Health, medicine & the body

@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…

@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…

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 @profmiketoole @AndrewHayen This isn't correct? You can't just extrapolate population risk to individual risk? Individuals have either a zero or 100% chance of a clot, depending on causal mechanisms (as yet unknown). Nobody has a…

@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.…

@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…

@simonahac #auspol With the tens of billions spent on roads and tunnels in Sydney right now, why is nobody talking about traffic evaporation? https://t.co/tf5g223lvp

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.…

@GregDore2 @GidMK @profmiketoole affirmation for those who argued for elimination, for health, the economy, and 'freedom'? If you don't use strong restrictions, you need many more weaker ones, for longer, and they cost more across all 3…

#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 #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…

@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.…

#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.

@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…

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.

#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.

#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 #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 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…

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…

#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…

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

@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.

#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.…

#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 @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 #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 #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 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…

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @GregDore2 @ProfPCDoherty what definition of 'safe' are we using if somebody's head has to be cut open to try to remove clots? Is it a greater good argument? Some are expendable? Justifiable, when alternatives…

#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 #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 @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 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.…

@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…

#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…

@ProfPCDoherty have you done any work on the concept of immune amnesia? I see that measles infection can sometimes 'wipe' the immune system's memory of other diseases a person had been immune to?

#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 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…

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

#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 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.…

@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,…

A prominent Australian infectious diseases expert was on radio this morning, being quite cavalier about the chance of children becoming infected in Australia. Does most of them little harm etc. None of this would get ethics approval for…

#covid19 #auspol Anybody see a TGA update today?

#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

"Resilience has been built out of our health systems, and replaced by just-in-time systems designed to run at close to 100 per cent bed occupancy in normal times." Also the reason toilet paper sells out in outbreaks, blamed on 'panic…

#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 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 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…

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

#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.…

#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…

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.

#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…

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

#auspol this is whack-a-mole. A high-risk strategic choice. When the word 'proportionate' is used, why does nobody ask 'proportionate to what'? With exponential functions, every part of the curve = 'out of control'. https://t.co/ARJRpSVvh6

#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 and yet, somebody will be that 1 person. That's what the public is thinking. "Not me". It's not likely to be them (one half of risk), but if it is them, it's game over (other half of risk). https://t.co/wJFqJmh2ev

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

#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 #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…

#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…

#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…

#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 #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

#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…

#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 #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…

#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…

#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…

#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…

#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 #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 #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…

#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…

Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentially life-changing. /1 https://t.co/qofYhonw0g We tend to…

#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

#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 #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…

#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 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…

#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 #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…

#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…

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

#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 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

#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…

#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…

#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…

#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 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 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…

#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.

#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…

Pretty sure there are still regulations around maximum number/minutes of ads per hour on Freeview TV? Surely @theprojecttv sails pretty close to whatever that line is? Anybody counted?

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

#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 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…

#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…

#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…

@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 #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 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…

#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…

#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 #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

#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…

#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…

#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 #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 #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.…

#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…

@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…

#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 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…

#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…

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

#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 Health Hazzard talking about ‘balance’, another strategic conservative word. They use it for climate change too, it means ‘we won’t actually act, to save the Economy’. Ask them to ‘balance’ the Economy with childcare, and wages,…

#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.

@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…

#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 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 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 #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…

@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?

#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 #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 #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…

#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 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 #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 #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

#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,…

#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…

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…

#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?

#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 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…

There really isn't an infectious disease that would survive if we did the basics. Clean food, water, air. Decent housing. Lack of crowding. The true medical heroes for all ages? They look a bit like this. https://t.co/dgai3jDe9P

#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…

#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'.…

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…

#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.

#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…

#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…

#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 #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…

@RichardfromSyd1 morbidity climbing in Israel. Suggests NSW’s hospitalisations have a long way to run. https://t.co/p10R4GE9ju

#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 #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 #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 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.…

#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 a tip for journos interviewing employees of the NSW Government, like NSW Health staff. They're not allowed to speak about what they know and see. It violates their employment conditions.

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

#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 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 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?…

@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.

#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.

#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…

#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 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,…

#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

@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

@YouAreLobbyLud @OrinCordus @RichardfromSyd1 I feel people will take too much comfort from the fact nobody died. https://t.co/EjIiW8xwWT

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

#nswpol #auspol still waiting, weeks in, for somebody to point out at the NSW press conference that the 70 and 80% figures are irrelevant without functioning contact tracing. Doherty requires it. And Burnet require all current restrictions…

@CrabbBrendan the photo alone a great plug for ventilation. Came upon by accident, same theme. Survival rates in field hospitals for Spanish Flu were apparently markedly greater. https://t.co/Z3FH0nXv8Q

#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…

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.…

#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…

Take your Godwin’s Law and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. Casually allowing an infectious disease to become endemic and a scourge for future generations is like letting the Nazi party continue to operate after 1945.

@OrinCordus @RichardfromSyd1 @YouAreLobbyLud @DrBevSmallwood apparently GPs are being asked to take on HITH duties, which (also apparently) violates the usual demarcation between State-run hospitals and largely commonwealth-run general…

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…

#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 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 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…

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…

@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,…

#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…

#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 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…

This new world where things are fine for kids provided they don't end up in hospital will make parenting a lot easier.

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 #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 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

Take that. McVernon is a great epi, but since when did she become a ventilation expert? Coatsworth and Collignon infectious disease physicians who do the same, wade way out of their area of expertise with sweeping pronouncements. Experts…

#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 #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…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus this is the Tweet that I’m trying to weave into my understanding of disease pattern. I thought pattern is defined purely by rate of growth of infection. But this suggests the pathogen itself can be endemic, or…

#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?…

#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 #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…

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…

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…

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

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 "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…

“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.…

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…

I’ve enjoyed the advice from infectious disease physicians on building ventilation and education. https://t.co/XBBtl0cmVp

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 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 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…

#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 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…

#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

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…

Settled in my comfy chair, ready for another #Insiders free of any public health expertise.

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…

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…

Pre-print, large study of UK healthcare workers suggests differences in efficacy between Pfizer and and AZ mostly due to AZ being given to those with existing co-morbidities. @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus https://t.co/C4gduki41x

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

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. Alexander Pope

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…

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…

#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

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

Where I live, this is the official advice from the NSW Department of Education, via NSW Health. A nationally prominent medical practitioner is providing the advice I’m re-Tweeting, to the public. This seems a breach of professional…

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…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

Why not use this 3rd dose to help suppress transmission too? Why make everybody wait 6 months? Sure we need to get everybody at least double-jabbed as a priority, but there seems capacity to do both. #auspol https://t.co/7NJloBG1kn

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

“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…

So they’re getting it under control? Or some smoke and mirrors here? On the ground I’m seeing very little attention to case locations and tracing. Many locations never even make it to NSW health notifications. @RichardfromSyd1 @rossleedham…

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.

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

Track what libertarian conservatives do across the world. It's a very cosy plagiarism club. In the UK today for example, they're having their own Christian Porter moment. Owen Paterson, a Tory MP, was found to have taken money.../1 #auspol…

There is a fast-track way to change the world. It would take 10 minutes. Everybody join a union. And it’s not just about money. Political libertarian ideas are stupid. But they win because they’re organised. Unions have always been the…

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…

Anybody else getting double-posts because Twitter keeps saying 'Whoops you posted that before'? Even when you haven't.

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

When dams overflow, there’s lots of anger about needing bigger dams to capture this ‘wasted’ water. The concept of downstream, of the global health of the waterway? Ha. Using dams for water security is like buying a bigger wallet for…

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,…

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…

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

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…

The real politics of the nation are seen in our footpaths. Anybody who works with footpaths knows that the old collective public service ideas build and maintain them. Libertarian ideas are destroying them, with the smallest trip…

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

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

I think plagiarised, but at least somebody there may not have been a cold-eyed zealot. #auspol https://t.co/IhDZCcKEZo

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…

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…

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

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…

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

Struggling to find clarity on endemicity/epidemicity. Many references say it's all about rate of infection. And/or they say it's also about being self-sustaining in a geographical area, for endemicity, but epidemics can be geographically…

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…

Australia’s public health team swings into action. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/uFWJUSoUFc

Greg Hunt. ‘Most significantly’ we have hospitals for when we (let you) get sick. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/FDFvtpeOWq

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…

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…

My useful transmission vectors enjoyed their dinner. How about everybody else? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/KgDpFo0ITj

“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…

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

Great example for ‘mildism’ here. Repeated ‘mild’ brain injury from concussions. We’ve seen where that ends up. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/OvUILTafBp

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…

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.…

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…

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…

“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…

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’.…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

‘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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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

Help me out brains trust. Over 100,000 tests yesterday, huge test positivity jump again . Means really bad things, yes? @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @rossleedham @OrinCordus @djf0001 @polioandme https://t.co/GhSfI0anEQ Press…

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…

What 'living with the virus' and 'only hospitalisations matter' produces. Infection is what matters. It shuts things down, just as being infected with the flu shuts things down. Multiply by the thousands, every week of every year, and…

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…

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?…

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…

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…

"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

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…

"Cases (leaks) don't matter, only hospitalisations (roof collapsing on your head) matter." #covid19aus https://t.co/kspC6PUBJr

Australia used a lot of AZ. And still nobody official says that, when discussing boosters. https://t.co/O8AnH4YjJu

"If we have 25,000 cases a day in January, the NSW health system will not be able to manage. It will be in a complete crisis. That's all there is to it. It's that simple." Professor Adrian Esterman

@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…

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…

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…

Only hospitalisations matter was reaffirmed at National Cabinet today. Made me think about a heart disease health strategy that said 'people can have as much heart disease as they like, we'll just make sure it's managed within our ICU…

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.…

Massive real-world libertarian trial. Several weeks where most of NSW stopped wearing masks, because ‘nobody told them to wear one’. Now they’ve been told to wear one, they all put one on. A population chafing at being told what to do?…

Exactly what’s going on. The bad people strategise every day to undermine public health work. Every single day. https://t.co/jXanPqiMVl

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…

Hospitalisations rising markedly. Waiting for ‘it’s not hospitalisations that matter, it’s only ICU that matters.’ Followed by ‘it’s not ICU that matters, it’s only deaths that matter.’ Followed by ‘those people had underlying conditions’.…

To use this graphic again. Imagine if thousands of people in NSW were getting whooping cough, or TB, every day. And that most of them weren’t going to hospital. Would we say ‘all good, let it spread’? I think we know the answer.…

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 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…

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…

The libertarians here will be onto this next (already underway for HCWs). Not fixing problems, re-branding them as non-problems, spinning them as somebody else’s problem, and finally fudging the data so that problems become invisible.…

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 -…

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

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…

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…

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.…

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?…

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…

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…

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…

‘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 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…

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

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…

I prefer the weekly comparison, focusing on the day leads to re-normalisation of the ridiculous. Hospitalisations almost tripled in a week, ICU doubled. https://t.co/Ir7vvSLRzi

Won that bet. Still a rubbish half-arsed decision, RATs are most powerful to detect infectiousness even in the asymptomatic. Refusing to subsidise that while supporting removal of public health measures - what can you say. #COVID19Aus…

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,…

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…

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…

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

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…

If the school is on fire, you call in the firies. They tell everybody else to fuck off, while they put out the fire. The end. https://t.co/GfbQlAGre3

Complete social breakdown. Remember when even having a cold, or a headache or stomach ache, was considered obvious reason to take a day off work? Now you’re forced to go, with a potentially lethal disease that you can also pass on to…

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…

This is how the reframing happens, every day. Now going to hospital isn’t ‘severe’ disease. Being hospitalised for just about anything has meant serious illness, in the world I grew up in. It’s not a hotel. https://t.co/3RihlVRnjb

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…

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…

A hospital is beds, buildings and machines that go ping. The LNP has been very upfront about this, the whole time. Keep business open, have enough beds for the maimed workers. I guess the latter is some minor improvement on the 19th…

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…

Precious from Brad Hazzard this morning: “Give a damn about your community, your family and most particularly, the health staff across NSW who you expect to be looking after you if and when you end up in our hospital system.” Say it in the…

"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.

She wasn't listening to the Premier yesterday. We need to 'push through' this. Get the volunteers in the hospital canteen to scrub up. https://t.co/SuUjWeEcPT

Have Tweeted before maybe about what POW camps in the Korean War can teach us about Covid. But in case not.../1 https://t.co/b79VSMhsgl The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at…

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…

The slogans do their work. Deep neural programming. Vast numbers can repeat this in their sleep, without any idea what any of the words mean. https://t.co/IeMN5NwOhd

I thought hospitalisation numbers here are cumulative? Not sure how they go backwards by 82 in a day? Not really like testing data, which can change as results come in. Or am I missing something obvious? @juliette_io @RichardfromSyd1…

My gut says the feds are toast at the election. But my brain says many treat politics like football, and the parties are their teams. And we all know people will back a losing team for generations.

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…

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…

Nothing to fear people of NSW. Room at the hospital for the kids. https://t.co/7C160s9R6U

Health care workers protesting in their thousands against vaccination is the ultimate victory of neoliberal/libertarian ideas. Like pilots protesting against the oppression of air traffic control. Societies can’t be saved from this belief…

‘Endemic’ is something always present in a population, at a certain level. Like low wages, vast gaps in wealth, underfunded public schools and hospitals, and low tax rates for the wealthy. ‘Epidemic’ is peaks within this. Like massive tax…

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.…

Conversation with a colleague, about back to school RATs and her children. "I won't be testing them twice a week, only if they have symptoms, it's too upsetting for them". I sympathise. Disease control should never have been outsourced to…

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

All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persistence of disease in poor regions/countries. Like a character of…

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…

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.…

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…

If your way of life can’t cope with infectious diseases, the answer is to change your way of life. Like industrial farming, you don’t need to drench the livestock with antibiotics, you need to let them graze in a field. Living with…

That Israel is recommending a 4th dose for the under-60s as well now, due to increased efficacy against severe disease and death, suggests the 3rd dose protection for those wanes in a concerning way. Sheba Medical Centre data, anybody got…

#insiders Phil Coorey giving his N=1 story about a cafe owner closing shop ‘if we go into lockdown again’. I’d hoped we could have public health advice every week on #insiders by now, 2 years on. Not to be.

