Lockdowns Were Inspired by the CCP, admits Professor Neil Ferguson

Professor Neil Ferguson, the discredited Imperial College computer modeller behind Britain’s draconian lockdown policies, has come clean about his inspiration: none of it would have been possible without the shining example of the Chinese Communist Party.

In an extraordinary interview with the Times, Ferguson admits that if it hadn’t been for China’s example, no Western country would ever have dreamed of putting its populace under house arrest.

Back in 2019, no European country’s pandemic plans seriously entertained the prospect of putting a country on pause.

Then, that’s what China did. “I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March,” Professor Ferguson says.

In January, members of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention.

Ferguson said: "They [China] claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”

Then, as infections seeded across the world, Sage debated whether, nevertheless, lockdowns would be effective here. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.

“And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

That phrase ‘get away with it’ is instructive. It implies that, at least on a subconscious level, Ferguson is aware that copying Communist China’s lockdown policy was not a morally acceptable act, merely one that peculiar circumstances made possible.

Though the lockdowns are unprecedented in modern history and have, in the UK, been responsible for the biggest collapse in GDP in 300 years, as well as the destruction of many thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of jobs, Ferguson shows zero contrition for having provided the computer modelled doomsday scenarios responsible for all this misery.

Neither did he apologise for breaking his own lockdown rules when he was caught with his mistress, saying instead: “I made some mistakes. I’ve been completely open in terms of saying they were mistakes. But, nevertheless, the fact that journalists were digging into my private life at that level of detail was not something I could ever imagine. That’s not something you want to be on the end of.

“My wife and son and my partner had journalists on the doorstep. I was actually in my flat in London, they didn’t know where I was. It was a very difficult time.”