December 2021
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
For those of you who have ‘economic dreams’, this will be exciting. For those with some sort of functioning brain, maybe less so. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2xVatntlRC
My Year 5 daughter's teacher is a libertarian anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-anything public health person. Yesterday she told the class not to follow rules, not to let people tell you what to do. This will be her last 2 weeks at the school, I made sure of it this morning.
I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large organisation today, discussing Covid. A few things really struck me: 1) the government's refusal to eliminate Covid in the community has just meant a flick-pass to business to eliminate it in their businesses instead. /2
2) Business is very unhappy about this, and the requirement to notify SafeWork Australia for any positive case is the economic equivalent of the Inquisition. (It's excellent that they have to, SW don't muck about, but SW are overwhelmed and unhappy too I suspect.) /3
3) You can see the power of slogans and spin listening to these meetings. When I suggested that the vaccines won't stop infections, they immediately said 'yes but it's like the flu, you'd expect people to become infected now, it's normal, this virus won't go away.' /4
No workplace can allow infection of staff with SARS-Cov-2. The national spin about 'we have to live with the virus' was never going to fly in workplaces. Business knows this, and are scared and angry, because it's up to them now to do what government won't - eliminate it. /5
Workplaces want vaccination to be their get out of jail card, their due diligence. It won't be enough, because WH&S runs on science, not bullshit. Maybe this is an own-goal, as the business lobby groups were strong proponents of opening up. Sowing, reaping etc. /end
Covid-19 workers compensation claims, NSW. Under WHS law, employers have a duty to eliminate Covid-19, unless not ‘reasonably practicable’ to do so. Until now many employers have defined that reasonableness as ‘can I be bothered’. It won’t stand up in courts. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/Ba9JaFXvaF
Always such rich spin pickings at times of threat. ‘Backwards’. By implication it means ‘forwards’ is anything that removes public health measures. For libertarians, the past 2 years have been a battle against lockdowns, not the virus. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/LMAR8DZCJ3
Imagine a kitchen company saying its approach to silicosis in its workers was to tell them to ‘live with’ it. That political slogan for Covid violates basic workplace law. Business is required by law to eliminate Covid spread. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/ZmERXXSOl3
Safework Australia. Last dot point, 'wearing masks'. In NSW most workplaces dumped masks because the PHO no longer required them. It won't hold up in court. Many businesses using vaccines as their main (or only) control measure. The government encourages it. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ufOD2p3Q15
One for the ventilation experts. Advice from the NSW government, to business. The first highlight - many workplaces are not providing masks, and nearly always not appropriate masks when they are. Second highlight - hand washing and 1.5m better than masks?. #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/5XzOeYgiqa
My kids were gutted when school went back. Like all kids ever, in history, until the past 2 years. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7FPWNhpSor
Can't pick a winner here. The halcyon days of Denmark's 'live with the virus', that we're recreating right now here. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/r2Pgj3KPgR
There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/uAvn2lEEFK
No doubt politicians do make an appearance in bushfires, but overwhelmingly action is decided and driven by experts. You could say the scale of pandemics warrants greater political involvement, but think back to HIV in the 1980s. /2
Do you remember many big political press conferences? Me either. This pandemic has been politicised. It’s not the scale of the challenge of defeating Covid that has caused that, it’s the scale of perceived potential ‘economic’ disruption that has caused political interference. /3
It’s unquestionable that conservative politicians in particular, globally, as they have for climate change, strategised from the first day of the pandemic to make sure they were in a position to control the degree of economic disruption. Our National Cabinet was sold as…/4
…a way to coordinate and unify our response to the pandemic. It’s nothing of the sort. It was designed to deal the federal government into the conversation; it has little constitutional role in dealing with health emergencies. Once there the federal government has used…/5
…the Cabinet to close parliament, introduce unaccountable and unrepresentative recovery committees stacked with vested interests, and divide the States whenever it seemed there might be widespread restrictions. Basically the politicians have mostly just got in the way. /6
Our public health professionals know how to deal with pandemics, they’ve done it many times before. But in this pandemic, they’ve been marginalised and corralled inside politically-controlled mechanisms. Mostly fabulous expertise and will, but constantly neutered by highly…/6
…restrictive terms of reference, determined by politicians. The broader point here is - elected representatives have almost NO place in dealing with emergencies. They have a symbolic, communicative role with the public. But it’s symptomatic of our populist times that…/7
…hardly anybody has thought about or asked, why are politicians determining strategy and direction here? None of them are trained in pandemic management. A pandemic isn’t something where wide consultation should be required either, it’s like a bushfire. There are are clear…/8
…procedures to be used, tested over centuries. No need for public consultation or to represent views, or any of that guff. Just putting the fire out. Elected representatives are for situations where there are no clear procedures to follow, where that’s a…/9
…genuine public conversation, to figure out what to do. Local governments live this every day, very clear and uncomplicated things to get done - roads to be built and repaired, water, sewer etc. But constantly bankrupted and disrupted by populist local elected windbags. /10
Give the power and responsibility back to our institutions that our modern populist windbags keep stripping away from them. Those institutions are all that protect our longevity as a society. /end
‘Omicron is mild’ the way the eye of a storm is mild. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/GTXaWes1kN
Waleed halfway to the Holy Grail here. We're not acting 'globally' to end the pandemic. But we're not doing that because the 'global' as we think of it, doesn't exist. You can't create international from national. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/AM9MvH6IDw
The 'international' or global community created nation states. In 1648. Trying to get nation states to cooperate 'globally' is like making crockery by smashing all the plates you already have, and then gluing them back together. /2
The only global world we've ever really had was the Holy Roman Empire. God, and swords and shields. There's little appetite for either of those solutions, the world has splintered into a million righteous 'local' unities. Not diversity, a million home-grown empires. /end
@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @rossleedham @djf0001 one day isn't a trend, as always, but that's a notable jump. https://t.co/0FlSA1mEGY
Mission accomplished, in the yellow highlight. Runway cleared for re-election. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/kK5wlcH3yC
ATAGI: "At this stage, there is no evidence to suggest that earlier booster doses of current COVID-19 vaccines will augment protection against the Omicron variant." Protection against hospitalisation, I assume? Not suppression, as the PM claims. #auspol #COVID19Aus
Community transmission, anyone? With a side of mild? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/4yCM0ji1Iv
“To have a modest increase in the numbers is not especially concerning at this point to me because it has not seen a big increase of numbers in our hospitals,” he (Brad Hazzard) said. This is the BS that sent Europe into a Covid Christmas abyss. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
Premier Dominic Perrottet also urged a focus on hospital cases, particularly in intensive care. "They are the numbers that matter,” he said. Hospitalisations will lag by weeks, and if this is our new public health principle, we can scrap vaccinations for most conditions.
