January 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
“In 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic will end. Driven by the inexorable, inevitable spread of the Omicron variant and the use of vaccines, the global population will generate immunity to this virus.” (Dr Coatsworth) We need a dark green texta and a copy of ‘Eugenics for Dummies’. https://t.co/KrGeBVUdWT
Car crash investigation complete. #COVID19Aus #auspol https://t.co/fP9vzSllgH
SKY News obediently shifting the narrative this morning to ‘ICU numbers are low’. Reality check for hospitalisation hopium from the ABC here. Robert Booy suggests hospital staff are just being ‘too careful’. Can we find him a gown? #COVID19aus https://t.co/epEMnYYelR
No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for continuing to raise it. The problems with democracy. I don’t agree with everything here, for example I think social media is a response to the…/1 https://t.co/7ucHyJLIzF
…weaknesses of democracy, not a cause of those weaknesses. But unless we recognise that democracy is failing, it will ultimately fail. It was failing before the pandemic, and has been just embarrassingly useless during it. I see the people here every day, looking on in…/2
…stunned disbelief, at the magnitude of the stupidity of our response to Covid, worldwide. But the seeds of this go a fair way back, most obviously and recently with climate change, where we saw very plainly that democracy isn’t dealing with it. /3
Some see every critique of either democracy or autocracy as an argument for the other -acy. My two cents? Our problem is in believing either of them even exist. There are just people, believing certain things and then acting in certain ways. You don’t apply democracy or…/4
…autocracy to people, democracy and autocracy are the visible manifestations of people believing and acting in certain ways. We have it backwards. Ultimately all people are pretty much the same, and this is what we’re not seeing (I think). They want a degree of individual…/5
…freedom, but also a degree of hierarchy and guidance and structure. They want there to be hierarchies of value, in all things. They don’t want to just celebrate diversity, but they also don’t want to just be told what to do. They want both. The Chinese for example look…/6
…’authoritarian’ to us because they run their societies mostly using custom and tradition, they have a longer-term view where decisions have to be assessed according to multiple generations at once. The idea of letting individuals live according to their personal beliefs…/7
…alone seems ludicrous to them. It should seem ludicrous to us too, even if we don’t want the Chinese model. We’re seeing the outcomes of that sort of libertarian fantasy right now. We have multi-generational institutions with wisdom accumulated over centuries, who know how…/8
…to beat this pandemic. We’re not using them, populist politicians are deliberately sidelining them for cheap, short-term political gain. That was our way of having that Chinese continuity, in our own societies, without being chained to family hierarchies. In the meantime…/9
…and as the graphic for Stan’s story shows, if you remove the hierarchies, people will just re-invent them. Libertarians destroy institutions, but this doesn’t ‘free’ people; it leaves them feeling rudderless. So they mobilise behind whatever else is offered to them. /10
Every tinpot fanatic or fundamentalist then has a shot of filling that vacuum of hierarchy and guidance. There are no systems, just people. The more you allow both freedom and restraint (or better, see restraint as just an enabler of more freedom), the happier we’ll all be. /end
We focus on hospitals. The real game-changer will be workplaces, that’s where the ‘live with the virus’ nonsense will be exposed. #covid19aus https://t.co/FQzkeQK65n COVID-19: Contingency plans drawn up over fears a quarter of public sector workers could be absent due to Omicron https://t.co/cNmM07tuno
The UK now requiring masks again in schools, for children and staff. We haven’t even required them once here, there’s no ‘again’. We may surpass their stupidity yet. #covid19aus
That part of the pandemic where live with the virus shitfuckery spreads well beyond hospitals. https://t.co/MFm4NN51mV NHS likely to lose nearly half of dentists after pressure increased to catch up on backlogs, profession warns https://t.co/hCrz0zpmGv
@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization have you looked at the guidelines for public health units, re. Covid? Lots of important codings, definitions etc. https://t.co/srE98cGM8c
Also @Bertrandization, would be interested in a lawyer’s perspective on whether our obligations under the IHR (link below) may be violated if we decouple testing (via RATs) from centralised recording. Detection is an obligation. https://t.co/499IJK2hmY
I think consumers are super ‘confident’. That they’ll get Covid. https://t.co/BJHNpGvaDi
The CDC sets the bar twice as high for schools as it does for the general population. The reverse of politicians. And our 7-day isolation period doesn’t even require negative RAT tests for clearance. The Brits require *2* negative RAT tests. We’re plumbing new depths. #covid19aus https://t.co/FYeQVQHU3L
A debating trick Covid minimisers rely upon is zooming in on weaponised metrics, like hospitalisations, and then having us all argue the number of angels on the heads of pins. Always zoom out instead and reinforce the basics. You end a pandemic by stopping infections. #COVID19
The new narrative out of the UK is one that may actually help us. ‘Covid disruption’. Disruption to everything, from mass infection. A narrative driven by reality instead of spin, for a change. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/qp32SP4D9m
‘Flatten the curve’ - did we notice the shift from that being a case-curve, to being a hospital/ICU-curve, to being a deaths curve? The only endemic thing in this pandemic is deaths. #covid19 https://t.co/bVPwmucQ4F
From a nurse in NSW Health. “We are short staffed every shift by about 4 nurses. Cannot recruit any more staff, no one is applying. Staff are resigning because of the new protocols and workload. We have had pandemic pay relinquished, so if we get COVID at work…/1
…it’s our own sick pay. We are turning away scores of people symptomatic of COVID who just want to be tested on top of increased presentations and no real way to have patient movement facilitated so we don’t spread COVID to the immunocompromised patients there for other.../2
…illness. It’s just a shit fight. We all know it.”
I’m not confident there’s widespread understanding of the difference between medicine and public health. https://t.co/8KOe1pCoBk
The free RAT debate is the PM’s next vaccine supply albatross. Expect tests to be free nationwide within the week.
The next UK-imported spin, people in hospital ‘with Covid’ rather than ‘from Covid’. Only 25% of those hospitalised in the UK right now for Omicron are unvaccinated. The vast majority of hospitalised are there because of Covid. /1 #covid19aus #AusPol2022 https://t.co/GAc0p8fpBM
The PM looking to massage hospital numbers at National Cabinet tomorrow. Every single day, worldwide, libertarian governments do nothing to fix the actual problem, and just put us through never-ending re-branding of problems as non-problems, weaponising of selective data,…/2
…spin and trickery. To beat them we need to step outside that daily misdirection, it’s like a Covid Penn and Teller show. And insist on the basics. Stop the spread of the virus. Stop people becoming infected. Reality will always eventually catch up with…/3
…spin, it’s happening in the UK right now. But we need to accelerate the destruction of the misdirection. The fire is out when the bloody fire is out. Not just a bit out, not living with or alongside the fire. OUT. /end
How is it acceptable that in the midst of the current emergency, the latest NSW epi report takes us only to 11 December last year? #COVID19Aus #nswpol https://t.co/wQO9zfGLlF
If you think it’s more important to have a child in school, than it is to have them not infected with Covid, you’re a lethal idiot.
You usually get moderating, averaging effects looking at the aggregate Covid data. A measure of how badly the pandemic is going is that even the global cycling of waves has broken free to unconstrained growth of cases. #COVID19 https://t.co/nkOEKtbCgE
You get a lovely contrast effect if you post the update from the week before, with every daily update. The only metric trending down is testing. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/1GRUvY5YSE
@SkyNews can we get ‘PR consultants’ opining about Covid off Press Preview? Manic, dangerous gibberish.
Nearly a third of all people tested in NSW yesterday were positive.
