Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist of Imperial College, London resigned from his role as a senior scientific advisor to the British government Tuesday evening.

He became known as professor lockdown after his alarming data modelling predicted huge casualties for the populations of the United Kingdom and the United States unless they enacted severe curbs on individual freedoms to lock the nations down. While the moves were criticised by senior legal figures as approaching a police state, Professor Ferguson's advice was nevertheless heeded by the government in March.

While Professor Ferguson frequently appeared in the media to defend his work and to tell the public not to break the lockdown rules, he was himself spectacularly breaking them in secret, according to a report in Britain's Daily Telegraph, which claims the hard-line scientist was meeting his married lover.