Hey ATAGI. Say cheese. https://t.co/yAB52nCrSc
Representative democracy only works when its delegation to expertise and officials is actually in place and functioning. That's why we invented it, to free most of us from the concerns of keeping things running. If the delegation isn't happening, nobody is flying the plane. /1 https://t.co/IJ2kjYbUNw
The vast majority of people think the pilots are up there, flying the plane. They assume things are being taken care of. (Unfortunately they think politicians are the pilots, more on that below). /2
In this analogy, politicians are actually more like the cabin crew, there to interact with the passengers/public. If you've worked in politics, you'll know 99% of the 'flying of the plane' is done by officials. They're the pilots. /3
Right now, if you talk to many, even most people, they're happy to allow politicians to determine what should happen, because they feel comfortable this hierarchical delegation process is in place and working. 'The experts know what they're doing'. /4
The problem is, this delegation process is specifically what populism destroys. Populist leaders are up in the cockpit, but they don't know what any of the buttons or dials do. But nearly everybody in the back of the plane - us - thinks there are pilots up the front. /5
You only have to look at the US and UK in the past 5-10 years to see that the pilots left the aircraft some time ago. Expertise deliberately sidelined, harassed, mocked. This is what actually wins elections, describing the pilots as 'elites'. /6
One way this is refracted in ordinary life is Covid restrictions. People who think the delegations to the pilots is still happening are happy to follow rules, to put a mask on if the law says they must etc. They don't want to think it out, they want to be told what to do. /7
Not because they're dumb or lazy, but because they think the delegation process is still functioning. 'Leave the pilots to fly the plane, they know what they're doing.' In my workplace, everybody except me took masks off, because 'the PHO no longer requires them'. /8
At first this puzzled and even angered me. But it's very clear to me now they think the rules are the pilots, flying the plane. As populism sweeps through our democracies, increasingly those planes are empty at the front. Dangerous times, with no clear way out. /end
‘asap’ in Australia = months of waiting for most, with vaccines being thrown away. A day late, and a dollar short. Again. This time we HAVE the vaccines, but won’t use them. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/9QEhjLHNSI
Must be an election coming. #auspol https://t.co/7Z8jy1JMXG
We don’t let politicians put out bushfires. Why do we allow them anywhere near a pandemic? Why does nobody question this? They have ZERO expertise in pandemic management. The definition of an emergency is that there’s nothing to ‘balance’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/s8x95XO538
During fires, do we allow people to return to their normal lives, to ‘live with’ the fire? No. Why do we do it for a pathogen that’s already killed more people than WW1? 60 times more Australians already dead of Covid, than the last huge fires. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/d4X4ZbhFnS
Endless confusion. I thought ‘big waves of infection’ *is* a pandemic. Endemic disease doesn’t infect in waves? Why is there such widespread variation in claims about endemicity? (Maybe the confusion is all mine.) #COVID19 @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/F24LROhG0b
Easy to focus on the loons. But the vacuum they operate inside is the one left by libertarian leaders, vacating the driving seat. Political libertarians destroy leadership and government. It’s their core belief. Every lunatic belief then rushes into the void. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/UVwDFwwMTF
We needed ‘more data’. Remembering we re-opened schools using data on 18 students. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2zm54MJd7p
Yes Minster tried to show that politicians never actually run a country. Officials and experts do. We laughed as if it was all just a joke. When populist pollies pushed the officials and experts to one side in the pandemic, they killed 17.5 million people. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/SHU0Ys3nIz
All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their privilege is just ‘how things are’. They don’t have to fight for identity, so it disappears from their view. A few short thoughts on Dan’s Tweet. #auspol /1 https://t.co/c0AN0lTmEY
The dominant Covid narrative in Western nations is all about inconvenience. SARS-Cov-2 is not an existential threat in their eyes, elite societies no longer recognise those. They feel themselves to be masters of the universe. That’s the (silent) collective identity. /2
Surely there’s a technology to make all this go away, so we can go back to our lives, country-hopping on planes? To ‘see’ the world, everybody else’s homes are pages from our tourist handbooks. A technology that slots neatly into customary elite lives, to minimise disruption. /3
Of course, that’s how we use the vaccines. We’re going to get that quick jab, and it’s all over with. The fact that we have pretty much all of the vaccines for our own use also disappears into the background. Fish don’t know water exists, until they’re beached. /4
Covid beached us. We’re not seeing it yet. Mostly because there’s very little ‘we’ left. Decades of libertarian politics has turned any idea of a collective society into a multiplicity of individual democratic customers. The pandemic to us is like bad customer service. /5 https://t.co/xSFkNr60ml
Only privilege allows a society to become a giant shopping mall of individual desires and beliefs. Where life becomes an individual career trajectory. All of the collective, ongoing work to maintain that individual lifestyle existence has become invisible to most of us. /6
Politically we fudge all of this by claiming our democracies value diversity. But it’s not so much that they value it, it’s that individual tastes, beliefs, ideologies etc. are all that we have left. We have nothing to draw them all together into any unified whole or wholes. /7
When things don’t work, as they increasingly don’t, we retreat into hyper-individualism. Every microscopic nuance of *personal* identity becomes a new political platform to live or die over. All sides of politics do it, all wallowing in the same libertarian wasteland. /8
I don’t know how this pandemic will end. We’ve used it mostly as more fuel for our hyper-individualised identity-based politics. We have no idea how to think or act collectively now. The best we can muster is constant new inflections on our beloved individual lifestyle egos. /9
Have Tweeted a few times that even those who want to act collectively/internationally/globally do it by trying to glue back together all of these hyper-individualised identities. Like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of random body parts. It’s backwards. /10
You have to go back to the time before the libertarian splintering. Trying to make collective things out of libertarian things only reinforces the whole libertarian fantasy. It assumes we’re all isolated libertarian individuals - they win, we’re using their framing. /11
The way out of this mess is to deny that whole toxic fantasy of libertarian ideas. Individuals and groups, nations and globes, are not binaries. No altruism needed. What’s good for all of us collectively is also what’s best for us as individuals. /12
Ultimately it means re-focusing on the *practical* ways we maintain societies. Our institutions, the engineering under the hood. Away from ideals, towards infrastructure. The stuff that falls over in the libertarian heartlands, like Brexit Britain. The basic public health…/13
…work that stops us all getting TB and measles every year, for example. That controls the quality of our air. Etc. Our identity politics ignores all of that practical stuff, we’re aristocrats who don’t notice the servants that keep our lives afloat./end
I don’t think the US really has a love of guns. It has an anxiety about communal or public life. In extreme libertarian countries, every person is their own nation State, with their own army. https://t.co/ZAnfBTZclC
If we deal with Covid as a medical science problem, we’re always going to ‘need more data’. More data = more people infected. If we deal with Covid as a wider public policy issue, we prioritise all the basic mitigations to prevent people becoming infected. #auspol #COVID19Aus
'Keep calm', 'don't panic'. All the usual gaslighting rubbish, as if the enemy here is inappropriate anxiety. Minister Littleproud this morning: 'we need to hold our nerve'. Like shirt-fronting Covid beats it. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/w7gIuvzYqg
That the last sentence is even included is a sign the politics of Covid is still winning over the science. Most Covid cases don't end up in hospital, for all variants. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/qelCW3IMT9
It’s too early to say how bad Omicron is. But absolutely the prime time to stop it spreading while we find out.
The US: 305,114 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 482,581 Covid deaths since. The UK: 62,130 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 83,744 Covid deaths since. Vaccines work. Except in the hands of libertarians. #auspol #covid19aus
The surge in informal voting for NSW local government elections is attributed to the absence of 'How To Vote' handouts at polling booths, due to Covid. Many assumed these were 'how to pick party X' flyers, all these years. But for many they were literal instructions, how to vote.
Regulatory theatre. Yet another regulatory decision that matches in almost every detail approvals given overseas by other major regulators, weeks or even months ago. Science is international, is this just delaying pandemic action? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/PrWuM5qlrl
Will this be the tipping point that will force us to at last to deal with prevalence, with spread? To finally stop substituting society with an ‘economy’? I’m not confident. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/UZAfj5QH23
Democracy only works if elected representatives take no part in 99% of the running of the State. That is actually how representative democracy was designed. Mature democracies should have only minuscule changes as a result of elections. https://t.co/bV8R6XRtBv
Elected representatives should not be determining pandemic strategy. The definition of an emergency is something that needs to be dealt with, using known effective procedures, not consulted about. We don't have politicians.../1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hl4SOpskFv
...'balancing' whether to put out a bushfire against the needs of Harvey Norman or Qantas. The horse trading with peoples' lives, weighed up against every vested interest group politicians are associated with, is what has both created and prolonged this pandemic. /2
This is a genuine failure of democracy itself. Our ideas about it are destroying it. If you've worked in government, you'll know it's not the job of elected representatives to run anything much at all. They don't understand most of the things they decide on. /3
They don't need to, in representative governance they have whole armies of experts who will do that for them, and present them with a few simple options. Public health teams, if left alone, could have ended this pandemic before it began. /end
Stupidity oscillates with a frequency of about 4 months. https://t.co/9lDBqjg8Ez
"There are nearly 9.9 million doses of vaccines sitting unused in clinics around the country this week, and the wastage rate has crept up to 4.3 per cent from 1.2 per cent earlier in the rollout." What could we use those for... #auspol #covid19aus
The Korean War POW experience tells us that the fastest way to stop these movements is to find the very small number of organisers, and shut them down. It will be a very small number. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ETac3RYCC3
@RichardfromSyd1 this made me think of you. https://t.co/JrgxNw83RY
The attention span of media cycles is worse than electoral cycles. Denmark was a poster child for the ‘live with the virus’ folk. And yet this sort of empirical wtf won’t alter their beliefs even the tiniest bit. They need to be held to account. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/Jrz0Kf60Pt
And for those always living in hope that vaccines will finally, definitively 'decouple' cases from hospitalisations, Denmark again won't help your cause. https://t.co/H2NqlNk12J
