Lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions”, driven by Government fear campaigns and "fantasy numbers" from dud models, a top international team of researchers has concluded.
On Tuesday March 10th 2020, Trump flipped to support lockdowns, Italy locked down and Tomas Pueyo published his viral post that convinced millions to back extreme measures. Why was that the day the world became China?
The UKHSA stopped its Covid modelling last month, but it has already begun to model bird flu. But when is it going to address the abysmal record of pandemic modelling when compared to real-world outcomes?
In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks, writes Ramesh Thakur.
Models predicting what will happen if we don’t do something are hard to test. But models predicting what might have happened if we didn’t do what we did are impossible to test. Yet they’re used to justify lockdowns.
Modelling has frequently been used to claim implausible results from Government interventions, not least when the UKHSA claimed the vaccines had prevented 25m infections when there had only been 6m infections in total.
NHS England has defended its requirement for masks in healthcare settings by citing a model in a preprint study that simply assumes masks work, contradicting the gold-standard evidence from controlled trials.
Imperial College London scared the world into locking down with death projections based on fatality estimates that the latest data suggest are up to 20 times higher than the reality.
Is it too much to expect that someone in a position of authority will announce that the alleged threat from monkeypox is over, asks Dr Roger Watson.
We were told there was no alternative to lockdown after Neil Ferguson warned of 200,000 deaths. But official UK inquiries into previous pandemics described modellers as 'court astrologers' and advised scepticism.
