Professor Carl Heneghan is sceptical about lockdowns and masks

Professor Carl Heneghan, of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, recently pointed out that the statistics in England for deaths with (not from, by the way) Covid-19 were very inaccurate because they did not make any allowance for the fat that people recover from it. Someone who tests positives but recovers or never has any symptoms and is killed in a road accident is recorded as a Covid-19 death. 

It takes an eminent epidemiologist to point this out. 

What absolute rubbish is being fed to us by governments and by the media.

This whole panic is driven by social media and bad journalism but bad journalism is part of the human condition. The serpent speaking to Eve was the first bad journalist. Social media and the power that Twitter wields is new. 


It has recently led to violent riots and a left-wing social revolution across the world. 

Revolutionary forces trying to change society are also part of the human condition - you had them in the fourteenth century too and in the fourth -but  this time big business, the very rich and the politicians of most countries side with the revolutionaries. Perhaps it is a new religion comparable with Christianity, which was adopted by the Emperor Constantine and most of his successors. If so it a religion spread by Twitter and Facebook.

I digress, which I hope is my charm. Getting back to Professor Heneghan, here are some quotations from him. The one I'd draw to your attention, from his recent interview with Unherd, is:

“Many people said that we should have locked down earlier, but 50% of care homes developed outbreaks during the lockdown period."

The next two quotations are old - dating from April 9. The rest are from the interview with Unherd.

"80% of the virus-related deaths were estimated to occur in those over 65 years of age. In seasonal influenza epidemics, about 70% to 90% of deaths occur in people under 65." 

"The data support the theory that the current epidemic is a late seasonal effect in the Northern Hemisphere on the back of a mild ILI season. The age structure of those most affected does not fit the evidence from previous pandemics." 

“In a pandemic you’d expect to see young people disproportionately affected, but in the UK we’ve only had six child deaths, which is far less than we’d normally see in a pandemic. The high number of deaths with over-75s fits with the seasonal theory."

“By all means people can wear masks but they can’t say it’s an evidence-based decision… there is a real separation between an evidence-based decision and the opaque term that ‘we are being led by the science’, which isn’t the evidence.”

“The stability of the virus is far less when the temperature goes up but humidity seems to be particularly important. The lower the humidity, the more stable the virus is in the atmosphere and on surfaces."


“We as individuals are part of the problem because sensationalism drives people to click and read the information. So it’s a big circle because we’ve created the problem — if we put the worst case scenario out there, we will go and have a look. If you want a solution, you’ve got to get people to stop clicking on this sensationalist stuff.”

“[The infection fatality rate] will be down about where we were with the swine flu: around 0.1-0.3% which is much lower than what we think because at the moment we are seeing the case fatality”.