The UK data, for when the ‘in hospital with Covid, not from Covid’ narrative takes off here. The LNP already trotting it out. By eye at least twice as many in hospital for Covid. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/mbgKoelHiX
Australians have had a low tolerance for libertarian ideas. The 2014 Budget, a libertarian fantasy wish-list, is empirical evidence, it destroyed that government in 2 years. My gut feeling is libertarian pandemic strategies will be even more toxic to voters. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/RVATr0w2Eo
Reclassifying election results is only a couple of steps further down the road. https://t.co/bmOnfXUGaX
History. Polio. A mostly ‘mild’ disease, for those who caught it. Did we say ‘ok let’s just let everybody get it?’ We know the answer. In an average year, polio killed 50-100 people. Covid has killed >2000 Australians, in less than 2 years. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/pwNOxsZW6V
Regional supermarkets reporting shortages, firsthand photo. Living with the virus - how long will this farce continue? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/m0tKSJEhyG
More libertarian farce. Covid is easy to kill - fresh air, soap and water. This pandemic is *entirely* caused by the PEOPLE who don’t want to stop Covid. #covid19aus https://t.co/zT6YGLW4YL COVID-19: 100,000 critical workers to take daily tests in bid to ease Omicron shortages https://t.co/iUKOAzj3hR
Waiting for the minimisers to call this ‘panic sick leave’. https://t.co/fuEXtYjSCV
I prefer the weekly comparison, focusing on the day leads to re-normalisation of the ridiculous. Hospitalisations almost tripled in a week, ICU doubled. https://t.co/Ir7vvSLRzi
Won that bet. Still a rubbish half-arsed decision, RATs are most powerful to detect infectiousness even in the asymptomatic. Refusing to subsidise that while supporting removal of public health measures - what can you say. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/NgY8anTlKd
Spot-on from Mike Ryan, from the WHO. The pandemic is mostly the result of the deliberate assault on that trust by libertarians, determined to paint all public health action as oppression. #covid19 #auspol https://t.co/P9zX018mt0
Probably worth noting that those who advocate for herd immunity don’t believe in herds. Only individuals.
Monkey-see, monkey-do. On exactly the same day, on opposite ends of the world, libertarian Oz and the UK announce the same changes to testing. ‘The aim is to prevent prolonging isolation for workers’. No public health justification, entirely about the Economy.#COVID19Aus https://t.co/n5oeNcx0PL
What wasn’ said as loudly yesterday is that by removing the requirement to confirm a positive RAT with a PCR, people will become ineligible for State-based relief payments. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/4CGoqHuMLD
Telling people to ‘live with’ Covid while it’s still in pandemic mode is like telling people to return to their homes during the ‘emergency’ phase of a bushfire, instead of at the all clear phase. The ‘live with the virus’ slogan is possibly the most toxically powerful of…/1 https://t.co/7tiHIKWPHX
…the pandemic. Speaking to lots of friends, they’ve all swallowed it. They assume by choosing to let Covid run, it will be just like the flu. When I point out we don’t have a pandemic flu strain right now, so the comparison is meaningless - vacant stares. /end
Model conversation to reverse populism. A: Do you have expertise/training/experience in this area? B: no. A: fuck off.
Suspect a similar story in many workplaces. At mine, staff told ‘ask your Director if you wish to work from home’. You ask, response: ‘not at this time, we don’t have any transmission here’. The lunatics are running the asylum.
Strip away the data and technicalities. The Anglo democracies have decided the way to deal with a pandemic, is to not deal with it. To let it infect at will. Not one journo says ‘if we don’t stop infections, the pandemic by definition will never end.’ https://t.co/K6uaokwMRJ
Today’s weekly comparison. https://t.co/g6V8ZbLNtX
Media and politicians are silent on the ongoing risk to regional areas. Take Bathurst, a prominent regional NSW town. 120 cases registered yesterday, with the LHD saying that’s certainly an under-count. Most regional towns have few if any spare hospital beds. #auspol #COVID19Aus
One of many families who can’t even get basic food stuffs at the supermarket. Fruit, vegetables, meat. Then having to listen to incompetent ideologues every day saying how swimmingly it’s all going. Learning to live with Covid. You need food to fucking live. #covid19aus #auspol
“You look at England and South Africa, it reaches a peak and goes up quickly and comes down,” Prof Collignon said. Media return to him for sound bites like a dog to its own vomit. #covid19aus https://t.co/Z9qsZu8mGo
National Cabinet yesterday. On a day when public attention was on a tennis star (seriously, who cares), how was this not the story of the day? How many layers of outrageous can we sustain? #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/amcFcA6WKr
@YouAreLobbyLud it’s all very Lord of the Flies now. https://t.co/MXZxR3vqsU
If herd immunity by natural infection actually worked, why would we still have colds and flus? Talk to ordinary people, so many of them infected with the chickenpox party idea that they just need to get Covid, to ‘get it over with’.
Same pattern, again and again. Infections begin amongst the young and mobile, then spread into the old. Severity thus appears ‘milder’ to begin, then gradually worsens. #covid19aus https://t.co/NoASgKVTgl
NSW Crisis Cabinet meeting today to discuss significant new restrictions. ‘Live with the virus’ usually only lasts a few weeks, before reality and BS meet face-to-face. #covid19aus #auspol
Boris is now attacking anti-vaxxers. To take attention off the disaster of living with Covid there. 2 PMs on opposite sides of the world, using anti-vax loons (including tennis stars) to deflect and misdirect. Not fixing problems; re-branding them. https://t.co/uh4oGY6tUg
NSW Government announces pissweak non-measures that seem based mostly on the old droplet mythology. And projects 4500-6000 hospitalisations, and instead of saying ‘we’ll try to reduce that ASAP’, says ‘that’s within capacity’. Preventable deaths are in those numbers. #COVID19Aus
No mention (that I saw) in today’s presser about regional cases. Let’s pick Western NSW. A 350 jump in 1 day. Bathurst, the example I used yesterday, went from 120 yesterday, to 257 today. That’s the Deputy Premier’s home town. Heard nothing from him at all. #nswpol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/PRbX2QITH6
In Western NSW, NSW Health forced to replace virus suppression with HCW recruitment. ‘Know any nurses’? You can smell the desperation. #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/pi4YXhIhVk
“Live with the virus” = privatisation of elimination of the virus.
From a pandemic strategy point of view, ask this basic question - WHY are we allowing all of these people to become sick in the first place? #COVID19aus #nswpol https://t.co/k5xwAOohXE
I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But there’s more here. /1 #COVID19Aus https://t.co/YemDa2GyMu
Clearly the Economy itself doesn’t exist. If it did, it would function no matter how healthy people are. All societies are, unsurprisingly, just people. There are no democracies or autocracies, no -isms, like capitalism, socialism or communism. Just people. With beliefs. /2
Those beliefs come up against basic physical realities. And it’s here that we can see that the binaries are debating points, not real things. As libertarian politicians withdraw government from a pandemic response, private individuals take up the slack and do it for them. /3
Nobody is ‘living with the virus’. Everybody is trying to get it out of their lives, and when the government doesn’t help, we do what we can without them. That’s because ‘government’ is just us. We invented it. Another dopey binary, us vs government. The public invented…/4
…government. Leaders are elected from this same public. Government bureaucrats are just more ordinary people. It’s people, all the way up and down. We invented government to be FREE of all the things governments do for us; so that we wouldn’t have to do them. Libertarians…/5 https://t.co/tagEvPNmFT
…who remove government from public work just dump that work onto - the public. The work still has to be done. I Tweeted recently about this in relation to government debt, how the libertarian push to eliminate government debt just pushed indebtedness back onto the public. /6 https://t.co/5UcPE3ceT3
Similarly, grand narratives about ‘authoritarian’ States like China versus ‘liberal democracies’ miss that all societies need to be directed. You can do it via a massive State apparatus, or you can dump that direction onto corporations instead, who direct and control people. /7
Somebody has to direct things, to provide structure and order. Liberal democracies aren’t sailing along with people individually free to do whatever they like, in many they get barely 2 weeks’ holiday, in a 52-week year. /8
It’s about economies of scale. You either centralise a lot of the basic work of society in a government apparatus, as our ancestors did, tired of each having to repeat the same backbreaking basic work of feeding themselves, keeping a roof over their heads etc. Or you don’t. /9
The latter is the libertarian push of the past 50 years. To dump that previously delegated work, back onto individual people. Just shifting the economies of scale. In fact increasing the burden on individuals, to do and pay for work their old delegated institutions did. /10
Most of our political debates about individual vs government totally miss that government is made up of the same individuals that libertarians are trying to ‘free’ from government. They’re trying to free us, from ourselves. That’s what the graph shows, dumping pandemic…/11
…responsibility back onto us, just removes the economies of scale in dealing with the pandemic reality. It costs us each, individually, a lot more, to try to do the same thing. /end
Superb. @TimLonghurst well done. Maybe make the middle square cumulative deaths for the entire outbreak? #covid19aus https://t.co/FX4mtKQyJn
Worth looking at the numbers in this thread to see the growing disaster in regional and remote NSW. Not mentioned in public discussion. https://t.co/UN9QXfszDl
Restrictions on dancing to stop mixing of different social networks - OK. The biggest mixers of social networks? Workplaces, and schools. Both sacred untouchables in live with the virus land.
