April 2021
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
#auspol Do we ever get tired of populist fact-free public frenzies? For example on the Oz vaccine rollout. The same pattern of a stuttering start seen also in the US and UK. Standard logistics. Delivering population-level things is bloody hard. https://t.co/5kar02teR3
@normanswan I notice the narrative in the early stages of the US rollout was almost to the letter what we're hearing here now. The data shows our *rate* of rollout is actually superb. Like an exponential curve, begins with a stutter, then bam. https://t.co/5kar02teR3
@EricIdle back to Python being comic writers and actors, rather than comedians...in that sense is "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" actually a great capture of the wider Python project? To highlight the humour of all life, rather than tell jokes to try to sugar-coat life?
I liked this @simonahac https://t.co/fhs84UTEgl
@ProfPCDoherty thought this was interesting. https://t.co/evvcfqxI7U
#auspol there's no clearer example of how domesticated ordinary working people have become to neoliberal ideas than Daylight Savings. We want an extra hour of an evening of sunlight? Why not all knock off an hour early? Noooo. Let's change the clocks 🙄
@billbowtell Some say we need to 'live with the virus'. We should be suspicious that the first living organism they've agreed to live together with, is a lethal pathogen. https://t.co/3IKSN5214O
@DrZoeHyde @GregDore2 Australia has agreements for 20 million Pfizer vaccine doses by end of 2021 (enough for half of us 18 and above). Domestic production is slower than anticipated. Could we negotiate for another 20 million Pfizer doses? Rollout will be slow either way.
AN estimated 600 million surplus doses available in the US in second half of 2021: https://t.co/XZsoGxuyYr
#auspol estimated 600 million surplus doses of vaccine available in the US second half of 2021. Australia only needs 20 million more Pfizer doses to vaccinate the entire over-18 population? https://t.co/XZsoGxuyYr
@billbowtell @rajah_mich up to 600 million surplus vaccine doses possibly available in US 2nd half of 2021. Oz needs another 20 million Pfizer doses to do the whole over-18 population with that vaccine. Time for diplomacy? Domestic production no faster. https://t.co/XZsoGxuyYr
@MarylouiseMcla1 thoughts? https://t.co/qwqWJwveOd
@EricIdle 'virtual particles' mentioned here. Back to the chat about Being and nothingness. 'Real' particles are just excitations of quantum fields. The fields are eternal. Virtual (more transient) particles assist 'real' particles to interact, via that field. https://t.co/EWlWcWXkvx
We are made of 'real' and virtual particles, which constantly interact with the eternal, quantum field. Thus we ourselves are part of the quantum field. Death may be a return to purely 'virtual' as opposed to real/virtual existence.
@billbowtell @rajah_mich it appears common sense has prevailed. https://t.co/U47qIJ5j8K
@PhillipAdams_1 Ben is a brilliant interview, and his book is a revelation on many fronts. Just sayin' https://t.co/zXQduezuGC
Imagine a leader saying 'we're not going to put out bushfires, we need to learn to live with them'. Instant laughing stock, end of their career. And yet 'living with' a pandemic virus has passed for common sense in nearly every developed country for over a year. https://t.co/YkEU5er8sH
@billbowtell have watched you plead with so many on this most basic of points. Astonishes me it needs to be made.
@normanswan @GidMK interesting? https://t.co/lnxXnEmd0Y
The Useless States of America and Useless Kingdom hoover up most of the world's best quality vaccines, to continue their avoidance of effective public health work, and prepare to return to a 'normal' life, having not learned a thing from the past year.
@GidMK methodologically, is all this talk of the risks of various vaccines confusing individual and population risk? Thought this was interesting: https://t.co/xFth2GBAY4
@profmiketoole interested to hear any thoughts from epidemiologists!
If 10 out of a million people get sick, it doesn't mean each person has a 0.0001% chance of getting sick. Some will have a 100% chance, others zero. The public intuitively know this, experts less so? Individual risk is an oxymoron. @liammannix https://t.co/uzSpkQYFph
Think that should be 0.001%
@simonahac An indication of how pathological the developed world's obsession with travel is? The (apparent) shut down of it during the pandemic merely returns us to levels of travel from 2004. https://t.co/GourZEM4lr
Maybe a mark of how specialised and narrow knowledge now is, that even experts speak constantly about the impact of the pandemic on the Economy. Rather than seeing that what we call the Economy was actually the cause of the pandemic.
