Risk manager + previously covid data analysis & modelling. He / him. đ¶
Guildford, England
Joined October 2018
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So Covid Twitter (and Twitter in general) seems to be dying⊠with just a few limbs still twitching. To be fair I havenât been helping much this year, having held true to my New Yearâs Resolution to spend time talking to my family rather than on Excel and Twitter. đ§”
James Ward retweeted
However high you want the state pension to be, the âtriple lockâ is awful way to achieve it
It ratchets up value of state pension in an unpredictable way - could reasonably be expected to push up spending by anywhere between ÂŁ5bn & ÂŁ40bn a year in 2050
James Ward retweeted
Talent is spread evenly across the country. Top A-level grades are not.
This year, an A or A* was 42% more common in London than in the North East or East Midlands.
In London, 32.7% of A-level grades were A or A*. In the North East, where I grew up, and the East Midlands, it was just 23.1%.
And when you look across England, an even clearer pattern emerges: London and the South East sit well ahead, with top-grade rates of 32.7% and 31.5%.
Then thereâs a sharp drop to 27.9% in the East of England. Every other region falls between 23.1% and 27.9%, with results generally weaker in the North.
This obviously isnât a map of where the most talented young people live. Itâs a map of how differently that talent is being converted into attainment.
Thereâs no single explanation of course:
Poverty matters. Prior attainment matters. Access to schools and subjects matters. So does the support available outside school and the economic opportunities young people see around them.
Demography matters too. Our recent @suttontrust Crossing Paths research found that Londonâs strong performance is partly driven by high attainment among ethnic-minority pupils, including disadvantaged ethnic-minority pupils. Whereas other regions have larger white working-class populations, currently the lowest-attaining major group.
London's success should be celebrated, and it's worth remembering that London schools werenât always the success story they are today. A generation ago, educational outcomes in the capital were poor. They're now transformed.
Which means the huge regional differences we see today are neither inevitable nor immutable. The question now is why we havenât managed to reproduce that progress for young people in the North and other parts of the country that continue to fall behind.
There isn't one easy answer of course. Closing these gaps means action on child poverty, early years education and teacher recruitment. But it also means being much more curious about why our education system works less well for particular communities, including white working-class young people.
A-level grades help determine who gets through the doors of our most selective universities, and from there into many of our most competitive careers.
A young person with the same underlying potential should not have dramatically different chances of accessing those opportunities because of where they happen to grow up.
Results day celebrates individual achievement. This map shows how much work remains to ensure that what a young person can achieve is not limited by where they grow up
James Ward retweeted
Very proud that Tax Policy Associates is the first to publish research identifying a highly statistically significant correlation between the number of cheeses a country has and the number of taxes (p=0.0000000375).
This changes everything.
James Ward retweeted
Donald Trump used âdecimatedâ correctly to describe the effect of US and Israeli strikes on Iranâs military capacity, although he didnât realise he was using it correctly.
two reasons to celebrate: the impact on the Russian oil industry, and the (approximately) correct use of the word âdecimatedâ
James Ward retweeted
If youâve seen this chart, itâs important to note this is NOT the current growth rate of the Ebola outbreak
This is the speed we are uncovering the outbreak *that has already occurred*
Itâs already enormous, and weâre only just unearthing it
James Ward retweeted
To the people of Tenerife,
My name is Tedros, and I serve as the Director-General of the @WHO, the @UN agency responsible for global public health. It is not common for me to write directly to the people of a single community, but today I feel it is not only appropriate, it is necessary.
I want to speak to you directly, not through press releases or technical briefings, but as one human being to another, because you deserve that.
I know you are worried. I know that when you hear the word âoutbreakâ and watch a ship sail toward your shores, memories surface that none of us have fully put to rest. The pain of 2020 is still real, and I do not dismiss it for a single moment.
But I need you to hear me clearly: this is not another COVID-19. the current public health risk from #hantavirus remains low. My colleagues and I have said this unequivocally, and I will say it again to you now.
The virus aboard the MV Hondius is the Andes strain of hantavirus. It is serious. Three people have lost their lives, and our hearts go out to their families. The risk to you, living your daily life in Tenerife, is low. This is the WHOâs assessment, and we do not make it lightly.
