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The failure of Imperial College modeling is far worse than we knew

by American Institute for Economic Research
April 24, 2021
in Opinions
The failure of Imperial College modeling is far worse than we knew

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A fascinating exchange played out in the UK’s House of Lords on June 2, 2020. Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who created the main epidemiology model behind the lockdowns, faced his first serious questioning about the predictive performance of his work.

Article by Phillip W. Magness from AIER.

Ferguson predicted catastrophic death tolls back on March 16, 2020 unless governments around the world adopted his preferred suite of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to ward off the pandemic. Most countries followed his advice, particularly after the United Kingdom and United States governments explicitly invoked his report as a justification for lockdowns.

Ferguson’s team at Imperial would soon claim credit for saving millions of lives through these policies – a figure they arrived at through a ludicrously unscientific exercise where they purported to validate their model by using its own hypothetical projections as a counterfactual of what would happen without lockdowns. But the June hearing in Parliament drew attention to another real-world test of the Imperial team’s modeling, this one based on actual evidence.

As Europe descended into the first round of its now year-long experiment with shelter-in-place restrictions, Sweden famously shirked the strategy recommended by Ferguson. In doing so, they also created the conditions of a natural experiment to see how their coronavirus numbers performed against the epidemiology models. Although Ferguson originally limited his scope to the US and UK, a team of researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden borrowed his model and adapted it to their country with similarly catastrophic projections. If Sweden did not lock down by mid-April, the Uppsala team projected, the country would soon experience 96,000 coronavirus deaths.

I was one of the first people to call attention to the Uppsala adaptation of Ferguson’s model back on April 30, 2020. Even at that early date, the model showed clear signs of faltering. Although Sweden was hit hard by the virus, its death toll stood at only a few thousand at a point where the adaptation from Ferguson’s model already expected tens of thousands. At the one year mark, Sweden had a little over 13,000 fatalities from Covid-19 – a serious toll, but smaller on a per-capita basis than many European lockdown states and a far cry from the 96,000 deaths projected by the Uppsala adaptation.

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The implication for Ferguson’s work remains clear: the primary model used to justify lockdowns failed its first real-world test.

In the House of Lords hearing from last year, Conservative member Viscount Ridley grilled Ferguson over the Swedish adaptation of his model: “Uppsala University took the Imperial College model – or one of them – and adapted it to Sweden and forecasted deaths in Sweden of over 90,000 by the end of May if there was no lockdown and 40,000 if a full lockdown was inforced.” With such extreme disparities between the projections and reality, how could the Imperial team continue to guide policy through their modeling?

Ferguson snapped back, disavowing any connection to the Swedish results: “First of all, they did not use our model. They developed a model of their own. We had no role in parameterising it. Generally, the key aspect of modelling is how well you parameterise it against the available data. But to be absolutely clear they did not use our model, they didn’t adapt our model.”

The Imperial College modeler offered no evidence that the Uppsala team had erred in their application of his approach. The since-published version from the Uppsala team makes it absolutely clear that they constructed the Swedish adaptation directly from Imperial’s UK model. “We used an individual agent-based model based on the framework published by Ferguson and coworkers that we have reimplemented” for Sweden, the authors explain. They also acknowledged that their modeled projections far exceeded observed outcomes, although they attribute the differences somewhat questionably to voluntary behavioral changes rather than a fault in the model design.

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Ferguson’s team has nonetheless aggressively attempted to dissociate itself from the Uppsala adaptation of their work. After the UK Spectator called attention to the Swedish results last spring, Imperial College tweeted out that “Professor Ferguson and the Imperial COVID-19 response team never estimated 40,000 or 100,000 Swedish deaths. Imperial’s work is being conflated with that of an entirely separate group of researchers.” It’s a deflection that Ferguson and his defenders have repeated many times since.

As it turns out though, Ferguson and the Imperial College team were being less than truthful in their attempts to dissociate themselves from Sweden’s observed outcomes. In the weeks following the release of their well-known US and UK projections, Ferguson and his team did in fact produce a trimmed-down version of their own modeling exercise for the rest of the world, including Sweden. They did not widely publicize the country-level projections, but the full list may be found buried in a Microsoft Excel appendix file to Imperial College’s Report #12, released on March 26, 2020.

Imperial’s own projected results for Sweden are nearly identical to the Uppsala adaptation of their UK model. Ferguson’s team forecast up to 90,157 deaths under “unmitigated” spread (compared to Uppsala’s 96,000). Under the “population-level social distancing” scenario meant to approximate NPI mitigation measures such as lockdowns, the Imperial modelers predicted Sweden would incur up to 42,473 deaths (compared to 40,000 from the Uppsala adaptation).

The Imperial team did not specify the exact timing of when they expected Sweden to reach the peak of its outbreak. We may reasonably infer it though from their earlier US and UK model, which anticipated the “peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months” following the initial outbreak. That would place Sweden’s peak daily death toll around mid-June, or almost the exact same time period as the Uppsala team’s adaptation.

