Search Result for 'James ferguson'

Boris Panicked and U-Turned Over Lockdown After Seeing Neil Ferguson's Projections "I see death in your future – a lot of death." The Mail on Sunday is serialising an explosive new biography of Boris by Tom Bower that claims Boris was panicked into imposing a full national lockdown after Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance were presented with Neil Ferguson's apocalyptic predictions at a meeting of SAGE. Bower tells how a critical meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) on February 25th was presented with the 'reasonable worst-case scenario' from Professor Ferguson under which 80% of Britons would be infected and the death-toll would be 510,000 people.The author writes: "This was an improvement on Ferguson's earlier assessment that between 2% and 3% would die – up to 1.5 million deaths. Even with mitigation measures, he said, the death toll could be 250,000 and the existing intensive care units would be overwhelmed eight times over."Neither Vallance nor Whitty outrightly challenged Ferguson's model or predictions. By contrast, in a series of messages from Michael Levitt, a Stanford University professor who would correctly predict the pandemic's initial trajectory, Ferguson was warned that he had overestimated the potential death toll by 'ten to 12 times'....The book reveals how shortly before the national lockdown, on March 16th, Ferguson forecast that one third of ...

by James Ferguson Matt Hancock and his closest advisors receive the latest modelling update from Prof Neil Ferguson Are you positive you are ‘positive’? “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?” – John Maynard Keynes The UK has a big problem with the false positive rate (FPR) of its COVID-19 tests. The authorities acknowledge no FPR, so positive test results are not corrected for false positives and that is a big problem. The standard COVID-19 RT-PCR test results have a consistent positive rate of ≤ 2% which also appears to be the likely false positive rate (FPR), rendering the number of official ‘cases’ virtually meaningless. The likely low virus prevalence (~0.02%) is consistent with as few as 1% of the 6,100+ Brits now testing positive each week in the wider community (pillar 2) tests actually having the disease. We are now asked to believe that a random, probably asymptomatic member of the public is 5x more likely to test ‘positive’ than someone tested in hospital, which seems preposterous given that ~40% of diagnosed infections originated in hospitals. The high amplification of PCR tests requires them to be subject to black box software algorithms, which the numbers suggest are preset at a 2% positive rate. If so, we will never get ‘cases’ down until and ...

I cannot be alone in noticing the huge gulf between the sympathetic coverage given to the Black Lives Matter protests in the mainstream media and the almost universally hostile coverage of the anti-lockdown protests. Celebrities who were encouraging everyone to remain in their homes until last week are now rushing out to join the protests, including Emily Ratajkowski, Jaz Sinclair, Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish. Not only is this virtue-signalling hypocritical – why is Covid likely to be spread at anti-lockdown protests, but not at Black Lives Matter protests? – it's also irresponsible, given how many of those protests have spiralled out of control into fully-fledged riots in at least 25 cities across America, including Minneapolis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus. Those protests have now crossed the Atlantic, with a march through the streets of Peckham yesterday in which demonstrators held up placards reading "Abolish the Police" and "Riot is the language of the unheard". That demo did not become violent or lead to rioting, but more protests are planned in London and other British cities over the coming days. Today, Metro ran an article entitled: "Black Lives Matter: Are protests taking place in the UK and how can you donate?" It included a handy guide to people who want to join those protests, something ...

Take Back Control Brendan O'Neill has written a blistering piece for Spiked in which he urges the British people to take back control – not from Brussels, but from Boris and Dom! We can’t go on like this. We cannot continue to allow the Government to control every aspect of our lives. We cannot idly accept that the state has the right to introduce rules and regulations that dictate everything from how long we can stay in the pub to who we can invite to our weddings. We cannot sit back and watch as government scientists use jumped-up, fact-lite graphs of fear to try to terrify and pacify the populace and prep us for yet another onslaught on our liberties. We cannot just watch and nod as officials shut down more areas of the economy, with a stroke of their pen, plunging Britain further into the worst recession on record. This is not sustainable. Something has to give, something has to break. The only important question right now is this: how can we make sure that happens? I know exactly how he feels. Worth reading in full. A Reply to Tom Chivers Tom Chivers and James Ferguson disagree about the significance of the false positive rate of the PCR test Tom Chivers took a pop at Lockdown Sceptics in UnHerd ...

Fear of Covid now 70% more transmissible by James Ferguson Blind faith in authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein On December 20th the UK Government put 44% of the English population into Tier 4 lockdown, cancelling Christmas get-togethers for 24m people, following a recommendation from the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag). Nervtag had identified a new variant of the novel coronavirus in the South East of the country, which was 70% more transmissible than its predecessor, carried a viral load up to 10,000x higher and which the primer on the widely used Thermo Fisher TaqPath PCR machines failed to pick up. However, these conclusions are highly dependent on the interpretation of the data and logically (Occam’s Razor) none of the claims made at that time about the new variant’s increased transmissibility, higher viral load or ability to escape detection appear justified. The PCR test The primers used to detect short gene sequences in reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) machines under the COVID-19 protocol, search for three gene types: ORF1ab (or just ORF), N and the ‘spike gene’, S. Positive test results require at least two of the three genes to be found but since amplification is run to a very high cycle threshold (Ct) of 40-45, known as ‘the limit of detection’ (LoD), ...

