Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a British professor of epidemiology and is the link that connects many of Britain’s major modern pandemic responses and the majority of the official cover ups related to those events. He also happens to be the pioneer of pandemic computer modelling, models which – when applied to real world situations – have often proven to be highly erroneous. Nevertheless, his importance to and influence on the events of the last quarter of a century cannot be understated. Sir Roy Anderson is the British Establishment's “man for all seasons” when it comes to pandemics.

 

Anderson was born on 12 April 1947 to James Anderson and Betty Watson-Weatherborn. He was educated at both Dunscombe School and Hertford Grammar School and would go on to study at Imperial College at the University of London. Between 1971 and 1973 Anderson was an IBM research fellow at the University of Oxford and from there he went on to lecture for four years at King's College, University of London (UCL). In the late 1970s, Anderson could be found lecturing at Imperial College London, where he would also be noted as a reader (a reader denotes an appointment of a senior academic to a Commonwealth further educational establishment with a distinguished international reputation in research or scholarship) between 1980 and 1982. In 1982, he would become a Professor of Parasite Ecology and he would become the head of the UCL's biology department two years later. He would hold these two positions until 1993, when he became the Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford University, a historic post first founded in 1860. That same year, Anderson would also be installed as Head of the Department of Zoology. He would also be named the director of the Wellcome Trust. Anderson had already served as a governor at the Wellcome Trust beginning just two years before, in 1991, and he would go on to head this “philanthropic” organisation until 2000, departing only when his behaviour towards a particular lady at Oxford became an uncomfortable issue.

 

Anderson received the Establishment honour of being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986 and he would become known for working on the modelling of the AIDS virus. He subsequently became an advisor for the Thatcher government. He would then begin making media appearances, such as an interview Anderson gave on 24 September 1987, where he politely discusses the AIDS crisis with Colin Tudge on the British classical music station, BBC Radio 3. Anderson's opinion on AIDS was reported again in the then Robert Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror a year later, on 10 September 1988. He had made a speech to the Science Association at a meeting in Oxford where he is recorded as warning that the country may be “on the border line of an epidemic that could hit many heterosexuals”. A survey conducted over the following year would find that some AIDS experts were concerned about the fight against the disease being downgraded because of the public perception that it “only threatens homosexuals and drug addicts.” Remarkably, the survey's findings showed that AIDS specialists believed that there were now “medical advantages” to treating HIV-infected people before they develop full-blown AIDS. The Liverpool Echo reported on 28 November 1989, that Prof Roy Anderson's predictions for the future of the spread of AIDS, with the article stating that he believed “the pessimistic view is that the second wave of the epidemic will appear in intravenous drug users in five to ten years time.” Anderson also stated that “there might then be a third wave, affecting mainly heterosexuals, on a longer time scale of 20 to 30 years'”. It should be noted that whilst Anderson was starting to talk about potential HIV treatments, Burrough's Wellcome – the then-US pharmaceutical arm of UK's Wellcome plc – had started producing and marketing a new drug for HIV called AZT. The compound was the first drug to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of what was called at the time “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” (AIDS).

 

In 1988, Roy Anderson was also making a name for himself among concerned mothers who didn't trust the MMR vaccine. On 10 September 1988, a report in the Aberdeen Evening Express with the headline “Compulsory Jabs Urged”, stated that “Children should not be allowed to attend primary school unless they have been vaccinated, according to a scientist”. A small side note in the newspaper article goes on to say, “Prof Roy Anderson of Imperial College London, said many health regions achieved only 57% of immunisation targets”. This may be the first hint of Roy Anderson's penchant for using totalitarian policies to increase vaccine uptake.

 

In 1998, Anderson would again become a government advisor and he would soon have his attention diverted towards a new variant of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a progressive neurological disorder of cattle, which is commonly referred to as Mad Cow's Disease. Some cattle in Britain during this era were being fed a meat-and-bone meal that included the remains of other potentially affected cattle. One of the main issues was that it took four to five years to show up in the affected cows. This meant that by the time the cause was identified and rectified, the damage had already been done.

 

BSE had been discovered in 1985 by a junior pathologist who identified a spongy brain disease in a Frisian cow, but the connection with a potentially new form of bovine encephalopathy had not been recognised by senior officials until 1987. In 1996, the UK Government was advised that a new variant had been identified in humans and later, in December 1997, it was announced that there would be an inquiry into the history and emergence of BSE, and the Government's response to the crisis up until March 1996. The Inquiry, which would produce Roy Anderson as a key witness, started on 12 January 1998.

