COVID-19 & public health

@billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @MarylouiseMcla1 thought this was interesting. Countries who made great play from 'opening up' often also have the highest stringency ratings. Goes to show the lockdown/'live with the virus' binary is false? The…

@CrabbBrendan NSW has eliminated Covid? Extremely unlikely we'd go this many days without a new case if there was still Covid circulating? Barring HQ accidents. https://t.co/ehwewS0TAV

@normanswan what happens to the (presumably) billion or so multi-dose vaccine vials once they're done with? Are they recycled during the rollout for multiple use?

Superb read from @billbowtell, one of the very few in this pandemic who understood and kept bringing us back to the basic fact. Nature makes viruses, but people and politics make pandemics. (My own two cents - the cause of this pandemic?…

Wonder if this was one of the anti-lockdown loon bridage's KPIs. https://t.co/CrKSeBYDx4

@profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan I find this ongoing attempt to adopt a UK-type narrative around Covid disturbing. Vaccinate high-risk groups, then 'open up'. This fault-line still there, with the 'economic' forces pushing against public…

Has NSW had one nice word to say about any other State in this pandemic? https://t.co/ygWoCoXcMF

@normanswan fair to say that when an entire (or near as) population is being vaccinated, just about every medical condition in existence will manifest itself during the rollout? And be portrayed as potentially vaccine-caused?

@MichaelWestBiz @BernardKeane how is the NSW $500 million 'Dine and Discover' program not just another grants rort? Tourist destinations and hospitality venues seem to have been packed solid for months, you can't get a booking. Just…

My chance of catching COVID from a vaccine seem about the same as Phase 2a arriving before Christmas. https://t.co/tKSSeedPWw

#auspol Do we ever get tired of populist fact-free public frenzies? For example on the Oz vaccine rollout. The same pattern of a stuttering start seen also in the US and UK. Standard logistics. Delivering population-level things is bloody…

@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 anticipated. Could we negotiate for another 20 million Pfizer doses?…

#auspol estimated 600 million surplus doses of vaccine available in the US second half of 2021. Australia only needs 20 million more Pfizer doses to vaccinate the entire over-18 population? https://t.co/XZsoGxuyYr

@billbowtell @rajah_mich up to 600 million surplus vaccine doses possibly available in US 2nd half of 2021. Oz needs another 20 million Pfizer doses to do the whole over-18 population with that vaccine. Time for diplomacy? Domestic…

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 virus has passed for common sense in nearly every developed…

The Useless States of America and Useless Kingdom hoover up most of the world's best quality vaccines, to continue their avoidance of effective public health work, and prepare to return to a 'normal' life, having not learned a thing from…

@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 @profmiketoole interested to hear any thoughts from epidemiologists!

@simonahac An indication of how pathological the developed world's obsession with travel is? The (apparent) shut down of it during the pandemic merely returns us to levels of travel from 2004. https://t.co/GourZEM4lr

Maybe a mark of how specialised and narrow knowledge now is, that even experts speak constantly about the impact of the pandemic on the Economy. Rather than seeing that what we call the Economy was actually the cause of the pandemic.

@SophyRidgeSky @KateEMcCann @billbowtell The UK was happy with a Covid Super League of the US and UK, hoovering up world vaccines, doing no meaningful public health work, domestically or globally. If only Covid were football.…

Australia has bought enough Pfizer to vaccinate all adults. Why isn't that being said? 20 million arriving later in the year, but 20 million before that time too, which could vaccinate over 50s. https://t.co/BNmKvfHu1l

Great piece by @CrabbBrendan and @profmiketoole . Oz in the same league table rush to vaccinate as fast as possible, as if you can end a pandemic within your own borders. Tragically, many poorer nations did excellent suppression in 2020,…

Who remembers tonnes of strawberries being destroyed because of the risk some may contain needles? Now explain to me how this is different to a vaccine potentially killing a few people? Why did we junk the strawberries, but keep that…

@MikeySlezak @liammannix another example of population vs individual risk? Peanut allergies. Some kids have them, peanuts are banned in schools. 1/n There isn’t a low risk every child will react to a peanut. There are a handful of kids who…

@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 vaccine risk and hesitancy is being described in public debate.…

Is it too much for somebody, anybody, to ask why, with 40 million doses of Pfizer arriving in Australia this year, those can't be used to vaccinate all 20 million adults in the country?

#auspol @CrabbBrendan The Premier of NSW on radio this morning again arguing no need for daily reporting of Covid case numbers, hospitalisations sufficient. Normalising the abandonment of elimination as a key public health principle.…

I think there's plenty of that going on. There are others too though who think the risk is being misrepresented. And who also think the vaccines are being used to evade the basic public health work.

#auspol @billbowtell so here we are, the public forced into a fake double-bind between 2 risks of death. What the Economy crowd wanted. The 3rd way? Eliminate virus transmission with basic public health work, while the clots are…

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @ProfPCDoherty wondering at the shifting of emphasis from virus elimination towards speed of vaccination? If immunity lasts a year, many will need a second round of vaccination before much of the world has had…

#auspol #COVID19 32 people now dead in the UK from the AZ vaccine. Risk expressed as "(tiny number) per million". Do we forfeit the right to describe risk in that way when the intervention is actually applied to millions of people? Vehicle…

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 narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is…

What Australia needs? Proper quarantine facilities, vaccine production capacity. What it's getting? A $600m white elephant gas-powered electricity generation plant, that nobody needs and which will drive prices higher.…

Australia has purchased enough Pfizer vaccine to cover the entire adult population. Just use it, even for over-50s still unvaccinated. It might take longer, but there's no way international borders will be rushing open any time soon.…

#auspol #COVID19 the latest AZ clot data from the UK. Why the Europeans generally suggest 60+ only for AZ. Our 50+ cut-off is actually where they're seeing peak clotting and mortality. Based purely on a desire to fast-track our Phase 2a,…

@CrabbBrendan @billbowtell "Among OECD countries, liberties were most severely impacted in those that chose mitigation, whereas swift lockdown measures—in line with elimination—were less strict and of shorter duration."…

#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 reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of…

#covid19 a way to flip public framings of pandemic action. Countries encouraged to feel deficient if they're not vaccinating fast enough. Like Australia. But what if we said instead that countries who already eliminated Covid are just…

#auspol #covid19 the pandemic is over! The UK full of this tripe now. Having sacrificed about 130,000 people to economic interests, it then (with the US) hoovered up most of the world's vaccine supply, and apparently ended the pandemic,…

#covid19 #auspol experts see 'living with the virus' as a control and vaccination process to achieve endemicity. Politicians and business groups see it as letting the virus circulate, with vaccines minimising damage. We must define terms…

#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 category. But a few thoughts. 1/n The AZ vaccine repeatedly…

@rajah_mich would you still advise Australia to hold out for the most effective vaccine available? I see we'll have enough Pfizer to vaccinate all adults by the end of the year, is there a need for this great rush to use AZ?

#auspoI the LNP has achieved almost full nerd immunity. Even with the pandemic the experts were carefully selected and toilet trained. https://t.co/PEtMNd1H9R

#auspol about time we started talking about risk and undue haste with vaccination. As Science points out, a sound strategy for a country with low or zero Covid (like Oz) is to extend the vaccine rollout to allow different vaccines to be…

#auspol Australia's obsession with vaccination haste is 90% this: https://t.co/rAFpkGr9gW

@CrabbBrendan @billbowtell good piece from Science, suggesting vaccination haste may not be the optimal public health strategy for countries with very low Covid rates? Use highest efficacy vaccines, take your time etc.…

@rajah_mich thought this was interesting, about how in countries with low Covid rates, holding off until other vaccines are available is a sound risk approach? https://t.co/HpRL1T5rKC

@MikeySlezak I know we discussed vaccines and risk a few weeks ago. Population vs individual etc. Had meant to tag you on this one earlier, I think it contextualises risk very well. Rather than just using population risk as a proxy.…

#auspol another outbreak, in which NSW will no doubt demonstrate its big kahoonas by rejecting a short lockdown, in favour of 3 months of hotspots and laundry lists of rules, to save the Economy. While running second-last amongst States…

#auspol "Our response will be proportionate". Gladys. More weaponised spin, making 'lockdown' the evil to be avoided. Global data shows conclusively that fast lockdowns have the best health, economic and civil liberties outcomes.

#covid19 the frustrating medicalisation of this pandemic. Vaccines spoken of as the route back to normal life. Wider expertise would show that normal life was the problem in the first place. It's resistant to all change.

@rajah_mich is my back of the envelope correct here? Assuming of course that 16 million all get vaccinated, which they won't, but I'm talking risk estimates here. https://t.co/KA2PNuwvuS

#auspol this is what 'proportionate' action looks like. It's not a 'lockdown' if you ask the public to do it for you. The lockdown you have when you're not having a lockdown. https://t.co/kNEaWKLE8A

@CrabbBrendan @billbowtell @GregDore2 if you recommend the public to not go out and mix, it's 'proportionate'. But if the government tells them not to, it's a 'lockdown'? Words matter, what on Earth does 'strongly recommend' mean in a…

#covid19 look, i'm educated to the eyeballs, not an anti-vaxxer. But this 'low risk' stuff irritates. That's population risk. If your entire population is being vaccinated, that small numerator becomes actual events. The ethics need to be…

#covid19 vaccine passports over before they began? https://t.co/73NTByRqDx

Watching JCVI give updated vaccine advice. Fascinating to watch expertise trying to shape individual behaviour with population-level arguments. The population is a statistical construct, nobody lives there.

#covid19 this from John Skerritt, a nice bloke. Economic thinkers have wanted this shift in the public narrative for a year, 'only vaccines will end this pandemic'. They won't, alone, it's a dangerous shift. It excuses us dropping the ball…

#covid19 a year since the disaster of 2020 summer holidays and Covid in Europe, they’ve learned nothing. https://t.co/rt5E1sphj2

#covid19 #auspol we're into day 2 of the 'proportionate' NSW response. 2 known infections only. Huge and growing venue list. Long list of restrictions. If this isn't all wrapped up by tomorrow, why is this more proportionate than a 3-day…

#covid19 "It would be foolish to assume that “better” vaccines available in the West will necessarily save us...(methods) to combat variants...may include booster shots, new vaccines, masks and slowing down reopenings."…

#auspol Good on them. But 'proportionate' measures again mean: 1) a lot more complicated restrictions, 2) over a lot longer time. Lockdowns are faster, more effective, and cheaper. And in aggregate restrict social freedom less.…

@liammannix @CrabbBrendan to use NSW as an example, this shows a total of 7,342 vaccinations in the past 24 hours. Weekdays usually around 20,000. These are relatively tiny numbers? Hesitancy or supply? https://t.co/WX7SKOwaiW

#auspol #covid19 individual and population risk. What's going on right now is mathematically dishonest, and unethical. Do we still talk about ethics? https://t.co/VZsPtuprY9

#auspol This is twice in 6 months that contact tracing has failed, as a primary strategy. Both times luck - that the virus didn't transmit further - saved NSW. Can our public discussion be more nuanced, instead of meaningnless slogans…

#auspol public health experts should provide public health reasons for this obsession with opening up. The public is leading both government and expertise here, other experts understand why. https://t.co/X68YXuc5y4

#auspol #covid19 why have we allowed 'opening up' to become a theme in this pandemic? As if public health restrictions were the problem, not the virus. Countries are doing well with forced internal reflection, economically too.

#covid19 watching UK news, with regular repeated BS about how the UK may soon be 'free of the pandemic'. As if you can end it inside one nation's borders. Like hoping to be free of rain or wind. The US and UK have been a disgrace in this…

#auspol #covid19 In the eventual wash-up after this pandemic, as an expert be one that didn't trivialise lethal side effects of an intervention. Your record will be here for all to see afterwards. https://t.co/txeXIKdwQO

#covid19 If countries who didn't control Covid until now manage it via vaccines, they can join those countries who did control it, who 'ended' the pandemic about a year ago. Can't let the incompetent who killed millions for an 'Economy'…

#auspol #covid19 https://t.co/naSdPSjjzt

@covid19 look out, virus about! How about 'we have restricted movement and gathering in this area because of this variant'. Nah, that might harm the Economy 🙄 https://t.co/zCE5YjGI01

#auspol #covid19 not seeing anybody connect the 2 plagues right now. Mice and Covid. Both caused by ecosystem disruption. In turn caused by our 'Economy', which has transformed agriculture into an economic system as well. The Economy…

#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 implications of participation in it." From the National Statement on…

#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 and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#auspol freedom is not the freedom to become infected. The libertarian BS that has opposed every action against this pandemic from day 1 needs to be opposed in every nook and cranny of its stupidity. https://t.co/0FmD4cDJC9

#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 for an alternative may be worth it if infections are low. 1/n…

#auspol #covid19 we don't need to 'learn to live with the virus'. It needs to learn to live with us. With our boot on its throat, through heavy restrictions as required. And vaccines to build immunity.

#auspol #covid19 the public health path ahead isn't vaccine A or vaccine B. It's vaccine + other public health measures. Many Australians calculating that the other measures will buy them the time to access a higher efficacy vaccine with…

#auspol #covid19 I guess it was this sort of thing that prompted the government to cut funding again from universities, and give it to rent-seeking parasites as tax cuts. https://t.co/nSgsJCN3fq

It would be a great for the Oz community if our prominent public health professionals explained what 'living with the virus' specifically means, in public health terms? There are so many ambiguous slogans in circulation. @MarylouiseMcla1…

#auspol #covid19 time to use the UK mantra here, and mean it. Data, not dates. https://t.co/mJcVYIytXq

#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 policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#QandA Australia's sophisticated multi-dimensional pandemic response is now being thrown away in favour of 'vaccinate fast, open up'. The motto of the countries who have failed in this pandemic.

#QandA the exponential growth in world travel is unsustainable, one thing we should learn from this pandemic is how obsessed we've become with it. Hopping on a plane seems to = end of the pandemic.

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole if mass vaccinations may need to restart as early as September in the US, this suggests the truth of #VaccinesPLUS? That speed of vaccination is a lesser problem now than lack of global focus and control of…

#covid19 #auspol A pandemic is an ecological, social and political event. We've treated it as an economic and medical event.

#covid19 #auspol in my experience good ethics also produces the best outcomes. 'Hesitancy' is the absence of ethical consideration. Repeating the line about low risks may be a breach of basic informed consent, just for starters.…

#covid19 #auspol the constant calls to 'open up' during the pandemic have been the grown up version of 'are we there yet?' from kids in cars.

@auspol @MarylouiseMcla1 we shouldn't make opening borders the endgame of our public health strategy. Right now too many seeing vaccines as a passport to 'normal life' while the pandemic still rages. https://t.co/IgprzVnpIc

@auspol #covid19 time is out of joint? Public health professionals daily giving individual health advice, and physicians having to plead to change the public health strategy?

@auspol #covid19 'hesitancy' is clearly about consent. If people are vaccine hesitant, it means we haven't done the basic medical consent. That's a dialogue, not the making of quirky TV ads.

@auspol #covid19 why doesn't Oz: 1. do a UK and prioritise the *first dose* to as many people as possible 2. that way the existing Pfizer supply could be extended across twice as many people, to help with hesitancy. Efficacy of both…

@auspol this isn't just about hesitancy. Using the highest efficacy vaccines is a better long-term strategic option for Australia. The endgame isn't opening borders, it's ending the pandemic, and getting as close to herd immunity as we…

#insiders it's ridiculous that hysteria about speed of vaccination is replacing our multi-faceted public health approach to the pandemic. A few months ago wise heads said speed wasn't the key thing. Now it's the only thing.

#auspol #insiders The public's instincts in this pandemic have been spot-on. Its 'hesitancy' right now is a warning to us that we're not seeing something. I'd suggest it wants to continue a strong, mutli-dimensional public health approach.…

#auspol much of the hysteria about the rate of vaccination in Australia is driven by the speed of vaccination in the UK and US. We need to look beneath the spin. https://t.co/K1Xlmjx45h

#auspol #covid19 have we lost perspective? Our Covid narrative is now overwhelmingly about speed of vaccination. That speed in developed countries is prolonging the pandemic. https://t.co/RJFXCoUjMd

#auspol #covid19 a guiding principle for me in this pandemic is to immediately do the opposite of what the head of any airline suggests. https://t.co/RGKEM9TtPy

#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 world's vaccine supply? The only nations who can afford strong…

#auspol #covid19 why in the hysterical public narrative of needing to vaccinate the country to get us through winter, is it not said that even under the original October deadline to finalise vaccination, the task wouldn't have been done…

#auspol Vaccination today will make as good as no difference to this current outbreak, unless it goes on for months. Australia is still mixing up ending the pandemic globally and getting fast vaccinations locally. The 2 are in some ways…

#auspol #covid19 think I give up on this. The developed world has turned pandemic strategy into some sort of football league of who can vaccinate the fastest. Which in turn prolongs the pandemic because vaccine often isn't going where it's…

#auspol #covid19 Oz was never going to be vaccinated enough by now to prevent this. Instead of fixing quarantine and focusing on ongoing local elimination, the push to 'open up' (with vaccination rate as the Trojan Horse) is again…

#covid19 when the history of the pandemic is written, it won't be lockdowns that caused mental health problems (if there are any problems above normal). It will be the people who put economies ahead of people. https://t.co/SQeUWfgcfj

#covid19 #auspol we learned what Oz hasn't learned. That we use a venal statistical instrument we call 'the Economy' to transform complex social issues into a handful of statistical indicators, framed to favour the interests of the…

#auspol #covid19 @CrabbBrendan all wise words. I sometimes wonder if the pandemic would be as good as over if the world quarantined and vaccinated countries with high viral load and spread. Ring-fence them. As we do for Ebola and other…

#covid19 #auspol @billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @GregDore2 a thread asking some questions about global public health programs. 1/n Normally for an epidemic outbreak, for example Ebola, the country of origin is rapidly…

#auspol Racism, paternalism, pandemics. With Ebola outbreaks, the world mobilises to isolate those regions and countries ASAP, to prevent spread. With Covid, the source is rich countries. Now the approach is 'vaccinate the world so our…

#auspol it's not 'hesitancy', it's those 50+ being plain fucking angry at the expediency of the Oz vaccination strategy. Not them being simple and resisting the science. NZ did so much better by putting safety first, and not rushing. Oz…

#auspol #covid19 rush to vaccinate = refusal to fix hotel quarantine. 'Hesitancy' = experts saying 'safe' in one breath, and then releasing the latest weekly clot data. The US/UK use vaccines as a substitute for strategy. We're following…

#auspol I think we're doing permanent damage to public health attitudes. Don't say 'this is very low risk for everybody'. Say 'most of you will have no effect, some will get very sick'. If you're hesitant to say that, you now understand…

@auspol and/or cash for quarantine. The only reason Australia is panicking about vaccination speed is because quarantine continues to leak. NZ isn't panicking. https://t.co/LjMofZ620M

#auspol #covid19 Experts and politicians would say 'but only 58 people have died from the clots, out of just over 24.2 million jabs! That's tiny!' It's the numerator, dimwits. Nobody lives in the denominator. https://t.co/d0C2QsjV50

#auspol #covid19 The developed world reminds me of the struggle road workers have getting cars to slow down. The desperation to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Hoping that vaccinating removes the need to do basic restrictions on…

#auspol #covid19 the guiding principle of any pandemic should be PREVENT INFECTION. Not allow it, and use medications to stem severe disease. If you allow it, even with medication, it will eventually get the upper hand. Movement and…

@patientsafe3 #covid19 #auspol when you read the detailed treatment guidelines for VITT, it makes you think AZ should be described as 'safe, except for people whose heads we might have to cut open to try to remove clots'. Saying that's a…

#auspol #covid19 strange that they were working on a problem that experts here say is a beat-up by the media. https://t.co/1qu9m3Hdu9

#covid19 #auspol has anybody sighted any ethical framework for our Covid strategy? The doctors-know-best narratives abound, as does 'hesitancy', all signs that no ethical analysis has been done at all. https://t.co/RTy6ynr7u0

#auspol so ATAGI-willing, AZ vaccine to some under-50s from Wednesday?

#auspol the dream that the vaccines will allow us to return to normal life with virus still circulating is just the latest lethal idiot idea from the Economy cult. The Economy is the cause of the pandemic, and continues to prolong it.…

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole I haven't seen a better thread confirming the importance of #VaccinesPLUS. https://t.co/2Ni83qxKCf

#auspol #covid19 year 2 of the pandemic, same script. The Economy cult who caused year 1, fresh from their jabs, back for more of the same. https://t.co/wO4yl6TU9h

#auspol #covid19 one of the simplest ways to understand why Melbourne has required more lockdowns than Sydney is to look at the volume of movement in each city. Melbourne much less congested, more movement to restrict to prevent spread.…

#auspol #covid19 I think this sort of messaging is misleading, and undermines longer-term public health programs. It may not be the world's 'ticket out', alone. https://t.co/sblLIYvfew

#auspol deaths are minuscule because Australia has had next to no circulating Covid, largely because of the dreaded 'lockdowns'. Progress in this pandemic will be impatience with the virus, not with the lockdowns. https://t.co/dORtGssuCk

#auspol everything about this thread makes a mockery of the bizarre shift in pandemic framing in Oz, where you could listen to the news and think we're lagging idiocy like the UK and US, because they're vaccinating quickly.…

@ProfPCDoherty @profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan @billbbowtell one of the most powerful analytical threads on the pandemic that I've seen. https://t.co/ZKPotZN4Wz

#auspol #covid19 This is a significantly higher risk than the AZ clots, what to do with young men? And where are the ATAGI minutes from yesterday? https://t.co/6zyO5wApWj

#auspol @JaneCaro the obvious story is the pitiful amounts on offer. The wider story is, millions of kids were being left behind BEFORE the pandemic, and nobody cared. Still no priority vaccinations for teachers and students. Childcare for…

#auspol #covid19 first rich countries provide breeding grounds for aggressive variants. Then they spread them through vaccinated travel, and provide fertile ground for further variant evolution by not controlling transmission.…

@Globalbiosec @rajah_mich @DrZoeHyde can I ask a question? 1/n In the TGA weekly report today: "With the ongoing risk of COVID outbreaks in Australia and the potential for severe long-term effects or fatal consequences of infection, the…

#covid19 #auspol the wisdom of the crowd not always a concept people are familiar with. The crowd has often been wise in this pandemic. e.g. the low mortality from TTS. Mostly due to early intervention. What prompted that? The crowd,…

#auspol #covid19 alarming to see so many experts with seemingly no understanding of risk at all. The 'low risk' attributed to the AZ vaccine, for example. Entirely 'likelihood', no 'impact' at all. Risk to individuals must be 'medium' at a…

#auspol calm clarity. The amount of time wasted in this pandemic over petty political squabbles dressed up as epidemiology. We need a Centre for Disease Control, and keep politicians of all flavours well away from the task.…

#auspol #covid19 one of the few scientific voices strongly foregrounding prevention of transmission *and* vaccination. So many now guilty of vaccination boosterism, seemingly unaware of how politicians are playing them with their latest…

@normanswan @CrabbBrendan can you explain Australia's vaccination strategy? The messaging is all about risk of outbreak. The demographic most at risk of such an outbreak are those 50+. They're offered a vaccine for which 2nd dose if jabbed…

#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 vaccinated. Vaccination isn't a speed tool to prevent and control…

#auspol The forces of 'open up and live with the virus' are on the ascendancy again, using vaccination as their disguise. As they hinted from the beginning, 'only a vaccine can get us out of the pandemic'. Vaccine here, pandemic is over,…

#auspol #covid19 Oz has reached a point where journalists understanding the politics and not the science, and experts understanding the science and not the politics, has stalled our thinking. 'Hesitancy' is the public sensing this.

#auspol #covd19 vaccination is an ecological tweak to a battle between 2 ecosystems, a pathogen’s and ours. We need to stop seeing vaccines as some static prophylactic.

#auspol #covid19 another day, another depressing spectacle of the developed world trying to vaccinate its way out of a pandemic created by its own way of life. A way of life it refuses to even look at, let alone change. A vaccine is only…

#insiders 'debilitating' lockdowns. Know what's debilitating? Covid. And Oz hurtling down the idiot path of planning to allow the virus to circulate amongst vaccinated people. Surefire recipe to breed lethal variants.

#insiders globally the cashed-up status quo is determined to convince us that lockdowns are the enemy, not the virus. Lockdowns proven to be the cheapest, fastest and least restrictive method against this virus.

#insiders vaccination is not a tool to 'open up' with virus still circulating. You have to control transmission as well as vaccinate. The UK discovering right now you can't just vaccinate.

#insiders we need to ask the question why so many Australians are still travelling offshore in a pandemic and needing to be quarantined upon return. That creates much of the pressure on quarantine.

#auspol gee, and I thought we were in the middle of a pandemic. This sort of drivel is what the government has been doing while it hasn't been doing quarantine or vaccination planning. https://t.co/gQ8KI8vXDP

@liammannix The amount of international travel in 2020 was actually about the same as in 2004. Look at that growth trend in the past 15 or so years, unsurprising that so much pressure against public health efforts has come from tourism and…

#auspol #Covid19 David is great. Highlighting the danger again of not controlling transmission *while* we vaccinate. Vaccines are not the silver bullet way out of the pandemic, alone. https://t.co/jJH8djU52i

#auspol #covid19 watching whining UK tourists on TV, 'what was the point of getting vaccinated if we can't travel?' The point of getting vaccinated was to try to end the pandemic. Travel is the developed world's most disgusting…

#auspol #covid19 If we get an outbreak of Ebola, in Africa, these same developed countries demand immediate lockdowns. Privilege is the demand to continue to travel recreationally in the middle of a pandemic. https://t.co/7OABKmolzy

@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 the majority of cases onset, within that 4-week period. I see…

@DrZoeHyde @GidMK 'effectiveness' of vaccines, are you able to clarify something? An effectiveness of 70% *doesn't* mean 30% of people who get the vaccine will not be protected?

#auspol #covid19 Pandemics keep killing until the social and political arrangements that cause them are changed. Right now rich countries want their old lives back, and assume vaccines will give them that without other significant change.…

#auspol #covid19 @profmiketoole @GregDore2 good summary animation of the UK situation. Shows yet again that unless you control the virus, it controls you. Have to maintain ruthless transmission control, alongside vaccination.…

#auspol #covid19 if Covid was a tax, the world would have smashed it a year ago.

#covid19 a pandemic at first allows a bit of purchase to specific disciplines, like virology, medicine, public health. Then as it goes on, it overflows the boundaries of all disciplines, and forces them and society to re-evaluate all of…

#auspol #covid19 know what causes mental health distress? Giving people a vaccine that could cause a lethal clot, and making them sit there for the next 4-5 weeks hoping it isn't them. https://t.co/42iShyLeFj

#auspol #covid19 the UK data suggest the cut-off for AZ vaccine should maybe have been 60, as it is in some other countries? https://t.co/F6jFxf0r0K

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole if prevention of harm from possible outbreaks was the strategic priority, would it have made more sense to vaccinate over-50s with the current Pfizer supply? Full immunity within 5 weeks. As it is many won't…

#auspol #covid19 a re-Tweet of sorts. I'm surprised at the discussion of risk by experts in this pandemic. For example, a tiny likelihood of a clotting event from a vaccine, is NOT a tiny risk, once you factor in impact. With impact, it's…

#auspol #covid19 not only does a pandemic overflow any discipline, the longer it goes on. It also forces those within a discipline, epidemiology for example, to lay bare their political beliefs too. Decisions are based on values, not…

#auspol #covid19 Nobel laureates are usually very welcoming of debate, as are experts without a prominent public role. But those who have gained a profile during the pandemic in the mid-range are often show-ponies, who use Twitter for…

@liammannix #covid19 I'd wager that the key to pandemics will end up being virulence, not immunity. About the agency of the pathogens themselves, immunity is all about us. Viruses talk to one another. https://t.co/mEV74rH7vw

#auspol #covid19 it's clear many here in Oz are just as casual about infecting children. Many of us were deliberately infected with measles and chicken pox and mumps etc. as kids, because it would 'do us no harm'. Now we vaccinate for all…

@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 expert advice. Everything in the public narrative is about…

#auspol #covid19 on the left, vaccine risk assessment based on likelihood of clot only. (Overwhelmingly what we see in public debate.) On the right, risk assessment with likelihood + impact. Risk management 101. https://t.co/GkTyDHHeJF

#auspol #covid19 the ABS' stringency and economic output reports are some of the most useful of the pandemic, but are rarely noted. The latest again challenges all the public narratives about lockdowns and economic impact. NSW mid-pack at…

@JohnQuiggin I'm a little surprised this data series hasn't got more traction in this pandemic. Goes right to the heart of many of the debates. https://t.co/54HTwEtRVc

#covid19 #auspol possibly worth reflecting that the virus has been relatively easy to defeat in the past year, for countries who tried. It's the people within those countries opposing that fight who have been the true obstacle.

#covid19 @billbowtell the pandemic mostly a battle of competing political philosophies, not a medical battle. https://t.co/Yk4xdmyMRj

#auspol #covid19 @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec very disappointing piece from @AlanKohler about #ZeroCovid. Having a 'few cases' *is* ZeroCovid, elimination is not eradication. You can't finesse an exponential with continuous ongoing…

#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 running away from some more grown-up 'living with Covid'. 1/3…

#covid19 #auspol it's not clear whether the destruction of the pandemic will be enough to force us to realise that extracting a tiny number of social transactions - the economic ones - and relabelling the whole of society as these…

#insiders there is no magic vaccination rate that will allow international travel again. Journalists need to take responsibility here too, and stop demanding the impossible.

#auspol #covid19 Sir Richard Barrons, previously Commander Joint Forces Command in the UK, said this before the pandemic. It's why I think the pushback on public health action so often is framed as individual inconvenience. We've had no…

#covid19 #auspol the BBC on exponential growth. https://t.co/ZxVxQfbPsJ

#covid19 #auspol If the developed world pursues travel bubbles, and the virus continues to spread and mutate elsewhere, and dangerous variants develop, watch rich countries demand the locking down of poorer nations. As with Ebola. The…

#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 ages? https://t.co/EYqq9Cr5Jc @profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan am I…

#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 in the political ideas used to address it. 1/3 The clear…

#covid19 #auspol no clearer example of how the real foe in this pandemic is libertarianism, not the virus. 'Freedom', as if sheltering from a lethal virus is some authoritarian oppression. Societies run by these ideas don't survive.…

#auspol #covid19 "This race between the vaccines and the virus, it isn't over yet." Matt Hancock. Vaccination is orders of magnitude slower than viral spread. The danger of having a single-pronged pandemic strategy, based on vaccines.…

@KateEMcCann sorry if I missed it, but which vaccine did you get?

#covid19 #auspol maybe only half of half of America is fully vaccinated. Gives some perspective to the feeling that 'normal life' is returning in the rest of the world. If this were a world map, nearly all of it would be shades of red.…

Credit where it's due, this really should be called the Reagan-Thatcher pandemic. The architects of societies of such lunatic individualism that the basic act of sheltering from a lethal virus is seen as oppression. https://t.co/Zu41E0dCNc

#covid19 #auspol superb numbers. https://t.co/U7ZUA0KxE2

#covid19 #auspol many politicians around the world now talking about a 'race' between the vaccines and the virus. Isn't it obvious that this framing removes every public health tool, apart from vaccines? Narratives reveal agendas.…

#covid19 #auspol will the TGA/ATAGI push the AZ cut-off age to 60 this week? Wouldn't stall the rollout too significantly, and the data has been suggesting this for quite some time.

@normanswan @teegstar is there any research on how long a person can delay a second dose? For example, if somebody has had AZ now, but wanted to wait until there's mRNA vaccine supply later in the year, for dose 2? So several months,…

#auspol #covid19 this is the debate we need to have. Experts lining up either side of a line here, between vaccinating and letting the virus circulate, and continuing to rigorously control transmission alongside vaccination.…

#covid19 #auspol people at work in their early-40s, low risk for Covid, got Pfizer jabs last week. Second at start of July, fully vaccinated inside 3 weeks. Full protection through bulk of the winter. Over-50s in the office, higher risk…

#covid19 #auspol Anybody see a TGA update today?

#covid19 #auspol dedicated quarantine facilities have 100% efficacy against all variants of Covid. And can be made locally with 12th century technology.

#covid19 #auspol when you use vaccines to try to avoid other public health measures, the public health problems reappear at the back door. https://t.co/2d0nZDLbcy

#covid19 #auspol interesting to see the TGA unpack a bit more the onset of clotting. Most cases appear within two weeks of first dose, some that take longer are suspected to have occurred earlier, but were masked by co-morbidities or other…

#covid19 #auspol the Delta variant will test just what 'proportionate' means in NSW. Until now it's clearly been political code for 'we don't do lockdowns'. https://t.co/ujLkUWYqu9

#covid19 #auspol dumbfounded by the ongoing advice on risk in this pandemic. Lots of patronising simplifications from supposed experts. 1/8 The risk to an individual of a clot with the AZ vaccine is tiny. That individual risk is used to…

#auspol saw multiple leading journalists run the line yesterday (again) that NSW somehow does public health differently. It's the job of journalists to take that sort of spin and unravel it.

#auspol #covid19 let's be really clear what this decision means. The public and some experts agitated for this for many weeks, and were ignored. The public was right, again. If you're an expert who didn't agitate for this, why didn't you?…

#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 product, which has traumatised and infuriated even those strongly…

#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 risk of an outbreak actually estimated. 1/3…

#auspol how do you have a lockdown, without having a lockdown? By asking the public to do it for you. https://t.co/6K4Ea5VbOa

#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 about public health strategy. 1/7 https://t.co/vj7QfwoECO This…

#covid19AUS #auspol a game the whole family can play. Take the expression 'we need to learn to live with X', and replace the X with: - Covid - paedophilia - Ebola - people smuggling - organised crime - welfare fraud - drugs. Why don't we…

#auspol #covid19 https://t.co/0habf8V8xZ

#auspol #covid19 serious question. Do the words 'strongly encouraged' have any meaningful role in public health work? https://t.co/ggwDIa2TWC

#auspol pop quiz. Should we 'learn to live with': A. this family, or B. a lethal pandemic pathogen? https://t.co/HBORuhmj7p

#auspol extreme libertarian politics has no place in a pandemic. It slaughtered hundreds of thousands in the UK, US, Brazil and India, and now NSW's leaders describe their public health approach in libertarian, political terms.…

#COVID19Aus Yep. Still to see experts here say whether they believe herd immunity is even an achievable thing in a modern, mobile population. Risk management suggests shutting this virus down with basic restrictions is the urgent need.…

#auspol #covid19aus from day 1 politicians looked to medical expertise only, preferably pliable and able to be house-trained to support underlying political agendas. That lack of diverse expertise for this most complex of all human…

#covid19 The problem with the idea of herd immunity is, humans don't live in herds. Every major city has an airport where you can contemplate this basic fact at your leisure. https://t.co/jwfWkFqsWY

#auspol remind me again why how fast Australia is vaccinating is some critical issue? Because we substituted 'opening borders' for 'ending the pandemic'? https://t.co/EXNVRT3KT8

Am a firm believer in the wisdom of crowds. An empirically-studied phenomenon. Another example, the apparently 'slow' vaccine rollout. That speed forces authorities to maintain other public health measures. Measures they'd love to drop.

#insiders zoom out ffs. The WHO says the critical issue right now is that most of the world has no vaccine at all. And we obsess every single day about how fast we vaccinate here. A truly global strategy wouldn't even be vaccinating zero…

#auspol @yaneerbaryam the same dimwits who've denied this for over a year now desperately trying to shift the metric to hospitalisations. 'We'll let people catch this, but vaccines will keep them out of hospital'. Criminal, lethal…

#auspol a measure of how stupid most pandemic discussion is, that we would seriously not laugh at the idea that vaccination is a meaningful tool to halt an outbreak already underway. https://t.co/0d4LZAsboo

What's the difference between a lockdown, and asking everybody to lockdown?

#auspol be immediately suspicious of those who paid no attention over the past 10-15 years as educational outcomes in Australian schools went backwards, now calling to get kids back in school in the middle of a pandemic, for the sake of…

#auspol #covid19australia I wonder if this will create a situation where an assessment will need to be made about just how long a person with 1st dose AZ can actually leave their 2nd dose, if they wait for an mRNA shot?…

#auspol #COVID19Aus National Cabinet to discuss vaccine hesitancy today. Reminds me of the public discussion on consent. Did anybody suggest that the answer to somebody hesitant to have sex was an ad campaign to persuade them? The public…

#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 reasons not being listened to. Their risk assessment is actually…

#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 arrived back there again. /1 https://t.co/8ZmmWVqVIT I saw even…

#auspol #COVID19Aus we must fight rampant stupidity, it kills people. Australia IS 'living with Covid', that's why we have all the protections in place. Like you wear oven mitts for cooking. https://t.co/lycjtVtsMy

#auspol #COVID19Aus the most urgent strategic need is for ongoing virus suppression, with vaccination alongside and second. Vaccination even at speed will be woefully insufficient alone to protect against Delta outbreaks.…

#auspol #COVID19Aus a good article. However many of these other drugs are used where there is imminent harm to a patient. There is no imminent risk of contracting Covid for most in Australia. If we're saying there is, why is there still no…

#COVID19Aus @CrabbBrendan very disappointed to hear yet another Oz expert on radio tonight say that we need to move away from 'zero Covid' and accept that we will have some virus in Australia. That IS zero Covid. We're already 'living with…

#auspol #COVID19Aus the pandemic is a battle between the public and the pathogen. Neither of those is manipulable by any individual or group. All individuals are just spectators to that battle. Tolstoy saw that about war.

#auspol #COVID19Aus when the history of this pandemic is written, will you be a person who fought against infection, or a person who fought to keep the social status quo? https://t.co/Iddr1UctPt

#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 to develop and manufacture variations to vaccines, and then…

#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 with a lethal virus. But that to one side, why don't we.../1…

#auspol anybody seen the Public Health Order for NSW that came into effect at 4pm today?

#auspol #COVID19Aus the 'non-essential activities' NSW most needs to abandon are the deliberations of NSW Cabinet. https://t.co/d96VDb3CKn

#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 door and asks them to hurry. /1 https://t.co/eNMMxvunNN 'We're…

#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 wants to live with Covid." (possibly paraphrasing, going on…

#auspol #COVID19Aus something rarely noted in this pandemic is that workplaces are consistently exempted from Covid safety requirements. Take the NSW Public Health Order released yesterday: /1 Same basic text as the entire pandemic: "When…

#auspol #covid19aus Sydney NOT locked down. Spot the difference, to a lockdown. Whack-a-mole costs more, harms more people, creates even greater restrictions on freedom. https://t.co/AqRUNr9YZv

#auspol this whole pandemic the righteous have called this 'panic buying'. Really the crowd (public) is just telling the humble observer what's coming. When a just-in-time supply chain meets a public planning to live not just-in-time, for…

#auspol #COVID19nsw The Prime Minister: NSW shows the way to contact trace your way out of an outbreak without using lockdowns. The same nonsensical binary for more than a year. Contact tracing works up to a certain number of cases. After…

#auspol #COVID19nsw public health measures form an integrated system. Conservatives have extracted one tool - contact tracing - and weaponised it, portraying it (like vaccination) as a cure-all. That same silver bullet thinking is the…

Contact tracing and vaccines so far tried as silver bullet fixes for the pandemic. Like hoping a bunch of flowers will paper over a dysfunctional relationship. Why don't people see that a pandemic is a complex socio-political event, not a…

#auspol #COVID19Aus join us tomorrow when Peter gives tips on painting and decorating, another area he has no knowledge of or experience in. https://t.co/7x9X2E0dAC

#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 of interaction between people. 1/ Science can help understand…

#auspol #covid19nsw NSW Health doing fantastic work. But why is it acceptable that the Premier can still stand there every day and quite explicitly say a priority is 'keeping the Economy open'? Does anybody seriously still believe the…

#auspol ultimately you need X amount of social restriction to quell an outbreak. You either apply it immediately ('lockdown'), or spread it out over days/weeks/months. What differs is the time scale, though the second approach is more…

#covid19 #auspol pandemics about the only thing in all of history that alter the distribution of wealth. https://t.co/jrqJqOBExq

#covid19 Pandemics kill orders of magnitude more people than wars. You can spot a privileged person by their furious desire to get an OS holiday back, in the middle of a pandemic. Like demanding a jaunt to Vietnam in 1973, or the Somme in…

#covid19aus you can lock down a city to prevent people becoming infected. Or you can do it a suburb at a time, as they become infected. Hard to see the superiority of the latter. https://t.co/0E6NmzKqfu

#auspol #covid19aus haven't seen the mobility data in a while. https://t.co/GB0Z3Wl9iv

#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.co/DAYlamS0Tv 'Lockdown' isn't a public health term. It's a…

#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 'freedoms' the least. 1/ https://t.co/N2FTr3mIcy One thing…

#COVID19Aus #auspol the dangerous delusion of maps. LGAs, like suburbs, are not physically bounded locations. They're administrative constructs. 'Ring-fencing' these rarely works, for that reason - beneath those boundaries, social…

#auspol #COVID19Aus watching the NSW presser. Offering this to help with the 'proportionate' response. Rate of growth proportional to existing value. Exponential. Not linear. https://t.co/NkX7hbYcFn

#auspol the idea that you have contact tracing OR lockdowns was an idiot idea when first weaponised by political spin a year ago. More lethally idiot now. How have more prominent voices not challenged this long before now? Asleep at the…

#auspol @normanswan an article from the SMH last year revealed NSW Cabinet deliberations about 'lockdowns'. Ministers choosing random lockdown-trigger figures, like 250 cases/day, divorced from any public health advice.…

#auspol #covid19aus @normanswan this article surprisingly attracted very little interest at the time. It shows a NSW Cabinet completely dismissive of public health advice. We were warned. https://t.co/LXDytpOSnc

#auspol #COVID19Aus the people I feel most for are those doing essential work, who never get to shelter. Who have to carry on risking infection, to keep society's lights on. I've not had a single day away from work the entire pandemic,…

#covid19aus I'm certain the abysmal numbers in the double-dose data is our choice of AZ. 12 weeks between doses is going to make that number lag terribly. https://t.co/NU13J7ZhAm

#auspol #covid19nsw still the same mistaken belief in 'panic buying'. People aren't panicking, they're preparing. Nobody wants to go to the supermarket with a lethal virus circulating in the community. https://t.co/BTpGRprPNH

#covid19nsw Those in the regions who have travelled to Greater Sydney since 21 June required to isolate for 14 days. Not seen anything about whether their family members must now do the same?

#auspol #covid19aus Covid 1, libertarian political bullshit 0. Given Covid comprehensively smashed the libertarian teams in the US, UK, Brazil and India, it's not clear why NSW felt selecting a live with the virus team would work better…

#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 pandemic, the thinking that actually created the pandemic. About…

#auspol why have (many) experts and journalists alike not pointed out long before now, that the NSW 'proportionate' idea is in direct contradiction to WHO advice, from the beginning of the pandemic, to 'go hard, and go early'?

#insiders maybe after 18 months somebody might point out that 'lockdown' isn't even a public health term. It's a weaponised political term. And we're already 'living with the virus', enough of that Trojan Horse for a switch to a mitigation…

#auspol #insiders every time somebody says 'we need to learn to live with Covid', ask them what it is we've all been doing for the past 18 months. What they really mean is let it rip. Terrorists.

#auspol the war metaphor has been criticised, when used. It's hard to know why, pandemics kill many, many more people than wars do. We mobilise for the long-haul fight if it's a war. We whine about missed trips to Bali when it's a…

#auspol sigh, unless we can vaccinate at exponential speed, vaccination won't be the solution. Longer term it will be a strong part of any solution, but for now controlling transmission is the critical task. While we vaccinate.…

#covid19aus a global emergency, which goes away if people stay home. Worth pondering.

#auspol #covid19 we need leaders to stop promising 'back to normal' and start talking about a prolonged, collective struggle. https://t.co/BpXKODN7wt

#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 to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have…

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole #covid19 this seems the danger in allowing virus to continue to circulate widely, amongst vaccinated people. Something much of the developed world seems determined to do. https://t.co/q4bd1MNNTr

#auspol by vaccinating off a zero community transmission base, Australia is among a handful of countries leading the world's pandemic response. You must do both. https://t.co/DfAabWMKEZ

#auspol #covd19 vaccine passports carry the assumption that a pandemic can carry on merrily alongside vaccinated people, going about their normal lives. This should strike us as dangerously perverse. The key to beating a pandemic is…

#covid19 a symptom of privileged societies out of touch with basic realities is their tendency to label any sort of analysis as negativity. Life isn’t supposed to have existential problems by this logic, just good times. Why even the…

#covid19 all pandemics are really about territory. About ‘home’. Destruction of the homes of living things, by ungrounded cultures of obsessive travel. Cultures whose own homes are increasingly jet planes and hotels. We need to ‘come in to…

#covid19 #auspol has anybody told Singapore that the definition of pandemic is that it’s an international event? You can’t end it at home. You can’t live with a pandemic virus as if it’s an endemic virus. You have to make it an endemic…

#covid19 #auspol many who argue against public health action against Covid use influenza as the example of how we should 'live with' a virus. We didn't live with flu last year either. There's nothing necessary about living with any…

#auspol #COVID19nsw workplaces a critical risk. Employers not bound by the public health orders on how many battery hens they cram into cubicle farms. Many telling staff they can't work from home, and to pay for their own masks.…

#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/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW planning for the next term, clearly making noises about a mitigation strategy for schools, while the strategy for the wider community is elimination. Not only contradictory, schools will become engine rooms of…

#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 require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#covid19aus #auspol I mean, this is fine. But as always there's that 'living with the virus' subtext, where we whack-a-mole it while trying to live 'normal' lives in the midst of a pandemic. Like a holiday to the Somme in 1916.…

#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 towards speed vaccination as the metric of success. /1…

#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 Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#covid19 #auspol there are no ‘tracks’. Left to itself a virus can’t move anywhere. People are its transport. People mixing and moving. Usually ‘economically’. https://t.co/vTLSLnFXHy

#auspol #covid19aus every day I ponder the past 30 years of almost national emergency action to stop a single refugee getting here by boat, contrasted with the apparent emergency of us needing to be able to travel freely across everybody…

#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, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1…

#auspol #covid19 very interesting hypothesis for cause of VITT. Accidentally injecting into vein instead of muscle. https://t.co/iWfewGqLD2

#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 political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

#auspol #covid19aus there's a certain human hubris around any of these schemes. Traffic lights, percentages, opportunities etc. The virus will ultimately determine this, not any of these metrics. https://t.co/AkQ1UZ1jeW

#covid19 #auspol so interesting that we smashed flu in NSW last year, with national lockdown, but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021, with society broadly open for the past year. Potential long-term good (inc. economic) that comes…

#auspol #covid19 new variant of 'live with the virus' discovered at National Cabinet. Hospitalisations, not cases. PR drivel, a la UK. I don't recall a time when influenza or measles or whooping cough was in wide circulation, alongside the…

#auspol #covid19 people want a 'plan' and some 'hope' to end the pandemic. The only meaningful plan is 'when the virus is domesticated or eradicated'. Everything else is Powerball.