We're so blind to political strategy. Privately the LNP spin-meisters love this stuff, it tells the lunatic fringe 'we're your people', and brings them into the fold. A telling-off by the senior LNP folk only cements that vote. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/Gre7DsVMse
Bit of a jump again today, and big testing numbers. Still trending up. https://t.co/7caFUm14qg
Very hard to talk about democracies without sounding like an apologist for authoritarianism. But if Covid shows something, it's that democracies have been (mostly) pretty hopeless against existential threats. It's important we understand why that is. https://t.co/31YR5HvFOA
2020/21. Where people march in the streets to fight for the right to go back to their meaningless, bullshit jobs. https://t.co/cEvB5LSahW
Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/phKHEWBwCx
…the price becomes astronomical to…um…screw the people who need the cars? Australia is desperately short of affordable housing (huge demand), and so the supply of affordable housing has…um…never been lower. The country has a critical shortage of workers in key…/2
…service jobs, so (the theory goes), salaries in those jobs are skyrocketing, to attract more people into them. (Errr, or we’re desperately looking to get visa-slaves back again, is what’s actually happening.) There’s huge demand for a pandemic-free life, so the market is…/3
…supplying just that. Errr, actually it’s supplying ‘living with Covid’. The Economy is entirely politics, a strategic, non-existent actor invented by conservatives to bypass politics. It has to go, and the first step is seeing that the Emperor wears no clothes. /end
Reduce the risk of lockdowns during the holiday season- Response to new variant of concern: Omicron https://t.co/pDVxuFZmfd
Remember Groundhog Day only ended when repeat after repeat of ever more extreme versions of the status quo failed, and then Bill changed his old ‘normal’? I feel there’s a message there. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/jGgzTAppL2
The Dom is on top of this. Still waving at Covid across the aisle in the supermarket, as it sits ‘alongside’ him. And I’m sure ICU staff feel for the small businesses whose cafe lattes and scented candles are more important than virus suppression. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/MA0rUjiMvi
And of course the only possible public health response is apocalyptic eternal lockdown. So let’s not have a public health response at all. /end https://t.co/VIMLPE127b
I think in the UK red must mean ‘good’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/wdPRSxeIr4 https://t.co/kmPXMX81gJ
Up is down, left is right, day is night. We’re living in a Dr Seuss book. https://t.co/eTAMubtZsg
Few of those at the top who cheer on Covid infection get infected. They never mean *they* will live with the virus, they mean the rest of us. Barnaby takes one for the team. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/t4l4Eq9N8y
I’m not an expert, but these look pretty striking. https://t.co/gi2h8CbpD5
Has there been even one documented case of fomite Covid transmission? Anywhere? #covid19aus
90% reduction in mortality for 3rd dose recipients. https://t.co/QC8DZsITK0
That regional curve alone should be a source of concern? Nobody built new ICU capacity out there this year. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IqyCTb6FvH
The first rule of modern conservative politics. Look after the private sector, and the private sector will look after you. Our Gladys heard your love Australia, she heard you say ‘get a lucrative job in the private sector.’ #auspol https://t.co/YSX7WUPEEa
Because libertarians don’t believe in a public sphere, when collective emergencies happen, they make up pseudo-publics to blame. Like the unvaccinated. They don’t solve problems, they try to re-brand them. Reality isn’t fooled. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/Kc1bbOUly5
Can’t we just call a spade a spade? It’s been obvious since the beginning that most conservative governments will use vaccines like a type of economic viagra. With a chaser of ‘following the medical advice’ spin. No integrated public health strategy. #COVID19 #auspol https://t.co/e2DhdEjdBL
Sorry, but even in my limited understanding, this logic wouldn’t apply for pandemic influenza. https://t.co/C6gPO5Jvge
Not sure why we need to ‘wait and see’ if Omicron is more or less virulent than Delta. (The data below suggests at least equal, then add more transmission = worse.) The clear implication is that if it’s more ‘mild’, we can let it run. Why let any Covid run? #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/Sk5qjrhBk9
Definitely seems a trend now. https://t.co/TkbQPMw7eh
SKY Australia is just relentlessly ‘on’. Like all good propaganda arms of governments, re-working the spin every moment of every day. Yes NSW infections are rising, but it doesn’t matter people, there are no deaths. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/LeyTUA75y3
@YouAreLobbyLud might need to drop in an elite Australian paediatric team to get those schools re-opened. https://t.co/NKZRktLWeL
‘Proportionate’ measures in the UK (global spin). Omicron doubling every 2-3 days. Politicians shouldn’t make the call on public health, Tory MPs blocking new measures. Our epidemic waves are all political, not epidemiological. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/WKmF8zBi9Y
Stephen Reicher making such a critical point, that the idea of ‘restrictions’ and ‘lockdowns’ is weaponised political spin, designed to get people to oppose necessary ‘support’ and ‘protection’. The key political barrier to beating this pandemic is that spin. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/pmmq13Viro
The UK facing an Omicron ‘tsunami’. Business interests are peddling the same BS about the importance of infecting children in schools, regardless. It’s about childcare for business, ignore the spin about education and mental health. History will judge. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/v64Qak6Udm
Am I reading this correctly, these are results for people who have had a 3rd dose? @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @Bertrandization @djf0001 https://t.co/ZrIx6aMhFs
“Test, trace, isolate and quarantine measures, alongside public health and social measures such as mask wearing, remain key to ensuring COVID-19 cases in the community remain within clinical capacity.” National Cabinet, 10 December. Bears no resemblance to NSW from 15 December.
Pubs and clubs leading the way. Property development, booze and gambling are pretty much indistinguishable from the NSW Government. Expect no action. https://t.co/um06leZWzP
The stock market, proxy for the ‘economy’. One short blip when Covid started, then continuing as if nothing had happened. That’s what’s killed 17.5 million people. The people are in the yellow line, the Economy and its puppet leaders, the black. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/EmC6gmUAPQ
Two (and likely more) critical problems with the ‘only hospitalisations matter’ idea. 1. Infected people still need to isolate. This shuts down social processes. 2. ICU capacity is a choke point for all society, and is continuously overwhelmed with high prevalence. #COVID19 https://t.co/IrYfRWT30s
Kids will respond to what’s expected of them. Just as societies do, to the expectations of their leaders. That’s the total vacuum in this pandemic, libertarians don’t lead, they see that as a conflict of interest. https://t.co/0Fog1C8sxU
Worth noting repeatedly that Covid is the only emergency response not being led by experts. We have fire commissioners, why can’t we have pandemic commissioners? Politicians will always weaponise disaster for short-term gain. They need to get out of the way. #COVID19aus #auspol https://t.co/9OxQOmDX4e
Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/K78HOfrv9L
School is obviously a popularity contest in many ways. There are always hierarchies of popularity. Culturally this is what elections and political parties are for adults, we export that high school popularity mechanism into our adult lives. /2 https://t.co/xWfYEHmih5
You can see this even on Twitter, where every day millions refract the issues of the day through a party-political lens, backing their team, or a more generalised ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. The actual events of the world are little more than fodder for these status hierarchy games. /3
And then also in high school, you have learning. Sometimes. A hierarchy of actual knowledge and achievement. A connection to the world of work, and to historical continuity, where humanity stores and accumulates wisdom over generations. /4 https://t.co/asfdLesw86
In the adult world, this becomes the many different hierarchies of expertise, embedded within a wide variety of cross-generational institutions. In healthy schools and societies, these two hierarchies - of social status and expertise - co-exist. /5
In our current populist, libertarian societies, that co-existence has been broken. The Prom King and Queen are now also driving the expertise hierarchies. Politicians are sidelining institutions and expertise, everything is re-routed into the social status hierarchy. /6
You can appeal all you like to the Prom Kings and Queens to fix climate change or Covid, they won’t do it. They don’t understand that geeky stuff, they wedgie people who do. The ‘cool’ kids have decided their reign needs to extend well past high school, into all facets…/7
…of adult life. This is what political populism ultimately is. It’s high school, with the ‘nerds’ permanently sidelined. Revenge of the Jocks. I appeal to everybody to bypass politicians entirely in this pandemic, they can’t help us. They will turn every fork in the Covid…/8
…road into some new opportunity to get votes for the next Prom. People who know little about democracy don’t realise leaders are only a sop to that school status hierarchy, in the wider expertise hierarchies that actually run our lives. It’s never been the role of political…/9
…representatives to ‘run’ anything. Watch Yes Minister, and watch it again, it knows. The cries of ‘unelected’ from the culture warriors directed at institutions and experts is the cool kids in school, trying to own the whole space. Civilisation depends on them not winning. /end
Mildly inconvenient for the mild narrative. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/m1pTE264FK
Hey Australia, if you can, give your kids the week off school. Only politicians and business really want them there. Have a Covid-free Christmas. #auspol #covid19aus
Denmark, already up shit creek because of Delta, has just met Omicron. Near-vertical growth. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/Jhvs3dWWhK
Wheeee, just like the rides at Dreamworld in Queensland! Which is the news of the day, Queensland re-opens. Tick tick. #covid19aus #auspoil https://t.co/uNUtJGo7z5
Public health professionals can correct me if I'm wrong, but a pandemic is defined by infection numbers. By cases. Not by hospitalisations. No matter how 'mild' Covid gets, the pandemic won't be over until infection numbers don't grow exponentially? #COVID19
This is the formal WHO definition of a case. Very interesting. Asymptomatic are included, if they’re a contact of a probable or confirmed case, even if they have no symptomatic disease. https://t.co/ck8JbQP0xg
h/t @PeteUK7 It's less than 2 weeks until Christmas. Even if they magically got everybody 3rd-dosed before then, it's still 2 weeks after that for the full boost? With lots of mixing before then. How many more ways can they avoid doing their job? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/D6kpPthMhd
Mildism is becoming more tenuous. Imagine if we end up with Omicron transmission rate coupled to Delta-like virulence. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/VLD65YDJCp
Emerging Omicron data from the SSI in Denmark, based on just under 3500 Omicron cases. Breakthrough infections significantly higher than for Delta. More than double even for booster vaccinated. #auspol #COVID19 https://t.co/8BQpSTgjmt
Link: https://t.co/i78HRkPaKj
Early Omicron cases in Denmark overwhelmingly in the 20-29 age group, which may partly explain early suggestions of mild virulence. #auspol #COVID19 https://t.co/Ij6ZEHx6D9
Link: https://t.co/i78HRkPaKj
Data wonks, looks a close-run tie at the moment, as far as hospitalisations go? Just under 3500 Omicron cases, sample size. @RichardfromSyd1 @djf0001 @Bertrandization @OrinCordus https://t.co/I8Qgjh489B
Forgot who was asking this yesterday. Imagine this. https://t.co/Hl6Js6bld6
The chief economist for the Western Australia Chamber of Commerce described masks this morning as 'sand in the cogs of consumer confidence'. This is what we're up against. Business isn't a thing. The Economy isn't a thing. There are just people.
