Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen
Life must have seemed pretty good for Neil Ferguson a month ago. He is described by Wikipedia, as "OBE, professor of mathematical biology, director of the
Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics
(J-IDEA), head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in
the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in
the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College, London". And then a pandemic comes along and he produces a model that sways the British Government and heavily influences the way in which countries institute their lockdowns. How could life be better?
Fast forward to May and he is embroiled in a salacious scandal involving an affair with a married woman during the very lockdown he helped to create. Oh well, the world-weary might sigh, the elite have always lived according to different rules. He is a brilliant man, who saved the world. Why not allow him a little leeway? But the criticisms of his original paper used to advise the government have also been gathering momentum. For example, The Times of India noted that it was not peer-reviewed, the code used for modelling was not published, and the analysis was one-sided and didn't look at costs as well as benefits.
But these and similar criticisms are nothing compared to the shredding his work received from a long-time software writer, who seized on the late publishing of the code to dismantle any credibility the paper might have. They concluded:
But these and similar criticisms are nothing compared to the shredding his work received from a long-time software writer, who seized on the late publishing of the code to dismantle any credibility the paper might have. They concluded:
"All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
"On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves."
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