Thread by @NeilDotObrien

As the UK tragically hits a record number of Covid-19 deaths, Covid-sceptic-in-chief @toadmeister appears to have deleted all his tweets from last year.

That's not surprising. Here are some of the things he claimed over the last year - a thread.

"Should we be worried about the uptick in cases? Almost certainly not. It’s due to recent increases in testing capacity... Given the over-sensitivity of the PCR test, the rise in new cases is telling us just how many people have had Covid-19 in the past"

Telegraph, 7 September

"as we sceptics are fond of pointing out, almost no one has the virus any more."

Spectator, 15 August

"we were told... the number of infected people was on the rise again... the rise was due to a combination of increased testing and false positives."

Telegraph, 14 August 2020

The check-in process at Heathrow took at least four times longer than usual and having to wear a face nappy for the entire journey was a pain in the bum. But... in Venice things started to look up – I’d finally escaped Gulag Britain."

Telegraph, 12 August

I may... convene a public inquiry of my own. The experts I’ll invite to sit on the panel won’t be the usual hacks with an axe to grind... They’ll be [like] Sunetra Gupta, the Oxford epidemiologist who believes we may have achieved herd immunity already"

Spectator, 25 July

The scientists predict a massive resurgence of Covid-19 infections if we don’t “get on top of things” and that part of the report is unconvincing... the paper seems pessimistic about the level of immunity that the UK population has already acquired."

Telegraph, 14 July

"I’m going to go out on a limb and predict there will be no “second spike” – not now, and not in the autumn either. The virus has melted into thin air. It’s time to get back to normal."

Telegraph, 25 June

"The decision to place the entire country in suspended animation on March 23 will end up costing more lives than the pandemic... one of the worst decisions in our history."

Telegraph, 12 June

"in some parts of the country – such as London – the virus is expected to have completely vanished by the end of next month."

Telegraph, 29 May

And even if you catch the disease, it it may not be much more deadly than a bad bout of seasonal influenza... We should dispense with silly, over-cautious social-distancing rules... Let’s just get back to the way things were."

Telegraph, 29 May

"I was sent a paper by Mikko Paunio, a key scientific adviser to the Finnish Government, estimating that the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is around 0.13 per cent – roughly the same as seasonal flu."

Telegraph, 18 April

"What happened to the British people’s bulldog spirit, , our instinctive libertarianism? ... It’s tempting to think the feminisation of British culture has left us bereft of manly virtues. We have become men without chests, to use CS Lewis’s phrase."

Telegraph, 18 April

"The choice is between switching to mitigation or maintaining the lockdown indefinitely... It’s inevitable that we’re going to have to abandon the suppression strategy before we develop a vaccine out of sheer economic necessity"

The Critic, 2 April

"Is the case fatality rate really as high as Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College would have us believe? Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University has speculated that it may end up being 0.05 per cent, lower than seasonal flu."

Telegraph, 3 April

"The country is well on its way to acquiring herd immunity and the much-ballyhooed “peak” that we’re trying to avoid by locking ourselves down won’t materialise."

The Critic, 31 March 2020

"Even if we accept the statistical modelling of Dr Neil Ferguson’s team... which I’ll come to in a minute, spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money."

The Critic, 31 March 2020

But sadly, he hasn't learned anything in 2021...

"A winter bed crisis in the NHS is an annual event... According to PHE, there was no statistically significant excess all-cause mortality in England in the final week of 2020"

The Critic, 11 January 2021*

"If you compare mortality in December of 2020 with average December mortality over the the last five years, there doesn't as far as I can see appear to be any increase at all"

"London Calling" podcast, 4 January 2020

"Some lockdown enthusiasts pick out a handful of examples where lockdowns have coincided with a fall in Covid deaths but that’s not a scientific approach."

The Critic, 11 January 2021

"If Whitty and Vallance had taken questions, I hope someone would have asked them what the projected number of cases would be on 13th Oct if you discount the 91% of “cases” that are false positives."

Tweet, (now deleted), 21 September 2020