UKC

Prof Neil Ferguson

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 Dan Arkle 05 May 2020

He has resigned after being visited by his lover.

FFS. Another useful mind lost due to a minor breach of lockdown. What an idiotic mistake. 

19
 DaveHK 05 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

The inexorable, irresistible lure of the boaby.

 arch 05 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Do as I say, not as I do.

8
 wintertree 05 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Moving straight past another example of inexcusable stupidity from someone who should be leading by example...

Why is it coming out now?  Another part of the strategy to line the scientists up to take all the blame as the UK cruises to the dubious title of “worst coronavirus responder”?

17
 Billhook 05 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Given his track record I'm not to sure he'll be missed by everyone.

His  research is  influencing government thinking on precautions, and claimed that up 250,000 will die and  some of his research methods/conclusions have been widely discredited and disputed by many of his peers.  So far we've had 32,000 deaths, mostly people with poor health and 'pre existing health conditions.

He also claimed that up to 510,000 people could die from Covid 19 if no action was taken*.

Ferguson was also the 'expert' during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic. Again his disputed figures resulted in pre-emtive strikes which ultimately led to 6,000,000 cattle, sheep and pigs being slaughtered and  which had not caught foot and mouth.**

He was also behind the claims that BSE ('Mad Cow Disease) in cattle would lead to between 50 and 150,000 human deaths. There were 178 deaths in total.

What really shocked me about Neil Ferguson  report in The Times a week or two ago mentions that his computer simulation code has 'several thousand lines of dense code' with no documentation or comments, nobody understands how it works except Ferguson and it's all in his head.

What really shocked me about Neil Ferguson  report in The Times that mentions that his computer simulation code has 'several thousand lines of dense code' with no documentation or comments, nobody understands how it works except Ferguson and it's all in his head. I was quite impressed with his work until I read that. I used to work with numerical models for nuclear safety, and nobody would ever have used results from undocumented code. Apparently his model was developed from one the modelled 'flu epidemics, so even if this one was put together in a hurry, the basic model should have documented.

* Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID- 19 mortality......'

** Destructive Tension, mathematics versus experience - the progress and control of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic.

15
 kaiser 05 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

The combination of our scientific advice and our government's decisions has led to our being the most damaged country in the whole world, both in terms of economics and fatalities.

This guy was the front man of the Imperial clique that dominates SAGE so - for me - the fact that his judgment has been discredited gives a glimmer of hope, albeit probably far too little and far too late.

17
 wintertree 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> , and claimed that up 250,000 will die and  some of his research methods/conclusions have been widely discredited and disputed by many of his peers.  So far we've had 32,000 deaths, mostly people with poor health and 'pre existing health condition’

There is no contradiction here.  30k deaths with 2 weeks of increasing social distancing followed by 6 weeks of lockdown and counting.  Kind of suggests it could have been a lot worse if we hadn’t locked down...

I totally agree with your view on his pandemic code however. 

2
 mik82 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

I'm sorry, but given that about 60% of over 60s have underlying health conditions it just means that most people dying are over the age of 60.

Patrick Vallance said that "up to" 10% of the population has had Covid-19. This is likely to be informed by by preliminary antibody studies that SAGE will have access to. Given at least 32,000 have died so far, allowing continued spread through the population would have lead to an absolute minimum of 180,000 deaths if 60% became infected. 32,000 is an underestimate, as it excludes "likely" deaths so you're looking at over 40,000. In an unrestricted scenario 80% would become infected due to overshoot of the herd immunity threshold - 320,000 deaths, but likely significantly more as there would be limited hospital and ITU beds.

Clearly he's made the wrong judgement in his personal life but is this really related to his academic output?

Post edited at 22:02
5
 Billhook 05 May 2020
In reply to mik82:

Thats not what Ferguson said!

6
 DaveHK 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> Thats not what Ferguson said!

Have you read the report? 

 andyb211 05 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Poor sod, all he fancied was a leg over, can't blame the lad for that.

Knocking one out on your own is champion in the short term but it just doesn't beat the real mckoy!

C'mon boys you know where I'm coming from  

12
 skog 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> So far we've had 32,000 deaths, mostly people with poor health and 'pre existing health conditions.

You say that as if it's no big deal - but it appears that those dying of covid-19 in this part of the world are losing, on average, 11 years of life:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jxSPdLfnPTgJ:https://...

Clauso 05 May 2020
In reply to andyb211:

> C'mon boys you know where I'm coming from  

The same spot as the rest of us, I assume... 

 Lord_ash2000 05 May 2020
In reply to skog:

If 250k die at 11 years each average that's 2.75m years of life lost.

If the knock on effects of economic collapse cause the whole population's life expectancy to fall by 1 month on average that's 5.4m years of life lost. Worth bearing in mind.

Post edited at 22:42
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 gallam1 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> What really shocked me about Neil Ferguson  report in The Times that mentions that his computer simulation code has 'several thousand lines of dense code' with no documentation or comments, nobody understands how it works except Ferguson and it's all in his head. I was quite impressed with his work until I read that. I used to work with numerical models for nuclear safety, and nobody would ever have used results from undocumented code. Apparently his model was developed from one the modelled 'flu epidemics, so even if this one was put together in a hurry, the basic model should have documented.

Check for yourself - it's open source, which is a credit to him and his team.

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim

 wintertree 05 May 2020
In reply to Lord_ash2000:

> If 250k die at 11 years each average that's 2.75m years of life lost.

> If the knock on effects of economic collapse cause the whole population's life expectancy to fall by 1 month on average that's 5.4m years of life lost. Worth bearing in mind.

Those two values are not comparable.  

The former death would happen now and is irreversible; the later is within our control as we have 30 years to change our values to support health more.  

The former kills many in their economically productive period, the later kills people in the part of their life where they need the most support from the state.  

Worth bearing in mind.

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 Billhook 05 May 2020
In reply to skog:

> You say that as if it's no big deal - but it appears that those dying of covid-19 in this part of the world are losing, on average, 11 years of life:

That link appears to be related to Italy.

 Bobling 05 May 2020
In reply to kaiser:

> The combination of our scientific advice and our government's decisions has led to our being the most damaged country in the whole world, both in terms of economics and fatalities.

Really?  Iran and Ecuador are two that spring to mind, not to mention North Korea which may or may not be fine who knows.  Then there's the storm to come in Africa and South America, Indonesia...what's going on there?  Am I missing something?

1
 jkarran 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> Given his track record I'm not to sure he'll be missed by everyone. His  research is  influencing government thinking on precautions, and claimed that up 250,000 will die and  some of his research methods/conclusions have been widely discredited and disputed by many of his peers.  So far we've had 32,000 deaths, mostly people with poor health and 'pre existing health conditions. He also claimed that up to 510,000 people could die from Covid 19 if no action was taken*.

We're basically two months in, over 50k dead facing economic armageddon and the ensuing escalation of international tensions. I'd not bet on us missing 250k dead just yet. Frankly that 510k doesn't look especially safe though the virus alone won't get us there the other horsemen very easily could.

jk

Post edited at 23:19
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 skog 05 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> That link appears to be related to Italy.

You didn't actually read it, did you?

 skog 05 May 2020
In reply to Lord_ash2000:

> If 250k die at 11 years each average that's 2.75m years of life lost.

> If the knock on effects of economic collapse cause the whole population's life expectancy to fall by 1 month on average that's 5.4m years of life lost. Worth bearing in mind.

One of these numbers is a statistic based on real study; I don't think the other is, is it?

 Alkis 05 May 2020
In reply to gallam1:

There is some utterly horrible code there, in typical academic style. An audit wouldn't go amiss.

Edit: Reading some more, I would be shocked if this hasn't got serious bugs and considering how it's written and documented good luck even knowing whether something is a bug or not. Typical academic code, mixing computation and IO, not using library functions where it would make the code rather less verbose and hence readable, etc.

Post edited at 23:35
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 wintertree 05 May 2020
In reply to Alkis:

My concern isn’t just bugs, it’s the maths that is implemented.  What is the physical model?  Does it pass peer review?  Does the maths correctly implement the physics model?  Does the code correctly implement the maths?  These days I’d expect to see the model set out as typeset maths with analytics solutions to simplified cases and a reference Python solver that cross checks against the special analytic cases, and then to see any high performance C/C++ codes verified against the reference Python version.  Problems can exist in many other places than the code; “Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”

A professional approach to modelling has separation, boundaries and cross checks.  When one domain specialist makes a computational model about their domain I always approach it with great skepticism.  I’ve unpicked a couple for clients - one in Excel - and they both failed at step 1 - a dimensional analysis of all the variables.  Garbage was flowing through them undetected.

Post edited at 23:46
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 Alkis 05 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

That is part of my point, it is not verifiable. When I'm saying bugs I do not necessarily just mean code bugs, literally just implementing invalid maths would be undetectable. Since it is horrific on top of that, I'd be shocked if it is not just broken outright. In a previous life I did find that man years of academic work had been wasted based on results that were invalid in a very pleasing and plausible way, due to a simple fence post error when downsampling an image.

Post edited at 23:53
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 wintertree 05 May 2020
In reply to Alkis:

Agree; although it’s important to step back and realise that an unknown pandemic is so complicated that a model is either far to simple or contains soo many free parameters as to be useless in the early stages (when free parameters outnumber data points to fit to), and the appropriate thing to do is to err on the side of caution and listen to epidemiology and history not a unprovable model.  The problem with a domain expert getting into modelling is that they can get carried away with the cleverness of the model and their investment of time, and they don’t have the maths/physics/theory background to appreciate that whilst it’s jolly clever it’s not predictive.  So I think we have compounded mistakes here.

1
In reply to Billhook:

> His  research is  influencing government thinking on precautions, and claimed that up 250,000 will die and  some of his research methods/conclusions have been widely discredited and disputed by many of his peers.  So far we've had 32,000 deaths, mostly people with poor health and 'pre existing health conditions.

So far we've had about 50,000 'excess deaths' and we are leveled off at the top of the curve.  That's isn't the end of the first wave, it is closer to half way through it.  Any mistakes with undoing the lockdown and we could easily end up with 100k excess deaths in the first wave.

A prediction of 250k deaths if no action was taken to suppress seems completely realistic.

I'm not one to idolise London based academics but I think there is an agenda here.  The 'lets open faster' right wing lobby who are primarily concerned about the threat to their own wealth are using the press to target their enemies.

I got a huge amount of flack for saying the Scottish Governmen's Chief Scientist shouldn't have been fired for going to her holiday house and I'll say the same for this guy.  It is stupid to fire the guy who made the right call on suppression vs herd immunity because he had his girlfriend round (especially since he'd recovered from the virus a few weeks ago and could reasonably expect to be immune).

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Removed User 06 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Brownie points for consistency. But....he has to go for the same reason she did.

3
 Jon Stewart 06 May 2020
In reply to Lord_ash2000:

> If 250k die at 11 years each average that's 2.75m years of life lost.

> If the knock on effects of economic collapse cause the whole population's life expectancy to fall by 1 month on average that's 5.4m years of life lost. Worth bearing in mind.

No it isn't. The predicted outcomes (on lots of different metrics including deaths, economic impact in short/med/long term, NHS load, but also qualitative stuff) of different policy options we can take now are what we need to compare. I don't even know what you're trying to compare.

1
 FactorXXX 06 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Is there any thread on UKC that you won't turn into propaganda? 

4
In reply to FactorXXX:

> Is there any thread on UKC that you won't turn into propaganda? 

The people churning out propaganda at the moment are the UK government.  Vote Leave was a propaganda operation from start to finish and the same people are doing the same things but with the budget and influence of the UK state behind them.

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 Blunderbuss 06 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

> The people churning out propaganda at the moment are the UK government.  Vote Leave was a propaganda operation from start to finish and the same people are doing the same things but with the budget and influence of the UK state behind them.

I thought Scotland was in charge of it's own affairs with regards to the measures put in place to handle this crisis there.......so shouldn't you be focusing on that rather than posting your consistently rabid attacks on anything to do with Westminster.

5
 Neil Williams 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Very, very foolish of him, but I would actually have tried to deflect it.  As a "great mind" he is more useful than the downside caused by his misbehaviour.

 Neil Williams 06 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

> I got a huge amount of flack for saying the Scottish Governmen's Chief Scientist shouldn't have been fired for going to her holiday house and I'll say the same for this guy.  It is stupid to fire the guy who made the right call on suppression vs herd immunity because he had his girlfriend round (especially since he'd recovered from the virus a few weeks ago and could reasonably expect to be immune).

Finally I agree with you

Yes, his resignation is to the disadvantage of the country even given his rather silly misdemeanour (which, if they are acting as one household in terms of isolation, is probably of highly negligible effect, and lots of people are probably doing it under the radar).

2
 veteye 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

> He has resigned after being visited by his lover.

> FFS. Another useful mind lost due to a minor breach of lockdown. What an idiotic mistake. 

Yet we are all mortal. The woman in question, Antonia Staats, is pretty attractive, and she came to him. I'm not sure how many of us would have turned her down. I don't think that I would. I think that he would have been more culpable if he had travelled to her.

I'm not sure how things will be feeling and sitting with her husband, even though it is reported that their marriage is an open one; And how is this all going to be kept from affecting their children. Does the Telegraph have any sense of responsibility there?

4
 wbo2 06 May 2020

In reply toBillhook via Tom

> A prediction of 250k deaths if no action was taken to suppress seems completely realistic.

Bingo!! 32000 deaths , so far, after applying mitigating effects , makes the original death toll from an uncontrolled pandemic seem quite realistic.  Why exactly do you think otherwise?  Or do you think it will just magic itself away

>A professional approach to modelling has separation, boundaries and cross checks.  When one domain specialist makes a computational model about their domain I always approach it with great skepticism.  I’ve unpicked a couple for clients - one in Excel - and they both failed at step 1 - a dimensional analysis of all the variables.  Garbage was flowing through them undetected.

But I've also unpicked multivariate stochastic models and found them very reliable, usable tools.  How else do you think this should be done.  And yes, the code gets messy if it's for 'personal use' rather than commercial release.  When a computer scientist makes a domain specialist predicitve tool I expect it to be nicely coded, pretty and extremely useless

1
 NathanP 06 May 2020
In reply to veteye:

> Does the Telegraph have any sense of responsibility there?

Ha ha, gave me a good belly laugh there to start the day. Thanks.

1
 summo 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

She's 38, not unattractive, would appear he's punching above his weight. Was probably hard to resist. Pandemic or not. 

6
 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

> How else do you think this should be done. 

To expand on what I said earlier...

  1. Write up the model as mathematics and words for peer review
  2. Look for analytical solutions to special cases of the model
  3. Write a reference implementation of 1 in a language relatively close to maths such as Python + numpy.  This is written with a focus on clarity of code to allow review against the spec, not speed
  4. Validate 3 with a review vs 1 and by comparison with results from analytical cases in 2
  5. If needed produce a separate, performance optimised implementation of 2 in C/C++. 
  6. Validate 5 by comparison with 3 for a subset of inputs.

It sounds like a lot of work but it isn’t.  The clarity of thought from having a clear reference of the maths, and the flexibility to try new things quickly with a clear reference implementation save more time in the long run that just jumping straight in to C/C++ with a bunch of ideas in your head.  It also produces code that most people knowledgable in such things don’t look at with deep mistrust.

1
 Lord_ash2000 06 May 2020
In reply to skog:

> One of these numbers is a statistic based on real study; I don't think the other is, is it?

Bristol university estimated a 6.4% dip in the economy would be the tipping point where more lifespan is lost due to economic effects than the virus. It's just the knock of effect of there being less money to spend. People are poorer so don't eat as well and don't live healthy lifestyles and on the public sector side there is less money available for health spending and social care etc.

My calculation was simple 65,000,000 people, 1 month lost each / 12 = years lost. 

That will be barley noticeable in real life, and won't be evenly spread. It'll be old people dieing sooner because of lack of spending on care and young people and children growing up poorer now which will result in them being less healthy in the future.

