The UK Wants to Police “Misinformation” Online, but Its Own He | G3 News

The UK Wants to Police “Misinformation” Online, but Its Own Health Service Was Just Caught Posting False Info

@COVID19Up: Less than a week after the UK proposed criminalizing the posting of “knowingly false” information online, England’s National Health Service (NHS) has taken down its own social media video over inaccurate information.

Last week, NHS England posted a video on its Twitter account to promote COVID-19 vaccination in kids. The video claimed that 1% of children will be hospitalized because of COVID-19, 136 kids in the UK had died because of COVID-19, and 117,000 children have “long COVID.”

But some, including Dr. Robert Hughes, a clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, questioned the accuracy of the data.

“As both a parent and scientist who has been involved in research on symptom duration and severity of COVID in children, the cited statistics didn’t make sense to me,” Hughes wrote in an article in UnHerd. “The idea that 1% of children with COVID are hospitalized for it didn’t pass the ‘sniff test.’”

Hughes contacted the Office of the Statistics Regulator about the numbers. The Statistics Regulator agreed that it was important that the NHS provides accurate figures.

“It is important that figures provided by NHSE&I are accurate and reliable,” the Office of the Statistics Regulator said. “In this case the claim made in the video fell short of these expectations—we contacted NHSE&I and it acknowledged that the data were historic and had methodological shortcomings. We are therefore glad that the content has now been removed from Twitter.”

Before its removal, the video had already been widely shared.

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