Let’s ask the professionals who run schools - teachers - about opening them in a pandemic. Not opinionated windbags like some paediatricians and other non-education professionals? Teachers don’t dictate paediatric care, non-school professionals should butt out. #COVID19au #auspol
Watch the UK. Our nations (fail to) act in lockstep. This time Boris copying us. We still haven’t achieved their 300+ deaths per day and called it ‘living with the virus’. But there’s time. https://t.co/CRQCKDPJ8m
The idea of ‘living with’ natural disasters. So much politics is done with language. Take floods. Yes we do ‘live with’ them, in the sense that we accept that they will sometimes happen. We DON’T live with them WHILE THEY ARE HAPPENING. We use emergency measures to control them. https://t.co/EdWxj1wqIJ
If the school is on fire, you call in the firies. They tell everybody else to fuck off, while they put out the fire. The end. https://t.co/GfbQlAGre3
Such a rich vein of horseshit here to be mined. Most obviously ‘balance’ and ‘proportionate’ as weasel words again, where nothing is being balanced, and the only proportional weighing is just how sick workers can get before they collapse on the job. /1 #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/RaMrzHMtUn
But ‘we need society to remain open’ deserves special treatment. Libertarians DON’T BELIEVE IN SOCIETY. Their arch-priestess, Maggie Thatcher, said those actual words, explicitly: “who is society? There is no such thing!” This is the gobsmacking gall of libertarians,…/2
…whose precious individual freedom is created and sustained BY SOCIETY. Discovering that dumping responsibility for a pandemic back on individuals causes the collapse of their comfortable lives, libertarians enact draconian anti-individual laws to force individuals to work…/3
…while infected, so that the delusional bullshit of them living their free, individual lives can be maintained. Libertarianism is a philosophy of privilege, of aristocrats with their servants. Society being ‘open’ to a libertarian translates literally as ‘the working poor…/4
…must continue to work, so that we here upstairs can continue to hunt, eat, fuck the nanny and travel to exotic destinations.’ They don’t want society open, they don’t believe it even exists. They pillage all collective equity for their individual benefit, privatising…/5
…collective effort for (their) individual gain. And they get away with it because they’ve skilfully reframed the lives of us, their servants, as ‘aspirational’ to their nanny-fucking example. The American Dream, the great ‘levelling up’, as the UK Tories laughably say. ‘You…/6
…too can be a parasitical fuckwit, just like us’. But you can’t be, of course. They don’t intend to ever let you join. /end
Major COVID course correction immediately required https://t.co/rF2HecxyNj
Complete social breakdown. Remember when even having a cold, or a headache or stomach ache, was considered obvious reason to take a day off work? Now you’re forced to go, with a potentially lethal disease that you can also pass on to others. #auspol https://t.co/4RW0JWz0WK
Numerous things to be taken from this data. 1) World Wars 1 and 2 are in this data. 2) See 1). 3) Pandemics are far more lethal than wars. 4) Governments spent 100-120% of GDP to fight WW1 and WW2. 5) Government spent about 35% of GDP to fight this pandemic. #covid19aus https://t.co/hAS9n2p55q
There’s genius-level parody on Twitter. And of course Covid minimisers who are a parody of themselves. https://t.co/SByl973x7A
Severity is the magic key that unlocks all of the politics of the pandemic. Using polio again as example, which was mostly mild, in the majority of people who contracted it. Covid the same. But both are public health emergencies. /1 #COVID19 https://t.co/PlhsecDduJ
Those early 20th century deaths from polio in Australia were low, many more people likely died from falls, or car accidents. And yet polio was a global health scourge, for thousands of years. Salk was a global hero when he developed an effective polio vaccine. Why? /2 https://t.co/hn38ElhWzr
It’s a bit sad that we even need to ask. People saw that tiny few who suffered terribly from and even died from polio, often children, and saw it as a tragedy. If they survived, a life in an iron lung? Horrible to even think about. /3 https://t.co/QSDNseth4o
And this is where I think severity is a window into 2022. Because libertarians define severity statistically. How many people get severe illness, how many die. Not the fact that people die, or get seriously ill. How many. Not the fact it may be children, either. Accountancy. /4
Not a tired narrative about bean-counters, but about individuals and communities, and how their relationship is understood. Because despite the rhetoric of libertarians about the primacy of individuals, they mean a statistical individual. Not a living, fleshy individual. /5
This is the crazy paradox of libertarianism. Promoting itself as being about individuals, but reducing those individuals to statistical, featureless points. Severity is how many points are impacted, not the impact on a given individual. /6
The barely-concealed lie of political libertarianism is that those who advocate for it do actually cherish that fleshy, lived reality of actual individuals - themselves. That’s the individuals they look after. The rest of us are the statistical points. If billions of…/7
…individuals have competing interests, as they inevitably will, what will decide it is the statistics. Majority rules. The majority is the libertarian substitute for the community. This is what populism is, replacing community with the majority. (Also what we disastrously…/8
…think democracy is, showing just how successful libertarians are in framing public discussions). So if a ‘minority’ of people develop severe Covid, the disease is ‘mild’. Compare that to pre-libertarian times, with polio. As above, nothing to do with how many suffered,…/9
…but to do with the magnitude of the individual (the real, fleshy individuality) tragedy. A *community* (rather than majority) is actually defined around that calculus, of real, individual suffering. Communities look after people because the community defines individuality. /10
A community forms when people think ‘shit, that’s horrible, let’s fix that’, when they see others suffering. ‘We can sacrifice to fix that, if needed’, etc. The essence of community is empathy, where each imagines that suffering…/11
…as happening to them. No statistical summing of individual viewpoints to decide what to do, but a universal humanity residing in every individual. ‘That could be me’. Every individual is a community, because of that universal view they each hold. That suffering…/12
…only makes sense in the context of a community, when they imagine it. The community life being denied that individual, the loves - all socially defined. Majorities and minorities are counting artefacts, not lived realities. There’s nothing to weigh here, or balance. /13
The ‘greater good’ is the universal humanity shared by every individual. Not a count of votes. Democracy isn’t about majorities or minorities, in a counting sense. It’s about prioritising that universal sense of being a person. In a community. /14
In sane societies a majority derives from the universal shared humanity, in each voter, who will then vote for that humanity. Populist libertarians decouple the vote from the humanity, their spin seduces people into substituting sport for politics. Who wins the most votes.../15
…becomes an end in itself. Once the decoupling is done, insert any actual content into the vote that you like, the focus is on the numbers. My side or your side. And govern for the majority. The minority, if only a few get severe Covid - they’re expendable. /end
Christmas 2021 should be remembered as the time the people of Australia, tired from 2 years of fighting Covid, were thanked by their governments by infecting them with it. #auspol #COVID19Aus
This is how the reframing happens, every day. Now going to hospital isn’t ‘severe’ disease. Being hospitalised for just about anything has meant serious illness, in the world I grew up in. It’s not a hotel. https://t.co/3RihlVRnjb
My pinned Tweet talks about society being a high school (literally). Here’s more evidence. The crime is ‘we wanted a party too’, not ‘you’ve killed 150,000 people in the pandemic’. https://t.co/QLgmTesuat
At a time when @RealOzSAGE and others have given governments clear advice to deal with the current crisis, what is National Cabinet discussing? None of it. Just more ways to force people back to work while infected. #auspol
How is this even believable? Missing a few weeks of school to get vaccinated against a lethal virus will harm children? Imagine putting your name to this letter. Let history judge the depths to which some have sunk. #auspol https://t.co/tysEONHF1G
Let’s also note that there is only ONE expert in education who could bring themselves to sign this breathtaking bullshit.
