by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
On March 16, 2020, “Report 9” was published, arguably the most fatal document in the history of science. It predicted mountains of coronavirus corpses and urged lockdowns modeled on the Red Chinese model. The author, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, once again embarrassed himself with momentous predictions that weren’t just a hair’s breadth off the mark but miles off the mark. How did this false prophet gain a hearing? Whose interests did he serve?
Would a court astrologer once have gotten away with it if he had predicted terrible doom for the king four times in a row – and been woefully wrong each time? Even the first blatant false alarm would have cost him his head or at least resulted in exile.
In the 21st century, clairvoyants live a more risk-free life – especially if their name is Neil and they teach at a venerable English university that, strangely enough, becomes all the more popular with its powerful patrons and partners the more impressively its staff sees the future. Then, they can even be woefully wrong with a fifth prophecy. They remain in office and in power.
This is what happened at Imperial College London, a university founded in 1907, which, according to Wikipedia, is “one of the most research-intensive and renowned universities in the world.” It employs 8,000 people. Its annual budget in 2015/16 was already €1.1 billion. “The university regularly achieves top positions in various evaluations of academic institutions.” A whopping 73% of its publications are considered “world-leading” or “excellent.” Journalists have declared it nothing less than the “gold standard for science.”
Report 9: The Most Disastrous Scientific Document of All Time
From this supposedly impeccable source comes “Report 9” – arguably the most influential, consequential scientific paper of all time. It was released on March 16, 2020, less than three weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) prematurely praised China’s mass quarantine in Hubei Province. In Report 9, a so-called “COVID Response Team” led by Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, presented a computer model designed to estimate the danger of the new coronavirus. It would play a crucial role in justifying measures the likes of which the world had never seen before. What the Bible took over a millennium to accomplish, he achieved in a few weeks: It touched the minds of billions of people, stirred their psyches, and ultimately turned their everyday lives upside down.
However, it promised more hell than paradise.
In Report 9, Ferguson painted a 20-page picture of “the greatest health threat since the 1918 Spanish Flu, which is said to have claimed the lives of 20 to 50 million people. If the world does not take extremely repressive countermeasures, 550,000 deaths are to be expected in Great Britain alone; there is a risk of 30 times the number of available hospital beds being overcrowded. Ferguson predicted 2.2 million COVID-19 victims for the United States and 326,000 for Canada. In a “Report 13” submitted two weeks later, Ferguson estimated 85,000 for Sweden. (1) Swedish researchers who applied Ferguson’s model to their own country even calculated 96,000 deaths.
To avert the supposedly impending catastrophe, Ferguson urgently recommended a hard lockdown for the entire population. This lockdown must be maintained for “at least 12 to 18 months,” with only a brief easing of restrictions in between.
How long should this continue? “As long as the virus circulates in the population,” that is until every last positive test case has been eradicated and the zero-COVID ideal has been achieved. Or “until a vaccine is available.” This is what Report 9 states verbatim. And this is what Ferguson emphasized at every opportunity from then on. (2)
Report 9 strongly advised against milder strategies to contain the epidemic. If we limit ourselves to isolating infected people and ensuring social distancing only for the most at-risk groups, the death toll would, at best, be halved. The UK would still have 275,000 deaths, the US 1.1 million; eight times more hospital beds would be needed than available.
Clear path for “Professor Lockdown”
“Report 9 had sensational consequences,” commented Aalen-based economist Prof. Christian Kreiß (3), author of exposés such as “Bought Research” and “Bought Science.” “Shortly thereafter, countless countries around the world imposed a hard lockdown with precisely the measures proposed by Ferguson and his colleagues. For example, schools were closed in 150 countries, affecting 1.2 billion schoolchildren (about 70 percent of all schoolchildren worldwide) by the end of May alone. (…) Neil Ferguson was subsequently dubbed ‘Professor Lockdown’ in the British press. Even today, almost all lockdown measures worldwide, and the justifications for them, are essentially based on the arguments presented in this paper.”
The British government was subsequently forced to slam on the brakes and make a radical U-turn. While the rest of Europe immediately followed Italy’s example and implemented a completely new, untested form of infection control, Great Britain, like Sweden, initially chose a more sedate, measured approach. They trusted tried-and-tested constitutional plans for epidemic control and relied on allowing “herd immunity” to develop, as is gradually achieved during every flu epidemic. As recently as March 13, Prime Minister Boris Johnson assured a press conference that there would initially be no more comprehensive quarantine measures or restrictions on significant events.
Johnson’s steadfastness was suddenly shattered after Ferguson presented his horrific figures to the national scientific council of which he was a member: SAGE, an acronym for Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. This 20-member panel of experts is responsible for advising the British government in emergencies of national importance.