Everybody should follow @Bertrandization, if they’re not already. Throw in @RichardfromSyd1 too. Very smart people who cut through the BS, and act as brilliant bridges between the (often muzzled) expert communities and everyday people.…

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 -…

SARS-Cov-2 is airborne. But I think it's more important to say, it's mostly STALE air-borne. Yes you can catch it outside, but it's much less likely. Like most respiratory viruses, it's primarily a disease of the built environment.

The 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…

The 'push through' narrative from the NSW Premier. At what daily case numbers, hospitalisations, ICU and deaths will we have reached the other side? Serious question, it's not defined. The UK reached a constant stream of hospitalisation…

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…

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

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…

Yesterday somebody was arguing with me about the need for more protections in schools. Their response was that very few if any ‘healthy’ children will die. Eugenics really is the new craze.

Anybody else planning to off-ramp these political co-morbidities come May? Getting (this) government out of the lives of Australians? #auspol (No response needed, just a vote for anybody else. Except Clive and Craig.)…

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…

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…

We need to expose everybody to Covid, so that they can…catch it again. https://t.co/Io3Ec3QpCt

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.…

Andrew Probyn trotting out the ‘balance’ line on #insiders, completely house-trained by government spin doctors. Such earnest pondering, as he weighs how many people we can kill to keep the Economy going. More eugenics, dressed up as…

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.…

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…

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…

Stacks of RATs at my local chemist today. $11-$12 each. Nobody is going to pay that longer term. And nor should they. Testing in NSW is now beyond a farce. And that's the plan, hide all the evidence of what's going on with infection.

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…

Conservatives undermine universal health care by saying ‘free’ health care should only go to the disadvantaged. Sounds fair and balanced. But it undermines the entire foundation of universal healthcare. RATs another LNP Trojan Horse to…

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…

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.…

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…

A lot more talk about excess deaths now. Very few draw the obvious conclusion from the data that countries who stopped their 'economies' were the healthiest they'd ever been. You can spot where the 'Economy' came back, around February this…

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,…

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.…

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

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…

It’s early still, but worldwide the only decoupling we seem to see in a sustainable way is deaths, from hospitalisation and ICU numbers. People are dying at a pretty steady rate, but not in hospital? https://t.co/q0COYqDDip

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…

I'm getting a bit misty-eyed remembering the days when a Premier would refer to 'health advice' when making decisions like this. It's naked industrial farming now. Buckets of antibiotics in our food next. https://t.co/BT6QCNVn6U

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 government relentlessly attacks super because it’s maybe an even greater threat to them than unions. VAST amounts of the nation’s wealth is now in super funds. And we - me and you - own those. /1 #auspol https://t.co/owb063cMgA This is…

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…

Is it really that difficult for somebody to ask the Premier, or NSW Health, what the infection numbers have been in schools after week 1? #auspol

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…

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…

If we were sequencing, or heck, even testing much, in NSW, we could trace this coming. As it is we’ll just potentially see an uptick in hospitalisations and deaths before the boss of the battery hen farm in Macquarie Street adds more…

In discussion with friends yesterday about ‘living with the virus’. All operating under the premise that this means ‘allowing ourselves to become infected’. I asked if they allow themselves to contract HIV. Or TB. Or Lyme Disease. All…

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

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…

The only reason anybody is talking about the ALP and China is because journalists report it. They could quite easily say ‘no that’s nonsense, we’re not even talking about it’. #auspol

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

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…

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…

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…

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

‘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…

Paul Keating in 1997. Contrast with the slogan-spewing 'leadership' we have today. The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others—in other words, to move…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for the image. Isn't it remarkable that hospital admissions got to almost EXACTLY NSW public hospital system capacity? And despite cases being 3-4 times more than the 25,000 per day projected by the Health…

Have been away a few weeks. Did anybody solve the issue of availability of (decent) MERV filters in Australia to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes?

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…

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…

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…

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 inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

The ‘my body is a temple/natural health’ types are the apogee of libertarian politics. The individual as gated community.

There’s an existential tension in play right now, for our societies. Their ‘normal’ functioning is not compatible with containment of infectious disease, without a dramatic pharmaceutical. Hypermobility and mass gatherings. I think we need…

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…

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.

Worth watching multiple times every day. It helps with mental health. https://t.co/4isSzCMkU2

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…

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…

Apropos of nothing, and because the world is still full of wonders even in crises. The e+ is an electron, travelling backwards in time. A positron. PET scanners in hospitals use these. They’re time machines. https://t.co/lZo9iE9r3f

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…

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…

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?

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…

Two races in, and the rule changes lead to…exactly the same teams winning all of the races, and everybody else being an afterthought. The whole formula is a joke. https://t.co/Gi7eLfKVTk

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

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…

"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 department has deployed more than 350 staff from head office into schools, and more than 2000 final-year university students...” A measure of how little teaching is respected, that the same thing would be seen as suicidally…

This seems a not uncommon view among virologists. I wonder about surrendering the control of spread, it’s spread that is the social and political core of infection. It’s the ‘public’ health bit. It indicates poor living conditions, that…

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

Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An…

Hospitalisations and deaths both trending up. Those were the metrics the National Cabinet told us to look at. So...we're looking. What happens now? https://t.co/e67HXHSxH2

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…

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_…

It may have been these stats that prompted some to demand kids be unmasked. Maybe they think the paediatric staff in hospitals need more to do. https://t.co/iBrBiHWSue

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

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter.…

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.…

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…

‘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…

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…

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…

"In the first quarter of 2022, excess mortality is expected to be nearly 10% (around 10% excess for January and February and around 5% for March)." (Actuaries Institute.) If we're going to use excess deaths as the metric now, somebody…

Has anybody heard 'endemic' for a while? Has it been renormalised too, like cases-->hospitalisations--->ICU--->deaths--->underlying condition deaths--->excess deaths? Is endemic now excess deaths? Will excess deaths now…

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…

“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

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…

Come on Patricia, enough with machine-gunning the government’s talking points. As if anybody in Australia even cares who Richard Marles is, let alone what Ministry he’d like to have. #insiders

So, we’re away. The choice between a government who doesn’t believe in government, and…anybody else really. Anybody who wants to do any sort of governing at all, by definition would be better. https://t.co/B2xbiQnFDy

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,…

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…

Now that the election has arrived, I urge everybody to read Lippmann’s wisdom on how these things work, and on democracy in general. Re-Tweeting a thread. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts

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…

Today’s virtual press conference question. “Prime Minister, how will your planned $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy find its way to aged care, roads, schools, hospitals, climate action and legal aid? A working bee for the well-to-do”?

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…

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

“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…

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…

“We need to start living with this virus, a similar way we live with the flu.” Tony Blakely. ‘Living with’ other infectious diseases was always about avoiding catching them. Like living with your dog’s farts, it’s not about shoving your…

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…

The real reason ‘living with the virus’ had to become the strategy. Poor people were forgetting their place. ‘Endemic’ was originally a term applied to infectious diseases when they were left to fester in poorer countries. Now endemic =…

“Mediscare”. The LNP swear their commitment to universal health care. It’s toxic to their core beliefs, they already got rid of it once, under Malcolm Fraser. Out-of-pocket payments up 50% in the past decade, under the LNP. And vast…

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.…

Somebody will be in trouble here, how will we live with HIV now? https://t.co/tkqwknx3TS

Lovely thread on the central thing we should talk about, but don't. Reducing transmission, reducing infections. Reducing sickness. Sane societies don't titrate sickness against hospital capacity. https://t.co/NhXtBmVDlk

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…

72 no longer living with the virus in NSW this week. A day to go. How much death is acceptable? Anybody in the press gallery fancy asking, on the election hustings? Or are we all still focused on fractions of a percent of some idiot…

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.…

NSW Health's guidelines for allowing close contacts back in the workplace include the possibility of employers requiring all employees to wear a mask. I'm betting we won't see that, in most cases.

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…

If Albo really wants to hide, he should go on Sky News. Nobody watches it. https://t.co/J82WCOu6Na

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…

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…

The rare soothing experience of somebody who knows what they're bloody talking about, on Twitter. https://t.co/MsXksMN2X1

@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…

On this election eve Australia, you can choose between a government who doesn't believe in government, and...anybody else at all, really.

All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s…

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…

Anybody else smiling at the thought of how much money Clive has pissed up a wall in this election? Australia doesn’t want Trump wannabes. #auspol

A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1…

The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not…

Bridget Archer on RN this morning hitting the bullseye. Saturday was a victory over tribal, ideological politics. Better tell SKY News Oz, which is still telling everybody the problem is we weren't tribal enough. Australia is still barren…

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,…

I was told by somebody who works as a contact tracer in NSW that their job will finish at the end of June, as there's no committed funding for contact tracing into the next financial year. #auspol

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…

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…

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…

The teal wave was a victory for the heart of Australian politics. Community. Community is independent of scale, it’s not local or global. It bypasses territorial war. I think it’s what makes Oz politics and life unique. We need to unpack…

“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…

Has anybody seen whether refunds will be available for those who have already paid for flu shots? https://t.co/c9QpgzG4Dx

‘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…

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…

A trick the N=1 crowd use to win at everything, is to make people think you have to choose between individuals and groups. But what’s good for everybody is also what’s best for you. Groups are just individuals, individuals live in groups.…

The Teals stumbled upon the heart of Australian politics. Community. We’re a communitarian country. Not capitalist, or communist, or socialist. Community is a politics, independent of scale. A politics defined by social relations, not…

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.…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

Political libertarianism has succeeded in savaging public institutions using fundamentalist ideas about ‘freedom’. Of action, but also of speech. We’re in a bind now, this fundamentalism stops beliefs from being regulated. Fish knows it.…

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?…

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’.

The RBA to announce the new cash rate tomorrow. Economics is designed to make the simple look ridiculously hard. What sort of society holds its breath about a cash rate, the cost of borrowing? A society where most don’t have any money.

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…

Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is really just the Reformation all over again. A secular version of it. I see so many bewildered by what they see as social breakdown…

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the…

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…

“As Health Minister I am not at all keen to be heading back the path that has exhausted everybody with all the restrictions.” BH, March 2022. Sitting on the couch watching Netflix isn’t exhausting. Being a teacher or HCW with the…

I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don't always question. /1 Twitter and other social media mostly…

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…

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…

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…

Your body is not a temple of health, it’s part of an ecosystem of other living things, that is healthy or not. Just as you’re not an individual customer of democracy, you’re a citizen of a community, that functions or not.

Anybody feeling like decades of ‘personal responsibility’ politics has led to everything we can’t provide personally - food, water, energy, education, transport, clean air, wages, equity, climate, healthcare, the arts etc. - falling apart?…

Work in Australia is predominately in varieties of care (health, aged, social) and services. That’s our ‘economy’. Privatising those areas for profit has led to death and system dysfunction. Conservative angst over ‘welfare’ mistakes…

Healthcare is underfunded. But within healthcare, a GP might earn $300K+ a year, and specialists multiples of that. It feels a bit like universities, which cry poor, but where senior managers earn more than cabinet ministers and Prime…

'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…

Has there been a typo here all along? Is it ‘Principle’ Committee, maybe? As in ‘in principle we’re protecting health’? https://t.co/4XadYnp3gh

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…

Personal responsibility health = 6000 Australians dead this year. Personal responsibility gas and electricity = no gas or electricity. I’m seeing a pattern.

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

The funding shortfall at Netball Australia sounds like the equivalent of about half the annual salaries of an NRL or AFL team. Seems a ridiculously small amount of money for somebody to find, for a sport with far more players.

In the constant debate about our Head of State, everybody talks about the ‘Head’ part. Nobody talks much about the ‘State’ part. It’s the much more urgent, existential problem, rescuing the actual machinery of democracy from the…

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…

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 love how economics can give you graphs and formulas to explain inflation. When it’s really just people who have supplies of scarce goods and services extorting everybody else.

Are we at the ‘send them back down the mines’ point yet, in our evolution of care for children? I can’t believe I live in a society that wilfully infects children with dangerous diseases, and then reinfects them, repeatedly. Egged on by…

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…

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.

It’s not rocket science to understand that ‘small business’ is small, because it’s unsuccessful. Nobody says a band is great because it can’t sell any albums. #qanda

I like to track the politics of language. Right now the climate change denial monkeys are keen on 'we're not there yet', when referring to battery storage. By which they mean we can't store gigawatts of power to replace a power station.…

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 saw other studies that said similar things about reductions in heart disease risk. Supports the theories of scientists like Paul Ewald, that many if not most of our chronic diseases may have an infectious origin. https://t.co/qhfAJT4WLg

If you won’t wear a mask because ‘nobody else is’, it’s time to re-enrol in high school so that you can be amongst peers in your stage of emotional development.

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…

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…

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…

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…

A couple of weeks ago 40 deaths in a day was around the national average. Now NSW is mowing them down in those numbers, alone. Political and health leaders who say nothing more needs doing, smile for the Royal Commission camera. #auspol…

Not sure if it's BA.5, but I'm hearing of a LOT more people infected in my community (home and work) this week? Anybody else? Some are reinfections too.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

I’ve just opened a packet of Ibuprofen. Or as the Tories call it, a new hospital. - Coral Fineman, via Graeme Meek

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.…

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…

In workplaces people are returning to work after the laughable 7-day isolation, and nobody is even told why they went missing the week earlier. To ‘protect their privacy’. Pfft, it’s to keep the business running. You’re supposed to tell…

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…

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

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…

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…

Personal responsibility public health is an oxymoron. https://t.co/hgMhlAc1pL

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 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…

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…

Many have been puzzled by the health advice given to National Cabinet. It’s not a great mystery, if you dig a bit. https://t.co/IL9X8nN5DC

When you stop an ‘Economy’, nearly everybody gets healthier and wealthier. We’re still not seeing that I don’t think, allowing the profiteers of the old normal to frame the true narratives of fear. The fear of changing the old normal.…

‘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…

When you zoom out from the highly partisan blood sports of local medical egos, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Prominent voices overseas see it. https://t.co/TC6vvglpu6

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),…

What stands out here is that deaths barely budge, even with *declining* cases and hospitalisations. That black line is endemic death. Now showing signs of becoming epidemic death, again. https://t.co/Hw7GuQLloP

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,…

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…

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.