But no the less it's lifespan lost now verses lifespan lost later. 

Imagine a situation where you had five 80 year olds and three 10 year olds. You can only save one group and the other will die, who do you save? In terms of lives saved you should save the five 80 year olds thus resulting in 3 deaths rather than 5. But most people would save the three children, saving far more in potential lost lifespan. Right now we are in danger of saving the old at the sacrifice of the young in future.

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 Phil1919 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Seems like its turned into a Boys Own thread. Judgements about how attractive she is etc. 

3
 Tom Valentine 06 May 2020
In reply to Phil1919:

Indeed. What we need to know is whether or not she's been peer reviewed.

2
 john arran 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Curious how the timing of this nationally important 'news' story has meant that other worthy stories - such as the UK now having the highest covid-19 death toll in Europe - completely off the front pages of the popular press.

6
 stevieb 06 May 2020
In reply to Lord_ash2000:

> Bristol university estimated a 6.4% dip in the economy would be the tipping point where more lifespan is lost due to economic effects than the virus. It's just the knock of effect of there being less money to spend. 

But did Bristol estimate how much stronger the economy would be with COVID but without a lockdown?

The FT view in this article is that the Long term economic damage without lockdown is worse. 
http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/maintaining-the-lockdown-and-saving-the...

1
 Oceanrower 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Personally, I'm delighted to see an epidemiologist keeping on top of his Staats...

2
 lorentz 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> Why is it coming out now?  Another part of the strategy to line the scientists up to take all the blame as the UK cruises to the dubious title of “worst coronavirus responder”?

Nail on the head there. Headlines in all the Tory friendly press about Fergusson instead about the UK sailing passed Italy and Spain's death toll. The sick man of Europe. 

I'm amazed that no one else  in this thread has yet inferred that at least we know who it was that recently leaked that Dominic Cummstains and his evil minions were sitting in on the SAGE meetings... Quite clear to me this shock revelation about Fergusson is Cummings' machiavellian revenge. "Exclusive to the Telegraph" is the new "a Number 10 spokesman said."

3
 earlsdonwhu 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

If Ferguson should have resigned, so too should Robert Jenryk but he is still getting wheeled out for briefings.

 yorkshire_lad2 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

BBCR4 Today this morning (Weds 8/5 approx 8.50am), looking for click bait, asking endless questions about Neil Ferguson when there are just a few more important issues to be discussing.

The bit I really enjoyed was another (academic?) interviewee they got on. First question from interviewer asked about Neil Ferguson.  In a perfect moment of clarity with delicious timing and a brilliant put-down: "I haven't come on here to discuss Neil Ferguson".  Priceless!

 Dave Garnett 06 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> He was also behind the claims that BSE ('Mad Cow Disease) in cattle would lead to between 50 and 150,000 human deaths. There were 178 deaths in total.

And your point is?  Even you must be able to see that those maximum and minimum limits must be based on different assumptions?  Happily, it looks as though the final number is nearer the lower end but there was very good reason to be concerned at the time.

And the reason why the death toll where BSE has been identified as the cause of death isn't much higher is because the progress of the disease in codon 129 heterozygotes turned out to be slower than it might have been.  Probably many people simply die of something else before they get vCJD. 

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to Dave Garnett:

> And your point is?  Even you must be able to see that those maximum and minimum limits must be based on different assumptions?  Happily, it looks as though the final number is nearer the lower end but there was very good reason to be concerned at the time.

Given what I was fed as a kid I still worry there’s a small evil prion army biding it time somewhere in my brain.

I agree there is nothing to attack in him having given a range - the fact it was such a wide range is due to just how little was known at the time, a not uncommon problem when a new disease emerges...  

In reply to earlsdonwhu:

> If Ferguson should have resigned, so too should Robert Jenryk but he is still getting wheeled out for briefings.

Totally. He's my 'local' MP. 120 miles from his constituency.

1
cb294 06 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

>   When a computer scientist makes a domain specialist predicitve tool I expect it to be nicely coded, pretty and extremely useless

This, x 1000!

CB

1
 mondite 06 May 2020
In reply to Dave Garnett:

> And your point is?  Even you must be able to see that those maximum and minimum limits must be based on different assumptions?  Happily, it looks as though the final number is nearer the lower end but there was very good reason to be concerned at the time.

Especially given how little was known about prions at the time (or indeed now). As such the estimates were always going to be highly variable.

In reply to earlsdonwhu:

> If Ferguson should have resigned, so too should Robert Jenryk

Ah, but politicians no longer resign when caught out...

 mondite 06 May 2020
In reply to cb294:

> This, x 1000!

Thats why you dont use computer scientists but use a developer instead. Everyone knows most computer scientists cant code for shit

More seriously for something important I would be expecting it to go through a proper review process and use a mix of domain experts and developers.

 Alkis 06 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

> And yes, the code gets messy if it's for 'personal use' rather than commercial release.  When a computer scientist makes a domain specialist predicitve tool I expect it to be nicely coded, pretty and extremely useless

Alarm bells right there on both of those statements. When code gets *this* messy, how could you even reason about the results?

PS: I know plenty of computer scientists that cannot program to save their lives. Computer Scientists are not necessarily good programmers.

Post edited at 09:59
1
 La benya 06 May 2020
In reply to Lord_ash2000:

do you have a link to the Bristol Study- sounds interesting (and enforces what i think- so it must be true)

 La benya 06 May 2020
In reply to Phil1919:

Indeed- the two comments regarding how it would have been impossible not to shag her are creepy to the max.

6
 Alkis 06 May 2020
In reply to mondite:

> More seriously for something important I would be expecting it to go through a proper review process and use a mix of domain experts and developers.

Exactly that.

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to mondite:

> More seriously for something important I would be expecting it to go through a proper review process and use a mix of domain experts and developers.

At this importance, peer review of the maths model and cross comparison of two implementations by different individuals or teams.  Cross checking of independents models or implementations is standard in many fields.  

1
 john arran 06 May 2020
In reply to john arran:

> Curious how the timing of this nationally important 'news' story has meant that other worthy stories - such as the UK now having the highest covid-19 death toll in Europe - completely off the front pages of the popular press.

... and it turns out that the last time the two met was in early April, which means the government could have released this 'story' at any time since then. If there's a genuine reason for such a delay, I'd be interested to hear it, but I don't think it wise to hold my breath.

3
cb294 06 May 2020
In reply to mondite:

I guess wbo's post and my reply need to be read as tongue in cheek, but both contain a kernel of truth.

wintertree's 5 point list may be ideal, but things usually fail at step 1, making a suitable mathematical model of your problem. I do not have a background in epidemiology, but in my personal experience this is most obvious at the interface of biophysics and cell biology, where modelling has become the flavour of the months.

My issue is that the maths is used to hide simplifications that are not justified. If you model a cell as a sphere, you will learn about properties of spheres, not cells...

As for peer review, I managed to have a paper accepted that contained two competing models for signal transduction that both managed to explain the existing experimental data. We used simulations based on differential equations to predict the response of the signalling pathway to specific, experimental pertubations. We then measured this response using a genetically encoded sensor, which allowed us to conclude which of the two models was correct.

However, due to a stupid copy/paste error our methods section gave the same equations and simulation code for either model.

Fortunately we spotted this at proof stage, as none of the three reviewers had caught our glaring mistake!

CB

 wercat 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

I've stopped worying about prions.  Given the hale and hearty people you see on the hills and crags who are older than I am and knowing the trip diet of lots of outdoor types in the 80s and 90s (Scotch eggs, pork pies, meat pies, pasties etc etc etc consumed in huge quantities) there shouldn't be many survivors!  I agree ot was worth worrying at the time and still, given the subsequent discovery of transmission of prions by medical procedures employing re-used equipment.

 wercat 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

It crossed my mind that the govt might have something on each of the members of SAGE so that at any time when party interests require pressure can be put on them for a Confession of Crimes followed by walking the plank, with the government not seen to be involved in removing and replacing with members more amenable to party interests/moron message.

2
 neilh 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

You would have thought that we would have learnt after Turing that clever minds are to be protetced and not vilified

6
 Phil1919 06 May 2020
In reply to La benya:

Sexism rife on UKC......nothing changes : ) 

Post edited at 10:44
2
 mondite 06 May 2020
In reply to cb294:

> wintertree's 5 point list may be ideal, but things usually fail at step 1, making a suitable mathematical model of your problem.

Its never going to be perfect but they dont seem to have even made an attempt at following best practice or even mediocre practice.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> His  research is  influencing government thinking on precautions, and claimed that up 250,000 will die and  some of his research methods/conclusions have been widely discredited and disputed by many of his peers.  So far we've had 32,000 deaths, mostly people with poor health and 'pre existing health conditions.

Can you give an example of any of his discredited work?

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> What really shocked me about Neil Ferguson  report in The Times a week or two ago mentions that his computer simulation code has 'several thousand lines of dense code' with no documentation or comments, nobody understands how it works except Ferguson and it's all in his head.

Ferguson and his team's code is here - 

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim

Maybe you should look beyond reports in The Times.

In reply to Phil1919:

> Sexism rife on UKC......nothing changes : ) 

Why is it sexist?  It might be a bit creepy but I don't understand why two blokes on a forum saying they found someone attractive is sexist. Perhaps if they had used words such as 'attractive, and clearly only with the powerful scientist because she's a women and women are stupid and only after powerful men to further themselves' then that would be sexist.

I saw a picture of her face on a report.  To me she looked attractive from what I could see.  I wouldn't want anything else because I'm married but if she was my lover and she had come over to my house in a lock down having not seen her for some time, I dont think a cream tea would be on the cards. 

Let's not virtue signal on her behalf either, women are sexually empowered these days too you know.  I would imagine she didnt want to go around to his house to discuss his interesting mathematical modelling either, do you?

Post edited at 11:23
3
 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> Ferguson and his team's code is here - 

It is now.  It was belatedly released some time after it apparently informed key policy decisions.  Before then it appears to be unreviewed and poorly documented, and written in a language that obscures (by necessity not by intent) the maths it implements.    

Post edited at 11:12
1
cb294 06 May 2020
In reply to mondite:

Medics playing at doing proper science?

CB

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> > Ferguson and his team's code is here - 

> It is now.  It was belatedly released some time after it apparently informed key policy decisions.  Before then it appears to be unreviewed and poorly documented, and written in a language that obscures (by necessity not by intent) the maths it implements.    

That may be so - I have not examined it. The point is that Billhook's assertion that "it's all in his head" is not, and nor was it ever, true.

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to cb294:

Thanks for the post.  I’ll reply in detail later.  Don’t suppose you’re interesting in modelling sub cellular Ca2+ signalling in non neuronal tissues?

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> That may be so - I have not examined it. The point is that Billhook's assertion that "it's all in his head" is not, and nor was it ever, true.

What I take that to mean is that the rational, mathematical model and configuration details were only in his head, other than the code (where they obviously have to be).

There’s a massive community effort going on to address that.  I’ve been disappointed to see it gravitate towards more complex models and not understanding and communicating to policy makers the applicable bounds of such models.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to Alkis:

> There is some utterly horrible code there, in typical academic style. An audit wouldn't go amiss.

> Edit: Reading some more, I would be shocked if this hasn't got serious bugs and considering how it's written and documented good luck even knowing whether something is a bug or not. Typical academic code, mixing computation and IO, not using library functions where it would make the code rather less verbose and hence readable, etc.

That's not hugely surprising. He's an epidemiologist, not a software engineer.

Nonetheless, the model's output for various European countries is available on J-IDEA's website, and it seems to have held up pretty well. Even for Sweden.

https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/details/Sweden

cb294 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Sorry, no real experience with Ca2+!

We did, however, steal the core of a single wavelength, cpYFP derived Ca2+ sensor to build sensors for the Hedgehog and BMP signalling pathways to track the subcellular distribution of activated receptors/ GPCR-like signal transducers.

CB

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> ... and written in a language that obscures (by necessity not by intent) the maths it implements.    

In defence of C, that's a weakness of the implementation and not the language. While these days it is more likely to be written in R or Python (as per some of LSHTM's more recent models), it's perfectly possible to write mathematically expressive code in C ( or in this case C++ ) - though since I do it professionally I admit to some bias here.

Post edited at 11:26
 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

I sort of agree.  I have a complex real time control system written in C for a small microprocessor that uses a lightweight object style array library to keep the maths clear, and with the right approach C++ can be clear.  But Python has moved on too; there the maths for my reference implantation are now built with Sympy including all analytical manipulations and typeset in-line as LaTeX presented maths using Jupyter notebooks.  This then gets - slowly - evaluated by sympy as the first reference and serves as the source for executable Python code for the second reference.  It’s way, way clearer than any C/C++ I could conceive of writing.  It’s remarkably rare I need to write C these days, the only time I have recently is for discrete Markov simulations next there the C is very restricted to just the probabilistic cross section from sparse transition matricies and is trivially comparable with a Python solver.

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to wercat:

> I've stopped worying about prions

They’re starting to get implicated in Alzheimer’s...  

 wbo2 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

That's all well and good... but how often do you describe stochastic modelling to the layman?  I really don't give a monkey's how you code some stuff up, but I do care about how you parameterise and  handle parameter variability, inputs and methods, and the real game then is how you transfer that understanding to policy makers.

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

I totally agree on the importance of clearly communicating the results and their bounds to policymakers. But for that to be a worthwhile exercise, you need to have credible results.  How it’s *documented* and then coded up cuts right to that credibility.  The bigger issue here to me wasn’t the code, it was the lack of clarity or peer review on the model the code implemented.  Even if the code had no bugs making a material difference to the result, there was no ability for anyone beyond the author to validate the model the code implemented.  Credibility of the model is totally unrelated to code or implementation or computer science stuff or language choice or any of that, and was not possible for anyone to review or assess as the only known versions of the models were in the author’s head and in the code - inaccessible to most epidemiologists even after the belated code release.
 

I’ve explained my modelling to people without any understanding of how it works quite a few times.  A basis of interdisciplinary research.

Post edited at 11:53
OP Dan Arkle 06 May 2020
In reply to all:

Well, this thread got technical quickly! 

 Alkis 06 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> ( or in this case C++ )

I'd be surprised if the .cpp files in there can't be compiled by a C compiler.

 wercat 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> They’re starting to get implicated in Alzheimer’s...  

What's that ...?

 earlsdonwhu 06 May 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

Or they resign from their specific role only to be brought back a few months later in the next reshuffle.

 Phil1919 06 May 2020
In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Imagine how you would feel if you were that woman being discussed like that behind her back on this site by a couple of the UKC members. You are objectifying the woman. I've nothing against you thinking 'there's only one thing that woman went to his house for and it wasn't a cream tea', it's the making of a judgement about the woman being worth sleeping with that I object to. 

6
 Oceanrower 06 May 2020
In reply to Phil1919:

If it helps, I don't think he's any oil painting.

Just for balance...

Post edited at 12:43
 Dave Garnett 06 May 2020
In reply to wercat:

> I've stopped worying about prions.  Given the hale and hearty people you see on the hills and crags who are older than I am and knowing the trip diet of lots of outdoor types in the 80s and 90s (Scotch eggs, pork pies, meat pies, pasties etc etc etc consumed in huge quantities) there shouldn't be many survivors! 

You were pretty safe with pork, eggs and lamb (the fact that sheep had had scrapie for centuries without apparently giving it to us was the basis for John Gummer feeding his daughter hamburgers). 

Beef was a special risk (unless you were also indulging in squirrel or human brains, of course). 

In reply to planetmarshall:

> it's perfectly possible to write mathematically expressive code in C ( or in this case C++ ) - though since I do it professionally I admit to some bias here.

You'd probably be better off using a genuinely maths-oriented tool, like Mathematica, Matlab or Mathcad.

