Yesterday’s post introduced Neil Ferguson’s interview with The Times, which the paper published on the evening of Christmas Day.

This was the biggest statement he made:

How Ferguson, he of the hopelessly outlandish — and false — predictions, could enter the fray on a worldwide pandemic using CCP methods beggars belief:

The other chilling statement made in the article was that lockdowns will be employed in future pandemics. That’s because they worked so well, we had to have one long lockdown — under various guises — for the better part of nine months, not the promised two or three weeks:

Yet, Matt Hancock relies on what this man and SAGE members regurgitate every couple of weeks:

My prayer for 2021 is that divine providence shines a light on the evil that Ferguson, a NERVTAG member, SAGE and Matt Hancock have been perpetrating on the British people:

Thank heaven that Bosnia and Herzegovina ruled against an inhumane coronavirus programme. I hope that we do the same:

Someone also needs to have the guts to investigate Ferguson and the rest of them:

Let’s look at The Times‘s article, which Science Editor Tom Whipple wrote: ‘Professor Neil Ferguson: People don’t agree with lockdown and try to undermine the scientists’.

Tom Whipple was absolutely gushing in his reporting, overlooking Ferguson’s previous bogus predictions over the past 20 years of notional pandemics. Some of those predictions put a severe dent into British farming (emphases mine):

He moved from Oxford to Imperial as part of the country’s leading infectious disease modelling group. They modelled the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, as well as the 2009 swine flu outbreak, in which at one point, before better data came in, they estimated a “reasonable worst case scenario” of 65,000 deaths.

When he returned to advise the government once again, this projection, two orders of magnitude above the real total, was cited by his critics. So too was foot and mouth, where the cull of millions of cattle and sheep, partly on the basis of predictions about the disease, still causes deep bitterness among farmers.

Whipple at least calls lockdown ‘a medieval intervention’. However, I would posit that, even in the Middle Ages, there were policies of sequestering the vulnerable and quarantining the sick, leaving the rest to work. People needed food and goods. Anyway, Ferguson describes how he embraced the CCP policy of overall lockdown:

In January, members of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention. “They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”

Then, as infections seeded across the world, springing up like angry boils on the map, Sage debated whether, nevertheless, it would be effective here. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.” In February one of those boils raged just below the Alps. “And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

Whipple gushed:

That realisation was a fulcrum in British history, and in the life of Professor Ferguson.

That ‘fulcrum’ meant poor health and/or imminent penury for millions of the rest of us.

This was Ferguson’s outrageously erroneous prediction that prompted Britain’s continuing lockdowns:

a quarter of a million Britons would die. If we wanted to stop that, he also projected, it would require extreme social distancing measures until a vaccine arrived.

Whipple’s next sentence reads:

That was when he went from unknown epidemiologist to academic superstar.

That is incredibly disingenuous. Millions of Britons knew who he was from his previous predictions. Our celebrity astrologer Mystic Meg could have done better by staring into her crystal ball. She would not have advocated lockdown or masks, either.

Ferguson expressed his surprise that people would criticise him:

“It’s bizarre,” he says. “Particularly given that I’ve never been a public servant. We volunteer for scientific committees, we don’t get paid anything.” He says he has not read most of the coverage, but can’t help hearing some of the criticism.

“Where it’s been disappointing is if people start out from a viewpoint that they don’t agree with lockdown, then try to undermine the science and scientists behind it. That hasn’t been a pleasant experience.”

Those statements puzzle me greatly.

His own track record speaks for itself, yet, his and SAGE’s policies have been ruling all our lives for the better part of a year. He doesn’t think people should criticise him because they are losing their livelihoods? Pure bunkum.

