Today in Things That Didn’t Age Well: the great foot-and-mouth scare of ’01, starring a very familiar face.
Australia is rushing specialist veterinarians to Britain as countries across the world move to contain the catastrophic outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that began there.
And amid warnings that Australia could lose $10 billion a year in exports and 25,000 jobs if the disease reaches here, strict checks are being imposed on all travellers who have visited contaminated countries in the past three months[…]
Australian airports have imposed a strict regime of checks for people who have been in the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic and Turkey. All those who have are sent through the red “channel” to have their possessions examined and, if necessary, disinfected.Similar precautions are being taken around the world.
In the United States inspectors are disinfecting the footwear of returning travellers, German and French airports are isolating and disposing of food from British flights, and French officials are spraying the tyres of vehicles from across the channel.
Does this all sound a bit familiar? The panic, the rush to slam down borders and impose travel restrictions. Above all, the scary, scary “expert predictions” of “catastrophe”.
Britain has asked for animal epidemiologists trained to monitor the spread of disease and specialists trained to manage animal disease emergency control centres, the “war rooms” in the battle to contain the disease.
A spokesman for the Australian Quarantine and Protection Service, Carson Creagh, yesterday warned that importation of the disease into Australia would be disastrous.
Mr Creagh said the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Research Economics warned in a report several years ago that a significant outbreak here would cost $8 million to $10 million a day to contain.
ABARE said the cost to Australia in the first year would be in the range of $6 billion to $8 billion[…]
The spreading crisis in Europe will place pressure on already dwindling world beef stocks.
The Age
So does anyone remember how foot-and-mouth spiralled out of control around the world, back in ’01?
Sure, millions of cattle and sheep were killed – not by the disease, but by the panic.
In the end, there were just 2,000 cases in Britain and a handful outside Britain.
But 6 million sheep and cows in Britain alone were slaughtered in the panic. Ireland went on the slaughter, even sending soldiers to snipe wild deer, after just one case.
In Britain alone, the cost of the panic was about £8bn.
Before anyone argues that the massive culls prevented a devastating outbreak, let us consider the source of all the panic.
[Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
National Review
Yes, that Neil Ferguson.
Even the above sentence over-eggs Ferguson’s credentials. He’s not an epidemiologist. He doesn’t have even high school biology credentials. He’s not a biological statistician nor a formally trained computer modeller, either.
Elon Musk described Ferguson as an “utter moron” and “tool”, who does absurdly fake ‘science’”.
Ferguson was catastrophically wrong about foot-and-mouth. He was absurdly wrong about BSE, bird flu, and swine flu.
Yet, on his word on COVID, billions of people have been plunged into yo-yo-ing lockdowns, forced to wear muzzles in public, kept from their “non-essential” jobs and social gatherings, and burdened with generations of debt.
We should have learned from foot-and-mouth.
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