Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College ‘Modelers’ are Incompetent Scientists and Shameful Liars

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Phil Magness is a national – nay, a global – treasure. Here’s a post from yesterday at his Facebook page, in which he further exposes both the gross incompetence of Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College ‘modelers,’ as well as Ferguson & Co.’s downright dishonesty. Here it is:

Huge discovery this morning showing data malfeasance involving Imperial College and Neil Ferguson.

Almost exactly 1 year ago I wrote an article on how a team of researchers at Uppsala University had adapted Ferguson’s UK model to Sweden, and yielded preposterous results – e.g. a prediction of over 90K dead if they did not go into lockdowns. My article made waves over in the UK, and Ferguson himself was grilled about it in testimony before the House of Lords. This caused Imperial College to fire off a bunch of tweets and statements disavowing any connection to the Uppsala adaptation of their model. It wasn’t their product, they insisted, and Imperial itself had never claimed between 40-100K deaths would result in Sweden

Well guess what. On March 26, 2020 the Imperial team released an update to its Covid model labeled as “Report 12” on its website. Buried deep in a spreadsheet appendix file, they included the results of their own runs of their same model for dozens of other countries…including Sweden. I reproduce a screenshot of it below from the spreadsheet. Their results were almost identical to what the Uppsala team got, including a top-end projection of 90,157 deaths if Sweden did not go into lockdown.