Superb article from March 2020: "Is epidemiology useful?"

Clearly not.

h/t to

Martin Neil

for spotting this.

As the years march on, it is easy to forget how egregiously wrong every single assumption around “the pandemic” was.

This piece (see below for link) from 31 Mar 2020 - which I highly recommend - lays bare the shortcomings of using GIGO¹ modeling as a driver of public policy, something which we see across many domains, most notably the “climate” agenda, but also many other fields.

In fact, I would characterise the age in which we live as one which is witnessing pseudoscientific modeling replacing empiricism.

Anyway, do enjoy. The commentary on Ferguson’s / Imperial’s Foot and Mouth disease modeling is particularly interesting. How wrong do you have to be before someone hesitates to trust you to determine policy (because that is what he did) which will cause death and misery for millions of people²?

It needs to be emphasised that the UK / Imperial was the intellectual nerve centre of the global “pandemic response”.

Yet Ferguson’s model was written using some 13-year old undocumented code which then needed to be “cleaned up” with the help of Microsoft to make it reusable by anyone else.

That isn’t even the worst of it - which is that the key assumptions forming the inputs to the model were garbage.

The summary of the piece is reproduced below. Click on it or here to go to the full article.

1. Garbage in, garbage out.

2. Because whilst many things weren’t known in spring 2020, what WAS predictable was that you cannot shut down the global economy without - over the medium and longer term - causing millions of deaths from economic depravation. The immediate harms to health from healthcare shutdown were also predicted by many.