Rang my GP practice today to ask if I could get my shot outside this afternoon. 'No, we don't do that, in case we need equipment'. I asked if people inside are masked. 'We ask, but we don't provide them'. Reminded me that doctors are the…

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…

It took the PMG 40 years to install a telephone service to every part of Australia, no matter how remote. No remote areas were sacrificed, no Australians told to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their phone connection. Nobody said ‘we…

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…

The infect everyone and titrate just a handful into hospital beds strategy is not going well. 'Everybody will get sick, but we'll try to stop people getting REALLY sick'? Imagine an economic plan that said 'everybody will be broke, but…

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,…

Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol…

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…

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.…

Anybody working in private or public organisations right now might be experiencing the community anger at the difficulty in providing basic services, with the nation awash with infection. You want to say, 'let me put you through to the…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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 idea that the public lead the country, and politicians have to follow them, is libertarian nonsense. 'Strongly encourages', asking the public to do things. In reality the public are looking for direction, without it they'll follow what…

One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy…

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'.…

Tony Blakely on The Project saying now isn’t the time for mask mandates. We need to wait a few weeks to see if the health system is falling over first. Those were almost the verbatim words.

People won’t wear masks even though they’re begged to because nobody wants to be the one to stand out from a crowd. Treat it like shouting a drink, carry a box of masks to group events and offer them around. Break the ice for others.…

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?…

Paul Kelly on RN avoiding questions about mandates. The Herd Immunity Taskforce applies those. Phil Coorey then with some claptrap about getting the chills at the thought of more mandates. Over 5000 in hospital, more than 50 dead every…

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…

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.…

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.…

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…

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.

Ordinary working people here are now equivalent in status to the billions in the developing world we’ve left to their ‘endemic’ diseases for years. Market-based politics made us all interchangeable. Business is looking to double the…

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…

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…

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…

Amazing piece reframing resilience as a collective rather than individual concern. "This framing was wrong. Our vulnerability lay not on our individual skins, but in the collective spaces between us—at the level of our very breath."…

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’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…

'Alarming' data is more than 70 people dying every single day of a preventable disease, that we're not preventing. Headlines you get when you replace a society with an economy. https://t.co/GVlGwNd3OD

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.…

“Cost of living” = you need to pay somebody now to stay alive.

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…

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

The surest guide to the UK leadership race is history. Is the political situation dire? If yes, a woman will win, given a hospital pass to try to fix it, before the conservative men then remove her to regain the top spot.

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…

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…

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.…

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

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…

33 of the deaths notified to NSW Health for today were people who could still be alive, if National Cabinet was more than a photo opportunity to pretend something is being done. https://t.co/LFeH7HLh7x

Memories of when we had a functioning public health system, so long ago (2018). https://t.co/89WOS498qH

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…

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…

In this hierarchy of controls for work safety, we can’t even manage the weakest end of the pyramid. Many employers, whose legal responsibility it is to implement this, are doing none of it. Nobody is demanding they obey the law and cough…

At what point does a national strategy of preventing severe disease and hospitalisation get judged by its failure to prevent severe disease and hospitalisation?

The reason the Reserve Bank has to create such pain by changing the price of money, is that government no longer invests in anything. So the price of money becomes the determining factor in privatised nations. Also, the Reserve Bank is a…

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…

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…

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

Watching the UK news about the terrible drought in Europe. In the UK ‘water companies’ are asked to take a range of measures. Another basic service, privatised. Why can’t basics like education, health, water and energy be not-for-profit?…

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,…

I'm not an infectious disease expert or an epidemiologist or virologist. But I know what an exponential wave function looks like and does, and going 'down' a wave isn't any better news than going up one. It's the recharge phase, for the…

And that 'peak' may be artificially maintained anyway by shifting patients to outside-hospital modalities of care, and drastically overloading those. https://t.co/Ls0Ezkj6Rw

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…

We all went through school watching the ‘geeks’ being bullied, and now scratch our heads wondering why nobody listens to the science. Nobody has ever listened to the science. The science got wedgies.

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…

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

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…

It’s not clear if the prominent health professionals advocating repeat infection were trained to think this, or whether their own sudden celebrity from talking bollocks is too seductive, so they can’t give it up. https://t.co/n76GQxvYgq

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…

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…

Here are the relevant sections of the Constitution. Did the Federal Executive Council recommend these appointments? A quorum for their meetings is a minimum 2 Ministers or Assistant Ministers. So somebody else in the Ministry was there.…

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.…

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’,…

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…

If your society needs to take urgent action against a threat, I advise getting rid of all forms of football. There are times it feels like the only thing anybody will take seriously.

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…

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…

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.…

Will conservatives care? For modern conservatives, the collapse of nationalised health care is a long-held dream. They won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it, this is their standard methodology. Cripple the public service, then privatise…

Not only does smoking make you more susceptible to a whole range of infections, the smoke itself carries a smorgasbord of nasty bacteria. The infectious origin of chronic disease hypothesis and theories of smoking-related disease may be…

This is actually true. The bit we (the public) missed is that we’ve been downgraded to itinerant-worker-from-developing-country status. ‘The Economy’ is the deliberate globalisation of the developing world model. And that always included…

Some Strayan innovation needed here. You put a big pipe in and pump it far enough out to sea that nobody notices. https://t.co/AMTNErTQPb

The brutal reality of our health system. A privatised and often exorbitant pay scale for doctors overlaid upon a public service funding model. No other public servants get to dictate their own fees, with those fees then subsidised by the…

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

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

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 whining from the LNP and business about union ‘domination’ at the Jobs Summit. Can anybody remember unions having a single voice in the past decade? Do as the conservatives do, make the changes and let the other side whine. Then make…

NSW will go to National Cabinet with an ambit claim of no isolation at all (the failed UK model), but will sell 5 days’ isolation (the failed US model) as some sort of compromise. And the winter wave apparently didn’t overload hospitals.…

With reporting that hospitals weren’t overloaded this winter, what does ‘overloaded’ mean? It appears to mean ‘didn’t cease functioning entirely’. But not ‘kept open by flogging HCWs beyond the point of exhaustion, with mass resignations,…

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’.…

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…

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…

Is there some way we can make Monique Health Minster? It’d be a first in some time, a health minister focused on health and not the economy. https://t.co/VEBrRLgtRb

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.…

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.…

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,…

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…

Around 1 for months. Huge caseloads. Everybody is infecting everybody i.e. no control. But you only need to get that Reff below 1 to drive the virus to elimination. We can’t be bothered. Like driving the Bathurst 1000 and stopping a metre…

“…children in the UK were weaponised, exploited in an ideological battle...” The disgusting, deliberate infection of children, using outrageous propaganda equating SARS-Cov2 with colds and flu, and nonsense about mental health and…

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…

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 explosion of talk about mental health. Much of it driven by politicians who want to blame the public for the damage political inaction causes. Social life is imitative. We’re becoming very good at blaming the inside of our own heads…

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.…

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.…

The 'preventing serious disease and death' strategy. The greatest failure in public administration in Australian history. The greatest mass casualty event. I tag auspol here because that's what the political discussion should be about, but…

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.…

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’.…

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…

‘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…

Medical folk, what might be the cause of that discolouration on the Queen’s hand? Steroids? https://t.co/h855hujbFC

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…

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.

“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

I think we need another public holiday to commemorate all of the thousands who have died in Australia this year from a mysterious disease that disappeared in late-2021, leading up to an election.

The 365 days per year job of controlling infectious diseases. Not jab-and-forget. https://t.co/CIPvZ1Mv3j

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 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…

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current…

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…

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

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…

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

An immune system is like a crumple zone on a car, it can stop you dying, but you don’t smash randomly into every car you see. It’s a last line of defence, after speed limits, driver training, road rules etc. ‘Natural’ healthers think it…

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…

The irony of the criticism of ‘MSM’ by just about everybody, is that it ceased to exist some time ago. There is no mainstream. It’s a marketing trick to enlist recruits who feel alienated, by anything, to make them think they’re a special…

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.…

See how ‘the economy’ is spoken of in the third person? As if it’s something that ‘runs’ separately to us? Us stopping work is just us stopping work. If it’s ‘costing’ somebody something, that tells you who really owns the economy. Not us.…

The death-and-disease-led-recovery continues apace in the UK. And where they go, we always follow. https://t.co/mmbhm3cbbl

Watching the UK Tories smash their HCWs and wondering why they do nothing? It’s all part of the plan. The LNP also say here that they love Medicare (they despise it and funnel billions to private health insurers to undermine it). The real…

Meanwhile in the terminal decline of the UK, feudal barons celebrate the death of a monarch by ransacking the poor even more. With all the problems the UK faces, removing the ban on bonuses to bank bosses was obviously top of everybody’s…

Brett could make “Has Anybody Seen the Pillars?” an agenda item at the next AHPPC. https://t.co/qwB3Y8pt2x

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…

h/t to all of those who fought so hard to infect the kids. You must be feeling nothing like the bottom-feeding arseholes people with a brain and a conscience think you are. https://t.co/KZUScLBLW5 h/t @MixtUpMixy

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.…

This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’…

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.…

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

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.…

You may think they paused proceedings to take this group selfie. This is the proceedings. The health advice will be in those folders nobody will open. https://t.co/rXnb5gfI3N

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…

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

@theprojecttv if not now, when? When the virus isn’t spreading throughout the whole community. You send the firefighters home when the fire is out. Grow a brain.

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…

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?…

If National Cabinet is so obsessed with consistency, how about abolishing Daylight Saving, country-wide? Up in the dark again today, like a rewind to winter. Weeks of disrupted sleep and tiredness pending. If we want an extra hour after…

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

Mark Dreyfus has put forward a pretty good anti-corruption body. But it’s worth remembering that almost none of it would be necessary, if we got rid of elections and selected representatives another way. By random, for example, as we do…

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…

The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1…

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.…

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…

Was JobKeeper ($90 billion) mostly a subsidy to business for badly ventilated buildings? Why weren’t our public and private buildings already low risk for transmission of infectious disease, a WHS requirement?

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…

The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so that even the other side continues to do their work, when…

"We'll follow the health advice so long as government pays"

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…

The focus of infection in public discussion is the acute phase. The main game is likely always the chronic phase. Some research suggests our other major killers like heart disease and cancer may also be the chronic phase of acute…

Your ‘mild’ infection is somebody else’s on-ramp to severe disease, disability and death.

If there was ANY disease we all get that isn’t overwhelmingly mild in most people, our civilisation would have already ended.

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…

Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a…

Love or hate the campaign from the 1980s, it gives us a glimpse into a time when preventing people being infected with lethal diseases was an assumed no-brainer. Suggesting ‘living with’ AIDS would have got you a free psychiatric…

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…

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…

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…

I notice the CDC strongly recommends against chickenpox parties (I'm one who had forced varicella infection via one of those). And yet some experts still utter the rubbish about 'natural infection'. Infection is an invasive assault on the…

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…

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

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

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…

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

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…

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…

Speaking to somebody who works as a contact tracer with NSW Health. Their contract (focusing mostly on aged care) was cancelled, the moment the isolation orders were dropped. Gold standard something, don’t know what.

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

Regulation enables, not restricts. Speed limits, for example. Nearly always framed as a ‘restriction’, on speed. But a speed limit regulates the flow of traffic. Having everybody going about the same speed spaces out vehicles. People…

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…

The most minimised thing is infection itself? Lived experiences of mild acute infections with colds and seasonal flu viruses are used to imply infection is even healthy. Many died in history creating that lower morbidity. And it ignores…

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…

Also 6 months ago there was discussion around the constitutional right of doctors to set their own fees. (Which is real.) From a public policy view, given taxpayers fund most payments, this is risky, so must have strong controls. What are…

In the cost-of-living crisis, why does nobody ask who we’re all paying to be allowed to live?

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…

Ask somebody who says 'natural infection' what unnatural infection might be?

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…

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…

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…

To understand how conservative politicians capture the vote of poorer people, imagine you're somebody who has no success with relationships. Nobody wants you. Would you rather: 1) be told you're a loser, but it's not your fault. Or, 2) be…

The triumph of economic, monetarist politics is to get everybody on all sides of politics to agree unthinkingly that the country is driven by a budget. That a country has to ‘buy’ its way of life. https://t.co/tdNtOTlAEY

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

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…

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)…

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…

If the truth was either obvious or popular, everybody would be a genius and society wouldn’t need governing. Spinoza provided the test of truth - it creates a feeling of surprised joy. A feeling of affirmation is just team sports.

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.…

Do they still have a budget lock-up? Where all the top journalists and politicians breathe each other's air for the entire day leading up to the budget presentation? #auspol

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…

Privatised telecommunications, now privatised health insurance. Getting government out of peoples' lives lets the hackers into them. #auspol https://t.co/O28Y1qCf4p

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…

Institutions are what hold societies together. The people who destroy them replace them with slogans. ‘The economy’, ‘living with the virus’, ‘the politics of envy’, etc. etc. Sloganism is populism. Most peoples’ understanding of public…

On the one hand we elect leaders to represent everybody. On the other we say society is a free market of individuals. There's not one point of contact between those two things. And we wonder why the world seems mad.

Yep, but it surprises me that nobody is suggesting funding the poorest households (and even others) to add solar panels and batteries to their homes. Can be installed in a single day, and unlike a rebate creates ongoing generation and…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why…

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.…

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…

Listening to the usual banalities about energy on #insiders, a gossip column for the elected populist dimwits. Here’s the disconnect between the Australian community (heart of our democracy), and the elected dimwits. From AEMO. There is so…

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…

The fact Bolsonaro is still in the race, let alone might win, should be a challenge to anybody who believes free and fair elections express the 'will of the people'. They're just popularity contests, easily gamed. https://t.co/gEkIq2ShXM

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…

Freedom of speech is like saying freedom of wealth. As if either speech or wealth are things we just have, freely. Both are contextual, and contested. Freedom of speech is mostly a campaign by those who already own all of the conversation,…

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…

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?