Clauso 06 May 2020
In reply to john arran:

> Curious how the timing of this nationally important 'news' story has meant that other worthy stories - such as the UK now having the highest covid-19 death toll in Europe - completely off the front pages of the popular press.

It hasn't been kept off the front pages of the quality press, such as the Daily Mash, though:

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/britain-scores-t...

 Robert Durran 06 May 2020
In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

> I would imagine she didnt want to go around to his house to discuss his interesting mathematical modelling either, do you?

It might have been part of the foreplay; some people find mathematical chat sexy - are you suggesting a woman couldn't find it so?

 kestrelspl 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Completely agree, that the documenting and validation is the important thing. Many ways to skin a cat,  and I don't think anyone who codes would confidently say they always comment all of their code to the standard one would like.

However, you have to extensively validate your code. Particle physics often does this by having multiple parallel code frameworks to implement the same thing and also spending a very long time verifying that when you change the parameters of your model in a controlled way it does what you intended it to. That plus detailed internal review processes inside the collaboration involving writing human readable documentation.

None of that should be taken as a comment on what the MRC team have done as I'm not in a position to judge. Very hard to tell the organisation and other internal validation steps that are in place from a single github repo.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

> > it's perfectly possible to write mathematically expressive code in C ( or in this case C++ ) - though since I do it professionally I admit to some bias here.

> You'd probably be better off using a genuinely maths-oriented tool, like Mathematica, Matlab or Mathcad.

Well it depends. Software Developers have their own preferences (usually the first language they learned), but the reality is we rarely get to choose due to pre-existing constraints. I don't know much about the Academic environment, but maybe there was some existing C code that could be adapted. Maybe it was what his supervisor used. Maybe he knew C and didn't have time to learn another language, and there wasn't a developer around who could implement it for him. Maybe he tried Python but it couldn't cope with the size of the dataset (having worked with Terabytes of data at the NHS using Python I have some sympathy for this view). Mathematica, Matlab and Mathcad are all commercial tools with their own strengths and weaknesses (Mathematica is a superlative symbolic manipulator but I wouldn't choose it for large-scale datasets). Who knows. I'm inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

 Dave Garnett 06 May 2020
In reply to yorkshire_lad2:

> BBCR4 Today this morning (Weds 8/5 approx 8.50am), looking for click bait, asking endless questions about Neil Ferguson when there are just a few more important issues to be discussing.

Yes, like how Matt Hancock missed his 100,000 tests a day by the end of April target:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000htw2

The spurious 120,000 number included kits posted out but not yet even used, let alone processed.  On no day before or since April 30 has the target been met.  It's also not clear whether, assuming the postal kits are returned, their results will be counted again.

It was an aspirational target that served a useful purpose of accelerating testing 10-fold.  This was impressive: the actual number hardly matters and Hancock could have just said so, while telling the truth.  However the extent of the dishonesty to which he was prepared to stoop in order to further his political ambitions is instructive.

Tim Harford is always very careful with his language but this as close as I've ever heard him come to calling a government minister a liar.   

Post edited at 14:01
 Rob Parsons 06 May 2020
In reply to Robert Durran:

> It might have been part of the foreplay; some people find mathematical chat sexy - are you suggesting a woman couldn't find it so?


Talk simultaneous equations to us, Robert ...

 GrahamD 06 May 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

Isn't Matlab implemented in C in any case ?

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to GrahamD:

> Isn't Matlab implemented in C in any case ?

Isn't everything?  Or almost everything?  Matlab is great within its limitations and is a bit of a pig to push beyond them.  My preference for Python in large parts stems from how well it integrates with C/C++ allowing you to quickly move beyond the limitations with a few critical sections in C/C++.   The interface is very natural (being what all of Python is built on), and the same applies to the multi-dimensional array object.  Matlab's C interface is an absolute pig by comparison.   Python also benefits from a vibrant open source ecology which has produced a whole bunch of ways to rapidly and automatically convert code that is slow in Python into optimised (loop or memory structure) kernels running on SIMD or GPU capabilities.   

 Toerag 06 May 2020
In reply to Phil1919:

> Imagine how you would feel if you were that woman being discussed like that behind her back on this site by a couple of the UKC members. You are objectifying the woman. I've nothing against you thinking 'there's only one thing that woman went to his house for and it wasn't a cream tea', it's the making of a judgement about the woman being worth sleeping with that I object to. 

That's not sexism though is it?  If it had been a male lover, homosexual posters on here could have said exactly the same thing about him.

 Toerag 06 May 2020
In reply to Billhook:

> What really shocked me about Neil Ferguson  report in The Times a week or two ago mentions that his computer simulation code has 'several thousand lines of dense code' with no documentation or comments, nobody understands how it works except Ferguson and it's all in his head.

Surely if his code is rubbish someone will have found a mistake in it by now?

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

> > it's perfectly possible to write mathematically expressive code in C ( or in this case C++ ) - though since I do it professionally I admit to some bias here.

> You'd probably be better off using a genuinely maths-oriented tool, like Mathematica, Matlab or Mathcad.

Plenty of models end up written in C; the problem with Matlab etc is that you have relatively little control over memory access patterns on the arrays, and their way of working is to manipulate array level objects through a maths stack operating at the object level, where the object is typically a whole array - so result=(a+b)*c is implemented as temp = a+b; result=temp*c, which results in an additional iteration over the data, an additional set of writes to and reads from memory (temp) and memory allocation overhead (temp).  Mathematica is something quite different to a standard programming language, Matlab is a great languages for quickly throwing together lots of maths into something that looks similar to maths (great for reference>code review) but as soon as you start throwing around large arrays or otherwise stressing things, dropping down to C/C++ gives you way more control over the critical factors affecting performance (typically memory access patterns).  Again, the seamless Python<>C/C++ interface is why I prefer it so much to Matlab for code that's going to end up performance critical.

That being said, none of the pandemic models seems that performance intensive to me...  Although I'm aware of a lot of academic supercomputer time being coopted in to running them so what do I know...

Post edited at 14:32
In reply to GrahamD:

And C is ultimately implemented in assembler...

But by using an appropriate entry method, you reduce the semantic complexity involved in the implementation. If the problem you're trying to represent is mathematical, use a tool that uses mathematical notation to represent the problem. It also means that those who think in terms of mathematics (modellers, for instance), have a more 'natural' tool for expressing their thoughts.

That's what our mathematical modellers do. If there's a need to turn those models into deployed engineering implementations, then you can turn to more conventional languages, and optimised implementations.

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

> That's what our mathematical modellers do. If there's a need to turn those models into deployed engineering implementations, then you can turn to more conventional languages, and optimised implementations

Exactly.  Math > maths like reference implementation > high performance implementation.  I do think you unjustly missed Python off your list however.  Especially with tools like sympy and the Jupiter Notebook and the ecosystem wide integration it's really very good these days.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to kestrelspl:

> Completely agree, that the documenting and validation is the important thing. Many ways to skin a cat,  and I don't think anyone who codes would confidently say they always comment all of their code to the standard one would like.

Not a software engineering discussion, I know, but...

I rarely comment code, and tend to regard comments as a "code smell". It's usually an indication that either the programmer is doing something "weird", or the code is not adequately expressing its intent. Ferguson's code doesn't need comments - it needs rewriting to express the intent of what he's doing using the language of his domain. That doesn't necessarily mean rewriting the whole thing in R, just splitting the whole thing into functional units using the Single Responsibility Principle would be a vast improvement.

2
In reply to wintertree:

> I do think you unjustly missed Python off your list however.

Maybe I've just seen too much poorly coded Python...

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to GrahamD:

> Isn't Matlab implemented in C in any case ?

It is these days. It was originally written in FORTRAN, the roots of which are still exposed in its array indexing from 1 and column-major array storage.

 Alkis 06 May 2020
In reply to Toerag:

That's the magic of rubbish code, you can't easily reason about it to find mistakes out. In order to find mistakes in the spaghetti mess that this is, you basically need to re-implement at least part of it, so that all computation kernels are actually separated from rather irrelevant stuff, rather than interspersed in one monolithic mess.

Having reimplemented it, you are then faced with being unable to verify *your* implementation either, since the mathematical model it is actually implementing is not documented as such.

In the academic code I mentioned earlier this is where it all failed. Several people, myself included, reimplemented the method and we could not reproduce the author's nice clean results. They kept pushing back that this must be an error in our implementations. Eventually, I got hold of their implementation, since I inherited the equipment it was driving, cleaned the absolute mess up and found our pretty quickly that the bug was in the code feeding data into the original, not in the reimplementations.

This is exactly the sort of issue anyone trying to validate these results will face, and this is in spaghetti C fed into a C++ compiler.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> Plenty of models end up written in C; the problem with Matlab etc is that you have relatively little control over memory access patterns on the arrays, and their way of working is to manipulate array level objects through a maths stack operating at the object level, where the object is typically a whole array - so result=(a+b)*c is implemented as temp = a+b; result=temp*c...

That depends. More recent versions of Matlab use JIT compilation to optimize element-wise array operations.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to Alkis:

> Having reimplemented it, you are then faced with being unable to verify *your* implementation either, since the mathematical model it is actually implementing is not documented as such.

I assume it's the model referred to in the docs, in these papers:

2005/2006 would tally with the age of the code.

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020

In reply to wintertree:

> That’s great if it’s caught up.  Can it JIT to GPU yet?

I couldn't say. It wouldn't be my prototyping language of choice, but since I'm often asked to make production implementations of research prototypes I've acquired a familiarity with it.

Blanche DuBois 06 May 2020
In reply to Toerag:

> Surely if his code is rubbish someone will have found a mistake in it by now?


One of the problems with rubbish code is that it makes it difficult to find mistakes in it by simply examining the code.

 Alkis 06 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

More recent -> at least since I was using it a decade ago. 

 planetmarshall 06 May 2020
In reply to Blanche DuBois:

> One of the problems with rubbish code is that it makes it difficult to find mistakes in it by simply examining the code.

Whether or not it's rubbish is a matter of perspective. Ferguson is an epidemiologist, not a software engineer, and presumably for 15 years or so it's been 'good enough'. That in itself is a quality not to be discarded out of hand (having spent the last 12 months reducing a C++ codebase from over 400,000 to 80,000 lines of code, I know how easy it is to go the other way and have something absurdly over-engineered).

Obviously the criteria for a model on which public policy decisions are made are rather different from that required for an academic whose only interest is churning out the odd paper. So now we have a codebase on Github thanks to Microsoft and others, it's getting reviews, regression tests, continuous integration and all those modern software engineering accoutrements. Personally I find that rather encouraging - just how much software has the NHS made open source recently, for example?

You'd think saving a few tens of thousands of lives would be enough for people to cut you some slack.

In reply to Blunderbuss:

> I thought Scotland was in charge of it's own affairs with regards to the measures put in place to handle this crisis there.......so shouldn't you be focusing on that rather than posting your consistently rabid attacks on anything to do with Westminster.

Scotland is not in charge of its own affairs.  It's being dragged into the sh*t by the least competent government in Europe and people are dying as a result.

The Scottish Government has no authority to borrow or print money or radically change the tax system.  It doesn't even control tax revenue from Scotland which is sent to England and only half returned as a 'grant'.   Scotland cannot do anything which costs significantly more than what England decides.   We can tinker about the edges but our lockdown period is pretty much decided by England because they control the money.

Westminster can overrule its decisions or even suspend devolution whenever it wants.  If Scotland diverges too far from what England wants the Tories will use emergency legislation to take control.

Scotland is not in charge of its borders.   If England decides to let the virus rip - as it did in pursuit of the crazy herd immunity policy causing the current spike - Scotland has no way to protect itself against massive seeding of new cases.  If England opens up too early or won't impose a quarantine on people arriving at airports then Scotland will get another peak of infections too.

4
 Alkis 06 May 2020

Actually, this makes me eat my hat a little:

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1254872368763277313?s=21

Carmack was involved in some janitor work on this and found it actually remarkably alright. So, with that, credit where credit it due, messy or not Prof Ferguson didn't do that bad a job there at all.

I do trust Carmack's judgement and experience well beyond I do of my own.

This still leaves needing to validate the actual models but at least the implementation appears sound. 

In reply to Lord_ash2000:

> Imagine a situation where you had five 80 year olds and three 10 year olds. You can only save one group and the other will die, who do you save? In terms of lives saved you should save the five 80 year olds thus resulting in 3 deaths rather than 5. But most people would save the three children, saving far more in potential lost lifespan. Right now we are in danger of saving the old at the sacrifice of the young in future.

This argument is nonsense because it presumes that immediate deaths are the only cost of tens of millions of Covid infections and that once people have caught it they have immunity for a long period.

It is reasonable to assume that recovered patients have immunity immediately after infection but there is no evidence they have long term immunity.  Assuming they do is a huge gamble.

The more people get infected the more virus there is in circulation and the more chance it has to mutate.  

Many people who recover from Covid will have serious long term health problems.  Scarred lungs, damaged kidneys, damaged livers.   The consequence of the disease goes far beyond the immediate deaths.  People have died of kidney failure after being 'cured' of Covid and discharged from hospital.

Some viral infections are more serious the second time you catch them than the first and some can remain buried in the body for a long period and then reemerge as something worse.  Covid is a new disease, we can assume that there won't be any similar consequences of infection but it is just an assumption.  That's a very big chance to take when we are talking about 10s of millions being infected.

1
 Phil1919 06 May 2020
In reply to Toerag:

Its still disrespectful. What's being said on here by a couple of posters would be similar to, on hearing about the Harvey Weinstein case, logging on to see what some of the victims looked like and saying publicly 'I can understand why he raped her, shes so good looking'. 

6
 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to thread:

Soemthing else not discussed - who was spying on Neil or the woman a month ago?  Seems unlikely the telegraph sat on this for a month, so someone else gathered the info and waited for their moment.  Random stranger with a grudge?  Tory Party?  The Russians?  Civil Service?  Another scientist on SAGE?  Cummings?  Someone else?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 Alkis 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Good question. The timing is rather suspect, isn't it?

1
In reply to wintertree:

Hadn't you already raised the issue of timing...? You got this earlier reply, suggesting the machiavellian hand of Cummings...

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/prof_neil_ferguson-719040?v=1#x...

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

Honestly I’d loose my own head if it wasn’t screwed on.  My main thought this evening was about who did it not the timing.  I missed the Cummings reply you linked.  Thanks for filling in the blanks in my addled brain...

In reply to wintertree:

> Soemthing else not discussed - who was spying on Neil or the woman a month ago?  Seems unlikely the telegraph sat on this for a month, so someone else gathered the info and waited for their moment.  Random stranger with a grudge?  Tory Party?  The Russians?  Civil Service?  Another scientist on SAGE?  Cummings?  Someone else?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Seems like either someone was watching him and sat on the information until the politically opportune time to further the 'open the country' agenda or somebody targeted him and sent journalists or private detectives to interview neighbours / colleagues to try and find dirt.

 neilh 06 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

The husband? 

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

> The husband? 

Unlikely.  Can’t imagine any dad wanting their kids bullied and singled out over something like this.  

2
In reply to wintertree:

> Soemthing else not discussed - who was spying on Neil or the woman a month ago?  Seems unlikely the telegraph sat on this for a month, so someone else gathered the info and waited for their moment.  Random stranger with a grudge?  Tory Party?  The Russians?  Civil Service?  Another scientist on SAGE?  Cummings?  Someone else?  Inquiring minds want to know.

The Labour party to discredit Tories?  I'm not being serious I'm just playing the game but why didn't you mention them.  It's just as credible

Al

4
 lardy nick 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> > More seriously for something important I would be expecting it to go through a proper review process and use a mix of domain experts and developers.

> At this importance, peer review of the maths model and cross comparison of two implementations by different individuals or teams.  Cross checking of independents models or implementations is standard in many fields.  

Both these things have of course been done. Surely you realise that? Report 9 on non-pharmaceutical interventions cites the earlier peer-reviewed publications that are the basis for the model. Report 13 on the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions in 11 European countries uses a different model but the predictions are congruent with the analysis in Report 9. The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) has for a number of years been comparing results from models developed by independent groups, including Professor Ferguson's team.

