Authored by Will Jones via The Brownstone Institute,

In one of the more bizarre moments at the Covid Inquiry so far, Professor Neil Ferguson, the architect of Britain’s lockdown, today denied ever calling for the first national stay-at-home order – in the latest instance of lockdown backpedalling. 

The Mail  has more.

Professor Neil Ferguson’s terrifying March 2020 models warned that 500,000 Brits would die unless tougher action was taken to curb the virus’s spread.

It spooked Boris Johnson into adopting draconian restrictions that saw the country told they “must stay at home.” Vaccines — considered the only safe route out of the pandemic — were still months away from being deployed.

But Professor Ferguson, who quit his role as a SAGE adviser two months after being caught breaking social distancing rules to meet his married lover, today insisted he didn’t tell officials to plunge the country into a lockdown.

He told the UK COVID-19 Inquiry that the situation was “a lot more complex.”

The inquiry is in its second module, which is examining core UK decision-making and political governance.

Hugo Keith KC asked: “Do you feel that you did confine yourself to the provision of scientific advice, or did you become, despite your best endeavours, irrevocably involved in determination of policy?”

Imperial College London’s Professor Ferguson, nicknamed ‘Professor Lockdown’ for his infamous modelling, said it was a “difficult question to answer.”

He said: “I know I’m associated very much with a particular policy.

“But as you’ll be aware from the evidence I’ve given in my statement and statements of evidence, the reality was a lot more complex. 

“I don’t think I stepped over that line to say ‘we need to do this now.’

“What I tried to do was at times, which was stepping outside the scientific advisory role, to try and focus people’s minds on what was going to happen and the consequences of current trends.”

The epidemiologist drew heavy flak for his team’s modelling on the Covid pandemic. 

Their work suggested 500,000 Brits would die if nothing was done to stop the spread of the virus and there would be 250,000 deaths if two-thirds caught Covid.

Worth reading in full.

Ross Clark in the Spectator says that perhaps the most remarkable revelation from Professor Ferguson’s inquiry evidence is that “he spoke to and emailed Ben Warner at No. 10 on March 13th, three days before the Imperial paper [Report 9] was published.”

Warner was a data scientist brought into Downing Street by Dominic Cummings and whom Cummings later credited for inducing pandemic alarm in No. 10, so Ferguson contacting him directly beforehand is significant. 

However, Clark notes that in his email to Warner,

“Ferguson then stopped short of damning the Government’s policy of mitigation rather than suppression. In fact, if the Government decided to continue with mitigation, he wrote, ‘there is a rational basis to that decision which I would say the science supports.’ However, he added, the Government should make it clear how many people were likely to die.

“Intriguingly, Ferguson then went on to write: ‘This event is in the natural disaster category and the cure (e.g. massive social distancing, shutdowns) could be worse than the disease.’ In other words, he had at least considered the possibility that lockdowns could cause more damage than they were worth – but neither he nor anyone else seems to have tried to model this.”

Republished from DailySceptic

In a world that's becoming more globalized and interconnected, moving to another country for work has become ever easier, language barriers notwithstanding, especially for specialized white-collar workers.

As Statista's Florian Zandt reports, according to the most recent edition of their Decoding Global Talent survey by consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, London remains the top destination for employees willing to switch their home base.

As the chart below shows, cities located in the Middle East and Asia have become more enticing for workers between 2018 and 2020 as well.

You will find more infographics at Statista

For example, 11 percent of survey respondents could imagine moving to Abu Dhabi, Tokyo and Singapore, translating into an improvement by nine, four and eight positions, respectively, compared to the 2018 ranking. More traditional and long-running hot spots like New York and Barcelona fell by six and five ranks. Amsterdam and Dubai complete the top 3, with 15 and 14 percent of respondents claiming they were willing to move to this city for work, respectively.

The survey conducted between October and December 2020 cites efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to push for a more attractive image and an increase in the Gulf state's soft power, as well as an at-the-time effective coronavirus response strategy by Asian cities like Tokyo and Singapore as possible reasons for their jump in attractiveness. The Gulf states in particular have long been immigration hot spots. For example, in 2023, nine million people living in the UAE or 88.5 percent of the country's population were foreign nationals. Roughly half of these foreign nationals are from India (27.49 percent of the country's population), Pakistan (12.69 percent) and Bangladesh (7.40 percent).

This perceived attractiveness often comes at a price, though. According to the 2023 Mercer Cost of Living City Ranking, Singapore was ranked the second-most expensive city for international workers. Among the 227 cities analyzed, New York City (6), London (17) and Tokyo (19) also placed in the top 20.