When will we begin to hear 'Omicron is like nothing we've seen before?' #covid19aus #auspol
200,000 infections a day. Merry Christmas from the libertarians. @YouAreLobbyLud #auspol #covid19aus @OrinCordus @djf0001 @rossleedham @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization https://t.co/0PLvrhWN06
The UK's 'let the bodies pile high' mass infection strategy is reliant upon mass testing. https://t.co/EcUizVCGfr
Dominic Perrottet, today with Alan Jones. Saying the quiet bits out loud now, the pure libertarian fantasies at the heart of the NSW Covid 'strategy'. We're now the UK. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/6ZuvwnMeNl
The Telegraph in the UK, a Tory rag, has announced cases are levelling off in South Africa. I call this particular shade of green 'Soylent Green'. https://t.co/gIC3IIRK4w
Because a feature of populist democracy is zero attention span or memory. Look at what was said about Delta when it arrived in July. Then look at how that turned out. We don’t even notice our Groundhog Day public sphere. #auspol #covid19 @covid19aus https://t.co/13xekHMDQu
The political libertarians primed the Covid pump years before the pandemic. We're living the trashed societies they've created for us in so many ways. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/lJ5GfaPnSX
Freedom Day NSW! Take that mask off and suck in some Covid, to spice up your Christmas with loved ones. Let's all drink to The Economy - Cheers! #nswpol #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/1pkT5SrDUq
Help me out brains trust. Over 100,000 tests yesterday, huge test positivity jump again . Means really bad things, yes? @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @rossleedham @OrinCordus @djf0001 @polioandme https://t.co/GhSfI0anEQ
Press conference at midday. I wouldn't hold our breaths, likely just 'welcome to Freedom Day' and live with the virus platitutdes. https://t.co/auTgvd0JiN
The PM live now, saying 'we're living with this virus'. Note what National Cabinet said at its last meeting. Suppression. That's not 'living with the virus'. Up is down, left is right, black is white. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/9fvERyoHON
From Covid HQ. "Ah, would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy, sir?" "How could you possibly know that Blackadder, it's classified information!" "It's the same plan that.../1 #covid19 https://t.co/lbKVPJS4sy
...we used last time, and the 17 times before that." "ExACTLY. And that is what is so brilliant about it!...doing precisely what we've done 18 times before, is exactly the last thing they'll expect us to do this time!" (Covid has already killed more people than WW1.) /end
The UK Covid experience: this week in NSW is another step along their path. First the 'pingdemic' of app notifications has begun. And now the definition of a close contact has been kneecapped, to prevent wide social paralysis with rampant infection. https://t.co/TakbMjy0jc
Interesting preprint from the Kirby Institute estimating vaccine efficacy against Omicron. @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 @polioandme @BrentHodgson https://t.co/aNM6Jo21R9
Seems to add weight to the argument that there are a lot of 2xAZ out there with not a lot of protection from Omicron right now. We knew that for symptomatic infection, but those severe disease projections are also pretty dire.
Risk management 2021. Government minister predicts 175,000 infections per week. Unknown morbidity and mortality of the infecting pathogen. Government does nothing. An employer would go to jail.
If we’re going to copy the UK Covid strategy, how about we also track how that’s going? The CMO for the UK saying big Omicron hospitalisations a ‘nailed on prospect’ after Christmas. Remember they also began with the ‘mild’ nonsense. Not now. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/F28oFAsBZZ
UK CMO warning against the ‘mild’ narrative for Omicron. In this same conference: not only are hospital numbers going to swell, but the people staffing all essential services are likely to become infected and need to isolate. Mass infection is not a strategy. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/vjpgBs0eIs
Perhaps the hidden story of 'hospitalisations are all that matter'. As many have suspected in Australia too. Here's the UK experience. Bed occupancy rates look of concern, but maybe manageable post-vaccination. /1 #COVID19 https://t.co/z28qyaFIsR
On the other hand, look at excess deaths in the home. (And how few are coded as Covid on the death certificate.) An obvious way to suppress your hospitalisations and deaths is to outsource them to private homes. /2 https://t.co/Od8uXDKQ6R
As further context, look at the slashing of NHS bed numbers in the past 30 years. In recent times it's been brutal: https://t.co/O6kfUVaKK1 /3 https://t.co/aKIlYpxbCr
There's ongoing uncertainty about much Hospital in the Home (HITH) is being used appropriately in NSW and Victoria, and how much HITH is suppressing hospitalisation numbers. /4 https://t.co/mMxDZuleq7
More generally, a thought experiment. Take any health issue, like car accidents, or shark maulings. Pre-pandemic, would we have laughed if somebody said 'our overall strategy is to keep the number of maulings and accidents within our ICU capacity.' I hope so. I hope we'd.../5
...ask 'what are we doing to stop the maulings and car accidents'? And yet with Covid, up is down, left is right, black is white. You can run ICU at full capacity into the indefinite future, apparently, without controlling infections. Burning through your HCWs. /6
When will the fantasy bubble of mass infection as a pandemic strategy pop? Why do some notable experts even support it? How is this not just the complete breakdown of due health process and basic common sense? /7
@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @drbecs @djf0001 @BrentHodgson @polioandme
The NSW Government's new campaign. Classic libertarian stuff, reframing a collective emergency as individual responsibility. https://t.co/B0W8EjbMEc
You really should be following JBM, if you weren't already. https://t.co/9H8BTfOCuM
VE against Omicron infection for 3rd doses being challenged by real-world experience. https://t.co/cUvLFIwJ9Z
I think in Oz libertarian politicians sometimes don't realise they're talking to a pretty small minority. It only works if you make it about aspiration, status. Like schools, and tax. Public safety? Not so sure. Very small and whiney minority, the freedumbs. https://t.co/bZSPRdsnUJ
What 'living with the virus' and 'only hospitalisations matter' produces. Infection is what matters. It shuts things down, just as being infected with the flu shuts things down. Multiply by the thousands, every week of every year, and society stalls. https://t.co/0JiwaEeVLE
@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 @rossleedham @BrentHodgson https://t.co/H01vkbuTXX
I ask Covid minimisers just how many deaths might sate their bloodlust? Now over 18 million, well past World War 1 deaths. We’ve had vaccines for a year now, which were supposed to end the pandemic. The minimisers use them like junkies. #COVID19 https://t.co/ZlagBBvL7c
In which it becomes clear that the children of conservative politicians are without question raised almost single-handedly by their wives. https://t.co/4Q5JTteCfM
Spin generates feelings rather than information. In the information sense, 'living with Covid' for a politician means 'do nothing about Covid'. Just as 'balance' means do nothing. #covid19aus https://t.co/ns69Rx0jz8
Positivity up as well. We've cracked the 2000. https://t.co/HgQmMBZXob https://t.co/3whuGwuGkh
The thing that ultimately makes a mockery of mass infection as a pandemic strategy. You don't need to go to hospital to be out of action. Imagine telling your workforce to all come to work with the flu. Staggering these obvious things aren't said. https://t.co/eu3oqhW4PP
It's reassuring that the 'personal responsibility' line our home-gown libertarian loons trot out are identical to the ones used in the US and in the UK, where people are mown down by Covid in the hundreds of thousands. https://t.co/KuPTRRfcyQ
With Australia spending over $300 billion to fight Covid, what consequences should there be for NSW leaders who ignored all of that and decided to just let Covid rip? Outside politics these people would be in jail. #covid19aus https://t.co/3K1t3KvzgN
I’m a huge fan of expertise. But I can’t fathom this resistance from ATAGI to relaxing 3rd dose timelines. Other major regulators in the world did it already some time ago. It’s on their heads if this all goes very badly. #covid19aus https://t.co/Q4iBDKn94P
NSW could advise here. ‘Relax more restrictions’. https://t.co/1aJ0ekzSpp
Variants should be named after the libertarian leaders who generate and prolong the pandemic. Append numbers [XYZ] to cover the sheer scale of variant generation. Trump XYZ Modi XYZ Johnson XYZ Bolsonaro XYZ Perrottet XYZ etc.
