Thursday, April 29, 2021

1980s Reagan-Thatcher bad marriage between conservatism and neoliberalism yielded today’s borderless, globalized children and sidelined parents. Neoliberalism became a far worse enemy than Marxism-Gerald Warner, 9/23/2015

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Over time you can get people to believe anything. 82% of Egyptian Muslims believe you should be stoned to death for adultery, per Pew Poll.

9/23/2015, “Conservatism Can No Longer Cohabit With Nihilistic Neoliberalism," Gerald Warner, Breitbart

“It was the iconic love match of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was best man and Margaret Thatcher matron of honour when conservatism embraced neo-liberalism at the start of a relationship that seemed destined to conquer the hearts of the developed world.

Then the Berlin Wall came down and rust-bucket Marxism fell into the dustbin of history, removing a once-feared rival to the newlyweds.

The honeymoon was lengthy and passionate; the marriage prospered and produced many offspring. But when some of the progeny grew into their teens, as not uncommonly happens, they became a liability. The most delinquent were Globalisation, Free Movement of Labour, Over-Mighty Corporations and Crony Capitalism. Conservatism found it had made a largely incompatible marriage, so now the unhappy couple are heading for the divorce court.

That is the plain truth of the matter: we have reached a point where everything that conservatives value is threatened less by Corbynista neo-Marxism than by rampant neo-liberalism. Is anyone certain, any more, what “neo-liberalism” means? In the 1980s it was shorthand for a worldview that looked to the freeing up of enterprise and the rolling back of the state to make people prosperous. Conservatives could go along with that: the enlargement of the role of the state had been the consequence of post-War Marxist hard totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and social democratic soft totalitarianism in the West.

Liberation from those straitjackets was a universal conservative aspiration, so it was natural for conservatism to find economic neo-liberalism congenial and adopt it as an instrument of wealth creation. The fact that this alliance was first implemented, with spectacular success, in Chile under Augusto Pinochet testifies to the initial compatibility of neo-liberalism with conservative objectives.

The inbuilt incompatibility, however, resided in the fact that neo-liberalism spilled over from the economic arena into the political, social and cultural zones. At the same time, so far from shrinking, the state expanded its role into more and more areas of life. Yes, it privatised utilities, but it quickly compensated for this by intruding into every other sphere of its citizens’ existence. Where was the gain in privatising railways, water or electricity, when children have been nationalised, subjected to state-sponsored sexualisation and brainwashing, with their parents sidelined?

Governments embarked on neo-Marxist projects of social engineering, enforcing political correctness and abolishing free speech. They coercively reconfigured their countries’ demography by imposing mass immigration, against the known wishes of the majority of the population. They even presumed to redefine marriage.

Neo-liberalism comfortably accommodated itself to this encroachment of tyranny, encouraging mass immigration as a source of cheap labour, to enhance profits. But it was not a joined-up response. No thought was given to the strain on hospitals, schools, housing, or to the fact that immigrants, seen as the solution to an ageing population, themselves grow old and consume welfare resources. The quarterly bottom line was the limited horizon of neo-liberal free-marketeers.

Above all, neo-liberals have shown no regard for cultural priorities. National identity and the broader culture of Christian Europe are to be discarded, true community identity replaced by a rootless individualism whose only enduring relationship is with technology. The family is despised, fiscally oppressed and treated with contempt. Conservatism can no longer cohabit with this nihilist, deracinated force that is already inflicting more damage on Western civilisation than communism ever achieved.

Neo-liberalism is not even true to its own tenets. It has long departed from the principles of Hayek, with his respect for tradition, and degenerated into crony capitalism and complicity with the intruder state. Conservatives urgently need to cut loose. The immediate battleground is the immigration crisis swamping– yes, that is the word, the only one that adequately describes the character of the threat – Europe and Britain.

There are now 6,000 incomers per day landing in Europe and the rate is accelerating. Neo-liberals gaze approvingly on this influx, seeing only a cheap labour source, disregarding the fact that the overwhelming majority is unskilled, unfit or unwilling to work. Not a problem: the welfare state (i.e. taxpayers) will take care of them while business cherry-picks a labour force from their ranks. Quarterly results will improve and shareholders’ dividends increase.

