Peter Ford, former UK Ambassador to Syria, responds to the alarmist report partially penned by infamous hysteria creator, Neil Ferguson.

“Imperial College have produced a study (link below) purporting to show that Damascus has far more COVID 19 deaths than anywhere on the planet, and that the epidemic has peaked there. The tsunami passed virtually unnoticed because of Syrian official under-reporting, allegedly. 

The Guardian point to this report in the context of a wider account of a bombshell briefing to Parliament by an expert from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. 

By implication the briefing tends to blow out of the water several tenets of establishment covid theory:-

1. Places in Africa and the Middle East such as Sudan and Yemen escaped relatively unscathed despite (or because of) not taking many lockdown measures-

2. Levels of herd immunity appear to have been attained-

3. Previous Coronavirus infections appear to have conferred high levels of protection-

4. The pandemic is virtually over in these areas- low levels of testing have obviously not hampered early recovery

‘Confounding’ is the word used to describe experts’ description of these findings, which evokes a delightful picture of the great WHO panjandrums et al scratching their heads at being at last rumbled.

The Syria report is even more odd. Extrapolating from death statistics for a single week at the end of August the authors, among them the famous Neil Ferguson, conclude that the official Covid death count for Damascus Governorate represented only about 1.25% of actual deaths. Accordingly the authors reckon there have been about 4,340 deaths in Damascus Governorate (estimated population 2.4 million).

If true, this would mean that Damascus had a deaths per one million rate of 1,850. That is more than double London’s rate of about 765 (6,885 deaths with a population of about 9 million). Peru, which has the highest death toll in world, scores 929 per million.

So to find such jaw-dropping incidence in Damascus is odd, to say the least, when the median age in Syria is 24 and when we know that covid 19 victims are predominantly elderly. And when the Guardian is reporting at the same time that countries comparable to Syria like Yemen and Sudan have escaped relatively unscathed. 

The authors do not address these anomalies. Why would they when among their funders we find the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and among the contributors to the study – a prominent Syrian oppositionist (Rim Turkmani)? Could the instigators of the study possibly have been looking to concoct evidence that  the government of Syria was hiding the extent of Covid’s spread in the country?