While President Trump makes the calls for the country, he has been basing his decisions on the information that is provided to him by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.

The problem that we have now is that we know that the Imperial College Model that they used to convince President Trump to shut down the entire country has been confirmed to be a complete fraud.

President Trump did what he thought was the right decision based on the information that he was given.

“The big projection being that 2.2 million people would die if we did nothing. That was another decision we made, close it up. That was a big decision that we made. Two very smart people walked into my office and said listen these are your alternatives. And that was a projection of 1.5 to 2.2 million people would die if we didn’t close it up. That’s a lot of people.”

In a report from the New York Times, Sheri Fink describes how the Imperial College researchers shared their projections with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. This is where the model is derived…

Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.

To curb the epidemic, there would need to be drastic restrictions on work, school and social gatherings for periods of time until a vaccine was available, which could take 18 months, according to the report, compiled by British researchers. They cautioned that such steps carried enormous costs that could also affect people’s health, but concluded they were “the only viable strategy at the current time.”

That is because different steps, intended to drive down transmission by isolating patients, quarantining those in contact with them and keeping the most vulnerable apart from others for three months, could only cut the predicted death toll by half, the new report said…

…Asked at a news conference with President Trump about what had led to the change in thinking by a White House task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, one of the task force leaders, said new information had come from a model developed in Britain.

Since this time, over 30 million people have lost their jobs and we’re nowhere near the number of deaths that this faulty model predicted.

Now, a software engineer who studied the model says it’s complete trash and needs to be replaced immediately:

“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.”