While nations shunt immigrants around the continent, at endless EU summits politicians try to reallocate the burden, exchanging recriminations and trying to dictate to countries the numbers they must accept. The one solution that is never canvassed is the only one that will work: expulsion from Europe of these unwanted economic migrants. Where are the Syrian Christians? Afraid to enter refugee camps for fear of being murdered by jihadists, thrown overboard from migrant boats by their religious enemies, or already dead: anywhere except among this invading force that is overrunning Europe while our effete governments wring their hands and urge ever more help for those who are annihilating our culture.

Sometimes even economic growth must take second place to cultural, social and religious priorities. That is the case now. What has conservatism actually conserved in recent decades? If it is to improve on that abysmal record it must break with multinational, multicultural, blindly materialist neo-liberalism and return to the defence of the fundamental identity of nation states, and pre-eminently Britain.”…image above, getty

 

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In 1918, Babe Ruth’s future daughter Julia caught the 1918 flu. Babe’s future wife Claire took care of her two year old Julia as well as Julia's grandmother while continuing to work. Claire’s two brothers couldn’t help since they had left the US to possibly die in a foreign war

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Julia Ruth Stevens, July 7, 1916-March 9, 2019

Dec. 1, 2007, Julia Ruth Stevens," Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)

[Julia Ruth Stevens, image from PSA]

Julia was born in Athens, Georgia on July 17, 1916.

“Her [Julia’s] mother, Claire, in search of a career as a model, was well aware of the fact that the opportunities in Georgia were fairly limited. Realizing that if she was going to make a go at a career she would have to leave the shelter of her Athens’ home, Claire packed up her mother and toddling baby [Julia] and headed off to New York where she eventually met and married one of the most legendary men to ever roam the globe – Babe Ruth. Sports Market Report recently spoke with Julia Ruth Stevens while she visited her summer home in Conway, New Hampshire and asked her to share some of the memories, thoughts, and feelings she harbors about her life and her legendary father.

[Claire, Julia, and Babe, psa]

Sports Market Report: Throughout your entire life you have been asked just about every imaginable question about your father, so, we thought we would like to start this interview by asking you to tell us something about your mother.

Julia Ruth Stevens: My mother was a beautiful woman who was also a wonderful mother. She had been the youngest of three children and her two older brothers lived with us. She split up with my biological father shortly after I was born, so I never knew him at all. He died not too much longer after they broke up. Well, when I was a baby, my mother took me to New York with her so that she could pursue her modeling career. That was 1918, and she did quite a bit of modeling work and also worked on the stage as a dancer and actress.

[Image: 1918, NYC: “Throngs of New Yorkers fill the streets of Manhattan to celebrate Armistice Day, November 11, 1918…..Public health officers across the nation feared that such large-scale gatherings would help continue to spread influenza, but knew that there was little they could do to try and stop them.” National Archives and Records Administration]

At that time, my two uncles had gone off to serve in the military and my grandmother was living with us. There was a great flu epidemic that hit that year and my grandmother and I [then two years old] both became quite ill. My mother took care of both of us while she still continued to work. She was a small person, but a very strong person. She had a lot of inner strength.”…

Babe and Julia’s mother Claire started a relationship in 1923 and married in 1929. Julia remembers meeting Babe at age 7 when he began visiting her mother.

[Left: 1933, Claire, Babe, and Julia, psa]

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Added: Babe Ruth with his wife Claire and two daughters, Dorothy and Julia. econproph

 

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Tuesday, April 27, 2021

India is #1 country in the world for Covid spreader, outdoor defecation; 344 million without regular access to toilets. Large portions of cities in India don’t have sewage lines-CNET, Sept. 11, 2020

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Studies have found that coronavirus can be spread through feces.India is the No. 1 country in the world for open defecation, with over 344 million people without regular access to toilets...The actual number of toilets built is inflated. Households are given 12,000 rupeesabout $160-to build a toilet, but Agarwal said the government rarely verifies that the toilets are constructed. Without verification, these funds are often pocketed by homeowners, village heads or construction companies….Or…shoddy toilets get built....Large chunks of Indian cities don’t have sewage lines.”