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…

The half-dozen people I know personally who’ve had unexplainable life-threatening medical episodes this week are still on the brink. Every day of their confused terror and their families’ suffering, I think of this photo. These grinning…

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

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.…

It all helps. But it still seems ridiculous that with all of our lauded expertise and knowledge, ‘let everybody get infected’ is still the best baseline we can come up with. Need to decouple that expertise and knowledge from the electoral…

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,…

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

“Infecting an entire generation is irresponsible. We don’t yet know what this infection does to children’s immune systems when it occurs repeatedly.” Karl Lauterbach, Minister for Health, Germany. https://t.co/PVGmxgeg8c

This is what an actual health minister says. Why Germany is what we call an advanced economy, and Australia is a big quarry with kickbacks at the gate for local casual staff. https://t.co/BQOxcAr3Lx

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.…

Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as a window to the real answer. /1 (source:…

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

I missed this one at the time. Ah well, at least they didn't miss any school, which would have caused a lot more mental health damage. /s https://t.co/SLEM78Pjtm

Has anybody been able to access 3M 9210 Auras in Australia? With the braided elastic? https://t.co/viELfX2rTd

Yep. But they won’t, because the engine room of society is conformity. They need leadership to provide pubic health action to conform with. Otherwise they’ll just conform with what everybody else is doing i.e. nothing.…

Because we listened to busybody, politically-motivated health experts about what to do in schools and not to people in schools themselves, this is where we’ve ended up. https://t.co/ibk9kt7vjs

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…

Big jump in hospitalisations, ICU and also almost doubling of PCR positives. How many more cycles of burning off the dry tinder do we need to reach rich hybrid immunity? https://t.co/6CuU5xw0Rw

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."

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…

My understanding of advanced epidemiology gleaned from the NSW Premier today is that this is easily fixed. Those who ‘feel sick’ should stay on the ship. And everybody else should get off and wander broadly through the community.…

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…

Political libertarians turn State health bodies into their compliant pheasant-dogs. “Just a friendly reminder”. And a personal favourite: “…what actions you may like to take”. The same libertarians issue edicts like, “you must fly a flag…

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…

“Chief medical officer Paul Kelly saying it was not likely Christmas would be spent under restrictions.” Smoke and mirrors. Infected family members will be eating in their bedrooms so as not to kill grandma. Privatised restrictions.

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

I’ve done a submission to this Inquiry. Everybody who feels passionately that repeated deliberate infection is a betrayal of public heath should have their say. Great made-easy-to-submit tool here (link). https://t.co/HxV663XAYS

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…

'Get through' meaning 'infect everybody, and try to save as many of them as possible, while minimising impact on votes.' https://t.co/wcj28QYymc

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…

The political and business types who demand we 'learn to live with the virus' are often the type of men who tell their wives to shut the kids up. Private school boys raised to lead the world, but somebody else will do the washing, cooking…

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…

Anybody else’s notification numbers not displaying?

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.…

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…

"Health authorities in NSW have asked people to resume wearing masks in public indoor areas and on public transport, although they have stopped short of reintroducing mandates." They don't have the authority to introduce mandates? Only…

A woman I know had to mask on doctor’s orders, to reduce her risk with another condition. She spent the next days apologising to everybody she knew, for masking. Social conformity drives society, not individual freedom. Freedom is…

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…

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…

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

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…

People tend to obey their leaders. For all of 2022, health experts have told people to wear masks. Politicians have told them not to bother. Who do the people follow? Not the health experts. Political libertarians know this. Their…

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

Somebody. https://t.co/p0QIJLBrpQ

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.…

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…

National Cabinet granted itself a half-dozen or more Chief Health Officer roles. Looking forward to that inquiry. https://t.co/qxhpA0g9iE

Twitter is proof ‘the people’ don’t exist. Theoretically it’s a platform where everybody speaks. But like life outside Twitter, what gets read is only the tiniest fraction of what gets said. About 5% of Tweeters get read regularly.…

Politicians lie. And yet given the choice between a politician’s and a medical professional’s advice on a mask, most choose the politician. Especially those who yell for freedom from politicians. Social conformity is the key to…

Hooray, like every other election for the past 30 years, somebody is more popular than somebody else. Like being back at school. If you want a job you usually have to demonstrate some sort of competence. To run the country, you only have…

Anybody with me yet on getting rid of elections? Why would grown-ups ever think popularity would solve any grown-up problem? We don’t raise our kids that way, we don’t run our businesses that way. https://t.co/aZsQqR6Kt4

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

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…

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…

‘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.

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.

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

Yes these are hypotheses, but a growing number of long-term chronic diseases are being linked to chronic infection. https://t.co/6g4T2GKPdp

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.

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…

Wow, that's big numbers after 6 months. Did we end up throwing away our 13 million doses, because we were too busy trying to win elections and infect everybody? https://t.co/wMgwv72GeW

I seem to have developed a change to my sense of taste in the past 24 hours. Not the absence of taste, but more like a de-emphasising of some flavours. Did a PCR this morning, will see. PCR result in - negative. Must be some other…

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)…

It seems like only yesterday all leaders were interested in children’s health. The end of corruption exceptionalism. https://t.co/n4IeXYO6Wp

A friend who had to be admitted to hospital with Covid because they couldn’t breathe responded with ‘it is what it is’. These adolescent slogans, or ‘You do You’, are how adolescents think. But that’s now our entire culture. Fatalism,…

If we had freedom, we could avoid infection. We’d be free to take evasive action. But we’re not, we have to work and kids have to go to school. And many workplaces are doing nothing to protect us. Only caged chickens, pigs and cows get…

Politicians were blindsided when public health institutions swung into action when Covid emerged. That won’t be allowed to happen again. Note the criticism they use of CHOs - ‘unelected’. Elections are how these political bastards destroy…

Can we get rid of billions of taxpayer subsidies to a hopelessly inefficient industry, private health insurance? If politicians want market-based public services, let them live by the market. Private health insurance never worked.…

The politicians who dumped Covid regulations to give you ‘freedom’, at the same time fight election campaigns on the ‘rule of law’, and wars on a ‘rules-based order’. The answer to Covid is regulation, not medicine or science. Covid exists…

Imagine telling a tradie cutting in a dusty environment that their mask represented their anxiety, rather than their safety. Many of them in fact wouldn't wear one, unless required to. It's called public health, and WHS.…

Local school being smashed by Covid. We have a Premier who learned his trade as a Young Liberal, relishing the ideological warfare that he now brings to a pandemic as well. Like conservatives globally, sees public health as State…

Thoughts and prayers. Or how about we throw all of our current leaders in jail and leave public health to our public health teams? https://t.co/qdprYHI6wJ

Heart-warming to just walk past an auditorium packed with local elderly folk, listening to local school choirs. Nobody is masked. They should have introduced local HCWs as well, 'hi, my name is Jane, I'm an ICU nurse, I may be seeing you…

Anybody warming to my 'get rid of elections' theme yet? https://t.co/sSezPWmQ6q

Well said Adam. Imagine putting anything before the health of your community. https://t.co/5I24EcIxzx

Applause to Professor Crabb for being open with his anger. Polite counter-arguments have got us nowhere, this isn't a scientific debate. It's the collapse of basic, decent public health practice. #auspol https://t.co/iA6b74nkPP

Grandparents on both side of the family now hospitalised in the latest Covid surges. No sympathy please, it’s not about that. They took every precaution possible. They were isolated from social life, and still got infected. The…

Some ‘vaccines work!’ minimisers again yesterday. Yes, they work. Like seatbelts work. Nobody goes out and deliberately crashes the car 4 times a year, just because they have a seat belt.

Because it enrages halfwits, I like to point out that ‘lockdowns’ just means ‘people get to stay home’. Anybody who watches the faces of people heading home on a Friday afternoon knows this used to be true freedom. Before the minimising…

Covid minimisers trotted out false balance early in the pandemic ('balancing' public health action against the economy). It's what they'd already been doing with climate change for decades. It's the same people. We've spent 3 years trapped…

An update on this. One sent home because the hospital was deemed a much too risky place to be. So HITH instead. The hospital, too risky. Australia, 2022. https://t.co/TQN9sdWIhH

Weak political leadership, exactly. And absolutely pissweak political journalism holding it to account for this public health disgrace. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/jxfuFUmpPK

Electricity generators in NSW often have contracts with local coal mines to supply at a set rate. Just curious how a cap on coal prices impacts that, anybody know?

Infection is a rising star in so many major chronic health conditions. I think it’s a paradigm for chronic disease that has a long way to run yet. https://t.co/heWO2vVqnq

I hear the frustration at Covid inaction. The only thing standing between all of us and the end of the pandemic is 9 elected politicians, who refuse to do anything. Their public health teams know what to do. They won’t let them do it. 9…

Nope, it relies upon most people not having a clue how anything much works, because they’ve delegated it to a civil service and elected representatives to do for them. The idea everybody knows enough about everything to run society is…

As journos join millions of other Australians in Covid-spreading Christmas parties, maybe they can share ideas for 2023 penance for the public health disaster they co-inflicted on the Australian community in 2021 and 2022, together with…

The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much.…

Note that he’ll be isolating for 10 days. I doubt that’s a coincidence. 5 days and then zero days were always political measures, not health. #auspol https://t.co/5oV1gWHHyM

⁦@theprojecttv⁩ , grilling ⁦⁦@AdamBandt⁩ about a windfall profits tax, saying it would be ‘sovereign risk’. That’s a sponsored talking point from these bloody companies, does anybody do journalism any more? The UK did this some time ago.…

National Cabinet took a distributed, federalist governance structure for public health, and replaced it with a small group governed by its own internal social conformity. That was the plan. A forum where to act on public health advice…

In the UK the Tories are throwing everything they have at protecting a dying generation of stale privilege. Adopting Oz-style refugee-bashing, and accusing unions of killing cancer patients. You can viscerally feel the ‘know your place’…

The CMO and National Cabinet need to openly declare that the public health approach they’re using is the GBD. It’s indistinguishable from it. Has one journalist asked this? #auspol https://t.co/m1DlswoZJ9

Finally on GBD, it was drafted at an American free-market think tank. Have a look at the articles on their site for the flavour of extreme libertarianism they endorse. This is now Australia’s public health policy. Under a LABOR government.…

Tragically @KarenCutter4 is on holiday (which she deserves), so looking at the NSW weekly epi report without her guidance. - lead summary point is that ‘we are likely to have reached the peak in infections’. - this based on stable PCR…

Most people have a much greater fear of doing something different to what everybody else is doing, than they do of dying. Social conformity is the essential glue that holds society together, but led in the wrong ways also the fastest way…

It’s not that people understood public health before, and now they don’t. They didn’t then either. But we had leaders who understood its importance and led accordingly.

Such an important point. Please can somebody report this sort of thing? #auspol I had a feeling Karen would peek ;) https://t.co/QsCvC60ccH

Anybody sharing Christmas with Domicron this year knows that ‘protecting the vulnerable’ means no Christmas. The normalisation of mass disease and death in 2022 highlighted here, when less than 10,000 cases a year ago was seen as an…

The people probably least surprised at the capitulation to Covid, is teachers. (Nobody asks them anything.) The ‘live with the virus’ folk were their students, and they saw that shift in them and in their parents. Schools have been coping…

This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

Public health alerts for spinach. Personal responsibility for mass infection and death. https://t.co/XRpGa7TGO8

Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain.…

Thunderbirds are go! Maybe some of our homegrown paediatricians and ID docs can get over there to herd (ha) the kids back into the schools, before they suffer critical damage to their mental health from learning at home.…

Imagine a target range for infection, like we have for inflation. In the old days (i.e. 3 years ago), that’s what controlling a disease meant. Heaven and Earth are being moved to get us back into the target range for inflation. Infection…

UK news yesterday, claims of this being the most ‘normal Christmas since the pandemic began’. More gaslighting rubbish. As a family currently having its Christmas ruined by having to manage Covid as a new house guest, the previous two were…

Overheard conversation at work, where somebody has Covid at home. Colleagues offering advice: “just let the whole family get it at once, like chickenpox, then it’ll be done with”. Slogans work.

We’re at about the first anniversary of letting Covid rip in Australia. The replacement of a world-leading public health response with…nothing. Just mass, repeated infection.

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

Glass houses and throwing stones. Those who say the Chinese vaccines weren’t as good leave out that at least they were using them as part of a fuller public health strategy. We’re a disgrace. https://t.co/AKgu1XOMt7

Electoral politics give people a magical sense of how power works. Winning an election doesn’t give the winner power to change things. 80-90% of power is framing issues across multiple elections. That’s what the ‘economy’ is, for example,…

Democracy as ‘the people’ running things now means celebrity dating experts running public health responses. https://t.co/chNhkLEgiu

Notice how quickly weekends off became weekends on again? And as for safer working conditions, whose union has done any sort of Covid audit? Anybody? https://t.co/H9SUAm1rx4

Personal responsibility public health. Story from a friend’s workplace, where Covid is rampant, and a staff member laughing and saying ‘as if you can catch Covid from workmates!’

Yesterday a friend posted to Facebook how they were feeling rubbish with a dose of Covid. Tonight’s picture is them dining out in a local restaurant. Personal responsibility public health.

What was the reason countries opened up? Business. Who were the greatest users of Covid welfare? Business. After public health orders, who is now responsible for managing Covid for most of us? Business. In aggregate who is spending and…

This is a surveyor, helping to build a road. It takes time, money and effort. Nobody says ‘we won’t use surveyors, everybody can do their own surveying’, because that’s obviously ridiculous. But that’s our Covid strategy. Globally.…

If our strategy is to reduce severe disease and death, we clearly should go back to what we were doing before the end of 2021. As a bonus it will also stop continuous ongoing mass infection and illness, and all of the disruption that…

So is this the age-old territorial pissing contest between medicine and public health? Some of the most aggressive Covid minimisers both publicly and in my own private experience have been GPs and ID docs. https://t.co/bUMplmap9d

Herd immunity is the market-based mechanism to attempt to deal with infectious disease. Not an analogy, this is the political epidemiology of Covid. Public health is intrinsically political.

A public health farce. Saying there’s real benefit in being reinfected, but please don’t get reinfected. In the context of a national strategy of ‘infect our way out of the pandemic’. But don’t get infected. https://t.co/dyuYVzRnfc

On FB (where brains go to die), somebody asked ‘why don’t you ever let up about Covid’? I said it’s like having a toilet leaking raw sewage into your house. You don’t say ‘let’s leave that until another day, and go and have some fun.’

