20 November 2022 — HART
The spectre of Ferguson lives on
In a sane world, the legitimacy of using computer modelling as a rationale for imposing covid restrictions would be seriously questioned. In 2020, Professor Neil Ferguson (an epidemiologist at Imperial College London) gained notoriety for his doomsday prediction that 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 British people could die as a direct consequence of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus. These wildly inaccurate prophesies were largely responsible for spooking governments into imposing ineffective and hugely damaging lockdowns and, subsequently, the modelling methodology was heavily criticised. Yet it has recently been revealed that NHS England are relying on this flawed approach to justify their mask requirements in healthcare settings.