Ferguson probably didn’t have to struggle to find a receptive audience in this round. It is headed by a man who previously helped the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) make money for twelve years, most recently as President of Research and Development: Sir Patrick Vallance. In March 2018, Vallance switched to the government side. Here, the two-legged epitome of a conflict of interest rose directly to the position of “Chief Scientific Adviser.” (4). In this prominent role, he headed the “Government Office of Science,” which advises the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. (5) In May 2020, Vallance, of all people, took over the leadership of a specially established “Vaccine Taskforce” of the government. (6) Vallance was already very familiar with this: With a 24% share in the vaccine segment, GSK is number one in the global market.
Another heavyweight in the SAGE panel likely offered no resistance to Ferguson’s scaremongering: epidemiologist Chris Whitty, whose malaria research in Africa was funded by the Gates Foundation with £31 million. He, of all people, had been appointed England’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO), the government’s top health adviser, in 2019. (7)
And a certain Jonathan Van-Tam also sat next to Ferguson in the SAGE panel: a respiratory virus expert who had worked at GlaxoSmithKline from 2000 to 2004. He had also been a member of the aforementioned “Vaccine Taskforce” since May 2020.
On March 23, 2020, the UK had recorded just 365 presumed COVID-19 deaths – 0.06% of the country’s 600,000 deaths per year. Nevertheless, Johnson announced general lockdown restrictions in a televised address that same day. People were only allowed to leave their homes to buy essential items such as food and medicine, to travel to work, or once a day for exercise, either alone or with members of the same household. All shops that did not provide essential services were required to close immediately. Gatherings of more than two people were banned. (8)
However, it seems that Ferguson’s dire predictions left few in the United Kingdom as unmoved as Ferguson himself. In early May 2020, the coronavirus-like national hero was embarrassingly caught repeatedly entertaining his married lover at home, ignoring the social distancing he had imposed on his fellow citizens. (10)
In a December 2020 interview, Neil Ferguson recalled how China had inspired his lockdown recommendations to the British Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE): “I think people’s sense of what was possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March… It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We thought we couldn’t get away with it in Europe (…) And then Italy did it. And we realized we could (…) If China hadn’t done it, the year would have been very different.” (11) Ferguson should have correctly added: “…and if I hadn’t pushed to emulate China.”
A perfect opportunity for Drosten
Ferguson counts Germany’s chief alarmist, Christian Drosten, among his “friends and colleagues.” Drosten immediately embraced the bleak prediction from London. Report 9 had only been published for two days when Drosten already dedicated a hymn of praise to it on his regular NDR broadcast, barely having read and understood the entire paper, as he himself admitted. Nevertheless, “I consider this study to be one of the best available to date (…) in which the analysis was particularly fine-grained, i.e., the mathematical model is particularly elaborate, and even the smallest details were programmed in.” (12)
At least Drosten qualified that even these “tiniest details” are, of course, not based on any certainty but instead on more or less bold assumptions. For example, Ferguson’s paper assumes purely hypothetically that two out of three “cases,” i.e., those who test positive, develop symptoms, i.e., actually contract Covid-19; one-third survive an infection without symptoms or experience only mild, cold-like symptoms.
Scientists, based on experience with other SARS viruses and severe influenza waves, came to far more conservative estimates. Microbiologist Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi predicted that 90% of all infected people would not develop any illness or would only experience mild symptoms. Immunologist Prof. Stefan Hockertz even estimated the figure at 95%, and other scientists estimated the rate at 80%. (13) Accordingly, Ferguson speculatively inflated the proportion of those who would actually become patients after an infection from 10 to 20% to 67%, a completely unfounded figure. And this horrendous exaggeration caused the projected numbers of hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care units, required ventilators, and deaths to skyrocket.
Drosten also admitted this: “But whether that’s really a third (who don’t get sick), we don’t know; this is really an estimate. This shows that such estimates are bold, and they can be completely wrong, and they can have extreme consequences at the end of a model calculation. That’s always the problem with models; you have to enter estimates in some places. So you have a scientific study that looks extremely complicated, but at the important adjustment points, it suddenly says: Yes, we asked an expert, and he estimated it. That’s a bit of the problem with such studies.”
“We don’t know,” “an expert estimated it,” “that’s a bit of the problem” – and despite all this, Drosten is convinced that “we now have to start this thought process among experts in science, even considering unusual options, if we believe in these modeling numbers. And I do believe in these numbers.” Even if they “can be completely wrong,” one has to courageously “believe in them.” Thus, science degenerates into an almost religious belief in estimates, in sheer speculation, with Professor Drosten as the high priest, whom his congregation must follow when he seizes on Ferguson’s cue to stoke even more panic: “One of the best studies available so far” is “not just based on the USA, but also on England, a country very similar to us. And the outlook is truly despairing. The bottom line is what one can read from this study is truly dire, and we must now sit down and talk together about options.”
