Yeah, we all remember who he is. Forgive me if I take any quotes from Neil Ferguson with a spoon of salt.
He lacks moral authority due to an incident which he has rightly been criticised for - what has that got to do with his scientific expertise?
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist...
Edit: The quote seems pretty clear - "we see it in the data" - which would just be a higher rate of infections in children, and he's clearly speaking as a member of NERVTAG, not just as himself.
1. Scientist predicts x by y.
2. Politicians take action to prevent x by y.
3. x by y didn't happen, therefor scientists were wrong.
It's like complaining your sys admins do nothing because nothing ever breaks. Or that Y2K was a conspiracy theory because it was prevented.
Turns out the model was something like 10,000 lines of undocumented and untested C code, which was... basically impossible to analyze or explain.
> Ferguson's research has raised questions by virologist Hendrik Streeck. Ferguson is the corresponding author for a paper titled "Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand", which describes itself as having "informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in recent weeks".[55] Streeck stated in reference to the paper "In the – really good – model studies by the Imperial College about the progress of the epidemic, the authors assume, for example, that 50 percent of households in which there is a case do not comply with the voluntary quarantine. Where does such an assumption come from? I think we should establish more facts."[56] The computer models which Ferguson authored were initially criticised as "unreliable" and "a buggy mess,"[57][58] but subsequent efforts to reproduce the results were successful.[59]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)