2022-07-11
It seems a long time now since those heady days of "scientific modelling", and the consequent lockdowns of the uninformed by the gullible.
The Daily sceptic reviews what we now know of that "scientific" model, which was hastily "sanitized" (no, not that sanitizer) and published on GitHub so that all could examine its entrails.
I reported on this in May 2020 (on a different site), and I am happy to say that I resisted any impulse to delve into the published code myself as such an enterprise would have kept me occupied full-time for an indefinite but certainly extended period. However, others did do so, at least to a limited extent, and their results are now, two years later(!), available.
If you are of a mind, you can read the details and check out the results, or if you are short of time or less inclined you can just reread my original piece - I claim total vindication!
There are legion reasons why the code isn't appropriate and could never produce what the public were led to believe by the credulous press.
"The provided documentation looks to be reasonably well laid out but is all marked as WIP – Work in Progress. This means that there is no signed-off design for the software that has been central to the rapid shutdown and slow destruction of our society"
This quote however is significant:
"In other words, the scientists produce what the politicians ask for: they are not providing a range of scenarios along with estimates of which is most likely. Whilst the politicians were reassuring us that they had been ‘following the science’, they never admitted that they were actually directing the science they were following"
The final quotes say it all:
"One of the most serious criticisms of the Covid modelling is that it has only ever modelled one side of the equation, that of the direct effects of the virus. The consequential health and financial costs of the NPIs were never considered in any detail but in practice seem likely to hugely overshadow the direct losses from the disease."
"Wouldn’t it have been good if the software used to justify the devastation of our society had been subject to at least a modicum of disinterested oversight and quality assurance? Perhaps we need a clearing house to intervene between the modellers and the politicians and safeguard the interests of the people. It would surely be useful to have some independent numerate oversight of the advice that our legal or classically-trained politicians won’t understand anyway"
That that should have needed to be said to the highest politicians in the land demonstrates conclusively that our current parliamentary system both produces and permits rule by basic incompetents.
Our political system has to be reformed to produce and promote competent people, and tinkering with an additional regulator will not cut it.