It takes little imagination to imagine how many hairs stood on end in Merkel’s crisis cabinet when the chief prompter of the Berlin panic orchestra, decorated with the Cross of Merit, struck such a tone.
And the radical cure recommended by Ferguson also met with Drosten’s approval. By “unusual options,” he meant a lockdown. This would be sensible but difficult to maintain – both for five months at a time and for two years with interruptions. Therefore, “we must also find something else (…) a vaccine.” Thus, he provided the template for the Chancellor’s memorable comment on April 9, 2020, which unmistakably contained a blackmailing threat: “The pandemic will not disappear until we have a vaccine” – and everyone dutifully gets injected.
One week after Drosten’s podcast, the first lockdown also hit Germany. Helping to prepare Germans for what was absolutely necessary was a Ferguson and Drosten fan, captivated by the dynamics of unhindered “exponential growth”: the telegenic Harald Lesch, the first polymath since da Vinci and Goethe. His television audience believes he, of all people, knows everything about everything, whether it’s asteroids or nuclear power plants, fracking or viruses. (14) His high-profile television reports on the coronavirus crisis easily qualify him for a highly paid PR contract in the medical-industrial complex.
Ferguson was spared fact-checking.
As eagerly as the mainstream media had picked up on Report 9, they seemed strangely uninterested in fact-checking to scrutinize Imperial’s bleak future forecast after a while. Ferguson’s predictions weren’t just a hair’s breadth off the mark; they were miles off the mark. More than seven months after they were trumpeted to the world – at the end of October 2020, shortly before the start of the next wave of lockdowns in Europe and worldwide – the official number of so-called “coronavirus victims” in Great Britain was just under 47,000 (instead of the predicted 550,000), in the USA 236,000 (instead of 2.2 million), and in Canada 10,300 (instead of 326,000). (15)
Is it thanks to the recommended lockdowns that the worst fears did not come true? The example of Sweden refutes this common objection. It was the only major Western country to forego mass quarantines following the Chinese model. Nevertheless, by the end of October 2020, there had only been just under 6,000 “coronavirus deaths” there – just 8% of the number predicted by Report 9. Seventy percent of these deaths were nursing home residents. By the beginning of March 2021, towards the end of the “second wave,” there were 13,000 official “COVID-19 victims.” On average, they died at the age of 84. For the portion of the Swedish population younger than 65, mortality even remained below the five-year average.
That there must be something fishy about Ferguson’s model was clear from the start, at least to Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell. “We looked at it and could see that the variables used in the model were quite extreme (…) Why did they choose the variables that produced extreme results? So we were quite skeptical. We did some work of our own that pointed in a completely different direction. In the end, it turned out that our forecast was much closer to the real situation. Probably because we used data we believed we could understand and that came from the actual situation, rather than from some theoretical model.” In general, Tegnell warned in an interview with the British online broadcaster Spectator TV, “one must be very careful with models. They are not made to make predictions; they are made to test different kinds of measures to see what kind of effect they might have. Because if you put garbage in, garbage comes out.”
In reality, nationwide lockdowns likely cost far more lives than they saved. In Great Britain, as in all other lockdown countries, a significant excess mortality occurred not before the start of the rigorous disease control measures, but during them. (16)
The true death rates are still far below the official horror figures. Anyone who tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 is automatically included in the official statistics as a “COVID-19 victim” if they die within the following month – even if they actually died in an accident, were the victim of a violent crime, suffered a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or a severe bout of influenza. As the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now admitted, 94% of US “coronavirus deaths” had at least one other underlying life-threatening illness. After autopsies of 735 alleged COVID-19 victims – an average age of 83 – forensic pathologists at the University of Hamburg even assume that SARS-CoV-2 infection can be considered the sole cause of death in only 1% of cases.
Should we, in fairness, acknowledge that “predictions are difficult, especially about the future,” in keeping with Mark Twain’s oft-quoted quip? Indeed. But why was Report 9 so blatantly wrong? Several other research groups also created computer models of the expected course of the pandemic. Scientists from the University of Los Angeles and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) compared their accuracy. (17) Across all time periods, the Imperial model exhibited far greater error rates than the others—and persistently overestimated estimates.
Autumn Wave-Making
By the summer of 2020 at the latest, official statistics had left Imperial’s Nostradamus as stark naked as the newly dressed emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale. Unfortunately, politicians and media representatives didn’t look closely enough. Figures from the British Office for National Statistics (ONS) already showed that mortality in 2020 was comparable to the severe flu epidemic of 1999/2000. The Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford estimated the infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19 at 0.3 to 0.49%. This means that out of every 1,000 infected people, no more than three to five died. For those aged 45 to 64, the rate was 0.5%, and for younger people, just 0.03%, as epidemiologists at Imperial College determined.