Service industries are about 80% of the Oz Economy. Do people remember that 'service' was what servants do? They were 'in service'. These are some of the worst paid jobs in the country, with the worst conditions. We've trendied them up, but they're still just service, slavery. https://t.co/3TW7gGWAK2
@GidMK @profmiketoole @AndrewHayen This isn't correct? You can't just extrapolate population risk to individual risk? Individuals have either a zero or 100% chance of a clot, depending on causal mechanisms (as yet unknown). Nobody has a 0.0004% risk? https://t.co/eRQ8DYxaOZ
There will come a time when the solemn pontification about the 'Economy' and its various indicators will be seen in the same light as Conan Doyle's fairies at the bottom of his garden.
#insiders can we stop talking about the 'Economy' as if it were an actual thing? It's a set of statistical indicators of social activity.
#insiders @AmyRemeikis not just the war crimes we don't talk about. We don't talk about the insanity of signing up to this GOP fantasy in the first place. Jingoism on the way in, jingoism on the way out. Always thus.
@SophyRidgeSky @KateEMcCann @billbowtell The UK was happy with a Covid Super League of the US and UK, hoovering up world vaccines, doing no meaningful public health work, domestically or globally. If only Covid were football. https://t.co/k2LD16AHBG
Australia has bought enough Pfizer to vaccinate all adults. Why isn't that being said? 20 million arriving later in the year, but 20 million before that time too, which could vaccinate over 50s. https://t.co/BNmKvfHu1l
Great piece by @CrabbBrendan and @profmiketoole . Oz in the same league table rush to vaccinate as fast as possible, as if you can end a pandemic within your own borders. Tragically, many poorer nations did excellent suppression in 2020, and now get no vaccines to reinforce it.
Who remembers tonnes of strawberries being destroyed because of the risk some may contain needles? Now explain to me how this is different to a vaccine potentially killing a few people? Why did we junk the strawberries, but keep that vaccine? https://t.co/9UfYwlLGht
@MikeySlezak @liammannix another example of population vs individual risk? Peanut allergies. Some kids have them, peanuts are banned in schools. 1/n
There isn’t a low risk every child will react to a peanut. There are a handful of kids who will, and the majority who won’t. 2/n
But with vaccines, we count people with clots, divide by total vaccinations, and call that the individual ‘tiny’ risk. If we don’t do that with peanuts, why is it valid with vaccines? 3/end
P.S. remember us destroying tonnes of strawberries, because of the risk some may contain sewing needles? There wasn't a tiny risk each strawberry had a needle in it, it either had it, or not. That (much less lethal) possibility was sufficient to have them immediately withdrawn. https://t.co/VgNnIerHSL
@normanswan tweeting this as somebody with training in high-level maths, stats, risk management and ethics. Not a yokel or in any way an anti-vaxxer. I'm concerned about how vaccine risk and hesitancy is being described in public debate. 1/n
Take peanut allergy. We don't count the number of children who have a severe allergic reaction, divide that number by the total number of children, and call that the 'risk' to all children, from peanuts. The majority of children have zero risk, a small number 100%. 2/n https://t.co/ucB7B1FFEw
We protect that small group from severe reaction and death by widespread restrictions on peanuts. Not by telling every parent/child 'the risk is tiny of having a reaction'. We don't mistake population risk with individual risk. 3/n
So why are we using population risk as a proxy for individual risk, with vaccines? Similarly, the majority will get no clots. But the small number who do may even die. They need protection. It's simply untrue that the risk to each individual is the population risk? 4/end
Is it too much for somebody, anybody, to ask why, with 40 million doses of Pfizer arriving in Australia this year, those can't be used to vaccinate all 20 million adults in the country?
#auspol @CrabbBrendan The Premier of NSW on radio this morning again arguing no need for daily reporting of Covid case numbers, hospitalisations sufficient. Normalising the abandonment of elimination as a key public health principle. Dangerous times.
I think there's plenty of that going on. There are others too though who think the risk is being misrepresented. And who also think the vaccines are being used to evade the basic public health work.
