Mad World

The last day of this awful, ridiculous year seems like a good time to write what will probably be my last blog post on the subject of Covid and lockdowns.  This was the year when the world went mad. Throwing out decades of scientific guidance on how to deal with a viral pandemic, most countries embraced the methods of a totalitarian communist state, with predictably catastrophic consequences. Not only was the pandemic agonisingly stretched out, life as we knew it was upended in the most tragic and harmful way, with our economy trashed, our schools emptied, our liberties stamped upon, our health service unforgivably mangled, our faces muzzled for no good scientific reason, our mental health pulverised and our future conduct in health crises put on a highly worrying footing. The lockdown fanatics got it wrong time after time . Wise medical practitioners were not listened to , governments preferring instead to adopt The Precautionary Principle on steroids. The USA allowed its greatest riv

*but were afraid to ask Why did the government put us into lockdown in March? One of the main reasons the government did so is because of the computing models of Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College Oxford. His model forecast a worst case scenario of 500,000 deaths.  This figure provoked a panicked response, to put it mildly. One problem was that Ferguson had in the past made similarly apocalyptic forecasts, many of which had been astonishingly wide of the mark . In 2001, he predicted that foot and mouth disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing less than 200 .  In 2005, he told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440 .  And in 2009, a Government estimate based on one of Ferguson’s models estimated the likely death toll from swine flu at 65,000 . In fact, it was 457 . Ferguson’s predictions haven’t been out by a mile or two, they’ve been out by the length of a whole mot