#covid19aus #auspol they say history teaches us nothing. Usually you’d assume that meant over generations. Not a year. Australia announces roadmap out of the pandemic today, ‘at last’! Like it did last year, as pictured. Nobody remembers?…

#covid19aus #auspol can somebody please ask National Cabinet if part of their 4-stage plan is to infect all children, as the UK is doing? It seems important. https://t.co/2jIvbYSBzh

#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's give up on this defeating them thing, we need our holidays…

@SkyNews Press Preview discussing gleefully the wilful infection of children with Covid, and a range of other nonsensical 'live with the virus' variants. The damage Maggie did to the UK is sad to behold. Each to their own, Spirit of the…

#auspol #covid19 there are many possible meanings of ‘live with the virus’. The political/economic meaning of it is a long way from the expert meaning of it. A desperate need to challenge anybody who utters these words to be specific about…

#auspol #covid19 funny (not ha ha funny) that the inventors of the ‘Fortress Australia’ line, to mock public health control of a lethal pathogen, also spent more than 2 decades winning elections by building this. https://t.co/0dymoWCYDD

#COVID19nsw #auspol Matt Lucas understands a NSW ‘lockdown’. It’s a Boris lockdown-lite. https://t.co/OfB93vYKlw

#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 Economy of influenza are over $40 billion. /1 A shift to an…

#covid19 probably spectacularly unpopular to say it, but watching the UK's collective orgasm over a fucking soccer game just seems symptomatic of how divorced from reality rich nations have become. The last days of Rome, bread and circuses.

#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 dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#insiders yet again a desperate need for somebody with basic public health knowledge in Insiders discussions. The journalists do zero homework in the area, and just repeat various slogans in circulation.

#auspol #covid19aus @AlanBixter the less asked question around Phase 2 of the plan is if we're just swapping suppression of virus with suppression of case numbers. Is there an undertaking to continue publishing these? Or will they be…

#auspol #covid19 understand this, and you understand not only what caused the pandemic, but what keeps it going. An 'economic' world where work = freedom, and being in your own home is being 'locked down'. As the Nazis said, 'Arbeit Macht…

#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 protection for the flow of people and goods. /1…

#ausol #covid19 drivel, from beginning to end. 'Fortress Australia', another weaponised political slogan. Australians have loved Fortress Australia, when it meant keeping brown people out. Privileged whining when it's applied on the…

#covid19 The elephant in the vaccine-soaked room. Rampantly mobile cultures still trading on old imperial DNA needed slowing down. They're not liking it. https://t.co/kxF2eK06aS

#covid19 #auspol https://t.co/Fj5lfg0Ga7

#auspol comparing COVID to flu, again. Like 18 months ago. Rings a bell, something about a 4-part plan. https://t.co/q8rtuWzC04

#covid19 #auspol yet another uncritical puff piece, describing widespread infection of children, and of the vaccinated, both highly risky (and also unethical, with children) strategies. https://t.co/Z2cLceq1DI

#auspol #covid19 the big push is on to shift the world to a 'continuous re-vaccination' strategy for Covid. Not actually a strategy, a weaponising of one public health tool in isolation. Not everybody is stupid enough to fall for it.…

@auspol #covid19 to understand why countries are so casually infecting children with Covid, you have to understand that most of them are rich, old, and living off migrant labour. There's no generational thought, just an eternal 'lifestyle'…

#auspol the same calculations worldwide, on climate change too. Public policy driven by attempts to maintain fragile coalitions of reactionary and populist conservatives. NSW's Covid strategy the same. https://t.co/o5BmDO1HUr

#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 You get a different story when you map deaths. Often the leaders with…

#auspol #coivid19nsw the NSW Premier just refused to classify teachers as essential workers for vaccine access, with school returning next week. They join the queue with everybody else. Pretty clearly seeing that the default will always be…

#auspol #covid19aus Targets, traffic lights - all meaningless corporate drivel. The virus pays no attention. https://t.co/UzJxcDYGm5

#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 killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1…

#auspol #covid19aus I had no idea the expert medical advice the PM refers to comes from the Treasurer. We can throw everything off Medicare that doesn’t kill you or put you in hospital, ‘live with’ hundreds of diseases and conditions. I…

#covid19 I can see us all becoming pincushions by the time this is over. Watch every permutation of the vaccines being used to try to rescue declining effectiveness. https://t.co/jLF7QVqUto

#covid19 #auspol the ultimate libertarian, lunatic endgame. Public health replaced entirely by 'personal judgement'. A pandemic created by collective behaviour, now left to the irrelevant and powerless resources of individuals. /1…

#covid19 'public health' reduces to the basics. Clean water, clean air, less crowding, sunshine. Industrial pollution was a symptom of an absence of concern about these basics. Pandemics the same, Covid came from filthy air, caused by…

#covid19 #auspol ultimately you need to limit social movement and gathering to beat a pandemic. You can pretend you're doing it 'proportionately' by taking baby steps, but you just need a lot more steps, and for much longer.…

#covid19 #auspol a vaccine is a momentary shift in balance of an entire microbial ecosystem, which continues to evolve. The public narratives around vaccines see them as medications, take and you're cured. https://t.co/ToZEHcKFgM

#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 the 4-stage national plan. /1 https://t.co/e4D4yHnUGe On the…

#covid19nsw Premier saying she wants this to be the 'last lockdown' for NSW. Current restrictions likely extended to ensure elimination. This pandemic would also be over faster if leaders would ask people to be ready to fight on, rather…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier saying her government avoids 'burdening' people with restrictions. While leaders continue to make restrictions the problem, and not the virus, this pandemic will continue.

#covid19nsw #auspol Dear Premier/CHO, can you say specifically whether children will be allowed to become infected as part of the National Plan?

#covid19aus #auspol language does much of the work in politics. Orwell knew it. How did we ever allow the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic act of sheltering from a lethal threat? Spin designed to prevent that sheltering. Not a public…

@MJA_Editor @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole horse has probably bolted on this one, but strategically imagine refusing to use the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic public health act of sheltering from infection? Weaponised terminology,…

#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 strategy, that would be seen as a noble thing. /1…

#auspol #covid19 @ProfJohnDrury the longer the pandemic goes on, the more we see that it isn't a biological/medical battle against a virus, but rather the endgame of deeply conflicting political beliefs. Beliefs that themselves generated…

#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 with an extreme libertarian virus about 50 years ago, generated…

#COVID19nsw #auspol have a look at the contrasting lines here for the Melbourne Delta outbreak, and the Bondi/NSW Delta outbreak. Go hard/go early IS the 'proportionate' measure. https://t.co/QjNEeSUjYL

#auspol #covid19aus NSW's stay at home orders. An awful lot of people still going to work? https://t.co/dHuZyKfPAl

#covid19aus #auspol "‘[It] is not because schools aren’t a safe place, they are a safe place, but what we really need to do in greater Sydney is reduce mobility,” Ms Berejiklian said. Pay attention Australia. Once adults are vaccinated,…

#auspol #covid19aus one day the sun will explode and incinerate the entire solar system. One day journalists might need to actually know something about the topics they report on, to keep getting paid. https://t.co/jqZMcSQEQz

#auspol #covid19 if you feel that conservative politicians will continue to 'follow medical advice', remember they've happily ignored climate science for several decades. Their only use of expert advice is to keep hospital numbers…

#covid19 heretically, the UK might put its reality filters back on if it loses this game against Denmark. Right now the football is distracting the entire nation from the criminal, almost genocidal, decisions of Boris' government.

#auspol #covid19aus on the one hand this is a good measure, masks are rarely wasted in a pandemic. On the other it's suspicious that this is a priority now. Suggesting virus will be allowed to circulate in the community, and in schools.…

#QandA lockdown isn’t a choice. You either do it earlier, or later. The virus determines it, not us.

#covid19 sometimes these death and hospitalisation emphases seem a bit to me like backing airbags for pedestrians, rather than crossings. https://t.co/CefPRypkYJ

#covid19 always a glorious morning when you awake to a flood of anti-lockdown Tweets, from masturbating adolescent males who want their freedom back. To hide in their parents' basement and eat Dominos while playing Fortnite.

#covid19 #auspol another day, another realisation that beating Covid is quite easy. It's beating people that don't want to beat Covid that's the almost impossible task. https://t.co/yoiC6O89fk

#covid19aus #auspol I suggest allowing the virus to circulate in the homes of these 3 Ministers first, and in the homes of all of their relatives and friends. A trial run. https://t.co/wj5iPG536s

#covid19aus #auspol as one GP pointed out yesterday, changing peoples' second dose to 8 weeks also means a practice's entire vaccination schedule gets thrown out of whack, with the 8-weekers then clashing with already booked in other…

#covid19 Nothing sums up England's global approach to this pandemic better than fans shining a laser pointer in the Denmark goalie's eyes, and booing during the Danish national anthem. https://t.co/zilN47evcX

#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 also collided with political ideas in the same area. . /1…

#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 leadership this morning on at least that topic. Though just asked -…

#covid19 #auspol sad that Dave Graeber is no longer with us. He'd have been angry and amused at the idea a pandemic threatens the 'Economy', of which more than half he contended was 'bullshit jobs'. https://t.co/RkH4CRD9b1

#auspol #covid19aus Meet the Covids. Tomorrow they're going to the shops. Bunnings, then IKEA. Then maybe to buy some lingerie. Everybody is very excited. https://t.co/q4t8B8nW95

#auspol #covid19aus Have been saying this for 18 months. It's only when this threatens peoples' lives that Australia now notices. A pandemic is a political event, not a biological event. https://t.co/kDPoKwvpkw

#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 fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our…

#auspol #covid19aus the economic forces opposing public health action in this pandemic first weaponised contact tracing, as some silver bullet. NSW showing right now how ridiculous that was. Now they’re moving on to vaccines, as the next…

#covid19aus #auspol count the 'please' in the NSW press conferences. The endgame of libertarian nonsense, treating society as individual customers. Please NSW Government, do the job you're paid handsomely to do. Increase restrictions.

#covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/2pDGbWMu2O

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @auspol #covid19aus seems a good time to dust this one off again. https://t.co/kCrk5HpDDQ @YouAreLobbyLud

#covid19aus #auspol I used a sophisticated algorithm to track the flow of Covid around Sydney in lockdown-lite. https://t.co/oDExCkot59

#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 make strong decisions. Don't become the scapegoat for their…

#auspol #covid19 it's extraordinary, the passion for rules that libertarians develop, when their refusal to do basic leadership leaves them with no other option. Like lockdowns, your ideology might reject it, reality will correct it.…

#covid19 @auspol "In sum, then, we have a clear choice: /1 https://t.co/Jn1QS6TNUz on the one hand, a psychology which is at odds with the medical advice, which is counterposed to systemic interventions and which both disrespects and…

@billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec absolutely critical insights here from @ReicherStephen on the social, psychological and political understanding needed to defeat a pandemic. https://t.co/uV1gD8WVW3

#auspol #covid19nsw would be lovely to move away from the naughty children narrative libertarians are forced into, 'if you all do the right thing', to 'come on NSW, let's smash this". You know, NSW, the collective, non-libertarian thing.

#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' narrative from the police, government and CHO underway. There's…

#covid19aus #auspol Remember this? Compare and contrast this collective determination to FIGHT an existential threat, with the shock and awe ads of individuals gasping for air in hospital, today. Deliberate, strategic bullshit to shift…

#covid19 comparing and contrasting with the idiot scenes of 'freedom' jubilation in the US and UK. Never a clearer indication of the ignorance and arrogance that generations of empire produce. https://t.co/oz7I6iGV8U

#covid19aus #auspol this stuff about 'severing the link' between cases and hospitalisations seems a bit to me like celebrating because we can all get milder forms of syphilis. https://t.co/qwsB1qZKr5

#covid19 this disappointment is a necessary practice run for the UK, when its 'Freedom Day' from Covid turns out to be a steaming pile of lethal propaganda. https://t.co/eUTLaBHf9H

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it seems NSW is following its usual absence-of-risk-management approach. Sightseeing the exponential curve. 'Don't leave home', but leave all the businesses open, so people will be sacked if they do stay…

#covid19aus #auspol both the Premier and CHO refuse to answer about leaving businesses open in Sydney. Throwing responsibility back on the community. To what? Not go to work? 'Hey boss, not coming in today, avoiding Covid'. This is a train…

#auspol #covid19aus by not ruthlessly challenging the NSW Government's 'live with the virus' statements at every point in the past 18 months, we've arrived. https://t.co/IIsH9hHRMd

#covid19 #auspol have people looked at the *global* rate of vaccination? Is it too much to ask spoiled rich countries to stop the pissing contest over vaccination speed and refocus on ending the pandemic, globally? Rich counties with…

#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 gone backwards with building ventilation, including hospitals.…

@covid19aus #auspol does NSW want to wait until Christmas to beat this outbreak, with only Stage 3 restrictions? Or swallow its pride and go for Stage 4? Guess which is better for the ‘Economy’? Nothing to ‘balance’ here people.…

#covid19aus #auspol John Barilaro saying that kids must get back to school, for the ‘Economy’. And that NSW is ‘riding the wave’ of its current outbreak, waiting for the ‘peak’. Close your eyes and it could be a member of BoJo’s cabinet.…

@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 is a teacher, and I once was too, so a real interest in…

#covid19nsw #auspol in the regions now. Again, 'essential work' the driver of this outbreak. Still undefined. https://t.co/IzyeqL0oNK

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Health Minister, asked to define 'essential work', says that's a matter for an employer and their employees. In other words, if you can't sell the lingerie without staff there, they're essential. Looks…

#covid19aus #auspol Premier: 'our absolute obsession is getting out of lockdown'. Not 'beating the virus'. The greatest enemies in this pandemic are those who make public health measures the enemy, and not the virus.

#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, where cases are in a community. Schools are the greatest…

#auspol #covid19aus great to see these measures. But how do we have leaders, more than 18 months into this pandemic, still talking about health and economic issues as two separate things, to be 'balanced'? https://t.co/OGDbPi3stC

#covid19 conservative governments from the first day of the pandemic have emphasised medicine, not public health. They’ve never denied it being for them about having enough hospital beds for the sick, not about preventing people becoming…

#covid19aus #auspol what sort of society knowingly and willingly infects its own children with a pandemic virus? When will even one journalist ask for a commitment from any Oz politician that children will not be allowed to be infected…

#covid19aus #auspol yes, sort of. We need to test by actually asking politicians whether this is now a priority because they’re planning for schools to have infection circulating within them at will. As in the UK. https://t.co/ssHhi1EENt

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw I noticed this last year, see circled in red. What that was doing on a public health sign is a mystery, except insofar as it reveals the true underlying agenda in NSW. We're living the consequences.…

#covid19nsw #auspol it seems a very similar calculus is going on in Macquarie Street right now. Between the 'end of their tether' Ministers, who likely are isolating in luxury somewhere, and the Premier and CHO. https://t.co/5JelIexgNP

@Globalbiosec #covid19aus the Premier, confirming your hunch from yesterday: "There’s a smattering all over the place, including the Eastern Suburbs and elsewhere..."

#covid19nsw #auspol when 'following the health advice', always best to have it harnessed to the carriage, and a good whip at hand. https://t.co/EPkIGSpmQL

#covid19aus #auspol it’s abundantly clear that the NSW strategy is about 90% designed simply to retain Cabinet unity. The refusal to define ‘work’ of any form is a strategic device to leave as much work as possible open, to appease the…

#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 strategists have found a way. They pretend to be doing public health…

#auspol #covid19aus it’s not, as commentary claims, that people don’t have common sense that is the problem here. It’s that common sense is meaningless in controlling most spread of the virus. It’s not lack of common sense that makes us…

#auspol #covid19aus the most important graphic of the pandemic? The nonsense of the term ‘lockdown’, a set of strong public health measures to *free up* people to live normally. Political libertarians don’t understand how regulation…

#covid19 you can be so successful with political strategy that you can get ordinary working people to even desire their own death. The #EnoughisEnough craziness trending globally. In a sane society, it would mean 'we've had enough of this…

#auspol #covid19nsw workplace mobility data is worse (i.e. there's more people moving around for work in Sydney) than last week. https://t.co/CL9UbW9R6f

#auspol #covid19aus Fantastic, pointed question about the loose Sydney restrictions from @aclennell Other journalists note - go hard, go early, with your questions.

#covid19nsw #auspol pressure building daily is showing that the NSW Government is still running a 'live with the virus' strategy alongside the eliminate the virus rhetoric. 'Live with' meaning 'businesses open'.

#covid19aus #auspol if something is confusing you about a person's behaviour, always dig until you find their most deeply held beliefs. https://t.co/cHmpzTlYsL

#covid19aus unfortunately Greg blocked me some time ago on this very topic. But a leading public health professional challenging the very measured reasoning of ATAGI? The risk assessment ATAGI did is very sound. https://t.co/bFxxLEhDNA

#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 becoming a billionaire. /1 https://t.co/XjAk4BtJ2N Modern…

#QandA can we please ask whether Australia plans to vaccinate children?

#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 this concern about having schools open. /1…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier’s dismissive snigger yesterday - literally a snigger - when it was suggested to her that Victoria’s essential work guidelines had been effective, was one of the most disgusting and revealing insights…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier ‘won’t hesitate’ to use harder measures. Going to need my dictionary here.

#covid19nsw #auspol the tougher lockdown might even be an actual lockdown, who knows. https://t.co/87AE8oABLF

#auspol #covid19 when supermarkets fix their supply chains, 'panic buying' turns out to have been an optical illusion generated by just-in-time lean logistics. The gig economy. https://t.co/Ra95K4zlYs

#auspol #covid19aus I call this painting 'Schools are Safe'. https://t.co/OJqaBRpKS8

#covid19aus #auspol that’s the part of the press conference where they give the order to fire up the helicopter. https://t.co/gd8sszzNQ2

@auspol #covid19 funny that the same lockdowns have improved the financial situation of just about everybody who didn't do well out of the old Economy. https://t.co/43dWa3PP4d

#auspol #covid19aus the snigger on display again here, when describing other States. https://t.co/BE2se4xe61

#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 even in the conversation. No question this is the stress many…

#auspol #covid19 "That's not how Australians live. We live with risk and ill fortune or poor health — even death — everyday." Stan Grant, mistaking everyday risks, for risks that grow exponentially and overwhelm a whole society.…

#covid19aus #auspol for the same reason nobody ever asks whether the plan is to allow children to become infected at Stage 4 of the national plan. Because old people and children are expendable. https://t.co/JL8lQi6YfC

#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 of being in business." /1 https://t.co/R2oTSkyXK9 "If you can’t…

#covid19aus #auspol finally attention to vaccination of children, in today's NSW press conference. Encouraging signs.

#auspol #covid19 it's very clear in the NSW Government advice and Health Orders that employers across the entire State *must* require workers to work from home, unless it's not reasonably practicable to do so. I wonder how much compliance…

@covid19aus #auspolthe league table view of vaccination again. All of those other countries/regions have orders of magnitude greater transmission and death than Australia. A global pandemic strategy would reflect that, and place Oz much…

#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 every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of…

#covid19 trying to think of a better candidate for most idiot line of the pandemic than 'we can't stay locked down forever'. Eliminate spread of the virus, and you can lift lockdowns straight away.

Modern conservative politics isn't government at all. It's regulatory capture, plundering of the treasury for vested interests. These parties have no real policy platform except cut taxes, cut regulation. Thus they can't manage anything,…

#covid19nsw #auspol looks like the mole responsible for leaking NSW Health data on daily cases may have been the same person who publishes the daily case numbers to Twitter...

#COVID19Aus three regional towns into 7-day lockdown in NSW now. This is all just locking down the State, one region at a time, and it might be faster to just do a Victoria and lock the lot down.

#covid19 #auspol Bezos flying into orbit in his rocket-powered dildo is where we end up when we turn societies into economies. Most of the world can’t afford to shelter in their own home (if they have one) from a lethal virus. The wealthy…

#covid19aus #auspol ring-fencing suburbs and even whole regional towns is about as effective as trying to avoid a fart in an elevator by standing on the other side of it. https://t.co/SsdGpRzXhY

#covid19aus #auspol a corollary of the 'live with the virus' belief is that public health action is taken not to prevent people being infected or becoming sick, but to protect hospitals. Another strategic death cult trick that flies under…

@auspol #covid19 bad numbers. No further actions announced. 'Waiting to see' if current restrictions bite. That waiting = 'being asleep at the wheel'. https://t.co/eYsjeOyOTw

#auspol #covid19aus the NSW Premier today said NSW has stopped the exponential growth of cases. Hmm. https://t.co/RWEriNvpd8

#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, job done, etc. Try this little gedanken experiment…/1 If a…

#covid19 extraordinary that smart people have to even try to mount an argument that using vaccines as a way to avoid basic public health work is a bad idea. https://t.co/s0U7GhspTV

#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. Just more attempts to disguise a total vaccine procurement…

#covid19aus #auspol the Premier attributing increased numbers to increased testing. Every single day more rationalisations of uncontrolled spread. 'Leaking' into neighbouring suburbs = spread, just say it. https://t.co/V0lMrGoHH3

#COVID19Aus #auspol together with removing the NSW Government for lethal incompetence, can we de-register journalists whose only question is 'when will you lift restrictions'? The grown-up version of 'are we there yet?' The virus is the…

#auspol #covid19 “We’re all responsible for own health”. No clearer evidence of how political libertarianism has undermined public health practice. Always look for the root beliefs. This is the very antithesis of the whole idea of public…

#auspol #covid19 the development of universal schooling also created a creeping adolescence of all culture. We can see this in the pandemic, the resistance to ‘lockdowns’ is like adolescents chafing at being grounded. Not an analogy, this…

#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 cases and hospitalisations. /1 https://t.co/rt6ybUxO0N Both the PM…

#auspol #covid19 @AlanBixter 'Money is the greatest vaccine of all'. That's the pandemic explained in a sentence. https://t.co/MT9NRtJEtl

#auspol #covid19aus this constant reference to our 'freedom' in today's press conference is obnoxious libertarian political bullshit. Ring-fencing hasn't worked anywhere, but is still the strategy. Vaccines seen as the salvation. We're all…

#auspol #covid19aus haven't been following the numbers closely, but from memory Victoria seems to be getting on top of the Delta outbreak there? That thing the NSW Premier says 'nowhere else in the world' has done? Twice now, in Victoria?

#auspol #covid19aus wonder what ATAGI make of having their expertise scare-quoted in this way? Can somebody find Nick a safe LNP seat so he shuts up and goes away? https://t.co/8UEHfO7Nxz

#auspol #covid19 so much of the daily hysteria doesn’t match the data. This is without much supply at the Oz end, and limitless supply at the bottom end of the graph. https://t.co/oNqPpp6r5L

#auspol #covid19 the only meaningful pandemic metric. If you think Australia is now running far behind the rest of the world, move there. Barring continent-level genocide in the next 6 months, we’re going to win by several laps.…

#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 disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism.…

#auspol #covid19aus we have found the lethal virus in our midst. And it is called Murdoch. Our road to Oz-Trump continues. https://t.co/RlHLCC5Cx8

#covid19aus #auspol only some sort of constitutional removal of the libertarians disguised as a NSW Government can save us. https://t.co/jceIxs1zTq

#auspol #covid19aus I think the federal LNP are lethally incompetent. But sometimes the daily team sports of Oz politics misses the important details. We’re already vaccinating significantly faster than the UK and US, even without any…

#insiders as always, all journalists with no public health expertise to counter idiot assertions. Vaccines won’t control the Sydney outbreak, the timescales are unworkable. NSW needs to escalate its NPIs.

#insiders again, idiot journalists trashing ATAGI, because they don’t have a single millibyte of public health knowledge between them. Australia’s outbreaks are due to poor quarantine. Countries who have used AZ extensively having even…

#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 in the world? Musings on this graph /1…

#auspol #COVID19nsw after stalling the country on airborne spread for 18 months, Peter Collignon now wades into another area in which he has no expertise. Several prominent experts stopped doing science and started doing politics, some…

@InsidersABC how about having a public health expert on the panel for the duration of the pandemic, even to one side (i.e. 4 on the show)? I suggest @Globalbiosec You include indigenous journalists for indigenous issues, why not experts…

#covid19 the libertarian idea that 'fighting' Covid means being infected by it, is akin to asking soldiers to go over the top and march into the machine guns, unarmed. https://t.co/mws4D0Ah2Y

#covid19 #auspol today's reading, NSW Cabinet, is from the Book of Leviticus. https://t.co/8Zq2SOOklr

#auspol #covid19aus curious that the advice of conservative-leaning experts is all about travelling with vaccine passports, nothing about public health strategy at all. OK, not really curious, just a figure of speech.…

#covid19aus #auspol it seems very dangerous to promise people a ‘way out’ based only on a percentage of people vaccinated? Control of all highly infectious disease involves much more than just vaccination. The public will rebel unless…

#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 Covid' as meaning 'zero cases and zero deaths'. It doesn't mean…

#auspol #covid19aus it's called federalism. It's what made us succeed in 2020. Also curious that other experts, right up to the Nobel level, have suggested vaccines are not the solution to the Sydney outbreak. Another expert freelancing as…

#covid19 Q: how many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? A: stop oppressing that fucking light bulb. https://t.co/UyQ426y2u0

#covid19 the Spanish Flu pandemic lasted just over 2 years. No vaccines, no real treatments. Covid will easily go past it in duration. And possibly still with deaths. WITH vaccines. A damning indictment of modern economic life, which…

#covid19 the WHO renamed viral variants with Greek letters to remove the geographical references. That's nice. But actually they should be named after the fuckwits of the pandemic, who generated them. The Trump, Bolsanaro, Johnson etc.…

#covid19aus #auspol there’s no mystery as to why NSW isn’t progressing out of this outbreak, like Victoria has. It’s been in plain view for over 18 months. The NSW Government thinks the ‘Economy’ is separate to society. The Economy is…

#auspol #covid19 I think we need to see evidence of who these ‘critical workers’ are. Right now they’re being used as the excuse to not go harder with lockdown. Melbourne also has critical workers and was able to lock down harder.…

#auspol #covid19aus this is a farce. Every single day getting worse. Mindless, lethal claptrap from the Premier about peoples' 'freedom'. https://t.co/i96e6qOgpt

#covid19aus #auspol those confused about the NSW strategy (or absence of strategy). Always go back to peoples' core beliefs. https://t.co/3hgF75vRb6

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus clear now that NSW is falling back on a UK strategy. Relying upon vaccines to fix an absence of restrictions. I pity those working in ICUs.

#auspol #covid19aus Not only no stronger restrictions (if true), construction (big donor) gets its way and some loosening. Meanwhile thousands of under-40s, who shouldn’t ever have been taking AZ, will be jabbed in an act of public health…

#covid19aus the point that the ‘live with the virus’ people ignore. https://t.co/G3vIpRimLK

#auspol #covid19aus I want to retweet this one every single day. Australia following the mindless weaponised rubbish from overseas, that get the jabs in arms, and the pandemic will be over. It’ll help, but it isn’t enough. Hugely dangerous…

#auspol Blacktown Mayor on Sky saying we need to get everybody vaccinated. Yes we do, but the framing here is the same as the deadly framing of contact tracing last year. People want a silver bullet, they don’t stop to think that the…

#covid19aus #auspol while you expect more deaths among the vaccinated, when you have widespread vaccination (this is the UK), it's still a sobering reminder that vaccines are not a silver bullet. https://t.co/1rMLTnKvmG

#auspol the comparison with other everyday risks is not the point. Risk exists within a context. The context in NSW is a government refusing to adequately restrict circulation of virus in the community. If it would do that, people wouldn't…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Premier today talking about the 'ripple' effect of people 'not following rules'. This is how libertarians work. Abrogate their own responsibility to do anything (restoring our 'freedom' from government). Then blame…

#auspol #covid19aus a game for people in lockdown. Colour in the infected LGAs. A new LGA every day, sometimes 2 or 3. https://t.co/WnZaIoIwlq

#covid19aus #auspol the cold, dead, genocidal eyes of the loons who think an economy and a society are two separate things. NSW was always going to end up here, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the core beliefs.…

#auspol #covid19aus during the Black Plague, whole towns were quarantined, not to protect the people in them, but to protect the people outside them. People inside the quarantined areas were left to die. W and SW Sydney, welcome to the…

#auspol #covid19aus libertarian theatre. Collective emergencies become individual tabloid pile-ons. Toilet paper, ‘rule’-breakers. (The delicious irony of libertarians getting their jollies persecuting rule-breakers). Sydneysiders 'willing…

#auspol #covid19aus you'd shoot a horse for less. https://t.co/G4kd0yB7q1

#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1…

#covid19nsw #auspol the breathless excitement from the Premier around 'jabs'. Would that the same passion applied to NPIs. Says the more jabs, the more freedom. Like a Boris Johnson clone. He killed over 100,000 people.

@auspol #covid19aus there’s a tragic comedy about all of these roadmap things. Like predicting the weather 6 months in advance. Here’s the only strategy that will work - at every moment, do what is most likely to drive the virus into…

#covid19 the evolving Covid-19 developed world pandemic strategy. https://t.co/ag1fy9d9Hd

#auspol #covid19 Waleed’s thought is the sort we need more of. Not narrowly confined within a discipline or ideology. This pandemic has seen us lurching from one mythology to the next, all to avoid one basic fact. We’re in a pandemic.…

#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 more than about 3 days out…/1 https://t.co/sJgSbnCxfn …but again…

#auspol #covid19aus always remember that many argued that the acceptable level of a lethal pandemic virus wasn’t zero. You don’t need data whizzes to understand the pandemic, this is all it’s been, every single day of it.…

#auspol #covid19 I’m glad we ditched public health measures to protect our freedoms in NSW. https://t.co/YuEyg80yeZ

#covid19 one of the mythologies of the pandemic is that nations choose the strength of their social restrictions. The only thing we choose is how quickly we apply ‘lockdown’ levels of restriction, and how many therefore die.…

#auspol #covid19 When this dam started to fail in the UK, the nearby town was evacuated while it was fixed. Nobody suggested ‘living with’ the leak. Why is it a ‘leak’ of virus into the community doesn’t register with us in the same way?…

#insiders #auspol the 2 things Health Hazzard says will end the NSW lockdown - individual behaviour and vaccines - both notably require the NSW Government to do almost nothing.

#covid19nsw #auspol both 70 and 80% figures are insufficient coverage if it’s adults-only, isn’t that right @stephenjduckett?

#covid19nsw Government incompetence is what brought AZ back into play in NSW in the risk calculations, cynics would wonder if that’s the reason no further restrictions are being added. The first clotting incidents will be interesting for…

#auspol #covid19aus the genius of conservative politics (again) now has us quibbling over single numbers as some sort of pandemic success measure. Just as they transformed society and politics into a handful of statistical measures they…

@sallymcmanus #auspol #covid19aus not sure which union covers contact tracers, but I bet if somebody were to look at their working conditions right now in NSW, we’d see the slavery saving the NSW Government’s flimsy Covid strategy from…

@auspol #covid19aus Dear ABC, if you're reading. Please ask Fran Kelly to stop dishing up Dorothy Dixers to guests, inviting them to blame ATAGI for the government's vaccine rollout.

@auspol #covid19aus conservative voters (including among experts) first mythologised mitigation (as opposed to elimination). Then contact tracing. Then vaccination. Then vaccination with AZ. https://t.co/7s7PK8zV36

#covid19nsw #auspol The Premier says the expert advice she's received from NSW Health and experts at National Cabinet is that Covid isn't a problem for those under 20. Let's release that advice, hey? Because right now it (if it exists)…

#covid19 any paediatric folk know this obvious specialist? As an aside, I've discovered that those who refer to the 'Fat Emperor' are usually cognitively damaged. https://t.co/iQVXxfn4xi

#covid19aus GPs in my (regional) area apparently giving AZ recipients the choice of 8 or 12-week gaps to the second dose. While UK data suggests around 8 weeks may in fact be the sweet spot for the 2nd dose, it’s interesting that regional…

#covid19 it’s all in the phrase. ‘My freedom’. Nobody has individual freedom, didn’t anybody read Robinson Crusoe? On your own life is slavery, just to survive. https://t.co/lTwG0gBGOl

#covid19aus #auspol we urgently need to sit our top political journalists down in a room with our top public health people for even half a day, so we don’t get this continuous barrage of un-researched confusion every single day.…

#auspol #covid19aus when I was a teacher, some staff had kids climbing the walls while the classroom next door was quietly learning. I’m sure the staff with kids climbing the walls thought it was a resounding success that they at least…

#auspol #covid19aus I suggest we need a new ‘public health passport’, whereby politicians and journalists get no access to press conferences or decision-making until they have a basic understanding of public health principles.

#auspol #covid19aus modern conservatives have a rat cunning. Watch them daily steer Australia away from an elimination strategy, using the NSW and Queensland outbreaks as smokescreens, towards the idiot UK strategy. Let virus spread, use…

#auspol #covid19aus I think it's only those with no understanding of basic exponential maths who think regular 100-200 cases per day (each of which may infect 8 others, or more) is something 'under control'. https://t.co/T0ebGkouZP

#auspol @profesterman @CrabbBrendan the CHO repeated this today. Why is there an assumption that Covid will achieve a steady-state endemicity? And that even if it did, it would be a relatively harmless one? Malaria is endemic.…

#auspol #covid19aus A beautiful representation of the spread going on. Fascinating and alarming to compare various versions of it. Proves yet again that you don't get to choose how hard to lockdown, you just get to choose how long you take…

#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 strategy for pandemic exit. It’s not advice on how to best exit…

@auspol #covid19aus the single most important decision about this pandemic, to accept that Covid will become an endemic disease, attracted not one single criticism or even comment in release of the national strategy. Please read this.…

#covid19aus #auspol At least one expert asking why we make the public health measures the problem, and not the virus. “I think the big focus should be protecting yourselves from harm and spreading it to your loved ones, not just getting…

#auspol #covid19aus the 70-80% target clearly well short of what’s needed. So the resurgence of the mitigation ‘live with the virus’ death cult continues. Meanwhile the public daily encouraged to think and feel those targets mean freedom.…

#COVID19nsw #auspol when asked why the numbers in NSW aren't going down, the Premier blames - the people. No clearer proof of the direct conflict of interest in a political libertarian running for public office.

@covid19nsw #auspol I'm guessing GPs in regional areas of NSW offering second AZ doses at 4 weeks is just their individual judgement of the situation in the State? Not a wider NSW Health judgement call of the situation in the State?

COVID-19: Double-jabbed are half as likely to be infected with coronavirus, study finds | UK News | Sky News https://t.co/9bCavTbxju

#auspol #covid19aus The danger here is that people are being encouraged to think that target = ‘freedom’. When that doesn’t happen, public resistance to further effort will build. There’s no substitute for revealing the unvarnished, brutal…

#auspol #covid19aus a bit of light grammatical Nazi relief for the daily press conferences. The singular of ‘premises’, is ‘premises’. A ‘premise’ is an assumption, like ‘we can live with Covid’. Usually tested inside a premises, where…

#auspol #covid19aus a disaster, spreading further every day, killing more every day, infecting more every day. Every day what does this change in the NSW approach? Nothing. https://t.co/TPggzLHMTu

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the Premier with the daily magical mantra about vaccines. Get vaccinated, yes. But it won't stop this outbreak, the NSW Government needs to do its job. What happens when you follow the wealth advice, and not…

@auspol #covid19nsw #covd19aus 'Delta is like nothing we've ever seen'. NSW Premier, who obviously failed geography. Victoria is next door.

#auspol #covid19aus fortress, hermit etc. Like restoring cargo cult tourism, slave labour through temporary visas and migrants with skills we're too lazy and stupid to cultivate here is some sort of 'open' Australia. https://t.co/D1d0axGCoG

#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 procurement deal for Australia, it…/1 https://t.co/YBVFcjZtxr 1)…

#auspol #covid19nsw the daily press conference, where we gather to watch the virus spread all over Sydney and beyond, while the NSW Government does little to stop it, and chastises us for not stopping it for them. https://t.co/sHW0GxeLMQ

#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 Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#covid19nsw beginning with all the good news and by again telling the community it’s all their problem. Must be bad.

#auspol #COVID19Aus #nswlockdown watching the NSW outbreak is like watching Armageddon with your streaming set to quarter speed. Slow-motion train wreck. Seriously, the NSW Government needs to be constitutionally removed from power, for…

#auspol #covid19nsw the difference between NSW and Victoria is that NSW will be dragged kicking and screaming to proper NPIs, infecting and killing along the way. The cynicism of these libertarian fuckers, to keep businesses open, and then…

#auspol #covid19aus Jack Lang was removed as NSW Premier by the NSW Governor in 1932, using the reserve powers (also used to remove Whitlam), because he wouldn’t follow a national plan agreed to by other Premiers. Can we think of another…

#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. Nothing shows better how the Economy is really just a tool of…

#auspol #covid19aus is there anything these vaccines can’t do? If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. https://t.co/0R0o32yxpR

#auspol #covid19aus this is the Brains Trust who daily listens to the wealth advice, I mean health advice, in NSW. https://t.co/fVYyNrK7ah

#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 strategic narrative for LNP governments. The old ‘live with the…

#auspol #covid19aus Australia needs its equivalent of Independent SAGE in the UK. A group set up by experts once they realised the UK government was using SAGE (our AHPPC) only as human shields. We need expertise unconstrained by National…

#auspol #nswcovid19 perhaps an oversight, but this is the first day untraced/under investigation cases haven’t been listed? https://t.co/K7DR10onDx

#covid19nsw #COVID19Aus the Premier says we don’t have exponential growth in NSW? We don’t have it with cases doubling every day, but it definitely seems to be there at a doubling rate of around 10 days?

@covid19aus @covid19nsw so now we do have under investigation numbers for today, by the look of it. Another big jump. ⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@OrinCordus⁩ https://t.co/rskYSrx6Xc

#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 separation, but personal interests, too, continued to…/1…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw this advice to businesses from the NSW Government is interesting. They're seeing transmission even in fully masked workplaces. https://t.co/vstjVaYMpi

#COVID19nsw #auspol more dire numbers for NSW today, spread into even wider areas of the State. NSW Government response? Nothing. More blather about 'jabs'. May as well be Boris Johnson doing these press conferences. Whitlam and Lang were…

#covid19nsw #auspol cases under investigation disappeared from the NSW public data yesterday (and didn't return today). Today break-down of cases by LHD also disappeared. Data issues? Or deliberate omissions?

#auspol #covid19aus hands up if you were disappointed this PM press conference wasn't to announce the removal of the NSW Government.

#auspol sometimes I think we made the same mistake with climate change as we have with the pandemic. Emissions, like infections, are the symptom, not the cause. We need to understand what it is in our beliefs and lives that causes both, to…

#COVID19Aus #auspol NSW Premier saying further restrictions won't work, because it's 'Delta'. How many days of this same repeated bullshit do we have to tolerate? And now, blaming the people. The circuit-breaker the CMO mentioned - time to…

#COVID19Aus #auspol NSW applied stronger restrictions to the alpha variant of Covid than what it's using against Delta.

#auspol #covid19aus NSW presser degenerates into the usual tabloid blaming of the public approach. When you elect libertarians and their idiot ideas start killing people, isn't it astonishing how quickly their anti-rule passions convert…

#auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde true. Let's vaccinate them for their own sake. https://t.co/QIXnAjdlro

#covid19nsw in bushfires, you fight the outbreaks, but you also put containment lines around the main fire. https://t.co/Fj7ZLsmmbA

#auspol #covid19nsw the best bit in the hearing today was Health Hazzard saying they had lots of work to do fighting the pandemic. I guess counting all those daily cases is laborious. https://t.co/3yVxgQB1lk

#covid19aus #covid19nsw #auspol today’s pop quiz. Is this: A. a virus spreading across LGAs unprotected by government, or B. LGA after LGA succumbing to an outbreak of not following rules? https://t.co/TVrDK1Qx1v

#auspol #covid19aus hey Premier, Brad. You’re libertarians, you don’t believe in rules. If you think there’s widespread rule-breaking, you should be applauding. The insane rabbit hole libertarian politics drags us down.…

#covid19nsw this is what the libertarians in Macquarie Street (who, remember, don't believe in rules) want us to do. Blame the catastrophe on us 'not following rules'. Turn on each other, rather than on them. https://t.co/Av8J1JXkEw

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus another day, spread into teh regions. Still no change to NSW strategy, in fact more fairy tale projections of freedoms with 70% of adults jabbed. National Cabinet or the Governor must step in.

#COVID19nsw #auspol is there a tipping point which will prompt the 24 members of NSW Cabinet to extract their heads out of their collective arses? https://t.co/OEgtkDCBgU

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol probably the most stupid thing I’ve seen in a while, and it’s a tough field. I also wouldn’t put it past the NSW Government to try this, as Trump did. The Premier has expressed this as her wish many times.…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus in pink, the ‘ohfuxponential’ curve. https://t.co/LVgx8w7JsI

#covid19aus #covid19nsw in today’s art inspired by Covid competition, @DeadInLongRun wins with a piece called ‘clusterfuck’. https://t.co/kh03OpoDJv

#covid19 the pandemic was never a medical or even biological event. It’s always been a political event. We’re listening to the wrong experts. https://t.co/Yk4xdmyMRj

#covid19aus #auspol we need to be ruthlessly awake to new libertarian slogans in this pandemic. Here's another - 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated'. Seems innocuous, but is just another attempt to use an individual libertarian lens for a…

#auspol #covid19aus I can identify the 'handful' of people non-compliant with public health efforts. 24 of them. The NSW Cabinet.

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus can somebody, anybody, at the NSW press conference just yell out for the Premier to shut up and ask if this daily bullshit is for real?

#auspol #covid19aus I was amazed when this story was published in 2020 that it got almost no attention at all. It shows very clearly why what we're seeing right now in NSW was always going to happen, and was never about 'health advice'.…

When given a choice between going regularly to the shops with Covid in circulation, or stocking up to avoid that, unsurprisingly the public choose the latter. As experts advised them to when the pandemic began. They protect their health,…

#insiders there are no silver bullets out of the pandemic.

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus work in progress. Should be a top seller, hoping to get Glad and Brad to wear at the daily presser. Always open for business, they’ll be up for it. https://t.co/Plyf6X95xz

#covid19aus #auspol I had to read this several times, to assure myself that this really is an ex-Deputy CHO, using people on ventilators as the key metric of public health success. https://t.co/S19PTcfkmd

#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 vaccine’s awesome power that they’ll tell me I’m lying. /1…

#asupol #covid19aus really hope this press conference after National Cabinet goes beyond a Powerpoint to try to rescue the PM's trashed reputation for vaccine rollout.

#auspol #covid19aus the federal CHO re-states the NSW idiot libertarian line, that the solution in NSW is people following the rules. So, we just watch the exponential increase and spread daily.

The health advice for the Western and far Western NSW outbreaks? ‘We’re sending more vaccines’. NSW clearly into Tory-UK land now, no attempt will be made to control spread. We’re going to jab our way out. Sorry, we’re going to do…

So Covid will only be allowed into the regions with a permit now. A ring of tin foil maybe. Still, it’s something. https://t.co/rSxNKK0yCD

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19 the pandemic will be a trilogy. Year 1 - epidemiology (epis) defeat the Empire (Economy). Year 2- the Empire strikes back, using vaccines to try to ‘live with the virus’. Year 3 - the return of the epis, when…

@DrZoeHyde what did you make of the CHO and leaders today saying children mostly catch Covid ‘from adults’? Isn’t this just an obvious attempt to deflect attention from the safety of schools?

#auspol #covid19aus is it just me, or are pandemic experts saying less, the worse the situation in NSW gets? Shouldn’t they be saying more? Why can’t they organise some sort of united group to call out the tragedy unfolding?

#covid19aus #covidnsw #auspol people of Australia. Meet the NSW Cabinet (2019 photo). Bringing Covid to your town soon. https://t.co/LTnremyPbH

#covid19nsw can somebody explain how ‘Operation Stay at Home’ will restrict movement, when most people are just going to workplaces the government refuses to close?

#Covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol NSW lockdown from this afternoon looking very likely.