Just for the record, I have no involvement with either Neil Ferguson or Imperial but have felt compelled to respond to some of the comments that are being made in this thread.

 mik82 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

Well it's clearly something that's been known about for a while and kept in case it it's needed.

Missing the 100,000 tests for 4 days in a row and having the most recorded deaths in Europe clearly needed someone to be sacrificed so Boris can go on TV on Sunday and announce we're ok to go down the pub (beer garden). Even better to get rid of someone who informed the decision to implement the current methods.

 Blunderbuss 06 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

> Scotland is not in charge of its own affairs.  It's being dragged into the sh*t by the least competent government in Europe and people are dying as a result.

> The Scottish Government has no authority to borrow or print money or radically change the tax system.  It doesn't even control tax revenue from Scotland which is sent to England and only half returned as a 'grant'.   Scotland cannot do anything which costs significantly more than what England decides.   We can tinker about the edges but our lockdown period is pretty much decided by England because they control the money.

> Westminster can overrule its decisions or even suspend devolution whenever it wants.  If Scotland diverges too far from what England wants the Tories will use emergency legislation to take control.

> Scotland is not in charge of its borders.   If England decides to let the virus rip - as it did in pursuit of the crazy herd immunity policy causing the current spike - Scotland has no way to protect itself against massive seeding of new cases.  If England opens up too early or won't impose a quarantine on people arriving at airports then Scotland will get another peak of infections too.

A perfectly predictable reply... 

1
 JohnBson 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Jeremy Corbyn himself. He wanted the bloke who's advice for him in hot water for breaking social distance in clap for carers dead but now he's no longer leader of the party he had to settle for a smear. 

6
 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to lardy nick:

Thanks for the post.

If you have a link to a pre-March 2019 (or even post-) publication or technical report that gives a mathematical description of Ferguson's model I would be genuinely interested to see it.   The peer reviewed papers I have seen do not actually contain a mathematical description of the model (to my reading) and so the model has not been published and has not been peer reviewed.  Without a published model, it is not possible for independent implementations to cross check results, nor is it possible for an independent review of the model to occur, only of published results (yes, that's a laden comment).  You note that results have been cross checked with those of independent groups; this presumably cross checks results from different models - you suggest this refutes claims made on this thread.  However, my claim has been subtly different - that I have seen no cross-check of independent implementations of the Ferguson model, nor have I seen a peer review of the Ferguson model (as opposed to results from it and a non-complete, wordy description).

You are right to note the importance of cross checks between different groups - comparing the results of different models is an important validation of the models and is good practice in many fields.  However I have yet to see evidence that the model has been published or that the implementation of it has been validated.

It's entirely possible that I have missed something - it wouldn't be the first time and it won't be the last, but until I don't think anything you have said refutes the view I have taken on this thread.   Happy as ever to be shown the error of my ways.

 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants and planeandsimple:

> The Labour party to discredit Tories? / Jeremy Corbyn himself

After the "it's not political" rant the other day I'm trying not to put fuel on the fire...  Also I just can't credit JC with that much ability...

2
 HansStuttgart 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> After the "it's not political" rant the other day I'm trying not to put fuel on the fire...  Also I just can't credit JC with that much ability...

The news was in the Telegraph, not the Morning Star...

 Robert Durran 06 May 2020
In reply to Blunderbuss:

> A perfectly predictable reply... 

Yes, but on this occasion I think pretty accurate; Scotland is largely bound the the UK in this.

2
 lardy nick 06 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

The forecasts for the deaths and hospital utilisation for the UK and the US (Report 9) that have been widely reported in media are from an agent-based simulation model previously developed for influenza, This was published, after peer-review, in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04795 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04017). Mathematical details of the hierarchical Bayesian model used in Report 13 are given in its appendix and would almost certainly pass peer review as a sufficient description (in fact I would wager much of the appendix has been taken from previous publications). 

 Ian W 06 May 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

> The Labour party to discredit Tories?  I'm not being serious I'm just playing the game but why didn't you mention them.  It's just as credible

> Al

I would have thought either the tories or labour would be last on the list; he's not a politician or an obvious supporter of either of them so neither party has anything to gain. I think it was just a journalist trying to catch one of the science types out - easy enough target after the Scottish lady.

 RomTheBear 06 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

> He has resigned after being visited by his lover.

> FFS. Another useful mind lost due to a minor breach of lockdown. What an idiotic mistake. 

It’s rather obvious the guy was taken out of the picture.


Can’t have people dealing with facts and evidence going around when you are running an operation based entirely on demagoguery and lies. 
 

Same phenomenon as in the US. Sad.
 

Post edited at 23:40
3
 wintertree 06 May 2020
In reply to lardy nick:

> The forecasts for the deaths and hospital utilisation for the UK and the US (Report 9) that have been widely reported in media are from an agent-based simulation model previously developed for influenza, This was published, after peer-review, in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04795 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04017). Mathematical details of the hierarchical Bayesian model used in Report 13 are given in its appendix and would almost certainly pass peer review as a sufficient description (in fact I would wager much of the appendix has been taken from previous publications). 

Sorry I’m obviously being slow.  Neither of the nature papers you linked contain the word “Bayesian” at all except for one reference.  Neither contains an “appendix”.  There are “supplementary notes”. [1, 2] - I’ve been over these a few times and there’s some jolly clever stuff in [1] but it doesn’t have a clear reference maths version of their model. The clever stuff is all about their methodology for determining parameters into the model.  It also appears to be full of baseless assumptions (50% ey?) and no sensitivity analysis on them.  [2] has more detail but it doesn’t spell it out well.  It’s also important to understand that supplementary materials are not peer reviewed with much/any rigour on most papers.  The second set of notes does go more into some equations that one could see a way to chaining in to a model, but it’s by no means a clear documentation of a complete model.

Neither of these represent a peer review of the model and neither of them relate to the model as put together for the current outbreak.  I wouldn’t have the foggiest where to start comparing the current github code to those two supp. materials.

[1] - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature04795/MediaOb...

[2] - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature04017/MediaOb...

Post edited at 00:02
1
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Some more info in this Guardian article.  

If the SAGE members aren't getting paid it is a bit much to expect that they take sh*t about their personal lives from the right wing press and then get zero support from the politicians.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/uk-scientists-being-drawn-int...

 Blunderbuss 07 May 2020
In reply to Robert Durran:

> Yes, but on this occasion I think pretty accurate; Scotland is largely bound the the UK in this.

How so in terms of lockdown measures? You can do what you want in terms of schools, business etc etc

Income tax can be increased, albeit not by much but if Scotland wants a more money at least show that desire through actual action.... 

He also  goes on about Westminster using emergency measures to take back control of Scotland went its own way, dear me...

Blanche DuBois 07 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

Why are you having a go at me?  My statement was to point out that "rubbish" code is difficult to understand and therefore difficult to spot bugs in.  It was in reply to someone else's statement about why if it the Profs. code is so rubbish then why hadn't someone on here found any mistakes in it already.  I made no reference or inferences about the Prof. whatsoever. 

Happy to accept your apology when it comes - oh wait, this is UKC.

Post edited at 06:10
1
 lardy nick 07 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

The Bayesian model is employed in Report 13 of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response team. Methodological details in appendix 1 are sufficient for someone working in the field to understand what has been done. As I said earlier this is a different model to the one used in Report 9, which was previously published in Nature. Of course there are limitations to the peer review process, anyone who undertakes such reviews appreciates that, but it is simply not correct to state the underpinning model (for Report 9) has not been peer-revied in the usual manner.  I agree the specific COVID-19 'implementation' of the model has not been peer-reviewed in the conventional sense and given the timescales it would have been unrealistic to expect this. However, members of SAGE, its sub-groups and their institutions are quite capable of this doing this - as I'm sure most people would agree now that its membership has been published (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-em....) 

 mondite 07 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> Whether or not it's rubbish is a matter of perspective. Ferguson is an epidemiologist, not a software engineer, and presumably for 15 years or so it's been 'good enough'. That in itself is a quality not to be discarded out of hand

How do we know its been good enough? How has it been tested and validated to ensure it is accurate?

A few years back I got given something to fix. Apparently there was a tiny little bug for a few edge cases which the original team working on it couldnt fix. So I downloaded the code and asked for the requirements document. After reading the document I sent a polite note asking where the rest of it was. It took another six months for all the parties involved to figure out what the actual requirements were and write them up. The code needed replacing (luckily since it was crap).

That had been in place for at least five years.

In this case it is worth noting the code we can now download isnt his original one but one a MS team have been trying to tidy up.

 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> Ferguson and his team's code is here - 

> Maybe you should look beyond reports in The Times.

It’s a version that has been heavily cleaned up by a team at Microsoft (but still has quite  few major, major bugs apparently)

The original version of the code which was initially used by the government team was a single file of code (extremely poor practice) which they have refused categorically to release, probably because they are so ashamed of it. It will probably take some legal action to get them to release it.

The lack of transparency and integrity in academia is shocking these days.

Post edited at 09:01
5
 Rob Parsons 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> It’s a version that ... still has quite  few major, major bugs apparently ...

Who's making that claim, and what are the supposed bugs?

 neilh 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

A bit too conspiracy theory for me.Let us just recap on who has amongst the politicans etc have been flouting the guidelines. Stephen Kinnock ( police warning and visit following a round trip from South Wales to london to see his Dad and Mum in his Dad's birthday).

Then of course there was the Scottish Chief medical officer--- resigned.

And so on.

The hard fact is that there are also people " shopping " on their neighbours who breach the rules and report it to the police.

In this digital age its easy to do.People get caught out.

Politicians like Kinnock and the other one who sits on the cabint who was also caught out are thick skinned or resiliant . Technocrats are not and probably just pack it in.

 Dave Garnett 07 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

> Politicians like Kinnock and the other one who sits on the cabint who was also caught out are thick skinned or resiliant . Technocrats are not and probably just pack it in.

I'm not sure it's a case of Ferguson being thin-skinned.  Maybe he just feels that on reflection he's been a bit of a hypocrite.  Not crime of the century, but he probably gets that he can't be sure he has immunity, and his previous self-isolation doesn't buy him a hall pass to have his girlfriend over, given his public stance on lock-down.

In short, maybe he just has a conscience.

 planetmarshall 07 May 2020
In reply to Blanche DuBois:

> Why are you having a go at me? 

I wasn't having a go at you. I was disagreeing with you.

 planetmarshall 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> It’s a version that has been heavily cleaned up by a team at Microsoft (but still has quite  few major, major bugs apparently)

> The original version of the code which was initially used by the government team was a single file of code (extremely poor practice) which they have refused categorically to release, probably because they are so ashamed of it. It will probably take some legal action to get them to release it.

It wasn't "used by the government". It was used to generate Imperial's predictions, which were presented to the government. The government, and not Imperial, and not Neil Ferguson, then implemented policy based on the advice.

Regarding the history of the refactoring effort, John Carmack gives more info - 

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1254872368763277313

I agree with other posters in that there is an obvious political agenda here - and people who disagree with the lockdown are using this code as a stick to beat Neil Ferguson whom they see as to blame, despite the fact that he does not make governement policy, nor does he make government policy for any of the other countries that implemented similar policies - most of which before the UK.

How many other models that influence or implement government policy are in the public domain? The software that distributes funding within the NHS ( which I worked on ) is not, for example.

As Carmack said, this is a "Good Thing". 

Post edited at 10:07
 neilh 07 May 2020
In reply to Dave Garnett:

I would agree about being a bit of a hypocrite.

 mondite 07 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

> In this digital age its easy to do.People get caught out.

It has been sat on for a rather long time though which is the suspicious bit.

> Politicians like Kinnock and the other one who sits on the cabint who was also caught out are thick skinned or resiliant .

That or shameless.

In reply to neilh:

As well as being a hypocrite his authority is now seriously undermined. The former effects his reputation the latter effects his position and it's probably the latter that has persuaded him to resign.

Al

 jonny taylor 07 May 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

> his authority is now seriously undermined

Why? He is not in any position of authority to tell the public what to do. His job is to report facts to the government.

1
In reply to jonny taylor:

His authority as a Government advisor.  I thought that was self evident.

Al

 wintertree 07 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> I agree with other posters in that there is an obvious political agenda here

I am very against the right-wing "lift the lockdown" agenda and aghast at the misdirection and nonsense used to push it - includes puppet accounts on social media including here, but I'm also uneasy at the state of the code when it was informing government policy.  The bit where it took something like 6 weeks to go from deciding to release it to a heavily refactored version landing in the public domain doesn't help - and this ongoing lack of transparency plays right in to the political agenda you mention.

1
 Andy Hardy 07 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

His misdemenousr occur on the 30th March and 7th April, Telegraph splash on the day our death toll rises to unprecedented levels.

Look everyone, quick, *a squirrel*!!

2
 jonny taylor 07 May 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

What I'm saying is that I don't think him disobeying the lockdown rules/guidance/"requests" [I genuinely lose track of which are which] makes his expert reporting of scientific facts any less correct. But you're welcome to have a different view to me on that if you want.

 gallam1 07 May 2020
In reply to Dan Arkle:

For anyone interested in a specific file to look at in the project::

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/src/CovidSim.cpp

I'm currently working on a fork of Chromium, which underlies the browsers that the great majority of people reading this thread will be using, and I cannot really say that the above is much worse than a lot of what we find in Chromium.

The general state of software is, like most human activity, pretty lamentable when put under a microscope.  I think the most important thing here is to maintain a progressive approach to improving it.  The Imperial College team have demonstrated a progressive approach, simply through their decision to make the code open source.  The sooner we all chip in and improve it the better.

Post edited at 11:10
 mondite 07 May 2020
In reply to gallam1:

> For anyone interested in a specific file to look at in the project::

That has been through at least one round of improvements though. Whats in Github has had MS devs working on it.

In reply to jonny taylor:

I'll be more explicit then.  Specifically his authority to tell others that they should not venture out. 

Al

Post edited at 11:27
 wintertree 07 May 2020
In reply to lardy nick:

Yes, report 13 does not relate to the code on github as far as I can tell, and the nature papers referenced by report 9 do not contain a mathematical reference for the GitHub code.  Lots of details of parts of it but no actual top down description.  I could still be missing something.   I also maintain that 40 pages of supplemental materials isn’t likely to have had any meaningful peer review.  As others have noted big efforts are going on to address all this but it’s disappointing how opaque the code was - still not released in its form at the time - that was apparently driving policy.

> However, members of SAGE, its sub-groups and their institutions are quite capable of this doing this - as I'm sure most people would agree now that its membership has been published

I’m sure some members do have the capability, but have they reviewed the model?  I see no evidence either way, perhaps you know more?

Post edited at 13:50
 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> It wasn't "used by the government". It was used to generate Imperial's predictions, which were presented to the government. The government, and not Imperial, and not Neil Ferguson, then implemented policy based on the advice.

Correct.

> Regarding the history of the refactoring effort, John Carmack gives more info - 

> I agree with other posters in that there is an obvious political agenda here -

I totally agree that the takedown of Ferguson by the press is political, and very obviously organised.

However there are still two big problems:

- the government is basing decision on models that are obscure and haven’t been audited. It’s totally reckless.
- imperial is refusing to publish the initial implementation of the model, this is downright dishonest.

Post edited at 14:26
1
 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

> A bit too conspiracy theory for me.

Nah, this is just how it’s always been working.

This reminded me of the takedown of Amber Rudd. Exactly the same M.O.

1
 neilh 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

Internet waffle form you of all people...lol .

Has Ferguson expressed any political beliefs assuming he is a remainer. In which case I expect all of SAGE to be picked of one by one over the next few weeks as they will be technocrat remainers.Cummins will be forcing them to sign bits of paper that they truly belive in the cause.

Put that in the conspiracy claptrap pipe and smoke it.

