Imperial College has produced a new fantasy number to test people’s gullibility. This time they are claiming that 19.8 million lives have been saved by vaccination.

Imperial College now have a global reputation for making provable wrong claims based on modelling and they appear to want to bolster that reputation. Previous harm caused by Imperial include Neil Ferguson’s models in 2001 that led to the culling of 6 million cattle and sheep allegedly to prevent spread of foot and mouth disease which cost the UK economy £10bn. Subsequent predictions have included 50,000-150,000 deaths in humans in 2002 due to CJD because of the BSE outbreak (there were 177 deaths), 200 million deaths from bird flu in 2005 worldwide (there were 78); 65,000 deaths from Swine flu in UK in 2009 (there were 457).

Although this was not Neil Ferguson’s work, this latest model from Imperial college is also out by orders of magnitude. Modelling is nothing by glorified guessing based on extrapolating from assumptions of the authors’ choosing. The assumptions were so wild in the latest attempt that they reached the absurd fantasy of 20 million lives having been saved. It is almost not worth wasting time on it but given the coverage it has had on mainstream media, it needs to be addressed.

Let’s take a look at what that would mean.. (more in the link below)

Imperial fantasy of 20 million lives saved