Who pushed exponential growth?
And who should have known better?
When Covid started the media relentlessly pushed that epidemics grow exponentially. One infects two, two infect four rather than the actual one infects, two infect between four and zero. Not that I knew the latter argument at the time. What I did know was that exponential growth breaks realizability in a finite world when more people are infected than exist so I was dubious about the propaganda. That still left the get out of growing exponentially then not, which I now reject as breaking Farr’s Law of 1840 unless some contrived event occurs. A little surfing of the internet and I found the standard SIR model of 1927 in which the growth is logistic, then I had to switch off the TV, the radio and not red the newspaper so as to avoid the constant gaslighting.
This article exists to list those people who you might have expected to have the background to reject the idea of exponential growth of an epidemic but instead pushed the misinformation. As such it will be incomplete and subject to updating. A lot of the people listed will have been subject to public abuse and I don’t wish this article to be the source of any more. Instead with scepticism being at the heart of science it should be a counter to those who’ve effectively said trust me I’m an expert when they are obviously prepared to go beyond their area of expertise.
Press conferences
Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Adviser, USA
Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser, UK
Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England
YouTube videos
Tom Crawford, University of Oxford
Nigel Goldenfeld, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kit Yates, University of Bath
Articles
Marcus de Sautoy, University of Oxford
Books
Jordan Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin - Admittedly a few paragraphs later he says it doesn’t, then he says it does.
Hans Rosling, Karolinska Institutet
David Spiegelhalter, University of Cambridge