No prizes for guessing what story dominated this morning's papers: Professor Pantsdown. A couple of weeks ago I dubbed Neil Ferguson "Dr Strangelove", trying to capture the mesmeric effect he seems to have had on successive British Prime Ministers. But it turns out the "Strange Love Doctor" would have been more appropriate. According to the Telegraph's spellbinding scoop – a marmalade-dropper if ever there was one – Ferguson has been carrying on an affair with a married mother-of-two during the lockdown. Talk about breaking the social distancing rules! And the icing on the cake is that the name of his 38 year-old mistress is Antonia Staats! You couldn't make it up, as we say on Fleet Street. The punning possibilities are endless. (Guido Fawkes: "Who could blame a boffin for wanting to massage his staats?") Incidentally, if you can't get past the Telegraph's paywall, not to worry. The story is also in the Mail, the Guardian, the Metro, the Independent, the New York Times... it's everywhere. The BBC even has it, although in a very muted form. The latest development is that Matt Hancock says it's now in the hands of the police. Are we about to see Imperial's Professor of Mathematical Biology led away in handcuffs? The intellectual architect of Britain's draconian coronavirus policy may be about to experience what ...

Today's Telegraph leads with the story that Boris is due to wind down lockdown restrictions on Sunday, although by the time you read this it will have officially been extended. Is this finally happening? Or will the announcement be postponed again? As Guido Fawkes points out, the Telegraph has predicted lockdown is about to be eased three times before on its front page, only for nothing to happen. But this is probably a case of fourth time lucky, according to Guido, because the story is "exclusive to all news outlets everywhere", i.e. all the other papers have it too. The Telegraph's Camilla Tominey has more details. One fly in the ointment – or, rather, two – is that the plan hasn't been signed off yet by Nicola Sturgeon or Keir Starmer, who both think it's too soon to start easing restrictions. According to the Mail, Sturgeon thinks any dialling back of stay-at-home measures would be "catastrophic". "Our assessment of the evidence leads me to the conclusion that the lockdown must be extended at this stage," she said at a briefing in Edinburgh this morning. (She must be looking at very different evidence to me.) Starmer, meanwhile, says the restrictions cannot be eased until testing has been ramped up further, highlighting the fact that the Government's daily figure has dropped below ...

Border Chaos Continues Peter Schrank's cartoon in yesterday's Times The list of countries restricting or banning travel from the UK today grew to over 40, including much of continental Europe. The international responses to the new 'variant' of the virus range from outright bans to new self-isolation requirements regardless of a negative PCR test (as in the case of Greece). The border closures are not all limited to UK travellers either. Sweden has banned visitors from Denmark as well as the UK, and Saudi Arabia has slammed its borders shut completely. The knee-jerk actions are reminiscent of the early phase of the pandemic, where country after country copied each other's panicky lockdowns. It deals yet another blow to the ailing travel and airline industries, as cancelled flights out of the UK number in the hundreds and climbing. Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a press conference yesterday and scarcely mentioned the unfolding travel bans. Instead, he focused on the ongoing issues at the Dover-Calais crossing, insisting that the blockade would be resolved in a matter of hours after a conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in today's Telegraph, closing the UK-France border is just another exercise in closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Emmanuel Macron’s ban on lorries entering France wins the prize for the ...

The Guardian has splashed with a humdinger of a story today, revealing that Dominic Cummings drove 264 miles from his home in London to stay with his parents in Durham. The police were tipped-off on March 31st after Cummings was spotted in his parents' front garden with his three year-old child by a member of the public and officers "explained to the family the guidelines around self-isolation and reiterated the appropriate advice around essential travel". The police took no further action, but the Guardian leaves its readers in no doubt what it thinks should happen: The witness, who did not wish to be named, told the Guardian: “I was really annoyed. I thought it’s OK for you to drive all the way up to Durham and escape from London. I sympathise with him wanting to do that, but other people are not allowed to do that. It’s one rule for Dominic Cummings and one rule for the rest of us.”Tulip Siddiq MP, the Vice Chair of the Labour party, said of the reports: “If accurate, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser appears to have breached the lockdown rules. The Government’s guidance was very clear: stay at home and no non-essential travel. The British people do not expect there to be one rule for them and another rule for Dominic Cummings. Number ...

In his analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the U.K., financial analyst James Ferguson questions the likely overstatement of Covid and investigates the factors behind unexplained excess deaths.