“Bug Tussle, n., a brief, vigorous dispute between insignificant persons, esp. of sleazy and low character.
“No need to bring in the Marines, it’s just a Bug Tussle,” or, “The arriving officers were told that the bar fight was not a big thing, just a Bug Tussle”.”
“We have read predictions for the total number of Covid-19 deaths in the UK ranging from 6,000 to 20,000 to around 66,000. It seems that epidemiologists’ models are as diverse in their outcomes as economists’.
“Epidemiologists did not predict last year that a pandemic would happen now, in the same way that economists did not foresee the financial crisis (or the current downturn). Developments are not that of a passive evolution in an isolated population, but influenced by government policies, which change over time, and individual actions, accompanied by massive economic costs and uncertainty.”
- From a letter to The Financial Times from Dr Jennifer Castle, Dr Jurgen Doornik and Sir David Hendry of Oxford University, 11th April 2020.
“Cabinet members have been taken aback by the disagreements among those now advising the government. One minister remarks, with a note of shock, that ‘scientists are as bitchy a bunch as lawyers’ and that ‘there are a lot of people who want Whitty’s job’, a reference to the chief medical officer Chris Whitty. Another notes: ‘The Sage [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] committee members don’t even agree with each other, they bicker. And we talk about following “the science” as if there’s one opinion and not at least seven.”
- From ‘Boris’ difficult decision’ by James Forsyth in The Spectator, 25th April 2020.
“I’m starting to root for a plague or world war to purify western culture, burning to cinders all the petty, neurotic, witch-hunting cliques with the white heat of real problems.”
- Extract from a two-year-old email from Lionel Shriver to a friend.
Science, said Max Planck, advances one funeral at a time. More precisely, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The problem, as James Forsyth’s insight into the squabbling at Sage makes clear, is that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic does not involve one science, but multiple sciences. And it looks increasingly clear that epidemiology, at least in the hands of some of its current practitioners, is not so much science as bullshit.
It is also looking increasingly clear that the Great Depression of 2020 was caused not by the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2, but by panicking politicians badly advised by grandstanding epidemiologists. In the finest tradition of the sunk costs fallacy, those politicians are now unwilling to relax the lockdown where it has been most firmly imposed, not least for fear of losing face.
It would seem that Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, might have some explaining to do. It was Ferguson’s virus modelling, not peer reviewed, that led the British government to abandon its prior strategy of herd immunity and impose a lockdown instead. The Steerpike columnist for The Spectator asks a number of questions of Professor Ferguson:
Q1.
In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu. He told the Guardian that ‘around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak… There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.’ In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
How did he get this forecast so wrong?
Q2.
In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent. His most likely estimate was that the mortality rate was 0.4 per cent. A government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths.
In the end swine flu killed 457 people in the UK and had a death rate of just 0.026 per cent in those infected.
Why did the Imperial team overestimate the fatality of the disease? Or to borrow Robinson’s words to Hancock this morning: ‘that prediction wasn’t just nonsense was it? It was dangerous nonsense.’
Q3.
In 2001 the Imperial team produced modelling on foot and mouth disease that suggested that animals in neighbouring farms should be culled, even if there was no evidence of infection. This influenced government policy and led to the total culling of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs – with a cost to the UK economy estimated at £10 billion.
It has been claimed by experts such as Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was ‘severely flawed’ and made a ‘serious error’ by ‘ignoring the species composition of farms,’ and the fact that the disease spread faster between different species.
Does Ferguson acknowledge that his modelling in 2001 was flawed and if so, has he taken steps to avoid future mistakes?
Q4.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that between 50 and 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. He also predicted that number could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic as well. In the UK, there have only been 177 deaths from BSE.
Does Ferguson believe that his ‘worst-case scenario’ in this case was too high? If so, what lessons has he learnt when it comes to his modelling since?
Q5.
Ferguson’s disease modelling for Covid-19 has been criticised by experts such as John Ioannidis, professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, who has said that: ‘The Imperial College study has been done by a highly competent team of modellers. However, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated.’
Has the Imperial team’s Covid-19 model been subject to outside scrutiny from other experts, and are the team questioning their own assumptions used? What safeguards are in place?
Q6.
On 22 March, Ferguson said that Imperial College London’s model of the Covid-19 disease is based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code, that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus.
How many assumptions in the Imperial model are still based on influenza and is there any risk that the modelling is flawed because of these assumptions?
A number of institutions are having a shocking crisis, and the mainstream media happen to be among them. Rather than contribute usefully to the national and international effort to suppress the virus, the BBC, Sky News and many broadsheet columnists have ghoulishly decided to concentrate their efforts on reflexively challenging any and all efforts on the part of the government towards protecting public health. Seekers after something closer to “the truth” have sought refuge in alternative media such as Unherd, which has brought its viewers some cracking content that challenges much about the conventional Coronavirus wisdom. Among that content, this interview with epidemiologist and Professor Johan Giesecke – hardly a fan of Neil Ferguson – which challenges the orthodoxy over lockdown, and this interview with Nobel laureate and biologist Professor Michael Levitt, which challenges just how quickly the virus has actually spread. YouTube was at one stage a contender, hosting a presentation by two Californian emergency doctors that also criticised the domestic lockdown policy, until that presentation was mysteriously removed – after racking up over 5 million views.
The reputation of traditional economists has never recovered from the profession’s guilt by association with the Global Financial Crisis (a crisis it was unable to foresee, and which it has subsequently exacerbated by prescribing precisely the wrong medicine, namely the issuance of yet more trillions of unpayable debt). The reputation of epidemiologists at large may be about to join them, down there in the toilet bowl of public opprobrium.