#covid19aus #auspol I’ve always found CEOs relating to the little people are mostly interested in them coming to work. https://t.co/92d3B2WBGl

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol are we getting a bit too excited here? No real changes to the restrictions in Sydney (that aren’t working), with this just hopefully keeping the regions out of harm’s way a bit longer? What did I miss?…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol NSW is not in ‘total lockdown’. It’s extended its existing lockdown measures - which aren’t working - to the entire State. Delta isn’t the problem. This is the Economy variant. Businesses remain largely…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW restrictions predominantly limit social activity. They do much less to restrict work. The NSW Cabinet still wallows in the fantasy that the ‘Economy’ is separate to the lives of its people. Until that last fantasy…

#auspol #covid19aus SKY News right now, exercising the next mythology. With 80% vaccination, we can ‘live with’ some cases. ‘Like the flu’. Misrepresents the Doherty recommendations, misunderstands endemicity, just the latest live with the…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol close all non-essential workplaces. All the rest is compliance theatre. People are getting infected at work. https://t.co/gSAEsXhPGs

#auspol #covid19aus the UK has ceased offering AZ now to under-40s. Clot-related deaths fell to zero. We’re still to see the impact on the vast number of under-40s now grabbing AZ here. The risk profile justified it in many situations, but…

No @andrewprobyn, ATAGI shouldn’t have assumed Covid would enter the community. It assumed governments would maintain NPIs and quarantine to prevent that occurring. Those who deflect blame from the incompetence in government to expert…

#auspol from Day 1 of this pandemic, leaders have been allowed to suggest that fighting this virus = making hospital beds available to those who catch it. Nearly 2 years in, those in the community who say ‘um, maybe we shouldn’t catch it?’…

@covid19aus #auspol Belief that the ‘Economy’ is an actual thing separate to the lives of people is now going to kill many of them, and destroy the livelihood of many more. And yet everybody still talks about ‘the Economy’. Our most…

@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 positive test result. Confirmed cases will receive a text message…

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus it takes phenomenal gall to stand up there every day and blame the community for this disaster, when you see testing numbers like that. There are only 24 people not doing the right thing here. They're in the…

#covid19nsw #auspol we 'live with' Covid the way we live with any other infectious disease. We have cases, and we prevent those spreading to other people. Zero Covid does NOT mean 'no cases of Covid'. Deliberate obfuscation. Bullshit is…

#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 extension of the idea of 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated'. /1…

#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, from all society. Nobody keeps a vantage point. Hope, blame,…

#auspol #covid19aus It's beyond time we ditched the politically-loaded term 'lockdown'. Deliberately designed to make people oppose public health measures. 'Locked out' is more accurate, we're locking the virus out of society. Sheltering…

#auspol #covid19aus as NSW case numbers continue to climb the exponential curve, I do worry that the Premier has already reached PLS (my new public health term). Peak Lecturing Shrillness. So far PLS hasn't slowed case growth. Closing…

#covid19aus #covid19nsw #auspol the public is continuously being sold the idea that vaccines will mean they can return to normal community life, safe from severe harm. Like a full-body Covid condom. Is it that hard to see this is just…

@covid19aus the glory of a pandemic is that all of society's greatest dickheads self-identify. Like in this Tweet and most of the comments on it. Who needs a census. https://t.co/81HENPIcfH

@covid19nsw @auspol take that data wizards. https://t.co/nH6L1vzprh

#auspol #covid19aus money is a wonderful vaccine. https://t.co/VuRIvaOw03

#COVID19nsw #auspol #covid19aus every day I'm staggered at just how naughty we all are in NSW. It's an epidemic of naughty, apparently. Imagine if your working hypothesis is 'one State in the Federation is much naughtier than the others'.…

#covid19nsw #auspol 100%. The reason NSW can’t turn its numbers around is that it refuses to close more workplaces. Still trying to save its Economy, rather than its people. Doesn’t even occur to it that those are the same thing.…

#auspol #covid19aus booster shots show the real politics in play here. Rich countries, and the rich within rich countries, see the vaccines as their ‘passport’ out of the pandemic, while the poor can be left to die. It’s standard developed…

@auspol #covid19aus pandemics are the RCT for all human beliefs. Turns out libertarianism is a lethal rationalisation of the status quo, via a set of statistical metrics it calls the ‘Economy’. That Emperor has been stark raving naked for…

#covid19 #auspol The ignorance of how political strategy works, the pandemic is about politics, not science. How did so many not see that the same libertarians who tried to 'live with the virus' by infecting millions, would use the…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol new messaging from NSW today. No 'as low as we can get the cases'. Just 'learn to live with Covid'. NSW as Australian pioneer, showing the other States the way! Exponential growth will put an end to this…

#COVID19nsw #auspol can even one journalist call the Premier out on this compete misrepresentation of the Doherty Report?

#covid19nsw #auspol and right on cue, when asked why cases are growing exponentially with the current strategy? Blame the public. Compliance porn. Libertarians are immoral, ruthless bastards.

Does anybody else ever pause and think, 'I'm arguing with people about the need to stop the community from becoming infected with a pandemic virus?' The gobsmacking genius of the 'Economy' as a mass persuasion tool, that millions now see…

#auspol #covid19asu NSW Premier and PM both still peddling the fantasy that there's a manageable amount of Covid. The old live with the virus, mitigation fantasy, they've been itching to have it back. https://t.co/lkgBjLW0Te

@auspol #covid19nsw let’s send @Lisa_Wilkinson to the press conferences. https://t.co/6zUixvpemF

#covid19 Sort of sums up whey we’re still in this pandemic. No resilience, no backbone for an existential challenge. A society of adolescents, chafing at being grounded. https://t.co/pVpIZy40Hp

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus the only 'balance' in the NSW approach is between the competing factions of NSW Cabinet. Our strategy is piecemeal because it's about protecting the Premier's leadership, not public health.

#covid19nsw #auspol journalists got a bit more fire in the bellies today. Keep at it.

#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_Speers? At the moment they're just individually tearing their…

@auspol #covid19aus the fundamental uselessness of National Cabinet illustrated by the fact that the debacle in NSW doesn't even appear to be on its agenda today. The 4-stage national plan is already redundant, thanks to NSW, and they have…

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw Covid cases now in the 3 largest WNSW regional towns. And in many smaller regional towns. This is what click ‘n’ collect looks like now in regional NSW as well as Sydney. Looming catastrophe.…

#covid19 Covid is like an earthquake, a disaster mostly of the built environment. How many people work in a building where there are no opening windows? Hospitals almost universally now. Field hospital patients during Spanish Flu had much…

#covid19 #auspol it does seem that antibiotics were one of the main drivers of the end of basic cross-ventilation in medical settings. Fresh air and sunshine. Florence Nightingale’s passion. Many public buildings today have no opening…

#covid19 #auspol I sometimes think of Dresden, when the public narrative shifts to a bit of stay at home time being too hard, less than 2 years into a pandemic. The bombing was 6 years into horrendous suffering and sacrifice.…

#covid19nsw #auspol to be brutally honest, these protestors are orders of magnitude less dangerous than the NSW Cabinet. What they do pales into insignificance next to what the NSW Government refuses to do, every day.…

#auspol I’m certain non-Western nations watch on and feel that the democratic model is in its last gasps. Protestors against public health measures, governments actively allowing whole populations to be infected to protect business…

#auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/C3mYNx7W9x

#covid19 who knew that the FDA still hasn’t approved Pfizer for US use? They’re still injecting under emergency use authorisation. https://t.co/tUO1kf1YiG

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus police would have orders of magnitude greater impact on containing the pandemic in NSW if they sent only 2-3 officers to Macquarie Street to arrest the NSW Cabinet. Cabinet cares even less about viral spread…

#covid19aus the genius of modern libertarian, populist politics is that both of these trending topics refer to the people being progressively infected by the government in charge, and not to the government doing the infecting. Fight among…

#auspol #covid19aus disappointing interview with Jodie McVernon on SKY this morning. The closer experts get to power, the more washed-out, ‘do whatever you like’ their advice becomes. Too scared to call a spade a spade.…

#auspol #covid19aus I wonder what other States feel about NSW saying that unless every other State follows the NSW strategy, they’re not acting as a true federation. Just staggering arrogance, from the State already using the national…

#auspol #covid19 conservative governments see vaccines the same way those people who badger their GPs constantly for antibiotics for a sniffle see drugs. The quick fix: “I don’t want to look after my health, just give me the drug’.

#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 Cabinet specifically excluded anybody below 16 in Doherty’s…

#auspol #covid19aus the ‘live with the virus’ loons are in the ascendancy again. At every fork in the pandemic road they’ve weaponised public health advice towards letting the virus rip. Idiotic extraction of “70/80%” free of all context…

#auspol #covid19aus wonder if #DoNotInfectOurChildren could get some momentum behind it. About 6 months’ worth of momentum.

#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 context. /1 https://t.co/MkWzvjXRUe Look at that spending in WW1…

#auspol #covid19aus if you're a bit light on the political machinations that lead to train wrecks like NSW, this will help. https://t.co/D7Wa8LPWeS

#covid19nsw #auspol the transition (back) to full 'live with the virus' strategy in NSW now complete. Unrelenting lies and bullshit every day. Misrepresenting Doherty yet again. The only thing that can force a change is people refusing to…

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw is there not one fucking journalist there that can say 'that's not what the Doherty Report says'? Has even one of them read it?

#covid19nsw #auspol how you feeling out in the small regional towns, NSW? When asked about maintaining no spread in regional towns, the Premier's answer? "Get vaccinated".

#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 too lazy to read it, which appears to be most political…

#auspol #covid19aus in which the Professor dodged the bus the PM was trying to throw the Institute under by fudging. Saying opening with large case numbers just makes the public health system work harder. It’s past the tipping point of…

#auspol #covid19aus I remember Nick and Sharyn tag-teaming on Q&A. Sweet. Drunk with access to the seat of power. It’ll eat them up and spit them out, they haven’t realised that yet. https://t.co/HEiY91t2Ic

#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 said ‘the outcome is the same, but the load on the public…

#auspol #covid19aus one of the co-authors of the Doherty Report contradicting what the Institute Director said late yesterday. Experts (like the Director, and Brendan Murphy) will discover that aligning yourself with libertarian…

#covid19aus #auspol and another expert clearing the spin surrounding the Doherty Report. https://t.co/NWlKIy1KpG

#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 latter, in time, with added deaths, morbidity and economic…

#auspol #covid19aus there's a depressing predictability to the same experts surfacing every time the government finds its politics clashing with the public health advice, to back the government. https://t.co/s39UxfkbHG

#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 decades of neglect and lack of care for some basics of life.…

#covid19nsw #auspol please NSW journalists, please interrupt the Premier to say not suppressing case numbers violates both the Doherty Report and the National pandemic 4-stage plan.

#covid19nsw #auspol sadly NSW now rapidly approaching the point where the BS and blather from the NSW Government is exposed as utterly powerless against the catastrophe it generated. The only silver lining in pandemics, BS has nowhere to…

#auspol #covid19aus the clear message here for the other States is, infect and kill your citizens, and they'll get vaccinated really fast. https://t.co/7ja7gZMAif

#auspol Birmo on afternoons with @PatsKarvelas talking about people getting their 'freedoms' back. Public health restrictions give us freedom from infection. Not freedom for untrammeled commerce, which is what conservatives mean.

#auspol #covid19aus adding @PatsKarvelas to the list of journos who didn't do the basic homework, nearly 2 years into the pandemic, and still mistakes elimination for eradication. No country ever 'lives with' a highly infectious lethal…

#auspol #covid19 in a few year’s time might actually be close to the truth. In our pincushion pandemic strategy - vaccinate our way out. https://t.co/ze9hrQwMpV

#covid19 #auspol a metaphor for a vaccine rollout, once you've done the low-hanging fruit. The US right now. https://t.co/irCvufAwWb

#auspol #covid19aus is it too much to ask that we go back to listening to experienced civil servants, and ditch the hand-picked expert consultancies with pre-determined briefs? https://t.co/I7kezt1ERX

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw nearly 1000 cases infectious in the community today in NSW. And the government's response? Talking about opening up. Only health system collapse may stop this lethal madness.

#auspol #covid19aus we had the PM quoting Batman this week. The NSW Premier is surely Macbeth: "I am in blood stepped so far, that should I wade no more returning were as tedious as go over"

#auspol #covid19aus I think the whole country knows we'll have to live with Covid. Like they live with impetigo, and head lice. It's never meant epidemic levels of impetigo and head lice in the community. We stamp them out.…

#covid19 if libertarians keep running pandemic strategy, we’re all going to be pincushions. And if they keep refusing to control transmission at the same time, we’ll be possibly selecting for a virulence that will mean Covid can drop you…

#auspol #covid19aus LGA boundaries exist nowhere except on a map. Using them as a barrier to Covid transmission is like using fishnet stockings to bale water out of a boat. https://t.co/hsHNb5g33y

#auspol #covid19aus like they care less about education or children's' mental health. To a modern conservative, a school is childcare for the workforce. Or it's a hugely subsidised private networking tool for the upper classes.…

@auspol #covid19aus not one word about ventilation in schools in the NSW school re-opening timeline. Knock me over with a feather.

#auspol #covid19aus the Premier saying that all States should support the Doherty model, because they 'signed up to it'. The triumph of spin over reality is that the community believe she and the PM are following the Doherty model, and the…

Thanks to @rossleedham for digging this out. The current metric NSW is considering for deciding whether a school should be re-opened, from the CDC, is the cases per 100,000 LGA population. NSW suggesting 50. That’s in the high risk range.…

#auspol #covid19aus Look at how on both sides of the world libertarians have now weaponised Delta’s transmissibility as another shift towards ‘let it rip’. For Gladys, this is ‘Delta is like nothing we’ve seen before’ i.e. nothing she can…

#auspol #covid19aus I still remember a time when staying at home was called a holiday. The homicidal cunning of the modern political libertarian, to reframe ‘freedom’ as going to work, and oppression as being in your own home. Gotta love…

#auspol #covid19aus weasel words. ‘Optimising’ public health measures = reining in uncontrolled spread in NSW. You’d hope. https://t.co/GoNwvPzTGr

#auspol #covid19aus Australia can’t. But it will, if the PM and NSW Premier get their way. https://t.co/gB61GAXXQb

#auspol in the true tradition of secretive crap, what was actually decided at National Cabinet yesterday? Are the simplified and lethal 70 and 80% vaccination targets still happening? Anyone? https://t.co/P3EJbXS1pY

I’m one of thousands of experts on Twitter. Some engage with the public and with other areas of expertise, others, not so much. The thing to remember with a pandemic (I think) is, it’s the public who will physically end it. With what they…

#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/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA Let’s consider those,…

#auspol #covid19aus have always found the hysteria about vaccination rates curious. It’s not where you start in a race, it’s where you finish. We’re going to round the US and UK up in the bend and win in a canter. https://t.co/tbyAh0ih7v

#auspol #covid19aus Greg Hunt regurgitating the laughable ‘kids need to be at school for their mental health’ line. Why would anybody believe conservatives on schools? Oz school performance has been in free fall, and they just fund…

#insiders we should immediately discount any leader who sees the task ahead as ‘ending lockdowns’, rather than ‘ending the pandemic’. Do the latter, and you do the former, without infecting people.

#insiders #auspol ok, so let’s draw the line in the sand here. People casually infecting children, rather than waiting a few more months to get them vaccinated. Not me. ‘Chronic, debilitating lockdowns’, ffs, Labor as bad. Try Covid for…

#insiders another fact and knowledge-free Insiders, no public health expertise there to mediate the free flow of meaningless Covid slogans.

#auspol #covid19nsw is it too much to ask that even ONE journalist can confront the Premier with her total misrepresentation of the Doherty recommendations? Just once? Or that she’s violating Phase A of the National Plan, every day?…

#auspol #covid19aus the UK a great example of what happens if your obsession is avoiding lockdowns. Lack of virus control means repeated, yo-yo lockdowns. There is no binary between lockdown and ‘living with Covid’. https://t.co/IpyCLmJ0js

#auspol #covid19aus a message for the NSW Government and our PM. https://t.co/jdPUbikYIM

#auspol #covid19aus come on Australia, you know how to do this. In a pandemic that number 30 absolutely must stay at 30. https://t.co/sVmuTMOSSj

#auspol #covid19aus another great intervention from Allan Saul. Summarises the entire NSW situation in under 5 minutes. Fascinating how vaccination also makes contact tracing harder, because more people become asymptomatic.…

#auspol only economists could blame administrators for the political fuck-ups of the pandemic. Maybe they hadn't noticed that the FDA only approved Pfizer for use in the past fortnight. https://t.co/WHhEryZ12V

#auspol #covid19aus imagine saying ‘it’s not about the number of kids being hit by cars, it’s about the number of kids being badly injured when hit by cars’. https://t.co/uXrqQIjNMD

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus cases under investigation in NSW hitting new records every day. How about at least one question at today’s NSW press conference on the overwhelmed contact tracing, and how that means the 70% and 80% figures…

#covid19nsw #auspol here's a tip NSW journos. Read this and throw away all the other questions you had planned for 11am today. This is all you need. https://t.co/tn6gOP0szD

@covid19nsw #auspol the NSW Premier saying (again) that case numbers aren't growing exponentially. It's hard to keep track of the lies, there are so many. Again lying about Doherty modelling and the National Plan as well.

#auspol #covid19aus so Premier Berejiklian, if all Premiers have 'signed up' to the National Plan, why are you the only Premier that isn't following it? https://t.co/Ae4Y2JEt3Z

#auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/nWy2iKnWP2

@theprojecttv if you talk about ‘living with Covid’, can you define precisely what is meant by that? A disease becoming endemic is much more complicated than that slogan.

#covid19aus #auspol this seems to match the UK experience, where last time I checked haematologists haven’t seen a single convincing TTS case for a 2nd AZ dose. https://t.co/w4MprLBGBW

#auspol #covid19aus so transparent. The National Plan always was just a re-election document. It shifts attention off both of his failures - vaccination and quarantine - claiming that at 80% it’s vaccination job-done, and people can…

#auspol #covid19aus 4.3 million a week globally becoming infected. 67,000 of them dying. That’s 67,000 families losing loved ones, per week. The Economy crowd want you to believe with a jab, this is all as good as over. Our disgusting and…

#covid19nsw #auspol "Delta is like nothing we've ever seen before". G. Berejiklian. NZ, only 14 days in, and already smashing it. https://t.co/zB6dfGy4lS

#auspol #covid19aus here's a proper National Plan, not just focused on winning the next election. https://t.co/JZcPweNFdA

@liammannix Zoe always good on schools and kids and Covid. https://t.co/SO4h1HQcY1

#covid19aus #auspol with us returning to the same idiot ‘live with the virus’ slogans of early 2020, like a dog returning to its own vomit, maybe we really need to focus much harder on endemicity and what it actually means. Aris is a…

@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 suppressed by vaccination and some restrictions? /1…

#auspol #covid19aus it would be a delicious irony if NSW, after banging the ‘live with the virus’ drum for weeks, now starts to drive numbers down. https://t.co/4IWJOGlVzp

#auspol #covid19aus desperation everywhere, for vaccines to end it. Pathogens live in environments, that we create. Our ‘normal’ is that environment. It may be that only a fundamentally different way of life will defeat Covid. Climate…

#covid19nsw #auspol sigh. Please, somebody, anybody at the press conference, point out that 70/80% Doherty figures are totally reliant upon functioning TTIQ. Which NSW doesn't have.

#covid19nsw #auspol the NSW Premier today comparing annual flu deaths to projected Covid deaths. An average flu year about 600 deaths. Covid deaths opening up at 80% projected to be over 25,000.

#auspol #covid19aus "...the Queensland premier is being alarmist here, as the dramatic figures are based on minimal restrictions and only partially effective TTIQ capabilities". 'Minimal restrictions' is 'opening up' (NSW plan). TTIQ…

#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 infected. Like replacing policing with a ‘you’ve been robbed’ app.…

#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 thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

#covid19nsw #auspol ah, the 'exciting' times in the next few weeks, where ICU numbers and deaths climb and we open up in NSW. Thank you Premier, fine linkages there.

#covid19aus #auspol would love to see polling on how many Australians would prefer 'freedom' from lockdowns, or freedom from Covid.

#covid19aus #auspol NSW moving to 'heroic' front-line workers phase. Standard libertarian playbook. Like the feds do with firies when their inaction on climate change incinerates whole towns. Put the last line of defence into the…

#auspol #covid19aus absolutely fantastic initiative. https://t.co/8FZd1wjOt4

#covid19aus #auspol Follow the absolute living daylights out of this group. Our own Justice League of expertise, to cut through the spin. Somebody with PS skills should put their heads on a Justice League graphic. @RealOzSAGE

#auspol #covid19aus we need to immediately replace 'live with the virus' messaging with 'live with occasional outbreaks, not widespread disease'. Thanks to #OzSAGE https://t.co/tiWgegtR8k

#covid19aus #auspol 8 facts about 80%. Good reading. https://t.co/wFkqNphGOc

#covid19aus #auspol surely a highlight of the pandemic to date. Churchillian. https://t.co/0ElyJeaCKW

#auspol #covid19aus great article. However the repeated claim that the Queensland Premier’s ‘80 deaths a day’ claim is ‘bollocks’, is, itself, bollocks. Look at the UK, much greater vaccination coverage, and averaging 100-200 deaths a day.…

#auspol #covid19aus Israel 😳 And the rest of the big jabbing triumvirate, hmm. https://t.co/QetPg5OlxJ

#covid19aus It’s fine to infect children, provided they don’t end up in hospital? This makes me curious what the rate of hospitalisation would be for all childhood infectious diseases, without vaccination. Were we wasting our time,…

#covid19aus #auspol @RealOzSAGE the true calibre of the man is revealed more every day. Nothing more needs saying really. https://t.co/yb36W9wVJT

I think I may re-Tweet this every day until the pandemic is over. It really is the only thing we needed to know from the beginning. https://t.co/jdPUbikYIM

@auspol #covid19aus this is the real pandemic battle ground. Libertarianism. The US is simply incapable of seeing an institutional response to anything as itself a freedom. Government and its institutions are also the people, there’s no…

#auspol #covid19aus I think we should all adopt ‘Morrijiklian homunculus’ to describe Covid politics right now. And “But if they can just get those ballots in the box, before the little caskets start dropping into the earth…”…

#insiders #covid19aus can we put Steve Duckett on Insiders every week to quickly dismiss Covid BS and clarify the Covid slogans that pass for public debate?

#insiders #covid19aus if we’re no longer concerned about children contracting infectious diseases, why don’t we abandon the entire national childhood immunisation program, for all infectious disease? Imagine the money we could save.

#covid19aus the pincushion model of public health continues. Whole societies doing that thing where you go to the doctor, who says your lifestyle is killing you, and you demand a pill to fix it. https://t.co/Cwk28bo7nu

#covid19aus #auspol superb. https://t.co/NbC2iPLzyl

#auspol #covid19aus if Jacinda would only watch the daily NSW pressers, she’d know that you can’t eliminate Delta. Ooops. https://t.co/BEiF6OassQ

#auspol #covid19nsw given the Premier continually stresses that modelling changes daily, with new data, curious that the modelling she releases today uses data that's about two weeks' old. https://t.co/pBaT2sIRoq

@RealOzSAGE is there analysis comparing the stringency of lockdowns in 2021 with those employed in 2020? Difficult to assess on public health orders, but anecdotally many have said 2020 lockdowns were ghost towns, whereas 2021 in many…

#auspol #covid19aus the danger to those with a #UnderlyingHealthCondition is those trying to defeat a pandemic using an underlying political ideology. https://t.co/UiBXBCDoWI

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Maybe the PM and Gladys have the graph upside down? https://t.co/BeMQkiyfTD

@aclennell valiantly tries to get the Premier to say what projected death rates will be when opening up at 80% adults vaccinated. The Premier nonsensically says 'get vaccinated'. By definition only 63% will be vaccinated when she opens up.…

#auspol #covid19aus which chapter of the public health textbook advises opening bars and restaurants in wealthier parts of town, at the same time as peak hospitalisation and death rates are predicted in the poorer suburbs? Asking for a…

#auspol #covid19aus workshopping ideas at SKY News evenings. https://t.co/RwtYrFrdL7

@auspol #covid19aus I've lost count of the number of times the UK has announced the pandemic is over. In the olden days this was called 'do the job properly the first time, or you'll be back doing it again, over and over'.…

#auspol #covid19aus the sentiment work the vaccine rollout team do suggests only 79% of Australians plan to get vaccinated. This is a very precise measure of how much your democracy has become infected with populism. The US and UK…

#covid19aus @DrZoeHyde The big fix appears to be on again for schools, as it was in 2020. Both times very limited Oz data used for assessment of Covid risk, when there's voluminous data from overseas available. Have to wonder if that's…

#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 kiddies back to school is safe. But maybe.../1…

Vaccines are fantastic. A vaccination passport is an admission that you haven’t controlled spread of the virus. Like telling people to all carry a gun, rather than reduce crime.

#auspol #covid19aus they 'follow the health advice' the way a yacht tacks into a strong headwind. https://t.co/hCKuMXRhaI

#covid19aus #auspol beginning to wonder if booster doses are just more vax-and-forget type thinking, and the problem isn't really waning efficacy. More an ongoing refusal to control transmission. @AlanBixter? https://t.co/1TuuT0KWXs

“Business needs certainty”. Which disqualifies it as a model to run a society (or pandemic response) with, you’d think. Life doesn’t do certainties, except death. They used to add taxes to that saying, but business found a way to avoid…

The vast majority of our ‘Blue Planet’ is as lifeless as any other lump of rock in space. It’s only that tiny, thin blue line that is alive. Climate change plays out in that thin blue line. The pandemic too. All about air.…

#auspol #covid19aus nobody uses ‘roadmaps’ now. It’s all GPS. Real-time data adjusted to conditions. Conservatives wanting a roadmap out of the pandemic is their road fetish. Ramming a set of business-driven actions through local complex…

#auspol #covid19aus The ACI has some terrific resources. This one on vaccines saves people a lot of time in trying to collate the information. https://t.co/naKzPQaH51

The idea of public health is anathema to libertarian governments, to them the 'public' is just individuals. Medicine yes, public health, no. They'll keep trying to use vaccines as medicines to bypass the complex social causes.…

#auspol #covid19aus pity we can't refer 'you can't eliminate Delta' to ICAC as well. But they are very busy with NSW Government stuff already. https://t.co/BzWy2CSeZI

@jmodoh #auspol #covid19nsw #nswpol can you ask at the NSW press conference whether the level of contact tracing required in the Doherty modelling for 70 and 80% openings is actually being met in NSW? With specific data/numbers on CT…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it's a new low in NSW governance that the NSW Premier first reiterates the worst case and death numbers are in the weeks to come, and then says the government will now no longer front the daily press…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw when pressed on why she was hiding from scrutiny just before peak cases and deaths, the Premier says 'but who knows when that will be'? She's spent weeks telling us when that will be. It's the basis…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw maybe the NSW Cabinet is going to Hawaii for a holiday. It's a favoured location for LNP leaders during natural disasters.

#nswpol #auspol the NSW premier today justified her ending press conferences by saying it was part of 'learning to live with' Covid. Nobody blinked. You don't live with a virus when it's in fucking pandemic phase. https://t.co/il4330oEWC

#auspol #covid19aus hats off to public health experts who still call a spade a spade. The task is ALWAYS to eliminate or even eradicate infectious disease. Yes it’s hard. Going to the moon was hard too. Our ambition replaced by the…

The definition of a pandemic is an epidemic that crosses international borders. In NSW Covid isn’t even an epidemic, it’s something that only happens in the poorer LGAs. https://t.co/0jf3jnIExW

#nswpol #covid19aus hey, if you’re a journalist, do the country a favour and just don’t go to press conferences, if your question is something like ‘when can we lift more restrictions’?

#nswpol #auspol saying we need to learn to live with Covid, in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak, is like saying we need to learn to live with climate change by sending the firefighters home in the middle of bushfires.…

#auspol 2021 outbreaks have been about workplaces. No commitment to pay people to stay home, so that’s where the virus went. Just as it will go to schools, into unvaccinated children, before Christmas. The same patterns the world over.…

#auspol #covid19aus There's not a snowball's chance in hell of any sort of meaningful 'opening up' at 70 or 80% of adults only vaccinated. Nothing in the modelling says it can be done under current conditions, and every country with…

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 talking about it as if we’re living ‘in’ an economy. /1 #auspol…

#auspol Vital insights from @RealOzSAGE. Covid is unlikely to become endemic, it will remain an epidemic disease. Not 'like the flu'. And the 'peak' of NSW cases depends on current conditions and restrictions. Each change to those…

Some get a bit upset when you compare a pandemic to a war. On excess death calculations, Covid has already killed about the same number of people as World War 1. In under 2 years.

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus Delta was never the real problem. Lockdowns were softer in 2021 than in 2020, due to refusal by government to provide the same level of support to workers to stay home. Money is the best vaccine.…

#auspol #covid19aus the always evolving political slogan-variants, which in turn create Covid variants. The UK overnight. They now say ‘jabs, jabs, jabs become jobs, jobs, jobs’. You won’t see clearer evidence of how vaccination has been…

#auspol #covid19aus The UK a common example given by many of how vaccines (alone) will get normal life back. UK Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty pointed out overnight that both cases and hospitalisations are higher there now…

#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 political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

"With vaccines on our side". Next the public health strategy for alcoholism will be paracetamol. Thanks to @drgregkelly https://t.co/LUCujZnB0P

#auspol all the idiotic passport fantasies. The passport is easy. People forget the border guard function, of checking and enforcing them. The entire population at war with itself, policing a politicised public health strategy.…

#auspol #covid19aus the comparison of plague with fire is quite accurate. Basic public health is about building the containment lines, back-burning, putting out spot fires. Medicine fights the fire front itself. Libertarians let the spot…

#auspol #covid19aus you can argue yourself blue in the face every day here with those who didn't notice Australia's pandemic strategy remains elimination of community transmission. Despite what the PM and NSW Premier say, violating their…

#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 this is another shift towards a 'live with the virus strategy'.…

#auspol Imagine if Australia had nuclear powered: - vaccine procurement - progressive taxation - funding to public universities, schools and hospitals - political donation laws - controls on political grants schemes - independent…

#auspol #covid19aus this is such a crucial point. It’s clear many think vaccines will turn Covid into an endemic disease, which in turn they think means something relatively mild, ‘just like flu’. More political nonsense.…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @MichaelSFuhrer such a critical misunderstanding in all of the public discussions. The ‘live with the virus’ people refer to endemicity, but seem to have no idea what that even means, nor that Covid will not…

#auspol #covid19aus The dreary daily battles about ‘freedoms’ and ‘lockdowns’. The majority of freedoms people complain about losing, are *social* freedoms. Freedoms created and maintained by society, as a collective of people. ‘Individual…

#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 adults double-jabbed. Son works in aged care, has been isolating…

#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 to watch international news and see just how many countries go…

#auspol #covid19aus I remember doing literature reviews, where you came to categorical conclusions based on a newspaper article. Actually I don’t, my thesis passed examination. https://t.co/qudOsi7pvA

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 avoid mass death, the problem isn’t the virus. /1 Societies are…

#auspol #covid19aus ⁦@DrZoeHyde⁩ ⁦@drajm⁩ can somebody help me with the highlighted sentence from today’s National Cabinet? I read it as: “The best way to protect children from Covid is…it doesn’t really matter if they get Covid.”…

#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 virus’ variant. Public health apartheid. /1…

#covid19 the power of simpleton slogans in this pandemic. Words like ‘balance’, and in this case ‘equilibrium’. Let the virus rip through people, and it will all reach a cosy equilibrium! Probably why malaria and smallpox and TB kill over…

@OrinCordus @RichardfromSyd1 so Tables ES1 and ES2 on pages 4 and 5 of the updated Doherty report. All zeroes in that left column, in both tables, for the vaccinated under-16s. Are they really saying no infections, no hospital admissions,…

#auspol #covid19aus Australians rise to this sort of challenge. Don’t open up before they all get the chance. https://t.co/78PpnSrCJO

#auspol #covid19aus look at government spending during both world wars. That boost gave us prosperity for about 50 years afterwards. Never believe economic thinkers who say we can’t afford to spend a lot more to beat Covid. It would also…

‘Authoritarian’ and ‘free democratic’ are both PR terms. As a governance person, I’m more concerned about ‘free’ democracies electing reality TV stars who advocate flushing lungs with floor cleaner against Covid, and who reject election…

#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, but an epidemic by my understanding is defined by number of…

#auspol #covid19aus #nswpol you see, NSW can do it, for road deaths. Costs a fortune and restricts peoples’ ‘freedom’ too. https://t.co/3aoal5sRta

#covid19aus #auspol I see tonight Burnet modelling is the new target for live with the virus, anti-lockdown people. Is there anything they couldn’t turn into some sort of political culture war? What boring, fatuous people, what a way to…

@auspol #covid19aus Singapore, with 77% of its total population fully vaccinated, is finding schools are a major source of spread. As the UK found as well. Here in Oz hand-picked experts are assuring parents ‘nothing to see here’.…

#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 in that 50-120 range. Significant morbidity as well. /1…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

#auspol #covid19aus ok, Pfizer on its way for 5-11 year olds. Let’s vaccinate all of the kids. https://t.co/ytYEV1SrCd

#auspol #covid19aus here are the top 5 epidemic diseases humanity has been able to 'live with', in history. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

#auspol #nswpol this is on the NSW Government's main page. "70% to reopen NSW" is surely not only false advertising, but also appalling public health practice? The false expectations this sort of thing sets up creates all sorts of problems…

#auspol #nswpol When a Premier says cases will go 'through the roof', what they're really saying is 'we will lose control of this disease'. Try to think of any other vaccine-preventable disease that has hundreds of thousands of cases in…

The big childhood infectious diseases of our lifetime never caused enormous mortality. We still developed vaccines for them. People kinda got back then that the next generation mattered. https://t.co/q6l9MtMErK

#auspol #nswpol can’t add childhood vaccination to the roadmap, but can let construction rip unvaccinated. Those who doubt that the NSW Government is run by business, for business - what more do you need? https://t.co/M2Uggbzdq2

#auspol lot of understandable anger about this protest. But in reality, it pales into total insignificance next to governments opening up the country with barely half the population vaccinated, with plenty of vaccine supply and eager arms…

#auspol #covid19aus the only thing that might slow the 'live with the virus' variant is a national strike. People refusing to get vaccinated or to send their kids to school until all of the roadmaps include time for *all* Australians,…

#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 https://t.co/BL9Aoohxpp Every day I'm lost for words, that we…

#auspol #nswpol a lesson from the pandemic. Betting on two flies crawling up a wall, it's true for Australians. Re-frame the entire pandemic on reaching some relatively meaningless 70 and 80% figures, and people will stop paying attention…

NSW is preparing a Covid-saturated environment for them, to make them feel more at home. https://t.co/FpLMrdbs6E

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 millennia. All ideas are dangerous ideas, they need to be tamed.…

#auspol I suggested tongue in cheek that if widespread hospitalisation and death is the metric for Covid and children, why not halt all childhood immunisation? Libertarians make sarcasm and irony redundant. https://t.co/zGE19wGbkA

Speaking to many people, I’m sure they assume life will be relatively normal at the 70/80% vaccination targets. We need to start replacing those numbers with the projected infection numbers. When you mention those, people think you’re…

#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 week. That’s just under their average *annual* deaths from a…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19 aus ⁦@RealOzSAGE⁩ Delta wasn’t ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’. It was what we saw last year, but this time without government support. So people had to keep working, get infected, and transmit it to their…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW will soon re-open, at an *average* adult vaccination rate of 70%. Danziger’s famous cartoon comes to mind. https://t.co/7MBNmI7GKu

#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 most inexplicable act of bastardry in the history of the…

#auspol #covid19aus substitute any other infectious disease for Covid in that headline, and ponder just how debased our democracies have become. Imagine a million kids getting flu in a month. In sane times that would be considered an…

@CrabbBrendan this is still true, for epidemic disease? It seems the important thing many aren’t understanding, that you can’t ‘manage’ epidemic disease. The crushing is much easier once you have vaccines, obviously, but it must still be…

The aeroplane is the new mosquito. Did you know the amount of flying in these past 2 pandemic years, which we assume to be a decimation, is the same as it was in 1990? This exponential growth preceded Covid. And caused it.…

#auspol #covid19aus I often say that NSW and the feds follow the UK lead in much of their pandemic thinking. Here’s another box we’re about to tick in Oz, mass and deliberate infection of children. Even modelled in the Doherty…

#auspol #covid19aus I’m guessing people who point to graphs like this are told ‘yes but the illness is mild in children’. Come on parents of Australia, draw a line in the sand before this is us. https://t.co/s0owIVF8Qh

@RealOzSAGE #covid19aus Brett Sutton gets a lot of eye candy comments, but you know, Dr Greg Kelly - come on people. Smart too, and heals kids! https://t.co/8pWutNZLbh

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus #covid19aus US data suggesting that vaccination + Delta may be equivalent to unvaccinated exposure to the Alpha strain of Covid. https://t.co/jqlgX03TOA

#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 newly-infected people will be asked to do, in the next 6 months?…

#nswpol come on journos, not too late to ask the Premier why it's OK to infect the State's children under her roadmaps. Why can't the timeline allow for them to be fully vaccinated?

I should have collected all of the international 'Freedom Day' announcements over the past 2 years. Pandemics don't operate over news cycles. All of the Freedom Days failed. https://t.co/4YKn4xlkNp

#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 back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

#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’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

#auspol #covid19aus this really is somebody from senior levels of the medical profession, arguing to infect kids rather than immunise them. What a world. https://t.co/8QX63s0Q0m

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 get to at *least* 80% total population vaccination. /1…

In the meantime over in political libertarian land, the enemy is still lockdowns. Not sure some of them have even noticed the pandemic. https://t.co/UrV19wgPES

#auspol #covid19aus I think real caution is needed with self-testing. A good tool where you've lost control of the virus, more problematic where you haven't, as you lose visibility of spread. Much loved by 'live with the virus' folk too,…

#auspol #covid19aus "...the government had no choice but to ramp up restrictions for a month to avoid unnecessary deaths." If you don't reach 80% *total population* coverage as a minimum, you're back with restrictions. @stephenjduckett…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus the NSW 'roadmaps', just bits of paper with dot points, with little implementation planning behind them. All of this ridiculous complexity because we won't do the obvious thing and just wait until most of Oz is…

#auspol #covid19aus would you hire a plumber who promised to fix 80% of your leaking toilet? https://t.co/9EwmwMtro9

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 Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

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 all under-10s in the regions this week. @RealOzSAGE #nswpol…

This is interesting. A 60-year pandemic. Definitionally, if Cholera is endemic in more than 50 countries, does this mean a disease can be both endemic (locally) and a pandemic (globally), at the same time? @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec…

#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…

When you elect populist libertarians. Fresh from killing about 140,000 Brits with Covid and another thousand every week, with an idiot live with the virus’ strategy, now the UK has no fuel, because of libertarian Brexit. Libertarianism is…

#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 @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus a ripper I think, like Aris’ thread…

Worth remembering this stat when we choose to not eliminate Covid. And this is business-related costs, add healthcare costs to those as well. We’re just kicking the can down the road for future generations. We’re very good at that.…

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 this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

#auspol #covid19aus speaking with people I know, I don’t think it’s widely understood that this ‘herd immunity’ strategy with children is also the Australian National Plan. https://t.co/EnqfmQob0x

The problem with rapid testing is that it also tends to privatise the pandemic. It lessens the sense of urgency in addressing the collective ending of it. ‘We don’t need to do more, people are managing it themselves’. Just seems a very US…

#auspol #covid19aus sat through another public health expertise-free #insiders. An epidemic and pandemic is defined by cases, not hospitalisations. The number of infections will determine whether this pandemic ends. https://t.co/60Nf79pYwB

#auspol #covid19aus @AlanKohler asking all of the questions most Australians aren’t asking. The answers may hit them like a truck, leading up to Christmas. https://t.co/MbfbLpuvIW

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus what is wrong with the parents of Australia, that they see this in the UK and want the same for here?Parents I know are too busy applauding ‘poor Gladys’, as she resigns for corruption. The Gladys who approved…

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, of disease and society. /1 @RealOzSAGE #auspol @CrabbBrendan…

#auspol #covid19aus Boris says the quiet bits out loud. This is the worldwide political libertarian pandemic strategy. Get back to work. https://t.co/y5Y5uMPj7G

#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 public health terms: "NZ has abandoned elimination, in favour of…

@theprojecttv saying ‘Covid Zero’ = zero cases of Covid. Never what it meant. It would take 10 minutes of reading to know this. 2 years into the pandemic and major networks still haven’t made the effort. #auspol #covid19aus

“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.co/2cX0uW7t2g @RichardfromSyd1 this one is an absolute corker.…

Am going to Tweet the same article twice this morning (this one: https://t.co/2cX0uW7t2g), this second time in contrast with what our PM said in the past few days. Just to highlight the magnitude of lethally stupid we face. #auspol…

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 particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

#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 the wrong people keep winning elections. /1…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus welcome to 2021, where civil disobedience will become wearing a mask to work in NSW.

National Plan = get jabs in arms, flights in the air, quarantine in homes. All Covid moved out of the PM in-tray. Dump the exploding case numbers on States. https://t.co/F2KZQejfqA

Populist libertarianism thinks expressing your personal feelings = politics. Climate change and Covid say: yeh, nah. https://t.co/CVlmoq1NuK

#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 make the decisions’. Meaning they ignore the advice. Like they…

India, a fraction of the wealth of much of the developed world, is moving towards elimination of Covid. While richer nations open their communities up to widespread infection, to save businesses. The majority of which would have failed…

#covid19aus preprint, but AZ effectiveness against Delta transmission dropped to zero after 12 weeks. @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/4kpDcTOf1c

#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 something important here, being missed I suspect. /1…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus hands up if you’re cheering on ‘Freedom Day’ in NSW, on Monday? The day we start infecting the kids! Our 6-child Premier leading the charge. Act 2 - we start sending them down the mines again, they should never…

#nswpol #auspol @RealOzSAGE Masks on the only unvaccinated group left in NSW ‘ludicrous’ and ‘restrictive’. If it walks like a Trump, and blathers like a Trump, it’s a Minister in the new Perrottet Ministry. A Deputy Premier even.…

#auspol #nswpol As NSW gives Covid its freedom tomorrow, the libertarian brotherhood in the UK, having also argued to smash borders open and get people moving again, has settled back into libertarian life. Restricting people moving,…

Anticipating another #Insiders free of any public health expertise.

#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 continued to circulate, but people did not end up with severe…

#auspol #covid19aus only a business reporter could re-normalise infections of thousands per day and deaths over 100 per day as life returning to normal. https://t.co/WvHsimAJXW

#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 exponential growth, this is political strategy playing on…

#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE the weaponisation of hospitalisation. Economic interests and their representatives in government have weaponised multiple public health concepts in this pandemic, and hospitalisation is…

#auspol not only are the press conferences gone, now the data has been trimmed (no case locations given for LHDs, that I can see so far). And cases pushed down the graphic, and vaccinations elevated. https://t.co/k6aF2sCeDl

Worth remembering that what we have 'freed' today is Covid. Like the freedom to leave the parachute in the plane.

#auspol I'm sure they'll both be fined, like Dan Andrews, for breaching Public Health Orders, and will pay the fines gracefully. https://t.co/JYAISBtwZ8

#auspol #covid19aus not a pesky public health sheila in sight. NSW is back, run by private (very very private - ssh, ICAC) industry. Gambling, booze and real estate back in the driver’s seat. A warm feeling, that our sacrifice has restored…

#auspol #covid19aus Dom Perrottet repeated the PM’s line yesterday, from earlier in the pandemic, that we need to ‘live alongside’ Covid. A society-wide out of body experience, because bugger me if Covid doesn’t live *inside* us. Not…

Just watch, as those loudest voices for ‘vaccines are all we need’ also forget all about vaccines, once the immediate threat is past. Nipah, 50% mortality, yikes. https://t.co/Lue4vnkrfu

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 group are real, they’re both abstractions. Individuals are…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW and Canberra follow the UK in pandemic thinking. NSW for example is now at the ‘take back control from experts’ stage (UK, 2020). If that goes wrong, they’ll spin that as ‘poor advice from experts’, as the UK is…

#auspol tales of freedom in NSW. Shared the OzSAGE ventilation guidelines with staff at work. Response: "just an ad for air conditioners". I asked 'what's our fresh air replacement rate in this building?' Response: 'no idea, we'll just…

“The people who are casually willing to accept thousands of COVID-19 cases a day as the cost of doing business are not the people cutting chickens or working in warehouses. They’re the people who own those businesses.”…

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than by Covid, have also endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Most diseases in that scheme are less harmful than Covid. #auspol…

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 libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus Paul Toole repeating that his job is to 'balance' peoples' health against the 'Economy'. We're back in 2020 again. What's this 'Economy' that we need to make some people die for? Isn't it just a tool to serve…

#auspol #covid19aus Finally somebody asks one of the idiot political libertarians why Covid vaccination for children is any different to vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella. https://t.co/h2g0rokC4J

‘Living with Covid’ in the UK is turning out to be like living with termites in your house. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/Osu8pA7j4v

Should our discussion of strategy for Covid move away from the short-termism of case numbers and immunity and more towards burden of disease? It #auspol #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/1H3C6LUZjO

#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 changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU Notice…

“Letting it spread is a bad, bad idea.” The idea that ‘living with the virus’ (hyper-endemicity) is our way forward is unfathomably stupid. Note the pre-print referenced in the thread showing emergence of a new fitness peak. #covid19aus…

Day 584 of the pandemic. Apparently ‘we can’t live like this forever’, pandemics are now a lifestyle choice. Time to dust off General Sir Richard Barrons again. https://t.co/2CRnPO2ERT

Worth remembering that in the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, the unvaccinated are mostly young kids, who can’t yet be vaccinated. The kids the Deputy Premier of NSW said it was ‘ludicrous’ to protect with masks.

Normalisation, another political strategy. Working brilliantly everywhere, if we define that as ignoring mass infection and death. #auspol #covid19aus Questions you often ask, ⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩, here are the answers.…

More tales from the front line of living with the virus in the UK. But, but…vaccines! https://t.co/xgFBx0zq7R

Some experts say prevalence is now irrelevant. I’m glad they’ve put that on the public record, it will streamline the work of future Royal Commissions. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/oiyuddjkbo

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 business, for business, you’d have to be blind to not see it.…

Settled in my comfy chair, ready for another #Insiders free of any public health expertise.