 

The BSE scandal was a well managed affair, it needed to be as the conservative government of the day had found themselves in a bit of hot water. During the period of 1983 until 1991, Sir Donald Acheson had been the government's Chief Medical Officer and had downplayed the risk of the potential cross-species spread of the illness. A cat had been diagnosed with the illness and, even with an example of cross species transmission of the disease, he had continuously recommended that it was safe to eat meat contaminated with BSE, stating clearly in 1990: “British beef can be eaten safely by everyone”. Acheson wasn't the only scientific entity at the time to be more concerned with sales of meat and milk than human health. The Southwood Working Party, which was led by Erik Millstone and a man named Patrick van Zwanenberg, would also claim in the early 90s that the offal of infected cattle was “safe for adults but not for babies”. The disease would eventually be transmitted to humans from the eating of contaminated beef. The official BSE inquiry would mostly attempt to shift the blame for the poorly managed response away from the government and on to the early stooges who had been tasked with playing down the risks. This moment was important in Anderson's development. His usefulness in managing the narrative of a precarious public inquiry had been noted by the Establishment and he would henceforth become a useful tool in the governments toolbox.

 

By the late 90s, Anderson's prestigious career had also seen him daubed with various honorary positions, titles and memberships, including his fellowship at the very exclusive Royal Society and the Zoological Society, as well as being a board member on many various international advisory panels. Some of these positions would be jeopardised by his own behaviour. In 1999, Anderson was suspended from his position at Oxford after he stated that a colleague of his had only got her promotion by sleeping around. The person he was targetting was Dr Sunetra Gupta, who would over two decades later oppose Anderson's extreme lockdown tactics during the Covid crisis as a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration. Notably, Gupta was married to Adrian Hill at this time, the man who has affiliations to the Wellcome Trust and who would later co-head the creation of the Oxford AZ vaccine during Covid-19 alongside Sarah Gilbert. At first, Anderson refused to retract his statements about Gupta, or apologise in any form, but eventually he was allowed to return to his Oxford position under the condition that he write a private apology to the people he had slandered. Anderson may have agreed to this proverbial slap on the wrists by the Oxford authorities, but Dr Gupta did not see this as an acceptable outcome. She demanded that he publicly retract his statement and that he also pay her a small amount of damages which would go to a charity. The pathetic drama, all to protect the ego of a misogynistic elite scientist, did not lead to Anderson retaining his position. A vote of no confidence from the board at Oxford would be unanimous, infuriating Anderson.

 

He would frame his departure with a positive spin. He had agreed with Imperial College London (ICL), to move his research projects, along with a grant worth over £7 million from the Wellcome Trust, and his band of 70 research staff to the ICL facilities, snubbing Oxford publicly in what appears to have been a pathetic example of pure egotistical spite. Along with his research team, Professor Anderson brought with him Professor Brian Spratt and Neil Ferguson, his close friends and colleagues. Even though Anderson thought he'd be able to retain his position as director of the Wellcome Trust, it would be “financial irregularities” which would eventually see Anderson removed from that specific position. It had surfaced that Anderson had an undeclared stake in a company receiving grants from the Wellcome Trust whilst he was also part of the committee which approved such grants. The financial stake was large enough to have broken the rules and, along with the Gupta saga still fresh in the collective mind of his colleagues, Anderson would stand down as the director of the Wellcome Trust. However, he would still continue to be receiving grants and funding from them.

 

Then, beginning in late 2000 and through 2001, Anderson and his team became central figures in one of the most controversial epidemic responses in British history.

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From Foot in Mouth to Foot and Mouth

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Anderson's team made a bizarre change to their central focus of study in the closing months of 2000 and during their relocation to Imperial College. Although his team had been primarily focused on human pandemics and modelling the spread of human diseases, they would suddenly, and without giving any public reasoning, divert their focus to studying Foot and Mouth Disease in November 2000. This sudden and dramatic sea-change in focus was made even more strange given that there hadn't been a significant Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in Britain since the late 1960s.

 

Anderson's research team at the time included Dr. Neil Ferguson and Dr. Christl Donnelly. Their team had pioneered the use of computers for modelling the epidemiology of human diseases, such as AIDS, malaria and TB; yet, none of these researchers had any veterinary training or an understanding of the differences between modeling a human epidemic as opposed to an infectious outbreak in animals. The BSE crisis, which was the only significant animal disease response Roy Anderson had previously been involved in, had been related to contaminated cattle feed and was not spread like a traditional virus capable of causing an infectious epidemic.