But Ferguson had no intention of stopping his scaremongering, nor did Drosten in Germany. And the inaccuracies continued. At the end of October 2020, he predicted that Britain would have well over 2,000 deaths per day by mid-December. (18)
In reality, this number never exceeded 556 until the end of 2020.
Why were Ferguson’s predictions so abysmal? Experts criticized his model from the beginning. But their criticism apparently didn’t reach policymakers, and mainstream media outlets remained silent. As early as May 17, 2020, the English newspaper Daily Mail quoted computer scientists who described Professor Lockdown’s model as a “mess” “that would get you fired in private industry.” Using the same model, scientists at the University of Edinburgh had reached entirely different conclusions. Health experts at the University of Oxford had also criticized it early on.
At the beginning of June 2020, the Montreal Economic Institute published an analysis titled “The Flawed COVID-19 Model That Led to Canada’s Lockdown.” In it, it pointed out serious scientific flaws. For example, there had been no peer review or an evaluation by other independent scientists. Several thousand (!) lines of the program were “undocumented,” as Ferguson himself admitted; (19) thus, no outsider can understand them. A senior software developer at Google identified “amateurish errors” in the code underlying the model. “All scientific papers based on this code should be retracted immediately,” he concluded.
Even at the beginning of the pandemic, doctors and scientists, who had to endure ridicule as “Covidotes,” had pointed out two factors whose omission in the Imperial model was particularly significant. First, respiratory viruses occur seasonally; they spread during the cold season. That SARS-CoV-2 was no exception began to become apparent across Europe, including in Germany, as early as the end of February/beginning of March, before government lockdown terror began: Infection and disease rates were already declining. (20)
The Imperial model also failed to take into account the fact that humans tend to have an immune system that can cope perfectly with almost all infections as long as it remains intact. Ferguson’s figures assumed that the virus was spreading completely unhindered. In fact, a large portion of the population—estimates range up to 80%—was already protected through previous contact with other coronaviruses; they had acquired “cross-immunity.” This was the only way to explain why far fewer people than feared became seriously ill and died after infection.
In light of such blatant blunders, doubts about Ferguson’s qualifications are obvious. The man is not a medical doctor, nor an immunologist or epidemiologist. He has no training as a computer scientist either. He doesn’t even have an A-level in biology, as he was forced to admit in a BBC interview. (21) According to Wikipedia, “He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1990, and his Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics from Linacre College, Oxford, in 1994.”
On the other hand, formal qualifications are, of course, not the only indicator of competence. Even without a title or certificate, someone can achieve great things in a particular field. After all, Ferguson has been a sought-after expert in mathematical models of complex dynamic systems for two decades. These undoubtedly include pandemics, as well as the weather and the stock market.
In this role, however, Ferguson has not consistently excelled. Rather, he has repeatedly embarrassed himself, beginning in 2001 during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Great Britain. Based on Ferguson’s model calculations, 6.5 million cattle, sheep, and pigs were “emergency” slaughtered. The economic damage amounted to 12 to 18 billion pounds. A study by the University of Edinburgh subsequently dissected Ferguson’s model according to every trick in the book.
One year later, in 2002, “mad cow disease” was a media buzzword. Ferguson concluded from his computer model that up to 50,000 people could die from BSE-contaminated beef. This number could potentially rise to 150,000 if the virus spreads to sheep. In reality, a total of 88 Britons succumbed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in 2001, 95 the following year, and a total of 2,159 between 2001 and March 2021.
When the H7N9 avian influenza virus began to spread in 2005, Ferguson estimated “up to 200 million deaths worldwide.” It wasn’t until eight years later, in February 2013, that the pathogen first jumped from poultry to humans. By May 2018, the WHO had counted 615 deaths worldwide, and by the end of 2020, there had been just one more.
As a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE), Ferguson played a key role in the World Health Organization’s false alarm about the swine flu (H1N1) in 2009. (22) He predicted a case fatality rate (CFR) of between 0.3 and 1.5%; 0.4% seemed most likely to him. That means four out of every thousand infected people will die. The British government concluded that “a reasonable worst-case scenario is that swine flu will lead to 65,000 deaths in the UK.” How many Britons actually died from it? By mid-March 2010, the number was 457. In the end, H1N1 caused one of the mildest flu waves since the turn of the millennium.
In Ferguson’s defense, it must be noted that forecasts are most difficult when they involve complex, dynamic systems. Although billions of dollars have been spent on weather and stock market forecasts for decades, they still rarely extend beyond a time horizon of a few days. This is where scientists enter the world of chaos theory – they study systems that react extremely sensitively to the slightest deviation in initial conditions. Even many laypeople are now familiar with the butterfly effect: Even a tiny change in airflow, triggered by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, can ultimately lead to the occurrence of a tornado due to the complex interaction of billions of particles.
