we can start to see a very clear pattern. Also, he has expressed his opinion on the matter a couple of times.
- I do agree that I could have discussed cancer misinformation elsewhere. This was a mistake on my part that took away focus from vaccines; HOWEVER, I acknowledge this in the paper: “While this does indeed trail away from the main topic of vaccines, it is apart of a larger theme of misinformation in general and demonstrates the convergence between misleading cancer and vaccine ideologies.” This is why there is a separate section titled Cancer. Admittedly, I got caught up in writing, but I knew that this wasn’t meant for peer review or actual publication! More importantly, while this section might not be relevant, it is still helpful because it has inspired me to write an actual literature review on the topic. Nonetheless, this section further demonstrates the common spread and crossover between topics of misinformation.
- I do agree with him that I could have contacted him beforehand, although this slightly misses the point of the paper — when addressing misinformation, the target audience should be the general public and not the person posting the misinformation. I have seen multiple people say this such as Drs. Jonathan N. Stea and Timothy Caulfield for example.
- Noakes claims that I do “not acknowledge ongoing controversy, diversity of thought and opinion”. I discuss this difference in opinion and how giving these opinions equal weight when it isn’t scientifically justified creates false balance. “Yet if he cared to actually review the literature on vaccine safety” — I think he has no idea that I talk about vaccine safety, common safety claims and more importantly, I cite a lot of info about vaccine safety (for example here, here, here, here, here, and here).
- Noakes claims I have an agenda “that has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of proper scientific debate of contentious scientific issues”. Wrong.
- He uses his past medical training and credentials as an appeal to authority. That is literally one of the issues at hand that I talk about in the paper. At this point, especially within the context of what I am talking about, it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
- He claims I am in the “Nursing Faculty” and am “not a medical student nor in the pure biological sciences”. That is dead wrong. I am not in the nursing program. I am doing a B.Sc. with a major in Biomedical Science.
- Basically, Noakes then goes on about it being “unusual” for a paper like this to be posted to RG. Although, narrative reviews by a single author without peer review have been published on RG before, including one that Noakes will later retweet. I do agree that I should have recategorized it as a pre-print.
- Finally, Noakes cites the very blogs that I go through point by point in the paper! These are the two blogs by Marika. His other sources about his nutrition trial are not relevant.
Here are four key points made below and something I have stressed repeatedly. If the overwhelming majority of posts and retweets bias a certain unscientific flawed position consistently over a long period of time, and without necessary correction or retraction of said posts, then we have reasonable evidence to conclude that the individual aligns with that position. Some completely ignore the substance of what they have said and play the victim card instead — in other words:
After the paper: COVID and beyond
After finishing the paper — which concluded that there is undeniable evidence that Noakes’ vaccine-related posts have pretty much all been anti-vaccine in nature — in February, I set out to continue to save screenshots of additional retweets/posts that were either overly controversial and concerning, unscientific, and or blatant misinformation. There were a few times that I also took note of positive corrections or actual commendable efforts to post scientific information.
*Unfortunately, throughout the months my names for the pictures varied every so often which makes it less accurate when looking up search terms, thus all calculations will be approximations regarding the number of screenshots.
~50.2% (~126/251) posts I have saved, as of Nov 21st, have been about COVID-19. ~67.4% (~85/126) of these COVID-19 posts contained misinformation.
Some of this misinformation included support towards anti-vaccine conspiracy theoriest, Judy Mikovits, attacks against Dr. Fauci, HCQ posts, downplaying the virus, herd immunity claims, false claims about media censorship, misleading Vitamin C immune boosting claims, and more anti-government anti-vaccine posts. He’s recently shared a post that says COVID is a hoax. He also drifted into germ theory denialism in September.
There have also been a lot of what I’d call half truths. It is true that Noakes has shared some studies that make it past peer review, for example, against lockdowns. It is true that these studies are published in legit journals and are written by people with legit credentials. This much is true, but that is about it. The issue here has been that several of these studies, such as the recent one by John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, have been heavily flawed — for more info please read both threads by Drs. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Andreas Backhaus.
- Great news. I’m amazed to see Marika has recently shared pro-vaccine information from Dr. Peter Hotez, and several other pro-vaccine, pro-science retweets, thus this pattern of misinformation can change; however, for Noakes, it has not.
- As of Dec 8th, misleading posts, some that are blatantly incorrect, keep being shared. After almost 9 months of keeping track of all of the misleading COVID related posts shared by Tim Noakes, I think I give up.