Right now, there are no symptomatic passengers on board. A WHO expert is on that ship. Medical supplies are in place. Spainâs authorities have prepared a careful, step-by-step plan: passengers will be ferried ashore at the industrial port of Granadilla, far from residential areas, in sealed, guarded vehicles, through a completely cordoned-off corridor, and repatriated directly to their home countries. You will not encounter them. Your families will not encounter them.
I also want to say something else, something that goes beyond the science.
I personally thanked Prime Minister @sanchezcastejon for #Spainâs decision to receive this ship. I called it an act of solidarity and moral duty. Because that is what it is. I want you to know that the WHOâs request to Spain was not made arbitrarily. It was made in full accordance with the International Health Regulations, the legally binding framework that defines the rights and obligations of countries and the WHO when responding to public health events of international concern. Under those rules, the nearest port with sufficient medical capacity must be identified to ensure the safety and dignity of those on board. Tenerife met that standard. Spain honoured it. Nearly 150 people from 23 countries have been at sea for weeks, some of them grieving, all of them frightened, all of them longing for home. Tenerife has been chosen because it has the medical capacity, the infrastructure, and the humanity to help them reach safety.
And because I believe that so deeply, I will be there myself. I intend to travel to Tenerife to observe this operation firsthand, to stand alongside the health workers, port staff, and officials who are making it happen, and to personally pay my respects to an island that has responded to a difficult situation with grace, solidarity, and compassion. Your humanity deserves to be witnessed, not just acknowledged from a distance.
As I have said many times: viruses do not care about politics, and they do not respect borders. The best immunity any of us has is solidarity.
Tenerife is demonstrating that solidarity today. The shipâs captain, Jan Dobrogowski, crew and the company operating the vessel have shown exemplary collaboration at this challenging time. On behalf of the World Health Organization, and on behalf of those passengers and their families around the world, I thank the people of Tenerife and everyone else involved.
Please take care of yourselves and of each other. Trust in the preparations that have been made. And know that the WHO stands with you, and with every person on that ship, every step of the way.
With respect, care, and gratitude,
Tedros
James Ward retweeted
People have been asking why this graph from OWID doesnât show a drop after the HPV vaccination.
Answer follows.
(red crosses are my overlay using the same data and the WHO 2000-25 standard populations)
1/4
James Ward retweeted
In my doctorate, I proved the ErdĆs Primitive Set Conjecture, showing that the primes themselves are maximal among all primitive sets.
This problem will always be in my heart: I worked on it for 4 years (even when my mentors recommended against it!) and loved every minute of it.
[Primitive sets are a vast generalization of the prime numbers: A set S is called primitive if no number in S divides another.]
Now ErdĆs#1196 is an asymptotic version of ErdĆs' conjecture, for primitive sets of "large" numbers.
It was posed in 1966 by the Hungarian legends Paul ErdĆs, AndrĂĄs SĂĄrközy, and Endre SzemerĂ©di.
I'd been working on it for many years, and consulted/badgered many experts about it, including my mentors Carl Pomerance and James Maynard.
The the proof produced by GPT5.4 Pro was quite surprising, since it rejected the "gambit" that was implicit in all works on the subject since ErdĆs' original 1935 paper. The idea to pass from analysis to probability was so natural & tempting from a human-conceptual point of view, that it obscured a technical possibility to retain (efficient, yet counter-intuitve) analytic terminology throughout, by use of the von Mangoldt function \Lambda(n).
The closest analogy I would give would be that the main openings in chess were well-studied, but AI discovers a new opening line that had been overlooked based on human aesthetics and convention.
In fact, the von Mangoldt function itself is celebrated for it's connection to primes and the Riemann zeta function--but its piecewise definition appears to be odd and unmotivated to students seeing it for the first time. By the same token, in ErdĆs#1196, the von Mangoldt weights seem odd and unmotivated but turn out to cleverly encode a fundamental identity \sum_{q|n}\Lambda(q) = \log n, which is equivalent to unique factorization of n into primes. This is the exact trick that breaks the analytic issues arising in the "usual opening".