2
 neilh 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

Internet waffle from you of all people...lol .

Has Ferguson expressed any political beliefs assuming he is a remainer. In which case I expect all of SAGE to be picked of one by one over the next few weeks as they will be technocrat remainers.Cummins will be forcing them to sign bits of paper that they truly belive in the cause.

Put that in the conspiracy claptrap pipe and smoke it.

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2002/12/19/thats-what-they-wan...

https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/03/07/britain-is-becoming-a-land-of-...

Post edited at 14:55
1
 daWalt 07 May 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

> I'll be more explicit then.  Specifically his authority to tell others that they should not venture out. 

so we're ok to go out then?

 Rob Parsons 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

You still haven't clarified your earlier claim that Ferguson's code 'still has quite few major, major bugs.'

Noting that your claim is 'major, major' bugs, what exactly are you referring to?

 wbo2 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear and several others

> However there are still two big problems:

> - the government is basing decision on models that are obscure and haven’t been audited. It’s totally reckless.

What's obscure in this context? Ditto audited, and how do you know this.  UKC is not a source/domain expert on this...

> - imperial is refusing to publish the initial implementation of the model, this is downright dishonest.

As above.  

 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to the thread:

Re: Ferguson's code:

It's worth bearing in mind that academic research is often not that well funded.

I would take a guess that were Ferguson, five years ago, to have put in a grant bid to fund a full-time computer-coding expert to support and improve the code, the answer would have been: "Worthy, but dull. Scientifically sound and obviously worth doing, but it's unclear how much this would change the outputs. Not a sufficient priority, Unfunded".

In reply to daWalt:

> so we're ok to go out then?

Can't for the life of me see how you made that link. It's certainly not something I'm aware of suggesting. I suspect you are just trying to bait me but then again it never ceases to amaze me how some on UKC can always draw the wrong conclusion.

Al

Post edited at 15:45
1
 HansStuttgart 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Re: Ferguson's code:

> It's worth bearing in mind that academic research is often not that well funded.

> I would take a guess that were Ferguson, five years ago, to have put in a grant bid to fund a full-time computer-coding expert to support and improve the code, the answer would have been: "Worthy, but dull. Scientifically sound and obviously worth doing, but it's unclear how much this would change the outputs. Not a sufficient priority, Unfunded".

True, but this is one of the reasons you shouldn't trust professors when it comes to issues of serious national interest. The responsibility for infectuous disease modelling that guides government decisions should have been at PHE.

 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

> Internet waffle form you of all people...lol .

> Has Ferguson expressed any political beliefs assuming he is a remainer.

 

Ho come on, why do you even push such a blatant strawman, this is beneath you. Nobody has mentionned anything about remain or leave. 

I’m simply pointing out that this is a clear modus operandi of the British right wing press: they will do a « take down » of a personality, usually on the basis of grossly inflated or imaginary misdeed, whenever the timing suits their political agenda.

It’s pretty clear that the British right wing press is dipping its toes in anti-lockdown alt right phenomenon. Discrediting the guy who built the modelling that led to lockdown is just the primer.

And the story was perfect to drown the noise just at the time the UK became the country in Europe with the most deaths.

Post edited at 16:03
2
 daWalt 07 May 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

just getting to the nub of it. Perhaps there are other epidemiologists with more "authority" giving different advice.

Maybe you could swap him out for Niall Ferguson

Post edited at 15:58
 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Re: Ferguson's code:

> It's worth bearing in mind that academic research is often not that well funded.

Absolutely. I’ve seen code written by pure academics and usually it’s creative but crap.

This is what happens when you get researchers doing the job of engineers because they got nobody else to do it.

However for Imperial to not release the code that was used I think is frankly dishonest.

Post edited at 16:04
8
 MG 07 May 2020
In reply to HansStuttgart:

> True, but this is one of the reasons you shouldn't trust professors when it comes to issues of serious national interest. The responsibility for infectuous disease modelling that guides government decisions should have been at PHE.

I suspect internally the answer would have been the same. 

In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

> As well as being a hypocrite his authority is now seriously undermined. The former effects his reputation the latter effects his position and it's probably the latter that has persuaded him to resign.

Undermining him was the intention because he is the voice on the SAGE committee in favour of lock down and government were about to announce loosening of lockdown.  This also explains why Handcock completely threw him to the wolves.  The long delay between him meeting his girlfriend and the story being broken is a smoking gun.

Johnson is an ex Torygraph columnist and Gove's wife writes in the Mail.  There is a completely incestuous relationship between Tories and the press and the newspaper proprietors have an obvious vested interest in ending lockdown because it is costing them a fortune in lost sales and advertising and the measures to fund it are likely to hit the rich.

Post edited at 16:32
2
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

I'm not saying you are wrong.  I haven't a clue but your assumptions seem to based solely on speculation, inuendo and an anti Tory agenda.

Al

Post edited at 16:38
4
 Rob Parsons 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> I’ve seen code written by pure academics and usually it’s creative but crap.

I think you are losing the plot. Or, otherwise, are grinding some undeclared axe.

1
 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to HansStuttgart:

> The responsibility for infectuous disease modelling that guides government decisions should have been at PHE.

That presumes that PHE would do a better job (isn't PHE the organisation that did a pretty poor job of getting testing organised early on?).

More basically, if epidemics come along every 100 years or so, then no organisation is likely to do a good job of preparing.

That's because the senior people are likely to be in a role for about 5 years max, and that means that 19 out of 20 of them would never have any chance of getting any credit for doing a good job of preparing for an epidemic. 

Whereas all 20 of them will get credit/blame for all sorts of short-term managerial stuff.   So obviously they are going to be responsive to that, and not the 100-yr epidemic.

 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> ... It's worth bearing in mind that academic research is often not that well funded.

By which I mean "in comparison with industry".

Over the last ten years there's probably been more top-notch programmers developing the latest snazzy video game, than working on all health-related computer codes worldwide put together. 

Of course it's easy to blame a government for lack of preparation, but it's more sense to blame society as a whole and society-wide priorities.

 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Of course it's easy to blame a government for lack of preparation, but it's more sense to blame society as a whole and society-wide priorities.

A similar issue is that many of our antibiotics (including the "last resort" ones) are stopping working as bugs evolve resistance. 

The relevant people flag this up as a serious issue, and everyone thinks "yes, something ought to be done".

But do governments then allocate a few billion a year to fix this? No, they don't. 

I'm guessing that that's because, while everyone agrees it's an important issue, it does not actually change anyone's vote.  In the same way, I'm willing to guess that not even one person in the UK voting in 2015 or 2017 had decided their vote based on pandemic preparation. 

In reply to RomTheBear:

> Absolutely. I’ve seen code written by pure academics and usually it’s creative but crap.

It's a different thing, research code is often speculative, trying things out to see if they work in the expectation that most of it will be chucked away.  If you carefully craft things it will take far too long to check whether it is worth doing at all.   There's also the unfortunate fact that scientists and mathematicians aren't trained as software engineers and they quite often write sh*tty code.

What should happen, and often doesn't, is that once you find something that works you go back and do it again properly or hand it over to someone else to do a properly engineered version.  

It is surprising that in what looks like a well established field there aren't some standard, well engineered, commercial or open source software packages for modelling this stuff.

 Richard J 07 May 2020
In reply to HansStuttgart:

> True, but this is one of the reasons you shouldn't trust professors when it comes to issues of serious national interest. The responsibility for infectuous disease modelling that guides government decisions should have been at PHE.

You highlight here a really important structural issue in the UK's system of supporting science.  There's research you do because it interests the scientific community and gets high profile publications which gets cited loads, and there's research you do because the government needs to know the answers to inform its policy.  They aren't necessarily the same goals, and historically you expect scientists in universities to do the former, and scientists in public research institutes to do the latter.  But the UK over a period of decades systematically ran down its public sector research establishments in favour of university research.  So you're right, PHE probably should have been where this research was being carried out, but it probably doesn't have that capacity.

In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

> I'm not saying you are wrong.  I haven't a clue but your assumptions seem to based solely on speculation, inuendo and an anti Tory agenda.

It's unlikely you will ever get proof about something like this unless there is a police investigation or public enquiry.  Even then it won't happen if the Tories are in power - it's amazing how many investigations have started and quietly disappeared.   Remember Boris and his girlfriend who was given public money or the report into Russian interference.  

It becomes a question of whether your standard of evidence is 'beyond reasonable doubt' or 'balance of probabilities'.   Mine is balance of probabilities and my conclusion is these guys are guilty as f*ck.

1
 Richard J 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> More basically, if epidemics come along every 100 years or so, then no organisation is likely to do a good job of preparing.

They don't though, do they, it's more like once a decade.  We had Foot and Mouth in 2001 - may not have been a public health issue but its economic impact was in the £billions (and its in that epidemic that Neil Ferguson learnt his modelling trade, in Roy Anderson's group).  Then several near misses of human diseases since then - Ebola, SARS and MERS, H1N1.  I don't think anyone would be taking a senior role in public health in the expectation that they won't have to deal with one.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Don't get me wrong.  Politicians are the lowest of the low closely followed by what currently passes as the media.  What concerns me about your views is that they always appear to be exclusively anti Tory, I'm therefore inclined to think that your motives and therefore your conclusions are questionable. I have lived through Labour Governments and believe me it's equally unpleasant.

Al

2
 LeeWood 07 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Ferguson could be considered a complete success - it all depends who you say he was answering to. Here's an insight

quotes:

The Business Insider raises the level of shock even higher.

“Ferguson co-founded the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, based at Imperial [College], in 2008. It is the leading body advising national governments on pathogen outbreaks.”

“It gets tens of millions of dollars in annual funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and works with the UK National Health Service, the US Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), and is tasked with supplying the World Health Organization with ‘rapid analysis of urgent infectious disease problems’.”

Getting the picture?

Bill Gates wants a COVID vaccine before planetary lockdowns end. The lockdowns, of course, are already making a wreck of the Earth’s economies.

Bill Gates’ money goes to Ferguson.

Ferguson supplies, to the CDC and WHO, a vastly worthless but frightening computer projection of COVID deaths. Ferguson thus communicates a justification for the Gates global vaccine plan.

The CDC and WHO act, based on what Gates wants, as expressed by Ferguson.

National governments surrender to WHO and CDC. LOCKDOWNS.

/quotes

disclaimer - no idea on the integrity of this source

Post edited at 17:53
10
 neilh 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

The simple answer is of course is that Ferguson was a fool unto himself if he thought that nobody would take pictures of the incident. There are enough reports in the media of police being contacted by neighbours to shop people. 
 

The telegraph do go after stories nobody else is interested in, like MPs expenses etc. It’s hardly earth shattering reporting. 
 

1
In reply to LeeWood:

> Bill Gates wants a COVID vaccine before planetary lockdowns end. The lockdowns, of course, are already making a wreck of the Earth’s economies.

I don't particularly like Bill Gates but ascribing him a financial motive is ridiculous.

He made his money on Microsoft and he's been giving it away through his foundation.   He not only will not make any money from a vaccine, he is actively not interested in making money.

1
In reply to neilh:

> The simple answer is of course is that Ferguson was a fool unto himself if he thought that nobody would take pictures of the incident. There are enough reports in the media of police being contacted by neighbours to shop people. 

I would be surprised if someone took a picture of everyone coming to my door.

But the key thing here is why is the incident which took place a month or so ago suddenly getting published at the most opportune point for a government which wants to raise lockdown despite not getting infections under control.

1
 Doug 07 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

I think its the timing of publication that is being criticized rather than the story itself - why did the Telegraph publish the on the day that the UK N° of cases  become the highest in Europe ? (possibly, allowing for all the problems of comparing different countries) 

1
 wintertree 07 May 2020
In reply to Doug:

Makes you wonder what story will happen in ~14 days time when we are likely to pass Italy in per-capita deaths. 

 elsewhere 07 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

"National governments surrender to WHO and CDC. LOCKDOWNS." - where does this quote come from?

 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> In the same way, I'm willing to guess that not even one person in the UK voting in 2015 or 2017 had decided their vote based on pandemic preparation.

No, but you would definitely vote based on different styles of politics, which can be more or less conducive to the proper handling of unpredictable event. 

In recent years people have voted for increasingly authoritarian and centralised government style, this increases our exposure to policy mistakes massively. This was a deliberate choice.

Post edited at 18:58
1
 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> In recent years people have voted for increasingly authoritarian and centralised government style,

Out of interest (because I get genuinely puzzled over this) what do people see as authoritarian about this or recent governments?

(This, of course, is a different question from what people see as incompetent or not caring or having wrong priorities of such governments.)

In reply to Lord_ash2000:

> Imagine a situation where you had five 80 year olds and three 10 year olds. You can only save one group and the other will die, who do you save? In terms of lives saved you should save the five 80 year olds thus resulting in 3 deaths rather than 5. But most people would save the three children, saving far more in potential lost lifespan. Right now we are in danger of saving the old at the sacrifice of the young in future.

Except what you are actually arguing against is more like saving the 80 year olds now, and then letting the 10 year olds live until 79 years 11 months and then maybe depriving them of their 80th birthday (unless in the intervening 69 years 11 months something is figured out to give them that 30 days back.)

But I suppose that doesn’t sound so dramatic. 

 LeeWood 07 May 2020
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

He's a clever investor - his donations have steadily increased his own foundation value

youtube.com/watch?v=wQSYdAX_9JY&

5
cb294 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

That is because our governments are not working in our interest (or that of normal farmers) but are the paid stooges of the big agrochemical and agricultural corporations.

You don't need to invest billions to ban certain classes of antibiotics for veterinary uses, period.

No point in first spending all that money on developing a new class of reserve antibiotics that can be used as a last resort to treat humans infected with MRSA, Neisseria, or Clostridia resistant against all normal drugs, only to squander that advantage by using the same antibiotic (or related ones where bacteria use the same resistance mechanism) for use in pig or chicken concentration camps.

Money is not the issue, political will is.

CB

 RomTheBear 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Out of interest (because I get genuinely puzzled over this) what do people see as authoritarian about this or recent governments?

Isn’t that bleeding obvious across the board ? Just look at the development of immigration policy, the massive expansion of surveillance powers, the brexit crisis which resulted in rye hardest of brexit with no compromises whatsoever, an unlawful suspension of parliament,  a centralisation of power to number 10, the withdrawal agreement bill which gives ministers huge powers to make and unable law as they wish, I could go on...

If you are not convinced about our authoritarian future just read the latest Queen speech which is almost taken out of an authoritarian playbook. 

Critically this is supported by the British public, with attitudes survey showing an increasing demand for strong authoritarian leaders.

Note that this phenomenon is not unique to Britain, it’s all across the West, but more so in the US, U.K., and some eastern european countries. 
It has been clearly noted and analysed by most educated observers for a while now.


You’d have to be completely blind to not notice that we are going away from the model of liberal democracy and turning a corner. I suspect the Covid crisis will be the nail in the coffin, but this is a process that has been going on slowly since 9/11.

5
 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to cb294:

> You don't need to invest billions to ban certain classes of antibiotics for veterinary uses, period.

Except that that's only going to work if done worldwide, and obtaining that consensus would be tricky.

 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> Isn’t that bleeding obvious across the board ?

Nope, not to me.

> Just look at the development of immigration policy, ...

Not really an "authoritarian" issue.

> ... the massive expansion of surveillance powers, ...

Yes, if they were actually used for authoritarian purposes.  So far it's mainly about counter-terrorism.

> the brexit crisis which resulted in rye hardest of brexit with no compromises whatsoever, ...

What's that got to do with authoritarianism?

> ... an unlawful suspension of parliament,  a centralisation of power to number 10, the withdrawal agreement bill which gives ministers huge powers to make and unable law as they wish, I could go on...

If that's all you've got then I'm not that impressed so far.

> If you are not convinced about our authoritarian future ...

Which I'm not ...

> just read the latest Queen speech which is almost taken out of an authoritarian playbook. 

