Most Americans have had a bellyful of the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health bureaucrat who upended society in the name of flawed or absent research in the name of conquering COVID.
It turns out he’s not sui generis, or even a bug in bad system — he’s just a feature.
And now we know where he gets it from.
According to an eye-opening article in National Review by Johns Hopkins professor of applied economics Steve Hanke and the U.K. University of Durham’s Professor Kevin Dowd, the Imperial College of London is kind of a Fauci cubed, based on its constant fear-mongering and bad research models. The college, unably headed by Dr. Neil Ferguson, wields power in inverse proportion to its competencies. And that power includes even the U.S. They begin:
The defining event in the history of Western Covid lockdowns occurred on March 16, 2020, with the publication of the now infamous Imperial College London Covid report, which predicted that in the “absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour,” there would be 510,000 Covid deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the United States. This prediction sent shock waves around the world. The next day, the U.K. media announced that the country was going into lockdown.
The impact of the report was amplified by the U.K’s soft-power machine, the BBC. Its reach has no equal: broadcasting in 42 languages, reaching 468 million people worldwide each week, and efficiently disseminating its message. With the BBC in full cry and the public genuinely alarmed, there was no room for dissent.
A copycat cascade then took hold, with the U.S. and other countries embracing London’s message and policies. The result was a policy based on a defective model that originated at Imperial College under the leadership of Neil Ferguson.
The model’s major flaw is its assumption that people would be unresponsive to the dangers that accompany a pandemic. That behavioral assumption is unrealistic. If people are told they are in danger of catching a potentially lethal disease, most will take action to reduce their exposure. The Imperial team turned the world on its head with fantasy numbers about a scenario that could never materialize.
It turns out that this group has been wrong on pretty much every infectious disease it’s ever made pronunciamentos about, at least over the past 20 years. Their formula has been to declare a public health emergency every time a new illness strikes, forecast monster death numbers, and demand huge disruptions from lockdowns and other measures until they get what they want. Hanke and Dodd write:
Before hurrying into panicked policy decisions, U.K. policy-makers should have been aware that Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team had a history of defective modeling. With minimal effort, policy-makers would have quickly discovered that that team had a track record that makes astrology look respectable.
Incredibly, they have been wrong on everything. In 2001, they dropped the ball on U.K. foot and mouth disease, where they demanded that every animal be slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease — millions and millions of livestock animals. Most of us remember how traumatic that was to farmers and animal-lovers. Turns out their forecasted death count wasn’t anything near what they claimed it would be, and most of the animals could have been safely vaccinated. They weren’t. But the Imperial College got a taste of power from this and went on to create other problems.
After that, they got busy with “mad cow” disease, something that cropped up in the early 1980s in the U.K. (when I lived there, which is why to this day I can’t donate blood), and they felt a need to redux. Bad forecasts, lousy modeling, and 178 people died, not their forecasted 150,000.
They made similar mistakes of overblown forecasts and underwhelming death counts on bird flu and swine flu.
And nobody punished them when it became obvious they were wrong. Hanke and Dowd call for an “audit” of this group to find out why their models were so off base and that makes sense.
What it shows is that power is an aphrodisiac among the medical elites, and they rely on a fear-mongering formula to wield power. Once a pandemic burns itself out, they will get started on another one because the name of their game is power.
It’s embarrassing stuff. Sunlight — and an audit — is can be the best disinfectant.