 

Coincidentally, a few months after Anderson's team had begun researching FMD, Britain recorded its first outbreak of the disease in over three decades. The subsequent actions of Roy Anderson, Neil Ferguson and their accomplices should be common knowledge; but, thanks to another convenient inquiry set up to fail, they were never held to account for their part in what would prove to be a devastating response to the Great Foot and Mouth Epidemic of 2001. This suspiciously convenient timing for an outbreak of FMD put Anderson's team in a prime position to become government advisors.

 

At the time, Foot and Mouth outbreaks were fought using a combination of methods. One of the most tried and tested ways to control a FMD outbreak was by using the vaccination ring method. Unlike humans, farm cattle don't usually travel long distances and thus, once an infection is noted, you then cull the affected animals and begin vaccinating all the livestock within a three mile radius, working your way back towards the original infection site. This is meant to effectively stop any outbreak within a week or two. There were political reasons why mass vaccination wasn't possible at the time, but a small vaccination ring alongside a focused cull had been successful in bringing recent FMD outbreaks in other countries under control quickly. The other methods, besides vaccinating, was culling the animals affected, and there are of course different levels of a culling response. If the government involved in the epidemic wants to mitigate the financial damage to farmers, then a combination of testing, vaccinating and culling can be very effective. However, it takes time, patience, persistence and resources to do the whole process humanely, something the British government at the time, then led by Tony Blair, had no interest in.

 

The MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food - which would soon after be abolished and replaced by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) had been trying to tackle the outbreak but, due to funding cuts made during the Thatcher government, their resources were insufficient for the task at hand. The FMD epidemic was a stage three outbreak by the time it was officially recognised, and it wasn't expected to be solved overnight. The MAFF would need more funding and resources if they were going to tackle the outbreak humanely. Anderson and Ferguson would soon be brought in to advise the Blair government on the appropriate steps and they would create computer models akin to Neil Ferguson's now infamous initial Covid-19 models. They predicted death and destruction on a scale beyond the imaginations of most and asserted that this dire scenario would undoubtedly unfold if they did not immediately take over the design of the response to the epidemic from the MAFF. Blair would give them the power they desired. Blair's lack of resistance to Anderson and his extreme methods could have been greatly influenced by the upcoming General Election, which was initially set to take place that May - only months away.

 

What followed was a fear-based and unscientific culling of mostly uninfected animals. The countryside of Great Britain became littered with burning pyres of livestock on a scale never seen before and the mass killing of animals left farmers completely traumatised by these extreme intervention methods. The British Army was even brought in to enact the culling process. The British countryside was put into lockdown and, unlike the Covid response, vaccines were vigorously attacked by Anderson as ineffective and likely to do more harm than good. This stance on vaccines represents an almost complete reversal when compared to our current paradigm. The FMD vaccines were widely considered very safe and mostly effective and there had been no negative side effects reported from humans consuming the milk and meat of animals who had been given this vaccine. In addition, this vaccine had been used to successfully control FMD on almost every occasion it was used. In contrast, today’s Covid “vaccines” are experimental, have many clear adverse reactions and were not fully tried and tested beforehand. Yet, the same people who have argued during the Covid pandemic for the mass use of these experimental vaccines had previously completely opposed a well-studied vaccine which had a known risk profile.

 

What the British people weren't being told at the time was how and where the outbreak really began and the epidemic’s plausible links to vaccine research, research which it is often argued, needs gain-of-function experimentation to aid in the development of potent and effective vaccines. The first rumours of a potential lab leak emerged in an article originally released in the Evening Chronicle on 5 May 2001 entitled: “Did Scientists Start Foot and Mouth Plague?” The article revealed that there were 20 current foot and mouth disease experiments being conducted by the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) at their Pirbright facilities including “Immune responses induced by foot and mouth disease vaccine”, “matching properties of foot and mouth disease virus strains with those in field strains” and “Transmission of foot and mouth disease in sheep." The article also reminds us that, during the crisis, the International Vaccine Bank for Foot and Mouth Disease was based at Pirbright, Surrey, and at that time stored “500,000 doses of high potency” vaccines for each of the seven different varieties of the disease.

 

Anderson and Ferguson's computer modelling failed to help in bringing the outbreak under control and, with a general election coming up, the political situation was tense. What would follow next was an extraordinary public manipulation of the data to make it look as though FMD cases were decreasing when they were not. Tony Blair would postpone the general election for another month. The official data, like during the Covid era, began being manipulated to suit the government's narrative and to aid their chances in the approaching election. The MAFF began changing the way in which they presented the statistics on their website -- they began deleting the previous day's figures as well as declining to report the earlier stats. Soon, they split the main number into three categories to play down the true totals. Anderson would have his computer model show that the crisis would be over, conveniently ending on the new General Election date Tony Blair had called. But, what the public hadn't been told was that the Army had sped up the cull.