9/11/2020, “India spent $30 billion to fix its broken sanitation. It ended up with more problems,” cnet.com, Ben Fox Rubin, Suruchi Kapur-Gomes

“The Swachh Bharat [latrine building] mission, launched in 2014, was an ambitious effort to stop open defecation. It’s far from reaching that goal.

garv-toilets-sanitation-faridibad-india-9662
"Just outside a slum in Faridabad, India, where there’s a line of dysfunctional toilets. James Martin/CNET"

“Urmila is a housemaid living in a South Delhi slum….She’s grateful for not having to use a public toilet, though she admits that many prefer not using any toilet at all. 

Meanwhile, Meera, who lives in a slum in New Delhi, prefers to defecate in the open, at nightfall….

[Image: Over 300 million in India defecate outside as of 2017] 

That means hundreds of millions of people in the country end up defecating outside, which can spread diseases including cholera, typhoid and COVID-19. Poor sanitation in India leads to over 126,000 deaths every year from diarrheal diseases. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to fix this longstanding issue through the Swachh Bharat, or Clean India, mission. A centerpiece program for his government, it started in 2014 as an effort to stop open defecation through promotion of better hygiene practices and the construction of millions of toilets [latrines, not connected to plumbing systems].

While Modi essentially declared victory against open defecation in October 2019…the work of this program is far from over, particularly as the coronavirus pandemic rages in the country.

Swachh Bharat [the latrine program] has made huge gains so far, but many challenges remain. Let’s run through them.

How does open defecation harm people’s health?

Fresh feces is filled with viruses and bacteria, able to transmit ailments including diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio. Transmission occurs when flying insects land on deposits and carry the viruses elsewhere or when excrement contaminates water supplies in groundwater or wells. Poor hygiene practices, like not washing hands after defecating, are common in poor and rural communities, making these areas especially susceptible to diseases.

“Kids are particularly vulnerable,” said Tom Slaymaker, a data specialist for UNICEF, who tracks sanitation and hygiene globally. He added that pathogens in fresh excrement are the biggest cause of diarrhea, and diarrhea is the biggest cause of death in children under the age of five globally.

Is the problem of open defecation getting better in India? Yes, it is, but there’s still a very long way to go.

India is the No. 1 country in the world for open defecation, with over 344 million people without regular access to toilets in the country, according to 2017 statistics from the World Health Organization and UNICEF. If you add up Nos. 2 to 10, it still wouldn’t come close to India’s number, showing just how big the problem is there….

The number of people practicing open defecation was twice as high in 2000, at 764 million….

How did India become the No. 1 country for open defecation in the first place?

Overpopulation and a lack of sanitation infrastructure have contributed to this health crisis. Additionally, India has often failed to properly maintain public toilets after they’re built.

Cultural behaviors play a big role too. Purity is an inherent part of toilet etiquette in India. According to common customs, toilets are often built outside the home and deemed unclean. That means many people in India still see open defecation as a more sanitary option than using a bathroom in or near the home. Because of this, even after the government builds new toilets for people, they will go unused, instead functioning as storage rooms….

(Image: “It’s evident that without proper attention and maintenance, toilets are at risk of being worse for community health than having nothing at all,” CNET)

Layered atop this cultural issue is a societal one. Lower castes for years had been tasked with cleaning latrines in India. While the caste system doesn’t hold the same sway it once did in the country, perceptions about lower castes being connected to toilets has put a negative light on sanitation.

How has Swachh Bharat worked to counteract these problems?

The central government has spent over $30 billion over the past seven years to improve sanitation across a country of 1.3 billion people. A primary part of this work has been building over 100 million toilets, especially in rural areas where open defecation has been much more widespread.

While past sanitation efforts in India have focused mostly on building toilets, Swachh Bharat has included a much larger component of promotional campaigning, bringing in celebrities for ads and putting Swachh Bharat posters around the country. The government is also providing educational material to stigmatize open defecation and change people’s behaviors so they use the new toilets.

