Neil Ferguson’s study convinced U.S., U.K. to enact unprecedented lockdowns.
The coronavirus death-forecast model that apparently convinced President Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to shift to a policy featuring unprecedented lockdowns of the healthy “could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.”
That’s according to two software company executives writing in the Daily Telegraph newspaper of London.
David Richards, CEO of the British-American software firm WANdisco, and Konstantin Boudnik, the company’s vice president of open source development, were referring to the Imperial College of London report March 16 forecasting 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 500,000 in Britain from the coronavirus.
However, just 10 days later, the lead author of the report, Neil Ferguson, told a drastically different story when he testified under oath to a British parliamentary committee.
Ferguson said the U.K. death toll was unlikely to exceed 20,000 and could be much lower.
“Since publication of Imperial’s microsimulation model, those of us with a professional and personal interest in software development have studied the code on which policymakers based their fateful decision to mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship,” Richards and Boudnik wrote.
“And we were profoundly disturbed at what we discovered.” They found the model “to be totally unreliable.”
By WND Staff