 

The manipulation of the official government statistics would leave everyone who was attempting to calculate the actual number of culled animals completely baffled. No one knew the true figures any more. Even the government's own leading scientific expert on FMD, Dr Paul Kitching, would criticise the approach of Anderson and Ferguson's computer modelling, saying when interviewed, that “Anderson’s Computer” had certainly come up with “some very seductive graphs”, but the data available to be fed into the programme were so inadequate that “one has to question the value of the data coming out.” Kitching was particularly critical about the change of the election date from May to June as well as the fact that the computer projections were being adjusted as the political situation advanced. After making those comments, Kitching stated that he was resigning as deputy-head of the Pirbright Institute and would soon be taking up a new post in Canada.

 

When a public inquiry was called into the FMD response, that would also be heavily manipulated. The Blair government would split the planned inquiry into three separate inquiries, each with different remits. This allowed Roy Anderson to remain completely unaccountable for the consequences of his actions. In addition, two of the people involved in the reviews were also connected with Roy Anderson. As the now defunct Warmwell website reported:

 

“What made this inquiry so particularly open to suspicion was the network of contacts intimately linking it to the little group of scientists who had been at the centre of the crisis since March, and who had been personally responsible for some of the most questionable aspects of the way it was handled. The Royal Society's President was Sir Robert May, the former government chief scientist, who had played a key part in recommending another fellow of the society (FRS), Professor David King, to succeed him as chief scientist, and who had then stepped in to become Mr Blair's chief adviser on the crisis. Another FRS was Sir Robert's former Oxford colleague, Sir John Krebs of the Food Standards Agency, who had played a key part in having Prof. Roy Anderson FRS put in charge of the Government's policy for controlling the epidemic. Prof. Anderson had co-authored two books with his former colleague Sir Robert May.”

 

The FMD crisis is quite astounding when you compare it to the Covid crisis. During FMD, Anderson and Ferguson would produce a terrifying computer model and this would be central to the government response. They refused to consider anything but the harshest measures immediately, and frowned upon any discussion of alternative policies. They used the Army to slaughter millions of animals without any regard for the emotional and economic harm they were causing to the people or animals involved. When their models failed, they created a new model and publicly manipulated the figures. Anderson would become all powerful during FMD, as not even Blair dared to challenge him. The key components of this pattern would repeat, beginning in 2020. Ferguson and Anderson produced a terrifying computer model, which became central to the response. They refused to use any other strategies with Covid other than the harshest measures available, there were again no discussions about alternative measures allowed. They used the medical establishment during Covid like they had used the army during FMD, expecting and demanding drone-like obedience to what were probably illegal orders. Then, during Covid, when their models yet again failed, they began manipulating the numbers.

 

Despite his role in the scandalous FMD response, in 2003, Anderson became a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Advisory Group on SARS as well as the Health Protections Agency (HPA) Advisory Group on SARS. In 2004, Roy Malcolm Anderson also became the chief scientific advisor to the UK Ministry of Defence until 2008, at which point he would be installed as the Rector of Imperial College. These were rich rewards for a man who had managed to create a public perception of success out of the entirely disastrous FMD crisis of 2001. Between 2005 and 2011, Anderson would be made a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Scientific Advisory Board for the Initiative on Grand Challenges in Global Health. By 2007, the awards and accolades for Anderson were getting ridiculous. As well as becoming chairman of the World Health Organisation Science and Technology Advisory Board on Neglected Tropical Diseases, he would also become the Governor of the Institute of Government, Trustee of the Natural History Museum, and a Council Member for the Royal College of Art, just to name a few. He would also become a major advisor to various governments and national scientific bodies all across the globe including in Malaysia, Thailand, Netherlands, Singapore, USA. He also boasts previous connections to institutions in Canada, Switzerland and Germany.

 

More than five years after the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak, another scare happened when cattle tested positive for the disease. On this occasion, they managed to catch the outbreak very early and it wasn't allowed to spread. On that occasion the government accepted that major lab breaches had happened at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright, which had led to the disease being released. In an article in the Irish Independent written on 11 September 2007 entitled, “Bio-security Breaches Caused FMD”, it states: “Five Separate breaches of bio-security at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright are being blamed for July's Foot and Mouth outbreak in Surrey”. The piece reports that wastewater carrying the live virus entered the drainage pipework and then leaked out and contaminated the surrounding soil. The investigations for the official reports were carried out by a man who the article describes as a “Health and Safety Executive and Professor”, a man named Brian Spratt.

 

Anderson was the man who had trained the infamous Neil Ferguson, with whom he helped design and create the computer modeling programmes which would first be introduced during the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Britain two decades before Covid.