India’s sanitation is broken, but there’s a plan to clean it up

A 2017 Bollywood film, Toilet: A Love Story, explored this mindset from the perspective of a village couple and a wife’s demand for a toilet. Film director Shree Narayan Singh wanted to send a message that a toilet doesn’t dirty a home, but open defecation does….

What are the challenges involved with this project?

There are a lot. Kabir Agarwal, a national reporter for news website The Wire in India, has been writing extensively about Swachh Bharat. He said the actual number of toilets built is inflated. Households are given 12,000 rupees — about $160 –– to build a toilet, but Agarwal said the government rarely verifies that the toilets are constructed.

Without verification, these funds are often pocketed by homeowners, village heads or construction companies, he said. Or as residents of a Faridabad slum told CNET, shoddy toilets get built and the builders keep more money for profit.

In other cases, the task of maintaining the toilets after they’re built is never settled, so they quickly go into disrepair or are vandalized.

“No one takes ownership of cleaning them,” Agarwal said....

Added to that, the work to bring wastewater to treatment plants and prevent it from contaminating water supplies will be a huge undertaking, partly because large chunks of Indian cities don’t have sewage lines, said Sushmita Sengupta, a program manager for the Centre for Science and Environment, a public advocacy and research group.

How has Swachh Bharat’s mission changed by coronavirus?

This project’s work, especially its focus on proper hygiene, has become even more critical during the coronavirus to help prevent more transmission of the disease. Studies have found that coronavirus can be spread through feces, so stopping wastewater from contaminating water supplies should help prevent the virus from spreading.

But such progress has been limited: India is still experiencing a massive spike in coronavirus cases and deaths over the past few months….

Despite Swachh Bharat’s shortcomings, Modi in August lauded its progress in helping contain the virus....

Swachh Bharat officials didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment about these problems….In 2001, the nonprofit World Toilet Organization started World Toilet Day to raise awareness about the health risks of poor sanitation. The day is still marked every year on Nov. 19.

Swachh Bharat has inspired many new innovations, including Google Maps now showing people the locations of 57,000 public toilets around India. Several startups have been created to tackle the problem too. These firms include Garv Toilets, which builds tech-infused steel toilets that require less maintenance; Ekam, which developed odorless, waterless urinals; and Basic Shit, which makes low-cost portable toilets from recycled plastic bottles.

How has sanitation helped public health in the past?

During the European Dark Ages, cities were densely populated and had poor sanitation systems. People didn’t follow proper hygiene practices either. These factors contributed to people’s immune systems weakening and diseases spreading faster, especially during plague years. In London in the 1800s, after the River Thames was used to dump wastewater for centuries, the Great Stink overwhelmed the city and sparked the construction of a new sewage system….

Stench, death and disease from poor sanitation were virtually eradicated in developed countries. But, these problems persist in many developing nations, including India, Nigeria, Indonesia and Ethiopia.

What’s the future for Swachh Bharat? After Modi declared India open defecation-free last year, Swachh Bharat has pivoted its mission to something called ODF Plus, or open defecation free plus. The aim is to build on recent gains by working on waste management and reinforcing behavioral changes."...

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“Suruchi Kapur-Gomes is a senior editor and journalist based in Bangalore, India. She contributed research, reporting and translations for CNET’s A Dirty Job project about smart sanitation in India. She writes for the Sunday Guardian, among other publications.

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Monday, April 26, 2021

If not Trump, who authorized failed foreign math professor Neil Ferguson and his 13 year old code about a different disease to use 300 million Americans as unpaid sales aids in his pitch to other countries urging immediate Covid lockdowns?