After all the crap about how we should infect kids rather than close schools, the NAPLAN comparison of 2019 to 2021 was released this week. The black squares? No statistical difference in performance. Lockdowns made no difference to results. #auspol #COVID19Aus @YouAreLobbyLud https://t.co/FR146DkZot
New spin variants introduced by the Sloganator yesterday: “living confidently with the virus”, “living together with the virus”. https://t.co/R26umg4Q1Z
Let’s store this one away for viewing during the next lockdowns. https://t.co/6GIU15RaWy
That part of the story where we take comfort from the shallows at the start of the exponential curve. https://t.co/TiIQqO8JFZ
@RealOzSAGE and others, I hadn’t realised N95 masks can be reused up to 5 times, and even more in lower viral load situations? And rotating them and leaving them to one side for a few days may be sufficient to ‘sterilise’ them between uses? https://t.co/J6mLERN9S9
Heh, ‘out of an abundance of caution’ can become the new knock-knock jokes. https://t.co/6hLerOSgpR
As a break from the incessant whining from rich countries in the pandemic, it’s worth looking at historical material from WW1 and WW2. 2 to 3 times longer than our current privations. We’re such fundamentally different people now. And not in a good way. https://t.co/U6fQSfBSNt
There’s been wonderful data work in this pandemic. But zooming out a little, it’s symptomatic of where we are that we always need to look for patterns amongst the infected, rather than stop them becoming infected.
Going back to this. Why would we make a lagging indicator the trigger for further public health action, as our PM and NSW Premier are keen to do? Why haven’t reporters picked up on that? Why do some experts repeat the same mantra? #covid19aus https://t.co/iQ3JFJxB8x
Strange that so many still come out for testing each day, if NSW is keen to live with Covid. Maybe they love the nasal swabbing, bit of a fetish thing. #nswpol #covind19aus https://t.co/kOjYwuEAF5
Maybe it’s just the male CMOs who become apologists for private health measures instead of public health measures. Well said Dr Sonya Bennett. #covid19aus https://t.co/QJcMx3wH7d
Last time the feds didn’t organise supply, this time they and the States haven’t organised distribution. And refuse to implement protective measures as a stopgap. What happens when we allow elected people to run emergency responses. Ideology instead of public health. #covid19aus https://t.co/3BzRgklmWQ
One of my favourite Beatles stories also shows I think the fantasy at the heart of modern libertarian politics. And Covid. McCartney was the prodigiously talented Beatle - the best bassist, guitarist, drummer and singer in the band. Also he was the Beatles’ work ethic,…/1 https://t.co/kC83iIacjk
…the one who kept them on task amidst overwhelming international fame. At one point the other Beatles apparently came to resent how much they were being driven by McCartney, and expressed this to him. So he said ok, I’ll take more of a step back and allow us all…/2
…to drive things more. What happened? Nothing, They all sat there, with nothing happening. Ringo Starr apparently then said to Paul something like ‘so, can you get us going again?’ This is the story of all groups, and of all societies. The overwhelming majority of people…/3
…want to be guided, to be told what they should do. Not bossed around, just guided. They need somebody to imitate and to act as a status-imitation point. That’s what our hierarchies of expertise do in society, or did. We all can’t know or do everything, we look for guidance. /4
Libertarians try to ignore this basic hierarchical fact of any group or society. There will always be a hierarchy, in whatever part of life or even in all of life, reflecting the differential value of different levels of understanding, aptitude and achievement. In fact this…/5
…is our democratic mythology, and what will ultimately destroy it. The idea that it means no hierarchies. That all views are equivalent. We all know that to be rubbish in all of our lives - there are good and bad plumbers, teachers, singers, bosses etc. Our Enlightenment…/6
…split between facts and values, where we can all have whatever values we like, and facts will order society for us, is delusional. All facts are part of value hierarchies too, that’s what peer-review is. There are hierarchies of expertise in science too, and rightly so. /end
I always suggest looking to the UK for a glimpse into future strategies employed by the PM and NSW Premier. This may be next. #covid19aus https://t.co/TtNbnp1gbE
Good luck finding a vaccination provider who has included this in their procedures. This federal government couldn't organise a fart at a whole food retreat. https://t.co/Km59JK6Bxs
NSW ‘treating people like adults’, says Premier. If you want public health restrictions to control Omicron, you're a child. Libertarians ARE children, spoiled rich kids who never did a day's real work in their lives. Their 'freedom' is freedom from responsibility, for anything.
Hey LNP, in a break from your election planning, how about doing some actual work and implementing your own announcements? Or is everyone already skiing in Europe? Hello, hello? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/NKttMz0pyA
"It's like the worst flu you can imagine, really," he said. The basic fact the mass infection 'mild' crowd never talk about. Covid doesn't have to send people to hospital to shut society down. https://t.co/6B3oyVNEN6
If you're not sure who to vote for at the next federal election, try to get a 3rd dose of Covid vaccine before Christmas. That will tell you. #auspol
Heck, politicians could even take personal responsibility for the jobs we elect them to do, rather than outsourcing them back to us while retaining their fat pay and super. https://t.co/Q06btxa9EX
Superb. https://t.co/ME9eRNiMgv
National Cabinet to meet tomorrow about Omicron. https://t.co/EM0ydhavZh
No wonder the government is after social media. This leaked report from AHPPC to National Cabinet tomorrow is everything Twitter has been saying for at least 2 weeks. What’s the point of either AHPPC or National Cabinet? https://t.co/pWMJSKgRYK
Strip away Doherty endorsement, and all some Premiers and the PM have left to justify what they’re doing is libertarian ideology. They want to push us to the next level of libertarian populism, the UK and US, where govt. is fully decoupled from expertise. https://t.co/ptNOwhBZPp
Let’s all relish that Adam is losing. 18 million dead, and so much of it is due to bullshit like this. https://t.co/4QZ8pXELUc
Have we noticed the gradual shift in Australia, from ‘always following the medical advice’, to the medical advice having to write pleading letters to politicians, like a constituent asking for their potholes to be fixed? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/cEs5fJp04s
There’s that other critical libertarian strategy word. ‘Balance’. The one they use heavily for climate change. It means ‘do nothing’. https://t.co/kigYoSH2PH
Populism means what it says - doing popular things. We think that’s what democracy is. It absolutely isn’t. Libertarian populists surrender leadership to popularity. Leaders once *led* us through adversity. Now they pander to popular whim. #covid19aus https://t.co/5cp7O7ERgX
It's only thanks to the voters of Australia that we no longer have to listen to Tony Abbott. The voters of NSW will hopefully follow suit with Domicron. https://t.co/c2T4H1hQVV
"Cases (leaks) don't matter, only hospitalisations (roof collapsing on your head) matter." #covid19aus https://t.co/kspC6PUBJr
NSW is 2.23% positive that Dominic knows what he's doing. https://t.co/3W74f889ok
'We will need restrictions, but that will be the Premiers' fault. Meantime let me also weaponise that as a libertarian freedom thing, to mop up more fringe votes.' The Premiers must be leafing through their copies of Julius Caesar. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/xzPAL3M7Hy
Australia used a lot of AZ. And still nobody official says that, when discussing boosters. https://t.co/O8AnH4YjJu
"If we have 25,000 cases a day in January, the NSW health system will not be able to manage. It will be in a complete crisis. That's all there is to it. It's that simple." Professor Adrian Esterman
@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @Bertrandization @djf0001 you fellas know much about rate ratios? Does a rate ratio of 7 (for example) in the graph below mean a person is 7 times more likely to be hospitalised or die from Covid than somebody without Covid? https://t.co/Xnj8MncpKj
Ah: "Compared with at 2–3 weeks after the second dose, rate ratios for severe COVID-19 at 18–19 weeks were 5·43 (95% CI 4·00–7·38) in Scotland and 4·71 (3·83–5·78) in Brazil." So denominator is earlier immunity from 2 x AZ.
