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Home News

Toby Young ridiculed for coronavirus maths “brain fart”

Amid much mockery of Young, fact-checkers FullFact were forced to issue a rebuke, stating that Young "incorrectly cited the study".

Henry Goodwin by Henry Goodwin
2020-11-19 14:14
in News
Toby Young speaks at the newly opened West London Free School.

Toby Young speaks at the newly opened West London Free School.

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Always keen to showcase his formidable intellect, writer and self-avowed lockdown sceptic Toby Young drew ridicule on Wednesday for some seriously questionable maths.

Young’s now-deleted tweet claimed that a study reported in the Daily Mail showed that Covid-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.1 per cent – comparable with the flu.

But, of course, Young’s calculations were off. If over 5 million Brits had coronavirus in the UK by August, as the study argued, and around 50,000 had died, then the IFR is around 1 per cent – not 0.1 per cent.

Amid much mockery of Young, fact-checkers FullFact were forced to issue a rebuke, stating that Young “incorrectly cited the study and the Daily Mail article, as well as incorrectly calculating an IFR rate”.

Young has since issued a correction, blaming it on the fact that he “had been up till 6am doing Lockdown Sceptics and had a brain fart”. Shame.

Here’s some of the best reaction.

Who to trust, all the epidemiologists around the world who say that it’s not flu or [squints] an egg who can’t divide by 100 pic.twitter.com/PlghqgpBU6

— James Felton (@JimMFelton) November 18, 2020

This man set up a school. He is the media’s very own Derek Zoolander. https://t.co/SDQ7BBgskc

— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) November 18, 2020

So I'm pretty confident all the trolls who consistently attack Dianne Abbott for making a numerical error will spend the next 5 years attacking Toby Young for this.
(It's 1% not 0.1%) pic.twitter.com/QeztLkG5fD

— Paddy Roxburgh (@PaddyTofu) November 18, 2020

Looking at Toby’s terrible maths here, I think we should all breathe a sigh of relief that he’s no longer involved in education policy https://t.co/Bva2krsPhh

— Liam Thorp (@LiamThorpECHO) November 18, 2020

Related: Downing Street’s war with the media is over. Or is it?

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