Government health agency official: Coronavirus 'isn't something the American public need to worry about'(01/26/20)

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said Sunday the American public shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus outbreak in China.

“It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,” Fauci said during an interview with radio show host John Catsimatidis.

“But it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously... It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about

then along came Imperial College MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease - major funder Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

29 Mar: TechnocracyNews: The Common Roots Of Climate Change And COVID-19 Hysteria
by Patrick Wood
In short and when seen through the lens of Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy, the whole world has just been punked and then panicked into destroying itself over COVID-19.
The culprit? A world-class Technocrat in Britain: Dr. Neil Ferguson, PhD is a professor at Imperial College in London that bills itself as a “global university”. It is thoroughly steeped in Sustainable Development and more dedicated to social causes than academic achievement. In fact, Imperial is very well-known for its alarmist research reports on climate change, carbon reduction, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, etc...

Ferguson’s conclusion that COVID-19 would kill as many as 500,000 people in Britain and over 1.1 million in the United States, set off a tidal wave of panic that has not subsided. His policy recommendations were just as shocking, namely, that societies must be entirely locked down in order to survive...

Thanks to Neil Ferguson and Imperial College, the entire world has panicked over COVID-19 and worse, leaders have implemented all of their policy recommendations lock, stock and barrel. Meanwhile, the entire global media obediently follows behind, fanning the flames of fear into a raging forest fire...
https://www.technocracy.news/the-common-roots-of-climate-change-and-covid-19-hysteria/

4 Apr Updated 5 Apr: Daily Mail: Ministers are accused of treating Doomsday scientist like demigod: Number 10 has failed to properly challenge the word of coronavirus professor Neil Ferguson whose study sent Britain into lockdown, critics say
By Mark Hookham and Stephen Adams
Professor Neil Ferguson and his team of academics at Imperial College London last month produced a shocking forecast of 250,000 UK coronavirus deaths without a draconian lockdown, persuading Boris Johnson to abandon his more limited response to the virus.

But now Professor John Ashton, a former regional director of public health for North West England, has accused No 10 of relying on a ‘little clique’ of researchers and failing to consult a wider pool of academics.
‘These guys are being regarded as demigods,’ he said.
‘Here we are talking about science but this research is being given a kind of religious status, like tablets of stone from the mountain.’...

A Mail on Sunday investigation yesterday revealed divisions among scientists about Ferguson’s study and criticism over some of his previous calculations.
It reveals how:
•Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine questioned the lockdown policy because the virus may already be more widespread than commonly thought;
•They warned the draconian restrictions are ‘going to bankrupt all of us and our descendants’;
•Ferguson faced mounting calls to make the computer model he uses public so it can be scrutinised by other scientists;
•His modelling of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic came under fire, with a top scientist claiming it contained a ‘myriad of errors’.

Yesterday, Prof Ferguson said Britain is unlikely to lift lockdown rules until the end of May and warned the infection rate will remain high for ‘weeks and weeks’ if people flout social-distancing rules this weekend...

His landmark paper’s accompanying press release presented what Prof Ferguson described as ‘concrete estimates’ based on a complex computer model.
But experts highlight how the model uses a string of assumptions, including that 0.9 per cent of those infected will die. This figure relies on data collected during the Chinese outbreak but US spy agencies have cast doubt on the accuracy of the regime’s statistics...

Research by Ferguson and his mentor Professor Roy Anderson during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 helped persuade Tony Blair’s government to carry out a devastating cull of animals.
But Michael Thrusfield, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, last night said that their model contained errors and they ‘generated an Armageddon virus which did not accord with reality’...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8188041/Ministers-accused-treating-Doomsday-scientist-like-demigod.html

NYT was impressed by the Neil Ferguson/Imperial College report which, they wrote, “reached new conclusions because of the latest data from Italy”:

17 Mar Udated 2 Apr: NYT: Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action
It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London.
By Mark Landler and Stephen Castle
With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies...
“A lot of it is not what they say, but who says it,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global health governance program at Edinburgh University. “Neil Ferguson has a huge amount of influence.”...