‘Battles’ is wrong, they were battling Covid before. Now they’re just letting it infect everybody, cheered on by the Infinite Covids here at home. https://t.co/TdZ2a5Cqch

I have @NjbBari3 to thank for a revelation today. A couple of weeks ago I thought I’d contracted Covid, because my sense of taste started to go a bit wonky. But 2 PCRs and multiple RATs since that time, and nothing. Then I saw Noor mention…

You’d have to be pretty thick to not see conservatives have been gradually dismantling public health (in the funding and disciplinary sense) for several decades. All the while saying they’re its greatest fan. They couldn’t lie straight in…

Isn’t there some saying that thank you’s cost nothing? Why the Tories endorsed clapping for the NHS, meaningless symbolism. This should be ‘apologies to those who have to work over Christmas, to deal with the mass disease we inflicted on…

There’s no public health effort against Covid, because our politics has no public. Res publica - also ‘common-wealth’ - means something held in common by people. Replaced by a global market, which allows no collective component. Europe at…

What this great graphic doesn’t show is the privatised lockdowns which replaced PHOs. People isolating when sick. Having lived through that entire time, I can say everything pre-Nov 21 felt much more ‘free’. Unless you wanted international…

“…society is behaving like it’s reached disease-free equilibrium. The harsh reality is that we are still in the grasp of a global COVID-19 pandemic and the ending is going to be brutal.” https://t.co/YG2MsCK6k1

Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international community is thought of as made up of nations. But the international community pre-existed nations, who were invented at the Peace of…

POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

I think powerful anti-virals might make inroads into many if not most chronic health conditions. https://t.co/my3btyTySP

Just as background to my earlier thread about Korean POWs. This is a direct quote from Major William E. Mayer from the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Mayer was commissioned to study the returned prisoners. See full quote at:…

To clarify, this isn’t an argument to make the 95% like the 5%. That’s the myth of ‘the people’ running democracy. They never have, and never will. Everybody leading everybody means nobody leading anybody. It’s about how you select the 5%.…

I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same social dynamics. A society is not a collection of ‘the people’.…

Following best practice throughout history, the pandemic became ‘endemic’ when richer countries and richer groups within those societies decided they were relatively safe. About end-2021. Endemic means ‘killing somebody else, mostly the…

The mid-December peak predicted by both official CHOs and National Cabinet, and also prominent experts. What happened there, will anybody be held to account? Yes anecdotal, but many communities seem to be awash with infection. Local…

This is a great initiative, because this pandemic is really about political persuasion and outright propaganda much more than it’s about public health. It’s therapeutic adding your favourite spin to the list. https://t.co/LRDRLtqYmr

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

All public health involves a politics. Using the immune system to try to defeat a pandemic is the free market version of public health. Not an analogy, it shifts all public health action to the individual. Which is an oxymoron, because it…

NSW ensured that only hospitalisations and ICU numbers are half-useful metrics to assess how we’re going. Maybe a hint of Covid from Santa in the pipeline here. https://t.co/M1PhfAkZI4

One of the main arguments used for the current Covid inaction is that the public won’t support anything else. Even some prominent public health experts say it. But surely one of the most fundamental roles of public health is to build…

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including…

It’s stunning to look at the data and think, this IS the strategy. Not an error. This was intended. The Great Barrington Declaration, substituted for State-driven public health expertise. https://t.co/5zHMuzQuBd

I said in 2020 that political libertarians would use any vaccine developed to end public health measures in the pandemic. All the data will show you the explosion of cases and deaths here after vaccines were introduced. They use them as…

Public health agencies calling the BS in the UK. On a collision course with the ‘get infected and get back to work peasants’ of the ruling Tories. https://t.co/QmqSiFgEEj https://t.co/FTILVRKrx5

A favourite Covid stupidity for me is privileged folk lining up to defend the poor’s right to continue working and get infected. And calling anybody who says that’s a bad idea ‘privileged’.

What is described as ‘factually incorrect’ here is me saying there’s no indication that infection with SARS-Cov-2 creates lasting immunity, to SARS-Cov-2. I’m not a medical scientist, but everything being said about immunity here to me…

And yet some medical professionals right here will argue every day that this ongoing carnage is the only way forward. Doesn’t match any principle of public health, medicine or medical ethics I’ve ever seen. It is a word-for-word statement…

Great piece. The problem in the questions it asks us, is that there is no we. No public. The reason no public health is going on, is that an economy has no public. Each person in a market is equivalent to every other, globally. It’s a race…

The Tories are allowing the NHS to collapse. They despise it because it’s State-run. They’re doing what Maggie Thatcher did to trains and coal mines, to health. Here in Oz we still shell out billions per year to prop up private health…

Political libertarians want us to use human immunity to beat the pandemic. It’s like saying the only thing we need to defeat crime is giving everybody a gun. Not coincidentally, they tend to say that as well.

A surgeon. In medical training, are there any public health subjects at all? https://t.co/kQYk2cTM8h

Because it really annoys cookers to mention lockdowns a lot, it’s worth remembering that lockdowns applied to all of us. Whereas personal responsibility public health is ‘as much protection as you can afford yourself’. Which for most…

Another expert input which clearly implies our strategy is to infect our way out of the pandemic. While at the same time people are told to avoid infection. A public health farce. https://t.co/aqYvSR9V70

Somehow the idea of allowing infection of the entire population, repeatedly, and then miraculously titrating the resulting serious illness to the number of hospital beds available, appeared strange to not one major journalist in Australia…

Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privatised the public health work. This is fundamental to bypassing…

The ‘focused protection’ of ‘the vulnerable’ that most governments sing now from the GBD hymn sheet. Has anybody seen any protection of even obviously vulnerable people happening? They’re still dying in large numbers.

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

She won’t because it will make her stand out from everybody else, who aren’t wearing them either. Nothing is more terrifying to humans, who are social creatures. They would rather die than be non-conforming. https://t.co/ToN8q5Y01E

Preppers have always seems a sad symptom of a dysfunctional society. But the more N=1 politics wins, the more we may all need to incorporate greater self-sufficiency into our lives. Nobody is looking out for you. https://t.co/8XOBkHypKC

The UK and US both suffering from Long Libertarianism. Australia is still in the earlier stages of the chronic disease. Tye libertarians actually relish the destruction, they’ll feel no need to do anything. This is their actual plan.…

“…the term to which we’ve pinned our post-pandemic hopes has so many definitions that it means almost nothing at all.” The only common meaning seems to be ‘disease that won’t go away because we can’t be bothered doing anything about it.’…

Our government is advised by some health professionals inside the tent and out that this is public health best practice. I know minimisers, sometimes even health professionals, take Tweets like these and mock them. Can they explain to us…

Hybrid immunity spin is being ramped up in Australia right now. Some people have had Covid 5 times in 2 years. Time to call enough, and particularly from health professionals campaigning under this same banner. You expect idiot politicians…

Is there accountability in public health? Several prominent public health experts and officials predicted the end of the current wave to fall around 2 weeks before Christmas. If the BOM completely misses major storm activity, questions are…

All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group at any scale will determine the direction the other 95% will…

This is fascinating. Influenza vaccination also shown to significantly reduce risk of heart disease, from memory. https://t.co/WhhCU9CiHe

Sir Humphrey would be proud. Damn patients, obstructing the smooth working of hospitals. Will we ever know the full story of how many patients here were farmed out to varieties of out of hospital care to keep government hospitalisation…

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

The industries that employed near-slave labour pre-Covid were hit hardest by lockdowns. We sacrificed public health to try to save them. Pandemics reboot societies, living with the virus is a desperation attempt to deny it.…

Minimisers will always stick to the likelihood axis, and ignore the impact axis. Basic risk management, not being done. Mostly because we ask individual experts, who have academic axes to grind. And not public health departments, who do…

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling…

Anybody need a new cooker? https://t.co/ieN5k3ZK8g

I have a longstanding debate with a friend about Covid. They say PH measures had to be relaxed to ‘balance’ action against a lot of other social priorities. I say to them that this is is what PH was designed to do, to do that balancing.…

Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or employee, except in cases of gross negligence. Where this gets…

A government regulation restricting our movements to protect the community from a virus, and the same virus restricting our movements. The difference? You get a say on the regulations. And everybody carries the load.

The Victorian election told us the loudest anti-public health action voices in Oz are a tiny minority. Why are we still listening to a word they say? It’s smoke and mirrors, a con.

I remember in the early days of HIV, how anybody engaging in unprotected sex knowing the risks of HIV was condemned by the community, even charged. But with Covid social and economic activity without precaution is celebrated.

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

One of the most disgraceful episodes in the pandemic. As if poorer suburbs were to blame for Covid. Disease shaming, we saw it for HIV 40 years ago too. This is today’s politics, no public, just playing invented groups off against each…

Viruses don’t go viral. The untold story of Covid is that social media is one of its greatest enablers, by mobilising the forces of those who oppose basic public health action. Allowing that opposition to go viral.

They are still suggested by Queensland Health, wherever people can’t socially distance? https://t.co/S4zM28itUu https://t.co/89nAqEAN8F

This is what ‘endemic’ has always meant. The disease left over when the privileged are safe. The privileged aren’t living with the virus, they try to live in gated, safe environments. They mean the rest of us have to live with it, in a…

Just out of interest, does the world have over 936,000 public health scientists and infectious disease epidemiologists? https://t.co/ljLXFVXlrA

First libertarians destroy societies (that they don’t believe exist). Then they mobilise the anger through social media to viciously attack anybody who tries to fix things. They’re bullies from high school, now running the world. I don’t…

This used to be standard public health and safety stuff. Shaping public support with campaigns (more or less well, but at least doing it). This is in fact what the libertarian ‘freedom’ rubbish is, a public shaping campaign. We were led to…

I love Twitter, but it shares the life is a high school disease. Every day the focus is more upon somebody’s team or group outdoing somebody else’s team or group, than it is upon actual reality. With each team lining up its experts and…

All societies are an equilibrium of forces or power, not rational designs. For example policy on home ownership will reflect those who have power in that area, like developers and existing homeowners. For Covid, nearly everybody is being…

Good on @latingle (today’s ABC news). Deal with Covid like we do bushfires. Hand it over fully to public health teams, experts. Politicians’ only role is to build public support for and fund what those teams require of us. Public health…

Fires, floods and now Covid. Making society an economy omits the basic act of sheltering from a threat. If the economy collapses unless you infect everybody repeatedly, it’s a failed social model. With climate change this will be the…

I’ve taught in rough high schools, but nothing I saw there matches the venom between some health professionals in this pandemic. Only rarely does it seem to be those at the frontline of treating the infected in hospitals.…

Australia and NZ showed how this could be done. It was the political libertarians in the UK and US who drove global spread, by deliberately obstructing public health action. Libertarianism is the cancerous politics of the privileged.…

Again, the salute is just the result of mobilisation of far-Right groups via social media. Regulate social media. That will also help beat Covid, because you won’t have these same groups constantly undermining public health messaging.…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

Imagine having a health minister who openly talked about Covid possibly causing incurable damage to the immune system. https://t.co/5kVkun72vs

Great change in politics comes because it’s forced. Not from politics itself. It took millions of men being killed in the great wars to advance women’s rights significantly, by opening up opportunities for them with the men gone. The…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

A shorter way to explain why nothing is being done to beat the pandemic, is to point out that under current politics nothing is being done to fix any public problem. Education, health, roads, climate change etc. The politics that rejects…

The ‘focus on severe disease’ to date is killing hundreds of Australians per week. https://t.co/In9fIutqa5

Robodebt takes you straight to the heart of libertarian political belief. The fundamentalist obsession with removing the State from peoples’ lives. People created the State. It’s us, all of us. Unlike the privatised enclaves libertarians…

They update flu shots every year. Australia’s boosters to date are for older variants of Covid. There’s no talk at all of any new vaccine for 2023 either, globally. This is the ‘balance’ economic politicians talk about. 100% economy, 0%…

Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shifted. Away from the ‘public’, which current politics openly…

The pandemic surfaced glorious turf wars in health. Like this morning, a GP spokesperson on radio when asked about the expertise of pharmacists, saying drugs aren’t the answer to everything, sometimes you need fewer drugs. Kinda what my…

It appears the only way to really prevent severe disease and death, is to control transmission. We’ve had 2 years of ‘focusing on severe disease’ now. The bodies are still piling up. Just maybe, severe disease and death are always the tip…

The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is made of millions of individuals, each choosing their own fate.…

The inevitable transition to ‘endemic’ (i.e. let everybody get infected and do nothing, as we’ve done with the developing world forever) disease. Not even ‘just like the flu’ now. Everybody qualifies for a flu shot. Only the vulnerable to…

Referring to this again, why has fighting a pandemic with an economy led to mass infection, disease and death? We can see it here, just one more step towards stripping way every last public health protection. Now, even vaccines. The answer…

Deaths down to 2 bus loads this week. I still marvel at the normalisation of disease, that more than a thousand people can be hospitalised in a given week for Covid, and it’s not newsworthy. https://t.co/yuSFwfa8my

When you infect entire populations in ageing societies, there’s nobody left to do the work. If we’d used risk management instead of political ideology to manage a pandemic, this would have been obvious. https://t.co/eyxCNcqKUC Alt text…

The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free…

The LNP’s $100 billion+ gift of public money to private health insurance companies, since 1997. Australia couldn’t find more than $30 million (contestable grants) to fund Covid mitigation in schools. https://t.co/N0fqz3Dg4l

Heart disease in the 20th century followed a pretty classic epidemic-type curve. Have Tweeted before that some believe the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic may have been responsible, that heart disease was the chronic after-effects of that pandemic.…

A group of career student politicians we call National Cabinet turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into a nation of anti-vaxers, in a year. And the same BS in here about doses only in winter, and the young not…

We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater historical shift, to unwind most of those post-war years. /1…

The thing to remember on this topic, and tying into my broader theme of the stripping away of public institutions, is that the LNP already abolished universal health care once. In 1981. Never be fooled into thinking that’s not still their…

In the space of 2 years we went from being a public health powerhouse, to widespread vaccine hesitancy. That shift was led. https://t.co/DBJhraxhM9

This is the great achievement of public health in the past 150 years. The fact in the past 3 years this curve is trending downwards again in some of the richest countries in the world is a measure of the magnitude of social breakdown going…

