A report entitled Use and abuse of mathematical models: an illustration from the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom13 strongly concluded that ‘the slaughter that took place was grossly excessive’ and that ‘the rift between the models and the practical reality of implementation may be so huge as to make the models irrelevant’. In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could die worldwide from bird flu. They didn’t.
