Vernon Coleman

Vernon Edward Coleman (born 1946) is an English conspiracy theorist and writer, who writes on topics related to human health, politics and animal welfare.

He was formerly a general practitioner (GP) and newspaper columnist.

Coleman's medical claims have been widely discredited and described as pseudoscientific conspiracy theories.

Coleman was born in 1946, the only child of an electrical engineer.

He was raised in Walsall, Staffordshire, in the West Midlands of England, where he attended Queen Mary's Grammar School and a medical school in Birmingham.

Coleman qualified as a physician in 1970 and worked as a GP.

Coleman has since written under multiple pen names; in the late 1970s, he published three novels about life as a GP under the name Edward Vernon.

After publishing his first book, The Medicine Men, in 1976, which accused the National Health Service of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies, Coleman left the NHS.

In 1981, the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) fined him for refusing to write the diagnoses on sick notes, which he considered a breach of patient confidentiality.

In 1987 Coleman appeared on the Central Weekend Programme as a sceptic against jogging for fitness.

A 1989 editorial in the British Medical Journal criticised Coleman's comments made for The Sun as the 'Sun Doctor' on leprosy as a 'particularly distasteful piece of tabloid journalism...[containing] a catalogue of selected facts and misinterpretations' following the announcement that Diana, Princess of Wales, was to shake hands with a person with leprosy.

The incident was later covered on Channel 4's Hard News, with Coleman declining to defend his statement without a fee covering travel costs.

Writing for The Sun newspaper in 1989, Coleman denied that AIDS was a significant risk to the heterosexual community.

He later claimed AIDS is a hoax, writing, "it is now my considered view that the disease we know as AIDS probably doesn't exist and has never existed".

Such claims have been rejected by the medical community.

On 17 November 1989, The Sun published an article under the headline "Straight sex cannot give you AIDS—official", claiming "the killer disease AIDS can only be caught by homosexuals, bisexuals, junkies or anyone who has received a tainted blood transfusion".

The following day, Coleman supported The Sun 's claims with an article under the headline "AIDS—The hoax of the century", similarly claiming AIDS was not a significant risk to heterosexuals, that medical companies, doctors and condom manufacturers were conspiring to scare the public and had vested interests in profiteering from public service announcements, and that moral campaigners were attempting to frighten young people into celibacy to establish traditional family values.

Coleman also claimed gay activists were "worried that once it was widely known that AIDS was not a major threat to heterosexuals, then funds for AIDS research would fall".

Journalist David Randall argued in The Universal Journalist that the story was one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent history.

Coleman has claimed that COVID-19 is a hoax, that vaccines are dangerous, and that face masks cause cancer.

All these claims have been debunked by more senior medical professionals.

Coleman has also claimed the Coronavirus Pandemic has links to the Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theory and the Great Reset Theory, which both suggest a cabal of elite figures are attempting to depopulate the global community.

No evidence has been found to support these claims.

An anti-vivisectionist, Coleman provided a supplementary memorandum for the House of Lords on the topic of vivisection in 1993.

Coleman's 1993 novel Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War was turned into a film in 2002 with the same name.

Whilst working for The Sunday People, Coleman wrote that if children diagnosed with autism were "stuck up to their necks in a vat full of warm sewage for 10 hours they would soon learn some manners" and that diagnoses of hyperactivity and autism were "misused by middle-class, aspirational parents to excuse the behaviour of their obnoxious children."

Following the article, autism charities received phone calls from distressed parents.

The Chairman of the East Anglian Autistic Support Trust, Owen Spencer-Thomas, whose elder son has severe autism, condemned Coleman's remarks as "irresponsible, medically unsound and deeply hurtful" to families that had a child with autism.

Spencer-Thomas challenged Coleman to spend 24 hours caring for his son in the presence of fully trained carers who understood the effects of autism.

Coleman declined and refused to withdraw his remarks leading to an investigation by the Press Complaints Committee.

During his time at the paper, Coleman was again censured by the Press Complaints Commission for making misleading medical claims.

In 1994 Coleman was ordered to pay damages for threatening scientist Colin Blakemore, who had been targeted by anti-vivisection activists after a letter bomb sent by animal rights group calling itself 'The Justice Department' was sent to Blakemore's home, with another exploding and injuring three people.

Blakemore was later granted a temporary injunction by a High Court judge after Coleman had said he would publish a pamphlet with Blakemore's home address and telephone number to encourage the public to 'get in touch with you to discuss your work'.

Coleman was ordered not to publish anything that might jeopardize Colin Blakemore's safety and to give solicitors the names of anyone to whom he might already have given the information.

In 1995, Coleman published the book How to Stop Your Doctor Killing You, which the Advertising Standards Authority later subjected to an advertisement ban.

Coleman went on to work as a newspaper columnist for a number of publications, including The Sun and The Sunday People, where he was an agony uncle until he resigned in 2003.

Coleman became a self-published author in 2004 after Alice's Diary, a book about his cat, was turned down by traditional publishers.

He relinquished his medical licence in March 2016 and is no longer registered or licensed to practice as a GP.

Coleman was reported to have been made an honorary professor by the International Open University based in Sri Lanka.

Coleman's self-published books and blog have been reported as a major source of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, cancer, HIV/AIDS, vaccines and human health.