A Tribute to Keith from his fellow members at HART
Dr Ros Jones
We have recently learned of Keith’s death last year and this is a belated tribute from the HART team.
Keith joined HART early on and was an example of the wide range of expertise within the group. He had recently retired as a patent examiner after nearly thirty years experience in the field of diagnostic testing, including PCR, DNA chips and immunoassay.
He also held a D.Phil from Oxford University in the field of Molecular Reaction Dynamics, which involved statistical modelling and chemometrics.
In 2020, his understanding of statistical modelling and also his knowledge of PCR technology may have made him an early sceptic. He also had a strong ethical view and joined a group of health professionals, scientists and academics sending open letters to the regulators and to politicians on the perils of recommending the new mRNA technology covid vaccines to healthy children and the ethical bankruptcy of basing that policy on protecting the elderly and vulnerable. Over the three years 2022-2024, he signed no less than 23 letters, the first in January 2022 highlighting a new increased mortality in young males aged 15-19 noted just weeks after the vaccines started to be used in this age group. The last letter he signed was to Keir Starmer as part of NORTHgroup, an alignment of voices from across 29 countries calling for a moratorium on the mRNA platform.
He was always a very prompt responder to my requests for signatures on letters, often with just “Yes! K” but on other occasions a brief note of encouragement in our ongoing uphill battles to be heard. He also regularly joined the HART members’ Zoom calls. It was his reliability that made me question if anyone had a different email address for him, when I had four consecutive emails bounce back. I had fondly thought he had dropped his work email as he had finally retired fully, particularly given he was living mostly in Austria. So when Clare Craig found another email address and I wrote again, it was with great sadness that I received a reply from his wife Andrea to say that Keith had died last year.
She sent me these lovely pictures and tribute and also a link to Keith’s last publication – he had continued working to the end and had been really pleased to see this article in print only 6 weeks before he died. Smoke in your Eyes: Investigating the Effects of Wind Power on Weather Trends and Climate using Time Series Analysis
Meanwhile another member of HART recollected working with him on PCR testing back in 2021 and another messaged to say how Keith had helped her with supervision of final year undergraduate projects. “He did it pro bono, just because he was so passionate about training the young generation, helping them to develop critical thinking. He had loads of patience and all five students wrote a touching dedication to him in their dissertations.”
The tribute below reads: “Thankful for his tenderness, his intelligence, his humor and his compassion”.
We in the HARTgroup join his friends across the world to say a heartfelt thank you to Keith.
