A vaccine opponent is sentenced to 5 years for encouraging terrorism during pandemic

LONDON — An opponent of vaccines who wrote social media posts urging violence against scientists, politicians and public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic was sentenced Monday to five years in prison after being convicted of encouraging terrorism.

A British judge said 55-year-old Patrick Ruane had a “compulsive and obsessive” opposition to vaccines and spewed vitriol on the Telegram messaging app. One message described “whacking” England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, over the head.

In a series of messages in 2021, Ruane posted that he was “all for hunting them down and … executing” those who made and delivered COVID-19 vaccines. He encouraged others to “find where they live, put a kill squad together and shoot” them in their beds.

In a discussion about Whitty, the vaccine opponent wrote that hitting someone on the back of the skull with a rounders bat – similar to a baseball bat – or a metal mace “would turn said target into a vegetable for the rest of its life.”

He also called for an “IRA playbook,” a reference to the Irish Republican Army’s bombing and shooting campaign, and advocated blowing up vaccine laboratories and 5G phone towers.

“This wasn’t idle chit-chat online – he was encouraging people to seriously injure or kill others, suggesting who to target," said Acting Commander Gareth Rees of the Metropolitan Police Counterterrorism Command, which began investigating Ruane's posts in 2021.

Prosecutor Julia Faure Walker said the posts reached a “very large audience” through two Telegram chat groups, one of which had 18,000 users and the other 8,000 users.

Ruane, an audio producer for films, was initially arrested in November 2021 and charged almost two years later. He was convicted at London’s Central Criminal Court in September on two counts of encouraging terrorism.

Passing sentence on Monday, Judge Richard Marks said Ruane’s messages were “extremely dangerous” during a volatile time.

“You were, of course, fully entitled to publicly vent your views and to do so in an extremely cogent and forceful way, if you chose,” the judge said. “You, however, went very much further and in so doing committed the offences of which you were convicted.”