#auspol ZeroCovid bad. Net-zero emissions bad. I’m seeing a connection. A War on Zero. Maybe it’s what a lot of them got on science tests, and the memory stings. https://t.co/VAiPsu4ftn

Chief Medical Officer yesterday: vaccines alone won’t be sufficient to ‘suppress circulation’ of the virus. And reinforced the need to suppress that circulation. We need to shift the discussion to prevalence, and the health/social/economic…

While the elimination of influenza in 2020-21 won’t last, it showed us how even a bit more ambition in public health (rather than just medicine) might change our lives. Societies that succumb easily to epidemics lack resilience in their…

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. We need to understand how Australia builds and maintains a…

Denmark became the new Sweden this year for the culture war types who cling desperately to the idea that the whole pandemic is some form of alarmism. It ‘opened up’ to great fanfare this month. It’s given the cases graph another erection.…

Just under 50,000 cases registered in the UK today. Should we run a book on how long 'live with the virus' lasts there? Odds of another lockdown before Christmas? #auspol #covid19aus

Nothing about this data screams 'we need to get those kids back to school fast'. To me anyway. #auspol #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/x6IPsSGUJo

#auspol #covid19aus The NCIRS and the MCRI are the government’s go-to for advice on children in schools. Neither have the slightest connection with schools or education in their remit or research expertise, that I can see?…

Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologists seem less so. Etc. What to do when the science is…

#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 people to fix it. Simultaneously the UK government crying…

Describes exactly what we’ve seen in this pandemic. The deliberate assault on our public institutions, including our public health institutions. Politics created and prolongs this pandemic. @RealOzSAGE #auspol https://t.co/jMhKMki0mf

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 #COVID19Aus Nearly all of this analysis makes the assumption…

Struggling with the euphoria in Melbourne, opening with only half the city vaccinated, with over 2000 cases per day. Why did we even bother, Australia, in the past 2 years? Why not just surrender to the let it rip crowd at the beginning?

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 mentally and socially. Society is a high school. Not an analogy. /1…

'Living with' an infectious pathogen. Whooping cough a recent example. Australia had a 4-year pertussis epidemic between 2008 and 2012. 40,000 cases in 2011 alone. 140,000 all up. An example below of the public health action taken. Not…

“I’m living in fear - not of COVID, but of being put in isolation again. It’s super painful.” Wtf? Isolation is worse than having Covid? How stupid are we? Watch the Reverend Dom do a Boris here and force schools to stay open, even with…

#auspol what vast numbers of people seem to not understand. That we only ‘live with’ any infectious pathogen through the continuous, immense and costly work of public health methods. Imposing a new endemic disease on the world, when we had…

Men in dark conservative suits, discussing Australia’s public health planning. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ygctKmYkGn

The UK as a guide to NSW pandemic strategy. Boris’ new framing and spin? ‘We have very high case numbers, we always said we would’. Action? None. Watch Dom say the same if cases take-off here. Has warned us high case numbers are coming.…

“Singapore had previously announced in June it would be abandoning its zero-Covid strategy in favor of a new plan to live with the virus. The shift was possible thanks to the country's high vaccination rates, which are among the best in…

This will be why the NSW Government removed mask mandates for gyms and dance classes this week. Their current public health strategy seems to be ‘hide NSW Health from public view’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/wvBbRGpHDF

Hooray, now we can hopefully vaccinate the younger kids before they go to back to school! (Breaking news: I’ve just been informed we already sent all of the kids back to school, so that Qantas can return to profitability and the PM can win…

Covid is airborne. Life is airborne. Most of all known life in the universe is in that thin blue line. Of the roughly 7000km between the Earth’s centre and space, only about 20km is alive. In that thin blue line. Air quality is…

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 their resilience. Much of ‘freedom day’ type rhetoric is about the…

#auspol #covid19aus Nick Coatsworth on SKY right now, bashing Burnet mask studies and trashing the idea of masks in schools as being scientifically unsound. Maybe he could comment on Covid school safety studies based on a sample size of 18…

80 years ago, Robert Oppenheimer discovered the adrenaline rush of being courted by the powerful. It destroyed much of the rest of his life. A warning in his story for experts in this pandemic. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/t3eXFhd1VP

Another reminder that the NCIRS, which together with the MCRI is the government’s go-to for advice on schools and Covid, is an active proponent of the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme. For Covid? ‘No Jab, No Worry’. #auspol…

For a while there the let it rip crowd pretended their concern about schools was about kids missing out on education. They’re saying the quiet bits out loud now, Alan Tudge yesterday. It was always about business. #auspol #covid19aus…

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-Deputy CMO). Perplexing. #auspol #covid19aus /1…

The same politicians who are demanding students return to school mid-pandemic, often almost completely unprotected, because of apparent concern for their education, presided over this for the past 20 years, and did nothing. #auspol…

This entire pandemic has been about existing vested ‘economic’ interests doing everything in their power to undermine basic public health action. Just as they undermine climate action. Health systems should be the last line of defence, not…

I wonder how many seriously consider that we may not end this pandemic? We keep declaring victory over it in individual countries. Like pissing in a hot tub and saying ‘it’s fine, it’s all over here on my side’. #covid19aus #auspol…

Dominic Perrottet, when asked about opening up to the regions again, said ‘business and consumer confidence’ is low there, so that apparently needs addressing. More than half of yesterday’s cases were in the regions. The Economy will fix…

“…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’ll only use them for harm minimisation. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

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 some ways the birth of what we call countries today. Why I think…

Imagine a road safety strategy that said 'we're getting thousands of crashes a week, but very few people need to go to hospital.' The utter tripe that passes for common sense, with Covid. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/bvPBPB0L3v

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 statement, and replace ‘The NSW Road Toll’ with ‘Covid morbidity…

Have friends and family in Germany who say ‘Australia shouldn’t be locking people down’. 100,000 dead there, and ‘living with the virus’. No surprises how that’s panning out. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/da44NBwJ81

“Was July 19 Freedom Day for us, or Freedom Day for the virus?” Lest we ever forget that the ‘freedom’ talked about in this pandemic was freedom from basic public health measures. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7URYQbbHKd

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 Covid, to ‘live with’ it, what moonshots do you offer as an…

China never wavered from a Covid elimination strategy. The clear evidence that stopping infections and deaths is a boon to ‘the Economy’ should have destroyed that idiot, fairy tale substitute for society entirely. But the Economy is a…

NSW schools to trial RAHT. Includes use for surveillance testing. Would be nice to see a basic mask mandate as well. Ventilation seems to be a lost cause. #auspol #nswpol #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/VwRjKkOqSm

Societies that prioritise financially comfortable elders owning multiple homes while making even one home unaffordable for the young, were never going to give a shit about kids getting Covid. https://t.co/KBzXHsmrJg

It’s Y2K all over again. The people who oppose precautionary action then claim it wasn’t needed, when the precautionary action works. Every single week of the pandemic we see this same pattern.

A hard question not being asked in the West. The fracturing of shared beliefs that has crippled both climate change and pandemic action, *is* the ‘plurality of belief’ we at the same time advertise as our democratic strength. Our deepest…

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, on anything. Emissions and infections are only by-products of…

As always, expert regulators have to act within the framing given to them by their masters. Vaccines were never going to be allowed to help suppress the virus. A surrender to endemicity too. #auspol #covid19aus @Bertrandization…

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 4 weeks. Calculation seems to be all 6 months from 2nd dose?…

The pandemic is caused by economics, not the virus. #auspol #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/CsIZ5rShBW

Based on reporting and public response, it appears this Covid thingy was mostly something about grounded planes and cancelled holidays. https://t.co/7uWKbBemE4

Blaming China for the pandemic is like leaving all of your windows and doors open, and blaming the rain when the inside of your house gets wet. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/SUeEhbPAqk

293 deaths yesterday in the UK. The government response: ‘get vaccinated’. The libertarians were always going to use vaccines like they use CCS for climate change - as a quick technical fix to restore business as usual. #auspol @RealOzSAGE…

COP26 and Covid show again that facts and science don't unite societies. They only do that within a framework of wider beliefs, a worldview. The libertarians are winning because they sell a worldview. Worldviews are impervious to facts,…

Contemplating the number of hours of conversation generated on Twitter every day arguing over whether to do basic public health things. Like arguing whether to put out fires, or fix leaking roofs.

Let’s just park this ‘Freedom Day’ snap from the UK, 19 July. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/F6AaSUAOrH

My son explaining why being back at school is better than online learning. “It’s easier to bludge at school, the teachers can’t tell if you’re doing anything”. #auspol #covid19aus

It would be naive to think something like this won’t happen here. Not only allowing children to become infected, but legislatively mandating it. A defining time for our societies. Choose your side. #auspol #covid19aus…

Another libertarian triumph. The young lining up to fight against basics like public health. But not for affordable housing, secure employment and a living wage. #auspol https://t.co/3gbuBRcLYz

3 days isn't a trend. But we're maybe on the way up again. #nswpol #covid19aus https://t.co/NirrB4o1Dw

All pandemics can be beaten, without a microscope. The basics: clean air, clean water, good food, less crowding etc. In some ways the development of medical weapons against infectious disease continually stalls attention to political…

Australia used Thalidomide. The US didn't, based on FDA advice. I'd recommend people follow the FDA strong advice to vaccinate kids aged 5-11 too. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/0rT6atxZ50 https://t.co/SG6NoiVrPE

Pfft, as if you'd close a business to stop infection. That's so 2020. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/mKK3WIfKMl

Anybody else look at this and think 'now there's a country who wants to live with the virus'? Me either. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/FrBBvuTrx3

It seems Covid at least is really excited about Denmark's live with the virus strategy. https://t.co/d5k5jNjwBg

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 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

The most infectious thing in this pandemic is slogans. ‘Like the flu’ a particular favourite. https://t.co/qmuL0UEKUj

I call this the ‘You Had One Job’ curve. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/qSiZhb2dkB

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 democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

Another expertise-free #Insiders, @andrewprobyn and @PhillipCoorey fresh from a European junket, opining that the rest of the world is leaving Oz behind. At the exact time Europe is descending into another Covid winter, with more than…

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 numbers build to a threshold - the low-hanging fruit of new…

1, 4, 5 and 6 on this list all told their populations ‘just put a bucket under where the roof leaks, you’ll get used to it’. 2 and 3 said ‘let’s fix the bloody roof’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/8M2JpAci9M

People overseas see the public health achievement in Australia, of getting most of us vaccinated with minimal infections. The people here in OZ who opposed public health measures every step of the way are now claiming the victory is purely…

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 people are so far thought to have died from Covid. That's more…

If you develop a new weapon in a war, what do you do with it? You use it, to win. Vaccines are our biggest weapon against Covid. What are we using them for? To surrender. To 'live with the virus'. You can't make this stuff up. #auspol…

Remembering 2 of our leading journalists, fresh back from Europe, said on the weekend Europe was leaving Australia behind. In coffin construction, maybe. Same continent, same ‘live with the virus’ from last year. Same lethal outcome.…

Comparing pandemics with war. Before the 20th century, the biggest killer in wars was? Infectious disease. Like the American Civil war, where the biggest killers by far were diarrhoea and dysentery. Pandemics kill many more than wars. But…

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 virus' euphoria and 'o shit' rapid retreat? International…

680 children have died of Covid in the US. Over 100 in the UK. Experts in Oz say we need more data to assess risk to children from the vaccines. Those vaccines aren't going to kill hundreds of children. Get on with it. #auspol #covid19aus…

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 and pericarditis risks. Didn't stop teen vaccines. /1 #auspol…

Is hundreds of children dead of Covid 'real world data'? Asking for a friend. We need a name for people determined at all costs to infect children. Actually, it's 'National Cabinet' - it's in the National Plan. #auspol #covid19aus…

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 https://t.co/31QlMZfcdK Flying on one of these babies to…

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 were promised boosters as an incentive to do it. #auspol…

Been in discussions with business today about the projected tsunami of compensation claims from staff who catch Covid at work. I wonder if those who backed ‘living with the virus’ read the form guide first. Goes way beyond health. #auspol…

“We need to shift our focus away from always looking at the cases, and rather look at the daily hospitalised cases.” Has somebody ripped the chapter on prevalence out of public health textbooks? Infection matters, surely? #auspol…

NZ is one of the few places left on Earth that hasn't gone batshit crazy. What they're arguing for here would have been considered common sense only 30 years ago. Libertarian politics is destroying our sanity and societies. #auspol…

The same people who say masks damage children socially and psychologically, are now eagerly pushing a system where they'll have swabs shoved up their noses and down their throats multiple times every week, instead. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

"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 classic example...40K cases a day..." /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Imagine McKinsey advocating for crime and corruption to become endemic. You expect this Covid nonsense from a business consulting firm. But from so many experts? Any bad thing becoming endemic, is itself a bad thing. Let’s think. #auspol…

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 in the community, with then repeated epidemic waves? /1…

Mr Hunt said while he expected children to be able to get vaccines shortly, caution was needed: "(Regulators) will work to make sure that there are no corners cut in ensuring the safety and protection of our children." (Corners = masks and…

This from Yves Smith is worth pondering. Be interested to hear if the science checks out (seems OK, to me, but not my field.) #auspol #covid19aus @Bertrandization @djf0001 https://t.co/sph4v1LuBJ

I think when even the CMO describes removing public health measures as 'freedom', we may as well give up. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/U3dxRypv3F

Still not seeing commentary in OZ about wildly varying intervals between AZ doses. Very large numbers of people had compressed intervals between dose 1 and 2. The OS data suggests strongly this will matter. The US had compressed intervals…

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 epidemiological curves show social behaviour more than virus behaviour. /1…

Are we confusing repeated infection with persistent infection, in the idea that us all being repeatedly infected with Covid will create ongoing immunity? Repeated infection seems more like a constant, damaging assault on the immune system.…

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 their own ideas cause. /1#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud…

This is a gap in this pandemic. We really need an authoritative ‘measures’ tracker, to go alongside all the cases data. https://t.co/QF9iVNAAGs

What’s the point of our lives? Grant captures the libertarian shift. We have no collective goals, only individual goals. Identity politics of the self. Why we can’t solve climate change, or Covid. All diversity, no unity. No unity *of*…

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 symptomatic infection than Pfizer, over time. And even providing…

I doubt anybody is surprised that vaccinations for under-12s were pushed back to 2022, and we hear confirmation now we don’t have any paediatric doses in the country. #insiders #covid19aus #auspol

“It must never be taken from us again.” I think he genuinely sees the past 2 years as economic life, stolen by pesky public health measures. The ‘can-do capitalism’ and ‘don’t-do government’ speech. Clearly he leads a don’t-do government,…

The slower approval of vaccinations for kids for ‘safety’ reasons is a risk management triple somersault with double twist, being almost oblivious to risks already under our noses. At a minimum how about rigorous PH measures in schools in…

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. Something I want to understand. A short thread. /1 #auspol…

Most expert debate on the pandemic is in the political-social-cultural area, not separate to the facts. There is no separation. An expert claiming facts clinch the argument for them is a Wally. https://t.co/rr7Pc9LkPD

The R number globally has oscillated around 1 for just about the entire pandemic. Covid has been endemic, internationally, the whole time? With localised (national) epidemics? #covid19aus #COVID19 https://t.co/0XpObkZdJ6

Let’s shift our vaccination strategy towards control of transmission, make it a key tool in an overall suppression/elimination strategy. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/gRApvIA3ph

Clear explanation of relative risk in relation to vaccine efficacy percentages. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/7yXXut6a1m

It won’t be an endemic Covid world. ‘Living with Covid’ will be like taking Covid in as a flatmate, then discovering it throws huge rave parties regularly and unexpectedly. #auspol #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @djf0001…

Some still point to Sweden as a Covid role model. So far Public Health Sweden has killed more people than died in World Wars 1 and 2 there, combined. Public health is under assault, worldwide. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7HCDaOgNRb

I suppose I should be grateful people are wearing masks at all. In my workplace people wear them when they get up from their desk and go somewhere (like the toilet or copy room), and then take them off when they sit down or talk on the…

We have doses sitting there, unused, right now. Why do we have to wait until vaccine efficacy has fallen off a cliff before giving the 3rd dose? Because (live with the virus politicians) say, all that matters is hospitalisations and…

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 burden is being deliberately shifted to business,... /1 #auspol…

When simpletons appeal to other simpletons by saying 'living with Covid' is 'just like the flu', they mean non-pandemic flu. The more accurate comparison would be trying to live with pandemic flu. We know how that ends. #covid19aus #auspol…

We all remember this? People mocked for worrying about clotting risk, with AZ? 4 per million. The same mockers now say extreme caution is needed with Pfizer in children. Oz running at about 10 (mild) myocarditis cases per million. #auspol…

50 million people are infected with Covid worldwide, every 90 days. Prevalence matters. #auspol #covid19aus

Australia's Covid ball and chain continues to do what he does best. Get in the way. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/uwSSiCARfl

Do you think the spin merchants who came up with 'pandemic of the unvaccinated', as a libertarian dodge to get rid of PH measures, now think about kids being the only unvaccinated left? The group they're 'cautious' to vaccinate? #auspol…

NSW makes it official. The gold standard of contact tracing no longer much bothers with it, because 'vaccination'. Pandemic must be over, somebody better tell Covid. #auspol #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus https://t.co/5ESL02XWOi

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, it may drive NSW towards elimination. We know Covid is an…

Winning is about power. Power comes from the organisation of belief. Logic won’t defeat the libertarians. Only unions can. It would take 10 minutes to change the world. Join a union. Even the RBA is saying it. #auspol #covid19aus…

All medicine is political. All science is political. Not 'influenced by' politics. Intrinsically political. 'Facts' never speak for themselves, and all facts are value-laden. #auspol #covid19aus @laurelleoz https://t.co/vgWNC7na9D

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 room. Vaccination makes all contact casual or low risk.…

Will vaccines paradoxically extend the pandemic? Developed nations almost universally have used them as an excuse to drop most public health measures. They’ve fuelled a ‘live with the virus’ resurgence. And by allowing the vaccinated to…

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 might know. /1 #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE @c_drosten…

Something has gone very wrong in Victoria, over many years. Have to wonder if it’s the same as the UK and US, libertarian leaders planted seeds decades ago, that are now reaching maturity. Kennett in the 1990s. The idea of the ‘public’ is…

And yet ANOTHER #insiders free of public-health expertise. Why are we all talking as if the pandemic is over? Don’t we see this same idiot trend every summer, overseas, the declaration of victory with lower case numbers? Europe again…

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 bit in red. Decades of guaranteed income. #auspol #COVID19Aus…

If ‘living with the virus’ will require big annual population vaccine coverage, flu vaccines are a guide? We only tend to get big coverages for vaccines administered at childhood. Flu vaccination estimates for <65 years, for Oz.…

When they talk about purity and pure blood, I’m not sure if they see themselves as Voldemort, or Joseph Goebbels. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hFTiO37M3f

‘We’re waiting for more data’ here in Oz. Is it coming by post and stuck in the Christmas mail? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/A2bexF1FN3

This is what happens when you don’t have vaccines, and actually have to take Covid seriously. Public health networks a likely cause of success. Giving libertarians vaccines in rich countries was always going to prolong the pandemic.…

Erm, I’m not a public health professional. But that looks a strange endemic curve there, on the left? @RealOzSAGE @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 #covids19aus https://t.co/TFYqXjShza

Remember the same libertarian ideas that call it a 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' are responsible for the unvaccinated being unvaccinated. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/xnYogmxC8y

For a brief period (May-November 2020), Australians were the healthiest they'd ever been. The period the libertarians described as oppression, and 'we can't live like this forever'. The Empire Struck Back in 2021. #auspol #covid19aus…

New @RealOzSAGE modelling for NSW through to June 2022, taking into account degree of contact tracing and under-12 vaccination. Still to my knowledge the only peer-reviewed pandemic model we’ve seen used. #auspol #covid19aus…

It would be interesting to know what proportion of employers have actually provided masks to employees, and what proportion required employees to buy the masks themselves. #COVID19Aus

Some Liberals remember that government is about people. And that the 'Economy' is these same people. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/yfTGUfNCch

Christian Drosten in January 2021, about Germany. 'Pushing the numbers way down', what the wise have said for 2 years, and every politician has ignored except in short bursts. #auspol #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/7Uav8gZV8Y

Thank you @MarylouiseMcla1 (in response to news many vaccine doses are going to waste). #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/3ONo1Y3BSr @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization Source article. Also, this continued reliance upon the GP network. It's a…

Second dot-point. I still can’t believe we’re using the word ‘lockdown’. Could there have been a worse choice of word to encourage support of restrictions? All quite deliberate spin. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/yfvWlJWUjY

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 leading Europe. Rule Britannia. #auspol #covid19aus…

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 steadily and ruthlessly through 2020-21, they’d be leading Europe,…

In which some paediatricians argue that what a government puts in a PHO is the gold standard for scientific advice. These same governments zealously removing all measures except vax is why some are now zealous, with vax. #auspol…

The 3 most pointless weeks of school remain this year. Send the kids home out of Covid’s way, ffs. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/CXY17dNyV7

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 effects.) Airborne = maximum precaution. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

"Minister for Health Brad Hazzard said COVID booster shots would be an important part of keeping the community safe through the summer and New Year." Most of the NSW community won't qualify until well after New Year. #auspol #covid19aus…

Will there be a reckoning one day for those in prominent medical science positions who call to 'live with' a novel pathogen while it's still uncontrolled? You can understand the average punter doing that, but so many who are paid shedloads…

This Department of Health national Covid restriction checker is a pretty useful tool. NSW will soon have nothing left to populate it with, but 10 points for trying. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/OQf4hZdM9S

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 they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick…

You have to wonder how much this isn’t about ATAGI guidelines, and all about the political reality that allowing 3rd doses at < 6 months would mean an admission that 2 doses isn’t ‘fully vaccinated’, just prior to the election. #auspol…

Laura Tingle makes the point that our truly essential workers don’t wear high-vis or hard hats. They’re nurses, teachers, supermarket workers, cleaners, sewage workers etc. The ruling LNP code their true allegiances in their rapid return…

I wonder if Omicron might be the thing that forces the government to relax its 6-month requirement on 3rd doses. #auspol #COVID19Aus @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @djf0001 @Bertrandization @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/LR9BuGOByS

Australia’s public health team swings into action. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/uFWJUSoUFc

‘Finally will have a Saturday off’. The genius of libertarian strategy, to get even the young to think slavery to a job is freedom, and sheltering from a lethal virus is oppression. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TlVG51Xp9e

Greg Hunt. ‘Most significantly’ we have hospitals for when we (let you) get sick. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/FDFvtpeOWq

The data calls out the lie of these protests. The overwhelming majority of Australians have no time for it. But ideas are a type of virus, libertarian fantasy is getting its claws into many Australians, aided and abetted by populist…

The UK to shorten the gap between 2nd and 3rd doses. And look at the massive caseload and that 7-day case average for the UK: 44,193. ‘Living with the virus’. Imagine 45,000 new flu cases, per DAY. Spin and bullshit is winning. #auspol…

That’s some jump in positivity. #covid19aus https://t.co/o1hCaPqNBL

Yes. Rich nations live with the delusion that we get to choose the way out. Like a large bushfire, we don’t. Pandemics are worse, the trees (infections) regrow quickly and can be ‘burned’ multiple times in a short period. You can’t ‘live…

A leading political journalist on #Insiders describes vaccines as ‘our only protection’. There’s a due diligence requirement to learn even basic public health ideas, in a pandemic. Massive fail, week after week, from our Canberra gossip…

EU, US, Canada, Israel all now have approved vaccines for 5-11s. Several million children already vaccinated. Is the only obstacle for ATAGI approving it here the embarrassing political question - do we have supply? #auspol #covid19aus…

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 politics, and our lack of understanding of it, hides…

The ‘let’s infect the kids to save the Economy’ UK is now requiring masks in schools. In the monkey-see, monkey-do world of live with the virus zealots, maybe it will change the rhetoric from our homegrown child-infection cheer squad.…

‘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 next to you on the bus? Can you wave at it in the next aisle of…

It needs explaining why mass infection is the chosen option, when mass vaccination is already available. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7OAeb8NW1k

A government with a laissez-faire response to pandemic viruses, and a DEFCON-5 response to unfriendly Tweets. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TTM7LQg3a1

My useful transmission vectors enjoyed their dinner. How about everybody else? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/KgDpFo0ITj

From my walk yesterday. This is resilience. Would that we had more of that, right now. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/aDwoF0pGIf

“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 remain open.” The countries who have done easily the best…

Faster than the variants is the development of political strategy and spin to head-off economic damage. Within a day of the announcement of Omicron, the 'it seems mild' spin-variant was already set to go. #auspol #covid19aus…

The JCVI in the UK (often very 'cautious') has approved 3rd doses from 3 months since the second dose. Let's see how fast ATAGI are. Still waiting for update on child vaccinations from them as well. #auspol #covid19aus…

The daily spin. Take the phrase 'mild Covid'. The focus is all on the 'mild'. Compare it with the phrase 'mild stroke'. Does anybody want to have a stroke, no matter how mild? Language is politics. #auspol #covid19aus

Reckon experts read that headline and get the pecking order here? It won't matter what they find. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/eT5Wwg0zBP

“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 Omicron incursions into Australia, rather than eliminate it at…

“National Cabinet further noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are in late stage consideration regarding when Pfizer can be rolled out to 5 to 11 year olds.” Focus on…

Great example for ‘mildism’ here. Repeated ‘mild’ brain injury from concussions. We’ve seen where that ends up. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/OvUILTafBp

Running out of people to vaccinate? I can think of a few million sitting in infants and primary schools right now willing and able to get the curve going up again. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/NPvAs0AZSe

For those of you who have ‘economic dreams’, this will be exciting. For those with some sort of functioning brain, maybe less so. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2xVatntlRC

My Year 5 daughter's teacher is a libertarian anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-anything public health person. Yesterday she told the class not to follow rules, not to let people tell you what to do. This will be her last 2 weeks at the…

I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large…

Covid-19 workers compensation claims, NSW. Under WHS law, employers have a duty to eliminate Covid-19, unless not ‘reasonably practicable’ to do so. Until now many employers have defined that reasonableness as ‘can I be bothered’. It won’t…

Always such rich spin pickings at times of threat. ‘Backwards’. By implication it means ‘forwards’ is anything that removes public health measures. For libertarians, the past 2 years have been a battle against lockdowns, not the virus.…

Imagine a kitchen company saying its approach to silicosis in its workers was to tell them to ‘live with’ it. That political slogan for Covid violates basic workplace law. Business is required by law to eliminate Covid spread. #auspol…

Safework Australia. Last dot point, 'wearing masks'. In NSW most workplaces dumped masks because the PHO no longer required them. It won't hold up in court. Many businesses using vaccines as their main (or only) control measure. The…

One for the ventilation experts. Advice from the NSW government, to business. The first highlight - many workplaces are not providing masks, and nearly always not appropriate masks when they are. Second highlight - hand washing and 1.5m…

My kids were gutted when school went back. Like all kids ever, in history, until the past 2 years. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7FPWNhpSor

Can't pick a winner here. The halcyon days of Denmark's 'live with the virus', that we're recreating right now here. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/r2Pgj3KPgR

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

‘Omicron is mild’ the way the eye of a storm is mild. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/GTXaWes1kN

Waleed halfway to the Holy Grail here. We're not acting 'globally' to end the pandemic. But we're not doing that because the 'global' as we think of it, doesn't exist. You can't create international from national. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Mission accomplished, in the yellow highlight. Runway cleared for re-election. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/kK5wlcH3yC

ATAGI: "At this stage, there is no evidence to suggest that earlier booster doses of current COVID-19 vaccines will augment protection against the Omicron variant." Protection against hospitalisation, I assume? Not suppression, as the PM…

Community transmission, anyone? With a side of mild? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/4yCM0ji1Iv

“To have a modest increase in the numbers is not especially concerning at this point to me because it has not seen a big increase of numbers in our hospitals,” he (Brad Hazzard) said. This is the BS that sent Europe into a Covid Christmas…

Representative democracy only works when its delegation to expertise and officials is actually in place and functioning. That's why we invented it, to free most of us from the concerns of keeping things running. If the delegation isn't…

‘asap’ in Australia = months of waiting for most, with vaccines being thrown away. A day late, and a dollar short. Again. This time we HAVE the vaccines, but won’t use them. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/9QEhjLHNSI

We don’t let politicians put out bushfires. Why do we allow them anywhere near a pandemic? Why does nobody question this? They have ZERO expertise in pandemic management. The definition of an emergency is that there’s nothing to ‘balance’.…

During fires, do we allow people to return to their normal lives, to ‘live with’ the fire? No. Why do we do it for a pathogen that’s already killed more people than WW1? 60 times more Australians already dead of Covid, than the last huge…

Endless confusion. I thought ‘big waves of infection’ *is* a pandemic. Endemic disease doesn’t infect in waves? Why is there such widespread variation in claims about endemicity? (Maybe the confusion is all mine.) #COVID19 @RealOzSAGE…

Easy to focus on the loons. But the vacuum they operate inside is the one left by libertarian leaders, vacating the driving seat. Political libertarians destroy leadership and government. It’s their core belief. Every lunatic belief then…

We needed ‘more data’. Remembering we re-opened schools using data on 18 students. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2zm54MJd7p

Yes Minster tried to show that politicians never actually run a country. Officials and experts do. We laughed as if it was all just a joke. When populist pollies pushed the officials and experts to one side in the pandemic, they killed…

All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their privilege is just ‘how things are’. They don’t have to fight for identity, so it disappears from their view. A few short thoughts on…

If we deal with Covid as a medical science problem, we’re always going to ‘need more data’. More data = more people infected. If we deal with Covid as a wider public policy issue, we prioritise all the basic mitigations to prevent people…

'Keep calm', 'don't panic'. All the usual gaslighting rubbish, as if the enemy here is inappropriate anxiety. Minister Littleproud this morning: 'we need to hold our nerve'. Like shirt-fronting Covid beats it. #auspol #covid19aus…

That the last sentence is even included is a sign the politics of Covid is still winning over the science. Most Covid cases don't end up in hospital, for all variants. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/qelCW3IMT9

It’s too early to say how bad Omicron is. But absolutely the prime time to stop it spreading while we find out.

The US: 305,114 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 482,581 Covid deaths since. The UK: 62,130 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 83,744 Covid deaths since. Vaccines work. Except in the hands of libertarians. #auspol #covid19aus

The surge in informal voting for NSW local government elections is attributed to the absence of 'How To Vote' handouts at polling booths, due to Covid. Many assumed these were 'how to pick party X' flyers, all these years. But for many…

Regulatory theatre. Yet another regulatory decision that matches in almost every detail approvals given overseas by other major regulators, weeks or even months ago. Science is international, is this just delaying pandemic action? #auspol…

Will this be the tipping point that will force us to at last to deal with prevalence, with spread? To finally stop substituting society with an ‘economy’? I’m not confident. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/UZAfj5QH23

Elected representatives should not be determining pandemic strategy. The definition of an emergency is something that needs to be dealt with, using known effective procedures, not consulted about. We don't have politicians.../1 #auspol…

"There are nearly 9.9 million doses of vaccines sitting unused in clinics around the country this week, and the wastage rate has crept up to 4.3 per cent from 1.2 per cent earlier in the rollout." What could we use those for... #auspol…

The Korean War POW experience tells us that the fastest way to stop these movements is to find the very small number of organisers, and shut them down. It will be a very small number. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ETac3RYCC3

The attention span of media cycles is worse than electoral cycles. Denmark was a poster child for the ‘live with the virus’ folk. And yet this sort of empirical wtf won’t alter their beliefs even the tiniest bit. They need to be held to…

We're so blind to political strategy. Privately the LNP spin-meisters love this stuff, it tells the lunatic fringe 'we're your people', and brings them into the fold. A telling-off by the senior LNP folk only cements that vote. #auspol…

Very hard to talk about democracies without sounding like an apologist for authoritarianism. But if Covid shows something, it's that democracies have been (mostly) pretty hopeless against existential threats. It's important we understand…

Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol…

Reduce the risk of lockdowns during the holiday season- Response to new variant of concern: Omicron https://t.co/pDVxuFZmfd

Remember Groundhog Day only ended when repeat after repeat of ever more extreme versions of the status quo failed, and then Bill changed his old ‘normal’? I feel there’s a message there. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/jGgzTAppL2

The Dom is on top of this. Still waving at Covid across the aisle in the supermarket, as it sits ‘alongside’ him. And I’m sure ICU staff feel for the small businesses whose cafe lattes and scented candles are more important than virus…

I think in the UK red must mean ‘good’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/wdPRSxeIr4 https://t.co/kmPXMX81gJ

Few of those at the top who cheer on Covid infection get infected. They never mean *they* will live with the virus, they mean the rest of us. Barnaby takes one for the team. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/t4l4Eq9N8y

Has there been even one documented case of fomite Covid transmission? Anywhere? #covid19aus

That regional curve alone should be a source of concern? Nobody built new ICU capacity out there this year. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IqyCTb6FvH

Because libertarians don’t believe in a public sphere, when collective emergencies happen, they make up pseudo-publics to blame. Like the unvaccinated. They don’t solve problems, they try to re-brand them. Reality isn’t fooled. #auspol…

Can’t we just call a spade a spade? It’s been obvious since the beginning that most conservative governments will use vaccines like a type of economic viagra. With a chaser of ‘following the medical advice’ spin. No integrated public…

Sorry, but even in my limited understanding, this logic wouldn’t apply for pandemic influenza. https://t.co/C6gPO5Jvge

Not sure why we need to ‘wait and see’ if Omicron is more or less virulent than Delta. (The data below suggests at least equal, then add more transmission = worse.) The clear implication is that if it’s more ‘mild’, we can let it run. Why…

SKY Australia is just relentlessly ‘on’. Like all good propaganda arms of governments, re-working the spin every moment of every day. Yes NSW infections are rising, but it doesn’t matter people, there are no deaths. #auspol #covid19aus…

‘Proportionate’ measures in the UK (global spin). Omicron doubling every 2-3 days. Politicians shouldn’t make the call on public health, Tory MPs blocking new measures. Our epidemic waves are all political, not epidemiological. #auspol…

Stephen Reicher making such a critical point, that the idea of ‘restrictions’ and ‘lockdowns’ is weaponised political spin, designed to get people to oppose necessary ‘support’ and ‘protection’. The key political barrier to beating this…

The UK facing an Omicron ‘tsunami’. Business interests are peddling the same BS about the importance of infecting children in schools, regardless. It’s about childcare for business, ignore the spin about education and mental health.…

“Test, trace, isolate and quarantine measures, alongside public health and social measures such as mask wearing, remain key to ensuring COVID-19 cases in the community remain within clinical capacity.” National Cabinet, 10 December. Bears…

The stock market, proxy for the ‘economy’. One short blip when Covid started, then continuing as if nothing had happened. That’s what’s killed 17.5 million people. The people are in the yellow line, the Economy and its puppet leaders, the…

Two (and likely more) critical problems with the ‘only hospitalisations matter’ idea. 1. Infected people still need to isolate. This shuts down social processes. 2. ICU capacity is a choke point for all society, and is continuously…

Kids will respond to what’s expected of them. Just as societies do, to the expectations of their leaders. That’s the total vacuum in this pandemic, libertarians don’t lead, they see that as a conflict of interest. https://t.co/0Fog1C8sxU

Worth noting repeatedly that Covid is the only emergency response not being led by experts. We have fire commissioners, why can’t we have pandemic commissioners? Politicians will always weaponise disaster for short-term gain. They need to…

Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Mildly inconvenient for the mild narrative. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/m1pTE264FK

Hey Australia, if you can, give your kids the week off school. Only politicians and business really want them there. Have a Covid-free Christmas. #auspol #covid19aus

Denmark, already up shit creek because of Delta, has just met Omicron. Near-vertical growth. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/Jhvs3dWWhK

Wheeee, just like the rides at Dreamworld in Queensland! Which is the news of the day, Queensland re-opens. Tick tick. #covid19aus #auspoil https://t.co/uNUtJGo7z5

Public health professionals can correct me if I'm wrong, but a pandemic is defined by infection numbers. By cases. Not by hospitalisations. No matter how 'mild' Covid gets, the pandemic won't be over until infection numbers don't grow…

h/t @PeteUK7 It's less than 2 weeks until Christmas. Even if they magically got everybody 3rd-dosed before then, it's still 2 weeks after that for the full boost? With lots of mixing before then. How many more ways can they avoid doing…

Mildism is becoming more tenuous. Imagine if we end up with Omicron transmission rate coupled to Delta-like virulence. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/VLD65YDJCp

Emerging Omicron data from the SSI in Denmark, based on just under 3500 Omicron cases. Breakthrough infections significantly higher than for Delta. More than double even for booster vaccinated. #auspol #COVID19 https://t.co/8BQpSTgjmt…

Early Omicron cases in Denmark overwhelmingly in the 20-29 age group, which may partly explain early suggestions of mild virulence. #auspol #COVID19 https://t.co/Ij6ZEHx6D9 Link: https://t.co/i78HRkPaKj

Data wonks, looks a close-run tie at the moment, as far as hospitalisations go? Just under 3500 Omicron cases, sample size. @RichardfromSyd1 @djf0001 @Bertrandization @OrinCordus https://t.co/I8Qgjh489B

When will we begin to hear 'Omicron is like nothing we've seen before?' #covid19aus #auspol

200,000 infections a day. Merry Christmas from the libertarians. @YouAreLobbyLud #auspol #covid19aus @OrinCordus @djf0001 @rossleedham @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization https://t.co/0PLvrhWN06

Dominic Perrottet, today with Alan Jones. Saying the quiet bits out loud now, the pure libertarian fantasies at the heart of the NSW Covid 'strategy'. We're now the UK. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/6ZuvwnMeNl

Because a feature of populist democracy is zero attention span or memory. Look at what was said about Delta when it arrived in July. Then look at how that turned out. We don’t even notice our Groundhog Day public sphere. #auspol #covid19…

The political libertarians primed the Covid pump years before the pandemic. We're living the trashed societies they've created for us in so many ways. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/lJ5GfaPnSX

Freedom Day NSW! Take that mask off and suck in some Covid, to spice up your Christmas with loved ones. Let's all drink to The Economy - Cheers! #nswpol #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/1pkT5SrDUq

The PM live now, saying 'we're living with this virus'. Note what National Cabinet said at its last meeting. Suppression. That's not 'living with the virus'. Up is down, left is right, black is white. #auspol #covid19aus…

From Covid HQ. "Ah, would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy, sir?" "How could you possibly know that Blackadder, it's classified information!" "It's the same plan…

The UK Covid experience: this week in NSW is another step along their path. First the 'pingdemic' of app notifications has begun. And now the definition of a close contact has been kneecapped, to prevent wide social paralysis with rampant…

Interesting preprint from the Kirby Institute estimating vaccine efficacy against Omicron. @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @djf0001 @polioandme @BrentHodgson https://t.co/aNM6Jo21R9 Seems to add weight to the argument that there are a…

If we’re going to copy the UK Covid strategy, how about we also track how that’s going? The CMO for the UK saying big Omicron hospitalisations a ‘nailed on prospect’ after Christmas. Remember they also began with the ‘mild’ nonsense. Not…

UK CMO warning against the ‘mild’ narrative for Omicron. In this same conference: not only are hospital numbers going to swell, but the people staffing all essential services are likely to become infected and need to isolate. Mass…

Perhaps the hidden story of 'hospitalisations are all that matter'. As many have suspected in Australia too. Here's the UK experience. Bed occupancy rates look of concern, but maybe manageable post-vaccination. /1 #COVID19…

VE against Omicron infection for 3rd doses being challenged by real-world experience. https://t.co/cUvLFIwJ9Z

I ask Covid minimisers just how many deaths might sate their bloodlust? Now over 18 million, well past World War 1 deaths. We’ve had vaccines for a year now, which were supposed to end the pandemic. The minimisers use them like junkies.…

Spin generates feelings rather than information. In the information sense, 'living with Covid' for a politician means 'do nothing about Covid'. Just as 'balance' means do nothing. #covid19aus https://t.co/ns69Rx0jz8

The thing that ultimately makes a mockery of mass infection as a pandemic strategy. You don't need to go to hospital to be out of action. Imagine telling your workforce to all come to work with the flu. Staggering these obvious things…

It's reassuring that the 'personal responsibility' line our home-gown libertarian loons trot out are identical to the ones used in the US and in the UK, where people are mown down by Covid in the hundreds of thousands.…

With Australia spending over $300 billion to fight Covid, what consequences should there be for NSW leaders who ignored all of that and decided to just let Covid rip? Outside politics these people would be in jail. #covid19aus…

I’m a huge fan of expertise. But I can’t fathom this resistance from ATAGI to relaxing 3rd dose timelines. Other major regulators in the world did it already some time ago. It’s on their heads if this all goes very badly. #covid19aus…

Variants should be named after the libertarian leaders who generate and prolong the pandemic. Append numbers [XYZ] to cover the sheer scale of variant generation. Trump XYZ Modi XYZ Johnson XYZ Bolsonaro XYZ Perrottet XYZ etc.

After all the crap about how we should infect kids rather than close schools, the NAPLAN comparison of 2019 to 2021 was released this week. The black squares? No statistical difference in performance. Lockdowns made no difference to…

Let’s store this one away for viewing during the next lockdowns. https://t.co/6GIU15RaWy

As a break from the incessant whining from rich countries in the pandemic, it’s worth looking at historical material from WW1 and WW2. 2 to 3 times longer than our current privations. We’re such fundamentally different people now. And not…

There’s been wonderful data work in this pandemic. But zooming out a little, it’s symptomatic of where we are that we always need to look for patterns amongst the infected, rather than stop them becoming infected.