@EricIdle you may recall a chat on here about 'nothing', and whether death is nothingness? I suggested there is no such thing as nothing, death is a virtual existence, rather than an actual one. Here applied to the entire universe: https://t.co/VmzdpAxMs6
#auspol @billbowtell so here we are, the public forced into a fake double-bind between 2 risks of death. What the Economy crowd wanted. The 3rd way? Eliminate virus transmission with basic public health work, while the clots are investigated. https://t.co/U0IwfbkG5k
@simonahac #auspol With the tens of billions spent on roads and tunnels in Sydney right now, why is nobody talking about traffic evaporation? https://t.co/tf5g223lvp
@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @ProfPCDoherty wondering at the shifting of emphasis from virus elimination towards speed of vaccination? If immunity lasts a year, many will need a second round of vaccination before much of the world has had one. https://t.co/nNZXcqJ4NO
If you think (as I do) that Church vs State defines all politics, going back centuries, then today's trending Tweets will make you nod. https://t.co/fcQfnKhqO6
#auspol #COVID19 32 people now dead in the UK from the AZ vaccine. Risk expressed as "(tiny number) per million". Do we forfeit the right to describe risk in that way when the intervention is actually applied to millions of people? Vehicle recalls have stricter crtieria.
Bruno Latour: "We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is important and who is not important." 1/n
The pandemic has been narrowly cast as a medical or biological problem, and we've missed the much broader range of expertise that is needed to understand, learn from and beat it. Hats off to the Go8 for at least trying with their Road to Recovery project. 2/end
@bmarsalis can i ask a question or two about one aspect of your playing?
What Australia needs? Proper quarantine facilities, vaccine production capacity. What it's getting? A $600m white elephant gas-powered electricity generation plant, that nobody needs and which will drive prices higher. https://t.co/TXSg5tXMXk
Australia has purchased enough Pfizer vaccine to cover the entire adult population. Just use it, even for over-50s still unvaccinated. It might take longer, but there's no way international borders will be rushing open any time soon. https://t.co/twR9F8XcFB
@normanswan quite a spike at exactly that 50+ age divide we use here? https://t.co/J1urVs40HW
#auspol #COVID19 the latest AZ clot data from the UK. Why the Europeans generally suggest 60+ only for AZ. Our 50+ cut-off is actually where they're seeing peak clotting and mortality. Based purely on a desire to fast-track our Phase 2a, which begins at 50? https://t.co/sbPKBS4QbC
@CrabbBrendan @billbowtell "Among OECD countries, liberties were most severely impacted in those that chose mitigation, whereas swift lockdown measures—in line with elimination—were less strict and of shorter duration." https://t.co/FqZlohQJ2J
@GregDore2 @GidMK @profmiketoole affirmation for those who argued for elimination, for health, the economy, and 'freedom'? If you don't use strong restrictions, you need many more weaker ones, for longer, and they cost more across all 3 measures? https://t.co/7SLTBQjyzm
#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of assumptions and values. 1/n
This frustrates the public, because they're taught that science produces facts, so how could experts disagree? Experts themselves seem not as aware of this more nuanced view of facts, mostly because we haven't used a wide enough range of expertise in this pandemic. 2/n
Scholars from the humanities for example are much more aware of how facts are shaped by assumptions and social processes. Almost exclusively we've drawn upon medical expertise to understand this pandemic. 3/n
This medicalisation of a complex event has left us hamstrung in understanding many aspects of it. Just a couple of many examples: the Economy. Spoken of as some independent entity that needs to be protected, a major barrier to basic public health work in many countries. 4/n
Vaccine 'hesitancy' another. Biostatistics used to frame the hesitant as naive and anti-rational, absent any understanding of the enormous complexity of how individuals assess risk. And absent even basic ethical considerations around complex decisions. 5/n
A superb exception to this narrow view of the pandemic was the Go8's Road to Recovery report. Drawing upon expertise across a wide spectrum, with nuanced and sophisticated recommendations. Some of these have been adopted. 6/n
Too often though the fracturing of universities into competing, billable disciplines has been reflected in expert advice in the pandemic. Often more about positioning than problem-solving, and nearly every other area of expertise drowned out by the biddable medical sciences...7/n
...delighted to be at the centre of political power and influence. Most of the advice from that broad discipline area has been superb, but again it also conflicts (because of conflicting values and politics, usually undeclared), and isn't tempered by wider expertise. 8/end
@billbowtell it was partly your work that inspired this thread. https://t.co/Ps4B5Pg14Z
#covid19 a way to flip public framings of pandemic action. Countries encouraged to feel deficient if they're not vaccinating fast enough. Like Australia. But what if we said instead that countries who already eliminated Covid are just waiting for the others to catch up?