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...
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.
...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.
...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."