Is it? Examples?

> You’d have to be completely blind to not notice that we are going away from the model of liberal democracy and turning a corner.

OK, so I'm completely blind. 

>  I suspect the Covid crisis will be the nail in the coffin, ...

I suspect it won't be.

1
 TobyA 07 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

"The Corbett Report is an independent, listener-supported alternative news source. It operates on the principle of open source intelligence and provides podcasts, interviews, articles and videos about breaking news and important issues from 9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more."

You've convinced me.

 MG 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Out of interest (because I get genuinely puzzled over this) what do people see as authoritarian about this or recent governments?

Actively and deliberately undermining the civil service, courts and parliament's role. 

Engaging in underhand social media activity such as posing as a factchecking site.

Blatantly and routinely lying so nothing is believed

Taken together those are serious steps to authoritarian government. 

3
 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to MG:

> Taken together those are serious steps to authoritarian government. 

Sorry, not really buying it.  There's a lot one can fairly criticise this and recent governments for, but authoritarianism doesn't seem to be among them.

Wiki: "Minimally defined, an authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct or indirect elections for executives, or both.[7] Broadly defined, authoritarian states include countries that lack the civil liberties such as freedom of religion, or countries in which the government and the opposition do not alternate in power at least once following free elections."

Edit to add: if you make any sort of international comparison, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World

.. it just seems a misuse of the word to describe the UK as "authoritarian".  It just strips the world of any meaning.

Post edited at 21:19
5
 MG 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Sorry, not really buying it.  There's a lot one can fairly criticise this and recent governments for, but authoritarianism doesn't seem to be among them.> Wiki: "Minimally defined, an authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct or indirect elections for executives, or

Very selective quoting. Your Wiki source

Limited political pluralism, realized with constraints on the legislature, political parties, and interest groups; [constraints on legislature, or attempts to simply close it]

Political legitimacy based upon appeals to emotion, and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems, such as underdevelopment, and insurgency";
[Brexit, anti-European and xenophobic  rhetoric]

Minimal political mobilization and suppression of anti-regime activities;
[fake web sites etc., also unhealthy journalism/political blurring]

Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting, which extends the power of the executive.[5][6]

[Henry 8th power grab attempts]

2
 Coel Hellier 07 May 2020
In reply to MG:

> Very selective quoting. Your Wiki source

Still not buying it. The website I just posted ranks all countries in the world on a 1 to 7 scale for civil liberties and political rights, and scores the UK in the top category in both.

So, if you're going to use the word "authoritarian" about the top score of 1, what words are you going to use for categories 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7?

[Or is this another example of the "concept creep" currently destroying language, where people no longer use accurate words, but misuse the extreme words.  See also "trauma" (= mild upset), "unsafe" (= disagreed with), "denied my right to exist" (= disagreed with me), "actual violence" (= said something I disliked), and dozens of others.]

4
 LeeWood 07 May 2020
In reply to TobyA:

> "The Corbett Report

I take that as a refusal to even look further

The main point of the video link I posted is to question Bill Gates motivation to keep the world in lockdown until all 7bn of the world's habitants are vaccinated.

So, if you dismiss the providers of this report, do you also dismiss the need for a world vaccine - or are you with Mr gates on this one ?

3
 Dr.S at work 07 May 2020
In reply to cb294:

You do know there is very little overlap between resistant strains of bacteria in animals and people don’t you? 

 Dr.S at work 07 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

And more importantly you need to sort out the prescribing practices in human health care.

 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Sorry, not really buying it.  There's a lot one can fairly criticise this and recent governments for, but authoritarianism doesn't seem to be among them.

In most authoritarian regimes, large parts of the population don’t recognise their government as authoritarian or at least refuse to see it as a problem and deny it.

It all depends on which side of the fence you are.

> Wiki: "Minimally defined, an authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct or indirect elections for executives, or both”

I would say this is already pretty much largely the case that our elections aren’t fair, nor free, nor functioning for a multitude of subtle but pernicious reasons.

The entire debate is flooded with lies, ideology,  anger, fear and manipulation, the political and media system is engaged in a cultural war where everything is decoupled from reality, add broken and archaic electoral systems that produce absurd outcomes on top of that, and what you have is something that may only cosmetically satisfy the criteria of a democratic society, but fundamentally isn’t.

Post edited at 01:01
4
 FactorXXX 08 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> I would say this is already pretty much largely the case that our elections aren’t fair, nor free, nor functioning for a multitude of subtle but pernicious reasons.

You keep saying "our", etc. but as far as I understand, you're a Frenchman currently living in Cyprus that has lived in the UK at some point.
How does that qualify you to make such statements?

4
 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to FactorXXX:

> You keep saying "our", etc. but as far as I understand, you're a Frenchman currently living in Cyprus that has lived in the UK at some point.

> How does that qualify you to make such statements?

 

I identify a Scottish and have a British passport, this is where I spent most of my life.

I know full well that people like yourself who are more concerned by where I was born than by what I have to say will never accept me as such, but you know what , fuck off.

Post edited at 01:57
5
 FactorXXX 08 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> I don’t know, please tell us what one needs to “qualify” ?

Well, living in mainland UK would be a start.
The way you talk in the Forums is as if you are experiencing exactly the same conditions as the vast majority on UKC and that obviously isn't the case.
So, to clarify, why do you think a Frenchman living in Cyprus has any meaningful insight as to what is happening in UK now.

3
 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to FactorXXX:

> Well, living in mainland UK would be a start.

Why ?

> The way you talk in the Forums is as if you are experiencing exactly the same conditions as the vast majority on UKC and that obviously isn't the case.

Funny that, I don’t see you saying that to the multitude of other British living abroad on UKC who also spend their time talking about the UK situation.

> So, to clarify, why do you think a Frenchman living in Cyprus has any meaningful insight as to what is happening in UK now.

Why do think a Frenchman living in Cyprus couldn’t possibly have any meaningful insight about what is happening the U.K. ?

I’m stuck at home and follow British news just as you do, no to mention I spent about 60% of my time in the U.K. for work prior lockdown anyway.
 

It might be hard for you to fathom that one could keep informed on what is happening in more than one country at once, but I assure you it’s totally possible, in fact I would  recommend it, you get a more perspective and detect the national biases more easily in fact when you do that.

Just a piece of advice, instead of focusing on where your interlocutor is born, focus on what they have to say, this might be more useful and less unpleasant.

Post edited at 02:19
6
 SouthernSteve 08 May 2020
In reply to cb294:

>You don't need to invest billions to ban certain classes of antibiotics for veterinary uses, period. 

I think this is a simplistic view and although not very obvious lots is going on.

In the UK veterinary antibiotic use has fallen massively and many antibiotics are no longer available. There are antibiotic policies on the wall of every practice. Some of the the antibiotics banned for veterinary use in Scandanavian countries (that have a really good state administered antibiotic regulations) are hardly ever used here. Close to home and rather disappointingly in intensive pig production in the Netherlands MRSA has a very high prevalence, but draconian rules have now been put in place. This is key area now in undergraduate and postgraduate training here. The professional and political will is there and is having impact.

However, in China colistin is being used in pigs and billions of people around the world do not have clean water supplies or toilets with sewage treatment.  Perhaps this is where the political will should be directed.

Do you want to stop using antibiotics in people? We have an ageing population with chronic infections and unless you are going to let them die antibiotics will get used and resistance develop. In a chest infection there may be > 10^10 bacteria, so there is a really big chance that one bug will develop a change that allows resistance to develop in one individual. Antibiotics and antibiotic resistant go together and following introduction of the sulpha drugs in the 30s resistance was noted within 10 years. 

Interestingly, the current crisis may give the populace much better of hand hygiene and infection control so that may be good thing coming out of this. 

 Coel Hellier 08 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> The entire debate is flooded with lies, ideology,  anger, fear and manipulation, the political and media system is engaged in a cultural war where everything is decoupled from reality, add broken and archaic electoral systems that produce absurd outcomes on top of that, and what you have is something that may only cosmetically satisfy the criteria of a democratic society, but fundamentally isn’t.

Let me guess, you didn't like the result of the last election?

1
 MG 08 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

I was talking about authoritarian tendancies, not claiming the UK has reached despotism. With government openly talking about politicising the judiciary, for example,  I think it is complacent to pretend all is well. 

1
cb294 08 May 2020
In reply to Dr.S at work:

The strains maybe, but not the resistance genes. Vancomycin is the examplary case.

CB

 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Let me guess, you didn't like the result of the last election?

You totally missed the point. Never mind, you clearly not going to get it.

Post edited at 08:02
4
 Rob Exile Ward 08 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

We were not presented with great alternatives but - did you?

Post edited at 09:23
1
 TobyA 08 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

I don't think you should go building any political analysis of Bill Gates's position, his foundations position, or indeed for what it's worth (very little!) my position about a Covid19 vaccine on a self-declared "alternative news" website which is clearly just pushing all the same old wrong conspiracy theories.

 Stichtplate 08 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> Why ?

Because you're essentially dishonest in how you project your own situation?

> Funny that, I don’t see you saying that to the multitude of other British living abroad on UKC who also spend their time talking about the UK situation.

Probably because other UKC contributors openly discuss their experiences from a foreign perspective  which is actually interesting and informative. In contrast you do stuff like denigrate British institutions which you have zero experience of without qualifying your statements to clarify this. UK schooling is a prime example.

> Why do think a Frenchman living in Cyprus couldn’t possibly have any meaningful insight about what is happening the U.K. ?

Because your statements are so often completely at odds with the actual experience of UK residents. A good example of this was your insistence that panic buying wasn't a problem in the middle of a three week period when supermarket shelves were constantly emptied of essential staples.

> I’m stuck at home and follow British news just as you do, no to mention I spent about 60% of my time in the U.K. for work prior lockdown anyway.

I've read a lot of books and watched a lot of documentaries on climbing Himalayan peaks. I wouldn't start telling people actually on Himalayan peaks what it was like on Himalayan peaks.

> It might be hard for you to fathom that one could keep informed on what is happening in more than one country at once, but I assure you it’s totally possible, in fact I would  recommend it, you get a more perspective and detect the national biases more easily in fact when you do that.

I'd really appreciate it if you could tell us about your experiences rather than tell us about our experiences, or at least be a bit more honest in your delivery rather than constantly using disingenuous framing devices like "our kids", "our NHS", "our country".

> Just a piece of advice, instead of focusing on where your interlocutor is born, focus on what they have to say, this might be more useful and less unpleasant.

Just a piece of advice. Be a bit more open about what's actually informing your own perspective.

3
 Rob Exile Ward 08 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

This is classic false news. You really shouldn't post such drivel even as a joke; people die because they believe this  cr*p.

It's not that hard to spot - look for corroborating evidence. In the case of Gates, he  and his wife have spent 20 years giving away their money as fast as they can responsibly manage; a) why would they want to make more if they're so busy giving it away, b) if they did want to make more wouldn't he be better off just focusing on something he knows, i.e. Microsoft, and c) has there ever been a single shred of evidence that the Gates foundation has made ANY money EVER from it's philanthropic enterprises? 

Surely you have enough critical faculties to see that the Icke-type conspiracy theories are both potentially damaging and highly improbable, right up there with moon landing conspiracists and 5g?

 profitofdoom 08 May 2020
In reply to arch:

> Do as I say, not as I do.

WHAT IS IT with these supposedly hyper-intelligent higher up people [1] doing it, and - more surprising to me - [2] thinking that they're going to get away with it???

Surely they know there are plenty of people peering out of windows these days, watching

 LeeWood 08 May 2020
In reply to TobyA:

> I don't think you should go building any political analysis of Bill Gates's position, his foundations position, or indeed for what it's worth (very little!) my position about a Covid19 vaccine on a self-declared "alternative news" website which is clearly just pushing all the same old wrong conspiracy theories.

Agreed, absolutely. What I do is look at the evidence, then question it. But I don't refuse to make a 1st examination at the mere sniff of conspiracy.

One of the earliest elements of the Corbett video is that Gates has donated to 5 major news agencies, which would naturally allow his affairs to be presented 'kindly'. One of those named is the BBC

https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/revealed-bbc-charity-receives-millions-in-fu...

https://www.devex.com/organizations/bbc-media-action-51179

Gates is named as the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, and his foundation the largest private charity in the world.

1998, USA courts: the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization, tying and blocking competition,, each in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act

2020, WHO: since Trump pulled support from the WHO, Gates foundation is the biggest donor into WHO, giving him a steering influence.

all verifiable in wikipedia

Relations with pharmaceutical companies 2002: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) purchased shares of nine Big Pharma companies, valued at nearly $205 million. This is when we begin to see a shift of Gates’ personal investments to those of his foundation.

https://static.mediapart.fr/files/2017/12/31/20130613-newsjunkiepost-b-bill...

The wealthy Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called Wednesday (15 April) for global cooperation to ready COVID-19 vaccines for seven billion people, while offering $150 million toward developing therapeutics and treatments for the virus.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/gates-foundation-cal...

Comment (mine); What we see here is one man of incomparable wealth and power, in league with the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies. We should at least inquire into his motivations ! Right now during the pandemic WHO directives are influencing and even transcending decisions which should should be taken at national level. 

9
 arch 08 May 2020
In reply to profitofdoom:

> WHAT IS IT with these supposedly hyper-intelligent higher up people [1] doing it, and - more surprising to me - [2] thinking that they're going to get away with it???

> Surely they know there are plenty of people peering out of windows these days, watching

Seems Footballers and Rugby players are exempt as well.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/52587293

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/52583357

In reply to arch:

Its interesting that Kyle is now trying to divert the scrutiny by bringing his wife and kids into the equation saying it's affecting them too.

Kyle, I reckon you fronting up £2k to bang a couple of prossies with a mate in a sex party might have had a bit more of an affect on them...

In reply to LeeWood:

Fruitcake

1
 wbo2 08 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:  The problem you have is that you inherently can't trust anyone to have anything but the worst motives, and thanks to the internet you can now 'Conspiracy' yourself down a complete black hole.

You should ask him for some 'peer reviewd' references just to join in here....

 malk 08 May 2020

In reply: is there somewhere where you can run this model with different parameters? eg like this: https://covid19-scenarios.org/

Post edited at 15:11
 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to Stichtplate:

> Because you're essentially dishonest in how you project your own situation?

You know next to nothing about my situation, you're just projecting your little prejudice as usual.

> I'd really appreciate it if you could tell us about your experiences rather than tell us about our experiences, or at least be a bit more honest in your delivery rather than constantly using disingenuous framing devices like "our kids", "our NHS", "our country".

So I lived most of my life in the UK, still spend most of my time in the UK, work every single day with people based in the UK, most people I know are British, I obtained British citizenship, learned your language, vote in the UK. However, whatever I do, in your book, I will still never be allowed to call the Uk "my country", or say "my NHS", and my knowledge of the UK is equivalent to "having watched a few documentaries".

You are a nasty piece of work. I think I'll just keep ignoring you again; honestly, listening to people like you, it's all a bit much to take.

Post edited at 15:37
14
 Rob Exile Ward 08 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

BBC Media Action Mission: "They believe in the power of media and communication to help reduce poverty and support people in understanding their rights. Their aim is to inform, connect and empower people around the world. They work in partnership to provide access to useful, timely, reliable information. They help people make sense of events, engage in dialogue and take action to improve their lives. "

The absolute b*stards!

 Stichtplate 08 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> You know next to nothing about my situation, you're just projecting your little prejudice as usual.

> You are a nasty piece of work. I think I'll just keep ignoring you again; honestly, listening to people like you, it's all a bit much to take.

Sorry if I’ve got anything wrong about your past life Rom, hard to keep stuff straight since everything about your history seems to be in a constant state of flux (what are you this week, 30 something or 50 something?).

i don’t think you’re a nasty piece of work or anything, I just think you’re a bit sad with a bit too much time on your hands.

