imperial college london was the cause of the overreaction to covid19. it was their shitty pandemic simulation that showed over 10% of the planet would die "if we do everything right" and much higher percentages if everyone didn't cooperate immediately on stopping the spread. this freaked out the british government, who in turn spread the news around, freaking out europe and the anglosphere. before anyone had the chance to verify anything, the planet was rushing into lockdown everywhere. when asked to show the code they used for the simulation, they delayed over and over again. eventually they hired microsoft to come in and "clean the code up a bit". even with weeks of work on it by an army of developers, what got released was still a huge pile of shit that couldn't even reproduce the numbers originally shown to the british government. each time it was run with the exact same inputs, it would return wildly different results.  there were no consequences for icl or the academics there who freaked out the planet with their flawed simulations that lead to the insane government overreach that followed.
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