Shutting Down Incompetent Academic Modelers

On March 22, modeling geniuses at the University of Arizona forecast massive overcrowding at Arizona hospitals by April 13.

COVID-19 Forecast Model, Arizona and Pima County, March 22 | Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health

The exact opposite occurred. There was never a COVID surge, and hospitals are running at record low occupancy. Hospital staff are being furloughed.

The State of Arizona just furloughed the modelers who destroyed the state’s economy and put huge numbers of people out of work. Hopefully they will be held accountable for the massive damage they have done.

Hopefully the lesson from this will be for people to stop listening to alarmist modelers. They have an agenda which has nothing to do with protecting the public.

Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

26 Responses to Shutting Down Incompetent Academic Modelers

  1. Matthew says:

    Hahahaha! The hypocrisy: Neil Ferguson meets his lover (married, no less) while wagging his finger at the rest of us about how evil we are and how we need to toe the line; some animals are truly more equal than others…

  2. Bob G says:

    I’m 61 and somewhat frisky but I’ll tell you wwhen I was younger I was totally frisky and I can totally understand why this guy did what he did when the chance appears you’re a fool if you don’t take it s Obviously just goes to show that this guy never thought covid-19 was that lethal

  3. Petit_Barde says:

    Antonia Staats, senior climate activist of avaaz.org, wants to end imaginary fossil fuel subsidies. By a “staggering coincidence” she met Ferguson, the gravedigger of the world economy.

    The climate clown show is a very small world.

  4. nfw says:

    “pause” it’s work? That is not “Stop”. It just means wait ’til we can make them panic some more.

  5. richard says:

    Who would have though that out of 195 countries with Corona the UK would be responsible for 11% of the deaths.

    11, mainly , 1st world countries have been responsible for 92% of deaths.

    So the Uk has had more deaths than 184 countries put together.

    I call absolute bullsh** on the figures.

    Data from Worldometer.

  6. Logic n Reason says:

    ‘Professor’ Ferguson’s inept mathematical models have not only caused misery during this pandemic. His malign influence in government goes back decades. In 2001/2002 there was an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in the UK . He was involved in the research which ended up in the unnecessary culling of hundreds of thousands of farm animals. His ‘research’ was heavily criticised after peer review. Then in 2002 he predicted that between 50 and 50,000 people could die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. He also predicted that number could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic as well. In the UK, there have been fewer than 200 deaths from the human form of BSE. In 2005 he claimed that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu. In an interview with the Guardian, he compared it to the 1918 Spanish flu, adding: “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.” Only several hundred people died worldwide. In 2009 the Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate of between 0.3 per cent and 1.5 per cent, with his most likely estimate landing at 0.4 per cent. A Government estimate based on his advice was that a reasonable worst-case scenario was the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths. Swine flu killed just 457 people in the UK, with the chief medical officer concluding in 2009 that the actual mortality rate was 0.026 per cent. And now in March of this year a paper produced by Prof Ferguson’s team predicted that the coronavirus pandemic could lead to 250,000 deaths in the UK unless stringent lockdown measures were implemented. His research is said to have convinced the Government to change direction. This paper was never peer reviewed.
    What concerns me is not only have successive governments kept this clueless failure of an academic on its payroll but how much influence does his college have on using obviously flawed mathematical models pushing the UK government’s climate change agenda.

    • Noel Herron says:

      Great stuff , what a piece of work this tosser is.

    • mikegeo says:

      You’re correct on Ferguson’s always faulty data but off on a few of his nonsense prediction numbers and the damage he’s caused.
      His hoof and mouth predictions resulted in the forced UK government slaughter of over 10 million animals. And he was skewered by the real medically knowledgeable but not before the politicians had already given him an OBE – likely to stop the guilty politicians from being skewered too.

      https://www.oie.int/doc/ged/D3278.PDF (Use and Abuse of Mathematical Models – UK chief veterinarians summary investigation)
      Ferguson’s failures should have gotten him fired at least, but NO – he’s still been left to cause more damage as you noted.

      • Login n reason says:

        Thanks Mikegeo. Then the results of his projections on foot and mouth were worse than I remembered ( well it was almost 20 years ago!). If he had been an actuary in an insurance company he would have been fired years ago. It’s just been released that the woman he’s been screwing ( and has now forced his resignation) is also a far left green activist. You can bet the he’s been involved in computer modelling for the government’s green agenda. In short the guy is a political activist first and scientist – ahem- second

    • Rowland P says:

      Pay-rolled by the Bill Gates Foundation.

    • Colorado Wellington says:

      I just posted this on another thread:

      Here is a software engineer’s review of the CCP Virus pandemic code created by preeminent epidemiologist and Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson.

      Code Review of Ferguson’s Model
      by Sue Denim

      Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson’s code. I figured I’d do a review of it and send you some of the things I noticed. I don’t know your background so apologies if some of this is pitched at the wrong level.
      My background. I wrote software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years. Obviously I’m giving only my own professional opinion and not speaking for my current employer.
      The code. It isn’t the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What’s been released on GitHub is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas the original program was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored, and it will probably take some kind of legal compulsion to make them release it.  Clearly, Imperial are too embarrassed by the state of it ever to release it of their own free will, which is unacceptable given that it was paid for by the taxpayer and belongs to them.

      Read the body of the review text here

      Conclusions. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one. 

      On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.

      https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model

      It would be a blast if some whistleblower released the HARRY_READ_ME.txt programming diary of the poor sap who for the last 10 years had the privilege to administer the original highly scientific 15,000 line single program file for prof. Ferguson.

    • pinroot says:

      I’ve seen this elsewhere, thanks for pointing it out here.

    • Colorado Wellington says:

      As others have pointed out, the outrage is that he was finally booted from his elite governmental role for the minor infraction of being horny and hypocritical rather than for the enormous harm and suffering his bullshit modeling caused.

      The governmental elites are dysfunctional, corrupt and self-serving.

  7. Alan Jones says:

    can we hope that folks will recognise how they have been so badly conned?

    All around the globe, like infantile children, these modellers have been creating ridiculous projections; that even more amazingly; everyone has swallowed without seemingly a second of …….. hang on ……….. wait a minute …………

    Can they be held accountable for what they have unleashed?

  8. Disillusioned says:

    They have an agenda which has nothing to do with protecting the public.

  9. Old Grumpus says:

    It’s clear that Fergusson prefers the Swedish model.

  10. Greg W Smith says:

    Why didn’t they fire him? Being on the right team forgives anything.

  11. CheshireRed says:

    Tony, you’re on the money here.

    The Guardian is giving great prominence to a piece by our old friend Bob Ward, (A UK climate alarmist PR attack dog, for those who don’t know him)

    The ENTIRE sub-text to the article is exactly what you’re saying here; to protect the ‘integrity’ and influence of climate models.

    Current climate policies are entirely predicated on modelling. If modelling is found to be suspect it loses credibility. From there it’s a small step to being ignored or cancelled.

    See for yourself.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/06/neil-ferguson-scientists-media-government-adviser-social-distancing

  12. mikegeo says:

    An excellent commentary on Ferguson by Delingpole on Breitbart UK. Accurate and scathing.
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/05/06/would-buy-a-used-computer-model-from-bonking-boffin-neil-ferguson/

  13. MattofNJ says:

    This graph is all you need to see. US is dying of a self-inflicted wound with very few excess deaths due to COVID, and this is real data from CDC not a model.

  14. Gator says:

    Interesting. Antonia Staats, the Soros puppet, tweeted that she was excited about “getting my teeth into recruitment”, as she spoke of her activism. I’m guessing that she did not actually use any teeth.

Leave a Reply to richard Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *