2021 Threads
230 demonstrable authored self-threads.
@DrZoeHyde @GregDore2 Australia has agreements for 20 million Pfizer vaccine doses by end of 2021 (enough for half of us 18 and above). Domestic production is slower than antici…
@EricIdle 'virtual particles' mentioned here. Back to the chat about Being and nothingness. 'Real' particles are just excitations of quantum fields. The fields are eternal. Virt…
Imagine a leader saying 'we're not going to put out bushfires, we need to learn to live with them'. Instant laughing stock, end of their career. And yet 'living with' a pandemic…
@GidMK methodologically, is all this talk of the risks of various vaccines confusing individual and population risk? Thought this was interesting: https://t.co/xFth2GBAY4
If 10 out of a million people get sick, it doesn't mean each person has a 0.0001% chance of getting sick. Some will have a 100% chance, others zero. The public intuitively know…
@MikeySlezak @liammannix another example of population vs individual risk? Peanut allergies. Some kids have them, peanuts are banned in schools. 1/n
@normanswan tweeting this as somebody with training in high-level maths, stats, risk management and ethics. Not a yokel or in any way an anti-vaxxer. I'm concerned about how vac…
Bruno Latour: "We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very n…
#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic re…
#covid19 #auspol it's incredibly difficult to challenge the public narratives around vaccines and risk without being immediately shunted into some loon anti-vaxxer, irrational c…
#auspol the over-50 demographic votes very heavily for the LNP. Let's see how long this age cut-off lasts. https://t.co/eisDS1wa7G
#covid19 #auspol "consent should be a voluntary choice, and should be based on sufficient information and adequate understanding of both the proposed research and the implicatio…
#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family…
#auspol #covid19 "In many places, the decision is not whether to vaccinate, but whether to use AstraZeneca now or wait for another vaccine to become available...Even a long wait…
#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public…
#auspol When did Oz's expert community sit down with international colleagues and decide the best global strategy right now is rich nations speed vaccinating with most of the wo…
#covid19 #auspol @billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @GregDore2 a thread asking some questions about global public health programs. 1/n
#covid19 #auspol the narrative about vaccination to prevent outbreaks. Is it dangerous? US, UK, Israel, the fast vaccinators. 5-6 months in, still only 40-60% of populations vac…
@rajah_mich I'm after any summary data on time between vaccination and development of VITT, median or average time etc. The 28-day figure they quote, it's not clear there where…
@normanswan @teegstar @rajah_mich vaccine 'hesitancy'. I've worked extensively in risk management, and suspect the public is actually being more sophisticated than much of the e…
#auspol #covid smart people need to stand up and smash the idiotic use of the 'hermit kingdom' insult, the 'we need to live with risk' spin from economic thinkers. As if Oz is r…
#auspol #covid19 not a formal statement from the EMA themselves. But seems indicative of a view of top officials within it that AZ vaccination should cease in the EU for all age…
#covid19 #auspol viruses spread through social activity. Social activity is governed by political systems and ideas. The seriousness of a pandemic is therefore deeply implicated…
#auspol it's extremely frustrating, at age 53, to have waited weeks for the TGA and ATAGI to follow the European example and set the AZ age cut-off at 60, with clear UK data in…
Climate change. The volume of combustion gases humanity has released into the atmosphere in the past two-and-a-half centuries; I think it hasn't really registered with many the…
#covid19 #auspol dumbfounded by the ongoing advice on risk in this pandemic. Lots of patronising simplifications from supposed experts. 1/8
#auspol #covid19 the world already struggled with anti-vaxxers. Imagine the damage that's been done to future vaccination campaigns by the persistence with a clearly risky produ…
#auspol #covid19 This is the risk assessment ATAGI used when first recommending use of AZ in Australia. The critical thing that I haven't seen mentioned is, at no time was the r…
#auspol I've had first dose AZ, just as context. This isn't a pro-vax/anti-vax question for me, or even pro-AZ/anti-AZ. Twitter turns everything into debating binaries. It's abo…
#auspol no means no. First rule of consent. Sexual or medical. Vaccine 'hesitancy' isn't an ignorant public. It's a public having reasons for resisting something, and those reas…
#auspol #COVID19Aus conservative governments began the pandemic not trying to prevent infection, but just making sure there were enough hospital beds for those infected. We've a…
#auspol #COVID19Aus the model (too flattering) the developed world is stumbling towards is continuous re-vaccination while allowing the virus to circulate. It takes serious time…
#auspol The Premier of NSW today again saying that her government resists lockdowns because it respects people's 'freedoms'. To me freedom includes freedom not to be infected wi…
#auspol #COVID19Aus imagine the long, late nights in Macquarie Street, where government spin doctors agonise how to spin an imminent lockdown, while Kerry Chant bangs on the doo…