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole…

The one hope I see for turning around the deliberate destruction of the public as an idea and practice since the 1970s, is engineering. The socio-technical complexity of the modern world. The Romans hold the key. The longest and greatest…

Ditch taxpayer support to private health insurance. An abomination in public policy, designed by the LNP to destroy Medicare. https://t.co/z8eoDQSti2

“However, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas on Tuesday said parents were loving the consistency of knowing the same rule applied to everyone.” But with Covid, everybody can bring it to school whenever they like, hey Peter.…

NSW bringing its own save-Medicare strategy to today’s National Cabinet. Kill a few busloads a week, will take the pressure right off the health system. https://t.co/pRIRALlJA4

@Globalbiosec has been saying for a long time this disease will always be epidemic, never endemic. Instead government listens to experts whose focus is curating growing social media followings, for fame and profit. https://t.co/dGTbatIbF9

Arijit’s wonderful thread made me think about how Covid minimisers say our choice is to do everything to stop Covid, or nothing. The idea of just doing something is ignored. The public of public health is not mono-dimensional, there are…

People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated essay I Tweeted earlier, from 2021. To me they’re interchangeable in the way they conceptualise things - a more compassionate…

We see these stories every year. People are highly attuned to the quality of their water. Interestingly air quality has also driven previous massive public health interventions. The only new thing we’re seeing today is an assault on public…

I don’t work in public health, but if I did I’d be embarrassed and ashamed at what’s going on. https://t.co/Jcq2x5zfbe

This is like private health insurance. The free market works so well that we have to shovel millions (or billions) of public dollars into the privatised option, to try to make it work. And it still doesn’t. https://t.co/kFIfS2ZJ1r

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

The current drama over interest rates and inflation is another legacy of the neoliberal/libertarian ascendancy since the 1970s. The idea that the money supply is pivotal to economies was N=1 politics trying to turn societies into…

Douglas Adams’ observations about technology are another way to see how the world we live in is 100% social, and 0% economic, capitalist, socialist or anything else. Nearly everything we don’t understand we attribute to some abstract -ism,…

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

James Valentine on ABC Sydney this morning with Julie Leask, talking about why the public has gone lukewarm on vaccinations. Lots of talk of ‘vaccine fatigue’. But the real reason not mentioned, that political leaders deliberately led a…

We might get somewhere if the response to the collective disasters facing us wasn’t always just using them as a platform to tell everybody else about our individual grievances. That’s part of the libertarian victory too. The worse things…

As a member of the public, what to do when NSW Health recommends you wear a mask in healthcare settings, and medical professionals who work there say the opposite? https://t.co/ITlBMkPg4q Is this one of those AHPRA things, @YouAreLobbyLud…

I have expert-fatigue. I can’t remember a time in the past year for example where NSW Health wasn’t recommending masking in indoor crowded places. But then the media is full of expert opinion directly contradicting the need to. Social…

Thanks to @djf0001 for this amazing image from the first year of the pandemic in the US. Over a million body bags since then. You’d have to think the people who physically process those would have a view about living with the virus. (Ivan…

A close friend who has been casual about Covid for the whole pandemic (has been infected twice) is now experiencing quite dramatic swings in both blood pressure and heart rate. Their doctor ‘puzzled’. I asked if Covid had been discussed.…

Who’s ‘we’? The 20,000+ who have died because of Covid in the last year alone in Australia, I had no idea they’d died of ‘fearful doctor’. Will have to Google it. https://t.co/JaGPVHA5fD

My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his community. But his conviction, that only knowledge and understanding can ever set humans free, remained unmoved. This portrait is such a…

Tim Brooke-Taylor died right at the start of the pandemic. While quite old he was also in a tier of society that usually manages to avoid public health problems. He may be a good entry point to discussing the politics of individuals and…

The Audit Office of NSW, school attendance trends. Kids were escaping already before the pandemic, the continuing decline in attendance follows the same negative slope. Anybody who’s worked in secondary schools knows missing school is not…

Elected reps have no answers, they don’t run anything. The answer to the cost of living crisis is to stop living having a price in a market. To reverse the transformation of societies into economies. Which will also restore the public. And…

2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depressing story. But the other parallel movement isn’t. Hans (RIP)…

By my reading, there have been more than 1000 Australians in hospital for Covid in Australia every day since 27 December 2021? Graph ends 3 Feb but there are still more than 1000 today, I believe. https://t.co/UNkb5SYh2Q

To go back to this. The spin is that we restricted transmission of Covid while we got everybody vaccinated, to protect the vulnerable. But actually the vulnerable kept right on dying. Politicians had no intention of ever protecting them.…

The thing that has struck me throughout this pandemic is just how invisible the cogs of public administration are to nearly everybody. SARS-1 highlights this (bear with me). /1 https://t.co/r2KFCOnLSY It’s not a huge stretch to assume…

Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple ways. They’re the real-time proof that the politics we live…

I still haven’t found a single definition of a pandemic that isn’t based on number and/or extent of infection. Not hospitalisation, severe disease or death. Why are politicians and their enablers being allowed to simply define a pandemic…

Note this isn’t plan ahead to not get Covid. It’s plan ahead for when you get it, again and again. Public health is officially dead. https://t.co/3PE7UFUddz

The RBA Governor this week, when asked about huge bank profits with cost of living soaring. We need healthy banks was the answer. We need healthy schools. Nothing is happening there. This is what ‘balancing’ the economy against Covid looks…

Here’s a plan. Stop infecting everybody over and over. https://t.co/5D2mSmfF9O

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

Tut, we all know now being admitted to hospital isn’t a health concern. Provided there’s enough beds. https://t.co/XYCvUOneaW

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

While bad people rename the hierarchies that favour them, so that nobody notices nothing has changed, good people sing songs, thinking that changes the world. Nobody’s done a Covid benefit yet. It damages the business model. Life is a high…

Flu, TB and shingles now too. Vaccinations for other diseases seem to offer quite significant protection against Covid too. https://t.co/RtcfqecmfF

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

Or…we could use risk management and stop infecting everybody, just in case. Nobody loses. https://t.co/Xswy6DoxgC

Blake makes the excellent point in this article that the supposed invulnerability of children to disease is only about a century old. Prior to that most of them died young. Public health achieved that. The thing we’re not doing now.…

The trivialisation and normalisation of infection. For most of its history public health saw infection as a bad thing. During Covid flu and colds have been used by minimisers to suggest that widespread infection is a legitimate and…

No, it’s always meant reaching an immune threshold where SPREAD was prevented. Look up the definitions, they haven’t changed. Just as a pandemic continues to be defined by number of INFECTIONS. Not hospitalisations, or deaths.…

Rather than mobilising and monetising trolls, could expert Covid minimisers : - show us where ‘immunity debt’ and ‘hybrid immunity’ are in the textbooks? - show us where the same textbooks and even historical practice show the use of…

How often have we gone with a vaccination program where the VE against infection and symptomatic disease is so low? Are there other current examples on the immunisation schedule?

Our vaccination strategy with vaccines that don’t stop anything much except severe disease must at least possibly be turning us all into perpetual reservoirs for viral evolution. Keeping the hosts healthy enough to allow the virus to…

Was going to comment on some of the minimiser brain farts in Oz today. But I see the rest of the world noticed them, and you can’t better what they’ve said themselves, for ridicule.

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy…

Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse of ordinary community-based political life shadowed by a…

It’s a good question, anybody know? Contribution caps are quite low ($27K for the concessional tax, $110K if you’re happy to forego it). https://t.co/mYGqEjKL19

Organisations and societies can suffer a form of collective dementia. The ‘live with’ Covid strategy forgets what we did for infectious disease in the 20th century. The destruction of institutions does this, they hold societies’ collective…

Sport is always sold as a health thing. But the much more important thing community sport does is train Australian democracy. In some countries, it doesn’t even exist as an activity. It’s where we learn many of our community-building…

In a week where (astoundingly) leading health figures openly mocked action promoting clean air, it’s worth remembering that all Australian governments have been committed to that since 2015. https://t.co/f4Wd86Iwh1 @RealOzSAGE

Is there any reasonably current estimate of SARS-Cov-2 antibody levels in the Australian population?

@bmarsalis has there ever been talk of getting the Blue Turtles band back together, with Sting? Even as a one-off, and of course with somebody filling in for Kenny Kirkland. That band kicked arse.

Re-using this photo for another reason. These are our ‘elected representatives’. Have a look at the job sheet of a modern democratic government, it’s enormously complex. What specific expertise do elected representatives bring to that…

Reading the most recent seroprevalence data for Australia shows huge antibody levels in the population, near 100% for spike protein antibodies. When does herd immunity start?

You’d think ‘let’s infect everybody in the country’ would have a risk assessment. Running a school fete has a risk assessment. Can we see the risk assessment?

The everything or nothing narrative is still strong, on Covid. The people who want to do nothing say the only alternative is to do everything i.e. shut society down. Actually the answer is what it’s always been for infectious disease. To…

The economy crowd believe in markets, until they don’t work. Which is always, in epidemic waves. Then regulation, like high interest rates, will be used to restore order. Regulation won’t be used against disease epidemic waves though.…

I’d recommend everybody read the national public health guidelines for management of Covid, and compare with what they see actually happening around them. ‘What else could we do?’, minimisers often ask. This, what we’re already supposed to…

For believers in ‘the market’ as an actual thing, we currently have a free market of Covid action. Is mass infection and death what the market wanted? People seriously believe that billions of people left entirely to their own market-based…

Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as history. But that’s *not* ‘the economy’. It’s that ‘the’ that…

I post the numbers sometimes, but Karen does it with smart things added. Who knew an endemic disease came in epidemic waves, hey. https://t.co/wkOVbF8qSX

More than a year after letting Covid rip, the obvious (and relatively contained) ‘vulnerable’ still not protected. Probably because you can’t, in a modern society where everybody is connected to everybody else. https://t.co/m8EoM53Hjb

The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about…

One of my favourite pages to refer vax-and-forget people to is the list of control guidelines for infectious diseases, in NSW. Many members of the public are not aware these controls even exist, or that they’re applied 365 days of the…

In the UK, making the whole country sick forced record absences at work. The freedom-fighting libertarians are having none of it. Health checks at work to make sure you’re not making it up. Where they go, we follow. https://t.co/HPwmMpXsrW…

Politicians treat vaccines as medicines. Others treat immunity as a dialectic between pathogen and human/vaccine. But infection is an ecosystem. All public health measures, including vaccines, work long-term only if they can create an…

Not clear to me that any of those things will do much to keep kids healthy. https://t.co/gEZBwdrBsZ

Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilence”. JFK “The future of infectious diseases will be very…

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that…

Deans and course designers may want to use the evidence of the pandemic to restrict admission into infectious disease medicine and biostatistics to fewer sociopaths in future.

I like that the actuaries have forced at least some sort of acknowledgement of the magnitude of what’s going on. Nobody else has been listened to. https://t.co/pYwP2wHUyT

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

Covid is by far the greatest death toll from a natural disaster in Australia. Most of that is 2022. Nearly double the deaths of the second greatest disaster (Spanish Flu), and still climbing. Between 3-20 times more than any other disaster…

“The level of damage that’s been done to population health [during Covid], it would be as if everybody suddenly decided to take up smoking in one go.” https://t.co/liMQMODStY

Society is a high school. This is what we abandoned public health to do. Our moonshot. https://t.co/xf3C7VlW9H

The astonishment that society won’t fight a pandemic is maybe a deeper pain. The disappearance of purpose from lives, except you do you. Party, drink, travel, curate your online persona. The hollowing out of civilisation. Who could care…

Gigi Foster, Q&A last night. The politics of the economy will always refuse to acknowledge that letting everybody catch a lethal virus will kill lots of people. https://t.co/grVenzsWJY

‘The economy’ really means ‘everybody doing whatever they like’. That’s what the market supposedly is. Which then magically builds airports and hospitals, high quality schools, and controls infections. And we reckon Flat Earthers are crazy.

It’s not the planet, Earth, that contains the only known life in the universe. It’s the atmosphere, itself created by living things. That tiny, thin blue line. Unique in our known universe. Sustains us, shields us from asteroids and…

Sometimes hybrid immunity feels like the arguments for more guns. Rather than address violence, arm everybody against it. Rather than reduce infection, ‘arm’ the immune system more. https://t.co/xiQcb57RsK

Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden target ‘division’ in politics, as if the problem is people just not…

What feels more dangerous, living in an ‘authoritarian’ country, or in a country where everybody is their own authoritarian? https://t.co/O2f45Cu2li

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living…

From today's Fin Review. The usual binary, where there isn't one. Nobody is saying remove transmission, it's not eradication. It's controlling it enough that you also then control the amount of severe disease. And also chronic disease.…

We’re at least 30 years too late. Governments won’t fight Covid for the same reason they won’t fight climate change. The transformation of societies into economies, complete decades ago. We missed it. No amount of health data has even the…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

Friend at a local government conference says there was unanimity as to the greatest barrier to good governance. The elected body. The same for every level of government. The world is far too complex and technical now for popularity to be…

So the never-elected-as-Premier, who unleashed the worst public health disaster on NSW in its history, is gone. (Yay.)

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

Some blame lockdowns for a whole range of social, economic and health problems right now. Lockdowns only accelerated the collapse of systems that were already broken. What hid those breaks before was insane busyness. Hitting the pause…

The gap between discovering multiple sclerosis as a chronic disease, and identifying its infectious origins, was about 150 years. And we think Long Covid is as bad as it might get.

