The Scariest, Completely Out of Touch, Line in the New Edition of the Council On Foreign Relations Magazine

The Council on Foreign Affairs, New York City

The September/October 2020 edition of Foreign Affairs, the in-house publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, is out.

This is the magazine the elite insiders read to get guidance on policy direction from the CFR.

The new edition has an essay by Thomas J. Bollyky and Chad P. Bown, The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism.

Most of the article is a discussion on which countries will get first dibs on emerging COVID-19 vaccines.

But there was this scary line:

Forecasts project that the coronavirus pandemic could kill 40 million people and reduce global economic output by $12.5 trillion by the end of 2021.

Where they are getting this death toll number is not clear. It is the same number that was in the old Imperial College of London forecast which it is now understood was based on a faulty model.

From Business Insider, March 27, 2020:

Without intense government intervention, the novel coronavirus could infect 7 billion people and kill 40 million this year, according to a new report from researchers at the Imperial College of London.

But from The Daily Mail on May 17, 2020:

Modelling from Imperial College London epidemiologist Professor Ferguson, who stepped down from the government's Sage group at the start of May, has been described as 'totally unreliable' by other experts.

The coding that produced the sobering death figures was impossible to read, and therefore cast doubts on its strength...

When other scientists have tried to replicate the findings using the same model, they have repeatedly failed to do...

David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco said the model was a 'buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming'.

He said: 'In our commercial reality we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.' 

Johan Giesecke, the former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has called Ferguson’s model “the most influential scientific paper” in memory. He also says it was, sadly, “one of the most wrong.”

So what the hell is going on at Foreign Affairs? Is this a case where the magazine is unaware that the Imperial College Model has been totally discredited months ago?

Why are they pumping out total nonsense that 40 million people might die from COVID-19 by the end of 2021? Do they have that long of a publication schedule between submission and publication? It was obvious by April that the models were faulty.

But even if there is a long stretch between submission and punlication, why didn't Bollyky and Bown pick at least some of the problems, themselves, when the report initially came out? I did: Will 2.2 Million Americans Die From COVID-19?

So are the elitist establishment readers going to think that 40 million might die from COVID-19 by the end of 2021 because of this sloppy commentary?

For the record as of Tuesday, there have only been 782,341 COVID-19 related deaths worldwide.

-RW