As we transition into 2021, this COVID misinformation has continued:
US Election Fraud
More recently, Noakes has retweeted/posted around 55 Election Fraud related tweets. Some have been corrections against election fraud claims; however, several haven’t.
Roughly 65.5% (36/55) of tweets, as of Nov 23rd, have been supporting the false election fraud narrative.
This has continued to change, but the change is minimal. The fluctuations seem to reach ~65% at a minimum and ~72% as a maximum, thus it seems like as of right now, a majority of tweets/retweets still aid support to the election fraud narrative.
Jonathan Rosenthal, The Economist’s London-based Africa editor, comments below:
Rosenthal was hoping for a tweet “with actual evidence or credible reporting, rather than a photo with words typed on it (and no sourcing)”, sadly, we did not get that.
HOWEVER, on Nov 23rd, he finally corrected this Election Fraud misinformation.
Sounds like this was a personal choice in order to avoid losing a very close friend.
Isn’t worth it. So I’m out of here. I’ll be watching from the sidelines. I’m certainly not captured by the pro- or anti-Trump folks…my “political” opinions will remain my own.
HOWEVER, he posted another video about election fraud on Dec 3rd and this was the response
On Dec 5th, six more posts supporting the false election fraud claims were shared by Noakes, including a post by Team Trump. This is not the first time Noakes has shared Trump propaganda.
Team Trump continues in January 2021:
This article by Alistair Fairweather titled “Why do so many South Africans (still) love Donald Trump?“ is quite fascinating and relevant here.
This logic (picture below) hurts my head. We can say with confidence that there is no convincing evidence of election fraud. Yes, who knows, maybe for some reason this will somehow change in umm 20 years according to Noakes, but currently, we can conclude that there isn’t any convincing evidence. Science changes, evidence can change, conclusions about said evidence can change. That is partially Noakes’ point, that the evidence about election fraud can change; however, this fact doesn’t mean we should continue to create false balance by giving equal weight to each side when there isn’t equal weight to begin with.
Keep in mind too that there has been a huge amount of contradiction and hypocrisy when Noakes talks about science, thinking scientifically, “following the evidence”, “changing your mind”, and posting untruth information (p. 101-106). As I mention in my paper, Noakes has said that he tries “not to embrace any narrative that is not supported by definitive evidence” (p. 109). This claim contradicts every piece of anti-vaccine misinformation he has shared and expressed. This level of contradiction continues to be incredibly frustrating and disappointing.
This Twitter post above is similar to the common “Just Asking Questions” trope within the anti-vaccine community, and something that we’ve seen Noakes do quite frequently.
But alas, I think we’ve reached the conclusion of the election fraud claims for now.
January 2021 Update: NO, this wasn’t the end. On Dec 31st, Noakes retweeted four new election fraud posts that contain none other than the MyPillow Guy.
- Update: the MyPillow guy was now trying to urge Trump to use the Insurrection Act and invoke martial law.
Social Media Trends Continued…
Unfortunately, this recent burst of false balance has had a detrimental effect on his number of Twitter followers. Quite a few LCHF/Banting followers of his have come out saying that they still enjoy his work in the diet field and that he has helped them in their diet and lifestyle journey; however, they have also expressed concern over his recent posts.
I suspect that there is an association between Noakes’ posts about Election Fraud, the “Trump Narrative”, etc. and his recent loss of followers starting around Nov 3rd.
Between Nov 4th to the 15th, Noakes had a net loss of ~577 followers. This is a rare negative trend for Noakes’ follower data. From Nov 4th to Dec 14th, Noakes had a net loss of ~1339 followers.
This is what that loss looks like:
However, all of a sudden there was an increase again of almost 300 followers from Dec 14th to the 18th although this was short lived.
From 2014 to the beginning of 2020 there has been a pretty steady, almost linear, upward trend in Noakes’ follower count.
However, starting in about April there is a small jump with a sudden leveling out.
If we zoom into that trend we can see that starting from April 3rd to 12th there is all of a sudden a major jump. This keeps increases till about late May and has very very slowly been increasing from there. It seems as though this small uptick of ~2000 followers in April coincides with increased COVID & anti-vaccine misinformation shared by Noakes. Although, this is a speculation, the causal relationship here will never be known.
