A professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford, a good citizen, well-liked family member, and a person on Twitter are just some of the things that C arl Heneghan is. He doesn't have a track record of creating social media storms for fun or contrarianism. Heneghan was banned from a social media platform last week because he had trouble keeping up with racial slurs and death threats.
The number of people who died from Covid may have been overstated. His conclusion was that we had no idea how many people have died because the UK health statistics agencies use different definitions. He was put in the same camp as anti-vaxxers because of this.
Heneghan is not a sceptic in the way of Lord Sumption, who told a woman with stage four cancer that her life was worthless. Heneghan has been centring vulnerable people in public health, asking multiple questions at once, about what loneliness does to older people. What happens to the mentally ill when routine is disrupted? We can't normalise thoughtful and responsible behavior before we isolated the already isolated, so what decisions could a dutiful citizen make to protect others?
This isn't really a defense of Heneghan. There is a fault in the conception of how to prevent the spread of misinformation. Those with a good working knowledge of real news can be used to identify fake news. We want to separate the business of gathering news from the business of spreading it. It is time to admit that the experiment has failed.
A columnist for the Guardian is ZOE WILLIAMS.
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