Listening to Anne Ruston vomiting up ‘talking points’ on The Project. The clusterfuck that is Australia right now is a ‘gear change’. Never, ever vote for neoliberals or libertarians. This clusterfuck *is* the actual physical implementation of their ideas.
Looks like Jen bought a few too many RATs down at the pharmacy. https://t.co/0bBdqjS3dK
We’re seeing right now the global clinical trial for neoliberal/libertarian ideas. When you try to run society as an ‘Economy’, this is what happens. The Economy is a political ruse, a statistical rationalisation of vested interest. It wears no clothes. https://t.co/hsdspsSSzP
Walter Lippman believed that people choose governments based only on their perception of whether things are ‘working’ in society. If he’s right, the federal election could be unprecedented electoral slaughter. We can only hope. #auspol https://t.co/J2dFAqwNgc
Signatories to yesterday’s ‘Infect All of the Children for their Mental Health’ declaration here in Australia need to take note. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/lzw905kSEx
The politics of maths. Covid deaths in the UK, but the same principles apply globally. Currently running between 300-500 deaths per day. That’s 110,000-150,000 per year. (1500 die in an average flu year, in the UK). Short thread about epidemic psychology. /1 #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/3mCWkXml74
Have joked before that the only thing that has become endemic in countries like the UK now, is deaths. You can see it on the graph. Since about September last year, deaths have never really dipped below 100-200 per day. Even that is over 30,000 deaths per year, if continued. /2
The spin is magnifying our stupidity. The latest wave (here too) is described as causing less severe illness and death. Compared to what? Those previous epidemic peaks. Those are end-of-civilisation peaks, if they were sustained. Hooray, we’re doing better than that. /3
Epidemic disease patterns produce bizarre social psychology. Because deaths are concentrated in those relatively short peaks, idiot politicians can still maintain the fiction that things are going OK. We have pandemic downtime where that illusion is fed. But right now,…/4
…since the second half of 2021, is a MUCH more dangerous pattern. Because the ‘peaks’ don’t end. It’s endemic death. Sustained over a longer time, it will kill a lot more people than those astronomical peaks. And because our entire perceptual system and psychology is driven…/5
…by change and contrast (the frog boiling on the stove) - we notice change, not stasis - populations can be seduced into believing that this is now normal. Many in the UK seem to have settled into that lethal slumber. Hundreds dying every day has been normalised. /end
@RichardfromSyd1 @drbecs haven’t been tracking for a while, but is HITH now no longer reported? Or disbanded? Couldn’t see it here. https://t.co/sQLmZVLk6M
How far off are we? In all seriousness. It’s the de facto arrangement for some goods already. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/THSyX9K4ts
Latest NSW Government report (13 January) says NSW Health has 15,230 Covid patients under care. Most will be in the home (well in excess of the capacity of that care modality). NSW Health projections from last week (graph). Maybe we should start talking about ‘care’, not beds. https://t.co/wdrqAeG9NI
A hospital is beds, buildings and machines that go ping. The LNP has been very upfront about this, the whole time. Keep business open, have enough beds for the maimed workers. I guess the latter is some minor improvement on the 19th century. #auspol https://t.co/tImrSz2JY4
“(PM) says that modelling work was presented today relating to NSW to get an understanding on how the return to school may impact the workforce.” Note that. Not the kids. Not the teachers. The workforce. We’re all pit ponies now. #covid19aus #auspol
National Cabinet announces the solution to the shitfuckery of Australia 2022, is to return to Australia 1822. Get back to work, you slackers. And you can bloody well work infected with Covid too.
Visual representation of the new National Cabinet testing strategy for workers. Remove isolation, infect people faster, shut businesses down even faster. https://t.co/1oYcP2zqea
Excellent demolition of the ‘mild’ nonsense. Makes really clear the inability of neoliberal/libertarian societies to see the collective or public dimension to a problem. They don’t even believe that dimension exists. https://t.co/5tH7iCFYNp
It’s difficult to see anything except social implosion within a month, in most of Australia. The alternatives seem: - Omicron magically going away, or - renormalising widespread disease and death as normal life. The US and UK are well down the second road. National Strike?
Classic straw man debating tricks from the PM yesterday. Like saying the only choice is let it rip, or lockdown. Nobody is arguing to prevent every single infection. But lots of countries are stopping as many as they can. Not one measure announced to drive prevalence down. https://t.co/vAG4oH4Yvq
@SkyNews Carole Malone saying on Press Preview that Covid is milder than a cold is a disgracefully ignorant and dangerous thing to broadcast. 150,000+ people haven’t died of a cold in the UK in the past 2 years.
Kerry Chant clarifying that those who have had Covid do not need to isolate if they’re a close contact, for 4 weeks after their infection. They’re not considered at risk of re-infection in that time. 4 weeks! How’s that for infection-generated immunity. 10 bouts of Covid a year?
Panamax may need to do some brand recognition work. https://t.co/McNwGHuYD9
Politicians in Australia are living the pandemic rhetoric in reverse. From endemic attention to ending Covid, to epidemic bursts of effort, to sporadic indifference. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/chHIR2ufel
A new shirt-fronting Covid machismo I’m seeing is people talking about how ‘mild’ their case was. Possibly just means they got the tortoise instead of the hare variety of infection. https://t.co/RgGk64CNlV
Bought an air purifier for my wife to use in her classroom. School won’t buy them. I reckon if you asked parents to chip in $10-$20 each to have one in each classroom many would be delighted. None of this is rocket science.
This is how to change the country, fast. Nothing terrifies the LNP and their financial backers more than union membership. Ditto for the Tories and Republicans, in the UK and US. Their fear tells us where real power lies. https://t.co/p6FhpUoAwh
Best resource for those interested in choosing a retail air filtration option. There’s also an online tool @DrPieterPeach has developed that I’ll check on. https://t.co/dPZO8Jh8w3
Here’s the excellent online tool @DrPieterPeach developed to assist people to choose good air filtration options, easily. https://t.co/YNulYvUPQy
Just a reminder that Covid and climate change are the same issue. Clean air. That thin blue line contains all known life in the universe. You can’t see the Economy from space. https://t.co/uYFquoIG7D
Science is framed by values. For example, here. Whether we prioritise widespread infection of people to try to end a pandemic. Or whether we prioritise fixing some basics, like clean air in buildings and hyper-obsessive travel. https://t.co/kkFswc52A6
Nearly 10% of infections in the UK are now reinfections. And that number is growing disproportionately faster than first infections. There is no ‘exit wave’.
Breakdown of reinfection data from the UK. From the latest UKHSA update report (https://t.co/v4cFa7Qz8I) Reinfections showing the same pattern as infections. Driven mostly by school and young adult age groups. Some *third* reinfections jin the data too. /1 #covid19aus https://t.co/at1oUCoU45
Reinfections between 60 and 89 days (first graph was 90+ days). /2 https://t.co/lzNpAcjYzJ
Finally reinfections between 29-59 days. /end https://t.co/5ILhcu2ctk
#auspol https://t.co/3jDFv6iN4W
You can’t end a pandemic at home. https://t.co/eWbfZ38N0U
The countries who said ‘only a vaccine can end this pandemic’ have now ended it about 4 times. Better luck next time, maybe. https://t.co/pvqC7rcCn4
Australia really dropped the ball on testing. And it started already with Delta? https://t.co/UQs8Bb5uzz
How the Djoko saga was deliberately engineered to become 'please vote for me, because I stopped the boats'. #auspol https://t.co/0ofDXDdutU
Return to work today. Starring 'I don't need to wear my (cloth) mask when I'm at my desk', and 'I'll have a cup of coffee and remove my mask while sitting amongst you all'. And other favourites.
Trying to remember who suggested that epidemiology books should now be shifted to the self-help section of book stores.
Precious from Brad Hazzard this morning: “Give a damn about your community, your family and most particularly, the health staff across NSW who you expect to be looking after you if and when you end up in our hospital system.” Say it in the mirror, Brad.
"NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant has warned there will be a high number of COVID-19 deaths over the coming days, due to the extent of community transmission of the virus." She's off-message there. Mild, Kerry. Mild.
Just walked the streets where I work, in my lunch break. Pubs, restaurants and cafes that were brimming pre-Domicron: deserted. Not a soul in them.