Had meant to include you @longfacehorse
"...pattern of findings across the two countries, with differing variants of concern and temporal trends in infection rates, suggests that vaccine waning is a key driver for the increasing numbers of severe outcomes being seen in two-dose ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccinated individuals."
This Tweet is 6 hours old, and was used by ABC PM, including interview, today, in a story that was advertised as a possibility of Omicron being only half as virulent as Delta. It’s possibly an interesting hypothesis, but that’s pretty flaky QA filtering for a major news outlet. https://t.co/tPbfC5wf2I
Yikes. (from @ProfColinDavis) https://t.co/29rRibMZJb
Another libertarian spin trick of the pandemic. ‘But’. Two contradictory sentences, joined by but. ‘We put the health and safety of our people first, BUT we also have to [insert economic thing]’. Only what follows the ‘but’ is actually enacted. #covid19aus #auspol
How many times can we surf up and down epidemic curves before realising that the problem is putting politicians in charge of a pandemic? We don’t do that for any other emergency. Short-term media and electoral cycles and political ideology are powerless against Covid. #covid https://t.co/jyrPzw6wj8
I got nothin'. https://t.co/GcHisWBizq
I didn't need to be hospitalised for the breakthrough pertussis infection I got a few years ago. If hundreds of thousands of us got that same pertussis infection at the same time, society wouldn't function. Experts need to stop enabling insane political narratives. #covid19aus https://t.co/thoIkUcG7B
I bet the 'leak' is a Premier. Maybe even all of them. The PM normally tries to own communication from National Cabinet, it allows him to describe what he wanted them to decide, rather than what they did. And there are no minutes we can see. #covid19aus https://t.co/RXP0qso3VF
If this works, it's a true game-changer? https://t.co/znLjcA6lYz
Summary from National Cabinet today. Stay calm. Use common sense. Get vaccinated. We're now officially the UK. Pray. #covid19aus #auspol
You're famous @Amalgamquietude. https://t.co/Yb7YMyLMha
Only hospitalisations matter was reaffirmed at National Cabinet today. Made me think about a heart disease health strategy that said 'people can have as much heart disease as they like, we'll just make sure it's managed within our ICU capacity.'
We shouldn’t be surprised as one libertarian country after another surrenders meekly to Covid. We’ve seen how little they care about incinerating the only known life-supporting planet in the universe, through climate change. Covid was chicken feed for them to ignore. #COVID19
The UK moving swiftly now to pure Trumpland. Relentless attacks on expertise, leaving the field wide open for populist, ignorant windbags to control all facets of life. Democracy eats itself when it thinks popularity is its metric. https://t.co/2waVfIjLr6
Israel up to dose 4. It hit me, Covid really is just the flu. We have 4 flu shots every year…
A JBM calm, forensic analysis is soul food for a pandemic. Interesting hypothesis, prior infection and vaccination creating appearance of Omicron mildness. But once people arrive in hospital, likely little difference in severe outcomes between Omicron and Delta. https://t.co/daBhIQDmQv
The main way we become puppets to political strategy is by arguing issues using politicians’ framing of a problem. Like the focus on Omicron severity. This is seen as critical only within the framing of ‘only hospitalisations matter’. #COVID https://t.co/MYzdMPVfZk
Latest Imperial College calculation of decreased hospitalisation risk for Omicron - 15% less likely to attend hospital, and 40% less likely to need to stay more than one night, if attending. Still too early to conclude on severe outcomes. #covid19aus https://t.co/QJyBGz5Rkl
2000 jump in a day is some sort of new record @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @OrinCordus @polioandme @djf0001 @longfacehorse https://t.co/OiDmHzs4e3
How libertarian death cults have recalibrated our social frames. Notice it was only 2018 where physicians could legitimately talk about a 'public health crisis' when they'd seen 8 patients with silicosis. These tradies now wear masks. #covid19aus https://t.co/BT8vovHBXG
Does anybody remember Moses saying'God gave me some tablets, but I treated them only as advice, let's do something else'? #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/X9jnPzD0r0
"The notion that no government is good government is a debate topic, not a response to a crisis – and it is easily converted into camouflage for incompetence." Well said. https://t.co/i1nyL7Qq3N
I told my family at the beginning of December that we'd be under restrictions again before Christmas. I'm not a public health expert, but you have to be some type of moron to not have figured out yourself this was inevitable. https://t.co/DNZA5d0q3O
I guess these things are inevitable in hopium land. My younger brother tested positive today. Triple-vaxed, wore masks everywhere, mostly works outside. Christmas plans over.
UVC is ok now? I remember ventilation experts questioning its usefulness. https://t.co/qm6epW3bSo
I really liked this photo. It shows and symbolises the massive collective effort we’ve all made, continuously betrayed by venal, bastard politicians. Many of us saw the enormous betrayal already under Gladys, when she let Delta rip. All that collective effort, pissed up a wall. https://t.co/zms4xCK1QL
The quiet, building story. The regions. Where an ICU is only a long helicopter flight away. https://t.co/Ug5QXEPJo1
I remain happy wth my decision some time ago to stop giving the SMH any of my money. I mean really, two years into this pandemic, to be publishing unmitigated, ad hominem horseshit like this. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/HjgaqsM7lu
Massive real-world libertarian trial. Several weeks where most of NSW stopped wearing masks, because ‘nobody told them to wear one’. Now they’ve been told to wear one, they all put one on. A population chafing at being told what to do? Read the room, libertarians.
Not great, but glad I chose Moderna 3rd dose. 2 x AZ + Moderna = 3 x Pfizer. 2 x Pfizer + Moderna best of all. No data on 3 x Moderna. Latest UKHSA report. #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 @polioandme @rossleedham https://t.co/kKb8u1SpHE
Can't stress enough that our fixation on severity plays right into the hands of Covid minimisers. Scientifically vital information, but political dynamite. You can wear a raincoat if your roof leaks, and stay dry. You're not fixing the problem. https://t.co/vMBnjP8kjS
Exactly what’s going on. The bad people strategise every day to undermine public health work. Every single day. https://t.co/jXanPqiMVl
Wealthy nations hoard all of the world’s vaccines, and then wash their hands not only of international responsibility, but even national, with ‘personal responsibility’. I’m glad to see ‘libertarian’ being used so freely now. Know your enemy. The true cause of the pandemic https://t.co/ua8oNj5Tc3
Infection is disease. That thought has been continuing to emerge in my mind as I watch the attempts by the smart few to stop mass infections. We need to understand that infection is bad, because the way the mass infection crowd get away with what they’re doing is by…/1 #COVID19
…appealing to lived experience of everyday infection, of everyday people. The colds and flus we all grew up with. (Back to them in a moment.) One thing I think needs saying is that the past century has been hugely skewed in our history of infectious disease. Antibiotics. /2
Prior to antibiotics, cut your hand in the garden, and you could be dead within a week. Everyday cuts and scratches could kill you. We were more intrinsically aware of and wary of infection. Vaccination preceded antibiotics, but together they transformed how we experience…/3
…and think about infectious disease. They illustrate an ongoing truth, that pharmaceuticals save lives, but also dull our senses. They encourage a set-and-forget mindset. As we also see in warfare, with constantly failed dreams of *the* ultimate weapon to end conflict. /4
Infectious disease is an ecological phenomenon, much more than it’s a medical phenomenon. Medicine is one ecological input to the ecosystems of microbes, of which disease pathogens and ourselves are parts. Antibiotic resistance and vaccine waning clear examples of how…/5
…the dance never ends. With that in mind, Paul Ewald’s work has always fascinated me. There are two aspects to it that are better-known, firstly his hypotheses on modulation of virulence using public health measures, based on a particular hypothesis from evolutionary theory. /6
I won’t explore that one here, evolutionary theory is a bit of a battle ground. Though I will say (having studied evolutionary theory in depth) that the idea it means ‘mutations occur randomly, and those that are most fit survive’, which passes for accepted wisdom, is…/7
…historically inaccurate, when you actually read Darwin (which few still do). It’s more a product of the modern synthesis, and has become a type of scientific slogan, a highly simplified caricature of what Darwin discovered and discussed. Upshot being, I think evolutionary…/8
…explanations have a lot more intrinsic power that can’t be tapped while we remain fixated on these caricatures of Darwin’s thought. But to get back to Ewald’s other line of thought that seems massively pertinent today, on *chronic infection*. Ewald feels, and I agree, that…/9
…our assumptions and thinking about infection are mired in our experience of acute infection. The infections that resolve themselves, or via vaccination and antibiotics. (Or *seem* to resolve, Ewald’s critical point.) Perhaps most of us now have come to think of infection…/10
…as a temporary, resolvable bump in life’s road. A medicinal view of infection. Ewald suggests that infections, even those we think of as acute, may in fact be chronic, and persist for years, if not our entire lives. We are aware of some chronic infections, HIV-1, measles…/11
…varicella-zoster, etc. But Ewald suggests many of our chronic ailments, such as cardiovascular disease, may in fact be the result of chronic infection. (Just recently we saw an example of this with MS: https://t.co/McZNiUtM2o) /12
This can be both ongoing presence of the infectious pathogen in our bodies, and/or the ongoing damage caused by earlier infection. In both cases infection is a possibly permanent shift to the ecological balance between ourselves and our surroundings. (Noting that…/13
…infection also plays a positive role in evolution, in driving biological change.). Just some of the research on possibly infectious causation of atherosclerosis here: https://t.co/t7RPJKpb3n /14
The important overall point is, take infection seriously. As those who study Long Covid know, infection with Covid may have lasting, even lifelong morbidity and mortality impacts. The deliberate mass infection of entire populations currently underway fails even basic…/15