Going back to this. Why would we make a lagging indicator the trigger for further public health action, as our PM and NSW Premier are keen to do? Why haven’t reporters picked up on that? Why do some experts repeat the same mantra?…

Strange that so many still come out for testing each day, if NSW is keen to live with Covid. Maybe they love the nasal swabbing, bit of a fetish thing. #nswpol #covind19aus https://t.co/kOjYwuEAF5

Maybe it’s just the male CMOs who become apologists for private health measures instead of public health measures. Well said Dr Sonya Bennett. #covid19aus https://t.co/QJcMx3wH7d

Last time the feds didn’t organise supply, this time they and the States haven’t organised distribution. And refuse to implement protective measures as a stopgap. What happens when we allow elected people to run emergency responses.…

One of my favourite Beatles stories also shows I think the fantasy at the heart of modern libertarian politics. And Covid. McCartney was the prodigiously talented Beatle - the best bassist, guitarist, drummer and singer in the band. Also…

I always suggest looking to the UK for a glimpse into future strategies employed by the PM and NSW Premier. This may be next. #covid19aus https://t.co/TtNbnp1gbE

Good luck finding a vaccination provider who has included this in their procedures. This federal government couldn't organise a fart at a whole food retreat. https://t.co/Km59JK6Bxs

NSW ‘treating people like adults’, says Premier. If you want public health restrictions to control Omicron, you're a child. Libertarians ARE children, spoiled rich kids who never did a day's real work in their lives. Their 'freedom' is…

Hey LNP, in a break from your election planning, how about doing some actual work and implementing your own announcements? Or is everyone already skiing in Europe? Hello, hello? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/NKttMz0pyA

"It's like the worst flu you can imagine, really," he said. The basic fact the mass infection 'mild' crowd never talk about. Covid doesn't have to send people to hospital to shut society down. https://t.co/6B3oyVNEN6

If you're not sure who to vote for at the next federal election, try to get a 3rd dose of Covid vaccine before Christmas. That will tell you. #auspol

National Cabinet to meet tomorrow about Omicron. https://t.co/EM0ydhavZh

Have we noticed the gradual shift in Australia, from ‘always following the medical advice’, to the medical advice having to write pleading letters to politicians, like a constituent asking for their potholes to be fixed? #auspol…

Populism means what it says - doing popular things. We think that’s what democracy is. It absolutely isn’t. Libertarian populists surrender leadership to popularity. Leaders once *led* us through adversity. Now they pander to popular whim.…

It's only thanks to the voters of Australia that we no longer have to listen to Tony Abbott. The voters of NSW will hopefully follow suit with Domicron. https://t.co/c2T4H1hQVV

"Cases (leaks) don't matter, only hospitalisations (roof collapsing on your head) matter." #covid19aus https://t.co/kspC6PUBJr

'We will need restrictions, but that will be the Premiers' fault. Meantime let me also weaponise that as a libertarian freedom thing, to mop up more fringe votes.' The Premiers must be leafing through their copies of Julius Caesar. #auspol…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @Bertrandization @djf0001 you fellas know much about rate ratios? Does a rate ratio of 7 (for example) in the graph below mean a person is 7 times more likely to be hospitalised or die from Covid than somebody…

This Tweet is 6 hours old, and was used by ABC PM, including interview, today, in a story that was advertised as a possibility of Omicron being only half as virulent as Delta. It’s possibly an interesting hypothesis, but that’s pretty…

Another libertarian spin trick of the pandemic. ‘But’. Two contradictory sentences, joined by but. ‘We put the health and safety of our people first, BUT we also have to [insert economic thing]’. Only what follows the ‘but’ is actually…

How many times can we surf up and down epidemic curves before realising that the problem is putting politicians in charge of a pandemic? We don’t do that for any other emergency. Short-term media and electoral cycles and political ideology…

I didn't need to be hospitalised for the breakthrough pertussis infection I got a few years ago. If hundreds of thousands of us got that same pertussis infection at the same time, society wouldn't function. Experts need to stop enabling…

I bet the 'leak' is a Premier. Maybe even all of them. The PM normally tries to own communication from National Cabinet, it allows him to describe what he wanted them to decide, rather than what they did. And there are no minutes we can…

Summary from National Cabinet today. Stay calm. Use common sense. Get vaccinated. We're now officially the UK. Pray. #covid19aus #auspol

We shouldn’t be surprised as one libertarian country after another surrenders meekly to Covid. We’ve seen how little they care about incinerating the only known life-supporting planet in the universe, through climate change. Covid was…

Israel up to dose 4. It hit me, Covid really is just the flu. We have 4 flu shots every year…

A JBM calm, forensic analysis is soul food for a pandemic. Interesting hypothesis, prior infection and vaccination creating appearance of Omicron mildness. But once people arrive in hospital, likely little difference in severe outcomes…

The main way we become puppets to political strategy is by arguing issues using politicians’ framing of a problem. Like the focus on Omicron severity. This is seen as critical only within the framing of ‘only hospitalisations matter’.…

Latest Imperial College calculation of decreased hospitalisation risk for Omicron - 15% less likely to attend hospital, and 40% less likely to need to stay more than one night, if attending. Still too early to conclude on severe outcomes.…

How libertarian death cults have recalibrated our social frames. Notice it was only 2018 where physicians could legitimately talk about a 'public health crisis' when they'd seen 8 patients with silicosis. These tradies now wear masks.…

Does anybody remember Moses saying'God gave me some tablets, but I treated them only as advice, let's do something else'? #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/X9jnPzD0r0

I told my family at the beginning of December that we'd be under restrictions again before Christmas. I'm not a public health expert, but you have to be some type of moron to not have figured out yourself this was inevitable.…

I remain happy wth my decision some time ago to stop giving the SMH any of my money. I mean really, two years into this pandemic, to be publishing unmitigated, ad hominem horseshit like this. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/HjgaqsM7lu

Not great, but glad I chose Moderna 3rd dose. 2 x AZ + Moderna = 3 x Pfizer. 2 x Pfizer + Moderna best of all. No data on 3 x Moderna. Latest UKHSA report. #covid19aus ⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@Bertrandization⁩ ⁦@djf0001⁩ ⁦@polioandme⁩…

Can't stress enough that our fixation on severity plays right into the hands of Covid minimisers. Scientifically vital information, but political dynamite. You can wear a raincoat if your roof leaks, and stay dry. You're not fixing the…

Exactly what’s going on. The bad people strategise every day to undermine public health work. Every single day. https://t.co/jXanPqiMVl

Wealthy nations hoard all of the world’s vaccines, and then wash their hands not only of international responsibility, but even national, with ‘personal responsibility’. I’m glad to see ‘libertarian’ being used so freely now. Know your…

Infection is disease. That thought has been continuing to emerge in my mind as I watch the attempts by the smart few to stop mass infections. We need to understand that infection is bad, because the way the mass infection crowd get away…

Same pattern, again. Lockdowns aren’t a choice, the virus shuts society down whether you want it to or not. Spineless politicians wait for people to do it for them. That kills people. https://t.co/GZUYPYnckb

Some joked this would happen. But we deep down knew they’d go here. It possibly won’t stop just at health care either, if the Economy becomes too disrupted with mass infection. The Covid minimisers have defined reality as ‘what we want it…

Hospitalisations have become endemic. #COVID19 https://t.co/77gNZeSB7y

The new plague tours a loss-leader for the next lockdown. https://t.co/IG9ON9mmQ1

UAE 99%, Portugal 90%, total population vaccinated. https://t.co/FwXNMdz7GH

My brother tested positive on a RAT before Christmas, and 3 times since. Still hasn’t got his PCR result. His wife now has a sore throat. No testing centres on the Central Coast until Wednesday. No RATs available. Is there a Pandemics for…

The chaotic, infected NSW mess is? The Queensland Premier’s fault. (Libertarians particularly like making women to blame.) Friends already repeating this new brain-worm back to me in conversation. Libertarians talk strategy every single…

The NSW Government also rapidly weaponising this with new spin (‘might cause rise in cases’). So the growing mess is: 1. the Queensland Premier’s fault, and 2. this lab’s fault. The party of individual responsibility. #COVID19Aus…

Anti-vaxers a scapegoat for governments who refuse to control transmission. When you control spread, very few get infected, vaccinated or not. Only when we outsource all public health work to the ‘jab’ do anti-vax loons become a critical…

Pay attention, and you can spot the massaging of pandemic metrics, in real-time. https://t.co/oNIFo1BQX1

What things are we planning to do as socieities that are so important, that we need to stop trying to beat a pandemic, to do them? It seems to be mostly: - tax cuts - dismantling the public sphere, and - flying on planes to trash other…

Vaccines smooth the hospitalisation and death curves. But killing people at a steady rate over a longer time isn’t progress. You’re just swapping axes. https://t.co/V5RFHGSK6K

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

‘Just like the flu’ has been a political phrase in this pandemic. Look at the guidance on flu from non-pandemic times. Nothing about ‘living with’ it, or using vaccines to make it more ‘mild’. All about stopping flu. The idea we all choose…

Every day you hope you’re at peak stupid. And every day there are new surprises to delay that call a bit longer. Like the PM’s new statement on close contacts: “What’s important with this definition is to try and understand…/1 #COVID19Aus…

Making sense of severity. Every variant of Covid is both mild *and* severe, depending on who gets infected and how they respond? So an assessment of severity of a variant is made on the collective outcome of many infections - an…

We need to refuse the hospitalisation framing of pandemic seriousness, and replace it with infection. Society cannot function with mass infections, despite the desperate whining of sociopathic business groups. #COVID19Aus…

The developed world’s Covid strategy of ‘infect everybody repeatedly’ has turned testing into a universal Tinder. Get a RAT to date, eat out, go to the cinema, etc. #COVID19 https://t.co/7jrnypx6aq

I see from National Cabinet today that workplaces remain like Faraday cages for Covid, curiously able to repel infection without doing anything.

This year’s federal election will test a hypothesis. The Australian libertarians believe we share the same dislike of government as the public in the UK and US. I think the Oz public has shifted there, and will entertain elements of…

@TeachersFed what action are you taking to demand schools are being made safe for the beginning of the 2022 school year? Ventilation, air filtration, masks? Or is it all just salaries and conditions for you, as always? #COVID19nsw

Let’s try this - being hospitalised means you *don’t have a mild illness*. In the past, if you were hospitalised for flu, it meant you had a severe case of flu. We can’t let hospitalisation be reframed as mild, because it ‘isn’t ICU’. Same…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

Spoke with a GP today who said the system of GPs overseeing peoples’ Covid self-care at home in NSW is collapsing. #COVID19Aus

I would say the majority of experts I read casually make claims about Covid becoming endemic. As if Covid being present in the population = endemic. It being ‘present’ in repeated epidemic waves seems a strange sort of endemicity.…

It’s surprised many that even most Premiers have now capitulated to let it rip. But it’s inevitable under populism, where politicians attempt to directly manage complex population-level events, bypassing expertise. We see that now,…/1…

Some infectious disease docs and paediatricians have been the surprising lead weight in the saddle bags in this pandemic. Trisha explains maybe why for the Dr Nicks and Professor Peters, but it’s still not clear what motivated the paeds.…

AHPPC: “Other population level approaches…are key to keeping cases within manageable levels and therefore preventing health system overwhelm.” A *public health* strategy should be one that prevents people needing to go to hospital at all.…

“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…

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?…

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…

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…

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…

@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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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

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;…

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…

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…

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

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…

Superb. @TimLonghurst well done. Maybe make the middle square cumulative deaths for the entire outbreak? #covid19aus https://t.co/FX4mtKQyJn

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…

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…

Major COVID course correction immediately required https://t.co/rF2HecxyNj

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…

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…

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

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

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…

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…

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…

“(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.…

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.

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…

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…

@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…

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

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.…

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…

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

"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.

Domicron: NSW needs to 'push through' the Omicron wave. Every time I've surfed, pushing through a wave has led me to...another wave.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

"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…

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

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

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…

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.…

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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.…

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…

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…

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.…

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 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…

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…

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…

"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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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…

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,…

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…

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.

#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.

“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…

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…

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 -…

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

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.…

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.…

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…

Those 'bumps' are the children, teachers and parents of NSW becoming infected with a lethal virus. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/c9hR9Cb5Jv

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…

I believe some reinfections are also with Omicron, when the prior infection was also 'mild' Omicron. (i.e. to avoid re-infection, you should aim to almost die the first time.) Even without new variants, this is like a perpetual motion…

This is the intent. Make the pandemic invisible by ongoing suppression of data. The UK is always the crystal ball into our future. https://t.co/OS8e11Xt0z

Really the pandemic has been a Randomised Control Trial for our core political ideas. The virus is just an amplifier of how those ideas play out in reality. Politics generated the pandemic, and only politics can end it.…

More social science and the humanities, please, to beat this pandemic. Who remembers the 1920 variant of the Spanish Flu? Nobody. A pattern repeated throughout the 20th century. https://t.co/9mZfocEylx

This story, about the libertarians in Denmark declaring Covid over (again). One of several in the ‘we’re moving beyond Covid, towards endemicity’ vein. Not one mention of what’s actually happening with deaths, in Denmark. #auspol…

One of 3 ‘endemic’ puff pieces from the ABC today. Highlights: 1) “Professor Jenkins believes the virus will soon become endemic on the east coast of Australia…/1 https://t.co/GFMPprFhJR …(and many other developed countries) which means…

Remember when delays to elective surgery were used as a battering ram against lockdowns? Reckon the same battering rams will come out to oppose letting Covid rip? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/KIi6Ib8ZMw

In years to come, Covid will seem a storm in a teacup. Because we won't be able to remember it. https://t.co/KPIJ96LGYn

Notice some in Australia talking about 'off ramps for masks' in today's papers here too. It's a global, coordinated Covid minimisation movement. https://t.co/aqJmAxDPZ6

This particular political metaphor (spin), ‘alongside’. The virus lives *inside* us, not alongside us. You can’t wave to it in the supermarket. Unless Tim means alongside poorer suburbs infected with Covid, in which case yes, that is the…

Less than 1 week into the new school year, my youngest (10) is one of only 4 students in her class still wearing a mask. We can and should blame the NSW Government for this. But also, that's a lot of parents who aren't insisting. We get…

From a public policy point of view, the only moonshot I see working longer-term against pandemics is ventilation. It's engineering. Behavioural and attitudinal change is a lost cause in populist neoliberal societies. Thoughts @GeoffHanmer ?

With government messaging relentlessly focused on ‘live with the virus’, what did Professor Dore and others think would happen to vaccine urgency? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/geVbrPacDz

“We’ve entered a new phase in the Covid-19 pandemic, which we can call bipartisan, unilateral surrender.” @thenation https://t.co/SycqvVjbdl

Every effort is being made by conservative governments globally to suppress attention to deaths. In the UK they're planning to not even report them. Even constant reference to 'cases' and 'hospitalisations', and the seemingly.../1 #auspol…

"The people who have been saying “this isn’t over” have been ignored at almost every step of this pandemic, and they have also been right every time." https://t.co/UfXfhEW5DE

Over 3000 infections in week 1, and not all schools open until next week. "I'm so pleased", says the Minister. Come back to the reality-based community, Minister. Away from shock and awe infection. #covid19aus #nswpol…

Two (true) stories from inside NSW schools that highlight how RATs have become the new public health magic beans. 1) A teacher came to school for 2 days, with symptoms, 'because I tested negative on my RATs'. /1 #COVID19Aus 2) A year 3…

Influenza! (US data) 1) Plummeting mortality over the 20th century. 2) Pandemic influenzas after 1918-20 often less lethal than non-pandemic influenzas. 3) Vaccination not responsible (wide use only since 1980). Ecological causes…

We know the infectiousness of Omicron. Those in schools know how half-arsed the current ‘measures’ are being applied. So we also therefore know that, like the US and UK, a tsunami of infection is imminent. #auspol #covid19aus…

Granville was called the ‘disaster that changed Australia’. 83 people died. We’re currently doing 7 Granvilles every week, with Covid. And leaders are ‘pleased’ with this. Look in the mirror, Australia. At what we’re becoming. #auspol…

50 years of libertarianism. No meaningful action against pandemics, or climate change. Rampant inequality. Soaring cost of living, stagnant wages. ‘Getting government out of our lives’. Who put government *in* our lives? We did. To save us…

It feels like cruise ships bookend both ends of this pandemic so far. And explain a lot of everything in-between. 'We're ready to go': Retirees demand cruise holidays return https://t.co/7WHCRznKlP

We need to expose everybody to Covid, so that they can…catch it again. https://t.co/Io3Ec3QpCt

“Vaccines work!!” always means ‘and so we don’t need to do anything else’.

I may have been unfair to #insiders by wishing they had public health expertise on their panel during a pandemic. As the show’s name says, it’s about what happens inside politics. And we know public health expertise doesn’t happen there.

The only thing children seem resilient to in this pandemic is infection. Everything else, including public health measures to prevent infection, risks damaging them for life. Strip away this constant BS. The sub-text is always the Economy.…

A measure of the libertarian carnival of Covid this morning. David Littleproud described free Covid testing as 'largesse'. #auspol #covid19aus

Agree. So those who said 'only vaccines can end this pandemic' could: 1) argue for other additional public health measures, or 2) argue to try to manage the illness rampant infection causes. It looks like 2) is the choice.…

The trickiest thing for Covid minimisers in discussing Covid off-ramps, is that they still haven't admitted the existence of an on-ramp, after 2 years. https://t.co/To9Xb0du0Z

When conservatives talk about being 'better economic managers', ask what economic things they've managed. For example the current government - what 'management' of the Economy have they done in this term? Covid stimulus? At other times…

Schools, week 2. Talking to a parent whose primary school aged child has Covid. Diarrhoea and vomiting so bad the child is hallucinating. And to what end? It won’t stop them catching it again. Children and staff disappearing every day,…

Imagine the view from a poor country. Developed world refuses to control pandemic virus when it emerges. Then hoards all of the global vaccine supply. Then declares it all over, while 50,000+ are dying a week, because they want their…

Superb thread showing again the power of maths to do politics. How our focus on rates instead of absolute numbers is enabling the removal of all public health measures, except vaccines. Many people are dying, fully vaccinated. #auspol…

Imagining the people who would still be alive today if we'd admitted Covid was airborne, and NSW hadn't decided to let Delta rip. https://t.co/xeUxGPoVK4

Ethical question. Masks with exhalation valves are pretty useless for Covid control. But in a workplace where others are either not bothering with a mask, wearing masks badly or using cloth rubbish, are they justifiable?

The only public health measure NSW Cabinet can be bothered organising in schools, will be gone. After only 4 weeks. Refusing to use public health measures to beat a pandemic. And now suppressing the evidence of that refusal, at pace. Not…

Who qualifies for a (free) Covid test in NSW? Outside schools. Nobody. Once chemists are stocked with RATs, only a doctor can get you a free test. Even the vulnerable groups listed need to do a RAT first. The LNP were outraged by…

National Cabinet still treats the vaccines as some great barrier to Covid transmission. If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. #auspol https://t.co/baAI8K6AV2

From a public policy and Covid strategy point of view, those advising government have been wrong every single time they’ve called an easing of the pandemic. Those that haven’t are repeatedly called alarmists and doomsayers. How about we…

Half the town I live in is isolating not because of asymptomatic testing, but because at least one member of the family is sick with Covid. We can do this the smart way, with testing, or just wait for widespread illness to do the isolation…

Of course the hope is that by mid-to-late 2022 Covid will have settled into a low-prevalence, low-morbidity endemic state. I keep coming back to the fact that the only vaccines we currently have, are waning for Omicron as well. Even the…

*bangs head on desk* Just out of a meeting with senior managers in an organisation. 'Thank God' masks will soon be gone, they say. Then, Long Covid implications for business in the UK and US. 'That's just like the flu, some get over it…

Another disallowed narrative right now is what the lives of the ‘vulnerable’ (of which there are millions) will be like if we allow the ridiculous prevalence of disease we currently accept, for Covid. They won’t be able to hide.…

The libertarians are pushing on, relentlessly. Dropping all Covid measures, the same trend across multiple countries. I still believe all of this hangs upon existing vaccines holding the line. If they wane sufficiently, we’re back at…

The UK has decided that about 200 deaths per day, for Covid, is ‘pandemic over’. About 70,000 deaths a year, at this baseline. A bad flu year there is about 1500 deaths. The same push is on in much of the developed world. A disgrace. As…

People in Oz mostly follow government health orders. They may have no interest in the science, but people will assume it's safe to not wear a mask, for example, if the government says you don't have to. So much for 'wanting government out…

Democracy is failing not because politicians are rorting and lying and pursuing only what is popular. They've always done that. /1 #auspol https://t.co/4uoofWcyzn It's failing because all the checks and balances to control the populist,…

Worth resharing this, after discussing Covid vs flu yesterday. Many quote flu + pneumonia for flu deaths. This is because many pneumonia deaths are triggered by flu. But Covid pneumonia has tripled pneumonia deaths as well, so people need…

To flip the endemic death narrative back upon itself. This is US data, from January 2020 to 4 February 2022. Overwhelmingly (outside a pandemic too), people don’t die ‘of’ influenza’. They die ‘with’ influenza. Of pneumonia, mostly. /1…

Democracy has been an embarrassment in this pandemic. Whereas China has smashed it. We need to rethink our ideas around what ‘authoritarian’ means. It says a lot more about us, than it does about China. Telling people what to do is not…

A pandemic is over when we stop widespread infection. It’s in the definition. That’s the Tweet.

The Herald is barely fish and chip wrapping now. This was them in October last year, parroting the ‘hold our nerve’ nonsense. As if the pandemic is about us all being big chickens, afraid of getting infected. Doesn’t dumb triumph always…

If we stopped celebrating the removal of public health measures, and started celebrating elimination of widespread infection, the pandemic would be over. Those celebrations are what generate the next wave. The same pattern, in every wave.…

The UK had such fabulous Covid data. The Tories are kneecapping it to maintain their fiction of living with the virus. The push is on to do the same here. Journalism is focused on PMs playing ukuleles. https://t.co/8P7sXrSqWD

Why do we celebrate removing public health measures, and not removing infections? Because society is a high school. Worth repeating that, as I do. It’s not an analogy. A society of teenagers will always see PH measures as being ‘grounded’.…

Waning in VE against hospitalisation and ED admission for Omicron, for 3-dosed mRNA, after 4 months, in the US. 2 months: ED 87%, hospitalisation 91% 4 months: ED 66%, hospitalisation 78% https://t.co/aCrrWemqWs

‘A new way of thinking’ in Denmark. Not really, it’s the same way of thinking they had late last year, when they declared the pandemic over. What’s new I guess is the ignoring of death. That’s all the rage. https://t.co/BjGkvhZypp

With Australia’s huge Covid prevalence now, an Australian Covid strain isn’t out of the question. But good luck spotting it. https://t.co/Pnp7dxLLBr

The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally rid of Covid, but we’re into our 3rd year of it. /1…

Political journalism is largely infected with the same populism virus as the rest of society now, so we'll struggle to get much useful analysis while elections are underway. Let's talk about the ONS survey and trends here. /1 #auspol…

South Africa was considered the epicentre for Omicron. The pattern there needs watching, despite inter-country comparison complexities. Case numbers never returned to the old baseline. Deaths still rising. https://t.co/311DuTkf3d

Ongoing ANU polling shows how populism fails. The country is clearly unimpressed with 'Let it Rip' Covid, but is powerless to do anything in real time because populist democracy is only constrained by elections. /1 #auspol #COVID19aus…

The only thing we know with certainty about schools and Covid in Australia, is that we know almost nothing. The data is suppressed. If there's nothing to hide, publish the data. https://t.co/rE64wLETgN

Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

A great outcome. From a public health point of view, the focus on immunity is very much a last line of defence framework. It allows infection to reach people, and hopes their immunity will protect them. Maybe a good approach with…

The UK debating the removal of free tests. Imagine having free tests. $40 billion in unnecessary JobKeeper payments, but we can't have free testing, in a pandemic. The corruption of pandemic data, on which most journalists are silent.…

For populist governments, a 'problem' is defined as anything that they're responsible for inside a 3-year electoral cycle. Pretty clear what that means for problems like climate change, and pandemics.

Victoria has had about 10,000 Covid cases in schools, in the past week (according to the ABC). NSW? Who knows. Actually, the NSW government knows. #auspol

Not seeing anything in the NSW public health orders (which haven't been updated in weeks) about the new ATAGI 3-dose requirement. Nothing about early childhood staff and 3 doses either. The entire infrastructure of NSW Covid ground to a…

The Chinese have adopted a smart strategic line. Stung by constant criticism about human rights, they've started to respond by asking why the West allows millions of its own citizens to die from Covid infection. #COVID19Aus #auspol

"Malabar, Maroubra, Coogee, Clovelly and La Perouse beaches would also be closed for 24 hours while council lifeguards looked for any further sightings of sharks." 1 shark death = lockdown of beaches. >2000 people dead of Covid since…

Any journo who wants a good Covid story should do a bit of snooping around residential colleges on university campuses right now. Tales of widespread infection. #auspol

For the time poor, today's NSW press conference. Premier: 'the pandemic is over'. Kerry Chant: 'no it's not'. Health Minister: 'Kerry Chant will be taking some well-deserved leave'.

Hands up who holidayed in France in this pandemic? Anybody? Anybody? https://t.co/JXX8TXzNhp

Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1…

I think 3. is the issue in many countries. Australia's public health journalism is letting us down. Obvious questions not being asked, for 2 years. Like wtf 'live with the virus' even means. https://t.co/8DZoOTqzQ5

Why are we pretending the pandemic is over? Because the wealthy are now comfortable they're protected. No sarcasm here, this is the literal underlying political reality. Working people can get sick and die, there are always fresh workers.…

So we are seeing Omicron reinfecting Omicron? https://t.co/80RJzeBrNg

Australia needs a national surveillance survey. Politicians are deliberately trashing data to hide public health damage. “For any real-time health surveillance system to be reliable and cost-effective, it cannot rely solely on…

Like others, I’m pushing daily in life and work against a tidal wave of politically-engineered Covid fatalism. ‘We’re all going to get this, let’s just get it over with’. Populist politics needs to go. The problems facing the world can’t…

Again, is it too much to ask a politician, those who have the opportunity to do so, what the plan is when the current vaccinations have waned, somewhere around winter? What’s the ‘living with the virus’ plan then? #auspol…

I’d like a new ‘proportionate’ response to the pandemic. Those who argue for widespread infection of the population - 50% is a number bandied about - must demonstrate their commitment to this suggestion by exhibiting the proportionately…

The obvious question, again. Why you’d open schools in the middle of the largest wave of the pandemic. https://t.co/Cm51MROi68

Wonderful thread on the sort of risk assessment we can all do when deciding how to act as the pandemic continues. Vastly more nuanced than anything most governments are doing (which is mostly, nothing). https://t.co/5BuqJAN0LZ

NSW have done it again, with schools. Testing to cease for schools, with the Premier saying research shows transmission is extremely low. The NCIRS research used ended on 17 December 2021. At the red arrow. Last time, NCIRS data was used…

It’s dark when I get up for work, and it’s still summer. The result of daylight saving robbing one end of the day for the other (and thus nothing is ‘saved’). Have always hated it, for the circadian chaos it causes, but even more because…

Still staggers me every single day that Australia is now operating a system where millions of people have to pay for their own testing, in a pandemic. Not even the libertarian loons in the US and UK went that far. We have no visibility of…

For most countries the Covid strategy hasn't been a health strategy. It's been a demand management strategy for the health care system. People getting sick was just assumed. https://t.co/pCIcIdb7lX

Let's hope the Queen makes a full recovery. If she doesn't I wonder if the Tories will say she was at 'end of life anyway'. It's what they say for other elderly people who die of Covid. https://t.co/t2aIW9aLEu

Was listening to the CEO of Flight Centre on RN this morning, talking about borders re-opening. A few thoughts. /1 #auspol A common line was repeated, that 'business needs certainty'. Actually business doesn't need any more or less…

This advice works well for rich people who can watch the pandemic from home on the TV. https://t.co/yZSUaFHLb2

The reason I plead with people to join unions is not because I’m a union organiser (I’m not), or closely associated with the ALP (not either). But because politics is not just belief, but also power. /1 https://t.co/VhKM13BDIV Ultimately…

A love letter to the expert Covid minimisers here in Australia too. https://t.co/Mau9A2x4iw

Hey, any journos out there who want an easy story. How about somebody call out the claim from the NSW Government on low Covid spread in schools? Based on NCIRS data collected before Omicron and Christmas? Kinda seems important. #auspol…

NSW's guidelines for chickenpox are about to be significantly more stringent than its guidelines for Covid. And no, this isn't a problem with the guidelines for chickenpox. https://t.co/SBhohgXHIm

Portugal is a great example of what very high (95%) population vaccination can and can't achieve. Not a lot in terms of stopping Omicron infection (they were smashed too), but a lot to suppress deaths. Deaths were still higher though than…

If we’d called SARS-Cov-2 ‘Putin’ instead of Covid, it seems our leaders may have actually done something to keep it out.

Today will be the day when journalists ask two basic questions: 1) what do we do when the 3rd dose of vaccine wanes in 3-4 months’ time? 2) why are we using 2021 data to assess Covid spread in schools? I know, I know. A man can dream.…

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

Yes, 'vaccines work'. Like brakes work, on a car. The car also needs wheels, and fuel, and roads, and...

Spread in schools is 'extremely low', said the NSW Government this week, referring to 2021 data (but pretending it was 2022 data). In 2022 Covid is feasting in schools. Apparently it's better for the kiddies. https://t.co/RyBoJRLh13

2020-21 *was* ‘living with Covid’. We not ‘moving to’ living with Covid. We’re moving to living with a lot more Covid, and a lot more disease and death. https://t.co/d7cuKmJmrM

Here we are nearly at the end of February, and the ‘weekly’ NSW epidemiological report, about the only useful Covid data the NSW Government now release, is still the 29 January version.

The most disastrous thing Putin has done may be to take the world’s attention even further from the pandemic.

‘Mental health’ is becoming a bit of a catch-all to describe political issues. The brutalising politics of the ‘Economy’. Neoliberals medicalised a pandemic so they could ignore it. It suits them just fine for us to attribute blame for the…

Two of my kids are still wearing a mask. Next week the NSW Government removes all school mask requirements. This weekend we'll discuss what to do. One is still weeks away from a 2nd vaccine dose. 21st century Australia feels like 17th…

It's like living in a George Orwell novel, sitting here every day watching political libertarians talking about the pandemic being over, while the bodies pile up. Crimes against humanity, glossed over with cheap political slogans.…

Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’. We see our democracies as naturally more peace-loving. In reality those democracies are held in place by force, mostly the $600…

Early polling suggests people don’t want to live with the virus in South Australia either. Covid may clean out the entire National Cabinet, given time. Also look at how much young men are attracted to the LNP. There’s something in that I…

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed Western leaders like Johnson and Morrison see an opportunity to rescue their own careers, wars are tremendous platforms for populist politicians. We can walk and chew gum, deal with…

Hey #insiders, remember this? Still killing more people every day in Australia that at any other time of the pandemic. https://t.co/AojdS1bWBD

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for…

Tomorrow is wear a mask to work day. Every day is. The only people you need to socially distance from are politicians, and other Covid minimisers. https://t.co/Lpk5EQqisi

10 reasons I give people for why I still wear a mask (in case of interest). It's good to have comebacks ready. 1) I'm focused on the vulnerable in our community, not myself. 2) I get my science from scientists, not politicians. /1 #auspol…

It's all very Old Testament now, Australia 2022. We've had plagues (mice), pestilence (Covid), now floods. I'm feeling that direct link back to the text in many of the government's policies. https://t.co/CgXmyLLfix

The pandemic outcomes for the US and UK are even more similar than I’d imagined. https://t.co/oELvnQWeXv

I’ve seen case curves like this in the pandemic. But maybe never death curves this stark. Hong Kong is having a very bad time with Omicron. This needs to be understood. Total population vax rate < 80% seems to be some sort of marker of…

This maybe explains some of HK, contrasting with the UK and US. All have total population vax rates 76-78%. But the UK and US infected a lot more people in the pandemic, they may have more infection-based immunity. Though relativities - US…

Mandates are the simplest, fairest and cheapest forms of pandemic action. Conservatives have been successful in portraying law as restriction, oppression. But it’s nonsense, everything else can be gamed using the existing socio-economic…

Early morning workplace chat. One staff member came to work with a runny nose 'because the RAT said negative'. Is now regaling everybody with a story about her visit to a psychic. Outsourcing public health to individuals is an oxymoron.

Schools in NSW have now been back almost exactly one month. Either a lot of kids have caught Covid at school, or we have a major truancy problem. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/MXCihTnvgL

I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the NSW Government introduced the same rigorous methodology for tracking Covid cases, as it uses for allocating grants prior to an election. You collect the data you want to see.

On top of the total radio silence on actual details of Covid in schools, is the vacuum of reporting on what’s happening on university campuses right now, with infection. Particularly residential colleges. #COVID19Aus

You’d only need 2-3 stories like this in the news every day to derail the whole living with Covid rubbish. You can understand politicians suppressing it, but what’s the conspiracy of silence from media outlets? Nobody gives a shit about…

I doubt he’ll face the same challenge as some workers I know, who have run out of sick leave already. Another ‘live with the virus’ fantasy. People being repeatedly infected don’t have infinite sick leave. And it’s not their fault they…

This is where reframing the entire pandemic around hospital 'capacity' pays off for politicians. Hospitalisations and ICU still trending down. Cases trending up. https://t.co/FS49gbLjkz

Prevalence is still the main game, I think. Not least because a pandemic is defined by case numbers, not severity of outcome. Will the NSW/Australia case numbers plateau at a high rate, like right now? Or go down? Is Covid a permanent…

The most recent NSW Government guidelines for Covid isolation require people to restart isolation, if somebody else in their household develops Covid while the family is isolating and they haven't been distancing from them. Haven't seen…

Has any member of National Cabinet, from the PM down, wished ANY Australian a speedy recovery from Covid infection, in the past 2 years? Infected Australians have been statistics. Some of National Cabinet don't even mention deaths. #auspol…

It's heretical to say it, as a huge supporter of vaccination. But I think if we hadn't developed Covid vaccines, the public health response may have been more effective, saved more lives and shortened the pandemic. Politicians use them…

A Covid death every 30 minutes in 2022, in Australia. 'The pandemic is over'. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/DMqF5xPFUl

The targeting only of people ‘at risk of severe disease’ is the carrying over of the political targeting of marginal seats, to public health. Picking only the politically dangerous outcomes for action. https://t.co/3l4JzGY4IZ

The political libertarians at work again, trying to individualise collective events. Floods become your ‘personal responsibility’, via your insurance. Insurance is like hospitals for Covid, should be a last line of defence, not front line…

If you’re a public health professional, and your Covid shtick is to repeat ’get vaccinated’ like a parrot while ridiculing all other simultaneous attempts to control the spread of infection, why is somebody paying you? Parrots cost a lot…

The minimisers will be out in force saying it’s because not enough people are vaccinated. That’s half-true. The other half is rampant prevalence. Forgetting the latter is like saying your house flooded because you didn’t sandbag enough.…

Converting public health practice to 'personal responsibility' is like trying to build Snowy Hydro 2.0 by asking everybody to buy a bag of concrete, and meet up on the weekend for a working bee. https://t.co/6MVU4Sv33T

Great what creative work some experts can do, while others sit on their computers playing culture war games while parroting ‘just get vaccinated’. https://t.co/oZtMhmbdsI

‘We can never lock down again’. Except for the past 9 months. Worst lockdown of the pandemic so far, bizarrely called ‘opening up’. https://t.co/eFyahJvCZa

The attention to mental health, from the conservatives. Sounds great. But it’s the same dogma. Much of the problem is people brutalised by the realities of the modern ‘Economy’. Medicalising it makes it your problem, not theirs. They did…

Ironically, by rushing to pretend the pandemic was over, National Cabinet removed a crisis in the public mind. A crisis that was the only reason many would vote for them.

It’s glorious watching the flailing confusion of those who screeched the educational apocalypse of lockdowns for the past 2 years. And how wrong they were, and still are. Their crocodile tears over child mental health will be the next…

Monday morning at work, figuring out how to rejig things to keep them running with the latest Covid absences. I'm sure the story in many businesses and schools across the country. The pollie 'fix' of letting people circulate while infected…

The confidence trick of 'confidence'. Economically it means 'how much people are willing to spend and borrow beyond their means'. If it lags there, offer cheaper money and grants. With Covid, it means 'how much people are willing to allow…

One thing you can do to help others, is wear a mask. Another is not organise large Covid-unsafe gatherings and invite your friends, putting them in the difficult situation of having to 'balance' their friendship with you, with their health.

When I hear people say 'so what do you suggest, we lock down forever?', I'm reminded of the detailed, nuanced public health strategies we use for other infectious diseases. Like this, just one part of the NSW control strategy for…

Another expert on the radio this afternoon, talking about the death of a 2-year old from Covid. Parents can be reassured, apparently, that the ‘majority’ of children will have a mild illness. /1 Worth repeating I think that there isn’t a…

UK data suggest you really don’t want to be sitting on only 2 vaccine doses right now. https://t.co/alOKJb58EY

Clock is ticking on the Australian winter. It may reflect 3rd dose vaccination demographics in the US, but still pretty substantial waning here. And this is for hospitalisation. https://t.co/1HL1yrgWSO

The minimisers love to say 'child infection just reflects wider community infection'. That'd be a perverse reading of graphs like this. Even if it were true, they're saying 'Covid is out of control everywhere'. And that's supposed to be a…

The continuous motivated rubbish about how kids don’t catch Covid in schools. If they don’t, why does proper ventilation drop cases there by over 80%? https://t.co/IVgjLnRhxL

Speaking with people at work (the few that are left), about how some in the UK have now had Covid 3-4 times. 'Huh, how is that possible?' They thought getting it would give them 18 months of protection. The public health disaster is best…

Covid minimisers hate the comparison between live with the virus, and feedlot farming. A good reason to draw the comparison regularly. /1 https://t.co/K4rhAcfD3H It takes a modern form of political sociopath to see families using up their…

This was us too, envy of the world. Until vaccines arrived, and the local Tories weaponised them to make us a carbon copy of their dipshit murderous cousins overseas. https://t.co/6N8N8pEBb5

This graph from Roy Morgan I think shows an essential truth about Australian politics. People hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at 2008 (GFC) and early-mid 2020 (national lockdown). A few implications…/1…

Infected people are sick people. A lot of infected people = a lot of sick people. Letting Covid rip makes societies permanently sick. It’s not called Public Sick, it’s called Public Health.

Remembering that loud, ignorant voices insisted we send our children back to schools to get infected with Covid, so they could rescue their mental health and education. Education results have been in free fall for at least a decade. And…

Living the NSW dream. A friend tells of staff at work with kids at home badly ill with Covid. Staff are there because they've tested negative on a RAT, as per government rules. The kids have only been sick less than a week. No masks…

"Prevention of severe illness from COVID-19 remains the primary goal of the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination program." Once politicians make that the framework, mass infection is just assumed. https://t.co/IvQwJstG7t

Workplaces whose staff numbers have been decimated by Covid are not suffering from 'staff shortages', the latest renormalising spin. It's not a HR problem. It's a public health problem.

"Attempts to reach 'herd immunity' through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting Covid-19 spread through populations, of any age or health status will lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and…

What we’re seeing right now with Covid is the politics of privilege. Decades of living as if humans have no Earthly constraints, steadfastly refusing to be brought back to a life with sensible constraint. Climate change the same. Reality…

Julian Tang on UK TV this morning, asked whether Covid is now like seasonal flu. No, it’s still in an epidemic wave pattern. If it does make that transition, it may take ‘several years’.

Notice the Infinite Covid folk have shifted from endemic now, to permanent epidemic waves. Nobody noticed in the press gallery? Hello? Anybody home? https://t.co/ZhGs3Copik

The main roadblock to beating Covid globally is the hyper-narrowing of society’s focus to one statistical indicator, economic growth. Where ephemeral small businesses boom and bust inside 5 years, and human ambition is restricted to…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

Nothing says ‘society is a high school peopled with adolescents of all ages’ better than the social media response to Taylor Hawkins’ or any rock star’s death, compared to the silence about the ongoing mountain of Covid bodies.

Every day, the basics. - all infection is illness. - public health controls illness. - mass infection is a failure of public health. - public health was invented by governments. - public health is a government’s job. - the ‘Economy’ is a…

I’m no virologist, but the number of people I’ve seen say Covid will become mild ‘like other coronaviruses’? Aren’t Sars-Cov-1 and MERS an easy counter to that? Like any virus family, there seem a whole range of virulence outcomes that are…

With no government appetite to control virus spread or even offer ongoing mass vaccination except to vulnerable groups, is a person better off catching Covid now, while they’re still closer to their last shot? Won’t risk of severe disease…

WIll the real story of how hospital in the home and other outside hospital care modalities were used during this pandemic ever be told?

How about a ‘permissive recommendation’ here too? For those who want a 4th dose? Those happily swimming in Covid are free to continue. https://t.co/56Ec5kAwTI

This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden…

Anybody remember being told to go to work or school, with the flu? Every day, some new normalisation of the indefensible. Don’t think this won’t happen in Australia. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/RYC0aJ9fnX

Still doesn’t seem to be any AHPPC announcement from its meeting last Wednesday? On the National Cabinet’s lunatic plan to remove close contact requirements? #auspol #covid19aus

AHPPC appears to have recommended last Wednesday that 7-day isolation for the infected and close contacts is to remain? Is this now the decision, or does the fact nobody seems to have said anything about it mean National Cabinet is…

Nearly 3 months since school went back. Reckon the government accidentally reversed ‘vaccination’ and ‘open schools’ on their Gantt Chart? Me either. https://t.co/kq0C9NDTfC

"The NSW Health spokesperson said the best way to avoid COVID-19 infection was to remain up to date with vaccination against the virus." Maybe it was a cleaner or canteen person at NSW Health.

The Will Smith thing shows so well I think how neoliberal, libertarian N=1 politics has atomised society. What should be a case of common assault becomes instead a platform for a bewildering array of personal grievances. Everything is…

Every number going up, except vaccinations. A mono-dimensional public health strategy, where we can't even bother doing the single dimension. https://t.co/v7ReXjoacy

Speaking to employers about vaccination. It's fallen off a cliff, their staff won't now get a 3rd shot, and fluvax numbers for the coming year also only a fraction of previous years, for many. Prime example of how a fish rots from the…

National Strike. Politicians and captains of industry, if you want to live with this virus, go for it, run a Covid camp somewhere. Fuck off and leave the rest of us alone. https://t.co/JjYtrK4YGA

Thanks to @JayneFlan. Workers who contract Covid and are working in an area of ‘presumptive employment’ (more below) are ‘automatically presumed to have contracted the disease in the course of their employment’. Huge? /1 #auspol…

So, non-LNP members of NSW parliament. Now's the chance to reverse the State's Covid 'strategy' (a flattering term for it). https://t.co/vGgUyXzTrd

From the FT, UK. Politicians desperately want hospitalisations and deaths to be the metric. But back here in reality, infection = sickness. Communities are sick. Ongoing mass infection cripples societies. Infection is the metric. It’s how…

Day after day, we keep racking up new lows of public administration. Key experts respond from the sidelines with bizarre campaigns to remove even more public health measures. Can we have grown ups back in charge? h/t @Mike_Honey_…

Living with Covid is like running every part of your society permanently above the rev limit. https://t.co/RkfzPJ4Hrx https://t.co/FEkYC2tQwT

One of the disturbing experiences of the pandemic is the revealing of thoughts and beliefs of close friends and family. Beliefs they had often kept to themselves until now. And the nastiness of some of those beliefs, that are now seen in…

In which the ‘balancing’ of the Economy against public health turns out to be the equivalent of trying to lift yourself up with your own shoelaces. https://t.co/3Ktt1r3UGw

It’s no coincidence that those who say ‘schools must stay open’ said nothing about schools until 2 years ago. Nothing about plummeting academic performance, about widespread bullying in schools, pre-Covid. About the gutting of funding.…

Age and 'underlying conditions' would be used to rationalise the fact that most deaths ARE vaccinated. The public health point here is, these are preventable deaths, if we could get off our complacent arses and control spread.…

It says something about Australia in 2022 that we need philanthropists to fund a review of our pandemic response. https://t.co/mQB4Epd23M

I defy anybody to read this table from the NSW Government, and make sense of allowing the entire State to become infected. A potential public health catastrophe in the making, where's the risk management? https://t.co/sZpB0ZeGV5 h/t…

We have this strange idea that global Covid is an aggregate sum of national Covids. But as all the failed attempts at 'ring-fencing' Covid showed, it's the other way around. National Covid derives from international Covid. Countries are…

I used this in the AZ vaccine rollout. Where all talk was of likelihood of events, but not of consequences of events. You need both for risk management. The same should now apply for mass infection, for Long Covid. How likely sequelae are,…

‘Lockdowns’ were the perfect test case for neoliberal, libertarian politics. They made us into isolated individuals. The libertarian dream. But it stopped their society substitute, the ‘Economy’, stone dead. Nobody is ever free, alone. We…

Western tourists unconcerned about Covid pretty much sums up the entire pandemic. https://t.co/PPsHYtRy5X

When I caught whooping cough a few years ago, never at any time did a medical professional reassure the rest of the community that they were all going to get whooping cough, and their vaccines would protect them. They told me to go home…

It’s not a vaccine ceiling. It’s a governance ceiling. A vacuum where leadership was needed. Thus, everything ground to a halt. What happens when you elect governments who don’t believe in government. https://t.co/757YVJ6Opq

The 'don't mention the war' Covid strategy. This makes the front page. 91 people have died of Covid in the past week and a half, in NSW. https://t.co/AhVybeE5py

This is just one of the basic questions that the Covid minimisers need to answer. https://t.co/L80HZ1pYw6

Fewer than 50% of kids under 11 in NSW have been vaccinated. There’s a public health PhD in there, about why this is.

Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who…

It’s not clear to me if the alternative being proposed here is a pandemic that never ends. Even colds and flu are at least seasonal. What’s the proposed endgame here? https://t.co/kcE3QbW6wJ

Let’s go back to public health as stopping people getting sick. Rather than the imported battery hen model of medicating the livestock just enough to keep them laying. https://t.co/rWF99RaeI2

The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real…

"Britain has led from the front in removing social distancing restrictions, having rightly taken the view that once everyone who can and wants to be vaccinated has had that chance, then the Government has essentially fulfilled its public…

The federal government's take on Long Covid is unsurprisingly the same take it and all other Covid minimisers have on everything Covid. Get vaccinated. Yes, people have done that. They're still getting Long Covid. https://t.co/LcqTHfkoD4

‘Past’, not ‘passed’, ffs. Isn’t the Herald doing well under Nine. It must be the 50+ people dead per week that triggered the next Covid recruitment drive. https://t.co/Qed95bUYte

“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

Epic public health fail. Cheered on by epic political failures, and their expert enablers. https://t.co/g2zIDChECt

Boris Johnson hasn’t ruled out further lockdowns for the UK, if ‘more serious’ variants come along. Killing over a thousand a week there at the moment.

Fighting a pandemic with immunity is like fighting gun violence with bulletproof vests.

In Camus’ meticulously researched novel, the town is locked down until the pandemic is over, reflecting practice over millennia. There’s no ‘living with the virus’. What we’re doing right now is without precedent in human history. It is…

Mental health is worse when kids are at school, which the research is quite clear about. Academic performance was often better under lockdowns too, because students got individual attention. ‘Disruptions’ is sanitised drivel, it means…

It’s sad that respect for these children and their families was entirely absent when they were sent to Covid-saturated schools to become infected. https://t.co/a7WezUb9kB

Covid becoming endemic was the rationale given for removing protections. But it never became endemic. How do even prominent health experts get away with advocating a seasonal flu strategy for a pandemic virus? At the very least use a…

This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know their wages are still going nowhere, their jobs are insecure,…

The election narratives from both sides will be mostly irrelevant. Letting Covid rip violated the Australian expectation of what governments should do. Covid even removed Trump, and that's in libertarian heartland. Carnage may be on the…

Is it possible that #LongCovid is chronic rather than acute infection?

My audition as a political journo. "Prime Minister, you now know the price of a loaf of bread and litre of milk. Can you tell us how many people have died of Covid since you let it rip?"

Blood donation and Covid feels like a real sleeper issue. And the same absence of caution, driven by desperation, as we’re seeing for close contact rules. The claims about no transmission here - nobody is tracing transmission now, so how…

Actually I want to know if the dentist has Covid, or at the very least will be wearing an N95 and has a ventilated office. https://t.co/xYdm0KOO7O

Today's suggested press conference question. "Prime Minister, what percentage of workers are currently at home sick because they're infected with Covid?"

This is a Covid election, as the US election also was. The journalists who cover it won't see it as that, because they haven't registered Covid as a story to even write much about for 6 months. But the infected families of Australia see it.

