In March 2023, Cochrane stated it was engaging with the authors of the Cochrane Review on ‘Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’ of which my colleague Tom Jefferson is lead author.
Under pressure from a New York Times social media influencer, Cochrane’s Editor-in-Chief (EIC) posted a communiqué undermining the review and its findings.
Cochrane has now published a communiqué that overturns this statement.
In the midst of the Covid panic, some lost their heads. Cochrane leaders have now recanted their statement undermining their own review that they approved and has mega access figures. However, the damage has been done.
The confusion led to the then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky misleading Congress, giving false testimony to the U.S. Congress that the review had been retracted. This forced Congressional staff to correct the record of the hearing.
The communiqué opened the door to many of the names in the list of zero-Coviders to attack the review and distort reality.
The original communiqué now contains the following update.
Learning from this lesson is vital if we are to make improvements in how research is published and interpreted.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine. This article was first published on his Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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What sources were there in addition to ICL. We’re there a lot of others.
has anyone studied their history, methodology and financing.
The Bill Gates Foundation heavily funded Ferguson. No coincidence there. It seems to be a no go area where any authorities are concerned as to how, why, who these pseudo-scientists are funded. Probably because there is so much money swimming around for those willing to do and say what they are told. Ferguson has been doing it for years, certainly at least 30.
Why do they keep mentioning “pandemics”?
The word “failure” implies that the perpetrators were intending to improve public health, and believed in what they were doing. I’ve seen very little evidence of that. The most charitable explanation is of very early panic once they were told the virus came from a lab, followed by doubling down to cover up the leak and the needless panic. Then there are other explanations that have even less to do with “public health”.
Democide. No other explanation is remotely plausible.
Incidentally, since they mention the foot and mouth outbreak, it’s instructive to remember that, like COVID, that epidemic started from lab leak from a government animal research laboratory in Pirbright.
Tot it up, and there seem to be more disease outbreaks from the units set up to study them safely than there are from nature.
Global List of Lab leaks.
I think they’ve missed a quite recent one from some sort of lab in China I believe.
Whitty testified to the Inquiry that overestimates of numbers are “useful for planning purposes.” It sounds so sensible to budget for all contingencies, doesn’t it, until you look at the real damage it does.
An overestimate would be useful if it had an approximate probably attached to it e.g. the model said there is a 5% chance of 500,000 deaths without lockdown. That way governments could have contingency plans for a worst case scenario and look for indications e.g. rapidly increasing number of deaths that the worst case may be happening before putting the plans into action. The problem with the ICL models is either that they only gave one figure for expected deaths, or decisions were based on the worst case even if it was stated by the modelers that it had a very low probability of happening.
According to the report cited, the modellers had at least some caveats, which were ignored by governments in forming policy, and made into firm predictions for the benefit of the public.
That isn’t to say that Ferguson et al didn’t want it that way, as he’s never apologised for the foot and mouth disaster or anything else he got wrong… just collected the gongs.
The book can be downloaded free as a pdf from the linked website.
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/hpai-virus/#gsc.tab=0
And this is how food industries are being decimated – more nonsense “viruses.”
“Prior to the Covid outbreak, “most countries did have a plan to deal with pandemics”, Hanke told the Epoch Times, “but after the Imperial College of London’s ‘numbers’ were published, those plans were, in a panic, thrown out the window.”
I do not believe this. The bottom line is that national governments acted on instructions received from the Davos Deviants. The DD’s knew exactly what disasters the Lockdowns would create and the results we have seen fitted their sick, warped plans.
Governments did not ‘panic,’ they did as they were told. To suggest panic is to continue to support, even push the cock-up theory and we know that is BS.
Someone should tell Toby Young.
There is certainly a common factor with all these overestimates and ensuing disasters- one bloke called Ferguson. How on earth is he still being believed. He is a mathematician and nothing else. Well maybe an astrologist. Most lunatics who interfere with government and lives to this extent are usually ‘dealt with’ . He is more suited to the national lottery show like mystic Meg.
Actually he’s a physicist. His crap, totally wrong forecasts from the past are precisely the reason why he was listened to by those morons in government
How can it be that Ferguson has never been brought to book for his fantastical modelling that fanned the flames of Covid hysteria and informed governmental policy?
Perhaps he was telling people what they wanted to hear. Between Ferguson, SAGE and the government, the WHO and who knows who else, I could never quite work out whose hand was up whose backside – just that most or all of them were lying about almost everything.
I recall one of the modellers from (possibly) Warwick saying that they were specifically asked to model only worst case scenarios, not anything more realistic. Might have been the second lockdown.
I also recall Vallance airily telling the select committee that models are only “scenarios not predictions” so I don’t believe he was ever in a panic and he was in charge.
China’s lockdowns, which affected only 7% of the citizenry, were highly localized and very comprehensive.
To say Chinese lockdowns ‘worked,’ however, is misleading. Dynamic Covid Zero (the WHO Pandemic Manual repackaged) did work, and retained the support of 82% of Chinese.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/french-riots-an-ideal-excuse-for-another-lockdown/
We on here are not alone in suspecting the French riots will lead to martial law and lockdowns.
I loathe Ferguson but I have to say I’ve rarely eaten so well as when the mad git made his mad cow prediction. I was buying great cuts for next to nothing, it was like paradise! If only he had made a similar prediction on red wine and beer!
On a serious note, I genuinely think he should be prosecuted. He has a track record of turning up with insane predictions and he has never even been close to the Universe let alone the ball park.
His latest sojourn into his fantasies was funded by Bill Gates to the tune of £22 million. Is that not cause enough for Plod to stop dancing and get investigating what he was actually asked to deliver by Good Old Uncle Bill?
I firmly believe that any modelling should have to prove it can model a known similar event to within +/- 5%. The factors are all known, the outcome is known. If modelling is any use then it has to be able to predict, with reasonable accuracy, past events, current events and possible future events. It really should be the acid test before Government even begins to accept it.
In the case of Ferguson this should have been obvious. His track record is appalling. I remember all those pyres of sheep all around the country. All the cattle destroyed. All the Butchers Shops ruined. Ferguson got his money and walked free to wreak even more destruction.
I accept anyone can get things wrong but his modelling is known to not work and has been known not to work for 30 years. Why was he allowed anywhere near any form of power other than cleaning toilets? Who appointed him to destroy all those lives in all those cases of his predictions? Why is it not being asked “Who the hell appointed Ferguson?”.
The problem with that is that models are tuned (arbitrarily) to make them “predict” past events. That’s how the climate models work: always right about the past (including when the datasaet is modified), and always wrong about the future, because they were not modelling reality but adjusted to fit.
As John von Neumann said: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant. With five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
Climate and epidemiological models have dozens of parameters, each infinitely variable to taste.
No climate model can accurately predict the past climate, they have over a dozen different models which can “predict” periods of the climate within the parameters laid down. Which is like saying I can hit the bullseye on the dartboard every time if you give me 20 goes at it.