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Imperial College’s multi-country model used its earlier and more famous projections for the US and UK to claim validity for its more expansive set of international extrapolations. As Ferguson’s team wrote on March 26, 2020:

“Our estimated impact of an unmitigated scenario in the UK and the USA for a reproduction number, R0 , of 2.4 (490,000 deaths and 2,180,000 deaths respectively) closely matches the equivalent scenarios using more sophisticated microsimulations (510,000 and 2,200,000 deaths respectively)” that they released a few weeks prior. If Imperial’s US and UK projections matched, a similar validity could be inferred for the other countries they modeled in the multi-country report.”…

300 million Americans, including thousands of math professors and physicians, were instantly subordinated to 13 year old predictions about a different disease, the flu, by a failed UK math professor (though Knighted by the Queen in 2002 and listed as an advisor to the US government in his Nervtag bio) of a small foreign monarchy. By 3/16/2020, Trump had already published a 100-page US government lockdown plan in line with catastrophic predictions of unvetted 13 year old computer code about a different disease by a math professor of a small country thousands of miles away from the US. When Trump said, 15 days to slow the spread,” he had already planned it to be 18 months or longer" as his UK pals did. Imperial College reported US and UK as a single unit: We show that in the UK and US context, [“UK and US context?” Why is US included in a lockdown sales pitch by a foreign citizen? UK and US are vastly different countries thousands of miles apart, totally different health systems and governments. US does have its own math professors, universities, and the like. If not Trump, who decided that 300 million Americans are subordinate to 13 year old unvetted computer code about a different disease, the flu, along with its lead salesman, an unelected, unaccountable, foreign math professor and subject of a foreign monarch?] suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures.The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package…will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more)."So frequently and so epically did Ferguson overestimate death tolls that his colleagues mockingly call him “The Master of Disaster.…Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Charlotte Reid, a farmer’s neighbor, recalls: “I remember that appalling time. Sheep were left starving in fields near us. Then came the open air slaughter. The poor animals were panic stricken….And all based on a modelif’s but’s and maybe’s.”...In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE. In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009. In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.”...Of course, Neil Ferguson is described as an “advisor” to the US government in his Nervtag bio (screen shot from 4/25/21 at end of this post). It makes sense that a citizen of a foreign government, subject of a foreign monarch, a global joke for his prediction failures, would be put on the payroll of fellow global jokes, US taxpayers.

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4/22/21, The Failure of Imperial College Modeling Is Far Worse than We Knew,” AIER, Phillip W. Magness

“A fascinating exchange played out in the UK’s House of Lords on June 2, 2020. Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who created the main epidemiology model behind the lockdowns, faced his first serious questioning about the predictive performance of his work. 
 
Ferguson predicted catastrophic death tolls back on March 16, 2020 unless governments around the world adopted his preferred suite of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to ward off the pandemic. Most countries followed his advice, particularly after the United Kingdom and United States governments explicitly invoked his report as a justification for lockdowns. 
 
Ferguson’s team at Imperial would soon claim credit for saving millions of lives through these policies – a figure they arrived at through a ludicrously unscientific exercise where they purported to validate their model by using its own hypothetical projections as a counterfactual of what would happen without lockdowns. But the June hearing in Parliament drew attention to another real-world test of the Imperial team’s modeling, this one based on actual evidence. 
 
As Europe descended into the first round of its now year-long experiment with shelter-in-place restrictions, Sweden famously shirked the strategy recommended by Ferguson. In doing so, they also created the conditions of a natural experiment to see how their coronavirus numbers performed against the epidemiology models. Although Ferguson originally limited his scope to the US and UK, a team of researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden borrowed his model and adapted it to their country with similarly catastrophic projections. If Sweden did not lock down by mid-April, the Uppsala team projected, the country would soon experience 96,000 coronavirus deaths. 
 
I was one of the first people to call attention to the Uppsala adaptation of Ferguson’s model back on April 30, 2020. Even at that early date, the model showed clear signs of faltering. Although Sweden was hit hard by the virus, its death toll stood at only a few thousand at a point where the adaptation from Ferguson’s model already expected tens of thousands. At the one year mark, Sweden had a little over 13,000 fatalities from Covid-19 – a serious toll, but smaller on a per-capita basis than many European lockdown states and a far cry from the 96,000 deaths projected by the Uppsala adaptation [based on Ferguson’s math]. 
 
