Tweet [1]
Phil Magness exposes the gross inaccuracies, and the deceits, committed by Neil Ferguson and his fellow reckless Imperial College ‘modelers.’ [2] Two slices:
As it turns out though, Ferguson and the Imperial College team were being less than truthful in their attempts to dissociate themselves from Sweden’s observed outcomes. In the weeks following the release of their well-known US and UK projections, Ferguson and his team did in fact produce a trimmed-down version of their own modeling exercise for the rest of the world, including Sweden. They did not widely publicize the country-level projections, but the full list may be found buried in a Microsoft Excel appendix file to Imperial College’s Report #12 [3], released on March 26, 2020.
Imperial’s own projected results for Sweden are nearly identical to the Uppsala adaptation of their UK model. Ferguson’s team forecast up to 90,157 deaths under “unmitigated” spread (compared to Uppsala’s 96,000). Under the “population-level social distancing” scenario meant to approximate NPI mitigation measures such as lockdowns, the Imperial modelers predicted Sweden would incur up to 42,473 deaths (compared to 40,000 from the Uppsala adaptation).
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One year later we may now look back to see how Imperial College’s international projections performed, paying closer attention to the small number of countries that bucked his lockdown recommendations. The results are not pretty for Ferguson, and point to a clear pattern of modeling that systematically exaggerated the projected death tolls of Covid-19 in the absence of lockdowns and related NPIs.
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman reports on a woman in Michigan who is fed up with that state’s Covid restrictions [4]. A slice:
After fully embracing the Covid policy panic for most of the last year, perhaps the governor was able to gain a new perspective as she quietly travelled out of state. Perhaps the trip’s disclosure will hasten the day when Ms. Whitmer will answer the question recently posed [5]by Ingrid Jacques in the Detroit News: When is the governor going to ”set Michigan free”? Added Ms. Jacques:
At some point – and it should be soon – Whitmer will need to stop acting like the mother-in-chief, telling Michiganians where they can go and how many others can go with them and demanding they all wear masks.
Martin Kulldorff corrects some errors committed by John Giesecke [6]. A slice:
On March 16, 2020, Neil Ferguson and his colleagues at Imperial College predicted that around 500,000 in Great Britain would die from Covid-19 under a do nothing let-it-rip strategy. A significant factor in their model was their assumed overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9%. While that was one plausible estimate at the time, it would have been more scientifically appropriate to present multiple plausible values, as did the Oxford group led by Sunetra Gupta [7]. More recent IFR estimates are about a third to half of the Imperial College model assumption [8]. With these later numbers, the Imperial College model would instead have predicted somewhere between 165,000 and 250,000 deaths under a let-it-rip strategy.
While not part of their research report, in an email from Ferguson dated March 29, 2020, he reported on a scenario that his group ran using the Imperial College model for an “age-based cocooning” strategy, with focused protection of older high-risk people, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration [9]. “Making realistic assumptions about effectiveness,” they predicted 50-60% fewer deaths relative to a let-it-rip strategy. Together with the lower IFR estimates, that would have meant somewhere between 70,000 and 125,000 total Covid-19 deaths. We can compare this to the actual April 19 cumulative UK death count of 127,524 [10] from the implemented lockdown strategy.
Though I am sceptical of any predictive pandemic modelling, even under the questionable Imperial College models, lockdowns turned out to be a rather high price to pay for an outcome that was worse than what their unpublished models predicted for a focused protection strategy.
Some are warning that Britain’s Covidocracy is on the verge of becoming permanent [11].
A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets [13], the projected 3.4% death rate [14], and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary), millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled….
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Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape. You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields.What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.
What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague?
The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated.
Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, meltdown completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.
Covidocratic tyranny expands in Israel [15].
“Covid-19 has accelerated the creation of a dangerous surveillance state. [16]”
Charles Oliver presents another snapshot of Covidocratic tyranny [17].