Buying your food at the local deep-frying takeaway is probably now healthier than any cafe or restaurant. Good to know for any of us who want to live long enough to be mowed down by Covid in aged care. https://t.co/rvrioemFcC

The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should be straightforward, practical jobs to get done, now have to…

A friend today said ‘why are you still wearing a mask? Do you have Covid?’ Genuinely puzzled. It was nothing to do with Covid, it was all about not following the social norm of not masking. Why was I not doing what everybody else was…

Remember health alerts for other infectious diseases? They never stopped. Brings into stark relief the unprecedented public health vandalism that our Covid response is. https://t.co/v97EAfK2jq

Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips away the entire ecological context of host and pathogen. /1…

I’d wager he’s not in one of the hospital wards the rest of us are expected to use, where the most likely outcome of a hospital stay is Covid infection. https://t.co/qIEVS7bvcZ

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

For over 2000 years infection didn’t provide much immunity for kids at all. Then just at the time we started vaccinating them widely, they started beating the pathogens. Imagine being a health professional now advocating we just infect…

The Ebers Papyrus, over 3500 years old, describes the common cold. Those who say Covid will become mild and seasonal through repeated infection often use cold-like illness as a model. But colds have been mild for 3500 years. And we don’t…

Elections allow anybody into politics, so long as they’re popular. Getting a job in a supermarket requires more expertise. https://t.co/ohOy2TCOwF

The job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t mix. Until we remove the job as the foundation of social life,…

If you want to see the trouble societies are in, go small. The details. A friend had somebody reverse into their car recently. Waiting time to have the minor damage fixed at the smash repairer - 4 months. They can’t get staff.

Great piece on PM yesterday, on excess deaths, with @enenbee and @KarenCutter4. The ABC ended the piece with Catherine Bennett rehashing the old ‘reaping’ argument. And saying we can’t go back (to lockdowns, presumably). Which nobody was…

Speaking to families this week struggling with every variety of -itis. Conjunctivitis & tonsillitis are biggies. They say ‘lockdowns reduced our immunity’, to rationalise their suffering. So I asked them ‘when was the last time you had…

A pandemic is still (nothing has changed) defined by the number of infections? Not hospitalisations, or severe disease. Nice that the CMO put on record that there are no public health or social measures in place, and that’s the plan. Makes…

We need to constantly highlight that our Covid strategy was written by an extreme libertarian free market think tank. Word-for-word. I’d still be interested to be shown any public health text or set of guidelines that has ever resembled…

More politics with words. ‘Hybrid immunity’. Most meanings of the word immunity mean to be resistant to infection. But the politics of Covid has again subtly revolved around words, and transformed it into ‘having less severe disease’. I’m…

@ProfPCDoherty in your view is the partial immunity (seen mostly in reduction of disease severity) elicited by Covid vaccination, combined with repeated infection, likely to lead to an eventual resistance to infection itself?

The article ends with (official health) advice that would have done exactly nothing to prevent the infections: “So consider this a little reminder to do the right thing. Practise good hand hygiene and stay home if you feel sick.”…

When you have 50 years of politics where the overwhelming priority is to strip away all vestiges of the public, don’t be surprised when public health disappears as well. Market economies have no publics. It’s in their founding beliefs.…

This is the most recent WHO statement on hybrid immunity for Covid that I can find, from mid-2022. (Would be interested to know if there’s a later one.) What stands out is that the WHO is not at all sure it’s the way out of this pandemic.…

The way social media dramatically accelerates social collapse is maybe more obvious for issues like climate change and Covid. But a nice example today of the corrosive damage it does across the board. Was speaking with an insurer and…

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

Thanks to @DavidJoffe64 for pointing out why it was so important to get kids back into school. The bullies had nobody to beat up. https://t.co/5jFnWaxzK9

This is still the NSW Health advice. We need to make health departments completely independent of politicians, like the Reserve Bank. Then they can mandate again, instead of recommend. The RBA doesn't 'recommend' interest rate rises. But…

From last year. When politicians talk about ‘independence’, like the RBA setting interest rates or the Remuneration Tribunal setting politician pay, they mean something that: - benefits them - is deeply unpopular. So they fabricate an…

Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They have no idea how to do that. It’s much too complex. Their…

A family, friends, very casual about Covid, have all had it 2-3 times. One daughter now has measles, another flu-like illness. The father also flu-like illness, ear problems and fluctuating blood pressure. Public health 2023. Straya.

Insights into public health, 2023, from Tony Blakely. Two quotes, ABC news today. The first, where using vaccination to protect the wider community is described as a ‘philosophical or ethical question’. I thought it was actually one of the…

“He said the world could soon get to a point where COVID was considered no different from the common flu.” He being some random cruising guy from Derbyshire, trained in infectious disease outbreaks by politicians. https://t.co/gZLBbt6MkH

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking towards less concern about Long Covid now, and about infection of younger Australians. It reminded me again about Paul Ewald’s mission.…

It really shouldn't need to be said that infection is disease. Disease is not health. Public health should never, ever, be recommending deliberate infection.

My 80-year old mother targeted by cybercrime today. Think she's ok. Anybody else noticing this stuff ramping up? Courtesy of the Silicon Valley libertarians and their rubbish software and hardware, developed with 'freedom of the…

Great to have Ed back. Brilliant recognition here of the social penalty for even admitting you have Long Covid. Societies process all things socially, not politically or medically. Soc-iety. It’s in the name. https://t.co/Z8aOYGGuO5

Probably the greatest cause of mental health issues is being treated like a peasant in employment, but being expected to ‘live your best life’ in the mythology of prosperous societies. The best treatment for mental health is a living wage…

Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a sensible discussion about the quality of music, without…

I have older relatives who still keep much of their money in cash, hidden at home. It’s the equivalent of us all doing our own public health now. For the same reason, ‘the economy’ doesn’t serve ordinary people. It was designed explicitly…

The great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, towards chronic disease, in the 20th century. Due to advances in…

The problem with much chronic disease research is that there are no good conceptual models, to guide the collection of ‘scientific data’. So ‘anecdotal’ evidence is what you have. Think of all the years ME/CFS sufferers have been told it’s…

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

The usual suspects (diet and genes) have been used to explain the growth in autoimmune disease. In inflammation. Infection is a key trigger of inflammation. Chronic infection may be the cause. Suppression of acute infection relaxes us,…

Another good example of how data on LongCovid will be difficult to collect, when nobody is quite sure what it even is. Chronic disease is much more complex than acute disease. https://t.co/tW64gCzn2M

When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic classification. Ecological relationships. How you live with…

There's good stuff here, and just getting this process happening was an achievement, for which we owe people thanks. But we're also cycling back to the earliest days of this pandemic in the underlying assumptions. /1…

The 'Sick and Tired' report mentions the need for clear definitions, and clinical care linked to data. The problem with chronic disease is, this can take years. Decades. This is the priority right now - risk management. It's public policy,…

'Stealth virus'. Hidden infection. I'm not an expert in this field, but a pandemic virus that triggers little to no antibody response seems a bad thing. https://t.co/ir1fAj239C

Once the minimisers are done downplaying Long Covid, we can move on to autoimmune diseases. Then we can wait a few years for data and definitions, instead of doing basic risk management. 20-40% increased risk. https://t.co/EwsaFV5xAE

If ‘Long Covid’ is the phrase for ongoing chronic effects from an infection, shouldn’t we have a term for ongoing, repeated infection? To highlight that failure of public health. It needs a serious name to foreground it. ‘Infinite Covid’…

It’s the privatisation of health, just as everything else is privatised in the politics of the economy, which will allow no public, only markets. And for which every collective effort is called ‘anti-competitive’. https://t.co/fOImTlvl2p

A co-worker is off very sick, says 'chest is very congested', but GP says no signs of infection, so no antibiotics, and sent home. That word, 'congestion', could be another way of saying 'has difficulty breathing'? Which needn't be a…

That disparity between cases and hospitalisations. The ruins of a testing regime. https://t.co/HUYHabTAq9

Is there an overall 'wellness' of the community metric? Lots of disease-specific metrics, but anything that captures the perceived descent into mass sickness we feel? @KarenCutter4 ?

“We’ve got very good protection now against dying and getting into hospital and that’s because of a mixture of vaccines and immunity from natural infection, but we’ve also got drugs and other interventions.." We had all that in 2022.…

Anybody who believes that democracy functions or should function by ‘the people’ steering our society should read the comments on this (great) thread. Then block all the morons, to do your small part in sanitising this sewer of a platform.…

30% of businesses fail in their first year. 50% by their second. 75% by their 4th. Business (especially small business) is a terrible model for a society. But that’s what the ‘economy’ is. Not only does it mostly fail, it’s even worse than…

This seems bad. I’m sure somebody will minimise it into unicorns and lollipops. h/t @sidherian https://t.co/yCiqWFBmX3

This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that invented central banks is stupid. It’s a key plank of free market…

Chronic infection. The big sleeper. Infection is the problem, not hospitalisation or severity of infection. Infection is disease. Public health should never, ever, promote infection. https://t.co/WCPir4Eort

We need an accompanying survey of NSW Health staff attitudes to their current situation. I doubt it will seem a good news story then. https://t.co/eWZl4Cblr3

Humans are built to notice and be concerned about contrasts, not absolutes. For example you perceive a change in temperature or smell, then become accustomed. This is where normalising Covid infection got its power. By drawing upon a…

And let's remember we chose this 'extra burden', egged on by prominent health professionals. At a time our health system is on its knees with an ageing population. https://t.co/ZerPlYk7WY

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because…

The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of constitutional monarchy is another disguised infection by the…

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

How much communities changed when we all became interchangeable cogs in globalised economic markets: the old practice of letters of introduction. A community was seen as having agency, new members were assessed using existing…

Another chronic disease possibly falling to research on chronic infection. It's the big sleeper issue, and we're sleepwalking into whole new generations of it, with Covid. h/t @DrJohnWagner https://t.co/BFuGc1JJoY

The public is following politicians for Covid advice, the same politicians surveys say they think lie consistently. The same politicians who won't mandate their own official health advice. Health advice undermined by rogue health…

History changes less than we think. Living with the virus is good ol' Middle Ages public health. https://t.co/S7EaYr7h1Z

Travel and toxoplasmosis both start with a T. I think that explains the similar mechanism of a brain rendered insensitive to danger. A friend went on a cruise late last year, got horribly sick, was off for weeks. Now just returned from…

A great summary here of half a century of all-out assault on political accountability. By elected politicians. If you want to know how basic processes like public health are ignored in a pandemic, this is how. It's been a long project,…

Remember that sweet time we declared the pandemic was over, so somebody could sweep to electoral victory? Marked with the red cross. Elections, the greatest enemy of public health. And public wealth. h/t @ToshiAkima https://t.co/0HFia3Cj4F

Anybody still doubting AI bots could do a better job running countries? https://t.co/ysmVdqwoc3

The late Stephen Toulmin. Studied something I think fundamentally important to getting ourselves out of the mess societies are now in, with Covid and elsewhere. Casuistry, or casuistic reasoning. Case-based reasoning. Much, much more…

The vulnerable. To go back to the saying, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This was the insight that led to the invention of ‘the public’ in the late 19th century. Something we all grew up assuming was a natural part of the…

Turn this into what I call a case-based Covid Tweet. 59 dead this week in NSW. That rolls off the tongue fast, notice? Now imagine knowing those 59 stories, in their specifics. The huge network of failed public health practices it would…

Can anybody else think of a pathogen using our bodies right now as an airbnb? Or sorry, dirtyairbnb? https://t.co/0Yeku8ru4O

With hardly anybody testing, it’s STILL a public health debacle. Saturation infection. https://t.co/IK78oylDsw

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

If we want public health back, we need the public back. The public is brought into existence by the ‘public service’. It’s in the name, an administrative construct. Until its authority is restored, we’re pissing into the wind.

From somebody who sells a lot of history books. https://t.co/0LqNLFHTwX

A friend’s wife, a teacher, is celebrating Mother’s Day sick in bed, where she’s been all week. Infection picked up in a school full of sick students and teachers. Thanks for the selfies, National Cabinet. They’re really helping everybody…

If you’re reading, National Cabinet. Now that you’re all Labor, minus one Liberal Premier in free fall. With a big lead in all polls. If you can’t do basic public health now, it’s obvious it’s all about your individual careers, not the…

Have tweeted before about the possible links between the 20th century epidemic of heart disease and infection. Another 20th century epidemic was obesity. Is there a possible link to infection for this chronic condition? You betcha. /1…

A fascinating thing about Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, is that it shows a classic example of human group dynamics. The Beatles begin the movie completely dysfunctional. Nobody leads, and they even discuss that they may need that.…

Each time somebody returns to work after another infectious disease battering, they look a bit more shell-shocked. Still no masks, but not the same oblivious-to-reality joy either. The toll is mounting, in every way, emotionally,…

Astounding that many young people I talk to are active, almost rabid, followers of Gerard Rennick. This is young people without any history of conservative political (or any political) belief. The Right in the US is using social media to…

I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of social media, that societies emerge from the 'bottom up'. They…

Humans are social creatures. First, foremost, and always. Even when they’re being ‘political’ they’re being social. For a long time that social life was a relatively independent domain of life, free of the clutches of commerce and…

1. Social media destroys public health action and messaging. 2. People use social media to try to keep up to date with the messaging. 3. People say without social media, they couldn't have managed the pandemic. 4. Rinse and repeat.…

Want to know why they aren't already compulsory? A good fact for a populist age. Because somebody has to *implement* that, to keep the belts on. The only person who can right now, is the bus driver. But they're busy driving the bus. I bet…

'Social media' is like saying 'social brain surgery', or 'social piloting of planes', or 'social plumbing.' Media is a profession, a set of expert skills. Social media means dumping all that and letting everybody create their own news. We…

Glandular fever has usually been considered a mild disease. Acute infections often are. Acute infection was just EBV opening the front door. https://t.co/pvvObA3WRh

How the fuck could anyone know this? (Underlined.) We have no idea how much Covid we have anywhere, let alone in schools. Experts who don’t work in schools being asked to pontificate on what’s going on there. I can tell you what’s going…

How many times was your school closed for infectious disease outbreaks as a kid? How much has gross incompetence and corrupted public health been normalised in the past 3 years?

20 years ago this would have been a news headline in major newspapers. Now it’s the public health strategy of the National Cabinet and Chief Medical Officer of the country. Itself a word-for-word copy of a free market libertarian…

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1…

Despite all the modern libertarian rhetoric, people still grant the highest status in societies to their political leaders. If they lead casual indifference to public health, casual indifference is what we get. https://t.co/Mg6O2hpnJG

When you have a vax-only pandemic strategy, and then don't vaccinate. Anybody who performed this well in their job would be fired. Politicians just have to win an election, which they can game easily with bribes and propaganda.…

Inflammation and chronic inflammatory disease are at epidemic levels, and growing. The focus is usually on treating the inflammation itself, with drugs for example. But infection is a major cause of inflammation. Chronic infection may be…

It really is only a handful of years ago that Australia still did public health. Even the Murdoch press was into it. https://t.co/LGx5CG65Dw

This section of the NSW Public Health Act is interesting. Covid-19 from what I can see in Schedule 1 is a Category 2, 3 & 4 condition. https://t.co/mv7PEfD6hI

It also doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say that anybody encouraging people not to take precautions with Covid is potentially inciting a crime. Which is also an offence. https://t.co/8DazL1wHNv

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

The stupidity of populism. We're now suddenly interested in mental health, the vulnerable and face-to-face learning because those were all spin to avoid having to do anything against Covid. Say it enough and it becomes real, as Utopia says.