The real power of Facebook and Instagram is as contact tracing tools. To track all of the 'please infect me' moments from peoples' social lives.
Domicron: NSW needs to 'push through' the Omicron wave. Every time I've surfed, pushing through a wave has led me to...another wave.
All hail the next diversionary spin. The problem with RAT testing isn’t that the government didn’t buy any, no. It’s price gougers. https://t.co/prBlHtBRkl
My tip, always. Watch the UK. It’s our future. Deaths of hundreds per day re-framed as normal. More coming. Are we at peak stupid yet? Or civilisational collapse? https://t.co/UlMKeYxd9Z
What are the achievements of the Morrison government? The only visible activity is the daily spinning of inactivity, as activity. Undergraduate culture war debating games, every day. I imagine Malcolm Turnbull leading the LNP through Covid. Actually leading. Doing something.
So @CHaythorpeAEU and @TeachersFed, what are you going to do about it? Allow mass infection of students and staff? What would be the point of you, if yes? #COVID19Aus #nswpol https://t.co/b8KsnAPv9N
This bit of libertarian sleight of hand: “We’re now in a stage of the pandemic where you can’t just make everything free…When someone tells you they want to make something free, someone’s always going to pay for it, and it’s going to be you.” /1 https://t.co/nDXvnLDpYE
Yes, it’s OUR money Scott. As you like to say when dishing out tens of billions of it in tax cuts to people who don’t need them. Not yours, this isn’t ‘free’ to us - it’s our fucking money. We want OUR money to pay for OUR tests. You’re not giving us a freebie. /2
‘Someone’s always going to pay for it’. We’re all paying for it now. Twice. Once in taxes, once out of our own pockets. Double-dipping. If you’re so worried about spending, how about ditching the upcoming ruinously expensive tax cuts to the top end of town? /end
Tomas Pueyo got fame by being one of the first to talk about 'flattening the curve'. (Not great advice, as it turned out: a highly dispersed virus is easily eliminated using the same measures, but we've all been stuck with that flattening idea since). /1 https://t.co/4R8PC8KOyP
Then he became a bit of a universal expert, on everything. Now he's calling Omicron the end of the pandemic. He's not alone there. We'll see. /end
I am some days, not other days. So generally I am. https://t.co/2TAfofEmSg
She wasn't listening to the Premier yesterday. We need to 'push through' this. Get the volunteers in the hospital canteen to scrub up. https://t.co/SuUjWeEcPT
Have Tweeted before maybe about what POW camps in the Korean War can teach us about Covid. But in case not.../1 https://t.co/b79VSMhsgl
The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at escape. The Koreans began by observing all prisoners as they arrived. Those who showed leadership qualities amongst the prisoners - about 5% of them - were killed. /2
Another 10% were identified as good informers on their mates (like several experts in every country right now), who helped root out any troublemakers. About 40% of the American POWs died, because without leadership or direction, they lost all will to resist or even live. /3
This is how neoliberals/libertarians operate. Identify leadership of any resistance (unions, mostly), cut the head off them, and then either offer proxy leadership (often only fantasy aspirational ideals - super cheap) for who's left, or just let them wither on the vine. /4
In the pandemic, this means eviscerating any public health-led leadership as quickly as possible, and in the meantime weaponising all of the PH concepts as meaningless or redirected slogans, like 'live with the virus'. At the same time, provide no direction to business,.../5
...or fill it with so many loopholes that each CEO or manager will continue trading, in the absence of instruction to do otherwise, as if there was no pandemic. The public, the 'soldiers' who are left, will then all happily swallow whatever hopium offered, and/or die. /end
Kerry Chant: - we don't know when the peak might be - schools will drive case numbers - current vaccines won't make the pandemic end - NSW should expect a year of continuing epidemic waves. https://t.co/CtpRUhOlka
‘Confidence’ is a premium type of economic gaslighting. It’s not the amgydala, you pillock. As if we should be ‘confident’ to go out and get infected. It’s rational consumers responding to sociopathic politicians and economists. #covid19aus https://t.co/RLbDKFT5YT
So we passed the 3-week mark since Christmas. And as night follows day, deaths followed hospitalisations, followed cases. Remembering these infections were a deliberate political act, to win a PM an election, and give the NSW Premier a libertarian boner. #COVID19Aus #auspol https://t.co/MpA5WyTiWE
This is an excellent point. UK death figures are 'within 28 days of a positive test'. https://t.co/ZmGWRyyrER
This new testing systems is working well. Quality data. https://t.co/EH4hQ1ZRIt
I can't watch any of the press conferences now. They used to at least have an information function. Now they're the daily rationalisation of the refusal to do anything, while the country collapses.
Familiar with the spurious correlation page @Bertrandization and @RichardfromSyd1 ? https://t.co/NtT4ePD2Wn
@Bertrandization @RichardfromSyd1 Another compelling one. (I use these with the Ivermectin crowd.) https://t.co/7hNSn21YHs
The slogans do their work. Deep neural programming. Vast numbers can repeat this in their sleep, without any idea what any of the words mean. https://t.co/IeMN5NwOhd
Hands up if you reckon the Covid-minimiser experts' kids are being home-schooled? (If they have kids.)
We may come out of this pandemic understanding that politicians should never ‘run the country’. That’s not how democracy works. When they try to take over, people die. Sir Humphrey tried to tell us this 40 years ago. We thought it was comedy. https://t.co/ccmpHv2Hpw
About 20 million dead. So far. When we lost fewer than that in WW1, we had an enemy. This 20 million is mostly dead because our true enemies are the people who think the enemy isn’t an enemy. They want to live with it. https://t.co/4Cp7U9Vt9o
"If schools don't open and stay open, that's another 5 per cent of your workforce that gets taken out and that has a very serious impact”, said the Education PM. Calling it ‘Covid safe’ opening, like ‘Covid safe’ infections in other workplaces. Like ‘safe drink driving’.
Always watch the UK, it’s a window to our future. As soon as the Omicron (or any) wave peaks, the same narrative re-appears. ‘It’s over’. All measures will now be removed. https://t.co/d66nZlE31m
In other renormalisation news, the meaning of ‘proportionate’ becomes clearer. Killing 20 million of 7.8 billion people is better than killing 50 million of 1.8 billion. Relax, only Cretaceous-killing asteroids that destroy most life on Earth will require economic support. https://t.co/0YrTVBn3PM
Schools are going back so that parents can get back to work in businesses that have no customers. https://t.co/7w07lA3Hak
I thought hospitalisation numbers here are cumulative? Not sure how they go backwards by 82 in a day? Not really like testing data, which can change as results come in. Or am I missing something obvious? @juliette_io @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization https://t.co/50SOr4eWCS
My gut says the feds are toast at the election. But my brain says many treat politics like football, and the parties are their teams. And we all know people will back a losing team for generations.
We're all on the edges of our seats waiting to hear National Cabinet's plan to infect the entire next generation in a 'Covid Safe' way.
