Ofcom slammed over Neil Oliver 'turbo cancer' claims

GB News presenter Neil Oliver sparked fury last month when he spread a nonsensical conspiracy theory about “turbo cancer” existing and vaccine giant Pfizer buying companies to treat the non-existent condition, but now the broadcasting regular Ofcom has waded into the backlash to say the programme didn’t breach its rules.

As a reminder, Oliver – so critical of vaccines that he once said he’d happily catch Covid-10 “for the sake of freedom” – shared his thoughts on Pfizer’s acquisition of Seagen, a biotech company specialising in cancer treatments, which finished up back in December.

He said: “While young people drop dead and otherwise healthy people of all ages are harvested in hitherto unheard of numbers by heart disease and turbo cancer, our old friend Pfizer has been spending some of its recently acquired massive wealth buying companies that develop drugs to treat heart disease and turbo cancer.

“I don’t know about you, but until just a few months ago, I’d never heard of turbo cancer … Fuel injected, maybe with a bottle of nitrous oxide on the side for the sudden terrifying burst of speed across the line to unexpected death.”

He continued: “[Pfizer CEO Albert] Bourla has been all over the media predicting turbo cancers will affect a third of the world in the years ahead, even declaring that entire families will be affected.”

As we reported at the time, Bourla did not say ‘turbo cancers’ will affect a third of the world’s population – obviously.

And not only that, but five medical experts rubbished the bogus claim that the coronavirus vaccine causes “turbo cancer” in a fact-check published by Reuters back in December 2022.

70 complaints were made to Ofcom about the 13 January transmission, yet in a bulletin published this week, it confirmed it had assessed the complaints, but decided not to progress it to a full-scale investigation.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the watchdog said: “In line with freedom of expression, our rules allow broadcasters to cover controversial themes and topics. We recognise that these brief comments were the presenter’s personal view and did not materially mislead the audience.

“We therefore will not be pursuing this further.”

And Twitter/X isn’t exactly impressed:

Ofcom has previously found GB News in breach of its due impartiality rules (presenter Mark Steyn dramatically quit over his show getting penalised by the regulator for his vaccine comments), and currently has 12 investigations ongoing into the broadcaster.

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