Figure I: Imperial College Model for Sweden, March 26, 2020

It turns out that Viscount Ridley’s line of questioning was correct all along. The Uppsala adaptation of Ferguson’s model not only projected exaggerated death tolls in Sweden. Ferguson’s own projections for Sweden advanced similar numbers, all wildly off the mark from what happened.

Imperial College’s multi-country model used its earlier and more famous projections for the US and UK to claim validity for its more expansive set of international extrapolations. As Ferguson’s team wrote on March 26, 2020: “Our estimated impact of an unmitigated scenario in the UK and the USA for a reproduction number, R0 , of 2.4 (490,000 deaths and 2,180,000 deaths respectively) closely matches the equivalent scenarios using more sophisticated microsimulations (510,000 and 2,200,000 deaths respectively)” that they released a few weeks prior. If Imperial’s US and UK projections matched, a similar validity could be inferred for the other countries they modeled in the multi-country report.

The Imperial College team fully intended for its multi-country model to guide policy. They called on other countries to adopt lockdowns and related NPIs to reduce the projected death toll from the “unmitigated” scenario to “social distancing.” As Ferguson and his colleagues wrote at the time, “[t]o help inform country strategies in the coming weeks, we provide here summary statistics of the potential impact of mitigation and suppression strategies in all countries across the world. These illustrate the need to act early, and the impact that failure to do so is likely to have on local health systems.”

Failure to act, they continued, would lead to near-certain catastrophe. As Ferguson and his team wrote, “[t]he only approaches that can avert health system failure in the coming months are likely to be the intensive social distancing measures currently being implemented in many of the most affected countries, preferably combined with high levels of testing.” In short, the world needed to go into immediate lockdown in order to avert the catastrophes predicted by their multi-country model.

(Note: Imperial College also included a third possible mitigation scenario for stricter measures on top of general population NPIs, aimed at further isolating elderly and vulnerable people, projecting it could reduce Sweden’s numbers to between 16,192 and 33,878. They further modeled a fourth possible “suppression” scenario consisting of a severe lockdown that would reduce human contacts by 75% for the duration of the pandemic and maintain them for a year or more until population-wide vaccination was achieved. It predicted 14,518 deaths. Sweden clearly did not adopt either of these approaches).

One year later we may now look back to see how Imperial College’s international projections performed, paying closer attention to the small number of countries that bucked his lockdown recommendations. The results are not pretty for Ferguson, and point to a clear pattern of modeling that systematically exaggerated the projected death tolls of Covid-19 in the absence of lockdowns and related NPIs.

Figure II compares the Imperial College model’s projections for its “social distancing” scenario and “unmitigated” scenario against the actual outcomes at the one-year mark after its release. These projections reflect an assumed replication rate (R0) of 2.4 – the most conservative scenario they considered, meaning Imperial’s upper range of projections anticipated substantially higher death tolls. The countries examined here – Sweden, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea – are distinctive for either eschewing lockdowns and similar aggressive NPI restrictions entirely or for relying on them in a much more limited scope than Imperial College advised. The United States, where 43 of 50 states adopted lockdowns of some form, is also included for comparison.

Figure II

As can be seen, Imperial College wildly overstated the projected deaths in each country under both its “unmitigated” scenario and its NPI-reliant “social distancing” scenario – including by orders of magnitude in several cases.

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Similar exaggerations may be found in almost every other country where Imperial released projections, even as most of them opted to lock down. The Imperial team’s most conservative model predicted 332,000 deaths in France under lockdown-based “social distancing” and 621,000 with “unmitigated” spread. At the one year mark, France had incurred 94,000 deaths. Belgium was expected to incur a minimum of 46,000 fatalities under NPI mitigation, and 91,000 with uncontrolled spread. At the one year anniversary of the model, it reached 23,000 deaths – among the highest tolls in the world on a per capita basis and an example of extreme political mismanagement of the pandemic under heavy lockdown to be sure, but still only half of Imperial College’s most conservative projection for NPI mitigation.

Just over one year ago, the epidemiology modeling of Neil Ferguson and Imperial College played a preeminent role in shutting down most of the world. The exaggerated forecasts of this modeling team are now impossible to downplay or deny, and extend to almost every country on earth. Indeed, they may well constitute one of the greatest scientific failures in modern human history.



‘The Purge’ by Big Tech targets conservatives, including us

Just when we thought the Covid-19 lockdowns were ending and our ability to stay afloat was improving, censorship reared its ugly head.

For the last few months, NOQ Report and the American Conservative Movement have appealed to our readers for assistance in staying afloat through Covid-19 lockdowns. The downturn in the economy has limited our ability to generate proper ad revenue just as our traffic was skyrocketing. We had our first sustained stretch of three months with over a million visitors in November, December, and January, but February saw a dip.

