Neil Ferguson
© @SkyNews/twitterBoffin Neil Ferguson said 100,000 cases a day was inevitable but now believes the pandemic is in retreat and will be over by October.
Nothing has worsened the panic, misery and loss of public confidence more over the past 18 months than freelancing scientists and other politically motivated "experts" baselessly predicting catastrophe.

Or suddenly changing their minds.

They have loved their 15 lucrative minutes of fame and snapped up every invitation to pontificate before a TV camera.

Faced with a pandemic no one alive has experienced, many are just winging it.

Yet every word is treated as gospel.

When cases were rising, ex-Sage Professor Neil Ferguson said 100,000 a day was inevitable, maybe double.

Other scientists agreed, denouncing Boris Johnson as a clown whose Freedom Day gamble would swamp the NHS.

Labour's Keir Starmer chimed in with utter certainty that we were "heading to 100,000 cases a day" and the reckless PM was personally to blame.

Yesterday, only nine days later and with cases dropping like a stone, Ferguson said the pandemic is in retreat and will pretty much be over by October.

Starmer is praying his latest knee-jerk opportunism, the hallmark of his pitiful leadership, is quietly forgotten.

And let's not overlook the lockdown-loving wreckers of "Independent Sage", the discredited leftie science group set up by a Brexit-hating conspiracy theorist-cum-"journalist" to undermine the Government in our gravest crisis since 1940.

All involved should be ashamed.

A few members of real Sage should too.

They should have been told to speak publicly with one voice from the start.

Why are on-the-hoof Covid theories treated by credulous interviewers as unassailable fact?

No one really knows why cases began plummeting a week ago and are now down by half.

No one saw it coming.

It does far more harm than good for self-interested boffins to spout off when their guess is no better than anyone else's.