The family photo needs updating. Nobody is listening to you any more, clowns. Go rort some grants and leave your public health teams to finish the job. https://t.co/LloDoP94Xn
What would a day be without some group of contrarian experts undermining yet another plank in the public health arsenal? (It was the only plank we had left, so next they'll probably start on the weather reports.) https://t.co/KHYXyBtxnm
Also interesting to wonder what level that 'endemic circulation' will be, in terms of prevalence, morbidity and mortality. https://t.co/wikyWo9xYD
The embarrassing dysfunction of rich countries during the pandemic should force us to take stock of what we’ve become. But it probably won’t. Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander Joint Forces Command in the UK, is a good place to start. A re-share, with a twist. /1 https://t.co/D5UKTdcHfb
That ‘social offer to ourselves’. One of the few times in history that individual preference has been placed at the centre of society. Lifestyles, rather than lives. For most of history, the brutal reality of maintaining a society in the face of existential threats like…/2
…famine, pandemics, flood, fire and war has necessitated a collective focus. If people didn’t band together, they died. A simple calculus. But as Barrons points out, after WW2 we entered over half a century of mostly uninterrupted peace and prosperity. And that’s when…/3
…we decided to make that social offer to ourselves, to ‘free’ individuals to pursue individual rather than collective goals, more than ever before. Living off the fat of the prosperity and peace that generations had cultivated, stored in institutions, and also off the…/4
…collective sacrifice of the two world wars, which sated much of the historical bloodlust of war for so many decades afterwards. At the same time, I’ve Tweeted multiple times about how society in the 20th century began to model itself as a giant high school. /5 https://t.co/l1OFfr1BUB
That’s where we learn our social models. How to relate to one another, how to conceive of and perceive the world. The gradual creeping adolescence of all life, at all ages. The flattening of the ‘circle of life’, a perpetual lifestyle present. The big wars were maybe the last…/6
…gasp of that old collective world, with collective burdens. At least for 50-70 years. It freed up the even more rapid spread of high school society, as adolescent life is obsessed with individual freedom, with forging your individual identity. And so we arrive at Covid. /7
The pandemic collided with this rampant adolescent world, and we’re living in the debris right now. For an adolescent society, with its libertarian philosophy and politics, a pandemic becomes what everything else already is - a platform for individual expression. /8
Individual grievance (remember the flurry of demonstrations on a diversity of topics at the beginning of the pandemic). Individual ‘freedom’ restrained by public health orders. Etc. Rich countries behaving like adolescents who’ve been grounded. Because that’s what those…/9
…nations actually are. High schools. Societies have been on a gap year for 70 years. Except there’s no grown up life waiting on the other side, so the gap year never ends. Endless, obsessive recreational travel. Planes have been a dominant marker of the return to so-called…/10
…’normal’ life. Nobody commits to planning our way out of this pandemic, because that’s so grown-up and a drag. Live with Covid. Chill out. I personally don’t think there’s a way back for our countries. Once institutions are destroyed you can’t just put them back. /11
They emerge, over generations, you can’t just make them appear. When people look on in horror at the shambles of Covid worldwide, remember trying to get most teenagers to do their homework or their house jobs. That’s what you’re seeing. /12
Seems sensible to make them the cornerstone of a school opening plan. https://t.co/IQkfj8nPCw
Yes, but take it a step further. It’s the blue area, the between peak ‘endemic’ level of infection that does the most maiming and killing of all. And is the least noticed, because humans notice changes, not steady states. https://t.co/k7ohgqyX64 https://t.co/ZLSnodxT4F
This mental pygmy, part of a proud and global libertarian mental pygmy tradition, suggests the way forward is to make every year a ‘bad flu year’. Omitting also that Covid is currently killing almost twice as many as even a bad flu year. https://t.co/76vWThPAy1
I’m waiting for every blowhard expert who has opined on Covid in schools to welcome reciprocal advice from teachers as to the best way to do their job. https://t.co/f37tqOqszp
Very commonly done. For example flu deaths in an average year in the UK are about 1500. Add pneumonia and it’s 20-30,000. Which is the number the libertarians use as their ‘just like the flu’ for Covid. https://t.co/swZDZkjKiP
46. It’s going well. https://t.co/DHuOrRty1P
The ‘live with the virus’ variant is the most virulent of the pandemic. And evades all immunity, reinfection is rampant. Maybe the public need to understand that the pathogens we live with are controlled, 365 days of every year. It’s not jab-and-forget. https://t.co/s3qYp66QVS
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with…/1
…either words or blows, or both.” (Frederick Douglass) Join a union, people. Logic won’t win this fight. The opponent of the LNP is the union movement, which established the ALP. Without union members, Australia has no opposition. /end
The problem is that not once have our leaders steeled us for a fight. It’s all been endless promises of it being over. Like bribing your kids with lollipops. #auspol https://t.co/7jdt5wRjSC
From the UK. Teaching staff here should look at WHS options, as it’s plainly illegal to knowingly infect staff of any workplace with a notifiable disease. Government not even pretending, already lining up backup for staff they know will become infected. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/Lj6YqlpQog
Drove past my local drive-through PCR test site yesterday to see how it’s going. Not one person there. Probably all at home trying to buy RAT tests online.
Probably why ‘living with the virus’ resonates as spin. We’ve had viruses out in the granny flat for about 50 years. Now they’re knocking on the back door. https://t.co/Jim1QVit2E
There’s something so glorious about actual journalism. We don’t see much of it any more, it’s too often PR for the vested interests who bought up all the mastheads. https://t.co/4PphPL2EZC
h/t to @cfranks_chris
Red this one @Bertrandization @YouAreLobbyLud @RichardfromSyd1 ?
*read
Nothing to fear people of NSW. Room at the hospital for the kids. https://t.co/7C160s9R6U
Health care workers protesting in their thousands against vaccination is the ultimate victory of neoliberal/libertarian ideas. Like pilots protesting against the oppression of air traffic control. Societies can’t be saved from this belief system. It recognises no society. https://t.co/OYUy9Lj6qY
We live in epidemic social systems. We’ve replaced a public sphere of institutions focused on multi-generational, often invisible action on collective problems, with a daily, even hourly, ‘viral’ spread of faddish ideas and enthusiasms. /1 https://t.co/Z16wVSJWyZ
Society has been replaced by ‘trending’ enthusiasms. Of course we’ve always had fashions and fads, but never before have we transformed the basic operating system of society into repeated, viral epidemic waves. Now whether we do a basic thing like control spread…/2
…of a virus comes down to whether that idea trends. And it will never trend for long, because other enthusiasms will take over. There’s no hierarchy in the enthusiasms, any distraction will do. A movement towards virus control is easily supplanted by a celebrity’s dog video. /3
Maybe ‘living with’ an epidemic pathogen doesn’t seem ridiculous to more of us, because that’s how we already live. In daily, hourly waves of epidemic enthusiasm. They’re over there —-> on the RHS of your feed. Trending. /end (Image courtesy Fleishmanhillard)
NSW now forbidding anything less than a surgical mask in schools. Will be interesting if they also forbid anything better than that. My kids will be wearing better. https://t.co/stjhmDzJw8
This is the full advice to families today on NSW re-opening. Ventilation pretty cursory, though HEPA units were mentioned in the announcement as well. https://t.co/33COs1pMM6
In populist democracy, numbers = power. In Western democracies, numbers = boomers. The boomers are about to face the real risk of widespread infection in their demographic for the first time in the pandemic. Let’s see what happens with that.
‘Deep cleaning’ = the cleaning we used to do, before it was outsourced to lowest-bidding contractors.
‘Endemic’ is something always present in a population, at a certain level. Like low wages, vast gaps in wealth, underfunded public schools and hospitals, and low tax rates for the wealthy. ‘Epidemic’ is peaks within this. Like massive tax cuts and rorted grants in elections.
This pandemic and all of its problems stems from societies that have been shaped as high schools. That’s where we learn our social models, and we construct the adult world to match. Look at the desperate pleas to get kids back to school, through that lens. https://t.co/XmvNSSNW67
Testing ventilation in the workplace. Pleasantly surprised. https://t.co/c4Tyc2Panh
Thanks to @YouAreLobbyLud for his tireless work in this space, which also enabled me to get onto it. The monitor is now doing the rounds of the entire building. This is the sort of simple thing that can create change.
Great piece from @liammannix on endemicity. Less focus here on public health controls, that maintain the level of circulation of multiple pathogens in the community, 365 days of every year? Many aren't aware of it. Not just vaccines and infection. https://t.co/hAO9W3iiea
We need kids back in school, so that Australia can continue its decline towards the bottom of the OECD. Spare me the bullshit about us caring about education or mental health. There was little meaningful action on either, pre-pandemic. It's about business, not education. #auspol https://t.co/KNsk3lEGce
Libertarians are like those husbands who say to their wives, 'what do you do all day?' https://t.co/ciRB6aUZpF
The great public health achievement of the 20th century was the massive reduction in child mortality. The 21st century is sending children to school in the middle of a pandemic wave, unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated. https://t.co/9cWp9cVBWl
Conversation with a colleague, about back to school RATs and her children. "I won't be testing them twice a week, only if they have symptoms, it's too upsetting for them". I sympathise. Disease control should never have been outsourced to individuals.
