In one of the more bizarre moments at the Covid Inquiry so far, Professor Neil Ferguson, the architect of Britain’s lockdown, today denied ever calling for the first national stay-at-home order – in the latest instance of lockdown backpedalling. The Mail has more.
Professor Neil Ferguson’s terrifying March 2020 models warned that 500,000 Brits would die unless tougher action was taken to curb the virus’s spread.
It spooked Boris Johnson into adopting draconian restrictions that saw the country told they “must stay at home”. Vaccines — considered the only safe route out of the pandemic — were still months away from being deployed.
But Professor Ferguson, who quit his role as a SAGE adviser two months after being caught breaking social distancing rules to meet his married lover, today insisted he didn’t tell officials to plunge the country into a lockdown.
He told the U.K. COVID-19 Inquiry that the situation was “a lot more complex”.
The inquiry is in its second module, which is examining core U.K. decision-making and political governance.
Hugo Keith KC asked: “Do you feel that you did confine yourself to the provision of scientific advice, or did you become, despite your best endeavours, irrevocably involved in determination of policy?”
Imperial College London’s Professor Ferguson, nicknamed ‘Professor Lockdown’ for his infamous modelling, said it was a “difficult question to answer”.
He said: “I know I’m associated very much with a particular policy.
“But as you’ll be aware from the evidence I’ve given in my statement and statements of evidence, the reality was a lot more complex.
“I don’t think I stepped over that line to say ‘we need to do this now’.
“What I tried to do was at times, which was stepping outside the scientific advisory role, to try and focus people’s minds on what was going to happen and the consequences of current trends.”
The epidemiologist drew heavy flak for his team’s modelling on the Covid pandemic.
Their work suggested 500,000 Brits would die if nothing was done to stop the spread of the virus and there would be 250,000 deaths if two-thirds caught Covid.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Ross Clark in the Spectator says that perhaps the most remarkable revelation from Professor Ferguson’s inquiry evidence is that “he spoke to and emailed Ben Warner at No. 10 on March 13th, three days before the Imperial paper [Report 9] was published”. Warner was a data scientist brought into Downing Street by Dominic Cummings and whom Cummings later credited for inducing pandemic alarm in No. 10, so Ferguson contacting him directly beforehand is significant.
However, Clark notes that in his email to Warner, “Ferguson then stopped short of damning the Government’s policy of mitigation rather than suppression. In fact, if the Government decided to continue with mitigation, he wrote, ‘there is a rational basis to that decision which I would say the science supports’. However, he added, the Government should make it clear how many people were likely to die. Intriguingly, Ferguson then went on to write: ‘This event is in the natural disaster category and the cure (e.g. massive social distancing, shutdowns) could be worse than the disease.’ In other words, he had at least considered the possibility that lockdowns could cause more damage than they were worth – but neither he nor anyone else seems to have tried to model this.”
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Well, at some UK airports they don’t need to waste their time. Today about 8 days of strikes to happen during the Summer holiday period have been announced – baggage handlers, check in staff, etc. A Summer of discontent, maybe.
It is very difficult not to conclude that the state is at least colluding with these eco nutter groups. They are consistently allowed to break the law while plod all but applauds them and honest citizens are made to suffer their japes.
The situation is going to get worse and of course at some point somebody is inevitably going to be maimed or killed. When that happens responsibility will lie firmly at the government’s door.
Bloody evil.
I wouldn’t say very difficult, I’d say impossible.
And I’d describe the destruction of European Christian civilisation as Satanic rather than bloody evil.
“I wouldn’t say very difficult, I’d say impossible.”
Actually I agree with you but felt I should temper my words.
Yes, it is Satanic. Until the last few years, it wasn’t a word I tended to use. I could accept evil as a palpable entity in books such as The Exorcist, but I tended to dismiss such things when walking around in the harsh light of day.
Now I fully believe in evil and I see it every day. Part of what evil does is bring chaos. Chaos and debauchery is a part of a Black Mass and similar ceremonies. If Judeo-Christian society gradually brought light to the dark corners, the shadows are now encroaching again and the forces of darkness are making a comeback.
