I've heard three serious examples of misinformation on BBC programmes in the past 24 hours from Professor Robert Dingwall of JCVI, Lord Sumption and Sir Charles Walker MP. (1)
Dingwall, social science private consultant, who sits on JCVI (why?), was asked about Long Covid. He said the evidence was just 'anecdotal', the numbers of cases causally related to Covid was 'very small' and symptoms were due to people's 'minds' and 'stress'. He is wrong.(2)
Lord Sumption said deaths from Covid outside highly vulnerable groups is very small, 'in the hundreds'. Prof Spiegelhalter has since said he is wrong. (In India 2.2 million people are estimated to have died from Covid). Sumption should not be invited onto BBC to mislead.(3)
Sir Charles Walker MP on today's World at One said that children are "not at risk from Covid at all", and that there is scientific evidence that children are better off getting the infection than being vaccinated. None of this is true. No challenge by interviewer.
The BBC has an editorial duty to challenge and correct statements that are false. The media also report that PM Johnson said almost all deaths from Covid in the first wave were over 80. Again Prof Spiegelhalter said this is wrong, that 40% of people were in younger age groups.
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I don't mind public criticism but I do object to being misrepresented, in a major paper like @thesundaytimes without being consulted. Their leader writer Dominic Lawson has taken a pop at me so let me correct his accusations. (1)
He says I am not 'an epidemiologist', unlike Chris Whitty. He might have checked my publication record iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/pr… I would guess 80% of my 403 research papers are 'epidemiological', including numerous population trials.(2)
He takes a 2019 twitter quote from me about being "to the left of Jeremy Corbyn on economics and environmental issues." If you look at the context you'll see I was actually defending @campbellclaret from being expelled from the Labour party. (3)
Seven excellent reports in the FT from UNICEF and Children in All Policies-2030 (cap-2030.org) on what governments + companies should pursue to help the next generation overcome the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and economic inequity.(1) ft.com/reports/unicef…
Why investing in children is the most important economic imperative. ft.com/content/01eb69… (2)
Why cutting UK aid damages families, children and also our own international reputation.(3) ft.com/content/137490…
On vaccinating children. UK data released today reports that over ONE Year 5,800 children were admitted with Covid19, 690 children admitted with a linked paediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome(PIMS-TS) of whom 251 required intensive care. 25 children died from Covid19. (1)
What about Long Covid? ONS figures: 14.5% (of children aged 12-16 have symptoms lasting longer than 5 weeks, and 5.7% (4.1-8.1) lose taste and smell. If half of all children aged 12-16 became infected we might expect >100,000 to lose taste +smell. (3) ons.gov.uk/releases/preva…
The story so far. About the failure of public health. Not masks. Look at the death rates in China (pop 1.4bn), Vietnam (100m), USA (340m) and UK (68m). Yes, you cannot see the death curves in the first two because they are so low. (1)
Our leaders/advisers said you cannot suppress this virus. China and Vietnam did. Then they said these countries will inevitably face a huge second wave. They haven't - just smaller outbreaks that they jump on with good public health implemented by people on the ground. (2)
We were forced into prolonged national lockdowns. Hugely damaging to livelihoods, the economy and mental health. None of the Asian states had national lockdowns, only local ones. Their economies had ten times less damage. (3)
On Children and Long Covid.
No. You are being disingenuous with these studies. We agree the Swiss study is worthless because of type 2 error. Let us now look at the Zoe and the Australia studies...(1)
People are rightly worried about Long Covid and possible effects on children's developing brains. The Zoe study shows 4.4% of 1,734 infected children (588 younger 1,146 older children) get headache, fatigue and anosmia (three neurological signs) lasting more than one month. (2)
Worrying. If children are now to be exposed to infection by the UK government failure with public health/vaccination measures, + say another 50% of children up to 16 become infected, we're looking at 8.8 million x 0.5 x 0.044 = 193,600 kids facing prolonged symptoms. (3)
Several scientists are referring to an unreviewed short Swiss paper to support the idea that Long Covid in children is minimal. medrxiv.org/content/10.110… (1)
The authors correctly point out "limitations include the relatively small number of seropositive children, possible misclassification of some false seropositive children, potential recall bias, parental report of child’s symptoms, and lack of information on symptom severity" (2)
The paper reports on just 109 children picked up as seropositive compared with 1246 negatives. No conclusions can be drawn because of classic type 2 error: failure to reject a false null hypothesis because of an underpowered study. (3)