#auspol #COVID19Aus great response from @CrabbBrendan to the question on 7.30 last night, about whether NSW is paving the way to us all living with Covid. "I don't think anybody…
#auspol #COVID19Aus something rarely noted in this pandemic is that workplaces are consistently exempted from Covid safety requirements. Take the NSW Public Health Order release…
#auspol #COVID19 the longer a pandemic goes on, the less it becomes about science. In fact it's never really about science. A pandemic is a social phenomenon, driven by patterns…
#COVID19nsw #auspol even grown-ups get to play colouring-in. Another day where we wait to see if not locking down just leads to locking down, but one LGA at a time. 1/ https://t…
#covid19 #auspol it's nice to see this data getting the attention it deserves. Showing comprehensive 'lock-down' action is cheaper, faster, harms the fewest people and restricts…
#auspol @normanswan an article from the SMH last year revealed NSW Cabinet deliberations about 'lockdowns'. Ministers choosing random lockdown-trigger figures, like 250 cases/da…
#auspol #covid19 it's amazing that the same experiences, repeated multiple times, teach us nothing. Symptomatic of us using our 'normal' life thinking to try to understand a pan…
#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most…
#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSp…
#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people…
#auspol #covid19aus we have to challenge the ridiculous idea that Australia is now (apparently) lagging the rest of the world. The extreme narrowing of public health strategy to…
#covid19 #auspol extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colo…
#auspol #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW,…
#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and pol…
#covid19 #auspol in clear and deliberate violation of Godwin's law, imagine if during WW2 it all seemed a bit hard, and we decided to adopt a 'live with the Nazis' strategy. Let…
Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentia…
#auspol #covid19 worth noting that 'live with the virus' advocates are mostly concerned with costs to the 'Economy' of suppressing Covid. For comparison, annual costs to the Oz…
#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is da…
#auspol #covid19 love Ian's work, so no criticism of him. But 'opening up' is not medical or scientific advice. Like a trade deal, where you decide the degree of access and prot…
#ausol #covid19 drivel, from beginning to end. 'Fortress Australia', another weaponised political slogan. Australians have loved Fortress Australia, when it meant keeping brown…
#auspol #covid19 vaccination data is the current currency of much pandemic analysis. Showing the apparent world 'leaders' in pandemic action. /1 https://t.co/PW6VhaC1xY
#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye…
#covid19 #auspol the ultimate libertarian, lunatic endgame. Public health replaced entirely by 'personal judgement'. A pandemic created by collective behaviour, now left to the…
#covid19 #auspol it's worth pointing out I think that the standard we're expecting of aged care workers is not consistent with the 'vaccines protect us from harm' foundation of…
#covid19aus #auspol vaccination data has quickly become the proxy metric for pandemic success. Australia is actually tracking the world average. In a true global pandemic strate…
#covid19 #auspol two definitions of freedom doing battle in this pandemic. It IS the pandemic, the virus is just opportunistically hitching along. Developed nations, infected wi…
#covid19 Eventually all debates if they continue return people to first premises of arguments and ideas. In this case, ideas in health care around individual vs collective have…
#auspol #covid19aus more power to Gladys for strongly repudiating the boneheads in her own Cabinet who want NSW to live with the virus. Not often a fan, but good strong leadersh…
#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatt…
@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @auspol #covid19aus seems a good time to dust this one off again. https://t.co/kCrk5HpDDQ
#covid19 #auspol just as climate change mostly isn't about the small actions you take at home, the pandemic also isn't mostly up to all of us. It's up to a handful of leaders to…
#covid19 @auspol "In sum, then, we have a clear choice: /1 https://t.co/Jn1QS6TNUz
#nswlockdown #auspol #covid19nsw this is the time to think. Large test numbers show again that the community is self-organising beautifully. The daily stern 'naughty children' n…
#covid19 Open-air hospitals had much greater survival rates for both patients and staff, with Spanish Flu. The Florence Nightingale insight, open the windows and doors. We’ve go…
@JaneCaro @auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde think we need to be very careful here, the political strategy is very cunning from conservative politicians. Interest declared, my wife…
#covid19aus #covid19nsw this one didn't get a lot of airtime when reported a few days ago. Proposed traffic light system for schools in NSW and Covid. The amber level is key, wh…
#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Matt Lucas’ brilliant impersonation of Boris, this is literally the NSW Strategy. They’re not stupid, they want businesses open, and their strate…