Dr. Ferguson has been candid that the report reached new conclusions because of the latest data from Italy, which has seen a spiraling rate of infections, swamping hospitals and forcing doctors to make agonizing decisions about who to treat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-imperial-college-johnson.html

however:

23 Mar: UK Telegraph: Why have so many coronavirus patients died in Italy?
The country’s high death toll is due to an ageing population, overstretched health system and the way fatalities are reported
By Sarah Newey
According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health, the country’s mortality rate is far higher due to demographics - the nation has the second oldest population worldwide - and the manner in which hospitals record deaths...
But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

***“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three,” he says...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/

***NYT and the rest of the FakeNewsMSM have conveniently ignored Ricciardi’s revelation to this day, despite his credentials:

World Health Organization: European Advisory Committee on Health Research (EACHR)
Committee member: Professor Walter Ricciardi (Italy)
Professor Walter Ricciardi graduated with a degree in medicine in 1986 and a doctorate in public health medicine in 1990 from the University of Naples. He currently holds the title of Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome where he is also Director of the Department of Public Health and Deputy Head of the Faculty of Medicine. In addition to contributing to over 300 academic papers, primarily in the fields of Epidemiology, Health Services Research and Public Health Genomics, he is also Editor of the European Journal of Public Health, of the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice and Founding Editor of the Italian Journal of Public Health.
Professor Ricciardi is also active in national health policy and is Chair of the Public Health Section of the Higher Health Council. In 2011 the Minister of Health of Italy appointed him as his representative in the State-Region Committee for the evaluation of the Italian National Health Service. Internationally he is a member of the European Commission expert panel on “Investing in Health” (EXPH), a member of the National Board of Medical Examiners of the United States of America, and has was elected President of the European Public Health Association (EUPHA) from 2010–2014.

MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis
Lead Research Organisation: Imperial College London
Department Name: School of Public Health
A key feature of the Centre is the close links it has made with with public health agencies - such as the Public Health England, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO) - organisations which have to formulate and implement strategies to control infectious diseases...
Senior scientists in the Centre are world-leaders in infectious disease modelling and analysis...

Funding provided by MRC and Imperial College has allowed dedicated investment into the development of close collaborative partnerships with PHE, CDC and WHO and governments and research centres in many low and middle income countries (LMICs). We also work closely with other important organisations who work on improving health in LMICs (notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund and Gavi)...
Our relationship with BMGF (Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation) is of particular strategic importance - it is both the largest funder of Centre research, but more importantly is a key stakeholder in global health decision-making.

Indeed, in times of crisis, we embed our staff in some of those key organisations. Recently, one of our researchers joined a WHO field mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo to help that country respond to an outbreak of Ebola...

In addition to impact on public health, we have also been increasing our collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry, most notably with vaccine manufacturers. In the last 5 years we have worked closely with GSK and Sanofi Pasteur, helping to characterise the effectiveness of their malaria and dengue vaccines, respectively. Our work involved analysing the data those companies collected on their products during clinical trials and advising them, WHO and regulatory agencies on how their vaccines might best be used. We also work with a wide range of public-private product development partnerships developing new vaccines, drugs and vector control measures.
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FR015600%2F1

2 Apr Updated 3 Apr: Nature: Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19
How epidemiologists rushed to model the coronavirus pandemic.
by David Adam
(Imperial College’s Neil) Ferguson is one of the highest-profile faces in the effort to use mathematical models that predict the spread of the virus — and that show how government actions could alter the course of the outbreak...
When updated data in the Imperial team’s model indicated that the United Kingdom’s health service would soon be overwhelmed with severe cases of COVID-19, and might face more than 500,000 deaths if the government took no action, Prime Minister Boris Johnson almost immediately announced stringent new restrictions on people’s movements. The same model suggested that, with no action, the United States might face 2.2 million deaths; it was shared with the White House and new guidance on social distancing quickly followed (see ‘Simulation shock’)…

But, as he and other modellers warn, much information about how SARS-CoV-2 spreads is still unknown and must be estimated or assumed — and that limits the precision of forecasts. An earlier version of the Imperial model, for instance, estimated that SARS-CoV-2 would be about as severe as influenza in necessitating the hospitalization of those infected. That turned out to be incorrect...
“We’re building simplified representations of reality. Models are not crystal balls,” Ferguson says...

Government officials had previously talked up a theory of allowing the disease to spread while protecting the oldest in society, because large numbers of infected people would recover and provide herd immunity for the rest. But they changed their course on seeing the new figures, ordering social-distancing measures...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

sue Imperial College?

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