Derek Winton’s Response to Ferguson
by Derek Winton Read Derek Winton's original piece here and Neil Ferguson's response here. I should start by saying I don’t suspect any sinister intent on the part of Prof. Ferguson or believe he’s part of a conspiracy. As someone with a background in the hard sciences who also got their start in the heyday of British ‘bedroom coders’ I even feel a certain amount of kinship. To me this is a governance issue. Decisions on pandemic response strategies affect millions of lives and in my (hopefully not unreasonable) opinion should be based on the very highest quality of information and subject to the highest level of scrutiny. In my article I made eight substantive claims, summarised below: 1. The Imperial model was influential in the decision to pursue a lockdown strategy. 2. The research for ‘Report 9’ was not peer reviewed. 3. The model was not documented. 4. Prof. Ferguson apparently has no formal training in computer modelling, medicine or epidemiology. 5. Projections of death tolls from the same team in previous epidemics had been out by several orders of magnitude. 6. The code was of poor quality from a legibility stand point. 7. The model is an attempt to model a highly complex (and therefore highly sensitive) system but omits at least one key variable. 8. Projections based...