Ferguson also deserves credit for distinguishing between “prediction,” “projection,” and “reasonable worst-case scenario” in scientific estimates. But that doesn’t spare him two annoying questions. If conjectures about “reasonable worst-case scenarios” reliably turn out to be several orders of magnitude higher than what actually occurs – what value do these estimates have? And how responsible is it to loudly trumpet these speculations to the world without providing clear guidance on how to interpret them?
Ferguson is not responsible for the lack of scientific training many journalists have and the sensationalism that leads the media to publish frightening figures rather than reassuring ones. He bears no blame for the professional incompetence of governments and officials. He doesn’t have to apologize for the fact that laypeople shudder in awe and are dazzled as soon as copious amounts of mathematics are applied, conjuring up impressive curves and tables on monitors. But he has to reckon with all of this. He has to face misunderstandings as soon as he realizes that the predictive power of his models is grossly overestimated. Ferguson failed to do that. Instead of containing the fire, his spark had ignited, he fanned it further.
How could such a false prophet survive all these embarrassments unscathed? “The real scandal is: Why did anyone even listen to this guy?” reads the online portal Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science at Columbia University in New York. How is it possible that Ferguson’s university, out of legitimate concern for its reputation, didn’t distance itself from him long ago and didn’t part ways with him? Why does it cling so firmly to such a discredited man? What makes this professor so particularly valuable to his employer?
In our search for an explanation, we come across a telling list of highly potent partners and patrons.
A Lesson in third-party funding prostitution
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been particularly generous to Imperial since 2010. To date, it has donated a total of almost 190 million US dollars; in 2020 alone, this figure was 79 million. Apparently, Gates also directly funded the work of Neil Ferguson—184 million British pounds alone for predictions of COVID-19 mortality.
Gates also donated substantial sums to the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Modeling, which Ferguson established at Imperial College in 2008. It provides the WHO with “rapid analyses of pressing infectious disease problems” and “models” for these. (27)
Another of Imperial’s most generous patrons is the London-based Wellcome Trust, the world’s fourth-richest foundation—and ultimately an oversized pharmaceutical marketing agency disguised as a philanthropic entity. Its assets amounted to €34 billion in 2020. (28) Founded in 1936 by pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome, it supports medical research with the stated noble purpose of “assisting science in solving the pressing health challenges facing everyone.” Given Wellcome’s history, it goes without saying that these solutions consist of products from the pharmaceutical industry. The founder became extremely wealthy with the pharmaceutical company named after him, Burroughs Wellcome, which merged with its competitor Glaxo in 1995; four years later, it was the world’s third-largest drug manufacturer by sales, just behind Novartis and Merck. Just in time for the turn of the millennium, it was absorbed into the corporate giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the many beneficiaries of the pandemic.
Imperial College has also long had close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, its rector, Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson, advised both the WHO and the British government. As a member of the WHO Emergency Committee, Anderson played a key role in ensuring that the highest pandemic level, Level 6, was declared with astonishing speed. And it was in Great Britain, of all places, according to Anderson’s risk assessment, that swine flu was raging most severely, which is why particularly rigorous countermeasures had to be taken. Anderson loudly advocated publicly for the creation of large stockpiles of anti-flu medications and vaccines. As journalists revealed, Anderson was simultaneously on GlaxoSmithKline’s payroll as a non-executive director, earning an annual salary of €136,000 – a hefty investment for the world’s second-largest pill-maker, a peanuts-sized investment in terms of return. Thanks in part to Anderson’s PR skills, GSK raked in billions from the sale of a vaccine called Pandemrix, which had numerous side effects, as well as the essentially useless antiviral Tamiflu. (29) Following the WHO recommendation, GSK secured orders for 195 million doses of a vaccine against the H1N1 virus from 16 countries – and negotiated with 50 more. Between May and July 2009 alone, GSK is said to have posted a profit of £2.1 billion.
In 2015, Imperial College set up a joint laboratory with GlaxoSmithKline. It regularly hosts high-profile pharmaceutical representatives – for example, Sheuli Porkess, Deputy Chief Scientific Officer of the British Pharmaceutical Industry Association in 2019; Mark Toms, Chief Scientific Officer of Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK; or Toni Wood, Senior Vice President of GSK In 2018, he gave the opening lecture at the annual conference of its in-house Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering (IMSE). (30) In addition to GSK, Imperial’s regular “partners” include virtually all the major players in the pharmaceutical business, including some of the most critical vaccine manufacturers, from Pfizer and AstraZeneca to Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly. In early 2019, Imperial College organized a conference with the telling title “Achieving success in drug development through collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry.” Imperial is also participating in clinical trials to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.
