Oh my, how could this have happened?
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SAGE's Covid death predictions may be downgraded by tens of thousands because the vaccines are performing better than expected against the Indian variant and the estimates were based on out of date data.
In papers submitted to the Government this week which ultimately led to Freedom Day being pushed back to July 19, modellers at Imperial College London warned that there could 200,000 more fatalities in the UK by next June.
While that model looked at a 'worst-case' scenario, other universities forecasting the crisis for SAGE said it was realistic to expect 40,000 to die in that time.
However, the gloomiest forecasts were based on assuming that two doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine gave as little as 77 per cent protection against being hospitalised with the Indian 'Delta' variant.
They also worked on the assumption that being fully immunised with Pfizer's jab may only reduce admissions by 84 per cent. The groups' central assumptions had protection slightly higher.
But it has since emerged the vaccines perform much better against the mutant strain than any of the estimates plugged into SAGE's models.
Public Health England's best guess is that two doses of AstraZeneca's jab cuts the risk of hospitalisation by up to 92 per cent, while the figure for Pfizer's was even higher at 96 per cent.
The new vaccine efficacy estimates, based on real-world data of 14,000 Delta cases in England, were made public just minutes after SAGE's frightening forecasts were published on Monday, which led many to assume it was too late to use PHE's data in its models.
Yet Dr Susan Hopkins, the deputy director of PHE's national infection service, admitted to MPs yesterday that the Government knew about the figures last Friday. It suggests ministers and their scientific advisers pressed ahead with publishing the calculations, which strengthened the argument for delaying June 21, despite knowing there was more accurate data available.
Tory MPs have questioned why the real-world data hadn't been given precedence and have called for the models to be re-calibrated with the new estimates.
For weeks now, “experts” have been claiming that the new India variant is causing an increase in hospitalizations of COVID patients, and the panic porn media has repeated, even shouted the news. Turns out, those “increased hospitalizations” amount to around 50 nationwide, while China Flu patient admissions are way down. Since the Indian version is now the most prevalent strain, it makes perfect sense that hospitalizations would reflect this. Perfect sense, even any sense at all, is not found in our media.
SAGE, by the way, is dominated by the Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, the same person who at the beginning of the flu excitement predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. (he attributed his original estimate of 22 million to a typo — uh huh). This is the same man who completely blew his assessment of the risk of Foot-and-mouth (probably should be called foot-in-mouth) disease back in 2001, yet he’s still around, setting policy.
John Fund writes:
[Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths. . . .
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.
In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.
Last March, Ferguson admitted that his Imperial College model of the COVID-19 disease was based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus. Ferguson declined to release his original code so other scientists could check his results. He only released a heavily revised set of code last week, after a six-week delay.
So the real scandal is: Why did anyone ever listen to this guy?
There’s no real science anymore, it’s all agenda-driven. Goebels is (wrongly) said to have declared,“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver.” Whoever said it, I share his sentiment as it applies to “scientific opinion”.
