Oxford academic Carl Heneghan has had his Twitter ban overturned. The GP and professor of evidence based medicine was kicked off the platform on Saturday, after he shared a link to a Daily Mail article which suggested that the covid death toll may have been exaggerated.
The Daily Mail story was based on an Oxford University study which revealed that the number of people who have died from Covid in Britain is impossible to determine because of the inconsistent definitions of what is meant by a coronavirus death.
Heneghan’s colleague Dr Tom Jefferson of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University, said:
“Every night we were given this diet of cases, admissions and deaths. But we found that even the ONS doesn’t have a standard definition for deaths. We found 14 different ways to express the cause of death.
There are a number of death certificates where Covid-19 is the only cause of death, and that is not possible. It has to be something like Covid-19 induced pneumonia, if it goes to the kidneys and you get kidney failure.
We found some organisations coded Covid deaths even in the absence of positive Covid tests. Some nursing homes had allocated causality to Covid-19 not on the basis of tests but when those deaths occurred, usually in the Spring of 2020. Nursing homes decide themselves what was the cause.
All of this means that we don’t really know who has died of Covid, or how severe it is, and this continues to this day. Separating the ravages of the virus from the ravages of human stupidity is not possible.”
Twitter banned Heneghan for sharing the above.
Last night, a spokesperson for the platform said that Heneghan’s tweet had been mistakenly identified as fake news and that his account had now been restored.
Thanks, everyone, for the messages of support – for now, I'm still here.
— Carl Heneghan (@carlheneghan) March 27, 2022