A disease alarmist like Neil Ferguson, with a world-leading university as an unmistakable megaphone for his Cassandra-like prophecies, plays perfectly into the hands of all these partners. The worse a pandemic supposedly rages, the more dire the future prospects, the more urgent it seems to be to develop vaccines. The more willing governments are to subsidize their development, order enormous quantities, relax the approval process, and relieve manufacturers of liability for damages. They insistently advertise their products to the public for free. The more willing they are to force mass vaccinations if necessary. The longer they help to stoke fear. The longer they maintain restrictive infection control measures.
Ferguson was on the payroll of major pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, Baxter, and Roche for years, as the 2018 documentary “trustWHO” revealed. When asked about this, Ferguson admitted to such contributions to the pharmaceutical online magazine Scrip but found them completely normal: “I think it would be difficult to find a true expert in flu vaccines and antiviral drugs who haven’t collaborated with pharmaceutical companies at some point. (…) The development of such products is carried out by commercial companies; they have the data, and they are interested in research related to their products. (…) I think that science, in general, benefits from connections between academic and commercial research, as does the quality of scientific advice offered to public health authorities.” Nevertheless, Ferguson claims to have ceased his lucrative services to GlaxoSmithKline and Roche in 2007. Why, exactly?
Although it was clear by the summer of 2020 at the latest that Ferguson was just as wrong with his apocalyptic predictions as he was with his totalitarian recommendations, Imperial College continued to let him do as he pleased in the interests of Gates, Wellcome, and Big Pharma. And so he enjoyed the freedom to wreak further havoc.
How Neil ruined Christmas for the British
Shortly before Christmas 2020, on December 19, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced tightened containment measures. They were necessitated by a mutated strain of the coronavirus – VUI-202012/01, also known as N501Y or B.1.1.7 – which is believed to be “up to 70% more contagious.” Do more infections lead to more severe illness and deaths? The Prime Minister remained silent on this point.
How did he arrive at his risk assessment?
According to BBC research, Johnson’s “70%” alarm was based solely on information discussed the day before in a British government advisory group, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, or NERVTAG for short.
NERVTAG, in turn, had drawn the ominous “70%” from a single source: a ten-minute presentation given by a close associate of Ferguson, Dr. Erik Volz, on December 18, the same day.
Volz delivered his short presentation to Covid-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), a research consortium established in April 2020. Primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust and the British government, COG-UK is tasked with collecting, sequencing, and analyzing the genetic material of the new coronavirus from samples taken from infected individuals. Over 40,000 genomes had already been collected within six months, including the new strain. The Ferguson group estimated it would likely spread to another computer model. It assumed a 70% higher infection rate.
As the video recording of Volz’s presentation shows, however, the Ferguson employee did not defend this estimate at all. On the contrary, he repeatedly and emphatically warned against overestimating it and drawing hasty conclusions from it. Volz made comments such as, “We’re essentially still at a very early stage; we’ve only observed growth for one month,” “the model fit isn’t particularly good,” and “it’s not necessarily appropriate.” It was “too early to say” how infectious N501Y actually is. The 70% estimate, he said, corresponds to “the current state of our knowledge,” which, in turn, incorporates trends that “don’t always hold true.” Furthermore, the available data sets are of poor quality, “very noisy, and overdispersed.”
As a result, most of those present at the crucial NERVTAG meeting spoke out against any kind of “immediate action on the new mutation.” They wanted to “wait for further evidence,” according to the minutes published by the Daily Mail.
However, “Professor Lockdown” himself also attended the NERVTAG meeting, as did his colleague Wendy Barclay, a virologist whose Imperial laboratory is co-funded by the Wellcome Trust. These two, a senior Whitehall source told the Daily Mail, formed a “vocal minority” from then on: They initiated a media “bullying” campaign to pressure the British government to take drastic measures.
Immediately after Johnson’s pre-Christmas lockdown, Ferguson left no camera unturned, spreading the completely unsubstantiated rumor that the new SARS-CoV-2 variant might have “a higher propensity to infect children.” Although “we haven’t established any kind of causality for this, we can see it in the data.” His colleague Barclay assisted him. She, too, fed the mainstream media with the claim that the new mutant was increasingly affecting children; they were “perhaps just as susceptible to this virus as adults.”
For pharmaceutical companies hoping to include minors in their imminent vaccination campaigns, no marketing aid could be more valuable. Yet data from the Office of National Statistics suggests that children are more likely to be struck by lightning than to die from COVID-19. The COVID death rate for 5- to 14-year-olds is 1 in 3.6 million. (32)
The NERVTAG panel, including Ferguson, only provided Boris Johnson with the semblance of a scientific justification for the Christmas lockdown a month after Christmas. As the Prime Minister announced at a press conference on January 22, scientific analyses suggest that the new B.1.1.7 mutant “could kill 30% more infected people,” possibly even up to 91%. One of these “analyses” came, of course, from Ferguson.