The implication for Ferguson’s work remains clear: the primary model used to justify lockdowns failed its first real-world test. 
 
In the House of Lords hearing from last year [June 2020], Conservative member Viscount Ridley grilled Ferguson over the Swedish adaptation of his model: “Uppsala University took the Imperial College model--or one of them--and adapted it to Sweden and forecasted deaths in Sweden of over 90,000 by the end of May if there was no lockdown and 40,000 if a full lockdown was inforced.” With such extreme disparities between the projections and reality, how could the Imperial team continue to guide policy through their modeling? 
 
Ferguson snapped back, disavowing any connection to the Swedish results: “First of all, they did not use our model. They developed a model of their own. We had no role in parameterising it. Generally, the key aspect of modelling is how well you parameterise it against the available data. But to be absolutely clear they did not use our model, they didn’t adapt our model.” 
 
The Imperial College modeler [Ferguson] offered no evidence that the Uppsala team had erred in their application of his approach. The since-published version from the Uppsala team makes it absolutely clear that they constructed the Swedish adaptation directly from Imperial’s UK model. “We used an individual agent-based model based on the framework published by Ferguson and coworkers that we have reimplemented” for Sweden, the authors explain. They also acknowledged that their modeled projections far exceeded observed outcomes, although they attribute the differences somewhat questionably to voluntary behavioral changes rather than a fault in the model design. 
 
Ferguson’s team has nonetheless aggressively attempted to dissociate itself from the Uppsala adaptation of their work. After the UK Spectator called attention to the Swedish results last spring, Imperial College tweeted out thatProfessor Ferguson and the Imperial COVID-19 response team never estimated 40,000 or 100,000 Swedish deaths. Imperial’s work is being conflated with that of an entirely separate group of researchers.” It’s a deflection that Ferguson and his defenders have repeated many times since. 
 
As it turns out though, Ferguson and the Imperial College team were being less than truthful in their attempts to dissociate themselves from Sweden’s observed outcomes. In the weeks following the release of their well-known US and UK projections, Ferguson and his team did in fact produce a trimmed-down version of their own modeling exercise for the rest of the world, including Sweden. They did not widely publicize the country-level projections, but the full list may be found buried in a Microsoft Excel appendix file to Imperial College’s Report #12, released on March 26, 2020. 
 
Imperial’s own projected results for Sweden are nearly identical to the Uppsala adaptation of their UK model. Ferguson’s team forecast up to 90,157 deaths under “unmitigated” spread (compared to Uppsala’s 96,000). Under the “population-level social distancing” scenario meant to approximate NPI mitigation measures such as lockdowns, the Imperial modelers predicted Sweden would incur up to 42,473 deaths (compared to 40,000 from the Uppsala adaptation). 
 
The Imperial team did not specify the exact timing of when they expected Sweden to reach the peak of its outbreak. We may reasonably infer it though from their earlier US and UK model, which anticipated the “peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months” following the initial outbreak. That would place Sweden’s peak daily death toll around mid-June, or almost the exact same time period as the Uppsala team’s adaptation.

Figure I: Imperial College Model for Sweden, March 26, 2020


 

It turns out that Viscount Ridley’s line of questioning was correct all along. The Uppsala adaptation of Ferguson’s model not only projected exaggerated death tolls in Sweden. Ferguson’s own projections for Sweden advanced similar numbers, all wildly off the mark from what happened.

Imperial College’s multi-country model used its earlier and more famous projections for the US and UK to claim validity for its more expansive set of international extrapolations. As Ferguson’s team wrote on March 26, 2020:

“Our estimated impact of an unmitigated scenario in the UK and the USA for a reproduction number, R0 , of 2.4 (490,000 deaths and 2,180,000 deaths respectively) closely matches the equivalent scenarios using more sophisticated microsimulations (510,000 and 2,200,000 deaths respectively)” that they released a few weeks prior.

If Imperial’s US and UK projections matched, a similar validity could be inferred for the other countries they modeled in the multi-country report.

