Astoundingly, even after my last post (Orthomyxo’s Hero May be the Worst Scientist of All Time), Orthomyxo continues to defend disgraced scientist Neil Ferguson and the debunked Imperial College Model (ICM) that touched off worldwide panic and the tragic waste of trillions of dollars.
For further reading on the debunked model, the American Institute of Economic Research has issued: Imperial College Model Applied to Sweden Yields Preposterous Results. The article details two of the main flaws with the ICM — the inexcusable secrecy surrounding its source code and the “preposterous” predictions the model makes in the case of Sweden. The entire article is must reading.
First — and I found this to be utterly astounding — is the total lack of transparency surrounding the actual model runs. The model was released on March 16 — a date that will live in infamy. But despite the worldwide panic caused by the release, to this day Imperial College has refused to release the version of the model they ran to produce their results. Instead, the article explains
they released a heavily reorganized and generic file that would permit others to run their own version of the COVID model. They do not appear to have released the actual version they ran in the March 16th paper that shaped the US and UK government policies, or the results that came from that model
Secondly, the version of the model that they did produce shows that its assumptions would have made a total hash of predictions about Sweden’s actual results.
Although ICL only released scenarios and associated forecasts for the United Kingdom and United States, its model is theoretically adaptable to any country by changing the inputs to reflect its population, demographics, and the date its specific policies took effect.
In early April around the peak of the academic community’s backlash against the Swedish government’s strategy, a group of researchers at Uppsala University attempted to do just that. They released an epidemiological model for Sweden that adapted the ICL COVID-19 model from Ferguson and his colleagues, and attempted to project the effects of Sweden’s unique response on both hospital capacity and total fatalities.
The results of that study are telling. Under Ferguson’s model, the Swedish government’s response would result in 40,000 deaths shortly after May 1, 2020 and continue to rise to almost 100,000 deaths by June.
The actual results: As of April 29th, Sweden’s death toll from COVID-19 stands at 2,462.
One wonders if the fact that the model predicted results that were demonstrably wrong by orders of magnitude will shake Orthomyxo’s faith in his hero Ferguson and his favorite doomsday COVID 19 model. Actually, that is not true. Of course it will not. Long ago Orthomyxo and those like him proved they have no interest in data or science. Their only interest is in fearmongering and inducing panic on a unimaginable scale. They are dangerous. We must do all in our power to resist, debunk and foil their tactics.