Covid won’t keep Ken from Corrie’s cobbles IS ‘SILENCING SCIENCE’
BILL Roache has “recovered well” after testing positive for Covid-19, Coronation Street has said.
The star, 88, who plays Ken Barlow, has taken time off from the ITV soap.
A spokeswoman said: “Following recent reports about his health, William Roache has asked us to clarify that he took time off work after testing positive for Covid.
“He has recovered well and is looking forward to returning to the cobbles as soon as possible.”
Bill has been a part of the cast since the soap began in 1960.
When asked why he had stayed so long, he said: “It’s a happy place to be. I love going to work. You get job satisfaction and you get continuity, which is not usual for actors.”
In 2020, Bill was presented with the Guinness World Record for the longest-serving TV soap star after six decades on the Street. Coronation Street resumed filming in June last year and social-distancing
rules were put in place on set. Stars over the age of 70 returned to filming later than the younger cast members.
Scripts involving Bill’s character are currently being written and the soap said it is limiting the time it films with the more elderly cast during the pandemic.
On the soap’s 60th anniversary Bill said: “While I can do it and they want me, I will be there. Retirement is not on the radar at all. I have no plans for that.
“I don’t even like to think about how they’d write Ken out if I did leave. Because hopefully that is never going to happen.”
Last November Bill said he believed he was getting younger every year by thinking positively.
Ken is the only remaining character on the show since it first began, being married four times to three different women, as well as being embroiled in several love affairs.
He was also involved in a long-standing feud with archrival Mike Baldwin, who was played by the late Johnny Briggs until 2006.
officer have come to. What I find very worrying is that, with few exceptions, they say ‘Please keep my details confidential’.
“Clinicians say this to me. ITU doctors say to me they have been warned not to speak out regarding public policy.
“People who question the current orthodoxy are given rough treatment. Nobody wants to put their name to anything.”
Tim Spector, a professor at King’s College London, who designed the ZOE app – used to collect Covid symptom information – and who has been appointed OBE for his services to the Covid response, said: “There is a climate of fear and I have been personally attacked by other scientists on social media who I subsequently mute.”
And Robert Dingwall, a professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University, said: “The picture of science presented here may surprise many people. Isn’t it supposed to be a social world of civility, rigour and mutual respect, where ideas and people advance on their merits? Some parts are, indeed, full of nice, collaborative people working together for the benefit of humanity.
“Others, though, are brutally competitive, marked by patronage, nepotism, bullying and personal antagonism.”
The Sunday Express has been contacted by dozens of scientists who say they have strong views against the way the pandemic has been handled but are unwilling to put their names to them because of fear of repercussions. One academic who has spoken out is Professor Jon Deeks, an expert on test evaluation at the University of Birmingham.
He has questioned the evidence supporting the use of lateral flow tests. He said: “I have faced many defamatory things said to me on Twitter and to the media, including by other scientists who have even accused me of manipulating data. It becomes quite nasty.
“We are not talking to each other properly and there are many things we do not understand about this pandemic which we need to learn. But we are being thrown into confrontational positions on things, sometimes by the media and by the Government.
“There is a range of disciplines including virologists, public health doctors, statisticians and clinicians, and we don’t automatically understand each other.
“In terms of protecting freedom of speech, the university that I work with is incredibly supportive and the vice-chancellor has said it is his job to enable me to do my job, and they see public questioning of science as my job.”
Professor Carl Heneghan, director of Oxford University’s Centre
‘It has become
quite nasty’
for Evidence-based Medicine, said: “An envelope of fear has engulfed the debate around Covid. Scientists who suggested an alternative way have been subject to attack, ridicule and threats.
“I have been called an ‘agent of disinformation’ and one scientist even called me a ‘public health threat’ on Twitter.
“Science only operates if it continually opens up uncertainty and debate. There is no such thing as ‘the science’.”
Dr Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the BMJ, said: “Science is about debate and rarely absolute.
“Once we start attacking each other it has gone out of the realm of science and become personal.
“However debate needs to be encouraged as it is only this way we can get closer to the truth.”