What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics

For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism....

And yet it seems the lockdown didn’t apply to him and his lover. No, just to us, the plebs, the irritants sitting on park benches or going for more than one jog a day, us potential virus-spreaders who so annoy the pro-lockdown media by committing such crimes as shopping twice a week or sitting on a near-empty beach. We must be locked down, but not them; not the clever people; not the people who work at prestigious institutions like Imperial and know how to make disease models.

What's worse, his models were crap.

According to the models, unlocked-down Sweden should have had 40,000 deaths by now – in fact it has had around 2,850. This is a catastrophic level of error. That seemingly unreliable or worst-case models have been used to wreck economies and institutionalise an authoritarian era so grave that one cannot leave one’s own house without good reason is a matter of the utmost public interest. ....

In 2005 he said up to 200million people could die from bird flu – the final global death toll between the years 2003 and 2009 was 292.

In 2009, the UK government based its ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ for the impact of swine flu in Britain on Ferguson’s models, saying around 65,000 people could die. In the end just 457 people died.

In 2001 Imperial modelling on foot-and-mouth disease shaped government policy, which was to cull six million sheep, cattle and pigs. Later, an expert in veterinary epidemiology said that modelling was ‘seriously flawed’.

In case you're wondering why you are locked up and shops are closed, it's not the actual number of people who have contacted the virus, it's the models that predicted millions of deaths. The models that Neil Ferguson and other "modelers" sold to America and most of Europe. Modelers that haven't been right yet but give state governors the power to put you in jail for cutting people's hair.