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This pandemic has revealed quite a bit about how we view society and government and the part that science and all this advanced online technology can play in our lives. So sit back and listen in.

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Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. I am going to talk about something that's going to upset a few people. I'm sure I can hear it now. There was a great article this week, from City Journal and city journal.org is where you'll find it online. CJ is what they call themselves.

[00:00:28] They've got a lot of interesting stuff about really about London, about the UK, but here also in the US, they've got an eye on the news, the politics of fear, talking about economists and what's happening here. it just goes on and on. They've got a lot of very, very, very cool stuff. A bunch of things, Manhattan Institute as well.

[00:00:55] But in this particular case, they're talking about Britain's hard lesson about blind trust in scientific authorities, I have it up on my website as well as you'll find it at city journal, but this is, this is how this article goes.

[00:01:13] It goes on for quite a while, and it goes into a lot of background on this noted epidemiologist by the name of Neil Ferguson. Now, Neil Ferguson and all of these other epidemiologists from around the world actually met last October and they did some planning into pandemics, pandemic planning. What do they need to be concerned about?

[00:01:38] What might happen if there was some sort of a pandemic and what does it all mean? And they went through a whole bunch of stuff. It's called event two a one. There's what it was called. You can look it up online and it's a pandemic tabletop exercise. And they looked at a bunch of different scenario-based on pandemics that might occur, right?

[00:02:06] So you get these guys like Neil Ferguson who go to this planning. planning practices, if you will, like the event two Oh one. And they get up and bloviate and they talk about how, well, I've seen this before. The H1N1, you know, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and here's what's happened in the past.

[00:02:33] And they try and say, while this was happening in the past, and, it's probably gonna come out along the same lines in the future. No, I'm simplifying this. I get it. Okay. But that's the basics of what they do. So they all sit around and they talk about, well, what might happen? How might it be different?

[00:02:53] How could we have done something better in the past? And I'm glad they do these things. But part of the problem that comes from these is you get people who are all of a sudden elevated and they're elevated without peer review. And now peer review, I think is something that's really important. I'm not talking about P.

[00:03:16] I. E. R. This is nothing to do without in, you know, in the ocean on the docs or the peers. Right? Peer review according to Wikipedia is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field.

[00:03:44] So in other words, peer review is where you have multiple people who understand. The field, in this case, the epidemiology and can review the work that was done and then say, yes, this is valid. Now many people said, Oh no, this is coming on so fast. We just can't peer review. We have to, we have to go. We have to do, we have to go, we have to do, and I can understand that right up front.

[00:04:14] We didn't really know. Well, all we really knew was China was lying to us, right? We've known that for a long time, although that seems to be news to CNN and various other organizations like the world health organization that is controlled by China. But when that's about the only thing we knew. So we said, okay, let's try and protect everybody.

[00:04:36] Everybody stays home. And of course, it totally crashed the economy worldwide. Very, very, very bad. The very high impact here. Now, Neil Ferguson came up with this report titled the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality in healthcare demand.

[00:05:02] And he used some computational models that he had put together 13 years ago that had not been, you guessed it, peer-reviewed. We'll tell you a little bit more about his code here in a few minutes. But he used these comp computational models that he had put together to predict that absence, social distancing, and other mitigation measures.

[00:05:29] Britain would suffer a half a million deaths from the Coronavirus and the US would suffer 2.2 million deaths. And he also said that even with mitigation measures in place. The epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems, most notably intensive care units being overwhelmed many times over.

[00:05:55] So that freaked out. Parliament in the UK freaked out. Prime minister Boris Johnson. And he ended up imposing a national corn team. And of course, the US did the same. We stopped flights from China except for us citizens who could be repatriated. The same thing's true with those holding green cards. You could come back into the US as well.

[00:06:18] Well, at the time, everything looked to be pretty solid. And, now we're hearing things a lot different. So here's the bottom line. You're the UK scientific advisory group for emergencies. This is the guys that were tasked with handling the Coronavirus crisis so that the model was implemented in thousands of lines of undocumented code written in C.

[00:06:47] Which is a language you never write this kind of code in. It's what I spent decades writing Colonel level code in. Okay. It is not for researchers. See, as for professional programmers, they also said that he refused to publish the original source code. And the Imperial college has refused freedom of information act requesting the original source code.

[00:07:18] And the Imperial college says, yeah, well, you know, the public interest is not sufficiently compelling. Yeah. Yeah. We only crashed the whole world economy, so Ferguson himself even admits that the code was written 13 years ago to model an influenza pandemic. So it raises a bunch of questions here. Other than Ferguson's reputation, what did the UK government have in front of them to assess the model and the implementation?

[00:07:49] They certainly didn't have peer review. How did they validate the model? What safeguards were implemented to ensure it was correctly applied? This code is apparently a tangled mess of undocumented steps with no discernible overall structure. That's according to people that have seen it. Even experienced developers would have to make a serious effort to understand it, and it would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.

[00:08:25] In other words. It's a total farce, a total farce. And this article is written by the way, by a virologist. And part of what he does every day is modeling complex processes. So his opinion, which is what I just read to you here, is, are have some weight behind it, frankly. So apparently the Imperial college in Ferguson.

[00:08:54] Just used what's called the incumbency effect. Wow. The Imperial College has a good reputation and Ferguson has a decent reputation. Therefore, we're going to accept this one. In fact, they should never have accepted any of this stuff. Ferguson Imperial college completely refused to examine all of the taxpayer-funded code, any of the taxpayer-funded code.

[00:09:19] None of the taxpayer-funded code. Well, this is completely contrary to the, frankly, even the UK, certainly to the United States who also followed along. This is what dr fouled chief followed, right? These are the things he was saying. At the same time, Fowchee was saying them. This is just incredible. And I, I really like here how the Manhattan Institute for policy research calls Ferguson's arguments only a little better than the dog ate my homework.

[00:09:55] Oh. And by the way, Ferguson resigned from the Imperial college task force because he apparently had a tryst with a married woman and did not follow. Social distancing requirements in the UK and the social distance scene guidelines that he had published and presented to her Majesty's government. So there you go.

[00:10:25] Whole thing. Total farce. Absolute forest. Now obviously, we have people dying and that's never good, but we have it every year. And you know what has really put the icing on the cake for me personally, they started saying, Hey, don't pay attention to the comparisons of a normal flu season to Corona because I didn't have this. These are my words.

We've been lying about the number of flu deaths every year. Yes, yes, indeed. They have, you know, these tens of thousands of flu deaths that they've been counting every year. Apparently a bad flu year is only about 1500 actual flu deaths. So now they're saying. ignore the flu death statistics.

[00:11:18] We've been publishing for a few decades because we've been lying to you, but we're not going to say that. And. Well, you know, look at the COVID-19 deaths, which are also not COVID-19 deaths. They are, they have not been doing autopsies to check to see if they actually died of COVID-19. There are examples of this, including, the one child under the age of 18 that had died in this one city.

[00:11:48] Turned out. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. COVID-19 yeah. No, but it was reported as a COVID-19 I don't know if we'll ever figure this mess out. Anyhow, have a great week. Stay out of trouble. I'll be back next Saturday at 1:00 PM I'll be on with Matt Gagnon. On Wednesday morning at seven 34 make sure you join every morning for the morning drive show, and I will be back, as I said, Monday one to three armies, Saturday one to three also visit me online, Craig peterson.com have a great week guys.

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Welcome! Back to University Colleges Collapsing and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN