Second, the name Neil Ferguson ring a bell? He's the highly-credentialed asshat who helped screw the world when the Wuhan virus started around, also the bastard found having his married girlfriend show up to screw while he was insisting we'd all die unless we stayed locked in our homes.
And yet while Ferguson’s hypocrisy is important, especially for what it reveals about the arrogance of the new expert class, it is really his promotion of fear that he should be challenged on. It increasingly looks like his models were iffy, to say the least. According to the models, unlocked-down Sweden should have had 40,000 deaths by now – in fact it has had around 2,850. This is a catastrophic level of error. That seemingly unreliable or worst-case models have been used to wreck economies and institutionalise an authoritarian era so grave that one cannot leave one’s own house without good reason is a matter of the utmost public interest.
And Ferguson has form when it comes to the worst-case ideology that is so obsessed with being risk-averse that it causes whole new problems of its own. In 2005 he said up to 200million people could die from bird flu – the final global death toll between the years 2003 and 2009 was 292. In 2009, the UK government based its ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ for the impact of swine flu in Britain on Ferguson’s models, saying around 65,000 people could die. In the end just 457 people died. In 2001 Imperial modelling on foot-and-mouth disease shaped government policy, which was to cull six million sheep, cattle and pigs. Later, an expert in veterinary epidemiology said that modelling was ‘seriously flawed’.
Over and over he's been wrong, and the Brit government, and others, are still employing this asshat. Because a fellow 'Elite' cannot be dumped just for being catastrophically wrong, it seems.
Especially when his being wrong gives them cause to control other people.
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