Remember Neil Ferguson? He was the British academic who warned Boris Johnson to go into immediate lockdown, thanks to his Imperial College model that claimed the coronavirus would cause 500,000 deaths and take down their National Health Service. His first predictions even influenced U.S. officials to move forward with more extreme lockdown orders...
But since then, Ferguson's Imperial College model has proven to be extremely inaccurate. So much so, that he has been forced to resign, and fellow academics have even nicknamed him "The Master of Disaster."
“I’m normally reluctant to say this about a scientist," Jay Schnitzer, a vascular biology expert and former scientific director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center in San Diego said. "But he dances on the edge of being a publicity-seeking charlatan.”
And Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed his model was “the most influential scientific paper” in recent memory, as well as "one of the most wrong."
After being forced to resign, Ferguson now admits that he indeed made an "error of judgement and took the wrong course of action." However, he still refuses to release his original code work to other scientists wanting to double-check his results and predictions.
Read the full report on the National Review.