Lockdown professor steps down after breaking rules to meet married lover
Government adviser behind social distancing measures allowed woman to visit him despite telling the nation to stay at home
THE scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down the country resigned from his government advisory position last night, as The Daily
Telegraph can disclose that he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover.
Prof Neil Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during lockdown while he lectured the public on the need for strict social distancing to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The woman lives with her husband and their two children in another house.
The epidemiologist leads a team at Imperial College London that produced the computer-modelled research which claimed more than 500,000 people in Britain would die without the national lockdown. He has frequently taken to the media to support lockdown and praised the “very intensive social distancing” measures.
The disclosure of the “illegal” meetings will infuriate couples living apart whom the Government has banned from meeting up during the lockdown, now in its seventh week.
On at least two occasions, Antonia Staats, 38, travelled from her south London home across the capital to spend time with the 51-year-old scientist, nicknamed Professor Lockdown, who had only just completed two weeks self-isolating after testing positive for the virus.
Prof Ferguson told The Daily Telegraph: “I accept I made an error of judgment. I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in Sage [the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies]. I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus, and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.
“I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing to control this devastating epidemic. The government guidance is unequivocal, and is there to protect all of us.”
The first of Ms Staats’s visits, on Monday March 30, coincided with a public warning by Prof Ferguson that the week-old lockdown measures would have to remain until June.
Ms Staats, a Left-wing campaigner, made a second visit on April 8 despite telling friends she suspected her husband, an academic in his 30s, had Covid-19 symptoms. The couple and their children live in a £1.9 million home, and are understood to be in an open marriage. She has told friends about her relationship with Prof Ferguson, but does not believe their actions in meeting to be hypocritical as she considers the households to be one.
A week before the first meeting, Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medi- cal officer, and Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, clarified during the daily Downing Street press conference that couples not living together must stay apart during lockdown.
Grant Shapps, the Transport Secre- tary, recently reminded the public it was “illegal to be outside the home for one of any other than four reasons”. They are medical emergency, daily exercise, essential food shopping and for certain types of work.
The police in England and Wales have handed out more than 9,000 fines during the lockdown – equivalent to one every five minutes.
Dr Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s chief medical officer, was forced to resign last month after making two trips to her second home during the lockdown.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, said: “Scientists like him have told us we should not be doing it, so surely in his case, it is a case of we have been doing as he says and he has been doing as he wants. He has peculiarly breached his own guidelines. For an intelligent man, I find that very hard to believe. It risks undermining the Government’s lockdown message.”
Sir Charles Walker, the senior Conservative MP, said: “People will be desperately missing those that they love. And I totally understand if that separation becomes too much to bear at times.”
Ms Staats declined to comment.
AS A warm weather front promised to bake Britain over Easter, Government ministers blitzed the media with the clearest of warnings: Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives.
Boris Johnson was in intensive care as the Queen stepped in to rally the nation with a speech thanking the public for staying at home to protect the vulnerable. “Many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones, but we know deep down that it is the right thing to do,” she said.
The science behind the decision to lock down
Britain had been set out in a research paper submitted on March 16 by Professor Neil
Ferguson, the Government’s leading epidemiology adviser.
He and his team of computer modellers at
Imperial
College
London’s school of public health predicted that more than 500,000 people would die from coronavirus if no action was taken, or half that figure if the Government continued with its previous plan.
But while the public was enduring the lockdown restrictions prompted by Prof Ferguson’s advice, The Daily Telegraph can now disclose that he was flouting those rules to see his married lover. The academic, who had been in and out of No10 and meetings across government departments, was struck down with symptoms of the virus two days after delivering his research paper.
On March 18, he announced on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he was self-isolating in his London flat. “I’ve been in so many meetings in the last few weeks,” he told listeners. “We think there’s infectiousness for about a day before symptoms – and I was actually in a Downing Street press conference… The more serious point is it kind of highlights the need for the response which has been enacted.”
The news sparked an outpouring of support for “Professor Lockdown”, as he would come to be known, including a tweet from Nigella Lawson telling him to rest up. From his home he tweeted daily about his recovery and thanked the public for the many messages of support. Soon he was back to warning the public, again though Twitter, about new developments in the science from his team at Imperial College. It was not good news. “Our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought,” he tweeted on March 26.
Yet four days later, the professor was feeling well enough to break his own advice to the public and allow his girlfriend, Antonia Staats, to cross London for a visit.
The following week she made a second visit to Prof Ferguson’s flat, despite telling friends she suspected her husband had symptoms of coronavirus.
There is no suggestion Ms Staats visited him during the period he was self-isolating with the virus. But to some, the tryst shows a staggering hypocrisy and wilful flaunting of lockdown laws.
Prof Ferguson sat on the Scientific Advisory Group for
Emergencies (Sage), which has played a central role advising the Government during the pandemic, as well as the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), which advises Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, and Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary. Only six days earlier during the daily Downing Street conference on March 24, Dr Harries responded to a question on whether couples living apart could socialise.
“If the two halves of a couple are currently in separate households, ideally they should stay in those households,” Dr Harries replied and called on couples to “test the strength of their relationship” and move in together if they wanted to see each other. The Government did not want “people switching in and out of households
– it defeats the purpose of the reduction in social interaction, and will allow transmission of disease”.
If that was not clear enough, Mr Hancock added: “There you go. Make your choice and stick with it.” Prof Ferguson’s relationship with Ms Staats is hardly conventional. She is understood to be in an open marriage with her husband, an academic. The couple live in a £1.9million house in south London with their two children. Ms Staats has told friends she does not believe their actions to be hypocritical because she considers the households to be one. According to a friend, Prof Ferguson has met Ms Staats’ husband and they share an interest in data science. The 51-year-old epidemiologist is married with a son but it is understood he and his wife live apart. He is said to have met Ms Staats more than a year ago
through the online dating site Okcupid. Ms Staats, 38, grew up in Isny, south Germany, went to university in Berlin and came to London in 2003 to obtain a masters in Asian Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where her husband works. She is a senior campaigner at Avaaz, a global online activist network. Ms Staats has campaigned against Brexit, and in 2017 she was pictured protesting outside Parliament next to puppets of Theresa May and Rupert Murdoch while holding a banner that read “Stop Murdoch pulling the strings”.
Prof Ferguson is a regular guest on the BBC Today programme. In fact, Ms Staats told friends she was at his home on the same morning that he appeared on the 7.50am slot on March 30.
Over the next eight days he continued to appear on the show. On April 4 he told listeners: “Clearly we want to move to a situation where at least by the end of May we can substitute less intensive measures for the current lockdown we have now ... I don’t think anyone wants to lift measures at the current time and risk the epidemic getting worse.”
Yet on April 8, Ms Staats was again at his flat. The contradiction in what he says in public and what he does in
‘I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the need for social distancing’
private did not seem to bother him. For on April 10, again on Today, he said: “We clearly don’t want these measures to continue any longer than is absolutely necessary. I mean, the economic costs, social costs, personal and health costs are huge, but we do want to find a set out policies which maintain the suppression of transmission of this virus.”
Last night Prof Ferguson admitted that he had made an “error of judgment” and resigned from his Sage role. He said he “acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.
He said: “I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing to control this devastating epidemic. The Government guidance is unequivocal, and is there to protect all of us.”
But with thousands of lonely couples spending their seventh week in separation, the news of Prof Lockdown’s trysts will be a bitter pill to swallow.