The laughably labelled “Professor of Evidence Based Medicine” Carl Heneghan, is not so interested in evidence that makes his previously held views look pretty ludicrous.

This is a character crisis.

But it has got in the way of good, fast responses to the Covid crisis. https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1380573201500147714

Wiki history doesn’t tell us a whole lot about his training and experience in actually completing death certificates but the Oxford Uni website suggests he is a “practising GP”.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/professor-carl-heneghan

Really? I would like to have more detail about how he has been trained to complete death certificates and, indeed, the extent to which he has completed them.

Personal disclosure here. I have never completed a death certificate in my life.

I’m not a doctor.

But I have looked at a lot, often in uncertain or suspicious deaths.

I’ve taught a fair bit about causation in death & received a lot of valuable tuition from forensic pathologist about how a carefully completed death certificate looks like..

They include steps to death (events and conditions that put the death pathway in motion) plus the underlying or driving cause of death.

Sometimes one = the other.

I simply cannot believe that he does not know that diabetes, for instance, is a condition that is likely to predispose a greater likelihood of death from Covid but not be the CAUSE of death.

Indeed that person, BUT FOR Covid could have been expected to live many more years of healthy life.

See that “BUT FOR” in capitals?

It is one of the step tests in murder and manslaughter.

BUT FOR this would that person have lived or died?

It is inconceivable that a professor of evidence based medicine and a practising GP, no less, does not understand.

If he does not why the fuck is a Professor of Evidence based medicine at all at @UniofOxford of all places?

There is a conjunction between medicine and law and the careful completion of death certificates is one of them.

Why am I so incensed by this?

There are families grieving a huge loss brought early by Covid whose loss from this terrible disease IS being diminished by his misdirection

There are doctors whose careful completion of death certificates are being shaded.

Most of all: we won’t fix our terrible problems:-

political, health, societal as long as we misdirect attention from where the truth lies.

In this case, the driving cause of death that Covid has precipitated.

I have been DM about giving examples of poor death certificate.

One of the things you look for in suspicious or unclear causes of death is how the death certificate is completed.