He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics in 1990 atLady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree intheoretical physics in 1994 atLinacre College, Oxford.[5][6] His doctoral research investigated interpolations from crystalline to dynamically triangulated random surfaces and was supervised byJohn Wheater.[2][1][7] It was there that he attended a lecture byRobert May on modelling theHIV epidemic, which together with the death of a friend's brother fromAIDS, interested him in pursuing the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases.[8]
Ferguson was part ofRoy Anderson's group of infectious disease scientists who moved from the University of Oxford to Imperial College in November 2000, and started working on modelling the2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak a few months later.[10][11]
As of February 2020, at Imperial College, London, he was a professor ofmathematical biology,[12][19][20] director of the Jameel Institute (J-IDEA), head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine.[11]
During the2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak Ferguson worked on the team, led byRoy M. Anderson of Imperial College, creating mathematical models used to inform the UK Government of the most effective methods of preventing the spread offoot-and-mouth-disease.[22] Ferguson published a journal article inScience magazine in April 2001 describing the mathematical models that were relied upon by the UK government to recommend the mass slaughter of millions of cows, sheep and pigs in the UK in order to stop the spread of the disease;[23] over a decade later, the BBC would remind its readers Ferguson "was among those advising government on how to control the epidemic a decade ago."[24]
In August 2005, Neil Ferguson said in an interview thatbird flu could kill as many as 200 million people worldwide. He stated that "Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak" and that "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it [the death toll from bird flu] up to around 200 million people probably".[25] In the interview, he warned that failure to take swift action would be catastrophic for the United Kingdom, saying that "If the virus got as far as Britain, it would effectively be too late".[26] The virus did not reach Britain and 74 persons worldwide died of bird flu in 2005.[27]
During theswine flu outbreak in 2009 in the UK, in an article titled "Closure of schools during an influenza pandemic" published in theLancet Infectious Diseases, Ferguson and colleagues endorsed the closure of schools to interrupt the course of the infection, slow further spread and buy time to research and produce a vaccine.[29][30] Ferguson's team reported on the economic and workforce effect school closure would have, particularly with a large percentage of doctors and nurses being women, of whom half had children under the age of 16.
They studied previous influenza pandemics including the1918 flu pandemic, theinfluenza pandemic of 1957 and the1968 flu pandemic. They also looked at the dynamics of the spread of influenza in France during French school holidays and noted that cases of flu dropped when schools closed and re-emerged when they reopened. They noted that when teachers in Israel went on strike during the flu season of 1999–2000, visits to doctors and the number of respiratory infections, fell by more than a fifth and more than two-fifths respectively.[31]
In theHouse of LordsScience and Technology Committee's "follow-up" to the swine flu epidemic in 2009, Ferguson recommended that to halt transmission of swine flu, actions would need to include "treating isolated cases with antivirals, public health measures such as school closures, travel restrictions around the region, mass use of antiviralprophylaxis in the population and possible use of vaccines".[32] He was also asked why there was not a policy for vaccinating frontline healthcare workers at that time.[32]
In 2014, as the director of theUK Medical Research Council's centre for outbreak analysis and modelling at Imperial, Ferguson provided data analysis for the WHO, onEbola during theebola epidemic in Western Africa.[34] In the same year, he co-wrote a paper withChristopher J. M. Whitty andJeremy Farrar, published inNature, titled "Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission",[35] explaining the UK government's response to ebola in Sierra Leone, including the proposal to build and support centres where people could self-isolate voluntarily if they suspected they had the disease.[36]
In 2016, he co-wrote a paper titled "Countering the Zika epidemic in Latin America", published inScience. Although disputed by at least one other biostatistician,[38] Ferguson and his team concluded that the age distribution of future outbreaks of zika will likely differ and that a new large epidemic would be delayed for "at least a decade".[39] Cases of zika dropped after 2016.[38] That year, he predicted that the zika outbreak in the Americas would be over within three years, and clarified that "viruses tend to return when there are enough susceptible people, such as children, to sustain a new outbreak".[40]
Wolbachia is a bacterium frequently found in insects but not in theAedes aegypti mosquito, which carries thedengue virus. In 2015, Ferguson published a paper titled "Modeling the impact on virus transmission ofWolbachia-mediated blocking of dengue virus infection ofAedes aegypti", in which he and his team presented their experiments and used a mathematical model to show that one strain ofWolbachia, could reduce the ability of theAedes aegypti mosquito to transmit dengue, with a 66–75% reduction in thebasic reproduction number.[19][42]