Economist versus epidemiologist – is there a qualitative distinction ? A plague on both your houses.
“Bug Tussle, n., a brief, vigorous dispute between insignificant persons, esp. of sleazy and low character.
“No need to bring in the Marines, it’s just a Bug Tussle,” or, “The arriving officers were told that the bar fight was not a big thing, just a Bug Tussle”.”
“We have read predictions for the total number of Covid-19 deaths in the UK ranging from 6,000 to 20,000 to around 66,000. It seems that epidemiologists’ models are as diverse in their outcomes as economists’.
“Epidemiologists did not predict last year that a pandemic would happen now, in the same way that economists did not foresee the financial crisis (or the current downturn). Developments are not that of a passive evolution in an isolated population, but influenced by government policies, which change over time, and individual actions, accompanied by massive economic costs and uncertainty.”
“Cabinet members have been taken aback by the disagreements among those now advising the government. One minister remarks, with a note of shock, that ‘scientists are as bitchy a bunch as lawyers’ and that ‘there are a lot of people who want Whitty’s job’, a reference to the chief medical officer Chris Whitty. Another notes: ‘The Sage [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] committee members don’t even agree with each other, they bicker. And we talk about following “the science” as if there’s one opinion and not at least seven.”
“I’m starting to root for a plague or world war to purify western culture, burning to cinders all the petty, neurotic, witch-hunting cliques with the white heat of real problems.”
Science, said Max Planck, advances one funeral at a time. More precisely, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The problem, as James Forsyth’s insight into the squabbling at Sage makes clear, is that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic does not involve one science, but multiple sciences. And it looks increasingly clear that epidemiology, at least in the hands of some of its current practitioners, is not so much science as bullshit.
It is also looking increasingly clear that the Great Depression of 2020 was caused not by the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2, but by panicking politicians badly advised by grandstanding epidemiologists. In the finest tradition of the sunk costs fallacy, those politicians are now unwilling to relax the lockdown where it has been most firmly imposed, not least for fear of losing face.
It would seem that Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, might have some explaining to do. It was Ferguson’s virus modelling, not peer reviewed, that led the British government to abandon its prior strategy of herd immunity and impose a lockdown instead. The Steerpike columnist for The Spectator asks a number of questions of Professor Ferguson:
Q1.
In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu. He told the Guardian that ‘around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak… There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.’ In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
How did he get this forecast so wrong?
Q2.
In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent. His most likely estimate was that the mortality rate was 0.4 per cent. A government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths.
In the end swine flu killed 457 people in the UK and had a death rate of just 0.026 per cent in those infected.
Why did the Imperial team overestimate the fatality of the disease? Or to borrow Robinson’s words to Hancock this morning: ‘that prediction wasn’t just nonsense was it? It was dangerous nonsense.’
Q3.
In 2001 the Imperial team produced modelling on foot and mouth disease that suggested that animals in neighbouring farms should be culled, even if there was no evidence of infection. This influenced government policy and led to the total culling of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs – with a cost to the UK economy estimated at £10 billion.
It has been claimed by experts such as Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was ‘severely flawed’ and made a ‘serious error’ by ‘ignoring the species composition of farms,’ and the fact that the disease spread faster between different species.
Does Ferguson acknowledge that his modelling in 2001 was flawed and if so, has he taken steps to avoid future mistakes?
Q4.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that between 50 and 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. He also predicted that number could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic as well. In the UK, there have only been 177 deaths from BSE.
Does Ferguson believe that his ‘worst-case scenario’ in this case was too high? If so, what lessons has he learnt when it comes to his modelling since?
Q5.
Ferguson’s disease modelling for Covid-19 has been criticised by experts such as John Ioannidis, professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, who has said that: ‘The Imperial College study has been done by a highly competent team of modellers. However, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated.’
Has the Imperial team’s Covid-19 model been subject to outside scrutiny from other experts, and are the team questioning their own assumptions used? What safeguards are in place?
Q6.
On 22 March, Ferguson said that Imperial College London’s model of the Covid-19 disease is based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code, that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus.
How many assumptions in the Imperial model are still based on influenza and is there any risk that the modelling is flawed because of these assumptions?
A number of institutions are having a shocking crisis, and the mainstream media happen to be among them. Rather than contribute usefully to the national and international effort to suppress the virus, the BBC, Sky News and many broadsheet columnists have ghoulishly decided to concentrate their efforts on reflexively challenging any and all efforts on the part of the government towards protecting public health. Seekers after something closer to “the truth” have sought refuge in alternative media such as Unherd, which has brought its viewers some cracking content that challenges much about the conventional Coronavirus wisdom. Among that content, this interview with epidemiologist and Professor Johan Giesecke – hardly a fan of Neil Ferguson – which challenges the orthodoxy over lockdown, and this interview with Nobel laureate and biologist Professor Michael Levitt, which challenges just how quickly the virus has actually spread. YouTube was at one stage a contender, hosting a presentation by two Californian emergency doctors that also criticised the domestic lockdown policy, until that presentation was mysteriously removed – after racking up over 5 million views.
The reputation of traditional economists has never recovered from the profession’s guilt by association with the Global Financial Crisis (a crisis it was unable to foresee, and which it has subsequently exacerbated by prescribing precisely the wrong medicine, namely the issuance of yet more trillions of unpayable debt). The reputation of epidemiologists at large may be about to join them, down there in the toilet bowl of public opprobrium.
Economist versus epidemiologist – is there a qualitative distinction ? A plague on both your houses.
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