Moreover, Terry Tao has long suspected that the applications of probability to number theory are unnecessarily complicated and this "trick" might actually clarify the general theory, which would have a broader impact than solving a single conjecture.
This is one of the coolest such examples! See comments from Lichtman below, who proved the related primitive set conjecture arxiv.org/abs/2202.02384
James Ward retweeted
The Arabian plate is converging with the Eurasian so the Hormuz strait will close by itself in a few millions years effectively rendering this entire issue irrelevant.
James Ward retweeted
I've released a new word game called Parseword, that tries to make cryptic crosswords more accessible. You can play it here: parseword.com
James Ward retweeted
all those covid vaccinations really pushed up the death rates.
Oh, wait, 2025 mortality in England is a record lows.
Must have read the chart upside down.
(from bsky.app/profile/actuarybydaâŠ)
đ
James Ward retweeted
@ONS released weekly deaths by occurrence date with deaths recorded by mid-Jan 2026 which allows to finalize the picture for 2023 and (almost) 2024
This confirms that England and Wales was back on pre-pandemic mortality trends already back in 2023
James Ward retweeted
Because it remains important to show the world what Russia looks like, the country that continues to spent hundreds of millions of dollars every night trying to freeze and terrorize the Ukrainian population, I have compiled a "best of" from my guides through Russia's cities.đ§”
this could explain a lot, if they are getting their geopolitical insights from the Risk board (although it doesnât quite fit with Zelensky having âno cardsâ if Ukraine has overrun european Russia up to the Urals)
James Ward retweeted
It's New Year, so time to look back and forward. These are 10 things I think we need to recognise in 2026. Itâs a response to what I think are profoundly damaging mistaken assumptions Iâve heard and read from practitioners, journalists, and analysts in 2025. Warning: very longđ§”
James Ward retweeted
Still 90 minutes to go, so I could end up looking foolish but I think it's fair to say Jane was wrong about that.
All Covid Vaccinated will be dead by December 31, 2025
*According to United States of America, who lead the charge to kill 95% of the World in 1994, under UN Agenda 2021.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
It is December 31st, 2025, and we aren't dead
worldometers.info/world-populatiâŠ
James Ward retweeted
RFK Jr. claims vaccines given in the first six months of life have ânever been tested for autismâ and that the only study on DTP found a link that the CDC âthrew out.â
None of this is true.
Infant vaccines have been studied for autism across massive populations. A Danish cohort followed over 650,000 children. Studies of cumulative antigen exposure in the first two years found identical levels between children with and without autism. Thimerosal-containing vaccines were compared head-to-head with thimerosal-free formulations. No difference. A 2025 WHO systematic review of over 30 studies across multiple countries reaffirmed no causal relationship.
The study claiming a link that heâs likely referencing relied on VAERS data, a passive reporting system incapable of establishing causation, and lacked a valid comparison group. The Institute of Medicine reviewed it and found it âseriously flawedâ and âuninterpretable.â It wasnât discarded arbitrarily. It failed basic methodological standards.
The framing of âthe CDC threw it outâ implies a cover-up. But the rejection of a vaccine-autism link isnât a CDC position alone. Itâs the consensus of independent researchers worldwide, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the WHO.
Notice the rhetorical narrowing: by specifying âfirst six months,â RFK Jr. sidesteps the enormous body of MMR research (given at 12-15 months) while implying earlier vaccines are an unstudied blind spot. They arenât.
The evidence base is enormous and consistent. Over 30 studies, millions of children, multiple countries, different methodologies, all pointing the same direction. Continuing to re-examine a question answered this thoroughly isnât scientific rigor. Itâs manufactured doubt. Resources spent relitigating resolved questions are resources not spent understanding what actually causes autism or improving the lives of autistic people.
The CDC, under RFK Jr.âs influence, has called for re-examination of this question. The WHO, the AAP, and researchers worldwide have not followed suit. Thereâs a reason for that.
James Ward retweeted
New in @NEJM: Pfizer's mRNA flu vaccine beat the standard flu shot in a phase 3 trial. 34.5% better. Statistically superior, not just noninferior.
The timing is brutal. đ§”
nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEâŠ
