Expert’s advice doesn’t add up
RTHREE lockdown cheers for Sophie EllisBextor. Her nightly disco from home, complete with glitterball, has been a real treat. When all this is over, Sophie, above, should get her own show. She’s the visual equivalent of the first G&T of the evening – cool, clinky and bubbly, with fizz.
RPROFESSOR Neil “do as I say, not as I do” Ferguson has had a bad week, which he brought entirely on himself. The man whose doom-laden advice to Boris Johnson led directly to the last miserable month-and-a-half of lockdown didn’t think his harsh protocols actually, er, applied to him. So he enjoyed trysts with his married lover at his home, in flagrant breach of his own strictures to the rest of us to stay in isolation. Of course he had to resign from the committee advising No 10.
So far, so fairly typical; Ferguson isn’t the first senior person during the pandemic to have been caught with his trousers down, if you’ll forgive the expression. Others have been exposed for their own double standards, including Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer who quit (reluctantly) after she was caught visiting her second home twice. Dr Catherine Calderwood had been prominent in press conferences ordering others to do no such thing.The winds of hypocrisy have indeed blown strong.
But back to Professor Ferguson. If we can’t trust him to follow his own advice, how far can we trust the advice itself?
The man’s track record on predicting pandemics is said to be unreliable, to say the least.
Almost 20 years ago his “modelling” over the impact of a possible foot-and-mouth epidemic allegedly persuaded Tony Blair to cull more than six million healthy farm animals as a massive preemptive strike. Later, scientists at the University of Edinburgh dismissed these calculations as “not fit for purpose”.
A year later, Ferguson was said to have predicted that the human form of mad cow disease could kill up to 50,000, and three times that if it passed to sheep.To date, fewer than 200 people have died.
Remember the 2005 bird flu scare? Ferguson reportedly recalled the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, pointing out that the 40 million who died when the planet’s population was much smaller meant “you could scale it up to 200 million now, probably”. No, probably not.
Fewer than 500 people have died of bird flu.
On it goes. Swine flu in 2009?
Stand by for a “most likely” fatality rate of 0.4 per cent, if you believed Ferguson, meaning more than 60,000 deaths. By year’s end it was actually 0.026 per cent and less than 300 had died.
These massive discrepancies between his apocalyptic modelling and reality have been widely reported.This is no scoop. So why was he trusted when he and his team at Imperial College warned that half a million of us would die of coronavirus if no action at all was taken and a quarter of a million if we had social distancing without a full isolation?
Did no one spot a pattern going back 20 years?
I’m beginning to seriously doubt this terrible lockdown was ever really necessary. Or put another way; if the professor told me the time, I’d definitely check my watch.