#auspol Is there a more disgusting notion than the UK Tories’ ‘levelling up’? Not to adjust the obscene wealth of the top 1%, but instead parade the fantasy of everybody becomin…
#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt…
#auspol #covid19 what happens when you turn your society into an economy. White-hot rage at loss of income, basic public health measures and averting the death of thousands not…
#auspol #covid19 "You want to have a set of economic policies that ensure that businesses pay workers enough so that they are economically secure. And that should be the price o…
#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where…
#covid19 another conversation yesterday with a ‘vaccines will set us free’ person, convinced it’s fine to allow virus to circulate freely, provided we’re all vaccinated. Jabs in…
#auspol #covid19aus Barely removed from Trump's constant Fauci-trashing. If you say you follow the health advice, and then don't like that advice, don't pressure the advice. Jus…
#covid19 #auspol watching the the UK acrobatically deny it’s even in a pandemic for the past 18 months gives us many lessons. More weaponised spin - ‘sever’ the tie between case…
#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a di…
#auspol #covid19aus the refusal of even many experts to resist the gibbering hysteria over vaccination rates astounds me. How often do prominent Oz people say we're running last…
#covid19aus #auspol I'm imagining a half-day education session for all of our leading political journalists, after listening to @frankelly08 on RN this morning describe 'Zero Co…
#auspol #covid19aus libertarian theatre. Collective emergencies become individual tabloid pile-ons. Toilet paper, ‘rule’-breakers. (The delicious irony of libertarians getting t…
#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads…
#auspol #covid19aus trying to find expert analysis of National Cabinet’s new 4-stage plan (their 3rd, the first 2 disappeared into irrelevance). You can’t predict the weather mo…
#auspol #covid19 for all modelling and government reports, people get lost in the details, and ignore the framing. This report just operationalises National Cabinet’s 4-stage st…
#auspol #covid19aus can we remember Australia, that during much of 2020, when the federal government could have been improving quarantine and getting the best vaccine procuremen…
#auspol #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in T…
#auspol #covid19aus to expand on this. Twice now the reserve powers have been used to remove elected leaders. Both were Labor politicians. Both for trivial ‘economic’ reasons. N…
@OrinCordus @RichardfromSyd1 still seems to doubling roughly every 10 days? https://t.co/MiyD6yF629
#auspol #covid19aus “The key message though, and the Doherty Model shows it, let’s get vaccinated, and that’s the path to freedom”. Stuart Robert on SKY, running the new strateg…
#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Camus: “…our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them. There were feelings all could share, such as fear and separa…
#covid19 "We knew that a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” could easily spiral out of control and become Pandemic 2.0. And look, it is...some pro-vaxxers are so convinced of their…
@covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol contact tracing is broken: NSW Health is introducing a new measure to ensure people continue to receive prompt notification of their COVID-19 pos…
#auspol #covid19aus vaccine passports carry the assumption that vaccination is a type of bubble that insulates the person from the pandemic raging around them. They seem an exte…
#covid19 #auspol Camus is a good guide at every stage of the pandemic. He observed that a plague isn't a feeling of being locked down, as it goes on. It's a feeling of exile, fr…
#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations…
#auspol #covid19aus we need a leading journalist to convene a roundtable of top public health experts once or twice a week, to comment on NSW's approach. How about it @David_Spe…
#covid19aus #auspol the Doherty Report modelled vaccination of those aged 12+ only as a ‘thought experiment’. Not because the Doherty people are bastards, but because National C…
#auspol #covid19aus Josh Frydenberg’s whinge about turning off government support, like all ‘we can’t live like this forever’ whines, needs to be looked at with this data as con…
#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the key elements from the Doherty Report which are not being prosecuted daily in NSW press conferences. For those who don't understand it or are…
#auspol #covid19nsw When asked late yesterday whether opening up with hundreds or thousands of cases still active in the community was a problem, the Director of the Institute s…
#auspol #covid19aus the thing to remember about a pandemic is, it only gives you an illusion of choice of action. You can go 'softer' or 'harder', but the former becomes the lat…
#auspol #covid19aus ventilation in the news. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more we see it isn't a medical thing at all. Like all great public health events, it represents…
#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/It…
@Globalbiosec @MackayIM curious whether ‘live with the virus’ will mean an endemic outcome, or whether we’re talking about an ongoing epidemic virus, with epidemic waves suppres…
#covid19aus #auspol the ‘pingdemic’ of the UK, coming to a town near you soon. Where we don’t trace infections to try to shut them down, we just let you know you’ve been infecte…