Covid isn’t the first example of the NSW Govt. choosing to ‘live with’ a natural disaster. The Hawkesbury floodplain is projected to have double the number of houses in coming years, all of which will be in the worst flood zone in the State. Developer $$. https://t.co/kb7D4tbTN1
The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short thread. /1 https://t.co/cEm8JzTsdi
I’ve Tweeted a few times about how the pandemic is itself a creation of neoliberal/libertarian ideas. Every attempt to suppress Covid is met with the same libertarian ‘freedom’ beliefs and narratives, about the supposed impossibility of preventing spread, because that will…/2
…in turn suppress social activity. Which then suppresses ‘economic’ activity, though the neoliberals don’t see that the ‘Economy’ is really just society, and thus economic activity is just social activity. We’d also already been through years of this battle, with climate…/3
…change action consistently thwarted for ‘economic’ reasons, economies supposedly needing to ‘balance’ action against climate change with the need to keep businesses open. (That ‘balance’ strategy of course immediately re-appeared when Covid hit.) But it’s what funds these…/4
…beliefs that will come into the spotlight this year as well. Cheap money. Cheap money has been the ICU for neoliberal/libertarian (let’s call it “N=1 society” as a shorthand) ideas. As community and collective assets and institutions have been progressively destroyed by…/5
…the N=1 crowd, what’s taken their place is astronomical private debt. That’s where the investment has had to come from, facilitated by historically low interest rates. Society wasn’t ‘freed’ by this demolition of its collective institutions, the functions they perform were…/6
…just privatised. Meaning you and I started paying for all of the collective things out of our own pockets, but without any of the economies of scale the collective version provided. And as this debt binge unravels, we can see prices/inflation starting to rise, as any…/7
…collective control and regulation (any social economies of scale) evaporate, leaving us all nakedly exposed to an almost survivalist social ethic. All of this, because of one simple, core, idiotically wrong belief. That individuals and society are TWO things, at war. /8
That’s the nonsense the N=1 people believe. (And some only pretend to believe it, because it makes them rich - they don’t do much thinking of any kind.) You don’t have to balance the individual and society. That’s what society *already was*, that balance. Individuals, sick of…/9
…having no economies of scale, of having to do everything themselves, worked together to create collective institutions, like government, to make their *individual* lives easier. Even those opposed to the N=1 crowd often make the mistake of arguing this as a binary. /10
They argue we need to ‘balance’ individual freedoms and collective priorities. Falling straight into the N=1 framing trap. There is no balance, there are not TWO things here. Just one. Individuals, who use collective things to make the lives of *individuals* easier. /11
If you set up a football club, it’s because it’s a lot easier to organise football games, collectively. The club doesn’t inhibit your freedom. It creates your freedom, to play football. Until we get back to core beliefs, N=1 thinking will continue to destroy our societies. /end
I wonder if it's enough thought about or said, that the current global Covid strategy hinges entirely on the 3rd vaccine dose not failing. If it does, the whole 'live with the virus' edifice comes tumbling down, unless we get new vaccines. https://t.co/SwZLiEJQY7
'Not only is the spread of this virus inevitable, it's necessary'. We need a roundtable expert discussion to debate endemicity and the supposed pathways towards it, I think. https://t.co/qXYcmOAUzo
Brilliant thread on the historical origins of the term 'endemic'. The science hasn't clarified that for me, but the history has. https://t.co/Tfoa01JJ03
I like to holiday in the years pre-pandemic, when we were still trying to eliminate infectious disease. All of it. https://t.co/ABUGvsRGYE
We’re well past the point where who wins the next election will make much difference for our major problems. Democracy’s problems aren’t in who is and isn’t winning elections. It’s that the populist bit of democracy - elections - has sidelined its operational arm. Expertise.
All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persistence of disease in poor regions/countries. Like a character of those regions. /1
Just as poverty and crime have often been attributed to certain regions and even classes of people. Like a genetic endowment. Endemic disease was essentially a shrug, ‘nothing we can do, these people will always have cholera’. /2
Essentially then, endemicity was a political refusal to deal with infectious disease. Rather than some biological characteristic. Also why debate since that time has continued about the relationship between epidemicity and endemicity. /3
Endemicity was often just uncontrolled epidemic outbreaks. Saturation infection, usually of the marginalised. Just as crime is ‘endemic’ in neglected urban environments. /end
Got a lot of killing still to do on its way down, that curve. https://t.co/gw6MrI2sKg
The South Australian trial really did try to reduce CO2 with air purifiers? Had they been drinking? https://t.co/4yeg6lwBri
Similar reasoning Christian Drosten used a while back to argue herd immunity was always a fantasy. We don’t live in herds. We live in hypermobile populations. https://t.co/BLW1XCk942
We don’t understand time. We’re born old, and get younger every day. A baby carries the biological and evolutionary history of its species, going back millions of years. Old. As it grows, it learns the customs, language, knowledge and traditions of its society. All old. /1 https://t.co/KTPmtle90p
Each of us as we go through this growth and maturation process adds new variations to that inherited legacy. New thoughts, new acts and deeds. New genetic changes. Time flows from old to new, our lives only appear to go the other way, from ‘newborn’ babe to decrepit oldie…/2
…because we, as good modern libertarians, can only see it as an individual phenomenon. What we see as *our* individual ageing is actually a collective drive towards youthfulness. Towards the new. Life acts against time. I was thinking about this in relation to the pandemic. /3
Neoliberal/libertarian “N=1” beliefs have no past, no time. Just an eternal present. As we live our lives now, focused on individual lifestyles divorced from the customs and traditions that are the accumulated wisdom of previous generations. Our ancestors fought pandemics…/4
…but we’ll ‘live with’ them (we think), because we’ve replaced a collective youthfulness with a sterile, individual, botoxed and face-lifted caricature of life. All of those rigid botoxed faces imitating the young are really a collective society enslaved to the old. /5
Maturity used to be fighting existential crises, for the continuation of the species. Now it’s a desperate attempt to ‘stay young’, perversely imitating the oldest part of our history, our biological and social heritage. Nothing is as old as a baby. It’s that drive for…/6
…*individual* immortality rather than a constantly renewed, young and fresh collective society that is the ball and chain around our legs in this pandemic. I’ve had my 3 jabs, I can go back to my individual lifestyle. /end
To deflect attention from their refusal to do anything, politicians told us to focus only on deaths and severe illness. So why aren't we focusing on deaths? Every day? Why is 70-80 deaths a day 'things going well'?
I like to track how the spin beds down in ordinary conversation and life. Another example today. In a meeting a senior manager said "I think by mid-year we shouldn't even be testing any more. You'll just not to come to work when you're sick, like a cold or flu".
Very good advice. Drive-through and other testing clinics are almost deserted. Use them. Otherwise the bean counters will shut them down. They also allow sequencing of results. Privatised testing should not become the norm. https://t.co/nUxesGqC0f
Josh Frydenberg says the approx. $260 billion Australians have saved in the pandemic will fire economic recovery. That 'saved' money barely dents the 2 trillion in personal debt. Debt generated by devolving collective public services to individual wallets. https://t.co/Ee7YdC7tKc
Hasn't this aged well. (h/t @djf0001) https://t.co/wdxS20M9hL
ACtually, h/t @longfacehorse !