The Imperial College team fully intended for its multi-country model to guide policy. They called on other countries to adopt lockdowns and related NPIs to reduce the projected death toll from the “unmitigated” scenario to “social distancing.” As Ferguson and his colleagues wrote at the time, “[t]o help inform country strategies in the coming weeks, we provide here summary statistics of the potential impact of mitigation and suppression strategies in all countries across the world. These illustrate the need to act early, and the impact that failure to do so is likely to have on local health systems.”

Failure to act, they continued, would lead to near-certain catastrophe. As Ferguson and his team wrote, “[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.” In short, the world needed to go into immediate lockdown in order to avert the catastrophes predicted by their multi-country model.

(Note: Imperial College also included a third possible mitigation scenario for stricter measures on top of general population NPIs, aimed at further isolating elderly and vulnerable people, projecting it could reduce Sweden’s numbers to between 16,192 and 33,878. They further modeled a fourth possible “suppression” scenario consisting of a severe lockdown that would reduce human contacts by 75% for the duration of the pandemic and maintain them for a year or more until population-wide vaccination was achieved. It predicted 14,518 deaths. Sweden clearly did not adopt either of these approaches).

One year later we may now look back to see how Imperial College’s international projections performed, paying closer attention to the small number of countries that bucked his lockdown recommendations. The results are not pretty for Ferguson, and point to a clear pattern of modeling that systematically exaggerated the projected death tolls of Covid-19 in the absence of lockdowns and related NPIs.

Figure II compares the Imperial College model’s projections for its “social distancing” scenario and “unmitigated” scenario against the actual outcomes at the one-year mark after its release. These projections reflect an assumed replication rate (R0) of 2.4 – the most conservative scenario they considered, meaning Imperial’s upper range of projections anticipated substantially higher death tolls. The countries examined here – Sweden, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea--are distinctive for either eschewing lockdowns and similar aggressive NPI restrictions entirely or for relying on them in a much more limited scope than Imperial College advised. The United States, where 43 of 50 states adopted lockdowns of some form, is also included for comparison.

Figure II: Performance of Imperial College Modeling in 4 Non-Lockdown Countries & the United States:

As can be seen, Imperial College wildly overstated the projected deaths in each country under both its “unmitigated” scenario and its NPI-reliant “social distancing” scenario--including by orders of magnitude in several cases.

Similar exaggerations may be found in almost every other country where Imperial released projections, even as most of them opted to lock down. The Imperial team’s most conservative model predicted 332,000 deaths in France under lockdown-based “social distancing” and 621,000 with “unmitigated” spread. At the one year mark, France had incurred 94,000 deaths. Belgium was expected to incur a minimum of 46,000 fatalities under NPI mitigation, and 91,000 with uncontrolled spread. At the one year anniversary of the model, it reached 23,000 deaths – among the highest tolls in the world on a per capita basis and an example of extreme political mismanagement of the pandemic under heavy lockdown to be sure, but still only half of Imperial College’s most conservative projection for NPI mitigation.

Just over one year ago, the epidemiology modeling of Neil Ferguson and Imperial College played a preeminent role in shutting down most of the world. The exaggerated forecasts of this modeling team are now impossible to downplay or deny, and extend to almost every country on earth. Indeed, they may well constitute one of the greatest scientific failures in modern human history.”

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Added: Neil Ferguson himself says his Covid code [that so impressed Trump] was written 13 years ago (2007) to model an influenza (not a coronavirus) pandemic. Via LockdownSceptics.org, 2/28/2021, Derek Winton:

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Added: Prof Ferguson advises the UK and US governments, WHO and the EU on emerging infections and modelling.” Nervtag stands for “New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group.”

From Nervtag bios, 4/25/21:

 

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Added: As someone in 2020 said, “This time we’re the cattle.”

Above, 4/12/20, The full horrifying scale of the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak told by the Welsh farmers in the middle of it,“ walesonline.co.uk, Anna Lewis
 
Above, April 13, 2001, “Scientists back rapid slaughter policy,” BBC, “No alternative this time around, say scientists.”
 