…risk management process. Infection is not the inconvenience of a cold, we don’t even know for sure that those handful of regular infections we’ve all suffered are only acute, without chronic long-term effects. Recognising that our bodies fight infection using our immune…/16
…systems isn’t a reason to welcome infection itself. It’s like saying we have guns to defend ourselves, so let’s all start shooting. The past century is unique in human history, as above, because it’s the first time we’ve thought of infection as a minor, temporary thing. /17
In evolutionary time scales, and even in the timescales of human history, infection plays out across generations, even centuries and millennia. We’re still fighting TB, malaria and polio. Early victories have to be revisited, time and again. /18
Just to finish, recent hypotheses of the causal role of influenza infection with heart disease, and how flu vaccinations can possibly mitigate against that. ‘Just like the flu’ never seemed a dumber thing to say. /end https://t.co/iNVAoSqmCA
Very, very useful. https://t.co/OZuGySF776
Hospitalisations rising markedly. Waiting for ‘it’s not hospitalisations that matter, it’s only ICU that matters.’ Followed by ‘it’s not ICU that matters, it’s only deaths that matter.’ Followed by ‘those people had underlying conditions’. Followed by data suppression. https://t.co/Fachny1bZR
Same pattern, again. Lockdowns aren’t a choice, the virus shuts society down whether you want it to or not. Spineless politicians wait for people to do it for them. That kills people. https://t.co/GZUYPYnckb
To use this graphic again. Imagine if thousands of people in NSW were getting whooping cough, or TB, every day. And that most of them weren’t going to hospital. Would we say ‘all good, let it spread’? I think we know the answer. https://t.co/fnDMOltkQl
Saw this. Thoughts? @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 @longfacehorse @polioandme @OrinCordus https://t.co/DXscfBj2lU
Some joked this would happen. But we deep down knew they’d go here. It possibly won’t stop just at health care either, if the Economy becomes too disrupted with mass infection. The Covid minimisers have defined reality as ‘what we want it to be’ for 2 years. https://t.co/uJ6cdJEt0d
Hospitalisations have become endemic. #COVID19 https://t.co/77gNZeSB7y
The new plague tours a loss-leader for the next lockdown. https://t.co/IG9ON9mmQ1
UAE 99%, Portugal 90%, total population vaccinated. https://t.co/FwXNMdz7GH
I find it’s usually people who have never worked in schools, and/or were popular at school, who think kids are damaged by not attending them. https://t.co/gIQu1Hrch4
What number of days until we find out if Christmas Day was a superspreading event? https://t.co/Fy1fhxbiIK
My brother tested positive on a RAT before Christmas, and 3 times since. Still hasn’t got his PCR result. His wife now has a sore throat. No testing centres on the Central Coast until Wednesday. No RATs available. Is there a Pandemics for Dummies we can gift the Premier and PM?
Update on this. Sites advertised as open, are closed. Sites that are open are so swamped that police have been called to prevent further cars joining queues.
Living with the virus in the UK is a multi-generational slaughter. https://t.co/rbnZiEakVl
The chaotic, infected NSW mess is? The Queensland Premier’s fault. (Libertarians particularly like making women to blame.) Friends already repeating this new brain-worm back to me in conversation. Libertarians talk strategy every single day. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/Ttil7ElBlP
The NSW Government also rapidly weaponising this with new spin (‘might cause rise in cases’). So the growing mess is: 1. the Queensland Premier’s fault, and 2. this lab’s fault. The party of individual responsibility. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/YGXUBsgiuB
Anti-vaxers a scapegoat for governments who refuse to control transmission. When you control spread, very few get infected, vaccinated or not. Only when we outsource all public health work to the ‘jab’ do anti-vax loons become a critical issue. #covid19aus https://t.co/zKZTumtLnv
The libertarians here will be onto this next (already underway for HCWs). Not fixing problems, re-branding them as non-problems, spinning them as somebody else’s problem, and finally fudging the data so that problems become invisible. https://t.co/e36HzclQrI
Pay attention, and you can spot the massaging of pandemic metrics, in real-time. https://t.co/oNIFo1BQX1
What things are we planning to do as socieities that are so important, that we need to stop trying to beat a pandemic, to do them? It seems to be mostly: - tax cuts - dismantling the public sphere, and - flying on planes to trash other peoples’ homes. #COVID19 https://t.co/ku8FLHPtGd
Vaccines smooth the hospitalisation and death curves. But killing people at a steady rate over a longer time isn’t progress. You’re just swapping axes. https://t.co/V5RFHGSK6K
There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely - climate change inaction. /1 #COVID19 https://t.co/OIVZ0iL5wN
A much bigger existential threat, ignored for decades by the same people now doing everything to downplay Covid. ‘Surely they wouldn’t just let people die, or send them off to work infected, or infect children, or flog HCWs half to death’. They already are. /2
They’ll meet little resistance because we’ve substituted lifestyles, for lives. Look around you, in the pandemic, and you’ll see it. The reason we can’t fight Covid with everything we might throw at it? It will disrupt lifestyles. Businesses, travel, tourism, socialising etc. /3
That’s all the ‘Economy’ is. Lives and their material necessities, replaced by transactional lifestyles. A cafe or restaurant going out of business is seen as more of a tragedy than somebody being infected with Covid. The minimisers organise and welcome the infection. /4
Societies who can’t function and fight off infectious disease threats at the same time, can’t survive in the long term. Plagues are in the DNA of history. Too many decades of lives and work decoupled from the physical realities of life on Earth. /5
After the horror of World War 2 we made a silent contract with ourselves to reject the miseries of millennia of human life, and recast all existential challenges as engineering challenges to be project managed. There would always be a pill, a new way for less people to grow…/6
…more food, HVAC and architecture and civil engineering to avoid climate extremes. Shit would no longer happen, shit was now a liability claim. We lost all sense of some things being bigger than us and out of our control, and thus the capacity to deal with them when they…/7
…happened, physically and psychologically. Every day of this pandemic you can see people saying they choose to not accept it as even real, or to not fight it because somehow ignoring it means it will go away. Or reframing reality to make Covid ‘just like the flu’, as if…/8
…wanting that to be true makes it true. From the beginning of the pandemic I’ve thought Covid would have to make us really suffer, to fundamentally break us and society, for us to take it seriously. Just as the world wars and their well over 100 million dead shifted our…/9
…horizons, as above. Nothing else shifts our deepest habits of thought and life, except catastrophe. And so here we are, sadly. History teaches us pretty much nothing. Hardly anybody studies it now anyway, they do business studies. They have lifestyles, not lives. /end
‘Just like the flu’ has been a political phrase in this pandemic. Look at the guidance on flu from non-pandemic times. Nothing about ‘living with’ it, or using vaccines to make it more ‘mild’. All about stopping flu. The idea we all choose to live with it is rubbish. #COVID19 https://t.co/VnfziMvvfs
A hypothesis. ‘Live with the virus’ rhetoric will become increasingly unpopular as the virus finds its way into the more affluent parts of the State. https://t.co/1vE4psjgkM
Every day you hope you’re at peak stupid. And every day there are new surprises to delay that call a bit longer. Like the PM’s new statement on close contacts: “What’s important with this definition is to try and understand…/1 #COVID19Aus #auspol https://t.co/boUXNJddFU
…that you’re dealing with a high volume of cases, and we just can’t have everybody just being taken out of circulation just because they happen to be at a particular place at a particular time”. Or in non-spin speak: ‘we can’t have people taken out of circulation for…/2
…being a close contact, just because they’re a close contact.’ As predicted, the Orwellian reframing of catastrophic shitfuckery as ‘nothing to see here’ gathers pace. You could control the astronomical case numbers, how’s that for any idea? /end
Making sense of severity. Every variant of Covid is both mild *and* severe, depending on who gets infected and how they respond? So an assessment of severity of a variant is made on the collective outcome of many infections - an epidemiological assessment? /1 #COVID19
I’ve seem the ‘mild’ narrative interpreted by members of the public to mean that the variant itself will be intrinsically mild, for all people. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s at stake here, to me. It will still be severe, and lethal, for some. We know some of the…/2
…things (age, co-morbidities etc.) associated with more severe illness, but the aetiology of severe Covid is still a bit of an enigma? Fewer may get severe disease, from a given variant, but the assessment of severity will be made on the aggregate, not individual data? /end
Because the general public understand almost nothing about the immune system, metaphors are rife. What prevents mass riots at the deliberate infection of entire populations is some bizarre metaphor of infection making us stronger. Like a gym for the immune system. https://t.co/TA4OkCbhwn
We need to refuse the hospitalisation framing of pandemic seriousness, and replace it with infection. Society cannot function with mass infections, despite the desperate whining of sociopathic business groups. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/A7H1LRprTj
The developed world’s Covid strategy of ‘infect everybody repeatedly’ has turned testing into a universal Tinder. Get a RAT to date, eat out, go to the cinema, etc. #COVID19 https://t.co/7jrnypx6aq
With yesterday’s catch-up from Christmas results, the better comparison is the day before? Roughly same no. of tests, cases doubled in 2 days. Data folk, is there still easy access to daily infections by town, rather than LGA? @rossleedham @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/Tag7vUKXLU
I see from National Cabinet today that workplaces remain like Faraday cages for Covid, curiously able to repel infection without doing anything.
