The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

The press portrayed the mass vaccination program as a gamble.9 But Ford thought of it as a gamble between money and lives, and one that he was on the right side of. Overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress approved his plans at a cost of $180 million.10 By summer, however, there were serious doubts about the government’s plans. Although summer is the natural low season for the flu in the United States,11 it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, when flu is normally at its peak. And nowhere, from Auckland to Argentina, were there any signs of H1N1; instead, the mild and common A/Victoria was the dominant strain again. Indeed, the roughly two hundred cases at Fort Dix remained the only confirmed cases of H1N1 anywhere in the world, and Private Lewis’s the only death. Criticism started to pour in from all quarters: from the assistant director of the CDC,12 the World Health Organization,13 the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet,14 and the editorial pages of the New York Times, which was already characterizing the H1N1 threat a “false alarm.”15 No other Western country had called for such drastic measures.