22 Dec 2020 Professor Neil Ferguson has been confirmed to be advising Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government on coronavirus, despite officially resigning in May for breaching his own lockdown restrictions to meet with his married lover. On Monday, the British government confirmed to The Telegraph that Professor Ferguson is still advising the government after his name appeared on a list for a meeting of 15 members of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) on December 18th. The Nervtag meeting attended by Ferguson concluded that a supposedly new variant of the Chinese coronavirus — which is believed to have been present in the country since at least September — “demonstrates a substantial increase in transmissibility compared to other variants”, with up to a 70 per cent higher transmission rate than previous strains of the virus.