I love the new National Cabinet uniforms. https://t.co/Bhg21FSvB6
This year’s federal election will test a hypothesis. The Australian libertarians believe we share the same dislike of government as the public in the UK and US. I think the Oz public has shifted there, and will entertain elements of libertarianism…/1 #COVID19Aus #auspol2021 https://t.co/gBJXSFOmct
…such as tax cuts and free speech. But I think they still expect government to provide essential services, including protection of health. They don’t see it as some dumb freedom thing, they see it as basic delegation of core work, to institutions we invented to do that work. /2
Governments using libertarian political ideology rather than public health to fight a pandemic will test this hypothesis. It could (many of us hope) lead to electoral slaughter. Australians have never supported their health being threatened by their own governments. /end
@TeachersFed what action are you taking to demand schools are being made safe for the beginning of the 2022 school year? Ventilation, air filtration, masks? Or is it all just salaries and conditions for you, as always? #COVID19nsw
Let’s try this - being hospitalised means you *don’t have a mild illness*. In the past, if you were hospitalised for flu, it meant you had a severe case of flu. We can’t let hospitalisation be reframed as mild, because it ‘isn’t ICU’. Same old re-normalisation trick. #covid19aus https://t.co/UwccCh7fdz
A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into stark relief. /1 #COVID19Aus #auspoll
Here’s government spending as a percentage of GDP, going back more than a century. Massive expenditure in both world wars, and then hovering around 15-25% of GDP, in non-war times. Next Tweet has the figures post-2008. /2 https://t.co/OUU5JfVupF
Average figure since 1990 about 25% of GDP. Whether that’s too little or too much is another question, a bit more on that below. What you can see clearly here though is that extra government spending for Covid raised this to about 35% of GDP. Compare with the previous graph,…/3 https://t.co/YSUfBLZ2rE
…for WW1 (about 50%) and WW2 (over 120%), and you can see government support for this current crisis is relatively puny. For those who object to comparisons to the world wars, current estimated excess deaths for Covid globally, in under 2 years, is 18.6 million. /4
That’s more than died in WW1, in under 2 years (WW1 was 4 years). And every member of the Australian population is at risk of Covid, unlike WW1. So at least as great a threat as that world war, and a long way from over. Another important historical fact to note is that this…/5
…huge government spending in both world wars led to enormous prosperity for decades afterwards, the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and ‘post-war boom’. So the common language of politics in our day of this (supposed) mountain of debt in our own time, that ‘will need to be repaid’…/6 https://t.co/Qqlrpt5bPE
…is nonsense. Our government debt is tiny by both world and historical standards, and history shows massive government investment helps create ongoing prosperity, across generations. But how have we managed to maintain prosperity, without large government spending in recent…/7
…decades? This is where the libertarian shift comes into play. It’s true we’ve led comfortable, prosperous lives in this time, but instead of government investment enabling that, we’ve paid for it ourselves. In private debt. Have a look. /8 https://t.co/iDEXwwzMqy
Historically the libertarian push began in the late-1970s and early 1980s, with the Thatcher and Reagan supply-side revolutions. Trickle-down society. The stagflation of the 1970s was conquered by replacing government investment with private investment, funded by private debt. /9
That’s you and me today, with enormous mortgages and personal debt, as well as vastly over-leveraged businesses. Libertarians shifted the driving force of investment in society from public hands, to private hands. More accurately, they shifted it from collective endeavour…/10
…(a ‘common-wealth’) to individual liability. But government always was just those same individuals, pooling their resources and efforts for collective benefit. Now increasingly they fund absent public services out of their own pockets, without the economies of scale. /11
Back to Covid. Australia’s success with Covid in 2020 had a lot to do with JobKeeper, government investment for the furloughing of business activity. I’ve Tweeted before that its lesser success in 2021 is almost entirely due to an ideological withdrawal of this same level of…/12
…support, by gutting JobKeeper. (I’m certain that was also strategic, to force Australia to adopt the let it rip strategy the libertarians fought for in early 2020.) Australia could easily afford to smash Covid again, as it did in 2020, but current economic mythologies,…/13
…shared by politicians of both sides and most of the Fourth Estate, won’t even consider it. It’s all the household economics lunacy, about ‘needing to pay down debt, and bring the budget back into surplus’. Countries aren’t households. History empirically shows the lie…/14
…of those mythologies. It’s not clear what proportion of political libertarians actually believe the nonsense beliefs they espouse, and what proportion know that it’s all just a strategic ruse to favour existing privilege. Either way, that set of beliefs is destroying our…/15
…societies and stopping us from even trying to defeat Covid. It’s difficult to see this ending well, given the level of neuro-programming libertarians have succeeded in exercising upon societies in the last 50 years. But diagnosis is a necessary first step. /end
Spoke with a GP today who said the system of GPs overseeing peoples’ Covid self-care at home in NSW is collapsing. #COVID19Aus
I would say the majority of experts I read casually make claims about Covid becoming endemic. As if Covid being present in the population = endemic. It being ‘present’ in repeated epidemic waves seems a strange sort of endemicity. #Covid_19 https://t.co/SMPVwIW7Yk
It’s surprised many that even most Premiers have now capitulated to let it rip. But it’s inevitable under populism, where politicians attempt to directly manage complex population-level events, bypassing expertise. We see that now,…/1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TjtfR8FUn5
…where that management is really only the management of messaging, not realities. That’s what politicians do, manage messaging, it’s their specific job. Experts always run the country in 99% of what we do. If you replace expertise with popularity, everything will be…/2
…subservient to that popularity, a complete decoupling of actual outcomes from decisions. Problems will be re-messaged as non-problems, or as somebody else’s problem. It will only ever be about messaging, never outcomes. Again, not because politicians are intrinsically…/3
…venal, but because in democracy, that is their specific job. To create and carry the narratives, while the experts do the actual work. Populism removes the expert layer, leaving nothing but messaging. The Premiers and PM have run out of ways to re-message an event…/4
…that pays no attention to any of the messaging. So they’ve thrown in the towel. What they should be doing is say ‘ok, we’re now handing management of this over to our CHOs and other pandemic expertise, to end this once and for all.’ Let the pilots fly the plane again. /end
I reckon if we set fire to all of our bush land at once, we can be free of bushfires too. https://t.co/Ymd6lAj63T
Some infectious disease docs and paediatricians have been the surprising lead weight in the saddle bags in this pandemic. Trisha explains maybe why for the Dr Nicks and Professor Peters, but it’s still not clear what motivated the paeds. https://t.co/GGQ15mgiEw
AHPPC: “Other population level approaches…are key to keeping cases within manageable levels and therefore preventing health system overwhelm.” A *public health* strategy should be one that prevents people needing to go to hospital at all. Or getting sick in the first place.