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Matt Ridley argues that “flawed modelling” – especially that of the reckless Neil Ferguson and his fellow ‘scientists’ at Imperial College – “is condemning Britain to lockdown.” Two slices:

Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation (giải phóng). A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to (bắt làm nô lệ, phụ thuộc, bắt phải phục tùng, áp chế) a profession that has performed uniquely badly during the pandemic: modellers. The Government’s reliance on Sage experts’ computer modelling to predict what would happen with or without various interventions (can thiệp) has proved about as useful as the ancient Roman habit of consulting trained experts in “haruspicy” – interpreting the entrails of chickens. (xem bói bằng chân gà, kê túc)

As Sarah Knapton has revealed in these pages, the brutal (đầy thú tính, cục súc; hung ác, tàn bạo) postponement of Freedom Day coincided with the release of a bunch of alarmist models predicting a huge new wave of deaths. The most pessimistic, inevitably from Imperial College, estimated at the extreme end of its range of scenarios 203,824 deaths over the next year. It did so by assuming a range of possible percentage reductions in hospitalisations following two vaccinations. Imperial’s data on vaccine efficacy assumed 87% for AstraZeneca, 90% for Pfizer or in a worse case scenario just 77 per cent for Astra Zeneca and 84% for Pfizer. The real world data published after the Imperial modelling shows two vaccinations to be between 92 per cent (AstaZeneca) and 96 per cent (Pfizer) effective in preventing hospitalisation. That would cut the Imperial forecast of deaths by a gob smacking 90 per cent to 26,854.

This keeps happening. In April the modellers assumed a 30 per cent effectiveness for the vaccine at preventing the spread of the virus. This was described as “a pessimistic view – but it is plausible, it’s not extreme”, by Professor Graham Medley, chairman of the SPI-M sub-group of Sage. It turns out it was far from plausible. At the end of March the BBC’s favourite modeller, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, was forecasting that by June 21, even with “optimistic” assumptions, less than half of Britain would be protected against severe disease by vaccination. The true figure is over 80 per cent of those aged 18 and over that have been vaccinated at least once.

This is the same Professor Ferguson who told us in the 1990s that thousands might die of mad-cow disease. The correct number, as it turned out, was 178.

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Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, sometimes deliberately to frighten us into compliance.

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