In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted…

In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done in the past 4 years. Because he's firmly in the cooker camp, and that's really not him. /1

Thinks anybody still talking about Covid as a threat is engaging in catastrophising, completely out of perspective with the scale of the threat. He's wholly within that fake return to normal we bought by vaccines that took some of the rough edges off severe disease. /2

I sympathise with him, because I've met experienced and knowledgeable people here that work with infectious diseases who still refuse to answer one basic question for me. Why are we allowing a pandemic to be defined by the level of disease, and not by the level of infection? /3

Public health knows that infection is the key, because if you don't control it, microbes as living things can continue to evolve ways to avoid anything you might do to try to prevent them killing or maiming you. But we won't address this political shift in definition. /4

Never mind that even with our political focus on severe disease and death, on the logistics of managing hospitals and aged care, we've been letting the bodies pile up anyway. It's a rush to the exits of public anything. History is better than science here, /5

I ask people like my friend to name other pandemics humans have deliberately chosen to live with, any time in history. They never can, because there aren't any. As far back as the Bible and even earlier, human communities knew pandemics were the deepest evil. /6

And I suggest all we've done is kicked the can down the road, taken the blunt edge off the microbial assault with vaccines that can't control infection, and offloaded all the resulting chronic impact onto future generations. This is of course the Western business model. /7

Since the 1970s anyway, to live for the now, have recreational lifestyles, fuck tradition and custom and thought and planning for the future. Live in 3 or 4-year electoral cycle bubbles of engineered enthusiasms and fads, popularity team sports. /end