It wasn’t just the shortened month. We expected that. We also expected the continuation of dropping traffic from “woke” Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but it has actually been much worse than anticipated. Our Twitter account was banned. Both of our YouTube accounts were banned. Facebook “fact-checks” everything we post. Spotify canceled us. Medium canceled us. Apple canceled us. Why? Because we believe in the truth prevailing, and that means we will continue to discuss “taboo” topics.

“Nations, states, and central banks are quietly but rapidly shifting their money to precious metals. With bank runs, recession, CBDCs, and worse on the horizon, it’s easy to see why. NOW is the time to learn more about moving portions of your retirement or wealth to a self-directed gold and silver IRA through an America-First, Christian precious metals company.” – JD Rucker (not a financial advisor, just a guy who’s paying attention)

The 2020 presidential election was stolen. You can’t say that on Big Tech platforms without risking cancellation, but we’d rather get cancelled for telling the truth rather than staying around to repeat mainstream media’s lies. They have been covering it up since before the election and they’ve convinced the vast majority of conservative news outlets that they will be harmed if they continue to discuss voter fraud. We refuse to back down. The truth is the truth.

The lies associated with Covid-19 are only slightly more prevalent than the suppression of valid scientific information that runs counter to the prescribed narrative. We should be allowed to ask questions about the vaccines, for example, as there is ample evidence for concern. One does not have to be an “anti-vaxxer” in order to want answers about vaccines that are still considered experimental and that have a track record in a short period of time of having side-effects, including death. One of our stories about the Johnson & Johnson “vaccine” causing blood clots was “fact-checked” and removed one day before the government hit the brakes on it. These questions and news items are not allowed on Big Tech which is just another reason we are getting canceled.

There are more topics that they refuse to allow. In turn, we refuse to stop discussing them. This is why we desperately need your help. The best way NOQ Report and ACM readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We are on track to be short by about $4100 per month in order to maintain operations.

The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. We had 5,657,724 sessions on our website from November, 2020, through February, 2021. Our intention is to elevate that to higher levels this year by focusing on a strategy that relies on free speech rather than being beholden to progressive Big Tech companies.

During that four-month stretch, Twitter and Facebook accounted for about 20% of our traffic. We are actively working on operating as if that traffic is zero, replacing it with platforms that operate more freely such as Gab, Parler, and others. While we were never as dependent on Big Tech as most conservative sites, we’d like to be completely free from them. That doesn’t mean we will block them, but we refuse to be beholden to companies that absolutely despise us simply because of our political ideology.

We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above.

As the world spirals towards radical progressivism, the need for truthful journalism has never been greater. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going.

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“Nations, states, and central banks are quietly but rapidly shifting their money to precious metals. With bank runs, recession, CBDCs, and worse on the horizon, it’s easy to see why. NOW is the time to learn more about moving portions of your retirement or wealth to a self-directed gold and silver IRA through an America-First, Christian precious metals company.” – JD Rucker (not a financial advisor, just a guy who’s paying attention)



Yes, We Need Your Help

I hate being “that guy” who asks people to donate because I think our conservative news network is so crucial, but here I am…

When I left my cushy corporate job in 2017, I did so knowing that my family would have to make sacrifices. But I couldn’t continue to watch the nation slip into oblivion and was inspired by President Trump’s willingness to fight the good fight even at his own personal expense. What I didn’t realize then is that conservative media would be so heavily attacked, canceled, and defunded that the sacrifices would be extreme.

Many in this nation are struggling right now even though we weren’t struggling just a few years ago. I’m not alone. But I wake up every morning and operate the sites we’ve been able to build because there’s really no other choice. I refuse to be beholden to Big Tech like so many other conservative news outlets, which is why you won’t see Google ads here. With that said, it’s often challenging to pay the bills and it’s even harder to expand so we can get the America First message out to a wider audience.

The economic downturn has forced me to make a plea for help. Between cancel culture, lockdowns, and diminishing ad revenue, we need financial assistance in order to continue to spread the truth. We ask all who have the means, please donate through our Giving Fuel. Your generosity is what keeps these sites running and allows us to expand our reach so the truth can get to the masses. We’ve had great success in growing but we know we can do more with your assistance.

We currently operate:

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I would even be willing to entertain investments and partnerships at this stage. I’ve turned them down in the past because editorial purity is extremely important. I’ll turn them down again if anyone wants us to start supporting RINOs or avoid “taboo” topics like voter fraud, vaccines, or transgender supremacy. But I’d talk to fellow America First patriots who want to help any (or all) of our 10 news sites. Hit me up at jdrucker (at) substack (dot) com if you’re interested.

For those who have the means and just want to help keep the mission of spreading a conservative, Christian message to the nation, please consider a generous donation.


Covid variant BA.5 is spreading. It appears milder but much more contagious and evades natural immunity. Best to boost your immune system with new Z-Dtox and Z-Stack nutraceuticals from our dear friend, the late Dr. Vladimir Zelenko.

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