My hypothesis now is that this sudden drop in followers is not due to some Twitter censorship conspiracy theory but due to people unfollowing because of his polarizing, typically right-wing, typically unscientific, non-diet related posts. Something concerning to look at will be if Noakes has lost followers in one area, but gained or maintained followers in another area.
Sadly, this has been the case in the start of May when his follower count was leveling out. There had been an increase in anti-vaccine related followers. That is, people who follow Noakes and anti-vaccine accounts such as Children’s Health Defense (blue) and RFK, Jr. (red). There was also a very unfortunate but unsurprising increase in Judy Mikovits followers.
Tim Noakes had joined the app Parler. Concerningly, he apparently had done this because he believed his Twitter account was being “controlled” when he tweeted about “sensitive” topics. He said he’d use the platform to promote scientific information and debate, but he has not done this in a majority of cases, especially when the topic has been something such as vaccines. A majority of what he has posted related to either COVID-19 or US politics for example has created false balance.
Fact Check: the Dominion voter fraud claim is false and baseless:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/technology/no-dominion-voting-machines-did-not-delete-trump-votes.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/politics/dominion-voting-false-claim-delete-trump-votes-fact-check/index.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-and-friends-host-steve-doocy-debunks-trumps-dominion-voter-fraud-conspiracy-pushed-by-fox-stars
The claim of “censorship” comes up a couple of times in this blog. Erin Gallagher, a social media researcher, had two good tweets about it:
Oh the irony here. The two tweets below by Noakes’ co-author and friend, Marika Sboros, cannot be emphasized more. I think she knows about his nonsense…
By the way, I can confirm that despite sharing some misinformation in the past, Marika Sboros and Tim Noakes have completely diverged from what they post on Twitter.
Thankfully, Marika is doing a great job amplifying frontline doctors and scientists in the respected field.
But what is Parler and why is it deeply concerning?
Well, it seems to be part of the Russian disinformation campaign. Yes, that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it seems to be well documented. Additionally, it seems to be where right-wing Trump supporters had gone to engage in “free speech”, although some suspected that this would result in a mass of misinformation. It did.
Additional info can be found here:
- “What is Parler? Everything you need to know about the conservative social network.”
- “Conservatives find home on social media platforms rife with misinformation.”
- “Conservatives Flock To Mercer-Funded Parler; Claim Censorship On Facebook And Twitter”
- “Parler Games: Inside the Right’s Favorite ‘Free Speech’ App”
It is extremely concerning, and telling, that these were really the only people Noakes followed on Parler:
I am not going to go into all of them right now.
- One common example though: Sharyl Attkisson is known for posting mass amount of misinformation, notably anti-vaccine misinformation and myths. Noakes has called her “fearless”. Predictably, she also postedfalse information on Parler.
When I first started writing this post, Noakes was following Katie Hopkins and David Icke. I did write more about them, including the publication on how Icke was a major conspiracy theorist, but it seems that Noakes stopped following them.
At first glace though, I’d also call attention to the fact that Noakes was following Dr. Simone Gold, Dr. Zev Zelenko, Scott Atlas and Tucker Carlson.
Tying a lot of this together, there has been much crossover between MAGA Trump activists and anti-vaxxers, one such example is demonstrated by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. This has also been emphasized by Dr. Richard Pan.
Noakes retweeted Dr. Simone Gold’s posts at least 6 times and retweeted several of Dr. Zev Zelenko’s posts as well. Noakes retweeted Dr. Gold as recent as January 12th, 16th and 29th.
*The Telegram group page contains more anti-vaccine COVID disinformation.
Of note, not only have they consistently downplayed the pandemic, made dubious claims, and promoted COVID treatments that don’t seem to work, both Drs. Simone Gold and Zev Zelenko were at the rally in DC that eventually led to the attack on the US Capitol. Dr. Zelenko seems to suggest that he’d support the Proud Boys because of “Truth”, “maintaining liberty” and “freedom”. These are two people that Noakes follows and has amplified much of their misinformation — this is, and has been, quite concerning.
The FBI is now seeking information about various individuals who breached the Capitol — one of them is none other than Dr. Simone Gold.
Update:
Parler has surrendered complete forensic databases to the FBI.
I can confidently say that Noakes’ activity on Parler was minimal — which was not what I was expecting.
Apple, Google have suspended Parler from their app stores and now Amazon has kicked the app off their web server. The website is now down.
Update: Noakes is now on Gab.