You want evil? Incarnate in such as Gates and Fauci.
They’re the high priests, but they depend on disciples.
All the more reason to remove our consent from the government & our MPs.
Thought a reply to you was a perfect place to dump this information. I’m writing to the Prime Minister & my MP removing my consent to be governed & represented by them. We the people are sovereign & without our consent they have no authority.
https://www.donotconsent.co.uk/
Thanks BB.
My pleasure. The more of us who withdraw consent, the less legitimacy the current government & parliament have.
Well I fully support this initiative. Everyone should do it, it only takes a second and it’s something which can be recorded and count towards something meaningful. A good indicator of public opinion and demonstrates solidarity. Your government are literally enabling serious harm and death to befall their citizens, and the more time goes by the more normalized it becomes. The data never get any better. Here’s David Dickson’s latest;
”New UK data on Adverse Events.
Over 1.65 million Adverse events.
Almost all reported are considered serious.
In 2008, a risk of 1 in 100,000 was barely acceptable. In 2010, a risk of 1 in 14,400 was earthshattering. Yet in 2023, a risk of Serious Adverse Event Following Immunization of 1 in 93 to 1 in 112 is ignored.
Yet NACI and other countries announce their booster programs for the fall.
Safety signals ignored from the start.”
https://twitter.com/dksdata/status/1679626558989033472
Haha I just saw this.
Doing another Mogs….
The Resistance is growing, LOL <sshhh>
Well it was lonely being the only non-conformist. Now we are three!
Oh the nostalgia? Remember when the Police were “the public in uniform” and policed us with our consent?
Nice one Hux’, yet there is no mention of the breaking and entry, the criminal damage, the trespass. If it had been anyone else the terrorism laws would have been used and the key to the door thrown away.
The strange coziness with which the German state treats these people is indeed suspicious. To people unfamiliar with the German ‘democracy’: The German government has an own secret service/ secret police solely for ensuring that the population doesn’t do really prohibited stuff like discussing politics (that’s not a joke — the mere discussion of alternate forms of government is illegal in Germany), the police is trained and armed to deal violently with larger and smaller scale insurgencies and the people controlling the German state don’t hesitate to use them in this way when it suits their political agenda, eg, for breaking up anti-COVID-measures marches.
I doubt that there’s the kind of conspiracy the author of the article hints at but the Greens are by far the most prolific party of the currently governing coaltion and while they may be forced to distance themselves publically from the German equivalent of Just stop oil but they’re certainly secretly sympathizing with them and frustrated because they cannot just rule dictatorically. Yet.
Yes, how is that Energiewende working out? I used to so admire West Germany and how it became the most prosperous country in Europe with people leaping across the wall in one direction only. From Tyranny to Freedom. From Misery to Prosperity. But the Teutonic efficiency that we all admired has turned into pretend to save the planet absurdity.
Since the hegemony of Merkel , the smell of the Stasi and its efficient control of the Democratic German State lingers and it is impossible not to believe that Germany is not a satellite of the Russian Federation .
The double negatives are a bit confusing here. It sounds as if you want to say that Germany is a satellite of Russia, though you actually say the opposite. I say there is no evidence that Germany is a satellite of Russia, and plenty that it is a satellite of America.
Russia and the Germanic world’s wars against each other have been destabilising Europe for centuries. We’ve been dealing with the same again over the last few years with Germany using the EU as its avatar. The core of the Ukraine situation is the EU’s (and thus Germany’s) interference in the Ukraine as the EU (German) obsession with expansion continues unabated.
I just voted for London Calling and The Weekly Sceptic at The British Podcast Awards, I used different email addresses for each, not sure if it is necessary.
Just voted for the Delingpod, keep James happy.
Just stop treating these cretins with kid gloves. Here’s an idea, governments and police forces everywhere – pretend they’re demonstrating against lockdowns or vaccine mandates and go in, batons flailing.
