IN THE first part of this report, published in TCW yesterday, I focused on some of the key players in the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or Sage, and their ties with Big Pharma and Big NGO, particularly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In Part 2 today, I investigate Sage’s subcommittees: SPI-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) and SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours), which play a vital role in how it functions. There is much overlap between the bodies with some members sitting in on all three, such as Patrick Vallance (Government Chief Scientific Adviser) and Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer), and was also the case with the now infamous Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
At the heart of Sage is SPI-M. It’s been driving government policy ever since the ‘war’ on Covid-19 began. Only very few media outlets, such as TCW and the Daily Mail, have questioned the ‘dodgy data’ derived from its computerised type of modelling. Anyone who suggests it is not perfect is often branded a ‘Covid denier’.
The man who ran the show at SPI-M at the start of the pandemic was Neil Ferguson. He is also acting director of Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC) based at Imperial College, which is funded by GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, in turn funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as TCW reported here.
Just to give a quick recap on how ‘well’ his previous modelling predictions have gone: in 2001, Ferguson’s modelling of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak influenced the UK government pre-emptively to cull well over 6million animals at an estimated £10billion cost to the economy. As a result, the farming community was utterly devastated, giving rise to more centralised power by the EU over UK agriculture.
Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University, an expert in animal diseases, later described Ferguson’s modelling during the foot-and-mouth period as ‘severely flawed’ and ‘not fit for purpose’. Ferguson’s predictions of ‘worst-case scenario’ were seen as grossly over-estimated.
This pattern of Ferguson’s models over-playing the ‘doom’ factor has been repeated several times. In 2005 Ferguson claimed that up to 200million people worldwide would die during the bird flu outbreak including up to 750,000 in the UK. This led to the stockpiling of Tamiflu in the UK from 2006; this was widely prescribed later in the swine flu pandemic. The World Health Organisation was able to link only 78 deaths worldwide to the bird flu virus.
In 2009, Imperial’s model led by Ferguson gave rise to the prediction of 65,000 deaths from swine flu in the UK; in fact only 457 deaths were linked to the virus. Based on Ferguson’s model, the government spent £1.2billion to prepare for the swine flu pandemic. As a result, more than 20million unused doses of vaccine were left over.
Once more it was Ferguson’s ‘doomsday’ modelling prediction in the March 16, 2020 report from the Imperial College Covid-19 response team that gave the dire warning of 510,000 UK deaths by the end of May 2020 if the government continued with its ‘herd immunity’ response to the pandemic. This catastrophic prediction caused Boris Johnson to do an abrupt U-turn days later and steered the course for the most draconian restrictions and dreadful lockdowns ever since. It was only after Ferguson was caught flouting the rules in May 2020 when meeting his mistress that he resigned from Sage but he is still, remarkably, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag). Given Ferguson’s record, it is hard to understand why he continues to be given a platform to speak and influence UK government policy. It is worth noting that Ferguson was very influential on Boris Johnson’s Christmas U-turn.
While SPI-M provides the ‘mathematical science’ for lockdowns, SPI-B provides the ‘behavioural science’. It’s a key component in its ‘PsyOp’ for the inhumane and disastrous lockdowns that’s estimated to have cost up to 200,000 lives (that’s more than the supposed ‘120,000’ lives taken by COVID-19) and cost the economy £2.4billion a day.
I use the term ‘PsyOp’ in the truest sense of its meaning – a psychological operation or psychological warfare ‘to denote any action which is practised mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people’.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfareAnd what was the planned ‘psychological reaction in other people’ that needed to be evoked by Sage last year? Fear. In other words, scare the public senseless and they will do anything you want them to do. This unfortunate truth has been echoed throughout history.
The Johnson government, through SPI-B’s coaxing, expertly crafted a highly effective advertising campaign for COVID-19. The government spent more than £1.1billion of tax-payers’ money on ads such as this.
To understand the ‘behavioural science’ behind the campaign of fearmongering, take a look at a screen shot from the March 22, 2020 Sage meeting.
The highlighted areas show how the SPI-B subcommittee proposed the use of fear – ‘sense of personal threat’ – through the media and intimidation – ‘the use of social disapproval for failure to comply’- against the trusting UK public. They even predicted that the overall effectiveness would be ‘HIGH’ (one of the very few things they were right about).
The report goes on: ‘There are nine broad ways of achieving behaviour change: Education, Persuasion, Incentivisation, Coercion, Enablement, Training, Restriction, Environmental restructuring, and Modelling’ [my emphasis].
Shockingly, ‘coercion’ is listed as an effective way of achieving behaviour change in this report. The current government adopted the technique of coercion with due diligence through its 2020 Coronavirus Act and subsequent draconian laws, with the police handing out fines to people illegally sitting on a park bench, for example.
In summary, the SPI-B report highlighted the need for three elements: fear, intimidation and coercion. They were incorporated into the production of a lethally effective propaganda campaign against the public by the UK government.
In Part 3 of this report, I will take a closer look at the key members of SPI-B and I’ll also investigate the newest group in town, Nervtag.
