Labour frontbencher Rosena Allin-Khan has been mocked over two attempts at the same tweet. In a desperate bid to attack the government, the Tooting MP raked up PPE shortages in the NHS from almost twelve months ago. In her original tweet Allin-Khan attached an image of a nurse with what appears to be a bin bag draped over her uniform. This was to illustrate her point that nurses in the NHS were so desperate as to resort to such methods. Unfortunately for Rosena, this turned out to be a photo of a nurse in Spain (see below).
After eagle-eyed Twitter users identified the photograph's origins and Tory minister Christopher Pincher asked her to confirm it, Allin-Khan deleted the tweet.
However, such was Allin-Khan's desperation to make her point about PPE shortages, she re-wrote the tweet and this time attached two new images (see below). Unfortunately, she'd got it wrong again.
The picture on the left-hand side of her tweet does not show nurses wearing bin bags. As many Twitter users pointed out, bin bags do not traditionally come with sleeves! One user even posted a link to a site where such aprons could be purchased.
Another user questioned both pictures, saying that the picture on the right showed pink aprons and not 'bin bags'. Donna Stimpson is an ICU nurse, so she should know.
The picture on the right-hand side of Allin-Khan's tweet comes from a BBC report from April 2020, in which it is claimed that the pink plastic sheets are 'bin bags'. Clearly this casts doubt on the BBC report too. Incidentally, the photo of the Spanish nurse can be found in the same report, so Allin-Khan had initially passed on the pink 'bin bags' as they weren't convincing enough.
If the use of bin bags was so 'widely documented' as Allin-Khan puts it, she appeared to scrape the barrel in finding evidence of it. Very poor and very desperate stuff from a bitter individual who earlier this year falsely claimed that the vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi had jumped the vaccine queue. He hadn't and she apologised.