Post edited at 15:48
2
 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to profitofdoom:

> WHAT IS IT with these supposedly hyper-intelligent higher up people [1] doing it, and - more surprising to me - [2] thinking that they're going to get away with it???

Intelligence is sometimes inversely proportional to wisdom.

That said, the guy just met with his partner, and he already had Covid so, presumably, was immune. He didn’t really do anything really wrong even though was contrary to the rules.

 RomTheBear 08 May 2020
In reply to Stichtplate:

> Sorry if I’ve got anything wrong about your past life Rom, hard to keep stuff straight since everything about your history seems to be in a constant state of flux (what are you this week, 30 something or 50 something?).

Maybe if you weren’t so weirdly preoccupied and prejudiced by where and when I was born or where I currently live, it wouldn’t be such a big problem. 
 

> i don’t think you’re a nasty piece of work or anything, I just think you’re a bit sad with a bit too much time on your hands.

Says the guy who hijacked this thread just to throw his bile at me for daring to refer to the UK as my country.

Hilarious.

If I had known that revealing that I wasn’t British born would cause so much trouble with minority of posters I would never have done it. It was a big mistake.

I’m just done with these forums, its mostly a very good crowd and there are a lot of very good posters from whom I’ve learned so much, but there is a small minority of people like you who totally ruin it for me and make me feel sick. It’s just not worth it anymore.

You’ve won, hope you are happy.

Post edited at 18:01
9
 Rob Parsons 08 May 2020
In reply to RomTheBear:

> I’m just done with these forums ...

Before you go, I would still welcome more information on the 'major, major' bugs which you have claimed to exist in Ferguson's code.

You've made a serious claim: to do so with no actual follow-up is disappointing, at least.

1
 LeeWood 08 May 2020
In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

> Fruitcake

Well, I can see where you're coming from - questioning the power of wealth is like questioning the power of gravity. 

Do you think it's just and right that 'The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population' ? source Oxfam

Which part of my post didn't you agree with - the wikipedia data, or Bill's push for 7bn vaccines to treat the whole globe ? Are you truly on his side - is this what we're all waiting for before we dare go to the crag ???

5
 LeeWood 09 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

> The problem you have is that you inherently can't trust anyone to have anything but the worst motives, and thanks to the internet you can now 'Conspiracy' yourself down a complete black hole.

> You should ask him for some 'peer reviewd' references just to join in here....

I'm grateful for your feedback. You and others have obliged me to look deeper; if I'm headed down a black hole its because you pushed me there !

Jeremy Youde is a respected academic researcher most noted for his commentary on Bill Gates. Youde is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He and others give their views in the following article - critique of a measured style - which might allow you and others to get a purchase on the scale and detail of the foundation's activities.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criticism

Gates strategy names him as a philanthrocapitalist. Since 2002 approx his foundation - which provides a tax-paying dodge to donors - has passed on billions of dollars to chosen causes. His personal wealth is still increasing as a result of the clever connections he creates between big corporations and research groups around the world.

The foundation approach is to prioritise technical and pharmaceutical health solutions. The current pandemic creates perfect conditions for it's greater success, as fundamental near term health measures are ignored; the longer we are intimidated with lockdown logic, the more likely we are to accept the solutions it wants - solutions which will ultimately be profitable to Gates and it's foundation donors.

2
 Rob Exile Ward 09 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

'The foundation approach is to prioritise technical and pharmaceutical health solutions.'

Actually you couldn't be more wrong. Their overarching concerns are reducing infant mortality, empowering women and helping communities help themselves. 

That 'respected academic' you quote doesn't even get his own wiki page.

 neilh 09 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

If he was respected he would be at one of the top 10 universities in the USA. 
 

it is ranked 39th just in the mid-west. 
 

Post edited at 09:08
2
 Coel Hellier 09 May 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> That 'respected academic' you quote doesn't even get his own wiki page.

Just to note that most "'respected academics" don't. 

 Coel Hellier 09 May 2020
In reply to neilh:

> If he was respected he would be at one of the top 10 universities in the USA. 

That is quite a high threshold for being regarded as "respected"! 

(NB, neither this nor my previous comment is support for the article named or its author; I'm just making a general point.)

 wbo2 09 May 2020
In reply to neilh:  If thats' your ball park no-one outside Oxford and Cambridge in the UK would count as respected.. OK, Imperial at a push.    Do you believe that's really true?

Actually this whole thread is a conspiracy theory of sorts thread.  Starting premise - someone has looked at respected professors messy piece of code for modelling and becuase they're not an expert in that field and don't understand the parmaetriasation and assumptions assume it's dodgy and he must be wrong, or hiding sometihng....

 neilh 09 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

39 th in the mid west is pretty low even in USA terms.

I doubt any uni in the uk would be that low.even the ones at the bottom of the uk leagues.

 neilh 09 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

Alright then top 50 unis in the usa.

 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

> Actually this whole thread is a conspiracy theory of sorts thread.  Starting premise - someone has looked at respected professors messy piece of code for modelling and becuase they're not an expert in that field and don't understand the parmaetriasation and assumptions assume it's dodgy and he must be wrong, or hiding sometihng....

Just to clarify.  Your read of the comments from multiple posters misunderstands a key point.  
 

Nobody here has looked at the professor’s code. Their code that was used to inform policy has not been released.  What was eventually released was a version overhauled by a 3rd party apparently over the course of 4-6 weeks.  There is no documentation on what was changed or fixed over that period.  I think speculation will continue over the original code - about which what little is known has raised valid concern for the possibility of significant errors from people who are experts in the field of code based modelling (as opposed to experts in epidemiology, where the code’s author’s expertise lies).

They are hiding something.  The code as was that informed policy.  Why are they hiding it?  Could be all sorts of reasons, some malign and some innocent. 

 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Just to note that most "'respected academics" don't. 

Well, at least until the decade long allegations of misconduct boil over into a Twitter spat and subsequent PR meltdown....  

Less flippantly I don’t see much correlation between who has the real expertise and who’se played the game to the point they’re important enough to have a Wikipedia entry...

Post edited at 11:51
 Rob Parsons 09 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> ... who’se played the game to the point they’re important enough to have a Wikipedia entry...

Anybody can have a wikipedia entry.

 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to Rob Parsons:

> Anybody can have a wikipedia entry.

Not actually true.  If found ones for “minor” people can and do get deleted - shunted over to a “Talk:” page in practice with the arguments for and against inclusion.  Edit: as I found out when looking in to the “expert” behind a link in one of the anti-lockdown threads on UKC.  Dozens of views in if they were important enough to have a page or not...  No actual page.

Post edited at 12:49
 Coel Hellier 09 May 2020
In reply to Rob Parsons:

> Anybody can have a wikipedia entry.

The basic criterion for being "notable" enough for a wikipedia page is:

"People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published[4] secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other,[5] and independent of the subject.[6]"

So, being respected with an international reputation within your field is not sufficient.  You also need to be "talked about" outside your field, such as newspaper articles. 

 Stichtplate 09 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> The basic criterion for being "notable" enough for a wikipedia page is:

> "People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published[4] secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other,[5] and independent of the subject.[6]"

> So, being respected with an international reputation within your field is not sufficient.  You also need to be "talked about" outside your field, such as newspaper articles. 

Not sure whether a Wiki entry is any sort of criterion to judge academic standing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Essex

Post edited at 13:26
 Rob Parsons 09 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> Nobody here has looked at the professor’s code. Their code that was used to inform policy has not been released.  What was eventually released was a version overhauled by a 3rd party apparently over the course of 4-6 weeks.  There is no documentation on what was changed or fixed over that period.  I think speculation will continue over the original code - about which what little is known has raised valid concern for the possibility of significant errors from people who are experts in the field of code based modelling

If we view the original code as a black box, we have the published outputs from it. We now also have the refactored code, which anybody on the planet (including anybody discussing the matter on this forum) can build and run.

Has anybody confirmed that, given the same inputs, the refactored code produces the same outputs as does the original code?

 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to Rob Parsons:

The GitHub code is apparently derived (we don’t know if it’s simply “refactored” or more) from a covid code itself derived from the code outputs of which were published in 2005, so as nice as your approach is, it’s now a different black box.  Perhaps some of the other recent working group reports can serve as a reference for this black box.  I’d rather review the model against a clear mathematical model but as neither exist in the public domain...  (the nature 2005 supplemental materials are not trivially interpretable as configuration for a black box or a mathematical description either, it’s all sort of lumped together with a bunch of context and not much clarity, at least to a numpty like me.)

Post edited at 13:56
 Rob Parsons 09 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> The GitHub code is apparently derived (we don’t know if it’s simply “refactored” or more) from a covid code itself derived from the code outputs of which were published in 2005, so as nice as your approach is, it’s now a different black box.

I have been assuming that the '500,000 deaths' result published in March arose from simulation runs done very recently. Is that not the case?

> the nature 2005 supplemental materials are not trivially interpretable as configuration ...

Indeed, it occurs to me that, now that we have the code, constructing the overall configuration necessary to rerun the simulation as it was originally done is the difficult part. Nevertheless, that seems to be the obvious thing to try to do, if anybody is casting doubt on the original code and/or results.

Post edited at 14:08
 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to Rob Parsons:

> I have been assuming that the '500,000 deaths' result published in March arose from simulation runs done very recently. Is that not the case?

That is my understanding but the “peer reviewed” model it is based on was published in 2005.  I’ve used inverted commas as what passes as a description was in supplemental materials which generally don’t get much of a review. 

> Indeed, it occurs to me that, now that we have the code, constructing the overall configuration necessary to rerun the simulation as it was originally done is the difficult part. Nevertheless, that seems to be the obvious thing to do, if anybody is casting doubt on the original code and/or results.

Agreed.  Ideally the GitHub repository would include configurations used for each technical report and each technical report would reference a code version and list parameters, but I haven’t seen that.

The obvious thing would be to release the original code.  Yours is the best suggestion for outsiders I think.

 Coel Hellier 09 May 2020
In reply to Rob Parsons:

> I have been assuming that the '500,000 deaths' result published in March arose from simulation runs done very recently. Is that not the case?

Thing is, you don't need a sophisticated code to arrive at that number for a "do nothing" scenario, all you need is the back of an envelope:

65 million people;
80% catching it (from R0 estimate)
1% mortality
==> 500,000 deaths in round numbers. 

Since, at the time, the "1% mortality" number was pretty uncertain (and still is really), there's not much benefit in doing a better calculation until you narrow down the mortality and R0 numbers. 

What the sophisticated codes are needed for is questions such as "if we close/reopen schools, how much difference does that make?". And questions like that are not really ones of mathematical equations, but more ones for monte-carlo modelling along with a whole host of assumptions about how people interact in society. 

 Rob Parsons 09 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

Don't get hung on my use of the '500,000 deaths' figure: that was intended just as a reference to the March paper which indeed did model the effects of 'non-pharmaceutical interventions' such as closing schools etc. - that was the entire point of the paper in fact.

I am assuming that all such modelling was done using the simulation code under discussion here.

 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> . And questions like that are not really ones of mathematical equations, but more ones for monte-carlo modelling along with a whole host of assumptions about how people interact in society. 

Which when you consider it comes down to public health monitoring, medical evidence and epidemiology, by which point the models only tell you what you already know.

An example of an open question seems to “what is the transmission rate through children in a school setting” - no model is going to give us the answer to that, and that answer is key to schools reopening.

 wbo2 09 May 2020
In reply to wintertree: No, but by setting that as a variable you'd be able to simulate it's impact on the overall picture and then  make an informed assessment if closing schools is a good thing to do?  Have you done much Monte Carlo or similar?  It's very powerful for revealing what matters, and what you don't know but need to investigate.

 wintertree 09 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

Yes, I’ve done a lot of simulation of biological systems using both Monte Carlo and large coupled, partial differential equation solutions.  I’ve even managed to get some analytic solutions out for corner cases despite my crappy maths.

To make any simulation worth a damned involving schools, we need to know the infection and transmission mechanic of covid in school aged pupils.  No simulation can tell us that, it comes from epidemiology, trace/test and medical evidence.  If we had those numbers, we probably wouldn’t need to Monte Carlo the hell out of it to know what the appropriate action was.   If we had them, a Monte Carlo simulation could be more instructive, but again I suspect fag packet estimates won’t be so different using mean class sizes, teacher ages and so on.

We know what matters; R0 and susceptibility to severe medical complications.  In terms of which “social parameters” affect R0, there are gaping holes in our knowledge of transmission that a Monte Carlo simulation can’t answer, and that become free parameters in such a simulation, which render its results questionable.

Which is why I think leading policy with detailed analysis of hospital admissions and ICU levels remains the sensible approach, and why I was sad to see the community RAMP effort focusing on adding more complexity to the model.   Complexity means free parameters in the early stages of a disease where medical and epidemiological evidence is only just getting off the ground.

Conversley I’ve seen too many people from varied fields go all-in with such simulations because of how much detail their results contain, how genuinely clever the models are and so on.  Doesn’t mean they’re particularly predictive...

Post edited at 17:19
 TobyA 09 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

> One of those named is the BBC

Not even your news site - a spin-off for the post-Farage even-harder right UKIP https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/new-ukip-gerard-batten-corbyn... claims it's "the BBC". The funding goes to a charity of the BBC aimed at international development through developing independent media in the developing world - exactly the sort of thing the Gates Foundation supports. I know a critical reading of the context of news sources is a hassle, but you don't appear to have actually even read what the article says itself! Regardless of the dubious populist-right website it is on and the political activism of the author! This Clews fella is really interesting https://www.thenational.scot/news/15780723.im-not-mental-says-david-clews-o... although you kind of feel when someone has to argue "I'm not mental" they may be on a bit of a sticky wicket already! Genuine questions do you use Unity News Network as a regular news source or did you find this via Google?

> 2020, WHO: since Trump pulled support from the WHO, Gates foundation is the biggest donor into WHO, giving him a steering influence.

> all verifiable in wikipedia

Go on then. Please "verify" to me that Bill Gates - the "him" you are referring to has a "steering influence" over the WHO? For example, if Gates decided that Taiwan should have full membership of the WHO (as the US Congress is again pushing) how would he steer his influence to achieve that against the Chinese veto? 

This is close to unreadable, but even reading it charitably, it doesn't actually prove what you're saying at all. The author appears to have had a few years of writing for predominantly conspiracy theory "alternative" news sites (Assad good, US bad, Gaddafi good, NATO bad and so on) like Globalresearch (the sort of "radical left" sites where there's always an icky feeling that someone is about to the blame the "Zionists" for whatever...) but seems to have disappeared in recent years. Maybe he got a job?

> The wealthy Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called Wednesday (15 April) for global cooperation to ready COVID-19 vaccines for seven billion people, while offering $150 million toward developing therapeutics and treatments for the virus.

And that's bad why exactly?

>  WHO directives are influencing and even transcending decisions which should should be taken at national level. 

You know the WHO doesn't really do "directives", they're all about the guidelines. How do you think UN agencies like the WHO transcend national level decisions? Genuine question: what is one example of the WHO giving a directive that has transcended UK decision making during this pandemic?

 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to TobyA:

> Genuine questions do you use Unity News Network as a regular news source or did you find this via Google?

Google. I' have little time for the politics of Left and Right because, as in my current quest, I see that the corporate interests behind gov are more consequential. I remain uncertain of your point here, Unity News will clearly have it's own agenda but how does reporting on the BMGF impact this ? The fact I'm focusing on is that the cash relation exits. The bbc charity has good intentions, as does BMGF *in writ*. The problem is that, since support comes in from BMGF - and other such - the bbc will be obliged to show respect for their dealings.

https://andrewharmer.org/2018/06/07/whos-funding-who/

The content of this link shows, roughly, that Gates contribution into WHO is Voluntary, not Assessed. Furthermore (quote) its voluntary contribution is “specified”, i.e. it can only be spent on specific things decided by Bill and Melinda (and they really do decide themselves. Beyond this, the article lists Gates personal stock portfolio - incl Coca Cola.

