Someone demonstrates that they are wrong over and over and over, should they be listened to in the future when they make claims about the same topic that they claim that they are knowledgeable about? Shouldn't they be someone else be looked at to provide the information rather than the person who repeatedly has been shown to be wrong?
You would think so, wouldn't you? Especially if it's about an issue that the government is looking at, where they have the power and authority to affect millions of lives based on that information. But you see, this isn't what many governments have been doing when it comes to the credibility of Neil Ferguson in predicting the threat of some illnesses or diseases.
For those who don't know, Neil Ferguson, and his team at the Imperial College, were the ones that predicted very high mortality rates from the novel coronavirus. They developed a model where they fed data to produce an outcome that they said was going to be what likely would happen. What did they say would happen? That there would 2.2 million dead in the US, 500,000 that in the UK and over 300,000 in Canada as a result of coronavirus infections.
That is, unless everyone followed Ferguson's recommendations. That if you had unmitigated intervention, there could be 40 million deaths worldwide. But she did what he said, my can be reduced greatly. He called for a 75% reduction in interpersonal contacts. That is, to lockdown and isolate people.
And these death figures were in the first few weeks of the alleged pandemic in 2020. Most countries in the world follow these recommendations to their own economic ruin and also high detriment in people's lives which included deaths from suicides and neglected medical treatments that only focused on the novel coronavirus.
A clear demonstration of the inaccuracy of these predictions came with Sweden. The prediction was 90,000 dead at the onset of the pandemic, but within two months his prediction fell on its face with only just over 3000 allegedly died from the virus created illness.
Ferguson was wrong. The catastrophic death toll did not happen in Sweden as he and his team predicted. He was also wrong about for other issues in the past, such as the swine flu of 2010 and other alleged pandemics, as well as some mad cow disease allegations. But despite his claims never happening, the government, at least in the UK, always followed his recommendations on his predictions that never happened.
What's funny is at the time, the Uppsala University in Sweden also used Fergusons model to do their own projections, and came up with a higher death toll by mid April alone if the country didn't lock down of 96,000. The claim that if there was a full complete Oconee in lockdown, that's would only be at 40,000.Sweden didn't do that, and obviously all of these projections turned out to be ludicrous and ridiculous. The Imperial College model was about the same, with 42,000 deaths if there was no heavy social distancing and lockdowns in Sweden.
Though the Imperial College never specifically stated by what date those deaths would be reached in Sweden, they did state that it would be three months in their US and UK model. Clearly these predictions were heavily exaggerated and wildly off the mark.
In addition to lockdowns and social distancing, Ferguson claimed the only way to avoid the chaos they predicted was also through high levels of testing:
[t]he only approaches that can avert health system failure in the coming months are likely to be the intensive social distancing measures currently being implemented in many of the most affected countries, preferably combined with high levels of testing
There were various levels of lockdown and non-lockdown modeled. Here's what they look like compared to the actual result a year later:
They were wrong. Not following the recommendations did not result in the chaotic outcome that they predicted for Sweden. Even in France, where if all the recommendations were followed they still predicted 332,000 deaths, and 621,000 is nothing was done by the government to stop the spread of the virus. But after a year, there are only 94,000 deaths that are allegedly a direct result of the novel coronavirus even though no evidence has been demonstrated that the cause of death was actually from covid-19.
If this is what people call science, when it is a great failure of science, and maybe one of the greatest failures of science in recent history. Countries have been ruined economically, lives have been ruined economically, people have killed themselves as a result of the social isolation, people have died due to neglect and medical systems failure to treat people for things that are not coronavirus related. And while these lockdowns were being enforced on people, Ferguson was one of the people to break his own rules, and sneak off to to have an affair with a married woman. That's how serious he thought of this new viral threat. He personally didn't even view it as the threat that he claimed it was. But he expected everyone else to do what he didn't do himself.