REPOST from PB 1 of 2
Architect of COVID-19 lockdowns resigns after flouting social distancing rules
Dr. Neil Ferguson, director of the prestigious MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, published an explosive report on March 16 predicting that without intervention coronavirus deaths in the U.K. could reach 550,000 and American fatalities could be as high as 2.2 million. Alarmed by Dr. Ferguson’s predictions, the British government scrapped its original plan of allowing its population to acquire "herd immunity" to the virus naturally in favor of a strict lockdown. The U.S. government fell into line with similar guidelines shortly thereafter.
On Monday, the epidemiologist whose projections guided the imposition of strict stay-home measures resigned his position when it was reported that his married lover visited him at his home — twice — in defiance of social distancing rules. Ferguson issued a statement accepting blame. "I accept I made an error of judgement and took the wrong course of action," he said. "…I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing." Ferguson had been recovering after having himself contracted the very virus he had been modeling, but he claims he was no longer infectious. However, Ferguson has admitted that he may have been infectious while attending a crucial press conference with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street on March 17. Johnson soon after came down with a severe case of COVID-19 that required a stay in intensive care, during which the prime minister narrowly escaped death, according to widespread reports.
The day after release of the Imperial College report, the New York Times wrote, “With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.” Ferguson’s department is staffed with 200 researchers, but it turned out that his COVID-19 predictions relied on an old model he first created to plot the spread of an influenza outbreak in Thailand back in 2005. Within a week of his report’s release, questions were being asked about Ferguson’s methodology. His response only rang more alarm bells: “I wrote the code (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu pandemics.” Ferguson then claimed he was unable to publish his model until Microsoft began helping him sort out his code, in the last days before Bill Gates stepped down from the software giant’s board.
So far, all that has been published, according to Breitbart’s James Delingpole, is a reconstruction by Github, rather than the original source code, which raises troubling questions about its initial accuracy. Computer predictions are only as good as the data they are fed, combined with their ability to account for all the variables involved. Ferguson’s influential COVID-19 model was driven by little more than very unreliable numbers coming out of China, plus the early figures from South Korea, Italy, and Spain. He seasoned his proprietary mix with numbers from the “Spanish Flu” pandemic after World War I. Using his 15-year-old code, Ferguson concluded, “Based on our estimates and other teams’, there’s really no option but to follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.” Ferguson has a history of vastly overestimating projected death tolls.
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https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/architect-covid-19-lockdowns-resigns-after-flouting-social-distancing#article