In today's trivia, name 6 Australian political leaders who have abandoned "any interest in Covid whatsoever". https://t.co/P8qsFtn0BO

We’ve had so many excellent experts describe the ‘health’ part of public health. It’s the ‘public’ part where nowhere near enough people are looking. That’s still the main battleground, competing definitions of what a public is. In Anglo…

Ed Yong’s astonishing piece on the ‘disenfranchised grief’ of Covid. To the minimisers who do this disenfranchising - fuck you. Your obsession with pretending Covid is a ‘sniffle’ has made people’s tragedies meaningless, as a final kick in…

We have significant expertise saying we just need to ‘burn out’ Covid, and it will be over. And then at the same time other significant expertise, like this, modelling catastrophic scenarios. Either could be correct, how do we decide?…

Talking to a car dealer today about the trouble they have getting cars from the factory. It’s Covid, supply chains full of it, it only needs one component supply chain to be impacted and the car just sits on the factory floor. Infection…

Maybe I misjudged our conservatives. Maybe Christ’s death was the first ‘personal responsibility’ death. The guy died to absolve the rest of us. He took personal responsibility for us. Maybe those millions dead of Covid were doing the…

“The massively disrupted Easter for Australians wanting to travel should be a clear signal to health officials that their rules are no longer fit for purpose.” Innes Willox The intellectual vacuum at the top of Australian business. Where…

Is there a public health subject in the infectious disease physician curriculum? I’ve seen many rank amateurs here on Twitter who seem to have a better grasp of basic public health concepts than some of our prominent infectious disease…

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between…

We’re going to intubate our way out of this pandemic. https://t.co/Boshys1Dbe

74 people died of Covid in NSW this week. Watch the vid. Why aren’t ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns mocked as ‘hysteria’? Road safety is hugely expensive, and complicated, and takes decades, and impacts every single person.…

Reading this brought home again the joke the developed world now is. Where infectious disease becomes a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Imagine even 20 years ago saying something like ‘we’ll let malaria spread, it’s up to each person…

What alternative society has to letting Covid rip? We have basic public health work, which we’ve been using for pathogens as infectious, for generations. Like measles. Even today, with a great vaccine, look at the public health work that…

At a social event tonight, reflecting on the power of political slogans. Multiple people talking about Covid, saying ‘we’re all going to get this now, it’s like the flu, we’re going to have to live with it’. No independent thought, just…

Pre-2022 we were ‘living with’ Covid in the same way we live with other infectious diseases. We were controlling it. How many of us are currently running around with tetanus, mumps, diphtheria, measles? We ‘live with’ them = we CONTROL…

From the Financial Times’ editorial board. An ‘economic’ HQ. Calling out the true agenda for ‘living with Covid’, and the emerging disastrous costs. https://t.co/0IVzwfAmus

Pandemics and wars have always revealed the true underlying functioning of societies. Their dysfunction creates the pandemics and wars, which then strip away the old ‘normal’ and its justifications. https://t.co/V7aoYBJPRR

Hey 'Covid is like the flu' folks. When was the last flu season that began in November, and was still going strong in the 3rd week of April?

Hey 'Covid is like the flu' folks. A P.S. When was the last flu season: - that started in November - was still going in the 3rd week of April - where most of the population was vaccinated - that killed 5000 people in 5 months?

What a disgusting joke. Don’t blow smoke up our arses by pretending this is due to the end of the Omicron wave, at 15,000 cases per day (that we know of). This is entirely due to Term 2 of school starting next week. The timing is…

Let’s see when removal of close contact rules is announced how many of the risk mitigations AHPPC said should accompany that (below) are implemented too. My guess is, we’ll go full UK again. Meaning - none. And nobody will report it.…

Do you reckon: 1) business has realised removing close contact rules is the government shifting liability from itself, to business, under WHS? 2) people realise they’ll have to use their own sick/carer’s leave (if they have any) to stay…

Has there been a single survey or poll in Australia to sound out the public on whether it wanted to ‘live with’ Covid? #auspol #covid19aus

Who would have voted for ‘endemic’ Covid if it meant 300,000 cases per week and 200 dead per week? And yet here we are, celebrating.

@theprojecttv discussing removal of Covid protections without any questioning of several hundred thousand being infected per week and a couple of hundred dying, This is ‘where we always wanted to get to’, apparently. Australians all let us…

Covid minimisers say 'if not now, when?' every time they remove protections. At the same time they promise that Covid has become endemic, that the pandemic is over. To ask them in return, about this endemic state. If not now, when? We've…

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1. Remember how the Doherty modelling was used to justify ongoing removal of Covid protections? These numbers were based on a good faith assumption that National Cabinet would keep other measures in place (they…

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

Dear National Cabinet. In the last 4 months, since you let Covid rip, Covid has killed more people in the country per day than any other event in Australian history. And we have vaccines. The greatest failure of government in all of our…

The Opposition Leader and candidate for PM gets Covid mid-campaign, and Covid still won't be an election issue. Sing it with me: "Australians All Let Us Rejoice For We are Dumb and Free..." #auspol I had meant to tag @YouAreLobbyLud as I…

Is there even one example of a pandemic pathogen that humanity has tried to ‘live alongside’ before? Surely this is a monumental lie, the Covid Emperor’s New Clothes? We know politicians lie, but how do experts get away with spruiking this…

Those spruiking the end of the pandemic, or ‘endemic’ Covid, surely have to answer some basic questions. How long is this line allowed to stay at this level? What’s the KPI here, have we arrived? Or how long can this continue without…

Fighting a pandemic using personal responsibility is like telling dad jokes. Funny, in a really bad way. https://t.co/zIaZWOkOh4

Personal responsibility for Covid really means personal financial responsibility for it. Everything must be done to ensure taxpayer money is kept from people who actually need it. Robodebt the clear precedent, no personal responsibility…

If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid.…

I speak to people who say things like ‘we need to DO something about what’s going on with our society, with Covid. Twitter is just talking.’ As a society we do little BUT doing. “Just do it”. Without thought or discussion. What we need is…

Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough…

We need a monument to the Covid dead in every major town, with names, constantly updated. A visible reminder of what has gone on and is going on, and to commemorate those dead. Monuments have power.

Australia was in the Vietnam War for ten years. Just over 500 Australians died. 5000 Australians have died of Covid in the past 5 months. Can I just clarify that this Tweet isn’t an attempt to minimise what happened in Vietnam. It’s the…

@abc730 it wasn’t ‘lockdowns’ that pushed out elective surgery times. It was allowing spread of Covid.

Governments thought Covid was a 'supply' problem too, late last year. Greater supply of Covid to the community would end the pandemic, apparently. And it did, for about 6000 people, who no longer have to worry about it.

7-day average for deaths has hit 42 now. We need the election out of the way so that hopefully somebody in Canberra can do some grown up public health work. Including reporters, @michellegrattan and @michaelpas two of the few who still…

Public health professionals have political views too. And you can’t do public health without involving politics, because what’s good for the public is a question of politics. About time these core political beliefs became part of the…

We're midweek, and already another 34 dead in NSW. Given our public health 'strategy' (using that term very loosely) is 'get vaxxed', why is nothing even being done about those hopeless vax numbers circled in red? #auspol #COVID19Aus…

The PM this morning. All of the Covid deaths in Australia are apparently 'with Covid', not from Covid. And the CMO and CHOs apparently believe this too? Ask them, somebody. Let's get it on the record. The stats already take that…

"The Prime Minister said if re-elected the government would continue to act on the medical advice because it has allowed Australians to live with COVID 'without fear'." I haven't seen any aetiology of Covid illness and death that includes…

"Common cold" coronavirus reinfections (with the same variant) are very common (2–3/year in studies before 2019, sometimes only one month apart)." Mitchell Tsai Is this true @CrabbBrendan, @Globalbiosec ?

PM, talking about Covid. “We want to put that in the rear-vision mirror. We’re putting this pandemic behind us and all the intervention of government in our lives.” Am thinking maybe it was the lack of 'intervention' that killed nearly…

The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes, and you’re then by definition the best people for the job.…

Things Australians need no longer ‘fear’, and can therefore now pretend are over. The PM’s method. - bushfires - floods - cancer - heart disease - inequality - etc. Yes, ridiculous. But we swallow it, for Covid.

Sharon Lewin on radio this morning, on the PM's assertions that everybody is dying 'with Covid', not 'from Covid'. As the ABS have said, only 10% are dying 'with' Covid. And for that 10%, Covid is still listed on the death certificate as…

For those interested, here's the ABS clarification about dying 'with' Covid. #auspol https://t.co/W4im7JkHvb

@QandA why are we listening to a political libertarian economist for the umpteenth time on Q&A on a public health problem they simply don’t understand?

@QandA Again, not one public health expert on the panel, to discuss Covid. Opinionated waffle that advances nothing.

One of the best things I’ve learned in this pandemic is that when we talk about a disease being ‘endemic’ in poor countries, what we really mean is it’s out of control and we’re doing nothing to stop it. Which is also what ‘endemic’ Covid…

It takes an outsider to see us for who we really are. Unlike the US libertarians, who are trying to undermine Oz from afar, Damien came to live here and discovered something profound about us we’re forgetting ourselves. A required vaccine…

@samanthamaiden and @David_Speers suggesting (I think correctly) that a large part of the big pre-poll and postal voting numbers is people trying to avoid Covid. The thing politicians and most journalists dare not name. #auspol

I feel it's important politicians and the public understand that if Covid is damaging the immune system, like HIV does, that it takes 8-10 years for HIV to turn into AIDS, in people. Even a 'mild' Covid infection is potentially a ticking…

47 people have died of Long Covid in Australia so far. That gets very little publicity, it's reported (if at all) as a morbidity problem, not mortality. #auspol #COVID19Aus

Is it possible Covid wipes immune memory for other pathogens, as measles does? https://t.co/XGXFLdHS7s

Walked past a local polling booth and none of the usual election atmosphere was there. People queued for miles, some in masks. No democracy sausages cooking. Another public carnival the Covid deniers have ruined. So many voted early to…

Saw Domicron interviewed at a NSW polling booth. He goes to the polls in less than 12 months. Never forget. Every single member of that National Cabinet should be wiped out electorally. The Australia of 50 years ago would have jailed them.…

For 30 years the LNP has been trying to introduce the neoliberal/libertarian politics of the US and UK. Those beliefs are poison to a communitarian Australian culture. Those furious at what we’ve done with Omicron are mostly so because of…

That sweet moment when your mother reminds you you're old enough to have had a smallpox vaccination.

We’ve now spent 70 years trashing our collective institutions, and those who did it got away with it because private debt allowed us all to feel we were doing well. We had the illusion of individual prosperity. There is no such thing. This…

It cost over $370 million to run the 2019 election. I'm guessing with Covid the 2022 poll could top $500 million. #auspol

Steve Duckett excoriated the outgoing govt. today for being asleep at the wheel with Covid. The ALP have inherited 9 years of neglect across every portfolio. The ALP builds things, conservatives flog it off to mates in the private sector,…

It’s not so surprising modern conservative governments chose to ignore a pandemic. They’ve been trashing government for decades. It’s more surprising how many experts lined up to help them (unlike Lisa). It’s they who allowed the…

1) ‘Endemic’ has always meant ‘in poor countries we don’t care about’. 2) We happily ‘lock down’ poor countries when diseases there might get to us . But refuse to restrict our own movement and activity in a pandemic, when disease here…

Is this the ‘endemic’ Covid we were promised? About 10,000 cases per day in NSW, even more in Victoria? Or are we eugenically cleansing the population of the aged, and then we’ll get more flu-like numbers? Why do the Premiers of NSW and…

If the federal election told us anything, it’s that whining freedumb warriors don’t register politically. And yet they’re so often given as the reason we can’t go harder against Covid, because the ‘community’ won’t tolerate it. They’re not…

Employers are often not revealing Covid cases in workplaces, quoting ‘privacy’ as their reason. If you read the guidelines, you’re supposed to tell your friends if you’re positive, but telling workmates is entirely at the discretion of the…

The same problem Teal independents targeted has an analogue in Covid. Where a handful of experts cloud the much larger majority scientific view on pandemic management, giving cover to Covid minimisation. OzSage counters this, but is there…

@simonahac do you see candidates on a stronger action against Covid platform as within the boundaries of Climate 200 eligibility, for funding? Given the close links between climate change and the growth of pandemics.

‘Gaslighting’, political attempts to make you doubt your (very sane) incredulity at being asked to return to ‘normal’ life with the pandemic still raging. But it’s closer to a type of grooming I think. Gradually breaking down your…

Working or learning from home are apparently very bad. But DIY healthcare with a potentially lethal disease is now the Australian way. Is it not transparently obvious, what’s going on here? Pretty coloured memes don’t hide public health…

And the percentage of 5-11 vaccinated actually went backwards. Probably some new kids turning 5? If preventing the death of your citizens isn’t your core job National Cabinet, why do we need you? To keep business open? Dead people don’t…

Do you skim friends’ social media feeds and see them in high-risk Covid activities, like big indoor social events, with no protections? ‘You have to live your life’, they say. There was a time that included fighting for the well-being of…

Every day this is the public health messaging I see in NSW. https://t.co/99ZhhUFeMR

I want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1…

“People are moving on when the personal risk is low. There’s nothing politicians or healthcare providers or the media can do about that.” (N Coatsworth) Public health was invented in direct opposition to this belief. As was pretty much our…

If people are perceiving their personal risk to be low, it may be because information on those risks is deliberately minimised or suppressed, like so much else about Covid. https://t.co/tnSTGoXqdu

Please don’t call it compulsory voting, it feeds the anger of the same parts of society who rail against ‘lockdowns’. Australians have always voted because they wanted to vote, the same way they wanted to put out bushfires. They saw it as…

‘Because of lockdown their resistance is down to disease’, says layperson, parroting what politicians tell us. That the key to getting rid of infections, is to give everybody infections. Be that person who didn’t believe this rubbish at…

It’s taken off almost as fast as free Covid. And ‘it’s sticking around’ is 2022 for ‘living with it’. https://t.co/jk2PFxf11o

Let’s see how free vaccines goes for the disease the same leaders used as an analogy for Covid, to minimise peoples’ perception of risk. The same people who already stopped getting Covid shots. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/GPh8SSkSzk

The real issue I see here, about the way National Cabinet has trashed our public health system. 1) Cost wasn't the reason most people didn't get flu shots before. They never saw flu as serious enough to bother. /1 https://t.co/Djwgxq5aKq…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and…

Walter Lippmann wouldn’t have been surprised that rich countries didn’t change their lives to beat Covid. "Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become…

In pandemics microbes invade the ecological niches or ‘homes’ of other living things. Destruction of habitat. Our hyper-mobility is petrol on a pandemic fire. We are never ‘home’, never grounded. Our imperial DNA still lays waste to the…

Has the Australian community ever been this sick? Hospitalisations as the key metric, hilarious, it’s a microbial sewer out there. You can’t do even the most basic social or work thing without a very high risk of being laid flat for weeks.…

What more could we do to defeat Covid? Treat it like a bushfire. Put experts in charge, while politicians get out of the way. Why did we let politicians lead the operational work? Especially ones who 'don't hold a hose'? We smashed HIV…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

Today we discussed how to give the virus even more opportunity to evolve towards vaccine evasion, by vaccinating even more people who will all be allowed to become repeatedly infected. https://t.co/txu3ViSdAG

I'm not a public health professional. But I wonder if using immunity as the basis for a pandemic strategy is like making sandbags the basis for a flood mitigation strategy. https://t.co/bmJJ3yUFNk

Queensland research showing millions may have a fatal kidney disease, from Covid infection. Chinese research showing SARS2 attacks T cells, a bit like AIDS. Imagine being a top health official or doctor, and advising ‘just jab them mate,…

“More supply is the issue, not more regulation.” APPEA acting CEO, about the gas crisis. Lobbyists write most of our public policies now. The property lobby the same, ‘release more land’. Airlines, travel and business, ‘relax Covid…

Public health should be socially contextual. Historically we didn’t really see voting as ‘compulsory’, nor public health measures as ‘mandatory’. Both were seen more as community action, for community good. Like fundraising for bushfires.…

The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

Second most vaccinated country in the world. And yes, vaccines work. But not enough, alone. https://t.co/jVG1N6KIE8

Forcing schools to be open with a pandemic raging, with minimal to no protections, crosses a threshold of immorality that disqualifies a country from calling itself civilised. Karma is coming for those who did this. https://t.co/xwLfQ4em5M

Stories about meltdown in both schools and hospitals today. Critical public institutions. Decades of ‘individual aspiration’ now leading to systemic collapse. Icing on the cake the gutting of public health, unloading vast waves of sickness…

Saying ‘vaccines work’ is like saying ‘seatbelts work’. They do. But you still need the brakes.

Too much wasted time arguing science in this pandemic. We had public health systems and procedures tested over 2 centuries that knew exactly how to beat Covid. The reason they didn’t isn’t scientific, it’s political. It’s the same politics…

Public health is defined as the health of the population as a whole. We’re all vaccinated for infectious disease, vulnerable or not, to prevent illness, not just death. How is the level of illness in Oz right now not a national crisis?…

A reminder that getting our 'freedom' back with Covid meant all of us going back to work in underpaid jobs. Always interrogate the slogans.

I'm more concerned that: - Covid is killing hundreds a week and government says nothing - people are catching a potentially lethal virus multiple times, and no public health mitigation is occurring - we're infecting everybody at will with…

A health system is like an immune system. The last line of defence. Using both to try to defeat a pandemic alone? Nobody says in wars ‘pull back, the medics will finish them off’.

Microbes live in ecosystems, which we’re a part of. Public health measures are designed changes to the ecosystem. Pandemics are the breakdown of ecosystems. It’s all ecology. ‘Live with the virus’ people utter ecological words, without…

Covid minimisers who flat out deny being Covid minimisers, are always followed by roving packs of Covid minimisers. They know. Useful for blocking, they flush each other out. One juicy thread can help you identify and remove sometimes…

Broken bones and other injuries heal. And yet we still avoid them. Relying upon immune memory, the body’s last line of defence, as society’s front-line of attack - it’s the Middle Ages. And Covid may trigger little immune memory, even…

Yesterday when discussing with someone that it might be a good idea to have Covid protections for an indoor event, they said society is in the phase of Covid where we let it ‘burn out’. We could try it for bullying, or domestic violence.…

Again and again, why do we bother immunising for most of the infectious diseases on our schedule if the rationale is only protection against ‘severe disease’? Most of them don’t cause severe disease, or kill many. It’s irrelevant. We do it…

The politics of the Economy adapted easily to Covid. ‘Confidence’, for example. Consumers ‘lack confidence’. Meaning they have no money, and have to be seduced into going further into debt. Conservatives are skilled at seducing people into…

The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/zAzjeDwxTY The principle of…

I think the minority of trolling Covid-minimising scum here on Twitter should have to meet with the families of the daily slaughter. https://t.co/qHCsGacEiz

One of the main reasons the ‘public’ isn’t more concerned about Covid, is that the public may no longer exist. You have to physically create and maintain it. There is no more public square, no broadcasting space where everybody dips in to…

The pleas on Twitter for Covid sanity are not looking for answers, because those are obvious. They’re looking for that disappeared place where those questions didn’t need to be asked. That’s much harder to solve.

Covid being airborne is likely why nobody with influence is really trying to beat it. Air is the last ‘commons’ left, almost impossible to appropriate for private profit. As the economic wankmonkeys would say, it’s the ultimate…

The existence of local councils was driven by public health action in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sewer, clean water, garbage collection, drainage. The shape of our societies was driven by public health. Ventilation should be next. The…

Easy to be gobsmacked by the gun drills in US schools. But we, like they, still have no Covid mitigations in schools. Covid has killed orders of magnitude more children than guns in schools. You don’t want Covid or guns, in schools.…

Climate denialism was the seed bed of Covid denialism. Climate deniers are now using the ‘wind and solar farms use a lot more minerals than a gas or coal plant’ spin. A log fire uses less than both. It’s a meaningless distraction, and…

I’d like to clean my teeth and get my hair cut once a year too, much easier. People should be prepared for the possibility that an annual vaccine may be 3 too few. https://t.co/r28EvgX0i1

Consistent with the developed world's Covid response. Where we just rename all the bad things as good things. https://t.co/coW7zdGUxb

'We gave you all vaccines, what else do you want?', said no public health textbook, ever.

Remember when we threw all the strawberries away, as a potential risk to public health because some dimwit put needles in some of them? Covid is killing over 300 Australians every week. I guess by analogy we're throwing the Australians…

We mobilise whole societies for many years at a time for wars, but now try to live with pandemics. Check the thickness of the Covid line, compared to 1918. That’s ‘living with’ Covid. https://t.co/lpTSCd5zJ2

Populism says that politicians ‘run’ a country. They never have. They have authority, but others with expertise run the country. Symbolic sod-turning is as close to ‘running’ anything politicians should be allowed to be. Covid would be…

There's not a single number here that has moved meaningfully in months. The State has given up, in every way. And I think it gets worse, in terms of our ongoing public health. #auspol /1 https://t.co/nOFQTUqI4Y Fewer than half of the…

ScoMo’s and Dom’s gravest Covid concern was ‘daily Covid press conferences’. Not Covid; the discussion of Covid. And here we are, a public health response entirely shut down. Not even vaccinating. But remember too, you only had to be given…

Now the election is over, time for political journalists to return to the greatest crisis facing the country. Covid. It’s clear the previous government workshopped spin to respond to the alarming number of ongoing weekly deaths from Covid.…

It’s clearly not over. And it won’t be over just by having enough hospital beds. Hospitals don’t stop Covid @AlboMP, hopefully you’re getting wider advice than the previous government. https://t.co/WuAvRHHGyw

Dear National Cabinet. This is a hospital. Hospitals don’t stop Covid. Titrating bed numbers to Covid illness is a failure of public health. We don’t do it for any other disease. #auspol https://t.co/6vhz5ikTq9

Where are the experts and politicians who say kids had to be back at school because they were missing too much education? My kids learned a helluva lot more in lockdown than they are in the Covid soup at school. #auspol…

Look at from around September 2021, when the NSW (at that time under Gladys) and the federal LNP decided to unilaterally change Australia’s Covid strategy to…no strategy. The perversity of calling everything after that time on the graph…

It interests me that musos, normally climbing all over each other for a cause, are happily out organising big-earning Covid superspreader gigs again. Let’s not pretend these are artists in financial difficulty. https://t.co/Yw0RcBVyFw

Over 1300 Australians have died of Covid since election day. 'No major hitches'. #auspol https://t.co/w1ZFnChw09

The pandemic showed few understand exponential growth. But it was right at the heart of the 'Economy' the whole time too. Compound interest. All those 'growth' forecasts - economic, super etc. - are exponential growth. Even tiny growth…

I’m not sure one leader or expert for hire framed PH measures as freedoms here in Oz. Despite us living the truth of it for nearly 2 years. The ex-PM had a rat cunning, describing them as ‘lockdowns’ from the beginning and their absence as…

Getting close to the ‘oops’ and ‘fuck’ stages for Covid now too. https://t.co/stGAdCX88y

It’s breathtaking that there are prominent people working in public health who have argued you can’t eliminate the circulation of dangerous pathogens, from the *beginning* of the pandemic. It’s not clear to me what profession they’re now…

I’m loving the actuaries riding into battle against the Covid minimisers. Very short thread on deaths, based on recent analysis of US death data from https://t.co/4zjjZrbXKB /1 Covid minimisers switch between absolute and relative figures…

A table of Tories who have been unmoved as 180,000 Britons have died of Covid, furious about trains not running. People can’t get to work! Call it an Economy and you can run a slave State in plain view. https://t.co/5LhBshRGqY

Instead of calling it Covid transmission, let’s call it Covid inflation. They do things about inflation.

Mark Butler interviewed about Covid this week, repeated the line from the previous government that leaders have always followed the health advice. We have multiple clear examples of this not being true. No journalist said boo. #auspol

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1…

This line from the SMH on 4 September 2021: "Friday brought the chilling announcement of 12 more deaths, against a new daily case record of 1431." The numbers seem almost quaint in 2022. #auspol #covid19aus

JobKeeper ended before Delta. Before even 2nd doses of vaccine were rolling out, let alone 3rd. It forced States to relax restrictions in the absence of the financial capacity to pay businesses to do anything else. I doubt very much this…

I hear politicians say we’ve entered a new phase of the pandemic. Do you reckon it’s the more than 50 deaths per day phase? Up is bad, right? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2FE49YGShA

In history political changes from pandemics were in direct proportion to the impact on the labour force. Elites will take a pandemic seriously only when they can’t get workers. With Covid this was the real cause of the spin of ‘getting…

Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid. 1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections is like a government giving its military slingshots instead of…

An actuary is like an economic epidemiologist. Will tell you very quickly which public health strategy is legitimate, because it'll be the one that makes the most economic sense too.

We won’t defeat Covid until we understand it not as a medical or even scientific problem, but as a political one. Public health can’t function when you’re governed by political beliefs where the public doesn’t exist.

Another struggling artist fighting to end the pandemic. https://t.co/y8gOO5HN9O

Same pattern the world over. Listen to the actuaries and the insurers they advise. Having to put dollars and cents against Covid statements cuts straight through the BS. Many insurance folk here in Oz are also still working from home. They…

The most powerful anti-viral for Covid is to not saturate the entire community with it.

"...Paul Kelly said rates of reinfections were expected to rise as not enough of the population had received a third booster shot." Is there a vaccine now that prevents infection? Did I miss something? https://t.co/KauJmCPOGG via…

For the umpteenth time, all of the diseases we immunised for before Covid were mostly not ‘severe’. We still didn’t let everybody catch them. Time for expert regulators to step outside the straitjacket framings of their political masters.…

I don’t remember life in Sydney pre-lockdown including pretty much every person and place I know swimming in viral soup. Wait until we see how ‘scarred’ they are 5-10 years from now, from repeated infection. https://t.co/oR5xV1myXU

Whether it’s climate, Covid or abortion, very loud minorities are holding sway over majority and expert opinion. That’s because the loud minorities understand political strategy, and the majority don’t. It’s smoke and mirrors, a massive…

Governments who wind back public health protections in favour of business activity, when a pandemic is surging, are demonstrating clear regulatory capture. They’re little more than point men and women for business. #auspol #covid19aus…

Data wonks, is there an easily accessible data source of Covid deaths by postcode, for Australia? #covid19aus

Stories of ‘personal responsibility’ public health. Relented and let my youngest go to a small sleepover, after 2 years. Says one of the kids was sick, coughing, ‘but wasn’t contagious’. I asked how they knew? ‘She coughed on her…

Over 1600 people have now died of Covid (not with, of) since the election. More vaccines and quarantine is good, but the vaccines don’t stop Covid, and quarantine is a bit moot when we have higher Covid density inside than outside…

At what point does this public health debacle end? When will those who tell the population that catching Covid is like a bit of flu be held to account? https://t.co/nKMzd9vl7i

NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye: "Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious…

The name of the elephant in the room is always Covid. https://t.co/NpTFws3ZYC

I wonder if the greatest gift for anti-vaxxers is the (failing) use of vaccines in this pandemic without supporting public health measures. We don't allow diseases for which we have vaccines to spread, just because we're vaccinated?…

Steven Moffat invented The Silence. Aliens who make everybody that encounters them forget everything, except for subtle deadly suggestions. The forerunner of the modern Covid minimiser. https://t.co/RRJ4w5YntR

Conservative politicians were already saying in early 2020 that their Covid strategy was to maintain public health measures ‘until vaccines are available’. Vaccines ARE public health measures, they only work in a wider context of control.…

I think it’s worthwhile to always re-remember that ‘living with’ Covid literally is ‘doing nothing’. It’s the triumph of the most disgusting spin and slogans over public health. https://t.co/InNoOZijE0

For those who cry ‘alarmist’ when Covid is described as a shitshow, what would concern you? A. More dead than World War 1, in 2 years? B. Mass infection, disease and death? C. Losing your Twitter platform of minimising trolls? Teachers say…

@michellegrattan any chance of you stirring up the somnambulist press gallery to force a government response on this ongoing carnage? Including refusing the 'this is deaths with, not from, Covid' spin politicians use, a blatant lie the ABS…

What makes it possible for governments to ignore public health processes in a pandemic is the suppression of information about what’s really going on. A short thread about strategy, about taking our society back. /1 #auspol #covid19aus All…

We follow the UK Covid strategy (do nothing) to the letter, so have a look how that’s going. In the UK the spin has rubbed off, people are seeing the herd immunity debacle for what it is - the politics of privilege pretending to do public…

Societies run by imitation. Power is really imitation, we copy those we admire. Our best weapon against Covid is ‘influencers’ acting against Covid. Often that’s musicians. What are they doing? Stroking their neglected egos at huge…

Planet Earth is like most planets, stone dead. It's that shimmering, gaseous, tiniest veneer of blue that is the difference. Air. Engineered by living things. What the Economy attacks, through climate change and now Covid. Dumb, hey.…

Action on Covid stopped because National Cabinet damaged federalism. States, who drive the public health response, are now bound to a bland, killing consensus. It’s a support group, convened not to end Covid but to end responsibility for…

Wastewater testing would help right now to assess the level of Covid in the community, given that RAT and PCR testing is a farce. As with everything Covid in NSW, it appears to have descended into minimising inaction and secrecy. Anybody…

BA.4 and BA.5 clearly feasting on the NSW community. And this based just on the pathetic numbers of PCR tests still being done. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7l2HPPViP9

Wormtongue in LOTR whispers magical bullshit in the ear of the king so that it becomes the king’s entire reality. His eyes cloud over, no longer taking in what’s happening. This is now Australia, suffering from sloganitis. Twitter is full…

Was reading the NSW Health mission on their Twitter page while accessing today's numbers. "Healthy people, now and in the future." Hats off to them for continuing to try, with government refusing to back public health. 23 more today who…

When was the last time any Australian politician, from any party or even an independent, mentioned Covid? When not explicitly asked about it. #auspol

OK journos, here's the primer for the next time you ask politicians why they're casually allowing tens of thousands of infections per day, and hundreds of deaths per week. Because they *will* BS you with 'those are deaths with Covid, not…

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol…

I was a teacher, more power to them for demanding better pay and conditions. The great enigma of this pandemic though has been the meek acceptance of mass infection of staff and students. Teacher unions were among the meek.…

Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir…

The new government wants 'vaccines and treatments' for Covid. Let's be Africa, who has few of either and is kicking our arse. O wait, they don't test much or collect data, you say? We've already got that bit covered. https://t.co/cO05F8uE27

Less than half of Australia has had a flu shot this year, despite free jabs and urgent messaging. Covid vaccines still stalled. Politicians did this, minimising the risk of infection for economic purposes. The public health system may not…

Many not coming forward for jabs now, since they were told to 'live with the virus', 'like the flu'. For many this = do nothing, what they normally do for flu. They're also not getting flu jabs. Covid minimisation is fostering a new…

The pandemic was 'over' as soon as the socio-economically advantaged felt safe. Always thus. And the disadvantaged do worse if they're unvaccinated or have co-morbidities? Bugger me if that isn't part of the definition of being…

Are there serious medical/public health professionals who genuinely still believe repeated reinfection with SARS2 will generate herd immunity? #covid19

Lots of talk from National Cabinet and their health advisers about a ‘new wave’ coming. The geographical metaphors are wrong, there’s not really any rising and falling here? No waves. It’s a mountain of persistent and growing infection. /1…

Two Covid reframings. 1) A ‘mandate’ isn’t somebody telling others what to do. It’s a community deciding on rules for the community. 2) It is a great idea to improve indoor air quality. But also, let’s look at why we have so many people in…

Minimising maths at work again. The shambles of other countries’ Covid public health efforts constantly used now to justify Australia killing over 7000 people since Christmas time. Because we’re still killing less than them, or something.…

Spent several hours in a small closed room with pretty much zero ventilation on Monday, with somebody who tested positive for Covid the next morning. I wore an N95. Escaped infection. I’m thinking the mask worked.

Personal Covid stories Part 2. My wife is a primary school teacher, I have 2 kids still at school. I work in an open office with several hundred people. We’ve just finished 2 tough school terms, masked, with HEPA filters and ventilation,…

National Cabinet and their senior health advisers presided over a complete stalling of Covid vaccination in their ‘opening up’. Flu vaccinations have been widely rejected too. And now this. We’re looking at the destruction of our public…

Governments and sympathetic experts have devoted most of their time in this pandemic to ‘messaging’ the low risk of Covid to populations. Having succeeded, they now use this as a reason to continue to do nothing. https://t.co/VqQlidcRbj

As I awake to another post-pandemic day, I wonder if all the people missing at work have just had a really tiring weekend.

Worth repeating that the true function of National Cabinet was to weaken the close link between Premiers and their public health situation and teams in each State, and force them to fight against the bland groupthink consensus of the…

A teacher friend is the sickest she’s ever been. On her second Covid infection, has been masked, is triple-vaxxed, is despairing. This is ‘personal responsibility’ pandemic action, individuals repeatedly smashed against the rocks by the…

Sharon Lewin this morning, quite correctly restating that the national Covid strategy is reduction in severe disease and death. That's what's tying our hands. We need it to be a public HEALTH strategy, against DISEASE. Against infection.…

One of my favourite data sites in the pandemic, for assessing local Covid cases. https://t.co/KwXspp2vqB

Phase D, final stage of the National Covid Plan, that we've arrived at. Um, 'minimise cases in the community'? Anybody seeing that, somewhere? And interesting that it says 'Managing Covid-19', not 'Living with Covid-19'. #auspol…

Listening to the car radio on the way home about how quickly communities have mobilised with the floods. That’s what Australia does, with fires too. It could do the same with Covid, if politicians and motivated experts stopped running…

Another friend, triple-vaxxed, experiencing their first Covid infection. Vomiting, splitting headache, body aching all over, fever. We have senior leaders and experts in this country wishing this on people multiple times per year. How long…

More minimising fun with numbers, this time the ABC. Look, Australia is doing well! We’re killing relatively far fewer than the pandemic bloodbath overseas! Maths and language are the biggest weapons of this pandemic. Have a look at this…

Last week a group of people I know were having a chuckle about me wearing a mask That group is now all home in bed with Covid. I'm sending them all my schadenfreude. https://t.co/6mpxq7sQdp

Hospitalisations and ICU numbers climbing steadily in NSW. Vaccinations (our apparent strategy) haven't budged in months. How much is NSW Cabinet paid? Is anybody doing anything? https://t.co/fsm81iSdL1

“We need to act now to slow the spread of the virus in the community.” (Kerry Chant, today.) Government not interested. It's fine for people to do fevered vomiting, with headaches & exhaustion, 3-4 times a year. While Covid potentially…

It costs $600 to get vaccinated against shingles, but we’re going to give $180 billion to people who don’t need it, in tax cuts.

In emergency operations centres politicians just get photo opportunities. The emergency is managed by experts. We do this for fire and floods, but for pandemics, the most lethal of all disasters, the experts get photo opportunities, and…

Brad Hazzard’s plea for wider eligibility for a 4th dose of vaccine would be more admirable, if the NSW Government’s only motivation for doing it wasn’t their determination to do nothing else. Let’s ‘follow the health advice’ again, and…

I think Peter did Australia a service with this Tweet. An articulate guy across much of what’s going on in society. But had absolutely no idea of the scale of the Covid disaster. Demonstrates so clearly the magnitude of the political…

In politics, what is popular gets done. It’s always been the job of a politician to make what needs to be done, popular. Covid minimising politicians refuse pubic health measures, saying they’re unpopular. But they made refusing them,…

Listening to Phil Coorey chat to Hamish McDonald on RN Breakfast, saying there's no way people would accept closing businesses again. Hey fellas, they're already broken, vast numbers sick. And is selling things more important than people…

Thank you ABC for putting faces to the statistics. Maths has been a key weapon of Covid minimisation. And language. These are the cannon fodder we've decided as a nation had to die to keep coffee shops open and airlines flying.…

Personal responsibility public health is an oxymoron. https://t.co/hgMhlAc1pL

"The pandemic isn't over", politicians say, in grave tones. Followed by...nothing. Like saying 'these fires and floods are out of control. Have a nice day.' https://t.co/feuZKorltt

Thanks to @SuffragetteLane for sharing this one. The magnitude of the catastrophe we may be in the middle of is light years from what the public is told. Also an excellent critique of public health professional failure, with lashings of…

Governments invented public health. They said to their experts 'find us a way to prevent widespread disease and death, so we can keep society going.' It's why we have local councils, for example, that was one recommendation. No 'balancing'…

The flood coverage, like bushfire coverage, is heavily about individual stories of loss. The ‘human tragedy’. More people die in a fortnight from Covid than died in these floods and the black summer bushfires combined. Property damage…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

More magical thinking. I’ll be glad of a 4th shot for my own protection, but shots aren’t the way out of this pandemic. Here’s an idea. Albo wants to emulate Hawke, with a business-unions accord on IR. How about using that same model to…

I don't know who coined 'vaxed and relaxed', but I love it. I got it from @lisa_iannattone. And also 'Infinite Covid' as a counter to the critics of 'ZeroCovid' .

A professor told me that the Chinese Covid strategy shows they have 'no regard for their own population'. It's curious that trying to stop their citizens becoming infected is a lack of regard, while the West deliberately infecting entire…

Longish quote about Marek's Diseases in chickens in next few Tweets, and then I wanted to ask those who understand vaccines if the Covid vaccines are 'leaky' in this same way, with the same possible consequences? (Thanks to @iko_iko11 and…

Covid removed all of them. Political journalists fiddling on their phones swapping their insider gossip won’t see or understand that. https://t.co/e7w1U8rls9

Newton’s 3rd law of pandemic action - for every proposed action, there is an equal and opposite obstructing reaction from a small group of Covid experts. The same pattern happening in every country. Whether it’s airborne spread, masks, or…

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP…

I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livestock. This isn’t an animal rights thing (though it is that too),…

Managed to book in a fourth dose for Monday. Vaccination is something that could easily be done outside, under a shade etc. Annoys me you have to go and sit inside a surgery or clinic that has had potentially infected people inside it all…

Here we go again. Solemnity of ‘Covid is not over’, followed by…nothing. ‘Please get vaxed’. Even though the vax won’t stop Covid. Covid will not (ever?) be over, if all we do is vax. https://t.co/li2wcXDOy5

NZ and Albo now parroting ‘personal responsibility’ too. It’s the personal responsibility of a political leader to lead a country out of a pandemic. Let’s have a new populism, one that rejects ALL politicians as populist windbags. #auspol…

Albo repeated this exact same drivel in a press conference this weekend. It killed thousands in NSW after Christmas. Politicians who don’t understand that public health is something THEY invented, staffed by THEIR staff, to beat pandemics,…

For progressive politicians frozen in the headlights of conservative Covid slogans, asking people to take ‘personal responsibility’ for a pandemic is like asking them to regulate air safety and road construction. #auspol #covid19aus

Hey @jacindaardern and @AlboMP, surrendering to the conservative spin that the only alternative to mass Covid infection is more government measures betrays your political traditions. Most people catch Covid in workplaces. Enforce WHS law…

Mark Butler on #insiders, saying ‘at this stage of the pandemic’ mandates aren’t needed. That must be the stage where everybody gets infected and thousands die. Maybe the mandates stopped that happening before. The Chief Health Officers…

There’s no such thing as choice in terms of whether to eliminate wide community spread of Covid. It’s only about time, the longer we delay it, the harder and more expensive it gets. You can’t function as a society with wide community…

Politicians and CHOs/CMOs seem all to be captured by the LNP framing of the pandemic. All believing you either lockdown/mandate things, or do nothing. But the public is everybody, make it a multi-layered response. /1 #covid19aus #auspol -…

Not 'mixed messaging', it's the use of vaccines as drugs rather than as part of an integrated public health strategy. Also pandemic leave was government funding business' failure to follow WHS requirements. The ALP should use that as a…

The genius of mandates is that they apply equally to all, irrespective of socioeconomic status or privilege. The law was designed to do that, it's a much more powerful tool than medicine in a pandemic.

Great segment on The Project, where a spokesperson for business says he prefers the advice of some prominent Australian doctors over the AHPPC, in arguing for fewer Covid protections. A critical insight into how key medical people are…

Today’s big Covid whinge from business reminds us again of the national benefactors they’ve been with the LNP in power for the past decade. Much easier to raid the Treasury than actually produce or invest in anything.…

Covid minimisers love to speak for ‘the people’. Like on masks, apparently ‘the people’ no longer support them. Thanks again to the ABS for skewering more of the minimising spin. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/EuG3PqNaOg

Climate change deniers concocted a deliberate Steve Bannon-type strategy to ‘flood the zone with shit’. Overwhelm and disorient the public discussion with junk science. This is exactly what Covid minimisers are doing now. Arguing ‘the…

Here’s @StevePriceMedia belting it out of the park. This is a lesson for everybody, keep it simple. Infecting the entire nation is unjustifiable and insane. The AIG - this is how Australian business wants to appear? #auspol #covid19aus…

From a friend. "A friend just got back to San Fran from a cruise. Required to test negative 3 days before. 50% ended up with Covid." Isn't living with the virus going well?

NZ is the same as here, masks required in some situations and not others. Business there (as here) is mostly exempt from having to provide or enforce masking. Always follow the money, in politics and in a pandemic. https://t.co/GX9Y9qAxrp

Omicron wave 1 was largely caused by the (then) pending federal election. Omicron waves 2 & 3 will be caused by the pending NSW and Victorian elections. It's why they won't act, for fear of spooking donors and voters. Never let…

Professor Ian Harris was speaking on RN about how increases in life expectancy over the past 150 years are overwhelmingly the result of public health measures, not medicine. The exact same public health (I'll add), an arm of government,…

I’m not a virologist, but so this really was just another minimising trick, to bury new variants as obscure sub-numberings inside Omicron? https://t.co/GxEhJWh9Re

The ALP is using the 'we inherited a trillion dollars of debt' line a lot to explain why it can't afford to do more on Covid. But retaining $180 billion in tax cuts to people who don't need them. Damaging the brand, Albo. Permanently. Do…

The major drop in life expectancy in the US (for example) because of Covid, in only 2 years, is pretty dramatic proof that public health is what shifts that metric. Not medicine, not hospitals. Population-level morbidity and mortality.…

We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

They’ve been ignoring public health basics from Day 1 of the pandemic, saying it’s about keeping people out of hospital. That’s a hospital management/mass disease strategy, not public health. The advisers should be held to account. #auspol…

More than any country, Australia knows how to mobilise as a community for a disaster. But rather than tap into that, effortlessly, political leaders imported culture war nonsense from the US and UK, saying Covid mobilisation was taking our…

It's excellent to see the penny dropping, the previous government's Covid response was largely about using its libertarian political ideology to replace basic public health practice. Those are *fundamentally* incompatible belief systems.…

Another busload dead. The personal responsibility pollies taking no personal responsibility for any of it. Their public disease strategy based on a herd immunity fantasy that has never happened anywhere, in history. #auspol #covid19aus…

'We inherited a trillion dollars of debt' - true. Also inherited - 8073 deaths from Covid. Since the election: - over 2400 more deaths - over 1.7 million more infections.

Albo is a good bloke. But for the love of our sanity, the best way to keep the costs of Covid action down is to suppression transmission. (Business should shoulder much of that load). The ‘Economy’ IS people. Infected people can’t work.…

Infections don’t come in ‘waves’. The virus doesn’t decide to infect in an alternating way. It just infects. What causes waves is us pretending the pandemic is over, then realising it isn’t. Over and over. It’s a dialectic between ‘it’s…

The James Webb telescope cost over $14 billion and allows us to see deep into space and time using infrared light. The National Cabinet Covid telescope cost over $300 billion, and can filter out wavelengths of infection and death,…

These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question…

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus Australia…

If the ALP thought like the LNP, they'd realise that the enormous pressure building on them on Covid is the PERFECT opportunity to ditch ridiculous tax cuts they don't believe in anyway. #auspol

We had quite a few selling the 'Omicron will be mild and end the pandemic' hopium here too. At what point will people be held to account? https://t.co/D8HK49cAAa

Some mock 'Zero Covid' as an ambition, telling people it means 'no Covid'. It should be called Net Zero Covid, like net zero for climate. Still Covid in pockets, but balanced by control elsewhere. It's how we manage pretty much all…

Imagine the work the NSW Government has done over the school holidays to make schools Covid safe for beginning of term 3 next week. I said imagine. There was no work.

Emergency payments can’t go on forever, sure. So, do we: A) stop the payments, or B) stop the emergency? Choosing A gives you a seat on National Cabinet. #auspol #covid19aus

If you feed chooks and cows a constant diet of antibiotics, you can keep them working for you while up to their bellies in their own shit. If we copy this UK and US Covid idea, prepare to get a warm belly. #auspol #covid19aus…

The reason we ‘can’t afford’ to beat Covid, and the reason most of us catch it, is work. Business. Covid is a WHS issue, but we’re told it’s up to government or us personally, to fix. As always, we’re privatising the good times, and…

If a business can’t afford WHS of a standard that prevents Covid spread, should we: A. close the business and charge it under WHS law, or B. allow workers to get infected, and to infect their families, some of whom will die? Right now…

The REAL problem is the vast number of workers without sick leave. Again business is socialising its losses onto us. Whether it’s non-existent WHS, or strip-mined wages and working conditions, Covid remains a creation of business. Of the…

Unsurprisingly, National Cabinet decided to fix the emergency payout problem by fixing the payout, not the emergency. Kicking the Covid down the road. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/tjBk4vAVCX

A pandemic response has to challenge the status quo, because ‘normal life’ is what the virus feeds off. The discomfort people like @YouAreLobbyLud cause is like a vaccine, priming our social immune system to respond. It could save your…

The Herd Immunity Taskforce met yesterday and affirmed its commitment to a fantasy that hasn’t stopped a single pandemic in all recorded history. For an encore it tweaked a few things to ‘get us through the winter’, no doubt reassured by…

It’s remarkable how often the health advice is a verbatim match with what politicians say in the week leading up to that advice. Watch the pollies when the advisers speak, it suggests the true direction of information flow. #covid19aus…

Spare me more journalists with no public health expertise, we’ve had that for over 2 years. One referring to the ‘emergency’ phase of the pandemic, in the past tense. Back when we infected and killed hardly anybody. #insiders

It is is absolutely irrelevant who does or doesn’t want to wear masks, or any other measure. Unless we stop the infections, we’ll never leave the pandemic. A pandemic is defined by NUMBER OF INFECTIONS. Do your bloody homework. #insiders

Would we ever say ‘we’re living with crime, and just making sure we have enough cells for serious crime’? Of course not. Not least because accepting low-level crime at a mass scale destroys your society. And even that will be healthier for…

In truth there is a herd immunity in play, with Covid. The immunity of the developed nation herd to reality. #covid19aus https://t.co/QsoU5ULjOe

The line that really gets me is that ‘people won’t tolerate’ any more action against Covid. As if we can choose what reality is, like reality gives a shit what we can tolerate. We’re not within light years of ration books. That was real…

Climate and Covid deniers are often the same people. They already support carbon capture and storage. A simple HEPA air purifier will do Covid capture and storage. Not a giant leap for mankind.

