FOR THE last two years, Regina Watteel PhD, a Canadian statistician specialising in risk-benefit and options analysis, has been on a mission to expose a pandemic modelling fraud, Dr David Fisman’s fraud. I took a personal interest because Dave Fisman and I are old acquaintances. He is, or at least was, an amiable character whose company I always enjoyed. What Watteel exposes is that behind the warm smile and good nature I remember hides a ruthless streak of ambition and a willingness to distort facts if it suits him.
The fraud in question was ‘replacing real-world observations with a fictional simulation to scapegoat an unprotected minority (the unvaccinated) for product failure’, Watteel claims.
The fraud was the ‘science’ that Fisman produced for the Trudeau government that asserted the unvaccinated were a risk to the vaccinated. This ‘science’ was then used to justify draconian Covid-19 measures – the vaccine mandates and passports without which it was impossible to eat in a restaurant, drink in a bar, play ice hockey, work for the Canadian government or travel by plane or train across the vast expanse of Canada.
Contrary to Fisman’s ludicrous modelling simulation, Watteel’s own analysis of the real-world data showed covid vaccines were a complete failure for which the unvaccinated were being scapegoated. After the rollout, covid cases in vaccinated-only workplaces rose to unprecedented levels, Covid-19 numbers dwarfed pre-vaccination peaks, and Covid-19 hospitalisations doubled previous records.
Fisman may not have the same name recognition this side of the Atlantic as has Professor Neil Ferguson, but in the rogues’ gallery of pandemic modellers he stands apart. The public has the measure of Ferguson, whose worst-case-scenario predictions have since foot-and-mouth in 2001 a track record of being risibly wrong. Few read for themselves Ferguson’s papers. The wildly exaggerated predictions produced by his worst-case fatality modelling make headlines and leave him open to public ridicule, but no-one, so far as I can tell, has formally accused him of outright intentional fraud.
Ferguson may even have reason to feel at times his modelling is misused politically. Many still believe wrongly his modelling led to the March 2020 UK lockdowns. In fact the former was used after the fact to justify the latter. (On March 16, 2020, Sage was presented with a report on the Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce Covid-19 mortality and healthcare demand which it had commissioned from a specially convened Imperial College Covid-19 response team led by Professor Neil Ferguson. Non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) does not mean lockdown; indeed this is what it had not previously meant. It means the ‘social’ steps that can be taken to limit infection and the impact of disease).
As Dominic Cummings put on public record during the Hallett Inquiry, he pushed Boris Johnson into the lockdown because of back-of-the-envelope modelling produced by Marc Warner, his personal modelling guru who was running the NHSX digital health programme.
Warner persuaded Johnson that if further mitigation measures weren’t introduced the NHS would collapse, overwhelmed by exponentially growing numbers dying of covid. As Cummings testified to parliamentary committees in May 2021, the decision to lock down was taken in a meeting with Boris Johnson in the Cabinet Office on March 14, the day before Ferguson’s draft study was first circulated. (For a detailed account of Cummings’s critical role see my series published last year)
Watteel’s quarry, Professor David Fisman, is head of the epidemiology department at the University of Toronto School of Medicine, one of the pre-eminent medical schools in Canada. He’s a friend and former Harvard School of Public Health classmate of Dr Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centre for Disease Control during the pandemic. Fisman became a public figure in Canada early in 2020. Even my own initial scepticism over the dramatised events in Wuhan was for a time suspended after seeing one of his early TV interviews. He seemed genuinely concerned. As I knew him and trusted him, I found myself thinking maybe there is something to this.
It didn’t last. Fisman, whose conflicts of interests include consulting for vaccine developers and teaching unions, pushed the covid agenda hard. Nor was Watteel the first to call him out. In January 2022, Ambarish Chandra, an associate professor at the University of Toronto (UoT) Rotman Business School, challenged him over school closures, which Fisman had also claimed would interrupt transmission. Fisman churlishly blasted Chandra as ‘right-wing’ when Chandra pointed out that his transmission claim was untrue.
Fisman then posted some hospitalisation statistics saying he was going to write a thread on the latest trend in data fudging, leading Chandra to point out Fisman’s own fudging, saying, ‘This graph of yours is not just misleading, it is straight out of “How to Lie with Statistics”. You selectively reduce the y-axis for kids to suggest that hospitalisations are comparable to adults. My undergraduate students know better than to do that.’
Fisman called Chandra ‘uncollegial’.
Eighty-one percent of Canadians received at least one covid vaccine but Fisman set out to help make life intolerable for those who didn’t. It was already disconcertingly common for people who were open about their choice to decline the experimental vaccines to be shunned by those who didn’t. Over Christmas 2021, one friend of mine was exiled from family celebrations. She had been sick with covid pneumonia in August and although she had recovered, her triple vaccinated mother remained absurdly afraid she might still pose a risk. Quality time with her mother that holiday season entailed standing outside in -20 °C speaking through the firmly closed window of a car. How does a vaccine protect anyone if the recipients remain fearful of those who haven’t had it?
Into this already combustible atmosphere, Fisman and his co-authors tossed in a paper suggesting that being unvaccinated against Covid-19 was a risk to the community in the same way as indoor smoking or drunk driving. ‘We thought what was missing from that conversation was, what are the rights of vaccinated people to be protected from unvaccinated people,’ he told CTV evening news. In his upside-down world, it was a crime to refuse a medical treatment and breathe the same air as others.
Prime Minister Trudeau now gaslights Canadians by saying, ‘My responsibility was to keep as many Canadians alive as possible. And all of the scientists and the medical experts and the researchers, not just in Canada but around the world, understood that vaccination was going to be the way through this. And therefore while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated I chose to make sure that all the incentives and all the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated.’
Watteel had never heard of Fission until April 2022. There is a laudable motivation behind her efforts to expose Fisman’s fraud. She writes of his paper, ‘Not only did it work to vilify an identifiable group of people, but there are no protections or mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening again . . . This is especially concerning, as Fisman leads the modelling for future pandemic preparedness and response at UofT’s Institute for Pandemics, showing that greater scrutiny of data and statistics is needed to prevent future scientific abuses.’
Fisman has an influential pulpit. As Regina Watteel ably argues, his pronouncements on epidemic modelling, which are far more extreme than any put forward by Neil Ferguson, need to come with a health warning. Your own health may depend on it.