Future Directions
Given the recent trend in Tim Noakes’ followers, I am curious to see where it goes.
Network Analysis:
I am in the middle of the data collection and planning stage of a social media network analysis. This is inspired from the Connections section of the original social media analysis I did for the paper I wrote, and I believe it is a more robust method of understanding the connections between his followers.
So far, I have collected the names (and other meta data) of >900,000 Twitter followers. This includes all of Noakes’ followers and followers from popular anti-vaccine Twitter accounts.
This is where I am still figuring things out. The goal is to categorize each one of Noakes’ followers based on which anti-vaccine account they are also following, as well as if they are following more than one.
- I recently created a practice network — I am trying to optimize the work flow before I work with tens of thousands of accounts.
For those interested in networks, specifically regarding online disinformation,, see Erin Gallagher’s and Dave Troy’s work.
Along with all of that, I collected the data of Noakes’ followers in Oct and after the sudden drop in Nov. This will hopefully allow us to better understand who unfollowed him. It is possible that a majority of the accounts were just deactivated by Twitter as apart of their normal “pruning” process to get rid of bots and inactive accounts. It is also possible that these accounts that unfollowed Noakes are still active and that this somehow correlates to the increase in election fraud posts.
But especially now since the US Capitol riot, Twitter has removed more than 70,000 far-right QAnon conspiracy theory accounts. Between January 7th and 14th, Noakes lost ~1741 followers. Who was removed? — to answer this I will collect a list of his followers again and compare time points.
See an example of a Voter Fraud Network Analysis here:
- Again, lots of people, including Noakes, have complained about this recent drop in followers since the US Capitol riot and have cried “censorship”. But it is interesting that we know pretty much exactly the type of accounts that were removed; hence, why is it such an issue?
Back to the original project — the metadata that comes along with these followers is the amount of followers they have, how many people they are following, their number of tweets, when they created their account, and even an URL to their profile pic. With all of this info, I am hoping to somehow create a ratio or systematic way to determine which users are most likely to be either bots or inactive accounts. You can imagine how an account created a year ago that is following two people, only has one tweet, no followers and has the default Twitter profile picture might be suspicious. It is possible that these are the accounts Noakes lost over time.
Additionally, I can update the number of shared followers that I was tracking back when I wrote the paper. I stopped because I was using FollowerWonk and you have to pay for certain features and it was getting pricy.
So that is where things are right now. The goal is to visualize shared relationships between users. This might identify a clear echo chamber or cluster of Noakes’ followers who share or align with anti-vaccine misinformation. This would hopefully help make sense of this entire situation.
I will keep you posted.
In closing,
There are several — some established professionals, some lay-public — who are tired and frustrated with Tim Noakes’ persistent stream of unscientific misinformation and conspiracy-like content.
That isn’t to say all of what he posts is nonsense. That isn’t to say that we can longer celebrate his successes in the sports science and nutrition fields. That isn’t to say that he hasn’t helped people along their nutrition and journey towards a healthy lifestyle.
However, over the last few years, this information has lessened on Noakes’ social media. Several, including myself, have tried to correct his misinformation and usher him into the scientific direction, but these efforts have not been successful.
As I specifically include in the abstract section of my paper: “The conclusions made in this paper are not all conclusive and there is room for flexibility — what is written is also meant to stimulate further input and discussion. Given the personal and emotive nature of the topic, it should be emphasized that what is written is with a non-malicious intent and should be perceived as in the interest of public health and online safety.”
As said above, efforts to engage in further discussion about this misinformation have been unsuccessful and several have participated in correcting Tim Noakes online. After he explicitly quoted a tweet in January 2020 which made false autism vaccine claims, as mentioned in my Update Paper, both Dr. Grant Jacobs and Dr. Tara C. Smith corrected him on this. What Noakes tweeted was scientifically untrue.
While several in the science and health field have amplified my paper, it is not about me. It is about what I complied together, the mass amount of posts shared and created by Tim Noakes that contain misleading and or unscientific vaccine (and COVID) misinformation.
Some reactions are below:
In closing, even those who have defended Tim Noakes in the past are frustrated. Those who have tried to look past his anti-vaccine misinformation and have tried to focus on diet and lifestyle, even they have had enough. They are frustrated by COVID-19 and they are frustrated by COVID-19 misinformation, the very misinformation that Tim Noakes keeps sharing.
Till the next update — Thank you.
FIN.
Sincerely, Science 