By Tony O’Riley-
Neil Ferguson, a member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and head of the disease outbreak modelling group at Imperial College London, has resumed his talk of lockdowns and restrictions.
Dubbed professor lockdown, Ferguson who left the govenment after breaking lockdown rules has the cheek to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday to suggest that lockdowns or other restrictions could help to protect people from infection and gather information.
Ferguson who left the government after breaking lockdown rules himself when he let a woman visit his home , is that last person who should be talking about lockdowns shortly after government ministers have been exposed for having a party last christmas whilst the British public were making serious sacrifices that included not seeing relatives.
This is on top of the fact the government scientist has an appalling record when it comes to making predictions.
Only last August, Ferguson was advocating the British public learning to live with covid“I wasn’t intending either to be the most gloomy, or the most optimistic,” and we will be able to manage it through vaccination rather than crisis measures.
” The era of lockdowns is nearly over, he suggested at the time, but has now picked the wrong time to suggest it may be necessary.
When the government scientist was pushed on the question of whether lockdowns may be necessary to keep the Omicron virus in check, and he suggested it may be
“There is a rationale, just epidemiologically, to try and slow this down, to buy us more time principally to get boosters into people’s arms because we do think people who are boosted will have the best level of protection possible, but also to buy us more time to really better characterise the threat.
“So if you imagine a kind of plan B plus with working from home might slow it down – it wouldn’t stop it but it could slow it down, so it’s doubling rather than every two or three days, every five or six days.
“That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it actually is potentially a lot in terms of allowing us to characterise this virus better and boost population immunity.”
“It’s likely to overtake Delta before Christmas at this rate, precisely when is hard to say,” Ferguson said, speaking in a personal capacity.
“We’ll start seeing an impact on overall case numbers – it’s still probably only 2%, 3% of all cases so it’s kind of swamped, but within a week or two we’ll start seeing overall case numbers accelerate quite markedly as well.”
Ferguson said the “key question” of whether the UK decided to attempt to slow the spread of Omicron would “critically depend on really the threat it poses in terms of hospitalisations. At the moment we don’t really have a good handle on the severity of this virus.
“There’s a little hint in the UK data that infections are a little bit more likely to be asymptomatic. But we really need to firm up that evidence at the current time.”
He said so far case numbers were particularly high in London and Scotland. “London is to be expected because that’s where most of our foreign visitors come,” he added. He said it was less clear why it had spread more quickly in Scotland but speculated that it could be linked with the Cop26 summit in Glasgow.
As far as the prospect of lockdowns, Ferguson said it was difficult to rule out anything, adding that we “haven’t got a good enough handle on the threat”.
He added: “Clearly, if the consensus is it is highly likely that the NHS is simply going to be overwhelmed then it will be for the government to decide what what he wants to do about that, but it’s a difficult situation to be in of course.”
He also noted preliminary work in the UK that suggests that two doses of Pfizer are roughly half as protective against mild disease as against other variants. But he said: “We think that protection against severe disease is much more likely to be maintained at the high level, but we don’t have firm data on that. That’s just based on extrapolation from past experience,” he said.
Faster Growth Of Omicron
Ferguson described the pace of Omicron’s growth “very fast”, saying: “It’s the same if not faster than we saw with the original strain of the virus in March last year, so it is a concern.”
He said data on the evasion of vaccines was preliminary, but highlighted a study in South Africa that said “this virus Omicron can evade immunity antibodies generated against the very original Chinese strain of the virus better than any variant we’ve seen so far”.
Plan B
“So if you imagine a kind of plan B plus with working from home might slow it down – it wouldn’t stop it but it could slow it down, so it’s doubling rather than every two or three days, every five or six days.
“That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it actually is potentially a lot in terms of allowing us to characterise this virus better and boost population immunity.”
Ferguson said the “key question” of whether the UK decided to attempt to slow the spread of Omicron would “critically depend on really the threat it poses in terms of hospitalisations. At the moment we don’t really have a good handle on the severity of this virus.
“There’s a little hint in the UK data that infections are a little bit more likely to be asymptomatic. But we really need to firm up that evidence at the current time.”
Sense
Neil Ferguson talked a lot of sense on this occassion, except that the scientist is in no position to talk about lockdowns or restrictions, after he himself broke those restrictions, and in light of the latest revelation of government hypocrisy which has definitely damaged trust and the credibility of such impositions.
There are curious questions among our observers and analysts as to why he frequently appears on BBC Radio 4 Today.