I was really surprised to hear that John Carmack and Github engineers were brought it to clean the code up - after - the government based some of its choices to

I was really surprised to hear that John Carmack and Github engineers were brought it to clean the code up - after - the government based some of its choices to go in to lockdown. I know more and more of us are getting sucked into the 'tinfoil hat zone' with increasing rapidity thanks to the internet - and you could competently argue I'm going there with this - but that sounds like it was done to maybe downplay fears and the fallout we've seen over the past few weeks around this code and its outsized impact on our current position. It was a 50k LoC monstrosity at one point - in a single file. Neil Ferguson was put in the spotlight as the "source of truth" by the UK media - I get that its more nuanced and I hope the UK government wouldn't have based its decisions to lockdown on this, and they instead took a wide range of data points - but the media pounced on Neils model being the thing that scared Johnson shitless into rolling back the idea of herd immunity. So then people wanted to see the model, and saw it turned out to be horrific in its quality, its lack of testing, and its potentiality to contain mistakes (which it did - given Neil rolled back his predictions after a while) I think that probably spooked some high profile people into action. The whole thing is weird and Neils reputation is in tatters in the media over the way this thing has played out (as well as for some of his extra-curricular activities).