 
Above, May 30, 2001, “100 days of Foot and Mouth,” BBC
 
 
Above, 4/4/2001, “Animal disposal row intensifies,” BBC
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In 2001 Ferguson insisted that millions of healthy animals had to be killed too, and in a hurry:
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3/28/2020, Neil Ferguson, the scientist who convinced Boris Johnson of UK coronavirus lockdown, criticised in past for flawed research,” UK Telegraph, Katherine Rushton, Daniel Foggo

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“Professor Neil Ferguson predicted Britain was on course to lose 250,000 lives during the coronavirus epidemic.”…

“In 2001, as foot and mouth disease (FMD) broke out in parts of Britain, Ferguson and his team at Imperial College produced predictive modelling – which was later criticised as “not fit for purpose.”

At the time, however, it proved highly influential and helped to persuade Tony Blair’s government to carry out a widespread pre-emptive culling which ultimately led to the deaths of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs. The cost to the economy was later estimated at £10 billion.

The model produced in 2001 by Professor Ferguson and his colleagues at Imperial suggested that the culling of animals include not only those found to be infected with the virus but also those on adjacent farms even if there was no physical evidence of infection.

“Extensive culling is sadly the only option for controlling the current British epidemic, and it is essential that the control measures now in place be maintained as case numbers decline to ensure eradication,” said their report, published after the cull began. [May 2001 report in Science, Ferguson lead author.]

The strategy of mass slaughter–known as contiguous culling – sparked revulsion in the British public and prompted analyses of the methodology which has led to it.

A 2011 paper, Destructive Tension: mathematics versus experience – the progress and control of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in Great Britain, found that the government ordered the destruction of millions of animals because of “severely flawed” modelling.

According to one of its authors--the former head of the Pirbright Laboratory at the Institute for Animal Health, Dr Alex Donaldson – Ferguson’s models made a “serious error by “ignoring the species composition of farms,” and the fact that the disease spread faster between some species than others.

The report stated: “The mathematical models were, at best, crude estimations that could not differentiate risk between farms and, at worst, inaccurate representations of the epidemiology of FMD.”

It also described a febrile atmosphere – reminiscent of recent weeks [in March 2020]--and claimed that this allowed mathematical modellers to shape government policy."…

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Added: In 2001, Neil Ferguson’s unvalidated predictive models resulted in brutal slaughter of millions of healthy animals. In 2001, “In fact, the epidemic peak preceded the start of pre-emptive contiguous culling.…(p, 6) It was carnage by computer.(9, 84)

From 2006 Abstract, Kitching, Thrusfield and Taylor:

During the 2001 epidemic of FMD in the United Kingdom (UK), this approach [killing infected animals] was supplemented by a culling policy driven by unvalidated predictive models. The epidemic and its control resulted in the death of approximately ten million animals, public disgust with the magnitude of the slaughter….Page 6: “In fact, the epidemic peak preceded the start of pre-emptive contiguous culling.It was carnage by computer(9, 84). This graphically exemplifies the isolation and abstraction of ‘armchair epidemiology’"….(75)….Page 6: “Modelling and scientific method:” The disparity between the course of the 2001 epidemic and the model predictions demands an explanation. The numerical output of models has an air of intellectual superiority…while also seeming entirely appropriate in a society where numbers can ‘…reassure by appearing to extend control, precision and knowledge beyond their real limitswrong numbers, one might add, are worst of all because all numbers pose as true (11). Numbers, therefore, may convey an illusion of certainty and security that is not warranted (43);…A model constitutes a theory, and a predictive model is therefore only a theoretical projection.…The degree of confidence in the 2001 predictive models is therefore low because they were not widely tested, and their conclusions (e.g. that pre-emptive contiguous culling was necessary to control the epidemic) have been refuted….The key question for any model is whether decisions made with it are more correct than those made without it (17). However, the consequences of following the recommendations of these [2001] models were severe: economically, in terms of cost to the country; socially, in terms of misery and even suicides among those involved in the slaughter programme; and scientifically, in the abuse of predictive models, and their possible ultimate adverse effects on disease control policy in the future.…[For example, 2020].

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