The competence of Professor Neil Ferguson has long been in question. Long before he was caught ignoring his own lockdown rules in favour of a crafty bonk with a climate change activist, he was issuing wildly inaccurate predictions about pandemics for some 20 years.
But now, a world leading computer expert, who has worked for many of the biggest players in silicon valley, claims the algorithm Professor Pantsdown used not only didn't work but Ferguson knew it didn't and tried to cover it up. A single computer model, which was presented to Boris Johnson as justification for locking down an entire country, risking destroying our economy and unleashing a generational misery upon us all, was fundamentally flawed and should never have been used.
The website Tpointuk.co.uk this week published a transcript from someone they called Sue Denim (not the author’s real name) who has been writing software for 30 years, working at the world’s most successful tech companies and playing a key role in the development of their most complex products, states:
"The code is terrifyingly basic"
"The first and, perhaps, most important criticism of the code is the fact that it is overwhelmingly simple – the code used amounted to just 15,000 lines. While this may seem like a lot, for a point of reference, Microsoft Windows 95 operating system had over 6 million lines of code. Some day-to-day apps that you use on your phone will likely have more than double the number of lines of code that Neil Ferguson’s model used. It should shock all of us to our core that such a gargantuan decision was made not with a supercomputer, but instead relying upon the equivalent of an app that an experienced developer could have designed and built over the course of a few weekends."
"The code doesn’t work"
"One of the most basic principles of modeling is that you need to be able to produce consistent results, before you can start making predictions." In the case of Neil Ferguson’s algorithm, their input would produce different results even when the input was exactly the same."
But, in the most damning statement of all, Sue Denim claims:
"Neil Ferguson knew the code was broken and tried to cover it up"
"Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London were completely aware of the inherent flaws with their code, yet did nothing to fix these. Concerns were raised by a team at Edinburgh University after they had simply tried to save the file in a different format, and found that this resulted in the algorithm predicting an additional 80,000 deaths! Instead of addressing the problems at the heart of the code (which would have required some hard graft), Neil and his team simply ran the fundamentally flawed models numerous times and took an average. In any other job, Neil Ferguson would have been struck off for professional negligence, and perhaps even prosecuted for fraud. Somehow, though, through the murky world and connections of academia, this man ended up advising our Government to take its most drastic course of action since the surrender of Hong Kong."
If true then an immediate investigation into Ferguson should be initiated. The cost to the UK, is likely to run into the trillions, and many businesses will never recover, tens of thousands have lost their jobs and, for many, this hardship will damage their lives irreparably. We have given ourselves a burden that dwarfs the financial crash of 2008 and, if the situation lasts much longer, will start being comparable to costs of the second World War.
Worse still, Ferguson was consulted by many of the countries in Europe, with France, Germany and others basing their lockdowns on his sayso.
Was Professor Neil Ferguson a bungling incompetent, or, as some are suggesting, a nihilist, whose intention was to cripple the economy for nefarious reasons? Either way we want answers, and we want them now.
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