Covid Inquiry: ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson denies urging UK-wide restrictions after ‘500k deaths’ model
Neil Ferguson admits to Covid inquiry he ‘stepped outside’ his role of Government adviser but wanted to ‘focus minds’ as virus swept through nation
The scientist who warned the UK would suffer 500,000 deaths if it did nothing in response to the Covid pandemic has denied calling for a lockdown.
Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, admitted to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that he had “stepped outside” his role as a Government scientific adviser in an attempt to “focus minds” on the gravity of the situation as the virus swept through the country in March 2020.
But he insisted he did not tell officials to put the country into a lockdown. Appearing at the inquiry on Tuesday, he told it that the situation was “a lot more complex”.
Professor Ferguson had given a press conference on 16 March 2020 discussing a paper he co-authored, which suggested 500,000 people in the UK would die if no action were taken. It was soon cited as the reason the Government introduced a UK-wide lockdown a week later.
However, at the press conference, Professor Ferguson had called the scenario “unlikely” and said “the worst case would never come to pass” as a response was inevitable.
Without radical change 260,000 people would die, he said then, based on the Government’s original plan to “mitigate” the outbreak instead of trying to stop it. If the country did lock down, then “tens of thousands” would die.
Since the pandemic began, the UK has recorded 230,000 fatalities that have Covid on the death certificate. Not all of these will have been caused by the virus. Some 55,500 were logged during the first three months of the pandemic, official figures show.
Lead counsel Hugo Keith KC asked Professor Ferguson: “Do you feel that you did confine yourself to the provision of scientific advice, or did you become, despite your best endeavours, irrevocably involved in determination of policy?”
Professor Ferguson – nicknamed “Professor Lockdown” for the modelling paper – said it was a “difficult question to answer”.
He added: “I know I’m associated very much with a particular policy. But as you’ll be aware from the evidence I’ve given in my statement and statements of evidence, the reality was a lot more complex.
“I don’t think I stepped over that line to say, ‘We need to do this now.’ What I tried to do was at times – which was stepping outside the scientific advisory role – to try and focus people’s minds on what was going to happen and the consequences of current trends.”
In May 2020, Professor Ferguson quit his role as a an adviser at Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), two months after being caught breaking social distancing rules to meet his married lover.
He continued to sit on the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) committee, and the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).
Earlier, another scientist told the inquiry that Covid deaths in the UK during the first wave of the pandemic could have been reduced if the country had gone into lockdown just two weeks earlier.
Professor Steven Riley, who works for the UK Health Security Agency but was at Imperial College London at the time, said a lockdown should have been called on 9 March 2020 instead of on 23 March. The World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic on 11 March, 2020.
He said data has since shown that people began to alter their behaviour on or around March 16, a few days ahead of the stay-at-home order. But government action should have been taken sooner, he added.
“My view is that the first national period of stringent social distancing (lockdown) should have been introduced on or around 9 March 2020,” he wrote in his witness statement to the inquiry.
Asked to elaborate, he told the it: “Once we had lab-confirmed deaths in ICUs (intensive care units) with no travel history, no obvious connections to any out of country social networks, even a handful of those would indicate that we would be rapidly progressing in our epidemic.”
He added: “We’ve got a lot of data about how social mixing changed over this period, and actually on or around March 16 seems to be when everybody did start to change their behaviour.
“So I think the best way to talk about this is to say: had we achieved that rapid reduction in mixing earlier than the 16th then the peak height would have been lower, and the area under the curve for the first wave would have been less, and potentially quite a bit less. And the area under the curve is proportional to the number of deaths in a very kind of crude but useful way.”
The inquiry in London now in its second module and examining core UK decision-making and political governance.
Meanwhile, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists accused the Government of not always adequately considering the needs of pregnant women during the pandemic.
In its witness statement to the inquiry, the college cited confusing messages to pregnant women during the early phases of the pandemic.
The college also suggested the strong “stay at home” messaging had an impact on a number of pregnant women, with anecdotal evidence showing that many skipped important routine appointments or did not seek help when they felt that their babies’ movements were reduced.
Source: https://archive.ph/267gg
The man is an absolute abomination. He has never delivered any accurate predictions and should be removed from any future governmental advisory position.