#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinki…
#auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde @RealOzSAGE I was going to do a detailed break-down on the latest NCIRS report which the NSW Government used today to assure people sending the ki…
Up to 75% of the businesses some plan to save by ‘opening up’ would have failed anyway, inside 5 years, even without the pandemic. The ‘Economy’ isn’t a thing, we need to stop t…
#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most…
#auspol #covid19aus Australia's choice of vaccination strategy has been mostly based on risk of Covid illness i.e. oldest and most vulnerable first. Less said I think is that th…
#auspol #covid19aus suspect a fairly common story out of Western Sydney, friends of mine. Family with adult son and daughter living at home, son with 2 kids of his own. All adul…
#auspol #covid19aus one of the curious things in this pandemic is just how immune to some basic empirical evidence so many seem to be. For example it doesn’t take a lot of time…
Still surprises me that we can get nearly 2 years into a pandemic, and very little discussion is had about economic resilience. If a society basically has to be shut down to avo…
@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @MichaelSFuhrer @djf0001 here’s the updated Doherty Report: https://t.co/6TbqamJXaP
#auspol #covid19aus another surprise to me (of many) is how even the well-meaning have swallowed the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated line’, the next libertarian ‘live with the vir…
#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus NSW Premier warning people of dramatic escalation in case numbers even at 80% adults double-vaxxed. The vaccines will protect us from harm. I’m sorry…
#covid19aus #auspol The normalisation of throwing kids under a bus. Pertussis deaths in the past century. Pre-vaccinations, annual deaths from whooping cough in Australia were i…
#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and buil…
#auspol #covid19aus Serious question. Is this the first time in the history of the world that a pandemic strategy is 'deliberately infect hundreds of thousands of people'? /1 ht…
Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas or opinions, they have an independent existence that crosses millen…
#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus news from the front lines of ‘living with Covid’, from the UK. Today’s figures standard. 35,623 new infections. Another 180 dead. About 1000 dead per…
#auspol #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on JobKeeper alone. Until mid-2021 it was winning too. Then came maybe the…
#auspol both the Liberal and National parties were formed in response to the creation of the ALP in Australia, our first party. Both represented existing wealth in Australia, th…
#auspol #nswpol hey political journos. When pollies say infections/cases no longer matter, only hospitalisations and deaths do, ask them what those hundreds of thousands of newl…
#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go ba…
#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’…
Hats off to the @GrattanInst and @stephenjduckett for calling it so early (July), and it's still bearing up well. There will be nothing like 'normal' life back until populations…
If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Co…
The further NSW Health senior staff get from Macquarie Street, the more they're able to call out the elephants in the room. 'Freedoms' the problem, children most at risk. Nearly…
#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…
#auspol #covid19aus Another vital thread on endemicity, a term bandied about with far too much ignorant abandon. Exhibit A, our vacuous hollowman PM. https://t.co/tB38yMLdGE
Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think…
Difficult to know where to start with the magnificence of what Ed Yong has achieved here. I’ve never seen a better popular piece on the inseparability of pandemics and politics,…
#auspol "New Zealand has abandoned its strategy of eliminating COVID-19 and will instead...live with coronavirus and control its spread as vaccinations rise." Translated into pu…
“More and more people seem to be accepting the idea the future will include COVID-19. Those people don’t understand what that means.” @RealOzSAGE #auspol #covid19aus https://t.c…
If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one pa…
#auspol this rare HD footage of Queen Victoria has profound hints (I think) to how we don’t understand politics. The adulation for the monarch was genuine. Quick thread on why t…
#auspol #covid19aus in our slavish copying of the UK Covid strategy in NSW and Canberra, we’ve moved to the next step. Where experts ‘only advise’, and ‘it’s politicians who mak…
#auspol bit of a sleeper in this week’s news, great article about the fracturing of communities, ostensibly by social media. Given the fractious nature of Twitter too, there’s s…
Speaking to an American friend, I wasn’t aware that community sport is pretty much non-existent in any widespread way, in the US. Most sport there is organised through schools.…
#auspol #covid19aus “…the biggest challenge for Australians will be getting used to hearing about high numbers of confirmed cases. Even in vaccinated societies, the virus contin…