Knowledge of this informs us that Gates interest in health (ie. not Real Health !) is purely financial. And no, his interest will not devolve down to individual nation actions but rather global decisions ie. as refernced elsewhere in posts 'basic health versus drugs and technology'. 

The mediapart article. It may be poorly written but all elements are confirmed in the vox article I referenced elsewhere. The emphasis on drugs and technology, which rewards foundation donors - through a tax loophole - for providing developing countries solutions which they can't afford (see discussion on patents, intellectual property rights )

> And that's bad why exactly? (7bn vaccines)

the focus on 7bn vaccines is bad for several reasons. a) it informs us that this is the best and only solution for dealing with the virus. b) thus taking the focus off basic health issues and prolonging lockdown and fear - we're not safe for 18 months ?? c) It carries the message that it will be obligatory - quickly argued that to be effective every person must have it. Clearly the other WHO supporters - Big Pharma - will clearly benefit from this smart move. 

> How do you think UN agencies like the WHO transcend national level decisions? Genuine question: what is one example of the WHO giving a directive that has transcended UK decision making during this pandemic?

Firstly we are all reliant on WHO assessment of the pandemic - the directives tell us on the basis of derived stats what to do - so we hope they are objective As originally such came out of china we have a perfect setting for corruption because the chinese don't tell us the truth about their dealings !

Response to your last question coming soon, just got to feed the chickens !

7
 neilh 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

Vaccines are a low priority for Pharma. They make their money on drugs.Most vaccines are given to third world countries or they pay heavily subsidised at cost prices. 
 

 Dave Garnett 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

> Knowledge of this informs us that Gates interest in health (ie. not Real Health !) is purely financial. And no, his interest will not devolve down to individual nation actions but rather global decisions ie. as refernced elsewhere in posts 'basic health versus drugs and technology'. 

OK...  So, you're saying the reason Gates established his foundation, and is giving away a large proportion of his personal wealth, is to make money? 

> the focus on 7bn vaccines is bad for several reasons. a) it informs us that this is the best and only solution for dealing with the virus. b) thus taking the focus off basic health issues and prolonging lockdown and fear - we're not safe for 18 months ?? c) It carries the message that it will be obligatory - quickly argued that to be effective every person must have it. Clearly the other WHO supporters - Big Pharma - will clearly benefit from this smart move. 

But a vaccine is the only solution that doesn't involve us all catching the virus and just hoping most of us don't die.  And if Big Pharma (whatever you think that means) doesn't make the billions of doses required, who will?  And if it's such an obvious money-spinning wheeze, why is Gates having to fund any of it?

Post edited at 11:08
 TobyA 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

> > Genuine questions do you use Unity News Network as a regular news source or did you find this via Google?

> Google.

So in other words you've decided what the facts are, and than are googling for sources that support what you already believe - even if they are far-right.

> The content of this link shows, roughly, that Gates contribution into WHO is Voluntary, not Assessed. Furthermore (quote) its voluntary contribution is “specified”, i.e. it can only be spent on specific things decided by Bill and Melinda (and they really do decide themselves. Beyond this, the article lists Gates personal stock portfolio - incl Coca Cola.

Lee, again you really need to try reading what you are linking to more carefully- it quite clearly says, that's the foundations stock portfolio, so very much not their "personal" portfolio. Harmer's blog post is also a repost from 5 years ago citing a study of the BMGF from 9 years ago. Have you any idea whether this is still the case?

And further: are you surprised that foundations contributions to UN agencies are voluntary? What exactly do you think philanthropic giving is? Harmer claims but gives no evidence for the "they really do decide themselves" bit, perhaps it's true, but further he makes no claims at all that anything the they, or the BMGF more generally, has funded has been in some way "bad". Perhaps it is, you seem to think so, but this is any evidence for it. I should add, for full disclosure, a LONG time ago I worked for 6 months for another UN agency, UNEP, and saw how much of my boss's work revolved going around mainly European foreign ministries and EU agencies begging for money or resources so we could finish our project (the assessment of depleted uranium use by NATO air forces during the Kosovo conflict). But even when you get voluntary contributions, it's the members, the states (who do - and sometimes don't - pay their assessed contributions) who have the big political control on the agencies (note my reference to the WHO, China and question of Taiwanese membership).

> Knowledge of this informs us that Gates interest in health (ie. not Real Health !) is purely financial.

Nope, you say that. You haven't shown it at all. Did you read that at both the anti-Lockdown protests in both London and Melbourne, Aus. yesterday the protesters were protesting against Gates and the BMGF. Oh, and 5G.

> The mediapart article. It may be poorly written but all elements are confirmed in the vox article I referenced elsewhere.

They really weren't at all. If you're convinced, well I doubt there is much I can say to change you mind, but when you are resorting to googling for poorly written stuff on frankly wackjob websites, rather than international newspapers or science journals - don't you have any sneaking suspicions that

> Firstly we are all reliant on WHO assessment of the pandemic

How exactly?

> - the directives tell us on the basis of derived stats what to do - so we hope they are objective...

Again what directives? Your profile says you live in France so maybe you didn't see the fuss in the UK, mainly end of March/early April, when the WHO were saying "test test test" (I guess as Germany and S Korea have done), but the UK government seem to come to the conclusion they didn't have the capacity to do it so they weren't going to. In other words doing exactly the opposite to WHO advice. So how again is the WHO (controlled by Bill and Melinda) directing the UK govt.?

 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to TobyA:

> So in other words you've decided what the facts are, and than are googling for sources that support what you already believe - even if they are far-right.

Seems pretty obvious really. If i'm on a climb it's natural I need to look for holds before I find them !

Your responses create much reflection, from which I see a basic issue. We are discussing here an alliance of global power of un-matched proportions. If we discuss the intents of China or Russia, then you will have no problems seeing the error of their politics, or the danger of their threat. But now we are discussing the danger of power within our own ranks.

I have already mentioned the BMGF support to 5 major news agencies, I have only checked this exists with the BBC.  Having established such connections few parties will be willing to 'bite the hand that feeds'. The result of this is that inside news will come from the fewer informal - less professional - critics, and because it is not mainstream - instantly tainted with conspiracy.

I think the nearest you might approach the truth is with the vox source - which in measured words discusses the ethics of BMGF in a professional manner.

Lastnight I listened to 20+ minutes discussion - youtube with Jeremy Youde and others - about WHO funding since Trump threatened to quit. On 2-3 occasions Gates surfaced in the conversation, comments *v discreetly* saying - yes, its not right that his financial contributions be of such magnitude as to dominate. Implicit meaning.

> Have you any idea whether this is still the case?

Yes I found a recent link listing their investment in Coca Cola

> And further: are you surprised that foundations contributions to UN agencies are voluntary?

Read more carefully ! VC & AC are two cats within the contribution scheme, used to explain the conditions attached to commitment and usage.

The chain of events in the pandemic is such that neither I nor anyone can vouch for accuracy. What happened and who said what and in which order. A great moment for rank opportunism ! Who supplied the combustible, who supplied the matches, who struck the 1st match, why the fire services were not close at hand - ALL - under the searchlight glare of billions spent on intelligence and security bodies such as GCHQ and american equivalent - - - - - - . 

Some experts were in at the start - politicians, epedimologists - but for some reason  the exchange of human vectors between china and europe remained unchecked - until the virus was rampant - no-one stopped the planes planes!  

Thereafter each country had its own reactions - scientific, political - driving some into blanket lockdown and others into selective protection of vulnerable categories and zones. Media and politics played a part in every situation. And the real need for actions taken - in relation to viral threat, as represented by statistics ? - wasn't this equally open to manipulation ?

1
 wbo2 10 May 2020
In reply to wintertree: For background I model subsurface flow and behaviour, and some other geological/geophysical stuff via Monte Carlo or bayesian simulation as I can't get sensitivity analysis from best estimate..  I'd suggest that once you move beyond having R0 as a simple parameter you get insight into what counts.  you could break down R0 as age variable, population density variable, rate obesity and plug those in and take it from there.  Otherwise you may as well just use R0 as is and produce a range with no real notion of how real they are - this is the problem with the internet data + excel crossplot method.

LeeWood - <the focus on 7bn vaccines is bad for several reasons. a) it informs us that this is the best and only solution for dealing with the virus. b) thus taking the focus off basic health issues and prolonging lockdown and fear - we're not safe for 18 months ?? 

Got a better solution?  Quite a few people would be interested I guess...

<Some experts were in at the start - politicians, epedimologists - but for some reason  the exchange of human vectors between china and europe remained unchecked - until the virus was rampant - no-one stopped the planes planes!  

Oh the power of hindsight! But I'm sure you'd be aok if your government suddenly locked down industry, air travel et al to the current extent on the threat of something the vast majority of people had never heard of and certainly didn't recognise as a threat worthy of creating a 1930's scale depression. 

 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to TobyA:

> Genuine question: what is one example of the WHO giving a directive that has transcended UK decision making during this pandemic?

Sorry, I can't give a UK source but this french one is pretty spicy:

youtube.com/watch?v=FPnUZ4kwKqE&

In this video  - all in french, a bit long and tedious, avocat (lawyer) Séverine Manna discusses coronavirus medical treatment which has gathered a lot of momentum. Its about the usage of chloroquine treatments for hospital admittants. Practitioners alledge that they - by their terms of reference - have been obliged to let patients die, because the use of HCQ has not been authorised. Severine expresses concern at the scale of the scandal, citing pressure from the OMS - Organisation Mondial de Santé (WHO)  for advising against it. (not a directive - to be sure - just research 'with clout' )

Whatever you may personally know or think about it, the controversy here in France is real and has attracted a lot of attention. Raoult at the heart of it - expresses great confidence in inexpensive treatments available to immdeiately stem the pandemic. The arguments against him favour 'better proven' ( more expensive !) drugs. Raoult is not anti-vaccine but - in face of such immediately available and sure treatment - HCQ - is dismissive of the need for vaccine. And that evidently - is a sure recipe for conflict of interests !

Post edited at 13:35
1
 TobyA 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

> Seems pretty obvious really. If i'm on a climb it's natural I need to look for holds before I find them !

I've tried to think of climbing analogy - perhaps you're actually dry tooling and just drilling slots where you want because the natural features don't allow you to climb your chosen line? - but really, it's not the same thing.

My point remains it seems - that you think Bill Gates is up to no good and is exploiting the pandemic by influencing the WHO - so you've gone out to look for evidence of this.

 wintertree 10 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

>   I'd suggest that once you move beyond having R0 as a simple parameter you get insight into what counts.

I agree.  I had a discussion with another poster on here about a month ago about a fine grained situation idea I wanted to try - turns out someone else had already done it and published it, with some analytical insight.

>  you could break down R0 as age variable, population density variable, rate obesity and plug those in and take it from there.

Indeed - but then instead of having one parameter, you have dozens or hundreds.  The number of identified, studied, and published cases (published as in statistics are available, not as a peer reviewed paper)  in each of your sub-categories of R0 comes down to smaller and smaller numbers and so is subject to more and more statistical noise based on the individuals, and your assumptions about how those different categories mix represent even more free parameters.

The information to constrain those parameters comes from medicine and epidemiology and both target and random testing across the population.  Which categories are most at risk of catching the virus?  What are the probabilities of transmission in different social and workplace settings?  What fractions of each sub-division of the population have an asymptomatic or presymptomatic infectious period?  How does the duration of an asymptomatic or presymptomatic period related to the viral load and means of infection?  The kind of model you describe needs reasonably accurate parameters for all of these, and we have very few of these answers.  If we did have these answers, the "right" thing to do won't be far off making a matrix of category of person vs social setting where the elements are how many people they go on to infect in each.  As each matrix element directly contributes to the population level R0, the matrix presents a clear and obvious approach to lowering R0 - as with optimising computer code, you profile first and then target the slow bits of code (high matrix elements) so you don't waste loads of effort on optimising the already-fast bits of code (low transmission matrix elements).  The contents of this matrix cannot come from modelling, they come from epidemiology, medical studies and things like biophysical studies of exhaled droplets (some great videos appearing out there from this), and studies of population interaction.  If we had an accurate matrix the models would be more accurate, but also no longer required.

It's something I said about a month ago - the choice is between a coarse grained model that's not far removed from a fag packet estimate, and a fine grained model that has the potential to meaningfully represent the population's complexity but that is so riddled with underconstrained parameters that it can be fit to almost anything, rendering its predictive power - or even its ability to discriminate the most important parameters - very weak.

>  Otherwise you may as well just use R0 as is and produce a range with no real notion of how real they are - this is the problem with the internet data + excel crossplot method.

Like I say, I think this trades one problem for another.  

 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

> Oh the power of hindsight!

Should we need hindsight in view of (my quote):

> the searchlight glare of billions spent on intelligence and security bodies such as GCHQ and american equivalent - - - - - - . 

Even if we agree there was not enough info right at the start - planes were still flying at a point when Italy had gone into lockdown.

> Got a better solution? 

Yes - see latest post on HCQ. Plus basic health / diet correction.

> Quite a few people would be interested I guess...

You would hope so, but here the problem - they don't carry enough commercial interest  

1
 Rob Exile Ward 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

Quiz question for you - where does this come from:

'All Lives have equal value. We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequity.'

 krikoman 10 May 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Testing and tracking, seem to be important indicators of how to get on top of the spread, were currently doing a shit job at both of these.

 wbo2 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

> Even if we agree there was not enough info right at the start - planes were still flying at a point when Italy had gone into lockdown.

Yes , that hindisight.  They were still flying when China locked down too.  Would you be ok with lockdown and it's personal consequences to you if all measures were implemented every time a disease flares - not just this one, but the others you don't read about too?

>

> Yes - see latest post on HCQ. Plus basic health / diet correction.

HCQ - ? Beyond speculation? and you know that's artificial, it doesn't grom on trees? You can be basically healthy and still die or be very ill, and if it was just left to run then the higher infection levels would increase that rate.

Where do you stand on vaccines in general?

 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> Quiz question for you - where does this come from:

> 'All Lives have equal value. We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequity.'

No idea. I think you want me to google it ?? Was it BG ??

 Rob Exile Ward 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

I'll give you a clue. It doesn't sound like Big Pharma, does it?

 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to wbo2:

> Yes , that hindisight.  They were still flying when China locked down too.  Would you be ok with lockdown and it's personal consequences to you if all measures were implemented every time a disease flares - not just this one, but the others you don't read about too?

We have all seen that there are more or less intelligent ways to lockdown, and that it's fortunate to have the national wisdom to make the right choice

> HCQ - ? Beyond speculation? and you know that's artificial, it doesn't grom on trees? You can be basically healthy and still die or be very ill, and if it was just left to run then the higher infection levels would increase that rate.

we western brats need to remember that we're all going to die at some point, and that what brought us to our present level of human success was survival of the fitness; in short - don't be too precious ! is it morally correct to be saved with a ventilator when the cost of such treatment might save 100 others of starvation who live in a state of poverty ?

> Where do you stand on vaccines in general?

As a base reference I stand with autonomy. our world is becoming increasingly complex in technology and interdependance, the benefits are not durable and could easily let us down

It's better to know how to perform that DIY task, repair your car, grow your own vegetables, and look after your own health - rather than being rich enough to pay someone else to look after such matters. From this reference, finding solutions which avoid vaccination may be considered better, but considerable education would be needed to put this in every man's reach; and perhaps certain diseases do justify a vaccine - NB. voluntary ! 

 Rob Exile Ward 10 May 2020
In reply to LeeWood:

'From this reference, finding solutions which avoid vaccination may be considered better, but considerable education would be needed to put this in every man's reach'

So you think smallpox and polio are lifestyle choices? That makes you ignorant and dangerous. 

Post edited at 21:23
 LeeWood 10 May 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> 'All Lives have equal value. We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequity.'

It's a nice quote. At a guess I'd say it's the writing of someone with a guilty conscience. 

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