Research Heneghan is one of the founders of
AllTrials, an international initiative which calls for all studies to be published, and their results reported. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Collateral Global, an organisation that examines the global impact of the
COVID-19 restrictions. He has also been a clinical advisor to three UK All Parliamentary Party Groups, including on the use of surgical mesh, and has advised the
World Health Organisation's clinical trials registry platform.
Honours and awards In 2013, Heneghan was voted on to the
Health Service Journal's list of top 100 most influential clinical leaders in England. He was awarded
NIHR Senior Investigation status in 2018. Heneghan received a lifetime achievement award in 2019 from Oxford's Medical Science Division, for his sustained commitment to education and teaching.
COVID-19 pandemic On 21 September 2020, Heneghan alongside
Sunetra Gupta,
Karol Sikora and 28 signatories wrote an open letter to the UK prime minister, chancellor and
chief medical officers asking for a rethink of the
government's COVID-19 strategy. They argued in favour of a targeted approach to lockdowns advising that only over-65s and the vulnerable should be shielded. During the pandemic, Heneghan has written for
The Spectator magazine. In it, he has commentated on various aspects of the
UK's governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On 19 November 2020, he wrote an article with Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist, in which he criticised the science behind wearing face masks to reduce transmissions of COVID-19. In the article he stated that; "Now we have properly rigorous scientific research that we can rely on, the evidence shows that wearing
masks in the community does not significantly reduce the rates of infection." His claim was met with criticism.
Sonia Sodha of
The Guardian argued that Heneghan had made scientific errors because he had misrepresented a Danish
randomized controlled trial which studied infection transmission rates on people who wore face masks. This was because the
Danish mask study was only focused on infection transmissions for those wearing masks, rather than on the overall community, so could not be used to make judgements on the effects of face masks on community wide transmission rates.
Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the
British Medical Journal (BMJ), also criticised Heneghan's claims about face masks because he believed his interpretation of the Danish study was inaccurate. However, Abbasi stressed that he believed it was wrong that Heneghan's opinion be marked as "false information" on
Facebook because, as he wrote in the
BMJ, "disagreement among experts, especially about interpretation of a study, is a common occurrence. It is the usual business of science." == Publications ==