#auspol Paul Toole on SKY saying they can’t delay openings further, because people have been given every opportunity to get vaccinated. I hear this nonsense a lot. As with expon…
#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE the weaponisation of hospitalisation. Economic interests and their representatives in government have weaponised multiple public…
All political and now pandemic battles play out in this picture. Because binaries make us horny, we tend to pick one side of this picture in our thinking. Neither individual or…
There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertari…
#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces chang…
Here’s the Premier, saying NSW is ‘open for business’. Actually most social activity will now re-open, but it’s revealing that his first thought is business. NSW is run by busin…
I agree with Walter Lippmann (from his 'The Phantom Public') that we have a far too idealised view of what politics is, and how it works. And this drives our cynicism towards it…
The extraordinary pace of vaccination has upset all of the modelling (in a good way). Many countries look on with envy at how Australia mobilises the community for a challenge.…
Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologis…
#auspol #covid19aus the death cult of libertarianism. 50,000 cases a day, 200+ deaths (described as ‘mercifully low’), and the usual libertarian response - asking individual peo…
Have watched and read numerous things on the apparent mental health and social damage done during the pandemic. A few thoughts about that, going back to some key assumptions. /1…
Wanted to re-share this superb analysis, as a way to put a bit more flesh on the bones of the idea that ‘lockdowns’ have removed our basic freedoms and damaged many of us mental…
The corner shop represented a more resilient culture, logistically. The hyper-mobility that new forms of transport injected into our societies also stripped them of much of thei…
Might need some guidance here. The CDC's guidelines on Covid and schools at no point refer to their use as 'ludicrous' (Deputy Premier) or an idea of 'ZeroCovid academics' (ex-D…
The bushfires of summer 2019, and a way to think about climate change. The astronomical volumes of combustion gases produced by those fires, to put those into perspective. On av…
Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacri…
“…the rate of confirmed infection was more than 10 times lower in the group of participants who had received a booster…boosters…may have an impact on reducing transmission…” We’…
The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021. This apportioning of territory after the Thirty Years War was in so…
How the ‘Economy’ changes everything about the world. This is Nordlingen in southern German. About 1100 years old. Urban patterns reflect social patterns. Notice the clear geome…
The politics of zero. We’ve had 2 years of outright assault on the idea of zero Covid (both in the eradication and elimination sense.) But take this NSW Government strategy stat…
58% of Americans were opposed to the idea of going to the moon. ‘Moonshot’ became the term for having a major collective aim. For the Neville Chamberlains who want to appease Co…
We can’t agree on emissions, or on Covid infections. We don’t talk about *why* we have emissions, or pandemics. It’s very difficult to make progress without getting to the why,…
Not seeing the varying duration between first and second doses amongst AZ recipients, in the ATAGI booster advice? Very many had compressed duration between AZ doses, as low as…
Track what libertarian conservatives do across the world. It's a very cosy plagiarism club. In the UK today for example, they're having their own Christian Porter moment. Owen P…
There is a fast-track way to change the world. It would take 10 minutes. Everybody join a union. And it’s not just about money. Political libertarian ideas are stupid. But they…
NSW shifting to the UK model of turning much contact tracing over to private citizens and their phone notifications. With case numbers dropping and far fewer mystery cases, woul…
Well done to the ABC for this digital journalism piece. It highlights the trap of believing too much that the daily political debate represents underlying realities. It rarely d…
Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1…
Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democr…
Patterns. We often focus on individual country patterns of Covid infection. The aggregate world picture is fascinating. For example I’d assume A (red) is the period where case n…
The overriding reason given for surrendering to the spread of Covid is that we can't continue (apparently) to do the public health work needed to eliminate it. About 20 million…
This is the only case numbers we should be looking at. The total world figure. Does the pandemic look over to you? Or just oscillating between idiot 'open up and live with the v…
The experts who say child vaccines aren't a priority, also argue against masks for kids in schools. Now they're slowing rollout of vaccines to under-12s, because of myocarditis…
As we worship our big steel Gods returning to Kingsford Smith and Tullamarine, a basic stat about our travel obsession. An A380 burns 10-11 TONNES of fuel *per hour*. #auspol /1…
Not sure the 6-month gap to a 3rd dose should be the blanket model in Oz. Lots of AZ in use here, and LOTS of people had their second AZ dose well under the 12 week mark, and we…