Even before Johnson’s appearance, the horror story was circulating in the media. Ferguson ensured this by “briefing” an editor at ITV News.
Ferguson’s “friends and colleagues” at the University of Exeter triggered a “second wave” of this mutant horror in early March; in a study of over 110,000 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, they claimed to have determined “a 64% increased risk of death” in people who became infected with the new variant.
With these figures, mainstream media outlets promptly stoked new panic (33), and lockdown fans gained further momentum.
What Ferguson left uncommented, however, was the change in the absolute risk of death: It remains relatively low, rising from 2.5 to 4.1 deaths per 1,000 infected people. Both these rates and the range of fluctuation are anything but sensational. They are not radically different from influenza pandemics like those that swept the globe in 1957 and 1968. Depending on the prevailing variants, influenza viruses also cause more deaths in some winters than in others.
History written
As the arsonist of Rome, Emperor Nero has likely secured a permanent place in the history books. Without exaggeration, Neil Ferguson’s works can be expected to enjoy a similar status. “Historians will surely be stunned for centuries to come by the role a deeply flawed computer model played in triggering a chain of events that fundamentally and perhaps catastrophically damaged Western society,” says British computer scientist Derek Winton. He occasionally advised Ferguson’s Imperial team on software issues. “When (if!) the dust finally settles on the coronavirus pandemic, it will be difficult for future historians to come to any other conclusion than this: We abandoned our carefully planned and rehearsed pandemic preparedness plans in favor of an experimental measure based on non-peer-reviewed, undocumented, obscure, predictively inaccurate modeling, using a design that omits one of the most important variables involved, created by an expert who evidently has no formal training in computer modeling or epidemiology, but who does have a track record of gross overestimations of mortality rates.”
So, were Imperial College’s models helpful? Without a doubt – for its sponsors.
And so the coronavirus pandemic illustrates in an unsurpassable impressive way what third-party funding prostitution means in the academic world – and what it does to it.
Harald Wiesendanger
Notes
(1) https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-03-30-COVID19-Report-13.pdf; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-boris-johnson-needs-to-speak-to-anders-tegnell; https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/7437147
(2) https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/bitstream/10044/1/77482/14/2020-03-16-COVID19-Report-9.pdf; https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid-19-imperial-researchers-model-likely-impact/; https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18425661.boris-johnson-mass-produced-vaccine-will-create-impregnable-shield-defeat-coronavirus/
(3) https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=66244&pdf=66244; https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/historisches-wissenschaftsversagen
(4) “U.K. Government Appoints Next Chief Scientific Adviser”, Scientific American, 9.11.2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-k-government-appoints-next-chief-scientific-adviser/
(5) “Appointment of Dr Patrick Vallance as government Chief Scientific Adviser”. Cabinet Office. 8.11.2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/appointment-of-dr-patrick-vallance-as-government-chief-scientific-adviser; “Patrick Vallance, President, R&D, GSK to become UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser”. GlaxoSmithKline. 8.11.2017, https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/patrick-vallance-president-rd-gsk-to-become-uk-governments-chief-scientific-adviser/
(6) “Funding and manufacturing boost for UK vaccine programme Government of the United Kingdom “, Presseerklärung vom 17.5.2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/funding-and-manufacturing-boost-for-uk-vaccine-programme.
(7) “Whitty, Prof. Christopher John Macrae”. Who’s Who. 1.12.2018. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U250932, https://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.001.0001/ww-9780199540884-e-250932
(8) „Einschränkungen: Großbritannien erlässt allgemeine Ausgangsbeschränkungen“, zeit.de. 23.3.2020, https://www.zeit.de/news/2020-03/23/grossbritannien-erlaesst-allgemeine-ausgangsbeschraenkungen.
(9) tagesschau.de: „Corona-Krise: Großbritannien verlängert Maßnahmen“, https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/grossbritannien-massnahmen-101.html; „Coronavirus: UK lockdown extended for ‘at least’ three weeks“, bbc.com. 16.4.2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52313715
(10) “Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover”. The Telegraph, 5.5.2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/exclusive-government-scientist-neil-ferguson-resigns-breaking/; “Top government adviser quits after breaking lockdown with his mistress”. The Times, 6.5.2020, No. 73152. p. 1; “Coronavirus: Prof Neil Ferguson quits government role after ‘undermining’ lockdown”, BBC News. 6.5.2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52553229; “UK coronavirus adviser resigns after reports his lover visited during lockdown”, CNN, 6.5.2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/uk/neil-ferguson-imperial-coronavirus-sage-gbr-intl/index.html
(11) “Professor Neil Ferguson: People don’t agree with lockdown and try to undermine the scientists “, The Times of London, 25.12.2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/people-don-t-agree-with-lockdown-and-try-to-undermine-the-scientists-gnms7mp98.
