At Monday’s press conference, he claimed he forecast Coronovirus.
"So for the PM's chief adviser to claim, in the middle of his defence, "only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses" is worthy of some inspection. Such prescience would indeed have been impressive and helpful, and he does have a long-standing and well-known interest in mathematical modelling and big data.
Looking at his blog, there is one reference to coronavirus, and it was indeed in a blog written in March last year. But it wasn't quite as billed. It is a blog about the risk of a pandemic starting from a leak from a biological lab.
The point of it is that governments should pay money to "Red Teams" to try to break security at such institutions, including £1m to "honey trap" the security bosses.
If this is the writing that "explicitly" warned of the danger of coronaviruses, then it rather suggests that a key No 10 figure believes that biolab security is the relevant issue.
But then things get even stranger.
Mystery
The internet archive Wayback Machine, which tracks the changing versions of publicly available websites, shows that the blog was edited some time between 9 April and 3 May this year (after the pandemic started) to insert the reference to coronavirus and Chinese labs. This was first pointed out by a data scientist Jens Wiechers on social media, and can be seen here.
It is in the form of a new quote from an article already linked to in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was not in the original blog.
And the sitemap of Mr Cumming's blog corroborates this, showing that this post was indeed edited at 20:55:20 on the evening of 14 April this year, still available here. This happens to be the day Mr Cummings returned to work from his Durham trip."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52808059
"So for the PM's chief adviser to claim, in the middle of his defence, "only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses" is worthy of some inspection. Such prescience would indeed have been impressive and helpful, and he does have a long-standing and well-known interest in mathematical modelling and big data.
Looking at his blog, there is one reference to coronavirus, and it was indeed in a blog written in March last year. But it wasn't quite as billed. It is a blog about the risk of a pandemic starting from a leak from a biological lab.
The point of it is that governments should pay money to "Red Teams" to try to break security at such institutions, including £1m to "honey trap" the security bosses.
If this is the writing that "explicitly" warned of the danger of coronaviruses, then it rather suggests that a key No 10 figure believes that biolab security is the relevant issue.
But then things get even stranger.
Mystery
The internet archive Wayback Machine, which tracks the changing versions of publicly available websites, shows that the blog was edited some time between 9 April and 3 May this year (after the pandemic started) to insert the reference to coronavirus and Chinese labs. This was first pointed out by a data scientist Jens Wiechers on social media, and can be seen here.
It is in the form of a new quote from an article already linked to in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was not in the original blog.
And the sitemap of Mr Cumming's blog corroborates this, showing that this post was indeed edited at 20:55:20 on the evening of 14 April this year, still available here. This happens to be the day Mr Cummings returned to work from his Durham trip."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52808059