The only way to stop this lot is by states hitting them hard. So protestors on runways get treated as terrorists and shot dead on sight, no questions asked. If they’re glued to the runway, tough, there won’t be any screaming when they get ripped off the tarmac. Anyone who uses bolt cutters on fences to break into an airport is potentially putting hundreds, even thousands, of lives at risk. The sentence for that has to be lifetime imprisonment all the way up to the death penalty. Governments can’t keep saying they support the ideals, but deplore the methods. If civilisation is to endure, there has to be proper rule of law and there have to be serious consequences for trying to disrupt it. Without that we have the present situation: anarchy.
JSO raided The Proms tonight. The Proms needs heavy duty security. When I used to go out clubbing, the bouncers were built like brick sh–houses and if you so much as looked at one the wrong way, you’d be flat on the pavement with a broken nose if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, it would be a lot worse. The police left the bouncers to their own judgement. If you ended up spending six months in traction, you shouldn’t have antagonised the bouncer.
But you are assuming that government see these people the same way you and I do. —They don’t. They are simply useful idiots for the Sustainable Development Agenda that needs to scare the populace half to death with evidence free tales of a climate apocalypse to soften us up for the world and its resources controlled by technocrats—With Climate as the excuse.
No, varmint. I’m saying what should be the case in a sane world where people believe in things like objective reality. No one is more cynical than me. I know full well we no longer have governments, merely agents of the Devil.
We have a jumped-up charity like the RSPCA running interrogations and prosecutions (while allegedly mass-murdering animals) so how long before these organisations get some level of recognition and are allowed to do the same?
I think we must have gone to the same clubs
AfD is coming – they will not tolerate this shit.
Western governments (apart from the Trump one) who subscribe to climate alarmism and NET ZERO policies, and the Eco protesters are both batting for the same team. Just Stop Oil etc etc, are the governments useful idiots doing their dirty work for them.—————— In reality those politicians subjecting us to the pretend to save the planet NET ZERO absurdity might as well be gluing themselves to runaways and buildings themselves.——-Governments can hardly come down on the brainwashed protesters like a ton of bricks when it is governments who brainwashed them all in the first place with misinformation and pseudo science.
It’s not the first time there have been suspicious links between “grass roots” protest movements and the more secret arms of government. I noticed (or rather, cashed in on others noticing) a similar “dark undercurrent” during the BLM protests, and wrote about it here, and subsequently here.
Yet another example of “government by psychology”? Other examples might be appeasing fears about mass immigration whilst actually promoting it, using inflation to reduce government debt whilst pretending to fight it, etc.
Yep You got it. ————We are governed by politicians pandering to the UN and WEF rather than to the people who voted for them. They would rather kid on they are saving the planet to get a little gold star on their lapel from the WEF and rip out our fantastic central heating than fight for their own citizens prosperity and well being. We are now governed by phony Eco Socialist traitors.
Governments encouraging people to run riot in order to impose more laws and restrictions on us? No never. Who’d have thunk it eh!
How long before they commit an act that will kill many innocent people? They must now surely be classified as a terrorist organisation and treated like one.
Personally I would not have stoppped the planes flying, if they wish to risk the consequences for their own lives as a consequenceof their actions then so be it.
I do think its becoming obvious that politicians across the west are in collusion with this group of terorists as I will call them from now on.
If you illegally access a runway, you are a terrorist. One person illegally on the runway could cause a plane to swerve on take-off or landing. If that person gets sucked into the engine, it could blow and take the full load of passengers up with its full complement of fuel. Several people could interrupt a landing and cause a crash. If that plane hit other planes, there could be a death toll in the thousands. Like I say, put snipers in airports. Anyone illegally accessing runways gets shot on sight.
Yes, of course they are.
The WEF-controlled Governments hope that most people will become so p!ssed off that they’ll accept Net Zero restrictions with a controlled and lower standard of living.
These Eco Terrorists are the Provisional Wing of the Eco Nutters in Government.
I think the thing is that eco-looneys and governments are working for the same globalist masters and thus have the same agendas.