Scientist demonstrates Pandemic lockdowns are “only for the little people”.
The Leona Helmsley moment for science has arrived. From the bigger they are, the harder they fall department comes this epic fall from grace by a deified idiot thinking with his non-science head.
From the UK Telegraph:
Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover
The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday night as The Telegraph can reveal he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover.
Professor Neil Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing in order to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house.
More here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/exclusive-government-scientist-neil-ferguson-resigns-breaking/
Mind you, this is the guy with the COVID-19 virus computer model that single-handedly destroyed the global economy, by initially predicting huge amounts of deaths. The fear produced a world-wide lockdown and economic devastation.
Oh, and his mistress, Antonia Staats, is a Soros-funded activist at the climate-wackadoodle organization in the UK known as Avaaz.
Josh of course, had something to say in a cartoon:
Buy Josh a pint when the pubs reopen? Go here.
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“Do as I say, not as I do” . . . a well-know tenet of almost all politically-involved persons, yet often overlooked by a gullible public.
It is amazing the number of times we are “surprised” by such behavior.
“well-known”, that is
Lack of integrity in elected officials is, indeed, “nothing new under the sun,” Mr. Dressler.
Why do people still believe in the integrity of the people in authority (i.e., why is it “surprising”)?
Because:
1) They long for integrity in their leaders (and especially in their spiritual leaders and people like scientists whom they trust to tell them the truth); they want very much for it to be true.
2) They are honest and upright in their own lives — they assume this is true of others, too.
The wonderful thing is that experience, which should make bitter cynics of us all, doesn’t destroy this idealism. We still hope for and, until proven wrong, believe for the best.
Leaders, many of whom achieve their status using tools only sociopathic or narcissistic personalities are willing to use, are more likely than the general population to lack integrity.
Nevertheless, while they don’t make the headlines, I think that most leaders ARE people of moral integrity — mistaken or ignorant many times, yes, but most are not cheating or hypocrites.
Unfortunately, along with an admirable idealism about leaders, the public has an unhealthy appetite for scandal. Disgusting behavior sells newspapers… . So, we don’t read about the vast majority who are people of integrity.
There is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Marianne Faithfull nails it.
Let’s get something straight that undercuts all the shocked surprise. Freedom from all traditionally commendable restraints makes one feel special, which in turn gives some thrilling meaning to a mundane life. Thus the tensions between scrupulous truth telling vs. some celebrated form of advocacy; as well as observing codes of moral conduct for the benefit of so many others (and by the way in the end yourself), even if in this instance you are the very source of the restraining rationale, vs. making yourself a covert or even better a daringly overt unique exception.
How primordial is this kind of appeal? Read for yourself the very few crafty enticements enlisted by the serpent in the first account of it in Eden: No real harm will come of ignoring any admittedly understood limitations, which surely were falsely posed to intentionally limit the full ascendancy that is plainly your due.
Yes, the emotions are quite basic. I see them in these simple analogy terms. We all know that drinking alcohol is bad for health and that it kills many people. Some drinkers feel a pang of conscience when they pay ever more money for their next drink — but then, should they attend a gathering where the drinks are free, they enjoy the alcohol much more and will commonly drink much more than usual, but with less worry from the conscience. They have, in their minds, shifted some of the blame to others like the donors stupid enough to offer them free grog. Then one day the doc tells them they have early, terminal liver damage that will consume valuable public resources to nurse them to the grave. Double bad.
You can construct many analogies along these lines. You can use cigarette smoking, for example. If you were ever a heavy drinker like I was, this will resonate. But I caught on, gave it up and have a healthy liver at 79. Geoff S
“then, should they attend a gathering where the drinks are free, they enjoy the alcohol much more and will commonly drink much more than usual”
I’m told that where people know they can get as many drinks as they want, they don’t drink much.
Yep it’s all over the news here in the UK. Quite astonishing..
Gee, I wonder what her husband and kids think of all of this.
They’ll be fine with it, I’m sure.
Sperm doesn’t transmit the virus. There is actually a study that claims that.
We don’t know which masks, gloves etc. for “protective” reasons they might have used (maybe before COVID-19?) so their encounter could technically have been very safe.
Special prophylactic “Bishop’s glove” is available to prevent those sorts of infections 😂
Was it an affair, or a strategy meeting with an eco-extremist from AVAAZ?
“I thought I heard you say something about 6ft?
This isn’t even 6 inches” 😉
BadaBing
Andrew
Hmm… some one had to fall.
I never knew that “scientists” predicted the future. I thought that was for fortune tellers.
For fortune seekers.
Police not interested either,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52562383
The UK police these days are only interested if you have stepped on cracks in the sidewalk/pavement or haven’t committed any offense at all.
Sounds like he has morals right up there with Prime Minister Trudeau. Rules are for others…Hypocrisy well without hypocrites there wouldn’t be many left in the alarmist camp would there?
https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
Harry Read Me all over again
Applies to GCMs too.
What beach are they headed to in fear of the rising seas?
