Inaccurate reporting about the scale of the pandemic doesn’t serve anyone well. As the country faces crucial months ahead, people deserve the full picture.

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We’re grateful to have our readers and supporters standing with us for good information–but we have an ambitious target and we need as many people to get involved as possible.

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Viral images of an email sent from the office of MP Nadine Dorries appear to show the health minister advising people that they will face short-term restrictions if they refuse a future coronavirus vaccine “to prevent you infecting anyone else until society has achieved herd immunity.”

The email, written by one of Ms Dorries’ caseworkers, is indeed genuine but she later said in a tweet that “this correspondence was not signed off by me and does not reflect my view or government policy in any way.”

The government has previously said that there are no plans to introduce a Covid-19 vaccine in a way that penalises those who do not take up the vaccine. 

However, it added that it will “carefully consider all options to improve vaccination rates, should that be necessary.”

Recent research from the University of Granada in Spain has claimed that people who walk their dog are at higher risk from contracting Covid-19 than people who either don’t have a dog, or have a dog they don’t walk. 

The paper suggests that this may be because dogs themselves are vectors for the virus, which ignores the possibility that the association may simply be because people going outdoors more often are more likely to have reported contracting Covid-19.  

However the paper didn’t separate out the risk from going outside more frequently from the risk of having a dog. There is little evidence dogs act as vectors for the virus.

There are other problems with how the research was conducted which means we should be cautious when drawing any conclusions from it. 

No effort was made to obtain a sample representative of the Spanish population, and the researchers also analysed around 40 variables. This is a relatively high number of variables to test, increasing the likelihood of finding an association between two variables where none exists.

The Daily Mirror and the Mail Online both repeated the claim that owning a dog could increase a person’s risk of catching Covid-19, although the former has since altered its headline, standfirst and main copy.

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