"Rapid testing is a ruse designed to trick people into agreeing to uncontrolled spread. Because that is exactly what has happened wherever it is widely available. The UK is a cl…
From what I understand, this current pattern of world cases *is* what ‘endemic’ Covid may look like? Baseline (here about 40 cases per million) being the endemic level of virus…
Looking at Israel’s data last night made me think about how we look at Covid data as being about the virus. When actually it’s much more about us, the people. These epidemiologi…
Austria, one home of free-market libertarianism. When you deny the public exists, you end up reinventing it one (incarcerated) group at a time. Libertarians hate the lockdowns t…
How to know what to think about waning vaccine efficacy? Revisiting the Oxford study of only a few months ago, showing that AZ may in fact maintain better protection against sym…
h/t to @RichardfromSyd1 for highlighting this one. The UK infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of its children aged 5-14. So…
Spent yesterday dealing with a single Covid case in a business. Via SafeWork Australia and NSW Health. Tied the whole business in knots, for 2 days now. It's clear now the PH bu…
The question for NSW seems to be, where to from here? Most of the cases in the blue circle are children, so cases may decline as they get vaxxed. If enough of us get a 3rd dose,…
From the guidelines the NSW Government has issued to business to manage Covid in the workplace. Note the continued fantasy of 1.5m. But airborne included in residence time in a…
Drosten here says vaccination can prevent the development of endemic Covid. But can Covid ever be endemic? I see so much confusion over this, so a few questions for those who mi…
The new NSW Health guidelines regarding ‘venues of concern’. If your kids are wondering what to train for when leaving school, I suggest WHS litigation, based on the underlined…
Thank you @MarylouiseMcla1 (in response to news many vaccine doses are going to waste). #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/3ONo1Y3BSr
The latest perverse way England is rationalising its Covid disaster. Calculating the numbers of people left to kill, compared to other countries. And on that metric, it’s leadin…
Now that libertarians are reframing PH metrics towards killing of people as a success measure, look how bad those Germans are, so many left to kill. If they’d killed more steadi…
Covid reminds me of asbestos. Hardly anybody showed ill effects from asbestos, when it was introduced as a wonder material. (My father was one, he died years later of the effect…
Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because t…
“"...the infinitely minute...everything that constitutes the visible universe, the universe accessible to observation, proceeds, as we know, out of the invisible and inscrutable…
Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own. The International Space Station (ISS) is an example I think of how…
‘Live alongside’ a virus. The simple, lethal appeal of the metaphors used by spin merchants. To unpack this one, how do you live ‘alongside’ a virus? Does it sit on the seat nex…
“The World Health Organization, noting that the variant has already been detected in many countries and that closing borders often has a limited effect, called for frontiers to…
“National Cabinet agreed that the Commonwealth and state and territory governments will continue to pursue a suppression strategy, noting the objective is to limit the rate of O…
“National Cabinet further noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are in late stage consideration regarding w…
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
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, politician…
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…
“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)…
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 c…
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 ident…
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, n…
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…
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 t…
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…
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…
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…
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 boo…
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
Help me out brains trust. Over 100,000 tests yesterday, huge test positivity jump again . Means really bad things, yes? @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @rossleedham @OrinCordu…
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 Blackadd…
Interesting preprint from the Kirby Institute estimating vaccine efficacy against Omicron. @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 @polioandme @BrentHodgson https://t.co/aNM6…
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 m…
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 b…
@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 m…
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 infectio…
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…
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…
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…
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 mad…
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 p…
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 i…
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 populati…