In February 2020, during theCOVID-19 pandemic, using statistical models that considered data on the number of deaths and recoveries inside China, travellers outside China and in those affected that had returned home, Ferguson,Azra Ghani and their team estimated that detected cases of COVID-19 had significantly underestimated the actual spread of the disease in China.[44][45][46][47][48] That month he stated that only 10% of cases were being detected in China.[47] At the same time, it was noted that the number of available testing kits had come into question,[46] and Ferguson calculated that only one in three cases coming into the UK was being detected.[49] He stated "that approximately two-thirds of cases in travellers from China have not yet been detected. It is highly likely that some of these undetected cases will have started chains of transmission within the countries they entered."[50][51][52] He said that the new coronavirus could affect up to 60% of the UK's population, in the worst-case scenario,[53] and "suggest(ed) that the impact of the unfolding epidemic may be comparable to the major influenza pandemics of the twentieth century."[45][54][55] His team's publication in mid-March of the projections that the UK could face hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID-19 without strict social distancing measures, gained widespread media attention.[56][57] In late March, he calculated that with "strictsocial distancing, testing and isolation of infected cases", deaths in the UK could fall to less than 20,000.[58]
Ferguson's research has raised questions by virologistHendrik Streeck. Ferguson is the corresponding author for a paper titled "Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand", which describes itself as having "informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in recent weeks".[59] Streeck stated in reference to the paper "In the – really good – model studies by the Imperial College about the progress of the epidemic, the authors assume, for example, that 50 percent of households in which there is a case do not comply with the voluntary quarantine. Where does such an assumption come from? I think we should establish more facts."[60] The COVID-19 computer model which Ferguson authored (seeCovidSim) was initially criticised as "unreliable" and "a buggy mess,"[61][62] but subsequent efforts to reproduce the results were successful.[63]
Ferguson has been a regular guest onBBC Radio 4's morning programmeToday during the pandemic.
On 5 May 2020, it emerged that Ferguson had resigned from his position as a government advisor on theScientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee after admitting to "undermining" the government's messages on social distancing by trysting with a married woman, Antonia Staats.[64][65][66]The Telegraph reported that she had visited his home at least two times. After resigning, Ferguson said "I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms", adding that he regretted undermining "clear messages" about the need for social distancing. TheSecretary of State for Health and Social Care,Matt Hancock, said that he was right to resign from his advisory position.[67] Ferguson did not receive a fine or prosecution for his actions, as at the time it was not illegal as he had not left his home;[68] this legal loophole was later closed.[69] It was subsequently revealed that Ferguson had remained a member of the SAGE sub-committee NERVTAG and continued to contribute to the advisory committee SPI-M.[70]
In August 2022, after revelations by former ChancellorRishi Sunak, retired Supreme Court judge and prominent libertarian critic of government COVID lockdowns,Jonathan Sumption blamed "Report 9" of Ferguson’sImperial College COVID-19 Response Team in 2020 for "one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times".[71]
In recognition of his policy work on non-pharmaceutical intervention measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic, Ferguson received an Emergent Ventures award and associated grant money from theMercatus Center.[73]
Ferguson reported on 18 March 2020 that he had developed the symptoms of COVID-19, and self-isolated. He recovered after a mild illness.[58][87] Ferguson is separated from his wife and has one son.[88]
^Highfield, Roger (12 April 2001)."Has the A-team defeated the virus?".The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved5 May 2020.The Imperial team alone had much to offer. Dr Neil Ferguson, a mathematical epidemiologist, had already started to analyse the numbers. He was alarmed by what his computer seemed to be saying: the disease was out of control.
^Ferguson, Neil (11 May 2001)."The Foot-and-Mouth Epidemic in Great Britain: Pattern of Spread and Impact of Interventions".Science.292 (5519). American Association for the Advancement of Science:1155–1160.Bibcode:2001Sci...292.1155F.doi:10.1126/science.1061020.PMID11303090.S2CID16914744.The quality of fit of the model to the data was good (Fig. 3, A through C), given the fluctuating nature of daily case reports. Incidence predictions are plotted (Fig. 3D) for the best fit model and for the parameter sets corresponding to the upper and lower 95% confidence bounds on predicted total epidemic size (measured by R 0). The 95% confidence bounds on the final size of the epidemic were estimated as 44 to 64% of the population at risk. Here we assume the population at risk to be the approximately 45,000 farms in the currently infected areas in Great Britain, under the presumption that infection is prevented from spreading further.
^Pallab Ghosh (6 May 2011)."Mass culling for foot-and-mouth 'may be unnecessary'". BBC. Retrieved7 May 2020.Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, was among those advising government on how to control the epidemic a decade ago.
^Wright, Oliver (6 May 2020). "Top government adviser quits after breaking lockdown with his mistress".The Times. p. 1.She lives with her husband and their children in another house.