Whipple then goes into the assignation that Ferguson and his married mistress had during the springtime lockdown. The rest of us were holed up in our homes and she travelled across London for an afternoon’s pleasure. My account of it is below. The title expressed my hope that this charlatan would be exposed and that we would be liberated. Alas, no:

Prof Neil Ferguson resigns: will coronavirus lockdown start ending in the UK now? (May 5)

Ferguson told Whipple that he had expected some sort of mercy, at least to be ignored. Why, oh why, did the media start digging into his private life? Oh, woe:

“I made some mistakes. I’ve been completely open in terms of saying they were mistakes. But, nevertheless, the fact that journalists were digging into my private life at that level of detail was not something I could ever imagine. That’s not something you want to be on the end of.

“My wife and son and my partner had journalists on the doorstep. I was actually in my flat in London, they didn’t know where I was. It was a very difficult time.” He and Sir Patrick Vallance, the present chief scientific adviser, agreed he should step back from Sage work.

Unfortunately, NERVTAG — New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group — allowed him to stay, hence, his continuing participation in these illiberal restrictions upon our lives.

Returning to lockdown, this is a curious statement:

These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. “If China had not done it,” he says, “the year would have been very different.”

Yes, it would have gone on as normal, with Rishi Sunak’s fantastic budget putting an end to austerity and giving us a better economy and hope for our post-Brexit transition future.

This month, the new variant — B.1.1.7, or B117, as it often appears — has caused more panic. Ferguson and his ilk have determined it is more infectious. However, it might also be less damaging to COVID-17 patients in hospital:

Nevertheless, Ferguson now wants even harsher measures:

he strongly implies that schools will have to shut in January, and even then the virus might evade lockdown.

Goodness knows what ‘the virus might evade lockdown’ might mean for Britons.

Whipple actually believes that Ferguson is some sort of scientific saviour. Good grief:

This is, I say, petrifying. It is also extremely interesting. Nowadays, it is orthodoxy that lockdown was right. In the next pandemic, we won’t hesitate to use it. But as this new variant shows, lockdown does not always work.

However, it also seems as if our first lockdown, sold to us as ‘flattening the sombrero’, to borrow Boris Johnson’s term, was done so on a false premise:

It was never guaranteed that lockdown would crush the curve. He is all too aware of this. “During late March, early April, we kept looking at the data as it came in. Was there any sign of hospital admissions and deaths hitting a peak? It was a very, very anxious time.” We now know that when we got it to its lowest, R, the reproduction rate of the virus, hit 0.6. Lockdown worked. If the professor’s modelling of the new variant is correct, it won’t be so easy to control. In the same circumstances it could have a rate just over 1 and the pandemic would not have retreated.

Ferguson says to his critics:

It’s clearly unfortunate that a minority of people almost don’t like the idea that you can just have random bad things happen in the world, and want to attribute it to some malign plan.

Ferguson and his family are largely unscathed from the policies he helped to develop.

Two other sites that reported on this interview had pertinent insights.

NewsWars noted:

In the Christmas interview, the epidemiologist admitted “there is an enormous cost associated with” lockdowns, specifically the erosion of civil liberties.

However, thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian measures, he said, “people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed.”

And how! A year ago, who could have imagined that the CCP would be indirectly controlling our health policy?

At UnHerd, Freddie Sayers wrote similarly (italics in the original):

He almost seems at pains to emphasise the Chinese derivation of the lockdown concept, returning to it later in the interview:

“These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. “If China had not done it,” he says, “the year would have been very different.””

To those people who, still now, object to lockdowns on civil liberties principles, this will be a chilling reminder of the centrality of the authoritarian Chinese model in influencing global policy in this historic year.

Let us look at what Laura Perrins, ex-barrister and co-editor of Conservative Woman, a haven of common sense, has to say about said policies. Let’s start with testing of schoolchildren, something likely to come in January, along with the current hue and cry to close schools again:

The Government, advised by SAGE, NERVTAG and other quangos — quasi-NGOs — have lied and lied and lied this year, culminating with Christmas:

In conclusion:

I could not agree more.

Pray that this scourge leaves us and other Western countries in 2021.

Freedom is never free.

Happy New Year.