“An expert,” according to American philosopher Nicholas Butler, “is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing”. Was there ever an expert who knew so much about nothing as Professor Neil Ferguson?
Ferguson achieved (renewed) notoriety when he first backtracked dramatically on his ridiculously alarmist predictions of, like, a million, billion, kajillion COVID-19 deaths in Britain. Then, his computer model was analysed by independent coders, who were scathing of it as frankly garbage. “Sim City without the graphics,” said one.
Not content with having made a national clown of himself there, Ferguson followed up by getting caught violating the draconian restrictions he had himself urged the government to impose. Sneaking out to shag a married woman while you’re forbidding ordinary people from even visiting their dying relatives is just part of Ferguson’s “expertise”.
Surely even this toxic idiot couldn’t make more of a fool of himself? Hold his chardonnay.
On Tuesday, Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, whose bleak projections of future deaths from COVID-19 influenced governments around the world to institute massive lockdowns, admitted of Sweden, which did not institute harsh lockdowns, “It is interesting that adopting a policy which is short of a full lockdown – they have closed secondary schools and universities and there is a significant amount of social distancing, but it’s not a full lockdown – they have got quite a long way to the same effect.”
Sort through the evasive verbiage and the message is damning: he was spectacularly wrong.
Speaking before a House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, the man who [predicted] half a million Britons could die from Covid-19 spoke of Sweden, whose 436 people per million mortality rate from the coronavirus is significantly lower than the UK’s 575 people per million. The Daily Mail noted, “As well as fewer deaths, Sweden’s GDP actually grew in the first quarter of 2020, suggesting it might avoid the worst of the economic fallout from the crisis.
Ferguson is still hemming and hawing and refusing to concede that his useless, dictatorial restrictions must be binned immediately.
Ferguson added, “I suspect though, under any scenario that levels of transmission and numbers of cases will remain relatively flat between now and September, short of very big policy changes or behavior changes in the community. The real uncertainty then is if there are larger policy changes in September, of course we move into time of year when respiratory viruses tend to transmit slightly better, what will happen then. And that remains very unclear.”
Business Insider noted, “In 2009, one of Ferguson’s models predicted 65,000 people could die from the Swine Flu outbreak in the UK — the final figure was below 500.” Business Insider also noted, “Michael Thrusfield, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, told the paper he had ‘déjà vu’ after reading the Imperial paper, saying Ferguson was responsible for excessive animal culling during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak. Ferguson warned the government that 150,000 people could die. Six million animals were slaughtered as a precaution, costing the country billions in farming revenue. In the end, 200 people died.”
This clown deserves to not just be sacked and barred from any similar position advising government ever again, it might not be unjust if he were tarred and feathered and forced to run a gauntlet of jeering, furious Britons.
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