@ur momisugly Anthony,
Stick with research, you’ll get eaten alive by the political class.
Cus you’ve still got a heart.
New CRISPR Coronavirus Test Could Be a Pandemic ‘Game-Changer’
Cheap accurate testing would enable the safe reopening of the U.S. economy.
RONALD BAILEY | 5.6.2020 3:00 PM
The researchers have created molecular tags that latch onto sections of viral genes and emit a signal when their presence is detected. The new STOPCovid https://www.stopcovid.science/ test enables the detection of as few as 100 copies of the coronavirus in a sample. “As a result, the STOPCovid test allows for rapid, accurate, and highly sensitive detection of Covid-19 that can be conducted outside clinical laboratory settings,” note the researchers. The test initially used standard nasal swab samples, but preliminary data suggest that it will work using much more easily collected saliva samples.
The research team is talking with manufacturers to further simplify and produce the test. The New York Times reports https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/health/crispr-coronavirus-covid-test.html that they estimate that the materials for one test would cost about six dollars now and would fall even further when mass-produced. “The ability to test for Covid-19 at home, or even in pharmacies or places of employment, could be a game-changer for getting people safely back to work and into their communities,” said team member Feng Zhang in the press release.
https://reason.com/2020/05/06/new-crispr-coronavirus-test-could-be-a-pandemic-game-changer/?utm_medium=email
Clearly he didn’t believe the carp he was spouting.
Computer modelling?
No, computer didling?
“The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house.”
That sentence seem a bit extraneous.
I think the real story about covid that we need to talk about that left doesn’t want to us that it shows that mass public transit and mass density housing, shibboleths of the left, are the worst possible condition for fighting a contagious virus like this
Stokes believes in AGW say no more he is just an Australian troll for the AGW crowd. He is paid to post this stuff here and other sites. I wonder what he thinks of Michael Moore now?? . Interesting that Mockton is backing down from the lockdown position he so strongly defended previously and is not publishing any more of his drivel here! We welcome Willis to publish a post on Swedens sucessess. Cheers
Eliza,
You are unkind to MoB, who is doing a lot of work, trying to be helpful. You criticise him for a change of course, when that is routine action for a thinking person on meeting solid evidence that contradicts previous. That is a bit rough of you. An apology would show you as reasonable and intelligent.
She was behind the neonicitinoid ban by the EU.
As one involved in horticulture and agriculture, I don’t want to see dangerous pesticides used willy-nilly.
Indeed, in the 1980s, I was firmly of the opinion that some of the garden pesticides used back then should only be sold by the properly-trained, which may have required a licensing system, but the state Labor Minister of the day didn’t agree (there were still old-time cautious Laborites in parliament at that stage).
I saw this as an alternative to the likely future banning of many chemicals for household use. The trouble with banning chemicals is that it only takes one panicked reaction and a precedent is set, which is followed by many other states and countries. Once activists have achieved one ban, they move on to the next target.
The end result is that one cannot be totally certain that the latest chemical to be struck off is as dangerous as portrayed, or merely another stepping-stone of the hard left march towards our economic ruin.
he upped the ante –
3 Apr: Nature: Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19
How epidemiologists rushed to model the coronavirus pandemic.
by David Adam
An earlier version of the Imperial (College London/Neil Ferguson) model, for instance, estimated that SARS-CoV-2 would be about as severe as influenza in necessitating the hospitalization of those infected. That turned out to be incorrect…
The true performance of simulations in this pandemic might become clear only months or years from now…
“Forecasts made during an outbreak are rarely investigated during or after the event for their accuracy, and only recently have forecasters begun to make results, code, models and data available for retrospective analysis,” (John Edmunds, who is a modeller at the LSHTM) and his team noted last year in a paper6 that assessed the performance of forecasts made in a 2014–15 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone…
Media reports have suggested that an update to the Imperial team’s model in early March was a critical factor in jolting the UK government into changing its policy on the pandemic. The researchers initially estimated that 15% of hospital cases would need to be treated in an intensive-care unit (ICU), but then updated that to 30%, a figure used in the first public release of their work on 16 March…
Ferguson says the significance of the model update might have been exaggerated…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6
25 Apr: Business Insider: How ‘Professor Lockdown’ helped save tens of thousands of lives worldwide — and carried COVID-19 into Downing Street
by Bill Bostock
Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, authored a paper that prompted the UK to scrap its coronavirus strategy.
Ferguson’s team warned Boris Johnson that the quest for “herd immunity” could cost 510,000 lives, prompting an abrupt U-turn.
His simulations have been influential in other countries as well, cited by authorities in the US, Germany, and France…
Scientists have piled in to criticize Ferguson’s paper in less uncertain terms.