Decisions are not made ‘by the people’, even in a democracy. The people follow the lead of somebody, be it leaders, experts, influencers etc. The opposition to masks and other public health measures is being led, but is described as…

If we need expert advice on how to manage Covid at home, then it shouldn't be being managed at home. #auspol https://t.co/VjKKAuTRyN

This is what NSW provides as guidance for those who get Covid. While you're responsible for notifying all of your personal contacts, it's entirely up to your workplace whether they tell any of your workmates. They rarely tell anybody,…

"The Prime Minister explained Australia would move away from isolation mandates when the Australian public develops a 'greater acceptance' of staying at home when sick or with flu-like symptoms." lol, the mandates are to teach us to stay…

Broken record, but the options to beat Covid aren't: 1. government spends tens of billions more, or 2. the public accepts mass infection. We've been played, as we were for climate change. The answer is: 3. business funds the basic WHS,…

The NSW Premier goes to the emergency Herd Immunity Taskforce meeting to discuss Covid being out of control, with a suggestion to relax protections even more. Like the UK and US conservatives, tax cuts will be the next ‘cure’. Complete…

Where we are now with Covid, with calls for ‘personal responsibility’, is a road we already travelled with climate change. Not a coincidence, the same fuckers using the same strategies. Collective problems as individual problems IS…

Another politician on the radio at lunch time, saying schools must stay open. Just looking through my press clippings for any politician (or health adviser) saying in this pandemic 'children should not be infected with a pandemic virus'.…

Most people catch Covid in a workplace. By law employers are supposed to move Heaven and Earth to prevent that from happening. Employers are not short of a quid, even during the pandemic. We're being played. https://t.co/fkYmVZyAOH

Many say that it's difficult for an employee to prove they caught Covid at work. It is. But in NSW at least, for a long list of 'prescribed jobs', they don't have to. The employer has to prove they *didn't* catch it at work. #auspol…

Public health paradoxes. Where we use ‘personal choice’ in banking, or supermarkets etc., despite the ideology of choice everything coagulates into a handful of monopolies. Give people ‘freedom’ and they *always* reinstate hierarchy. Why?…

We're following a market-based Covid strategy. The infected are individual Covid customers, with the invisible hand magically coalescing us all into something resembling public health action. Regulators ensure competition by breaking up…

In plain English, our Covid strategy is ‘we can’t afford to stop people getting sick’. Submarines? Fine. Huge tax breaks to property investors? Fine. Tax cuts to the wealthy? Fine. Stopping population-level illness? ‘We inherited a…

Any business claiming reintroduction of public health measures would be catastrophic for their business should be subject to an immediate WHS audit, to understand why statutory workplace safety requirements aren't already in place.

Public education campaigns. The problem with Covid isn’t public ignorance. It’s political negligence, a refusal to lead a public heath response. The public is no more likely to spontaneously self-organise a public health response than they…

Something no journalist I’ve seen is asking is ‘what’s the endgame of Australia’s Covid strategy?’ Given the vaccines don’t stop infections, and infections always lead to hospitalisations, deaths and economic havoc. #auspol #covid19aus

Personal responsibility public health. Overheard yesterday, a woman who’s recovering from Covid saying her husband had tried desperately to catch it off her, so they could get it over with and go to Fiji.

The pandemic isn’t mass stupidity. It’s the extension of privatised market-based politics, to public health. We already have privatised healthcare, transport, education, banking, defence, etc. The same political operating system responded…

Favourite personal responsibility public health things. Workers returning after only 7 days' isolation, masked, but removing the masks to eat and drink at their desk, a metre away from others. The whole country should have the Benny Hill…

Australia demonstrates so well that there are no waves of infection. The waves are public health action, of varying intensity. We are the waves. Descending wave is strong action, ascending weak. Prolonged strong action is flat.…

There’s a collective form of bipolar disorder. We’re seeing it now with Covid. We keep attributing ‘waves’ to the virus, but the virus isn’t an independent entity ‘coming at us’ in waves. The waves are alternating collective euphoria…

One of the reasons Covid is such a mess is that the previous government medicalised it, refusing to listen to a vast range of other expertise about what causes and stops pandemics. Medicine is where a failed pandemic strategy sends people.…

Is it too naive to ask when boosters and anti-virals will turn the death trends around? Can we make it a KPI? It feels like just waiting for the 'wave' to pass is what we did all the other times. #auspol #covid19aus

In an era of DIY public health, cough syrup is a good investment. Now sold out year-round. (Canada, mid-summer.) https://t.co/QwxASQhAkQ

We don't get to choose. No pandemic has ever been allowed to run. It destroys societies. Also why we invented public health. A 'living with the virus' strategy is really just a delayed elimination strategy. There's no choice here, except…

Neoliberal governments despise public health systems, and trashing services so as to be able to sell them off is 50 years old. No Tory is losing a minute’s sleep over this, they see Covid as a tremendous opportunity to keep destroying…

The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody…

The business press, joining forces with the Covid minimising loons, to describe the immune system as a muscle that gets stronger with exercise. https://t.co/H55cKoK8Xh

Still waiting for Australian teaching unions to get serious about Covid. https://t.co/CmjjMtJsTa

Southend is deserted, going broke. Combination of Covid and Brexit. Part of the global libertarian movement of unwinding centuries of human progress, to pretend all of civilisation is the consuming individual. Human evolution ends as a…

Can we please have just one example from history of a pandemic we ‘lived with’? One that doesn’t involve mass death, disease and social chaos.

The infinite Covids always championed a model of cocooning aged care and other ‘vulnerables’ while the rest of us wallowed in continuous Covid infection, kept at work with vaccination. They’re not even bothering with the cocoon now.…

Many are booking “revenge travel” after pandemic restrictions stopped them living life to the fullest - Brent Novak, Flight Centre. Whole nations of adolescents express their boredom with an existential threat. About 20 million now not…

Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask, in most indoor locations. So…where’s the mandate to reflect…

I think this maybe shows the tension between medical and public health thinking. Medical ‘management’ is focused on risk to the individual. But the greatest risk from Covid infection can be risk of infecting others, and accurate testing is…

The huge Omicron wave over Christmas was the previous PM in pre-election mode. NSW and Vic are allowing catastrophic infection levels because their leaders, like Morrison, fear spooking voters. Covid will only be over when we get…

Saying ‘non-severe’ disease requires no action for a pandemic virus is the equivalent, again, of saying all crime should go unchecked, provided it’s not serious. Or all assault that requires no hospitalisation. Etc. #covid19aus…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

This is the Covid equivalent of a first homebuyer's grant. Government money used to 'prime' the Economy, but actually making the situation much worse. Thankfully now expired, but with the damage already done. The purpose of the scheme was…

A useful graphic to determine which States have elections next. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/j2DH9FZDPc

It's interesting to compare absolute and per capita case numbers. When you do it becomes clear what the true function of National Cabinet is. Absolute numbers first, suggesting some States doing better than others. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

It seems the 'new phase' of the pandemic in Australia is just the old phase from the UK and US. Maybe we got a discount for it being second-hand. https://t.co/LBfpk8ZsXf

Social behaviour is led, it isn’t spontaneous. Why are Australians not wearing masks? Because they were led to refuse them. People ‘take their lead’ from…leaders. The politicians who led the ignore Covid and masks strategy? There they are…

The LNP, unnecessarily contributing to fear of masks and public health measures in the community. https://t.co/7U0FPLWwFl

Another favourite - ‘fear mongering’. People who use the phrase say we shouldn’t fear Covid, while they relentlessly prosecute fear mongering campaigns against public health protections. You have to be truly insane to fear protections more…

We’ve shot past 70 deaths per day now. Still climbing. Australia’s most lethal disaster was Spanish Flu. We’ll easily go past the deaths in that pandemic in 2022, with no controls in place to stop this continuing into 2023 and beyond.…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

The cure for Covid is fresh air. Imagine arguing against it.

If you get a Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak in your building, this will happen. People will be evacuated, the air system will be sanitised. But right now people wander through office buildings infected and shedding a lethal virus. Nothing…

All great progress in public health begins with doctors, and ends with engineers. Right now we’re destroying doctors and nurses, because nobody has called in the engineers. Providing fresh, clean air is not difficult, for engineers.…

There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId…

As we move on to the ‘next phase’ of the pandemic, the mass illness, economic disruption and death phase. https://t.co/y6XT2KOAht

Here’s our real inflation problem. Might hit 80 tomorrow. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2jv6JlR1Yd

I’m sure many Covid minimisers do actually care about more than their own interrupted lifestyles. It’s just that their humanity is asymptomatic.

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

Health departments surveying the public to decide what public health actions to undertake. Business groups say just do it. The ‘public’ is not some pre-existing group to be surveyed. It mobilises differently for every issue. If it’s…

Why waves will never end while minimisation is in play. Every single time a wave peaks and descends, it’s taken as evidence that measures weren’t needed. Which just sows the seed for the next wave. #auspol #covidq9aus…

Damn those lockdowns discouraging childhood vaccination. https://t.co/nHwvXZLyeW

Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics, for her studies on how groups best manage a ‘commons’ i.e. resources that are shared by a community, of whatever size. Air is an example, and thus Covid. She distilled it to 8 principles. See…

While personal responsibility is not the way out of the pandemic, it can help. We could simply refuse to go to any inside gathering, be it restaurants, concerts, conferences etc. Crash the economy, the only thing that will get the…

Respiratory pandemics are like earthquakes, disasters that are almost entirely an artefact of the built environment. All fixable, if made a priority. https://t.co/3kF1nrIByG

Finally starting to see news articles that don’t sugar-coat the magnitude of the disaster we’re living, and the criminal sidelining of basic public health practice. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DAyNMexvch

Politicians unilaterally decided we would all be infected. Consent comes into play here, as it does for intimate relationships. Unlike those, SARS2 infection crosses all degrees of intimacy, from strangers to lovers. The freedom to not be…

Managing risks in workplaces has well-established procedures. We’re not using them in a coordinated way. Covid is a WHS crisis much more than a medical crisis. Too many businesses avoiding basic legal requirements. #auspol #covid19aus…

Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of…

Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1…

Football, of all varieties, seems one of the most powerful ways to ignore reality. The UK is on its knees, but football keeps everybody drunk on the hopium. Here in Oz football was one of the Covid dambusters. Its team sports mechanism is…

The shift from mental health problems being almost ignored pre-pandemic to them now becoming epidemic/endemic is partly by design. Political libertarians gaslighting us to believe government and business clusterfucks are all problems in…

Exponential increase in house prices did known damage to the 'vulnerable' for decades. We did nothing about it, in fact government egged it on. Exponential societies need exponential growth to function. Why they won't fight Covid.…

When you read the history of public health, governments invented it to DO the ‘weighing up’. It’s spin that public health is something to be ‘balanced’ against ‘economic’ considerations. Like climate balanced against the Economy.…

The breakdown of inter-generational society, the flattering of the ‘circle of life’. Speaking to 20-somethings can be a window into where society is heading. Yesterday: ‘so how long are you going to keep wearing that mask?’, with a clear…

So far, touch wood, still one of the few with Long-NoCovid.

In libertarian land, public health achievement is freezing the numbers in the top 2 rows, while the numbers in the bottom row spin like you're playing the pokies. https://t.co/YQGmhyp9rF

Would be great if we stopped reporting any part of a wave, going up, peaking or going down, as better than any other part. It's all wave, and all generating the next one. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/5Cl2QK0HmG

In rich nations, it seems we assumed a pandemic would be like a football game that gets washed out, a temporary inconvenience. Rather than a Battle of the Somme type event. 'One more push', almost the exact words the NSW Premier uses for…

Some say the red arrow represents the point where ordinary Australians had had enough of fighting Covid. No. It's where the previous PM began his run for the election. JobKeeper ended months earlier at the purple arrow. Most had not been…

The plundering of Australia's gas reserves by fossil fuel multinationals is populism at its finest. The royalties? We're giving it away. How did this happen? Politicians signed contracts they didn't understand. They bypassed the officials…

More evidence of complete regulatory capture of government. In the UK Covid has now created ‘apocalyptic’ conditions in healthcare. The response from the governing libertarians? ‘We need more tax cuts’. They’re not a party, they’re a host…

‘The public is over public health action’ message is not descriptive, it’s performative. Spin, designed to create that outcome. Just as months of ‘live with the virus’ messaging softened people up to ‘open up’ (we weren’t closed).…

Some of us have been trying to get focus on stringency data for more than 2 years. It shows that elimination of a pathogen is the best ‘economic’ thing to do as well. Unsurprisingly, public health systems, invented by governments, save the…

Young adults in a workplace told me they’ve been avoiding ‘anybody who has kids’. They’re the people at work they see getting repeat infections. Hello experts who tell us kids catch Covid in the community, not in school. Infecting our kids…

Another day of political leaders, captured by big donors, letting the planet be incinerated, and a pandemic run completely unchecked. If you’re an expert helping on either count, does it get boring counting the pieces of silver every day?…

How you mobilise a public for a good cause. I'd bet 9 out of 10 people who donate to Jeans for Genes wouldn't be able to tell you specifically where their money goes. Or red noses. They don't check. But apparently even a free mask in a…

Memories of when we had a functioning public health system, so long ago (2018). https://t.co/89WOS498qH

Follow the actuaries. It's the epidemiology of Covid stripped of political spin and assumptions. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/XsdBeXr1vI

I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again…

Hey journos, how about a question to one of the experts who repeatedly tell you that Covid isn’t spread much in schools? To see which triple somersault with double twist new minimisation they can come up with. #auspol…

Even if it’s true (it isn’t) that ‘Australians won’t tolerate more public health protections’, so what? I was a teacher, most kids would rather do nothing at school all day. It’s not an option. If you put your hand up for election, do your…

How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded…

For the first time in 2.5 years, I’ve caught something. Dunno what it is yet, though identical symptom-wise to what my wife and youngest brought home from school last week. I was as ‘personally responsible’ as a person could be. But…

Med folk. I’ve read that vaccinated people will tend to show symptoms earlier, because their immune system is primed to recognise SARS2 infection. But being PCR tested while having strong symptoms should still be a pretty definitive test?…

The Carnot cycle for heat engines isn’t a bad way to think about Covid waves. Pistons going up and down by analogy are infections going up and down. But the down cycle is a recharging for the next up. Every part of the cycle continues the…

Those now adding more lead to the public health saddlebags by suggesting ventilation improvements should have a clinical trial first - when did we do a clinical trial for ‘living with the virus’? The costs of which are population-wide and…

A friend tested both RAT and PCR positive. Two days later had another PCR, tested negative. Poor swabbing technique for the second? It feels like widely varying degrees of vaccine- and infection-caused immunity in people might be making…

The first privatised pandemic can learn from multiple privatised wars. Most modern wars, like Ukraine, are really big trade shows for private arms manufacturers. Major powers become vehicles for the introduction of new products from the…

Another false binary in this pandemic is government funding furloughs, versus letting the virus rip. Why aren’t the businesses and schools people returned to after furloughs safer from Covid? What is the actual point of WHS? #auspol…

The gravitational attraction of National Cabinet solidarity, creating a public health black hole from which we can’t escape.#covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/GJQN2UsG5v

From the RBA’s own timeline history. The ‘economy’ was invented in the 1950s. By the 1960s the major responsibilities of elected governments, as highlighted, were largely flick-passed to the moneylenders. And thus we reach today, where we…

Polio was eliminated in Australia in 2000. It took 44 years, after introduction of the vaccine. It was mild in the overwhelming majority who were infected. A society reshapes everyone’s life to protect the vulnerable. An economy isolates…

Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’). Quarantined for nearly 30 years for being an asymptomatic superspreader of typhoid. Horrifying. Today asymptomatic carriers of Covid can live freely, while those who want to avoid infection have to quarantine…

Just as workplaces no longer publish salaries, to suppress wages, they also suppress information about Covid infections at work, under cover of a manufactured concern for privacy. To counter this normalisation, employees should speak…

The debates about individual and collective rights to me begin in the wrong place. Like that joke about being given directions, 'well I wouldn't start from here'. All the talk about 'balancing' the two, or prioritising one over the other,…

Lethal Stupidity: How the Palaszczuk government’s COVID response has thrown Queenslanders under… by @ColinKinner https://t.co/pWVeRFM9Q2

Thanks to @OrinCordus. 'Lockdowns' = people at home. To understand why the Economy folk fight lockdowns so viciously, read this. The Economy can't tolerate 'home', it was built on the destruction of place. My constant theme. /1…

Surprising Covid hasn't led to a remake of The Good Life. A show about reclaiming agency in life, centred on your home. Often called 'self-sufficiency', but it's not that. You can't live 'off the grid', without a grid. Just about shifting…

Testing, again. I'm in my 6th day of what feels like a head cold. Have tested 5 times for Covid in those 6 days, PCR on days 2 and 5, RATS on most other days. All negative. I see so many people in this situation not sure where the 'all…

Adolescence is a modern invention, emerging between 1910 and 1940 in America with the building of high schools. This social invention changed everything. The culture of high schools gradually became the culture of society itself. The…

Dr Coleman, CHO from the ACT. What's this 'stable period' she talks about, did I miss something? 'We don't report daily numbers for any other condition'. None of those is a pandemic, seems obvious? #auspol #COVID19Aus…

Binaries aren't real, and you can always find the empirical proof of it. Like 'lockdowns' v 'freedom'. Removing collective mandated protections just shifts those to the individual level. Locking down is replaced with locking up.…

Such a good point to counter the minimisers who are progressively stripping away all Covid data now as well. https://t.co/c9ViMaAWgu

"Everything that goes wrong in a nation first goes wrong in the heads of those who dominate it." Monbiot superb here on what happens when you elect governments who don't believe in government. Cost of living, Covid - all caused by the same…

Clearly determined to head-off public health action from Day 1. He wanted joint health and finance portfolios, to him this was an economic emergency, not a health emergency. Unlike the UK we managed to remove the vampire squid from the…

I remember many saying a few weeks ago that a cumulative death curve can only go up, so it going up didn’t matter. Meantime, people paid 6-figure salaries in public health tell us every day that Covid is now domesticated, like flu. Who’s…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

I thought Series 8 of Game of Thrones was the worst ending to a story I’d ever seen. But this writing team’s Covid adaptation may surpass it. https://t.co/9RSfx3FCKN

The concern for child mental health in this pandemic, and the assertion not being at school damages it. Here’s the last (2015) major survey on this. About 1 in 7 females aged 16-17 had considered suicide. About 1 in 20 had actually tried…

NSW has spent a fortune installing security fencing around schools, ostensibly to prevent trespass and vandalism. But the fences are also to keep kids in, to assist with absenteeism. Tell me the story again about lockdowns taking away…

To this day not once have teachers, the actual professionals in schools, been asked to advise on Covid in schools. Instead government-friendly paediatricians and infectious disease doctors are seen as the experts. https://t.co/5e1mKQ0gI3

The ‘new phase’ of the pandemic National Cabinet talks about, the who cares how many people get infected and die phase. https://t.co/lkn9HWkqg5

Since Australia adopted a ‘prevention of severe disease and death’ strategy, there’s been orders of magnitude more of both. The proportion getting access to ICU treatment has also plummeted. If National Cabinet was a corporate board, it’d…

Illustration of how the pandemic is intrinsically political. The greatest difference in ‘epidemiology’ here? The political beliefs of the different nations. Same virus. In Oz, the loss of control of the virus in 2021 was entirely due to…

Here’s one from the front-line of the RCT on neoliberal and libertarian political beliefs. Person sells own pension to pay for cost of living explosion, then dies of Covid, leaving children orphaned. https://t.co/6ROxH9tboU

Two things jump out here. Firstly the high number of deaths even in younger age groups. And also how much more lethal Omicron was than Delta, in Australia, despite desperate attempts to spin the opposite belief. #covid19aus #auspol…

Uncanny that taking ‘personal responsibility’ in a pandemic nearly always ends up looking like taking collective responsibility. People banding together to empirically disprove the nonsense libertarian political beliefs of our time.…

The political libertarian fantasy of gated communities of the vulnerable, shielded from Covid, nicely shot down here. And to go further, because the fact it doesn’t (and can’t) work also empirically disproves the core belief of that…

The sad calculus here is whether increased vaccine efficacy will drive the same shift we’ve seen throughout the pandemic. Towards a further reduction in public health measures, and an escalation of immune escape, illness and death.…

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other…

The Ministerial fiddling gets all the populist attention. But the previous PM had been covering all of the bases, with Covid. First escalating Brendan Murphy to Department Secretary, who then supervises the CMO and TGA.…

But WHY did Morrison do this? Many have been saying why for more than 2 years. The same reason he set up National Cabinet. He was in emergency mode to head off a proper public health response, to Covid. Like Perrottet, he saw Covid as a…

While media attention is on deception in senior public positions, can we add medical and public health professionals advocating to let a pandemic virus spread in an uncontrolled way? #covid19aus https://t.co/b2KZugpmKe

I don’t want to join the pile-on against institutions. Politicians corrupt institutions. But for Australia too, the job is disease control and prevention. Not death control and hospital bed management. A society that is widely diseased is…

I love this re-framing. We should be ‘learning to live with the protections’, rather than ‘learning to live with the virus’. Why would any sane society pick the second? #covid19aus https://t.co/g29r8dHhoR

Still waiting for those horrified with China’s ‘authoritarian lockdowns’ to explain where we’d get all of our manufactured goods, without them. https://t.co/FECzJOwORV

Australia shifted from Zero Covid to Net-Zero Covid. Net-Zero Covid is the culling of unemployable vulnerables. Economically that’s a ‘balanced’ approach.

Teaching friends say they’re having to test sick kids at school for Covid, and send them home if they test positive. Some parents aren’t bothering. Governments allow the parents to not bother.

Modern conservatives take processes like public health and make them debating topics. Society then gets absorbed in the debates, rather than asking the simple question - why is this even a matter for discussion? Passengers don’t debate how…

When you frame public health action politically as an assault on peoples’ freedoms, this is what you produce. Easy to blame the suggestible people who get caught up in the spin, but you need to blame the people who do the framing.…

If I want a (self-funded) shingles vaccine, why should I have to present to a GP practice to get the prescription? Don’t they have enough to do? Plus Covid risk. That’s 2 appointments, one to get the script, another to have the vaccine…

Daily Telegraph today, UK. Nearly 190,000 Brits dead (so far), but the ‘society is an economy’ crowd is already lobbying to stop public health action for future pandemics too. Their refusal to implement protections created ‘lockdowns’,…

Current leaders would take Covid seriously if they could privatise air. Air is the last of the ‘commons’, the last social good that can’t be appropriated by any individual or group. Commons in land and water are long gone, now big earners.

Real wealth comes from saving, not investing. Investing is speculative gambling, driven by exponentials. A society that saves can afford to shelter from threats, like pandemics. A society that doesn’t sees saving (‘lockdowns’) as an…

ABS analysis of 2020 national accounts. Notice the enormous subsidy to business (the pink), and subsequent big jump in profits (orange), which in turn drove inflation. Compensation of employees fell below 50% for the first time since 1959.…

Who lost during lockdowns. Households and businesses were very often wealthier than they’d ever been. It was the economy of scale of the State invested in people and business, rather than siphoned off as tax cuts to the wealthy. The…

The speed with which Covid became global is indicative of the hyper-mobility of human populations in 2022. I call it the ‘market on-ramp’, nations were transformed into economic markets. It should concern us that there is no inertia to…

AIHW’s “Australia’s Health 2022” concludes as in the image. It also states that while 2020 and 2021 outcomes show continuing good health for Australia, this was dependent upon the strong action it took to fight Covid. No ‘the pandemic is…

A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off. Some quite simple changes would change our society…

All pandemics are social, from Day 1. Viruses don’t go viral, we spread them in our social activity. The main argument of the BMJ piece appears to be that pretending problems don’t exist has worked before, so that’s our best guide now.…

The Covid minimisers used the climate change denial script almost to the letter. And we still get bogged down seeing it as a health/science issue, as we also debate climate science. That was the strategy, to distract us from the true…

If we devolve some responsibility for risk to individuals, they need information. Bushfires kill hardly anybody. Covid kills hundreds per week. We’re shutting down information we provide, for Covid. It’s not devolution of risk, it’s…

I forget who Tweeted this pic, sorry. For those who think ‘personal responsibility’ is the way out of the pandemic. They don’t believe it, it’s just a slogan to enable doing nothing. https://t.co/fJ4F1j8dNi

Some public health professionals assure me that the next ‘stage’, of forget-infect-sicken-kill, is best practice. I still wonder why PH is a discipline, if all it means is let everybody get infected, get sick and die.…

Some claim the greatest epidemic in human history is the surge in Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) in the 20th century. Heart disease is (many don’t realise) mostly unknown before that century. This may be an example of the danger of the idea…

Paul Ewald has suggested infectious causes for our main chronic diseases. So while we notice big acute disease events, like pandemics, we maybe miss the possible chronic disease these infections go on to cause. Here are 2 tables of…

Not really getting any better, is it? Still a busload dead a day, in NSW. Not one word from the NSW Government, not one question to them from journalists about this production line of death, month after month. #auspol #covid19aus…

Great thread, on a favourite theme of mine. The main game may be the sequelae, the acute infection phase could be just the overture. Past history suggests pandemics play out with chronic disease for the following century at least.…

I’m trying to figure out if this thread is circular reasoning. The mystery to be solved is non-Covid excess deaths. Suggested solution is overloaded A&E. But why is A&E overloaded? https://t.co/NWJPGgAt16

Yes. Calling excess deaths ‘Covid excess deaths’ and ‘non-Covid excess deaths’ seems like a re-spinning of ‘dying from or dying with Covid’. Excess deaths is the way that binary was put to bed, so no surprise minimisers are having another…

The masses organising to not pay energy bills isn’t the ‘personal responsibility’ the neolibs had in mind, I’m guessing. They prefer the personal responsibility of going to work in a shit, low-paid job, to get infected with Covid.…

Given National Cabinet is doing nothing about Covid, we can only assume they won’t release the minutes because nothing is discussed. It’s a photo-op. https://t.co/CIav9YmuYM

My expert analysis of excess deaths. Pandemics are surpassed maybe only by supervolcanoes and asteroid impacts in causing death. If you’re in a pandemic, a lot more people than normal will get sick and die. Until you end the pandemic.…

Chris Minns, opposing strikes in NSW. Typical modern progressive, completely house-trained by conservative ideology, the best offer to the public being a (supposedly) more compassionate version of the same ideology. The ALP full supporters…

The reason we don’t see stronger action against Covid. The mostly meaningless word ‘globalisation’ is the stripping away of all sovereignty and territorial and cultural definitions of society, and replacement by the unfettered flow of…

The neolibs (i.e. wealthy donors) are already gearing up for the next pandemic. And there’ll be none of that bedwetting public health nonsense next time, if they win this argument. https://t.co/32qcFCtg6O

Turns out ‘balancing the economy against Covid’ in the US put everything on one end of the see-saw. https://t.co/FvkRkCUC3X

Survivor - Covid is now in its 3rd year, and producers introduced a lovely twist with survival experts telling all the contestants not to try to survive at all. (And kid you not, the actual TV show originated in Sweden.)…

Experts can be such patsies. As if compressing isolation periods represents any sort of public health progress. Just tell your political masters ‘sorry, this is bullshit, act to reduce transmission’. https://t.co/aKyffZhNUr

“Treasurer Jim Chalmers has flagged that tackling the impact of long-COVID will be on the table at next week’s jobs and skills summit.” Jim, you could reduce the number of people catching Covid. No ‘impact’ of long-Covid, if people don’t…

Governments and schools have been very good at suppressing details of Covid impacts on education. But the evidence is there, if you look. https://t.co/yhVsVql0f6

This 7th ending of the pandemic in Australia is headlining the Spring festival of stupid, starting in only a few days. Nothing like sunshine after a long winter to deactivate what little critical thought we have left.…

This is the US. But this is exactly what the previous government was doing here, and National Cabinet was a crucial part of the strategy. At first Premiers (representing public health departments) resisted. But they’re all now lined up…

I think there’s an assumption that the huge Covid death burden this year was mostly aged care residents. But they’re barely 25% of the total. The other 75% were practising personal responsibility public health. Do not try this at home.…

There isn’t a clearer way to see that politics that attacks government itself and its institutions, such as public health, is the cause of this pandemic. Strip mining the economies of scale of collective institutions leaves individuals…

I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is…

Some say saturation infection here since late-2021 is us catching up with the rest of the world. ‘Reaping’. But compare the blue and green lines in those two periods of time. We are criminally worse relative to everybody else now than we…

The US, UK and India were famous Covid outliers, with uncontrolled tsunamis of infection. The democidal debacle overseen by our National Cabinet since late-2021 puts them all in the shade. There must be consequences for this collapse of…

NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective aims. Name even one ambition societies currently have, of this magnitude? Short 🧵 /1 https://t.co/ShW1F6Cqkj One of the most telling…

The jobs and skills summit may end up being a Covid summit. 140+ people all sharing the same space over 2 days.

The origins of the 5-day isolation period (down from 10 at the time) in the US. Any half-decent journalist could trace the lobbying behind the NSW Premier’s obsessive push for the same reduction in isolation period. #auspol #covid19aus…

National Cabinet members only comment on Covid to suggest removing protections. More than 11,000 Australians are dead from Covid this year. How is this not the largest news story in modern Australian history? 11,000! https://t.co/TSqsrmyn5Q

I think I said last week, if you want to beat Covid, get rid of football. You'd hate to think the PM supports this nonsense just so one of his beloved Rabbitohs can play this weekend. But nothing would surprise any more.…

In the world's first privatised pandemic, 'lockdowns' didn't disappear. They were privatised. Society would cease to function without at least some prevention of infection. All the anti-lockdown libertarians did was shift that process to…

Another favourite is people who come back from the US or Europe and prattle on about how ‘they’re just getting on with it’ (Covid). Meaning they’re ignoring it, and here in Australia we’re ‘behind’ because we’re not ignoring Covid enough.…

Re-watched this on the weekend. A whole planet mobilising to rescue one human in distress. It reminded me of what public health used to be, before we privatised it. https://t.co/OrS8TySXSc

Some public health experts say a pandemic is over when people stop talking about it, and countries stop fighting it. Imagine them advising on school bullying, ‘just keep it to yourself, and we’ll stop the school doing anything about it’.…

Covid minimisers inhabit the same universe as tabloid journalism. They know individual stories like this are the most powerful weapon, politically. Why you never hear them now, they bury them in statistics. Then they bury the statistics.…

Most Covid minimisers believe in Covid, it’s just that they want to privatise it. Like they have education, energy, childcare, water and other non-pandemic health care. The Covid debacle is just the latest privatisation debacle. The…

Which HCWs does the HSU represent, that a solution to losing pay is get infected, rather than fix sick leave? I thought global teaching unions' non-response to Covid was bad. We have a new winner. https://t.co/IPdahz6Xvw

For over 70 years there's been a research program to eliminate the common cold. The Covid minimisers like to say we need to live with Covid, because that's what we do for other infectious diseases. Horseshit, we fight them. /1 #covid19aus…

One of the greatest cons of the pandemic is the continued ignoring of one basic fact. That a pandemic is defined by number of INFECTIONS. Not hospitalisations. Not deaths. It’s infection that will also cripple beloved economies. #auspol…

“In a pandemic, scientific advancements and modern medicine don’t matter if people won’t take it.” Matt Koci, virologist. People won’t take it because the politics of our day framed public health action as oppression. Progressive politics…

“We have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick, you can go to work.” NSW Premier. The new 'just like the flu'. Except nobody caught flu 4 times a year. Nobody has months of annual sick leave.…

Covid freedom trolls notably aren’t out enjoying their apparent freedom. They’re here, continuously baiting civil society. It’s sponsored, deliberate propaganda.

Albo is like Biden. Tricked into implementing conservative Covid policies, the only point of differentiation being he’s a ‘decent guy’. Decent guys don’t preside over the death of thousands of people and do nothing about it. Decent voters…

The framing remains that the pandemic was really an assault upon free individuals by their governments. Nothing about infections at all, the actual definition, which are allowed to carry on with impunity. The ALP like a kangaroo in the…

When the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986, the eventual enquiry found that an internal NASA culture of suppression of individual criticism led to the disaster. I thought of this in relation to National Cabinet and AHPPC, short thread.…

Remember all the theatre from Covid minimisers about how flu this year would be a killer, because we'd missed two years of being sick? The 'get infected so you won't get infected' herd immunity Catweasels. https://t.co/gKvFhc6USv

From the SMH: "...the virus is not the killer it once was. At the start of the pandemic, one in 100 people who caught it died. Now, that figure is as low as one in 3000." A disease that infects millions and kills in 1 in 3000 of them is a…

ABC radio on the way home, talking about vulnerable people having to isolate themselves more and more to avoid Covid. Some staggering number of people with blood cancer (over 100,000?) just for starters. A quick thought experiment. Crime,…

What we’ve learned from Covid is that musicians are all for a cause if there’s no loss of income and live gig adulation involved. Has even one major international act spoken out for Covid action? We had a few speak out against it. Most of…

The callous disregard for public health our leaders show with Covid? Welcome to how the developing world has experienced us for decades. We’ve happily called diseases ‘endemic’ there for years as an excuse for doing nothing about them.…

When economic thinkers hijack public health and make it a logistical operation to manage hospital capacity. Infection is illness. Mass infection is mass illness. Public unhealthiness. Infection is not only the definition of a pandemic,…

Australia is on the brink of eliminating HIV. It's taken 40 years. Those who are 'tired' inside 3 years with Covid can contact the same mental health lines they offer to those forced to live in Covid soup. https://t.co/2o2fl1VOLD

Two days after pushing through 7 to 5 day isolation, the push is already on for zero. Conservatives are not a political party, they're the old donors now having captured the mechanism of government. Regulatory capture. Why they have only…

Business is going to play the ALP like a piano. The ALP already implementing the LNP Covid 'strategy'. Skilled migrant numbers up. Now pensioners back in the workforce. Business - 3, ALP -0. https://t.co/meAa64Luse

We’re not living with Covid, we’re ignoring it. Like we live with domestic violence, inequality, crumbling public infrastructure, and runaway climate change.

We’re ‘living with’ Covid the way dysfunctional couples stay together, because breaking up seems too hard. Covid is controlling that relationship. And it’s an abuser.

Climate scientists are a long way further down the road than Covid scientists. They know what decades of being ignored feels like. ‘The science’ has no political power of its own. What to do? Change politics. The fastest way? Mass joining…

Governments do nothing about Covid because they do nothing about anything. They represent privilege. Unions were always the counterbalance. They’re the way the politics of ordinary people are enacted. Like them or not, mass, even token…

For conservatives the State = oppression. But compulsory infection is oppression, it’s violence perpetrated on populations, by States refusing to do their public health job. Inaction is negligence, to not act can be even more oppressive…

Re-Tweet this one occasionally as a reminder to the ‘we locked down for 2 years’ people that they’re remembering slogans, not life as it was. All the white in the diagram is no-lockdown. Any larger coloured bits after JQ20 were the…

The moment questioning of Covid inaction gains traction somewhere, the denialism media immediately launch a counter-offensive. (The Torygraph in this case.) Ditto for climate. The ‘hardline’ article called for basic public health action in…

The greatest oppression in a pandemic is to do nothing. To force others to become infected, to give them no choice, is violent abuse. It kills people. The refusal to lead is not freedom for me. It puts me under constant assault from…

Is there another example of a government decision to knowingly INCREASE death in the community? Surely this distinguishes Covid decisions from anything else in the history of civilised societies? https://t.co/grIE7x5ps3

Listening to the Covid minimising propaganda, you’d think staying at home, not travelling, or wearing a mask were some modern version of the Battle of the Somme. https://t.co/SIwOTzUGwr

I sometimes ask Covid minimisers, what great human project are you engaged with, that makes killing all of these people unnecessarily worthwhile? It’s rarely anything more than basic socialising, or overseas travel. Like grounded teenagers.

What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021.…

For the local public health professionals concerned yesterday that an article about the impact of Covid on young people pre-dated the vaccines, here’s one from this week. A $3.5 trillion dollar problem. Remember you helped enable this.…

The world’s first privatised pandemic continues at pace. Soon letting the virus rip will shift from loss to profit. #covid19aus https://t.co/cDUw4C6B3v

The honeymoon of remnant immunity will be over by the end of the year. The cupboard is currently bare after that. Pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus is the can you can’t keep kicking down the road forever.…

Ask the National Cabinet what the Covid plan is for late-2022, into 2023. Make them say out loud their 'strategy' is 'you will all get infected and sick and we hope this will make Covid go away, but really we have no idea and hope you'll…

Experts who haven't sold their soul for public and political attention stating the obvious. To stop a pandemic, you have to stop the infections. A pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not hospitalistions. Not economics. INFECTIONS.…

Phew, finally the average daily deaths is down to about double the daily average in Victoria's nightmare 2020 outbreak. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/BrdehfOURQ /sarcasm

This is about normalising the forgetting of Covid, suppressing public interest in it. Premiers have openly attacked daily updates for this reason, they don't want the Covid conversations happening. It has nothing to do with public health.…

Such an important point. The spin that we're shifting risk management for Covid to individuals is exposed as a lie by us simultaneously stripping away the data they need to do that work. https://t.co/JF5ok2MVKZ

When politicians want individuals to take individual responsibility for core services like energy or education, they produce sites like this to maximise the information consumers have. With Covid they shut the information down. They don't…

What National Cabinet want is to get away from the drama of daily Covid updates. But that's long gone, the trickle (busloads actually) of daily deaths is already ignored by the public. Making this now a weekly release, with big…

The best way to regulate your speed when driving wouldn’t be to remove the speedo from the car. But that’s what we’re doing with Covid data, stripping it away, flying blind. We haven’t had anything approaching local data for months. Now…

We did a deal with the Chinese. They’d control Covid so they could keep running the entire manufacturing sectors of our outsourced economies. While we let everybody at home get infected while we fly around on planes ‘living our best life’.…

Since WW2, we've experienced prosperity and peace probably without parallel in history. The prosperity was largely re-purposed massive war industry, and fossil fuel driven. The refusal to fight Covid is the outcome of that 80 years feeling…

If China were to adopt the Covid 'strategies' of the West, the entire global economy would collapse. We mock them for disease control, while being utterly reliant upon their workforce staying uninfected. https://t.co/B7w9BHh8jH

The @theprojecttv segment on whether we’re declaring the pandemic over too soon was a pathetic example of how broken public health is. Serious story, great contribution from @enenbee, then 10 seconds into the discussion it’s terminated…

If the ALP really believes in the stop talking about Covid and it will go away strategy, do the same for the budget. Stop talking about the fucking economy, and it’ll fix itself. Elected politicians are going to kill us. Popularity as a…

"Many of the deaths aren’t counted in the official Covid tally, he said, because they happen months after Covid infections. “The deaths that are being reported as Covid deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age…

‘Shielders’. Lockdowns didn’t end. We privatised them. We dumped the entire burden *on* the vulnerable, forcing them to lock down their entire lives. Forever. Their mental health also now in free fall. Some public health professionals…

The pretty impressive results from UV air disinfection makes me think light itself should be a much bigger public health topic. It’s not just about air. It’s about the built environment, which is hugely about light too.

Lockdowns should always have been called sheltering, or shielding. To shelter from harm. Libertarian politics coined the word ‘lockdown’ to make sure everybody thought of it as oppression. Language is politics, all very deliberate. And it…

‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

Thanks to @stephenjduckett. A low fatality rate for a disease = thousands of deaths with mass infection. But also older people dying of Covid may only lose a handful of years of lifespan, individually, but aggregated it’s thousands of…

If the whole world took a holiday for 6 weeks, at the same time, we could probably be free of Covid. The ‘Economy’ wouldn’t allow it. Essential workers could have strong PPE to keep the lights on. It’s all doable. But, the Economy wouldn’t…

As we celebrate the ascension to the throne of our new sovereign, Covid, be thankful that King Covid is decimating the infirm, at a time there will be no young to look after them anyway. https://t.co/yJS3ybavxQ

Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role, an institution. Now imagine current leaders did the same with…

Scratch the surface of most Covid minimisers, and you'll find somebody who thinks the purpose of human civilisation is their recreational travel. Or they own an airline.

To put some perspective on the insanity of our baseline level of international travel, pre-pandemic the world burned about 360 billion litres of jet fuel every year. That's a billion litres a day. And it was trending UP.

I don't think it's possible to re-Tweet this one too many times. Australia didn't 'lock down for 2 years and then open up'. All that white space = most of the 2 years = no lockdowns. The longer periods towards the end were premature…

“So if you've had four … you would have had the most recent one within the last few months, and that would protect you until at least Christmas…so it might be something you do in March or April, at the same time you get your flu jab."…

Educate me. No amount of preventing severe disease and death will make a dent in ending a pandemic. The definition is, again, INFECTIONS. Number and geographical extent of infections. https://t.co/jzgdBkQH8r

In the wave after wave of minimising Covid fairytales, ‘it will become endemic’ is the equivalent of the climate war’s ‘the climate is always warming, it’s a natural process’.

'We can't just wish Covid away'. I wish Monique was invited to National Cabinet, she may even ask for agenda papers, at the moment it seems to be only phones, for selfies. https://t.co/1BFQYCBZJb

When the unchecked spread of a pandemic cripples the workforce of the people burying and burning the bodies. https://t.co/8Dxz11J0F9

If you're on a flight and there's a technical problem, would you rather: A. take a poll of the passengers as to what to do, or B. leave it to the flight crew? For Covid, societies have answered A.

Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the…

As our societies age, their mindset doesn’t. The explosion of adolescent culture in the 1960s was carried forward into boomer old-age, issues are now all framed in adolescent ways. Having a good time is now the only priority, a pandemic is…

As with climate change, the reason big money has torpedoed public health attempts to suppress Covid is that the people with the deep pockets are planning to be free of any danger. If you’re a patsy on their payroll, even well down the…

Phil Coorey this morning saying who knew August was the pandemic's deadliest month in Australia to date? This is the National Cabinet information suppression strategy, to make Covid fade from view while it mows down thousands of…

The reduction of publication of Covid data in Australia happened just after the month that more Australians were killed by Covid than any other so far. Is there more than a handful of journalists in this country actually doing their jobs?…

Still pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus. People are already staying home when they're sick, but asymptomatic carriers are infecting everybody else at work anyway. Respect would be to stop applying political ideology to a…

Of course the gutting of Covid reporting is a behavioural psychology rather than public health decision. Out of sight, out of mind. The experience in Ireland seems to confirm how effective it can be. https://t.co/jw3jVFSSJE

“We remain of the view that if people are sick, whether from Covid or from other health issues, they should not be at work and that is important,’’ Mr Albanese said. Keep up these LNP public health-free talking points, Albo. It's driving…

Hey National Cabinet, 'treating people with respect' includes telling them how much Covid is out there, so they can do your job of managing it.

In NSW, Covid is not listed in the Public Health Act as a vaccine preventable disease. Which is correct. But it does contradict the political assertion that vaccination has ended the pandemic. https://t.co/hFVh3yLbd7

‘Covid fatigue’ is just an adult version of ‘are we there yet?’

The ‘bludgers are rorting Covid leave payments’ Albo we saw today was a new low. Less than 3% of claims needed investigating, pretty much par for the course in any scheme. Softening us up to remove it altogether, using a time-honoured…

So does Australian government believe in the WHO or not? Or just Pentecostal raptures? “Still is an acute emergency” in my understanding of English doesn’t mean ‘we’ve moved onto the next phase of the pandemic’. https://t.co/0vWGLkc1gk

Can we stop saying new variants may emerge, and start saying that we’re producing them by not controlling transmission? Just as ‘waves’ of Covid don’t appear magically. We are the waves. And the variants. Every new political capitulation…

A beautiful example of the barren stupidity of libertarian politics. ‘Personal responsibility’ on the roads leads to gridlock. But if every individual driver drives slower via a collective speed limit, everybody drives faster. /1…

These aren't analogies, they're the same public administration processes. Telling people vaccination against severe disease is all we need for Covid is literally the same as telling them to smash their cars with abandon, because their seat…

@AdamBandt, @DavidPocock @JacquiLambie hold the balance of power in the Senate. Given both major parties' policy on Covid is to pretend it's over and do nothing, these 3 hold the only hope for Australians tired of compulsory infection.…

People could add the weekly cases and deaths to their profile descriptions, as a way of highlighting what National Cabinet is trying to suppress. They’re hoping there’ll be a bit of attention only once per week. #COVID19Aus

Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1…

Tales from the Covid front lines. 1. RN Breakfast, Jane Halton asked how her review into vaccine procurement is going. Couldn't reveal details, except to give a general sense that we have the '4th lowest death rate' i.e. it seems the…

Despite all the rhetoric from Premiers and PM about reduction to isolation periods, NSW Health continues to emphasise the importance of 10 days. They try, deaf ears alas in Macquarie Street. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/1BK9aKP0L5

All the rubbish about not being able to afford to take stronger pandemic action. Much more was spent in the last war (this is UK data, but same for Oz), and it led to decades of unprecedented prosperity. Investing in the country does that.…

It’s vanity to assume that the progress of a pandemic is based only on the degree of our own immunity. The agency of pathogens is now being recognised. Interestingly Camus’ novel ends with the virus inexplicably easing off. SARS-1 seemed a…

“Sky News host Andrew Bolt says independent MP Dr Monique Ryan is “addicted” to the “panic” associated with COVID-19.” Like Alan Jones, Bolt moved to a country retreat to lecture us about Covid bedwetting.

I call Covid minimising experts Lord Haw-Haws. Spouting propaganda in favour of the enemy, Covid. Like Haw-Haw (Joyce) though, often with better media skills than those who haven’t sold their expertise for 30 pieces of silver.…

Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular level of empire, now called an economy, the push to total…

Day after day, this is the elephant in the room. National Cabinet’s entire Covid strategy is ‘get vaccinated’. (We stopped even doing that months ago, and they do nothing to address it.) And the vaccines aren’t good enough to become…

In the absence of competent non-corrupt government, today's Covid report. Thousands were infected. Probably between 50-100 people died.