(12) ndr.de/nachrichten/info, ab Min. 16:42, https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/16-Wir-brauchen-Abkuerzungen-bei-der-Impfstoffzulassung,audio655164.html
(13) https://fassadenkratzer.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/systematische-panikmache-zur-tatsaechlichen-und-statistisch-erzeugten-gefaehrlichkeit-des-corona-virus/; mdr.de, 2. 10. 2020, https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/panorama/interview-klaus-rabe-corona-wieviele-infizierte-krank-100.html
(14) Siehe H. Wiesendanger: „Aufklärer vom Panikvirus infiziert – Selbst Harald Lesch streut jetzt Fake News“, https://www.stiftung-auswege.de/images/downloads/auswege-newsl65.pdf, PDF S. 24-27.
(15) Nach „Our World of Data“ (OWID), der hochwertigen Online-Datenbank einer Forschergruppe der Universität Oxford, https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/
(16) http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/collateral_judgement.html; s.KLARTEXT „Seltsam übersterblich – Wie Großbritannien zu seiner Covid-19-Opferstatistik kam“. https://www.klartext-online.info/post/seltsam-%C3%BCbersterblich
(17) Joseph Friedman u.a.: „Predictive performance of international COVID-19 mortality forecasting models“, 19.11.2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.13.20151233.
(18) Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), SPI-M-O: “Long term winter scenarios preparatory working analysis “, 31.10.2020, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/938967/201031_SPI-M_preparatory_analysis_long_term_scenarios.pdf.
(19) Neil Ferguson auf Twitter am 22.3.2020, zit. bei https://lockdownsceptics.org/the-imperial-model-and-its-role-in-the-uks-pandemic-response/#_blank
See H. Wiesendanger: “Figures from the Robert Koch Institute, of all things, prove: This lockdown is a senseless imposition” and “We are being deceived. The Robert Koch Institute continues to spread fake news – and no one contradicts it” in Auswege Infos No. 66 / May 2020,(20) https://www.stiftung-auswege.de/images/downloads/auswege-newsl66.pdf
(21) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mt0h, ab Min. 6:15.
(22) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/healthcare/did-who-experts-fuel-swine-flu-scare/articleshow/5439232.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst; http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/285670
(23) Andrew Scheuber, Chinese President sees UK-China academic partnerships at Imperial, Imperial College London, October 21, 2015, https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/168497/chinese-president-sees-uk-china-academic-partnerships/
(24) Zit. nach A. Scheuber, a.a.O.
(25) (25) “Social Sciences and Management Ranking “, www.topuniversities.com. Abgerufen am 13.3.2020.
(26) David Lee: “World Economic Forum Establishes “A.I. Council” Co-chaired by Chinese AI Expert Kai-Fu Lee “, Pandaily, 24.1.2019, https://pandaily.com/world-economic-forum-establishes-artificial-intelligence-council/; Imperial College London, “China and Imperial “, https://web.archive.org/web/20201231155935/https://www.imperial.ac.uk/about/introducing-imperial/global-imperial/east-asia/china/.
(27) https://apps.who.int/whocc/Detail.aspx?FJdjEEdrcMNfOU4d+dseSg==, abgerufen am 11.3.2021
(28) Stand 2020; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellcome_Trust#cite_note-endowment-4, abgerufen am 10.3.2021.)
(29) Aus dem ARTE-Dokumentarfilm „Profiteure der Angst“ (2009), https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=profiteure+der+angst+arte+doku; s. auch https://www.radio-utopie.de/2009/08/05/profitables-doppelspiel-mit-der-ah1n1-pandemie/
(30) Nach Christian Kreiß, „Nachdenkseiten“ vom 28.10.2020, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=66244
(31) Neil M. Ferguson, Steven Riley u.a.: “Report 11 — Evidence of initial success for China exiting COVID-19 social distancing policy after achieving containment “, Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, 24.3.2020, https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-11-china-exiting-social-distancing/.
(32) Nach Daily Telegraph, 10.6.2020, S. 1: “Lightning a bigger risk to pupils than Covid “, https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-daily-telegraph/20200610/281522228322629; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8404537/School-children-15-higher-risk-struck-LIGHTNING-dying-coronavirus.html; https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kids-more-likely-struck-lightning-22166411
(33) https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/medizin/grossbritannien-corona-variante-b-1-1-7-ist-laut-studie-toedlicher-als-das-urspruengliche-virus-a-faaf0a90-0f3c-48f0-8aaa-24de76a764f1; https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article228029951/Britische-Mutante-B-1-1-7-ist-laut-Studie-zu-64-Prozent-toedlicher.html