#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine…
#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine where best to allocate our resources”. Dr Kerry Chant, saying ‘it’s not about scaling back, it’s about scaling back’. /1
https://t.co/0WNPoZph2K
NSW is leading the Australian charge, cheered on by the federal government, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Two years of national struggle pissed up against a wall, in the space of a few months. A few lessons I see in this. /2
For political libertarians and the vested interests they represent, there is no emergency important enough to cease prosecuting the causes of those vested interests. Their parties have been captured by those interests, and the interests themselves have done a sort of calculus…/3
…that says we are wealthy and privileged enough to separate ourselves off from the fate of wider humanity. They already did it with climate change, we shouldn’t be surprised they’ve now done it in a pandemic. This idiot, so often unchallenged, idea, that vaccines…/4
…mean we can ‘live with’ hundreds of thousands or even millions of infected people wandering around in the global community, is the complete debasement of public health wisdom won over millennia. So obviously a ‘technological’ pseudo-fix to a complex social event. /5
Maybe vaccines will end this pandemic, but they sure as hell won’t do it in the 2 weeks between 70 and 80% of adults vaccinated, as the NSW fantasy roadmaps assume. It took a couple of *decades* to do it for smallpox. /6
Time after time in this pandemic, libertarians declare victory, only to have the virus reef their pants down in full public display weeks later, as everybody scurries back into lockdown. If the RFS said ‘we’ve put 64% of the big fire out’, wouldn’t we say…/7
…‘so what about the other 36%’? Reality is self-correcting here, it doesn’t matter what the libertarians or other live with the virus loons WANT to happen. If you only half-defeat Covid, you’ll be forced back into the cave, under the doona. /end