This follows on from the Introduction.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is defined as an infectious disease caused by an allegedly newly discovered coronavirus, identified as, “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2). The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 22 March 2020, based on the modelled projections by a team of nearly four dozen researchers – led by Neil Ferguson at Imperial College in London, UK, – the “Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team” (IPC), together with the WHO Collaborating Center for Infectious Disease Modeling as co-authors.

The progression of the “pandemic” has been orders of magnitude lower than initially predicted, while the global reaction, catastrophic.

In the report they published on 16 March 2020 on their website (not in a peer-reviewed scientific publication), they stated that COVID-19 posed the most severe global health threat since the 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic, and that without any quarantine or social distancing measures, their models projected, “approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US”. Almost immediately, the UK and South Africa, as well as many other countries, went into lockdown, and by mid-April, 82 were in some form of lockdown.

Very soon, high-ranking doctors, scientists, epidemiologists, and mathematicians, as well as researchers and journalists, who were analysing the global data, rejected the idea that we were in the midst of a virally-induced global pandemic, warning that the impact of the harsh measures would be far worse than that of the virus. Some advocated for an approach where the illness should be allowed to run its course naturally, with added protection needed only for those most vulnerable. And as the months continued, their views remained consistent; they could not see evidence that the initial flu season and subsequent “waves” warranted the designation “pandemic”. The overall the impact of lockdowns has also been viewed as far worse than the virus.

Here is a long quote by a group of “multi-disciplinary professionals,” including actuarial scientists, which formed Pandemics Data & Analytics (PANDA) in South Africa in April 2020, which gives a succinct summation how the momentum to put the world into lockdown was instigated:

“In taking up the lockdown baton from China, the world was conducting a dangerous experiment. That experiment involved tearing up the public health policy guidelines for respiratory virus epidemics of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the US’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and many others. These guidelines specifically cautioned against ever locking down given the collateral damage that lockdowns cause. To be clear, the ‘pseudo-science’ that PANDA is accused of ‘amplifying’ is the same science deployed by the WHO, CDC, etc. up until January 2020.

“These guidelines were the result of a century of evidence and deliberation that was summarily ignored when the virus arrived. Detailed statements of principle governing the evidential processes required to revise them were also ignored.

“The basis for all of this was the assurance of the WHO’s Bruce Aylward that China’s lockdown had contained its epidemic. This in turn was based on speculation that everyone was susceptible to COVID-19 and that, without lockdown, exponential growth of disease and death was inevitable. This was a curious assumption. Since February 2020, it had been known that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 in susceptible individuals, was very closely related to other coronaviruses, some widely circulating. The likelihood that immune systems would find it completely novel was low.“This radical shift to lockdowns was implemented by governments the world over without any sign of a cost-benefit analysis being performed. PANDA came onto the scene in May 2020 pointing out the prevailing ‘lives versus economy’ narrative was fallacious. Economies mediate lives and it was always to be expected that draconian business closures and stay-at-home orders would translate into suffering and public health disasters on an unprecedented scale. Failure to demonstrate any due consideration of this reality has been made all the more scandalous by its persistence for more than a year. PANDA’s analysis of costs and benefits is to this day the only detailed analysis we have seen, although many others have made the same point.

The next blog post looks at the analyses of the flawed model that shut the world down.