It could be a tipping point to an ending, or not. Cases are still higher than at many points of the pandemic, and that's with much less testing. Deaths certainly lower. But a pandemic is defined by infections, not deaths.…

Never ask a popularly elected person to run a pandemic response. No matter how decent they are. Serious problems are never fixed with popularity contests. https://t.co/MF3RAr5LmY

It's very common for Covid minimisers to say that letting Covid rip in late-2021 is justifiable because our deaths compared to the rest of the world are still very low. Yeh, nah. A disgrace, the greatest failure of governance in our…

The Chinese delegation were the only people I saw at the Queen’s funeral wearing a mask. Damn those authoritarians and their obsession with Western public health practice. We’ve moved on from all that stuff, now we embrace mass disease and…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

Can't quote-Tweet 2 Tweets at once, so will screenshot it. The decision to bastardise public health to mean only prevention of acute severe disease and death is coming home to roost. Infection is illness. Public illness, not public health.…

I'm still trying to figure out how you get a career as a senior public health person, and then say a pandemic is over while infections are off the charts. It's pretty much the entire reason the job exists, to stop infections. Infections…

The ALP here and Democrats in the US are using the same Covid strategy i.e. using the same framings to justify doing nothing. For the same political reason. Conservatives fouled the public health well, they created indifference,…

If we don't want a political solution to a health crisis, don't ask politicians to run a pandemic response. Amazing that their eagerness to do it didn't ring immediate alarm bells at the start of the pandemic. They had no intention of…

Working while sick was already the standard practice in the US before Covid. Many workers have no entitlement to sick leave at all. Pandemics are about politics, not health. https://t.co/fXlrQjCA7N

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

A testing scandal! Like not testing thousands of people for Covid every single day. And the ones we are doing mostly have to be paid for by the victims themselves. https://t.co/1PBsOQ1aou

The extraordinary coincidence of every single vaccination metric flatlining in Australia on the feel-good Covid is over boosterism lead-up to the federal election, and not budging since. I wouldn’t let a politician even walk my dog.…

The embarrassing failure of democracies on climate change and now Covid has to force a re-think of the idea that complex societies are best run by popularity contest, which we call elections. It worked while those elected were guided by…

Paul Keating used to talk about us desperately clinging to the apron strings of Rule Britannia. Never has it been more obvious than in this pandemic. Asian food keeps our reality cooking shows afloat. We won't bend to masks though.…

Not interested in being drip-fed Covid data by minimising politicians. I'll stick with the cumulative death numbers. Curve still not levelling out. https://t.co/rpRGL9ECQj

When you use a chronic rather than acute disease lens, it almost reverses who’s ‘vulnerable’ to Covid. https://t.co/EZYgTMRpBC I saw it in connection with one of @yaneerbaryam’s Tweets, Yaneer do you know the source of the table? It was in…

The obvious response to the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of Covid’, is to say ‘yep, so governments and business need to take personal responsibility and work a lot harder for us’.

I guess you could say there is international coordinated action on Covid. It’s a global Covid breeding program. https://t.co/OG9I8dGvsq

I think it’s worth repeating that ‘people are tired of Covid’ because people are doing all of the Covid work that governments and businesses are supposed to be doing.

Australian government spending as % of GDP. Politicians say that Covid spending couldn’t go on forever, but why is the choice government spending on public health, or nothing? Businesses are required by WHS law to prevent Covid spread.…

We may never know if Covid hastened the Queen’s demise. Not least because the last prominent regicide in the UK, by Oliver Cromwell, led to his corpse being exhumed, hanged and his already dead head being placed on a spike for the next 30…

Not once have teachers, the professionals in schooling, been asked about how to manage Covid and schooling. Instead a caravan of patronising and paternalistic government-friendly experts from other fields have consistently spruiked no…

The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity.…

Arguing the bleedingly obvious, that we’re in a pandemic and it’s killing millions of people, is the strategy. Like spending decades arguing that climate change isn’t real. It’s delay, not debate. Tying sane and good people in time-wasting…

This superb series notes that the English used the same tactics here as they used against the Irish. Identify the leaders, and kill them. As the Koreans did in POW camps as well in WW2. Lessons for Covid here too, change in any direction…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

The poor are still voting for the rich. Tories win the poor by targeting their desire, not to be poor. The poor hate being poor, they feel more shame than pride. And public health action reinforces their sense of powerlessness, if…

We elect populists and actually let them run things. They say Covid is over. They also say their hospitals are collapsing under the weight of public illness. In the SAME meetings. Time to appoint administrators and get rid of elections.…

"If people are unwell, they should stay home. But if they're not unwell, they should be able to live their lives." (Health Services Union) This is quite the advance in diagnostic medicine. Replacing all imaging, tests and medicine in…

Surely, by Covid minimising logic, these screening programs are entirely pointless? If you feel well, you are well. I had a friend who died of bowel cancer. He felt fine, until he didn’t. Then he quickly died. https://t.co/RPCTj2g0sa

I like the laws already there too, which say employers will need to make sure you’re not catching Covid at work. The ones nobody reads or enforces. https://t.co/yVrub9ibeD

Plagues and wars are about the only things that have ever re-balanced inequality in history. Why vested interests today are so determined to not let us fight Covid. https://t.co/1YeX1YJS83 @YouAreLobbyLud the deepest layer of resistance to…

Making the denominator zero is consistency. It leads to infinite Covid (for those who skipped maths for a political career). https://t.co/OVhEvHnjxh

Public health as a discipline and practice was invented well before universal voting. It wasn’t a ‘democratic’ invention. It was what we’d now call the top end of town responding to the physical reality of mass disease. Voting (populism)…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

From the home of 'personal responsibility' public health, and also of zero Covid isolation. National Cabinet could use this empirical evidence to guide decision making, but then they have no agenda papers, because they have no agendas.…

This is the NSW control guideline for whooping cough. Also a vaccine-preventable disease. This and the influenza control guidelines both recommend isolation of the infected. How much of the State's public health system does the Premier…

We are of course not 'treating Covid like any other virus'. It's just lies, propaganda, unquestioned by a lazy and house-trained journalism pack. https://t.co/olvfG0OU2h

The anger we feel about politicians doing nothing about Covid is the anger the most disadvantaged in society have felt about all politics, for years. Nobody helps them. Now debt is no longer cheap, the illusion of democratic shared power…

The CMO said today we need to stop treating Covid as an ‘exceptional’ infectious disease. Which other infectious disease killed 252 people in Australia this week, and infected 40,000? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/HQMzGANsZ9

Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

The introduction of germ theory shifted the entire basis of public health away from collective engineering works, and towards individual medicine and pharmacology. That suited political individualism just fine. We’d be much healthier going…

“Allen Cheng…said if mandatory isolation laws were lifted, the onus would fall on workplaces to enforce their own rules about when employees should come back to work and whether testing is mandatory.” There’s been no evidence of legal WHS…

Perrottet jumped straight from public health orders to personal responsibility. The silent partner to the political libertarians throughout the whole pandemic? Business. Do we even know how much business has invested in Covid mitigations?…

The standard WHS controls for workplaces. We’re not even doing 6 any more. Let alone 1-5. And nobody asks why this isn’t the alternative to public health orders, rather than ‘personal responsibility’? This has been a legal requirement for…

I wonder if there’s a way we can turn this into a public-led rating system for workplaces? Like we have already for travel, food etc. A simple rating of how safe a particular workplace is, for staff and customers/visitors? Ratings have…

In addition, I lost who suggested another brilliant idea yesterday, but employers should have remote work as the default, unless they can demonstrate actual implementation of the standard WHS risk control framework, for Covid. This should…

Another live with the virus democidal sociopath hopefully confined to electoral oblivion. Trump, Johnson, Morrison gone. Political commentators are too stupid to understand how much role Covid played in their downfall. Albo needs to wake…

The UK Tories can even manage to ditch tax-cuts to the top end of town. Quickly, within a week of announcing them. I don’t think the ALP recognises what terminal brand damage they’re doing letting Covid rip, and delaying ditching the…

If you know the cunning fanaticism of neoliberal political belief, you’ll know that the determination to get kids back into school during a pandemic was really about those schools being businesses who had been disrupted. Not about…

A friend describes her Covid experience. - her hair turned grey inside 2 weeks - her toenails turned black and she lost 4 nails - now can’t even walk around the block without being breathless - used to work 2 jobs, now can’t hold down one.…

I won’t be going to the work Christmas party during a pandemic. They asked why. I said ‘I don’t want to give my family Covid for Christmas’. Blank looks. WHS is almost non-existent for Covid in many (most?) workplaces.

From the Department of Health. This is misleading. You will no longer be required by *public health order* to isolate. But your employer can (and often should) still require it, under WHS law. https://t.co/5paz1Lo1e6

From a friend, about personal responsibility public health. "The CEO just walked past me, coughing and sneezing, as he has been all day. He was carrying cold and flu tablets, and said 'it's just a head cold'. No evidence that any testing…

Since the beginning of the pandemic, taxpayers in Australia have provided: - $29 billion in direct health support, and - $314 billion in economic support. A couple of critical questions here. /1 #auspol #covid19aus 1) Who’s going to jail…

Go after the core beliefs. Everything else is window dressing. Societies don’t get in the way of individual freedom, they make individualism possible. It’s not two things, it’s one thing. The same political beliefs prevent us fighting…

I know some suspect me of having drunk the authoritarian Kool Aid, by suggesting we abolish elections. But I often Tweet about how societies are now modelled after high schools, and their popularity networks. It's not an analogy. Elections…

Every political leader and expert comfortable with how things are going with Covid should be made to explain how 25,000 dead in a year is justifiable. (Easy question for the lazy political journos out there to use.) And 500K+ ongoing…

The world’s first privatised, free-market pandemic is a battle of two exponential curves. This one is winning. https://t.co/Yw1y1Jna37

If we apply the Covid methodology to these floods, the solution is to tell the pending victims to learn to swim. It’s not an analogy, that’s the direct equivalent. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/rSOsJpWle8

Many riches to be mined in here, as always. One that jumped out at me is the nearly 100 deaths from Long Covid this year, in Australia. National Cabinet may come to regret suppressing data, it gives the actuaries even more (deserved)…

The war on popularity, part something. Power is achieved by a majority of votes. This is how the voting system works. The problem with it is, ‘majority rules’ is profoundly undemocratic. We’re in a public health emergency where public…

Epidemiologically, what happened at the purple arrow? A previous PM wanted to 'end' the pandemic and allow fun Christmas holidays, to give him a launchpad into the election. Popularity did it. Elections. We need to get them out of…

@dbRaevn are you doing your usual summary of Covid deaths by State today?

The patient in public health is the public. The population, the body politic. Talk of mild and severe disease is imported from medicine, to describe individuals. More N=1 political framing. A public riddled with ‘mild’ Covid with pockets…

Is ‘let’s live with a pandemic’ the greatest farce in the history of the human race?

Thanks to @dbRaevn for more beautiful data visualisations. Imagine saying 2022 is the ‘perspective and balance’ year for Australia. Or that this ‘new phase’ of Covid means progress. Millions drunk on meaningless slogans. #auspol…

The dropping of isolation requirements dovetails nicely into upcoming Victorian and NSW elections, just as the explosion of Omicron cases coincided with the lead-up to the federal election. National Cabinet’s only function is electoral…

Dramatic waning of effectiveness of vaccines, in a public health strategy that is vaccination only. The herd of elephants in the room for our Covid ‘strategy’. UKHSA data (see link at end). Symptomatic disease first. (Experts welcome to…

Stunning that the same people who whip up hysteria about public health measures for Covid, saying people are ‘over it’ in under 3 years, spent more than 20 years whipping up even greater hysteria about refugees and boats. Boats which…

Andrews is doing this because he has an election coming up. Elections are popularity contests. Popularity destroys democracy, and ruins health and lives. The overwhelming majority of infections and deaths in Australia in this pandemic have…

The Bathurst 1000 reminds me of the staying power you need for an endurance event, with everything that can go wrong. A bit like a pandemic, which we turned into a short sprint instead.

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

I’m amused how world leaders lecture Putin and China on a ‘rules-based order’, and then at home ditch all the Covid rules and replace them with individual freedom to do what you like.

As a country that is not even requiring people to isolate or register positive tests (or test at all), we don’t really get to take cheap shots at China’s response to Covid. Not least because their factories are the only thing keeping our…

Yesterday my son said to me “you know, wearing a mask is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.” He was talking about being the only kid at school masked, and the social pressure to conform. This is key to…

So is Australia a rogue Covid state now? We don't even bother with WHO reporting, which to my knowledge is required under international law? Anywhere else we should be looking? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/MmgvfISVUY

Friends and colleagues often discuss now how ‘these vaccines don’t work, do they?’ Because they were promised they’d end the pandemic. And they didn’t. The anti-vax movement is having a recruiting bonanza. Public health vandalism by…

Under disability and anti-discrimination legislation in Australia, building owners are required to make their buildings accessible to those with a disability. What are they doing to cater for the ‘vulnerable’ for Covid? The same as they’re…

Just wanted to add, this seems like a flagrant breach of serious laws, to me. There are no serious audits I know about of what workplaces are doing with WHS or disability, for Covid. The ‘personal responsibility’ slogan would put an…

A measure of just how much elections destroy public administration is that Australia now has weaker Covid protections than even the US. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the ritualised popularity contest.

I should have used this as an exemplar. Covid minimisers have been attacking one-way masking. But it's still a powerful intervention. https://t.co/i0oQMqjDqT

October is National Safe Work Month! How delicious. So far I'm learning not to ride a quad bike to work. I wonder what Covid goodies the campaign will bring us. (I don't really wonder.) https://t.co/lwxTBRPlEb

Halloween is big now in Australia. That festival of death where everybody puts on a mask. Like the other 364 days of the year during Covid. But with masks. https://t.co/1XcJQ0e05k

"It's a clear sign we're in a different phase of the pandemic. We've got a large number of people who have been vaccinated, been infected or both. [There's] high levels of hybrid immunity.” Sharon Lewin, on Victoria’s total capitulation to…

Another vital story our political gossip columnists (journalists) don’t write about is how the entire world economy would collapse without the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese Covid measures. It’s doing all of the heavy lifting we refuse to do.…

The history of public health is so vital I think to understanding the Covid debacle we're living right now. There's maybe an assumption that the public health practice politicians are now shredding with abandon to try to win votes was a…

Hey Hamish, what's 'diminishing the value' of sharing a workplace is catching Covid there because employers,government and unions ignore WHS, and potentially taking years off your life. Plus hours of commuting with astronomical petrol…

The Covid global world tour is continuing, booking out all the venues so other acts can't get in. https://t.co/Mbxd3OAsq5

When you adopt a vaccines-only pandemic strategy, and then don't even vaccinate anybody. Any of us would be fired for incompetence. https://t.co/GaqoL8CUhM

Bathurst (the town) Covid positives. Car race was 8 and 9 October. Right on queue, 2-3 days later. https://t.co/YnUa9wo1Kd

We should all make a submission to this inquiry if we have something relevant to one of the terms of reference. It’s one of our only opportunities to be heard on Covid. The Cleaner Air Aus people have created two documents to help: /1…

Listened to a piece on ABC Radio this week about building ventilation. @DrPieterPeach made a guest cameo. Innes Willox said new buildings could factor in better ventilation, but it can be a very difficult task for old buildings. And that…

I know a lot of NSW teachers who quit last year. Not one of them has said it was about wages or working conditions, even though those aren’t great. It was Covid. https://t.co/O8pRq4jgqf

The great myth of Covid is that we get to choose the outcome. Reality chooses the outcome. No matter what our beliefs or wishes or feelings are, if they’re not aligned with reality, Covid wins. https://t.co/GLNkz2JYXO

Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” Public health similarly used to be us following the advice of trained and experienced professionals, on matters we…

The ‘victory over Covid’. https://t.co/Ly9brrbtxP

There may be a mask there, somewhere. It gives a fair indication of no change to Covid strategy if they win i.e. they’ll do nothing. Vote independent, the parties are well past their use-by date. Refocus Oz politics back on community…

NSW already has a personal responsibility gambling strategy, it’s going swimmingly. We should now expect public health/Covid messaging for major events that says ‘please infect responsibly’. https://t.co/3Qs04kR9TH

A healthy workout, look at those immune muscles. Immune systems evolved with infectious threats. They didn’t pre-exist the threats. What immune systems are ‘supposed to’ do is be a last line of defence, if public health fails and we get…

Covid accelerated all of the ways existing economic politics was already broken. Plagues and wars are all that have ever really fundamentally changed societies. Thus the desperate and laughable attempt to now pretend Covid is over. Reality…

'Natural infection' suggests vaccination = unnatural infection. Vaccination isn't infection.

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

The most powerful 4Corners I’ve seen for some time. Modern societies still run on cheap imported labour i.e. slavery. ‘Economy’ is just our modern re-branding. Covid exposed it. A combination of slavery and debt is what’s created our now…

What's happening in Griffith is total social collapse. 'Living with' Covid was designed to shift attention from this collapse, which is happening everywhere. No amount of economic hocus pocus will fix it. The old normal is dead.…

Yep. But that ‘immunity wall’ should also always be seen as a last line of defence. Infection is public health failure. https://t.co/5ZVeopGJ2y

Social media is like a daily populist election. Yesterday’s stories about Medicare rorting, for example. It quickly became a slugfest. But for all public programs, there has to be governance and accountability. You know, the stuff the…

I've seen some updated Covid advice from schools, following the ending of isolation requirements. All I've seen say that's the change they're making, i.e. no isolation. 'Attendance will be prioritised'. No indication of any WHS…

This must be the ‘new phase of the pandemic’ National Cabinet keeps mentioning. The apocalyptic phase. https://t.co/3RPUth47Ec

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

Some good stuff mixed with some empirically disprovable assertion, for example on schools. We need a Royal Commission, with TOR on public health and what it means in 2022. Politicians should never again run an emergency response.…

No prizes for guessing which bit the AFR cherry-picked from the independent (of evidence) review. As an ex-teacher and parent, one of the things that most disgusted me in this pandemic is the total disregard for children and teachers. /1…

"Mr Shergold said there was never much evidence that children were likely to contract a severe COVID-19 infection." Is No Jab No Play the next target? Infectious disease is now welcomed in our schools? Most of the jabs are for diseases…

It seems difficult to find the actual report. But reporting suggests it's written with the pandemic in the past tense. Does it talk about Australia's Covid INaction since late-2021? https://t.co/hcXgU6l4nZ

Have read much of the report now. There's lots that's good in here. But a private review of a public health emergency says everything that's wrong with the Western Covid response. Failures from 2021-on are mentioned but not really…

Notice the Trumpian shift in Andrews Labor? Give the 'elites' in universities a kicking. The pandemic certainly wasn't academic. It is - still is - political. National Cabinet is the greatest roadblock to ridding us of Covid.…

Everything about the freedom narratives is a lie. People do what they're led to do. If they're led to test and report, they test and report. If they're led not to, they don't. If they're led to believe 'we're all tired of fighting Covid',…

Everybody in Australia in 2022 knew that one of the highest risk groups for Covid was aged care facilities. But the residents were still infected and died in huge numbers. It showed either that you can’t ‘protect the vulnerable’. Or that…

The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselves. This is one of the greatest of all political libertarian…

Flu is mauling young kids in the UK. The hypothesis I heard on UK TV today? They weren’t infected enough during lockdowns. Endless cycle after cycle of bullshit, unsurprisingly leading to wave after wave of disease. (UKHSA data)…

Every time a politician says the pandemic is over, unless a new variant of concern comes along, it helps to remember not naming new variants means the pandemic is always over. Orwell would be proud. https://t.co/Zy6G7bYItT

I’m interested in this debate only because it’s a window into minimisation, the rage of the age. The claim that the ‘vast majority’ don’t commit fraud or waste is true for all jobs. The vast majority also drive safely, and don’t die of…

Kids who are infected with Covid may have a 77% greater chance of developing diabetes? How is this not the lead story in every news bulletin? We’re infecting ALL children, deliberately. The public health consequences in years ahead could…

Great watch, the wrecking ball of Brexit through the UK economy. And it punctures the libertarian myth that regulation is restriction, vital for Covid management too. Regulation enables, it creates freedom. It’s business people saying…

The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, but also to understanding how organisations work. /1…

I’m curious what activities the Infinite Covid crowd think are more important for society that keeping people from becoming sick, and dying?

Social media encourages the idea that a crisis like Covid is fixed with public discussion. Most of the critical processes in our societies are not only not discussed by the public, they’re invisible to them. The problem isn’t their…

You get a sense here of how National Cabinet has possibly destroyed the Australian public health system. Political expediency to win votes turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into an anti-vax breeding ground.…

The only caution in our Covid response is the reluctance to do anything about mass infection and disease. https://t.co/zpwe0X3z01

The authoritarian city-state now so beloved of Covid ‘freedom’ minimisers. Playing all the authoritarian greatest hits - hybrid immunity, deaths only a problem if hospital capacity exceeded, natural evolution to mildness with mass…

The real and clear story here is that the 'protocols' are nonsense for preventing Covid spread. And they're more rigorous that what we use on land. The whole country is a public health train wreck. https://t.co/mZeB2pnLVX Or that should…

The cheapest, fairest and fastest way to end a pandemic is with regulation. Law is a technology, invented by humans, to create economies of scale and fairness. All civilised societies have public health legislation, for this exact reason.…

When a minimiser says ‘so what are you going to do, try to avoid Covid forever?’, I love how they assume that we get to choose. This is a war, not Christmas shopping.

Every infection causes damage. The minimising of infection itself is a public health disgrace. A pandemic is defined by number of infections, not by hospitalisations or deaths. By definition the pandemic is not over until we get a dramatic…

Plenty of sensible things in the budget last night. Lots still to do, not least action on Covid. I sat there pondering that we have to endure the populist drivel of elections coming between us and necessary change, waiting for essential…

Which was the bigger hack, Optus and Medibank data, or flogging off public telecommunications and health in the first place to the private sector? A privatised pandemic may be the greatest hack of all.

Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedoms that are fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of…

Even ‘mild’ Covid increases risk of death up to 10 times in this study. And nothing will be done because government has been hacked by populists. A vacuum of leadership means the crowd reverts to the social conformity of ‘what everybody…

Wouldn't it be nice if all of the prominent media personalities advocating to let Covid rip could be 'discharged' in the same way, for 'doing their own research.' https://t.co/cuBIHveNei

Brad Hazzard on RN, describing the early days of Covid as 'silly' when we were concerned about 200 cases in the community. No Brad, what's silly is you and your libertarian mates infecting thousands of people every week with one of the…

A perfect example of how social media decouples the public from its institutional expertise is ivermectin and Covid. A drug that most had never even heard of became a household name and major obstacle to public health action. And fast.…

Great thread on the monetisation/financialisation of societies. Societies that succeed and last build stuff, they don’t just do card tricks with money. We ‘couldn’t afford’ to fight Covid because cash flow is our whole society, not stuff.…

To link two themes I Tweet about, social media replaces the adult world, mediated by institutions going back multiple generations, with a high school culture. It’s a technology that allows the cultural and social life of high school to…

In which a prominent Australian epidemiologist says we need to ‘ride’ Covid waves. Maybe it’s like a Covid theme park, and this is one of the rides. Silly me thought epidemiology was mostly there to stop continuous waves of disease.…

The ABC captions one of the images: “Only a small proportion of the population has been infected and built immunity.” Like not infecting everybody is China’s failure. I’m not aware of another pandemic where infecting everybody was seen as…

Only 3 busloads dead this week. ‘Riding the wave’. And this is the end of a wave. No more Covid exceptionalism, National Cabinet says. What were the cold and flu deaths this week? https://t.co/ZVDE0m1RUX

‘Covid exceptionalism is over’. Covid acceptionalism is rampant though. https://t.co/II6dFk4bVM

We need birthday cake Covid questions to politicians. John Hewson’s GST campaign derailed when asked a specific question about how it would apply to birthday cakes. With Covid politicians get away with ignoring it by sticking to…

‘Immunity debt’ is really public health debt. Australia swapped an established and powerful public health approach in late-2021 for a neoliberal, libertarian political approach to a pandemic. It privatised the pandemic, as part of the…

NSW was the advance guard in destroying Australia's then public health strategy, which was working brilliantly. This was all about politics, and keeping the NSW cabinet unified. Just as federally the LNP sabotaged climate action to create…

Australia should never forget that what it now calls 'opening up' from the pandemic in late-2021 was really 'Gladys trying to shore up her numbers in NSW Cabinet to prevent overthrow by a Perrottet-led opposing faction'. We see now what…

That lime green line is telling a story. The ‘we need to balance Covid action against the economy’ is bullshit story. https://t.co/40BDcbk05J

So tired of the ‘Zero Covid’ sneers. It just means disease control, effectively zero *circulation*. Like we have zero measles, and cholera, and TB in most Western nations. You know, you can go to the shops and not come back with a…

'We don't have a sterilising vaccine, so you'll all have to be infected repeatedly for the rest of your lives' isn't in any of the public health texts I've looked at. Am I in the wrong chapters?

If public health advice is 'get infected as often as you like', isn't that what would happen with no advice? I struggle to understand the point of being an (apparent) expert in pandemics, if your advice is 'just get infected'. 'Get…

The big slaughter over summer for the federal election is easily beaten by the mass slaughter for the Vic and NSW elections. Daily average deaths now still over twice what they were at Christmas. #covid19aus https://t.co/LwSXOsueZx

3 people close to me this week have had serious medical episodes. Previously healthy people. All have had Covid recently. Am guessing there’ll be no way to prove a connection unless somebody looks hard. And who’s going to do that?

People on Twitter saying that ‘in November 2022’ Covid is no longer dangerous. Like the passage of time somehow has made Covid inert. Another variant of ‘living with the virus’, that if you live with it a bit longer, eventually it’ll be…

We now know you can’t vote your way out of a pandemic. Just as we haven’t been able to vote our way out of climate change. Voting serves only politicians, not societies. If you have to try to make something popular to get it done, nothing…

The previous CHO was made Governor, likely to shut her up and smooth the way for Queensland ‘consistency’ with the National Cabinet approach to Covid i.e. do nothing. Premiers in 2022, heroes to zeroes. Tamed by the Morrison Groupthink…

By #ZeroCovid I mean elimination of wide community spread. In the West we have a God complex where we assume reality will be what we choose it to be. #ZeroCovid is not a choice to make, it’s likely the only way our societies can survive.

It makes as much sense to say we can choose to live with Covid as to say we can choose to live with runaway climate change. Existential realities care diddly squat about what we prefer.

Described as 'bipartisan' politics at the time, what it really shows is that both men have an election coming up. Elections were once a (poor) means to an end, now they're an end in themselves. Pollies get elected so they can get…

I'm an unalloyed supporter of vaccination. But given we used them to turn a public health approach into a medical one, and not in conjunction with a strategy to suppress infection, the public health outcomes would probably have been better…

Premiers, Prime Ministers and CHOs who declare this the 'next phase of the pandemic' need to explain what else that means apart from 'the phase where thousands of people die'. https://t.co/akdzqwS2Dk

To a rank amateur like me, that last question in particular seems like a BOOM. I'm sure some failed economist will correct my public health naivety. https://t.co/mbvXZ1Xgoq

For his fine work ending the pandemic. https://t.co/xpWe4ZbjcU

The 'next phase of the pandemic' I mistakenly said yesterday was just the phase where thousands of people died. It is that, but also the phase where the system collapses. https://t.co/tHw6TAMdvJ

This next phase of the pandemic feels a lot like every other phase of the pandemic. https://t.co/Qq7qCtKKX1

Again, this ‘next phase of the pandemic’ CHOs and National Cabinet talk about - is this in the fine print somewhere? https://t.co/EdM2ADYeG8

How many years did politics deny climate change? It’s surprising that we’ve been so amazed that the same politicians decided to ignore Covid. And that we didn’t notice them encouraging debates over ‘the science’, in the same way. To stall…

We didn’t get rid of lockdowns. We privatised them. https://t.co/iyHIFPZ5P7

The ABC could mean ‘will be returning after Covid-19’. But sadly they mean that Covid-19 is already over. Difficult to see these kids reaching the same age as the elderly folk they’re buddying with here, with several Covid infections each…

Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a…

As this mechanism continues to be elaborated, the outcome will determine whether Covid minimisers have committed public health crimes due to a staggering lack of caution. https://t.co/bgoTMc8sVt

Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science.…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

Politicians who say they 'follow the science' frame the terms of reference well before any work is done. That way they only hear what they've already decided they want to hear. National Cabinet has been doing this for the entire pandemic.…

Isn't it funny that we need to 'take sensible precautions' to live with Covid? Like it's dangerous, or something. Who knew. https://t.co/ArromFV9p4

If we're trying to hold off next shots until next winter, 'just like the flu', can we hold off Covid infections until then too, just like the flu? Asking for a friend with only half a brain. https://t.co/sSTInieRWS

Kelly says: "contribute to our collective effort to slow the spread of the virus". We're suppressing transmission now, collectively? I thought the strategy was mass infection to create 'rich hybrid immunity'? Serious question, this is a…

Contrasting German and Australian Covid leadership. https://t.co/SmHPTa21va

One of the most frustrating things in this pandemic is arguing to prevent widespread infection, because of the catastrophic effects it has on peoples’ lives. And realising the people opposing you are literally just trying to win debating…

We need to learn from decades of strategic stalling on climate change, by arguing ‘the science’. I don’t even argue the science of Covid, it’s so patently obvious that infecting everybody repeatedly with a pathogenic virus is idiotic.…

Thanks to Victoria and @dbRaevn we still have a view of the new normal. Which is just the old normal, plus mass disease and death. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/eobbztfcV6

More rich hybrid morbidity. A family member battling multiple opportunistic infections, which doctor says suggests they’re immunocompromised (they weren’t prior to their 2 Covid infections). A friend in hospital today to have exploratory…

Have a friend with recent onset Bells Palsy, and was looking at the research on connection between that and Covid infection. Any knowledgeable folk know what the current thinking is?

It's when you see these ads that you know this is what 'balancing' the economy against public health really means. "Be prepared for this next wave of Covid with all our PPE 10% off."

When we were asked to manage Covid with 'personal responsibility', at the same time all the data you might use to do that was taken away, this sort of data work became even more essential. #auspol https://t.co/fYqDohj00h

The simplest answer to ‘when should we start treating Covid like any other infectious disease’ is ‘when it starts acting like any other infectious disease’. https://t.co/ySMQfl4gbg

Astounding really, that the government's own health people can say this, and the government response remains...do nothing. One to file away for the Royal Commission. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/dpu6N8fR8o

I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry…

Headline should be "States Ignore Danger in Varying Ways". I love that NSW is "open and free". Libertarian slogans to fight a pandemic. Like bringing a knife to a gun fight. https://t.co/VyDTUcYMEu

Watching the news, with members of the public expressing dismay that Covid is ‘back’. It’s great proof of the success of the propaganda campaign, that they thought it had gone away.

The NSW Premier rehashing his same fantasy slogan of staying home if you’re sick, and going to work if you’re not, for Covid. Completely ignoring asymptomatic spread, and finite sick leave. He needs to go.

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if…

Hands up if your workplace reacted to the news of a new wave of Covid with complete indifferent silence and inaction? https://t.co/xeizI9gluX

You have to pinch yourself sometimes, that so many of the public have been made to feel like they’re doing something powerful by surrendering to repeated infection by a pandemic virus. Political spin is extraordinary to watch in action.…

The privatised pandemic. If we still had widespread PCR testing, and if we followed the advice of ‘stay home if we’re sick’ during these mass waves of infection, society would be ‘locked down’ in the same way as when we did that to prevent…

Sky News blathering about how ‘we need to learn to live with this thing’ (Covid). We do, it’s what we were doing, before the likes of Sky News decided to abandon the learning and just go back to what we were doing before there was a virus.…

My favourite part of the Covid cruise stories is disembarking infected passengers, while the next several thousand Covid sacrificial victims queue to get on for the next cruise. The new normal, cruising abattoirs. https://t.co/0PO1utmsfF

The magnitude of the public administration failure in Australia from late-2021 is best shown by comparing with the previous world champion Covid imbeciles, the UK and US. Yes death rates in Oz have been much lower. That’s due to the virus…

Other epidemiologists can help us here. The argument seems to be that Covid is out of control everywhere anyway, so no point trying to control it on cruise ships? https://t.co/VMNMW1tHFE

1) Lockdowns restrict circulation and gatherings to prevent infection. 2) Mass infection restricts circulation and gatherings as people ‘stay home when sick’. Both are ‘lockdowns’. You cannot live with a pandemic. Lockdowns are inevitable.…

It’s a theme today. A pandemic is a physical event, like a flood. What we *want* to do about it is irrelevant. You stop the flooding, or your society breaks. Not stopping it (‘living with’ it) is not a choice. You can’t live with perpetual…

You can’t have public health policy if you have political libertarian governments who don’t believe the public is even a thing. https://t.co/tUHVadWRR3

So tired of the debates over whether to have Covid restrictions or not. We don't get to choose. Either we do them, or the virus does them. Either we stop circulating, or it stops us circulating. Either we run society, or it does.

The question Project hosts, aka highly-paid celebrities able to isolate at will, isn’t whether people are ‘scared’ of Covid. It’s whether they understand a single fucking thing about it. You don’t, so they’re going to be none the wiser…

In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to…

Returning to this, notice the framing here, the mythology that ‘the people’ determine the outcome of a pandemic. They do, but only an outcome that is LED by somebody. Doing nothing is a LED outcome. ‘The people’ is not an autonomous thing…

Some Covid minimisers and politicians say we'll need to cycle through waves of Covid for another decade. Many industries are already on the brink of collapse. Ideology doesn't heal the sick, care/teach children, or keep food in…

One of the amusing cooker things is the certainty Covid escaped from a Chinese lab, and the simultaneous belief that Covid isn't dangerous anyway.

Singapore is being used as a guide for what to expect with our current wave in Australia. Singapore had about a 10% greater level of stringency of public health restrictions at the time of its wave, and nearly 25% greater booster rate for…

ATAGI was likely to implement new booster recommendations in early 2023 in preparation for winter. (Mark Butler.) To my knowledge Covid still isn't seasonal? Is the hope that if we keep talking about it like flu, it will become flu?

In the UK, ‘balancing’ the economy against Covid by loading everything on the economy side of the see-saw still isn’t working. Covid must be very heavy. https://t.co/ij67PAfAL1

Across the world politicians and business leaders spoke often of the need to ‘balance’ action against Covid with economic activity. Now action against Covid has been removed, leaving only economic activity. No surprise, it’s the climate…

It's the darndest thing, that the Oz community apparently stopped tolerating Covid measures the exact second 'Freedom Day' was announced by the then PM, and NSW Premier. All change is led. 'The people' is a fiction. https://t.co/Gv7c5ejjO0

For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each…

There’s a tipping point beyond which masking becomes a protection against society itself. It’s why superheroes and bank robbers wear masks. And increasingly, it’s true of those of us who still mask for Covid. https://t.co/y6nfhGhHaG

So in the past few days I’ve learned that Singapore: - has much higher masking rates than us - has much higher rates of vaccination (boosters) - still isolates people when sick - allows 5th vaccinations to people over 18. Comparing our…

It’s a very safe bet that a person who tells you we need to learn to live with Covid, is not involved in doing a single important thing to keep society running. They don’t even see the damage.

Here’s a song for everybody demanding that ‘the people’ rise up and fix Covid. Miller-Heidke knows (now) that conformity is the basis of all social groups. People are ‘caught in the crowd’. They have to be led out of that conformity.…

Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too.…

I'm beginning to wonder if there's a single point of similarity between Singapore's Covid strategy and ours. https://t.co/IlNogfrdYE

Again, if the role of a Chief Health Officer in a pandemic is to advise us all to do nothing, why do we need them? Like having firefighters outside your house on fire yelling to you to go back to bed. https://t.co/mrHdez2nVc

“We led the country, we were the ones that were taking everybody from overseas for WA because they locked their borders, for Queensland, for Victoria, we struck the balance all the way through, our economy as a result here in NSW is…

Isn’t it time to actually do some of this ‘balancing’ politicians and business leaders talk about with Covid? Right now there’s nothing on the Covid side of the see-saw, everything is on the economic side. A proposal. /1…

Throughout the pandemic NSW has been at the bottom of the economic indicators. Infecting its population has unsurprisingly done nothing to improve the 'economy'. https://t.co/5MKVwDEOyz

The people whose politics is heavily about the ‘rule of law’ will at the same time describe Covid laws as authoritarian oppression. They’re bad faith actors, their freedom is literally their freedom, from laws they don’t like. Not from law…

This is the most powerful medicine humans have ever invented. Law. Easily the fastest, fairest and cheapest way to end this pandemic is regulation. Viruses need bodies to spread. Bodies are regulated by laws. Law is justice, not…

We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war.…

Australia deliberately modelled the mass infection of children it then carried out. We don’t even think about doing that for much less dangerous diseases that we vaccinate our kids against. Infection and sickness used to be considered…

You can see the emotion in Oppenheimer, the science he led and what it created. About 200,000 have died through the use of nukes. Somewhere between 5 and 20 million have died of Covid. The science that promoted that shows no sign of…

The fossil fuel industry won again. We ended up with a Covid strategy for climate change this time. They take turns. The only significant progress seems mitigation for the most vulnerable, like for Covid. It will probably not happen too,…

As with Covid, it's pointless addressing pleas and arguments to the neoliberals. They're just representatives of industries who aren't interested. The only effective opposition is organised labour - unionism. That's the historical,…

Can we ask the prominent Australian experts who have consistently advocated for our current Covid strategy whether it included killing an additional 13000+ Australians so far this year? Was that a deliberate plan? #auspol #covid19aus

Who thinks a government with years of runs on the board in workers' compensation mismanagement was ever going to prioritise Covid protections in the workplace? https://t.co/6TMt6W9Qh2

The whining of entitled Western travellers, one of the greatest drivers of the removal of Covid protections. Even in my own childhood international travel was a once or twice in a lifetime thing. Now it’s like buying a coffee.…

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

When you 'balance' public health action against the economy, it doesn't work if you don't put anything on the Covid side of the see-saw. https://t.co/DTGQB2eXxZ

Thanks to @Mike_Honey_ for this one. We can't vote our way out of a pandemic. https://t.co/rZ5oxWGi0b

Can the Infinite Covid crowd explain to me why we can isolate people with mumps for 9 days, but not people with Covid? Mumps kills on average less than 1 person a year in Australia.

Journalists don’t point out the obvious use of the same strategies across both climate and Covid. COP27 agreed to little except ‘protecting the vulnerable’, to give rich nations an excuse to do nothing. Like with Covid. That protection…

The people who swear the best way to manage energy is to keep shipping tens of billions of dollars offshore every year to buy it from Texans and the Arab states, also say the best way to beat a pandemic is to do nothing about it. And they…

Those thousands dead will remain dead. If you're a Covid minimiser, nothing you do or say from this point on will absolve you of responsibility for those deaths. History and justice have long memories. https://t.co/7zK9ye2BTq

I strongly support anything that might restore sanity to public health and society, but I despair that we feel we have to mobilise all of society from the bottom up, all over again, to do it. That's the same libertarian framing the baddies…

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i Serres…

“It’s time to consider removing decisions about climate change from the short-term political cycle.” Let’s add Covid to that list. Elections are destroying civilisation. https://t.co/9E1LVEvLdF

Karen's weekly NSW epi report analysis and breakdown of the weekly NSW Health Covid numbers aren't to be missed. https://t.co/rqaAAypgyw

China losing control of Covid would be an international emergency. It astonishes me that so many seem so ignorant of how dependent we are on China functioning as normal. China is the world’s factory, it manufactures nearly as much as…

Phew, we’ve avoided having to redistribute wealth. Just as we avoided changing society because of Covid, and just infected everybody instead. The economy, the greatest political trick to protect the status quo of all time.…

Everything that upsets the status quo is bad for the economy. Paying workers more? Bad for the economy. Stopping people getting Covid? Bad for the economy. Having more flexible work-life balance? Bad for the economy. This is why the…

Language, not data. 'Living with the virus.' We live with crime, disasters, pain and suffering, poverty, injustice etc. The key thing is, how much. Living with Covid shouldn't mean everybody catching Covid 4 times a year. We live with…

I haven’t seen one piece of analysis that gets to the real reason Morrison probably did this. He was determined that the pandemic would not be allowed to interrupt his beloved economy, and his re-election campaign. https://t.co/Ax8HFGQVxe

If you’re a journalist, there’s still time to mention the thousands of Covid deaths that are happening in Australia this year. And to ask if that was part of Covid being ‘over’, as many of you have written. Your reputation and integrity…

The party who won’t do anything about Covid beat the party who definitely won’t do anything about Covid, with a party who won’t do anything about Covid coming in 3rd. Independents who won’t do anything about Covid came last. You can’t…

The evolution of SARS-Cov2, and of Covid minimiser spin. Facing off against each other, with minimiser spin so far proving the more virulent. The world cup of social collapse. https://t.co/S5ItAl6GCE

Limited action on climate and Covid, even with changed winners at elections, shows how democracy has been gamed. The conservatives win long-term not by winning elections, but by manipulating what is popular. That way even their opponents…

A shout out to all Australians about the #VigilAgainstCOVID today. People taking on personal responsibility for the public health action governments of Australia are not taking. @AlboMP

I still invite every Covid minimiser to recognise they’re occupying the far left of the risk matrix, in the black oval. But a pandemic is all to the right, in the 20 rectangles of light green, yellow, orange and red. The ‘what if you’re…

The freest we’ve ever been individually, in that libertarian way which now dominates politics, was under ‘lockdowns’. We were allowed to stay home, for weeks or even months. What we call neoliberalism is just re-marketing work as freedom,…

Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics of small government. As these same politicians like to say,…

Fact-checking with somebody who actually knows something about viral evolution. @TRyanGregory think you saw this clip, have we painted Covid into a mutation corner? https://t.co/JAeL6uAqx4

In any field, or even any part of life, the truth of what’s going on is extremely unlikely to be the most obvious thing. If this wasn’t true, everybody would be a genius. I remember that with climate and Covid. None of the popular…

Australia is still averaging about 15 deaths per day, from Covid. That’s over 5000 deaths per year, and significant and disruptive morbidity for many thousands more. Surely this isn’t the new normal? What are the KPIs for arriving there?…

Apparently the most popular search term on SEEK for months has been ‘work from home’. So much for the oppression of lockdowns.

What if an elimination strategy isn’t a choice, but the only way societies can survive? Is there one pandemic of an infection with high morbidity and mortality that societies have ever lived with successfully before? If not, maybe because…

Covid made visible the total absence of care for ordinary people that was already built into our politics. Personal debt has hidden that contempt for decades, creating an illusion of community. The last sop is token concern for the…

There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics…

This year's NSW Schools Spectacular had about 5000 students from across the State, belting out the tunes in close proximity to one another, with thousands of others looking on. One of the sponsors was the NSW Teachers Federation. Call me a…

I still wonder if Albo is just shrewd with timing. Knows Covid is a mess, but also knows how much the LNP weaponised it as an issue. https://t.co/Xmdexgh4kz

I know a few have shared this (thanks @NobodyImpawtant). Extremely powerful and educational explanation of current thinking on Covid sequelae and Long Covid, and the criticality of avoiding infection. https://t.co/PqzqSSnKSi via @YouTube

"The global economy is hostage to what China does with COVID”. There’s the elephant in the room the minimisers don’t even see. Financial analysts don’t mean by this ‘we want China to let Covid rip’. They mean if China does, the global…

‘Personal responsibility’ public health, as well as being an oxymoron, means paying for it yourself. Like private education, and toll roads. It doesn’t mean individual freedom.

The politicians who demanded societies ‘re-open’ in the pandemic, spent the previous 30 years demanding we ‘maintain control of our borders’ i.e. keep society as closed as possible. Except for recreational and business travel, and…

I wish 'public health debt' rolled off the tongue the same as 'immunity debt'. It has the advantage of at least being a thing that exists.

It seems HIV was able to reach pandemic levels because its acute phase was rarely serious. So it took that 8-10 years to register there was even a new kid on the block. Covid can be lethal in the acute phase (got our attention) *and*…

Thought of this watching Rae Duncan talk about chronic Covid. The possibility that the cardiovascular disease pandemic of the 20th century may have been the chronic phase of Spanish Flu. There's other research that posits the same link to…

We know how to regulate against harm for pretty much anything. Except Covid. Regulation is easily the most effective and powerful medical intervention for public health problems. https://t.co/j8Ylrmz7ul

Lawyers queuing to have Covid fines overturned feeds the freedumb narrative. The only serious ‘overreach’ in this pandemic is turning off the public health system.

‘Lockdowns’ (really just quarantine) should have been a libertarian wet dream. The ‘there is no such thing as society’ people get very heated when you suspend the functioning of society, as it turns out. They never meant freedom, they…

Local drive-through PCR clinic was apparently playing Christmas Carols this morning. Fantastic facility, well-ventilated, super quick. Governments closing these down so you can spend $10 per RAT to test 6 times to try to detect infection.…

Here in anti-authoritarian Australia, we let Covid rip into aged care homes because...freedom. And anybody have a copy of some National Cabinet minutes they can share with us? https://t.co/ic9kI3c7Kd

Want to vote for a National Cabinet censure motion? "We the Australians who don't want to be infected with a lethal virus multiple times every year for the rest of our lives, censure National Cabinet for replacing a public health system…

What's the highest number of documented Covid re-infections in an individual?

Christian Drosten says the population getting infected multiple times is all that will end the pandemic, without mucosal vaccines. But on the other hand he (and others) say don't get infected if you can avoid it. I think this comes down to…

Karen’s forensic weekly dissection of the NSW epi report is a Twitter highlight for me. If you want one of the best windows into what’s really going on with Covid in the community, watch for this thread on Thursdays. https://t.co/XvSxb4ov1Z

One of my areas of expertise is political strategy. We’re losing against Covid for the same reason we lost against climate change. We’re mistaking politics for a scientific debate. That debate is a fiction, minimisers only use it to…

To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be getting infected. The two don’t go together, but that (to me)…

“We are in the grumbling finishing stages of the pandemic where we settle into the new norm…we still don’t know what it is, but we suspect it will be ongoing smaller waves for many years, possibly decades.” Tony Blakely, saying the end of…