“Some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated,” John Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention from Stanford University, told The Telegraph…
https://www.businessinsider.com/neil-ferguson-transformed-uk-covid-response-oxford-challenge-imperial-model-2020-4?r=AU&IR=T
6 May: The Critic UK: The Fatal Hubris of Professor Lockdown
It wasn’t an attractive 38 year-old that brought down Neil Ferguson
Artillery Row By Toby Young
Following the resignation of Professor Neil Ferguson, I’m fascinated by the details about Antonia Staats, the woman he is having an affair with…Guido has dug up a podcast she did on March 31st (***now offline), 24 hours after visiting Professor Ferguson, in which she complains that the lockdown is putting a strain on her marriage. But it’s her politics I’m really interested in. The Telegraph has her down as a “left wing-wing campaigner”, a reference to the fact that she campaigned against leaving the EU and is a long-standing environmental activist who supported Greta Thunberg’s climate strike. Many of the papers have included this picture of her standing outside Number 10 delivering a petition to the Prime Minister about ending fossil fuel subsidies:
PIC
Some people have asked what the relevance of Ms Staat’s politics is. The answer, obviously, is that her politics are likely to be Professor Ferguson’s politics – and we know that he co-authored a paper in 2016 warning of the terrible consequences of leaving the EU and we can see from his Twitter feed that he’s not exactly a Tory. For instance, he sent the following tweet to the Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran when she won Oxford West and Abingdon in 2017: “Great news – so happy to wake up to hear you won! Fingers crossed that last night means at least a softer Brexit.” …
Just yesterday we learnt that the lockdowns have forced countries across the world to shut down TB treatment programmes which, over the next five years, could lead to 6.3 million additional cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths. There are so many stories like this it’s impossible to keep track. We will soon be able to say with something approaching certainty that the cure has been worse than the disease.
Neil Ferguson isn’t single-handedly responsible for this world-historical blunder, but he does bear some responsibility. His apocalyptic predictions frightened the British Government into imposing a full lockdown, with other governments quickly following suit. And I’m afraid he’s absolutely typical of the breed. He suffers from the same fundamental arrogance that progressive interventionists have exhibited since at least the middle of the 18th Century – wildly over-estimating the good that governments can do, assuming there are no limits to what “science” can achieve and, at the same time, ignoring the empirical evidence that their ambitious public programmes are a complete disaster. At bottom, they believe that nature itself can be bent to man’s will…
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-fatal-hubris-of-professor-lockdown/
***re the podcast which has been removed:
7 May: Daily Mail: She (Staats) admitted on a podcast recorded with a journalist friend days earlier that the lockdown had placed a ‘strain’ on her relationship with her husband Chris, who is yet to comment on his wife’s affair or their alleged open marriage…
Antonia Staats also spoke out in support of Ferguson who had told the Government to impose restrictions on the public to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
Friend and former journalist Jeremy Wagstaff interviewed Staats at her home to discuss how she was coping with losing her au pair caring for her two young children, the shortage of toilet paper and surviving the lockdown…
Staats, who is from Isny, Germany, makes reference in the podcast about her fears that her husband, an academic, might have already been infected.
She said: Chris has been not feeling great and thinks he got it. But we can’t know for sure. So what now? Do we assume he’s had it?’
Staats, makes no direct mention of her lover, but does give a nod to Ferguson’s advice on slowing the spread of the virus.
‘I’m not a scientist, so I feel reluctant to be like, ‘I think in three weeks we will be through the worst of it’,’ she said.
‘I feel inclined to believe the science and I certainly think its not like ‘oh Easter we’ll go back normal and after the Easter holidays the schools are going to open again.’…
The podcast was recorded by former technology journalist Jeremy Wagstaff for his Singapore based company. He conducted a series of interviews with people around on how they are coping with the crisis. The interview with Staats has since been removed from his company’s website…
Staats said she is able to work from home and is being paid her usual salary working for the US based activist group Avaaz.
She told the interviewer she was fortunate and considered herself in a ‘very privileged and comfortable position. I’m not someone in an abusive relationship who is now trapped in a flat with an abuser,’ she said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8293057/How-Neil-Fergusons-married-lover-enjoys-perfect-family-life.html
everyone in UK knows Wagstaff:
LinkedIn: Jeremy Wagstaff, Consultant/writer/advisor (former journalist, WSJ, BBC, Reuters)
Commentator/contributor
BBC
Mar 2004 – Present
Thomson Reuters
6 years 7 months (ending Jul 2018)
Wall Street Journal
10 years 6 months (ending Jan 2008)
Thomson Reuters
9 years (ending Jul 1997) etc
https://sg.linkedin.com/in/wagstaff
2 more pics posted by 350.org:
2012: Flickr: 350.org
#EndFossilFuelSubsidies London petition delivery. Jenny Rosenberg (Friends of the Earth EWNI), Antonia Staats (Avaaz), Marco Cadena (Push Europe), Emma Biermann (350.org), Parker Liautaud (young Arctic explorer).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/7393847884/in/photostream/
2012: Flickr: 350.org
#EndFossilFuelSubsidies London petition delivery. Jenny Rosenberg (Friends of the Earth EWNI), Antonia Staats (Avaaz), Marco Cadena (Push Europe), Emma Biermann (350.org), Parker Liautaud (young Arctic explorer).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/7393804452