Carl Heneghan is professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford. Dr Tom Jefferson is a Clinical epidemiologist
and Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford.
This week there was an update to a Cochrane review, which studies the way physical interventions can interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. The review, which Tom Jefferson is the lead author of, looks at evidence from 78 randomised trials with over 610,000 participants. In other words, this review is exactly the sort of higher-quality evidence
This month, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care published a Technical Report on the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. The report is a long 11-chapter document describing the UK’s response and pointing out suggestions for dealing with future pandemics. The report is described as ‘independent’, but the authors are public health civil servants and
Throughout the Covid pandemic, the BBC’s coverage has strictly followed what is now known as ‘official science’ – with journalists not asking questions, but just reporting what they are told. This has especially been the case when it comes to ignorance of existing research on respiratory viruses. This week saw the BBC report on the
Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in
Do face masks work? Earlier this year, the UK government decided that masks could play a significant role in stopping Covid-19 and made masks mandatory in a number of public places. But are these policies backed by the scientific evidence? Yesterday marked the publication of a long-delayed trial in Denmark which hopes to answer that very
The increasingly polarised and politicised views on whether to wear masks in public during the current Covid-19 crisis hides a bitter truth on the state of contemporary research and the value we pose on clinical evidence to guide our decisions. In 2010, at the end of the last influenza pandemic, there were six published randomised
Locking down Britain sooner would have saved thousands of lives, according to Neil Ferguson. But while Ferguson’s claims have been rightly contested – and the merits of shutting down Britain, particularly in view of today’s woeful GDP figures – remain debatable, one thing is very clear: lockdown is having a dreadful effect on the lives
Officially, more than 44,000 deaths in England and Wales have involved Covid-19. But how many have died as a direct result of the disease itself and how many are victims of the fear and neglect that it has engendered? It is remarkable how many deaths during this pandemic have occurred in care homes. According to