A week ago the NSW Government quietly signed an exemption to Public Health Orders to exempt employers from reporting Covid acquired in the workplace to SafeWork NSW. Now they only need to if an employee is hospitalised or dies. #auspol #COVID19Aus
"The NSW WHS legislation is a risk-based framework that considers what is ‘reasonably practicable’. SafeWork NSW appreciates that exceptional circumstances require flexibility on the part of the WHS regulators...". /1 #auspol #covid19nsw
So now, all employers need to do is provide a volume of risk that overwhelms the regulator, to trigger 'flexibility' i.e. no regulation at all. What a precedent. /end
It’s such beautiful proof that society is a high school. Boris kills over 150,000 Brits with Covid. But what might sink him is ‘why can Boris have a party, when we can’t have parties?’ https://t.co/zRFePXobtf
Let’s just say, enough. The same vested interests who have blocked action against climate change have been sabotaging action against the pandemic. Every single day some new strategy, to stop basic public health work. If you’re in a fire, you put out the fire. The end. https://t.co/LfI6MeP7kJ
Re-sharing Bruno. He’s talking about all human institutions. If you’re looking on every day and thinking the world has gone mad and can’t be saved, you may actually be right. Institutions ‘don’t get back up’. We’re living in the ruins. Voting won’t fix it. https://t.co/613NWpmVXY
The endgame of neoliberal leadership was always going to be no leadership. It’s in the definition. For a while public health institutions held on, but they’re now roadkill too. Do what you like. Survive if you can. h/t @YouAreLobbyLud https://t.co/0K3DXo6Lee
Vaccine effectiveness findings from the latest UKHSA report. Hospitalisation and mortality (Omicron) for 2 doses highlighted. Contrast with the dominant 'mild', and 'vaccines retain great protection against severe outcomes' narratives. https://t.co/Xokz3jMt75
To be fair, National Cabinet has acted quickly. To open up all the schools. That'll fix it. https://t.co/hXIUHd3uir
'Stealth' = 'we no longer bother with PCR testing'. https://t.co/H0mTLUKsVV
So at this point the only thing stopping 3 doses being called 'fully vaccinated' is that only 35% of Australians being fully vaccinated didn't run well with the election focus groups? https://t.co/pXsOge6jS1
Public health action takes place within a society. But starting in the 1970s, society was replaced with an ‘Economy’. The greatest strategic political weapon ever conceived. Many honestly believe it’s an actual thing. As with climate change, that’s the only real opponent here. https://t.co/O8jz8Qsfz7
If your way of life can’t cope with infectious diseases, the answer is to change your way of life. Like industrial farming, you don’t need to drench the livestock with antibiotics, you need to let them graze in a field. Living with infection is battery hen society.
That Israel is recommending a 4th dose for the under-60s as well now, due to increased efficacy against severe disease and death, suggests the 3rd dose protection for those wanes in a concerning way. Sheba Medical Centre data, anybody got it? https://t.co/IBWpVrRk97
Isn’t this what every social media platform does as well? Twitter does, all variety of loons here. The same loons who are driving people off Spotify, people who then come here to Tweet about leaving Spotify. https://t.co/TIo7cUTxcV
Such an important point, and deflates the libertarian bubble. The most effective and most equitable measures are nearly always rules. Mandates. https://t.co/9EXVfxo7WF
Decoupling. From mid-2021, UK cases settled into a new non-zero baseline. But deaths followed, and have also settled into an ‘endemic’ 3-figure state. Omicron then caused a rise in cases, and deaths followed. There’s no decoupling so far, more a shift of baseline. /1 https://t.co/Cm9XIzKp1u
This is also dependent on the non-waning of the 3rd vaccine dose. Omicron broke VE against transmission, but current vaccines also only slowed deaths, they didn’t decouple them from cases. Waiting now to see if Oz settles into the new endemic case and death pattern as well. 2/2
Meet just one of the libertarian leaders responsible for the Covid train wreck. The UK Treasurer. That’s a conservative estimate of his net worth, others are closer to $400-500 million. His father in law is a billionaire. Rishi is ex-Goldman Sachs. Believes in the Economy. https://t.co/JguMMzqog3
Premier Perrottet on SKY this morning, saying Covid deaths are our new normal, to accept. And we need to get our ‘annual’ Covid shots, just like the flu.
Can only hope that if BA.2 gets really moving here, we have a federal government by then who believes society exists. https://t.co/F4JM3BU36x
#insiders Phil Coorey giving his N=1 story about a cafe owner closing shop ‘if we go into lockdown again’. I’d hoped we could have public health advice every week on #insiders by now, 2 years on. Not to be.
Everybody should follow @Bertrandization, if they’re not already. Throw in @RichardfromSyd1 too. Very smart people who cut through the BS, and act as brilliant bridges between the (often muzzled) expert communities and everyday people. https://t.co/hsXxCDOTaW
“Yesterday, our dear officials were struggling with an evolving pandemic driven by a novel virus that made us all look like slow-witted fools. But today we are all living in the warmth of a stable endemic. Isn’t that good news for a change?” https://t.co/qmiRNet0lN
@YouAreLobbyLud @Bertrandization I feel you might both like this one.
In countries with low vaccination and/or public health measures, you see the unmitigated epidemic behaviour of SARS-Cov-2. Up, down, up, down, up… The patterns for other nations are mostly just temporarily attenuated versions of this base pattern. https://t.co/D1W8ofekoe
This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much of the rich visualisation public health has used for centuries to analyse outbreaks has been stripped back to the barest data - cases, hospitalisations and deaths. /1 https://t.co/jRXuqGfxY2
Those are often translated into line, column or other charts. But overwhelmingly this pandemic is understood in terms of case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths, with vaccination data added once vaccines were developed. No doubt a lot more analysis is done…/2
…inside public health units, that the public never sees, using other data and visualisations. But that’s the point - we’re not seeing it, and politicians are making sure we hear very little of what is concluded from those analyses. An exception was LGA mapping…/3
…at the time of greater use of geographical restrictions. Those mappings are still available, though few bother with them. But we got a taste of some of the ways outbreaks have been historically interrogated prior to Covid, during LGA restrictions and the debates over…/4 https://t.co/r2aNNvovv3
…spread in rich vs poor areas etc. That’s the bread and butter of real outbreak control, the interrogation and mapping of multiple possible causative factors. Tom Koch captures this well in his wonderful book. /5 https://t.co/gozN7iJWPL
In a way, and this isn’t accidental, it reflects other political things. Society, in its rich diversity and complex contexts, with its hierarchies of equity, disappears when you reframe it as a libertarian aggregate of individuals. What I call N=1 thinking. /6
All cases, hospitalisations, vaccinations and deaths become absolutely equivalent data points. All geography, class, income, disadvantage etc. disappears from view. The historical mappings, which as Koch explains have never been illustrations of reality but rather analytical…/7
…investigations, the testing of hypotheses, have mostly disappeared from public view. Unsurprisingly, when the dominant political belief system is that society, or the public, doesn’t even exist. That’s what libertarianism is, that belief. It’s not hidden. /end https://t.co/YRqVBUJhiO
2017. https://t.co/uR0EuFcOV2
So I’m reading this correctly - this is Omicron reinfection i.e. people catching Covid multiple times in a short period? https://t.co/80RJzeBrNg
My gut feeling that Australians don’t support libertarian fantasies (see again Tony Abbott’s 2014 budget) is getting support from the latest dire polling. Let’s hope this holds. https://t.co/cXaQHyrjEz
Essentially, if this turns out to be the case, it means the global ‘live with the virus’ strategy is dead. It always relied 100% upon vaccines. If they fail, we’re back at the beginning. And infection is no substitute. https://t.co/nKKDVJ770W
SARS-Cov-2 is airborne. But I think it's more important to say, it's mostly STALE air-borne. Yes you can catch it outside, but it's much less likely. Like most respiratory viruses, it's primarily a disease of the built environment.
The softening normalisation never ends. Deputy CMO out today, to explain that we’ll see a spike in cases when all those school RAT results come through. In a ‘nothing to worry about’ way, as if extensive asymptomatic infection in the community is some natural state of society.
The real story of the pandemic is not in these graphs we’re now used to. A ‘case’ is an infected person completely severed from their geographic, social and political context. Those contexts are what generate and drive the disease. https://t.co/F0sV9qunfU
Mandates and rules are the most democratic way out of the pandemic. They apply equally, to all. ‘Personal responsibility’ is entirely at the whim of your ‘personal’ circumstances. Meaning it just stratifies Covid disease impacts according to existing social hierarchies. https://t.co/TrauceGiF2
Those 'bumps' are the children, teachers and parents of NSW becoming infected with a lethal virus. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/c9hR9Cb5Jv
RAT to PCR ratio now nearly 2:1. https://t.co/6e4IhbSd90
The 'push through' narrative from the NSW Premier. At what daily case numbers, hospitalisations, ICU and deaths will we have reached the other side? Serious question, it's not defined. The UK reached a constant stream of hospitalisation and death, using the same logic. https://t.co/90LvFBb1iF
Public health, libertarian style. My wife, a primary teacher, said her year 3 class were discussing the RAT testing. One of the kids said 'what's that?' The other kids explained. Nope, never heard of it, the other kid said. Parents not bothering.