The NSW Health department still strongly recommends masks. Showing that the only people who've 'moved on' are the people who would rather trust a politician with their health, than a health professional. Let's see how that works out for…

A termitarium does something astonishing. It dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. It’s beautifully ventilated, but also protective from the elements, and maintains a stable temperature. It repurposes air and water as…

Boils aren’t a popular topic for discussion, but they’re horrible for many people. A long conversation with an afflicted friend made me think much wider things, about Covid and infection more generally. About microbes as an ecology. We…

Another biggie for the chronic infection is the cause of most of our chronic disease theory. h/t @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/ryFnXTCHlZ

Because the forces of public health minimisation are pushing hard against lockdowns again, time to re-Tweet this. All that white space is 'not locked down'. The NSW lockdown towards the end was also caused by ring-fencing poor suburbs, not…

Protecting people from disease doesn’t lock down an economy. Gutting their wages, making their housing unaffordable, raising the interest rates on their debt, uncontrolled inflation. Those things do. But they can still go to work. Or…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

Genuine question for Covid experts. Is there even one example of an infectious disease where herd immunity has been achieved, without a vaccine that prevents or dramatically slows transmission? @Globalbiosec ?

If you doubt the focus of libertarian think tanks is not just to continue to stymie Covid action, but to ensure public health action will be obstructed for future pandemics as well, you only have to read their mission statements.…

Yet more research showing an infectious origin for chronic disease. In this case, plagues from centuries ago (bubonic) now linked to autoimmune disease in the 21st century. We don’t learn, as we happily infect the entire globe with a new…

Any recommendations for a portable HEPA filter, in Australia? @DrPieterPeach ? Anybody else had good experiences with a particular model?

One of the things about adopting a reality-based politics, rather than a popularity-based politics, is that you see clearly how the hot air of all elected politicians and social media debates are irrelevant to what actually happens. Covid…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

Even the majority of Americans aren't buying 'Covid is over'. The great con, saying that 'the people' won't support more public health action. A tiny minority of cookers won't. They just scream loudly. Backed by big donor dollars.…

A common response if you question organisations about their Covid measures, is 'we're following government advice'. You need to press them on which advice that is. NSW Health advice for example would mean a lot more people wearing masks.…

Remember the argument for years for negative gearing on property? That without it there’d be no rentals? lol, as always nobody will be held to account for the lies. https://t.co/yI5GYlQKQp

Quick straw poll at work today. Large-ish open plan office. Who has had an infectious disease in the past month, including Covid? Every single person, except one. Me. The only person who’s worn a mask in the office in 2023.

Superb conversation with @CrabbBrendan and @c_s_wallace on the desperate need for a circuit-breaker at government level, to return sanity to public health in Australia, with Covid. Every day I think about that circuit breaker. I fear the…

In so many ways the collapse of public health and other social problems stems from a lack of respect for teachers and education. For two fundamentally important reasons. Teachers mediate our relationship with knowledge, and also to each…

Gotta love the economy. First it fixed a pandemic by infecting everybody. Now it's going to fix work from home by increasing the number of people who will never own one.

Every day on Twitter we’re living the fantasy that everybody expressing their individual view will somehow aggregate into a changed society. It’s the same libertarian con, social media is a giant sponge that soaks up public anger and…

Talking to a family yesterday where fighting has broken out over who made who else sick. Because they’ve had Covid multiple times, they’re not happy to now all be sick again, and the blame game has started. Was it a family gathering? Why…

Eric Topol talking about recent studies on brain inflammation following even mild Covid infection. That ‘dangling concern’ about much longer-term impacts is the concern I have about chronic infection. Post-polio syndrome another example…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

A story about gravity. A little bit of pure science, but with profound implications for everyday life I think. And joy, which true knowledge brings. Nothing restricts a person’s life more, in my view, than a misunderstanding of gravity.…

Beautiful description of the transition from a publicly-funded set of public health measures, allowing significant freedom, to privatised home lockdowns. Paid for by each of us individually. This is all that happened, just another…

I’m sure everybody thinks the social collapse facing the UK has an obvious answer. Tax cuts to the wealthy toffs who caused the social collapse. But popular! Way to go, elections. https://t.co/NYwPl6E6F9

By my rough calculation, these worst train disasters of the past decade killed only about a fifth of the people Australia has killed with Covid, in 2023 alone. Nobody has suggested living with train crashes. https://t.co/8PPnrBfNbC

Malaria wasn’t always just a tropical disease. It killed across about twice the area historically than it does now. It was eliminated in richer parts of the world, by public health action, land use and better housing. Not by living with…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

I track the UK news, because what happens there often follows here, as conservative strategists share IP. Australians will know ‘Stop the Boats’ only too well, nothing to do with immigration or boats, everything about winning elections. /1…

Another favourite. Nothing like actually advertising the collapse of public health in your country. https://t.co/NmhRvrpwLt

A cooker ex-friend constantly asks me 'so what would you do about Covid?' I say: "control the spread, like we do for every other serious infectious disease." Cookers bait you to say 'lockdowns'. They're a bit taken aback when you say…

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

The same libertarians who whined and protested about Covid rules are now excusing their lack of Covid action by saying ‘we’re following the government rules’. Just as they whine about free speech while suppressing the speech of everybody…

How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s…

The -ism words are so misleading. Take 'authoritarianism'. Libertarians mean State power. Removing public health measures so that the public is forcibly infected with a virus is the most authoritarian decision possible. The public is left…

Infectious disease physicians and Covid. One example. There's not a single public health measure mentioned here, apart from vaccination? Like antibodies are the only way to control disease? Is this a territorial thing, between medicine and…

That feeling every day that Covid is a train wreck, and nobody is doing a thing? It's peer pressure. Kate Miller-Heidke's Caught in the Crowd captures it nicely, in this bit. Now nearly everybody is turning their back, and walking away,…

Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That ideology hates anything public, it ‘distorts the market’, even…

Use the 'everything is social' lens. The previous PM set up NC to create a separate group dynamic, and like all groups tending to be loyal to itself. This then decoupled the members from their old groups, like their connections with CHOs…

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

Anybody seen a summary or research paper detailing how much AI was used to accelerate SARS-Cov-2 vaccine development? And absolutely not for anti-vax reasons, but because that would be seriously cool, and hope for the future too.

This painting of Spinoza is a deeply profound entire worldview for those despairing of our current situation. Spinoza was excommunicated by his own community for heresy. It’s what the image shows. He was unmoved, also what the image shows.…

We ignored the middle ground. Going straight from emergency public health orders and ‘lockdowns’, to doing nothing. It would have been EASY to sell transition measures like ventilation, managing outbreaks, masks as required by case numbers…

Life was pretty free pre end-2021 in Australia. Travel was the main sticking point, and dam-busting bomb that broke our public health. But we had purpose-built quarantine facilities at a cost of $1 billion for that. Rapidly abandoned.…

The reason Australia abandoned public health in late-2021 was the same thing that is destroying all democracies. Elections. Scott Morrison wanted a happy, ‘pandemic is over’ vibe to begin 2022, election year. Remember this message?…

There should be a special place at eventual Covid enquiries for members of the medical profession who led resistance to public health measures. Accountability will come, they should take no comfort from their early victories.…

In Australia’s black summer fires, I remember almost no real attention to air quality. The pandemic has changed us. Now the US very focused on air quality. Proof again that the anti-public health crowd are a loud hysterical minority.…

One of the great cons of the libertarian public health smashers is that action against Covid is generated by fear and hysteria. In reality most people who followed public health instructions did so calmly and without much complaint. The…

Society is a high school. Not an analogy, an actual cultural fact. This also means you can read all politics through your time in the classroom and playground. Libertarians are that tiny handful of kids who disrupt everybody else and…

Nobody told me? https://t.co/JhhqfGQQxM

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

Have seen these displays in two regional towns now. It appears to be anti-vax propaganda, is anybody familiar with it? https://t.co/keKHgLFNtm

If you’re old enough, think back to life before social media. If somebody didn’t know something, what did they do? Often it never came up, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. If it did they could use a library, or Google search etc.…

People will do what everybody else is doing. Society doesn’t run on facts, it works on imitation. Peer pressure. https://t.co/Ibrl46a5Sn

Normalisation is the model we’ve always had for the ‘developing’ world. Endemic disease. Economic politics makes no distinction between countries, it’s a globalised market. So it’s a race to the bottom, for public health. We’re all the…

A P.S. I don’t think people get this. Public health was the product of national governments. ‘The public’ itself is. As the economy replaces those with a globalised market, public health disappears too. It was the logical next step. You…

So much for the idea that children are so fragile that missing a bit of school will render them mental health wrecks. My kids still laugh when i ask if missing school in ‘lockdowns’ was tough for them. Imagine a world believing that kids…

If you believe as I do that much chronic disease is inflammatory, and that inflammation has its roots in chronic infection, then this research will come as no surprise. Using vaccines to target inflammation directly. https://t.co/sZABs4UgDu

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1…

Thankfully we went with the evidence-based 'let's let a pandemic virus infect everybody' instead, based on a single page manifesto from a free market think tank. https://t.co/MRHeUr0Wrx

Given we privatised Covid by leaving it to the public to fix themselves, at their own cost, why not do the same for inflation? Everybody refuse to pay more than 95% of the listed price for anything, problem solved.

Can't remember how much attention this got late last year. I particularly like the last two dot points, beginning 'doctors not sure why'. https://t.co/DP6aLkCVl9

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

We wouldn’t have a childhood immunisation schedule in Australia, based on the current advice from some of our prominent health professionals. https://t.co/Z50MC2ELyC

Was listening to a football team doctor talk about concussion in sports today. How they’re using an ‘evidence-based’ approach. Actually the approach needed is a risk-based approach. Ditto for Covid. Not ‘let’s wait and see if it cripples…

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most common objection to the comparison - that ‘we have a lot more…

The contrast between the hospitalisation bars and testing line tells a story here? I doubt those working in hospitals see the same dwindling pandemic the public is encouraged to. From: https://t.co/ElN5uJudAs https://t.co/8FPPHsjLO6

I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build things, with the calm adult effort and persistence that…

The more you understand the way societies materially operate, the more you also see politics as the tiniest veneer of pointless hot air getting in the way of things that actually matter. For example, this machine is far more important than…

I assume the engine room of medically-trained dumb in some Australian universities immediately fired into gear with their anonymous troll groups, to troll Williams' account. https://t.co/loDaGfnmBW

This sort of stuff always makes us think about ‘authoritarian’ governments. But all societies are controlled, just in different ways. They don’t function otherwise. For example most of our lives in the West are now almost completely…

When Covid arrived, standard public health processes kicked into gear. An influenza-based plan maybe, but the public health systems fired up. Then in 2021 they were switched off. How was that done? You're looking at it. That was the true…

Just to reinforce this, Australia's response to Covid was great public health. But the LNP has an ideological hatred of government. A populist group was their way to bypass the public health built into our federalist system, a wedge…

I believe we're not supposed to draw the comparison. But the science increasingly does. You won't find chronic infection if you're not looking for it. Many infectious disease physicians seem to be not much interested. From:…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

After a pandemic of heart disease in the 20th century very possibly caused by the Spanish Flu pandemic and other infections, now we're repeating the same mistake in the 21st century. https://t.co/ykH7NTmE7b

Building hybrid cardiovascular immunity in the UK. Are we at the point yet where senior medical figures in Oz advising the government will provide advice that actually relates to human health? https://t.co/iTGzMGbMYv

Heaven and Earth was moved to find the source of this continuous avalanche of death in Australia. Finally a drone found the wreckage of the public health system. https://t.co/lN4fKsnsjn

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

Chronic infection and the disease it causes is the biggest elephant in the room in medicine. The chronic outcome very rarely resembles the acute on-ramp. And so it’s nearly always missed. https://t.co/74bm2XvfMU

The whole thread is so important. And the work Paul Ewald has been doing for years on the infectious causes of chronic disease. https://t.co/HuRaIj1Vkd

The frustration of genuine expertise in this pandemic is palpable. But expertise has never translated directly into political action. Even the collective of a university doesn’t. Humans solved this problem though. They developed…

Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. /1…

Teachers chuckle at the contrast between school years where nobody is interested in learning anything, and adult lives at war over ‘facts’. Teachers socialise knowledge, that’s their role. That’s what’s now terminally damaged, because we…

School. A small handful rule, based on popularity and bullying. Most do nothing to stop them, the kids in the background. This is what elections turned adult society into as well, the same social mechanism. Not an analogy. That kid in the…

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change…

'Balancing' Covid action against the economy is like trying to lift yourself up by your shoelaces. There is no economy, only people. Unhealthy people means no economic activity. How stupid that this isn't common sense.…

The UK didn't really choose herd immunity as a strategy. They used a market-based mechanism, as fans of the economy do for everything. Herd immunity was just the closest thing they could find in public health that looked like a market.…

The politicians who attacked the ICAC findings today and at other times? It’s an independent body, public criticism of it undermines the whole basis of democracy. They should be sacked. If you think that’s too strong, try attacking the…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

You can't ask the public to demand our public health system be used to fight Covid. Most of them don't even know we have a public health system, or even know what public health is. They know what medicine is, not public health.

I Tweeted this yesterday without explanation. Much of the public knows nothing about public health. All it saw was politicians applying public health orders. When the orders were removed they thought the pandemic was over. But orders are…

Maybe there was a typo somewhere in the budget papers, 'renewable infection' instead of 'renewable energy'. I remember innumerates telling me cumulative death curves can only ever go up. No, they can be flat. Like ours was, with public…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

I’ve had employers say to my face when pressed on this sort of thing ‘we need to learn to live with this thing’. What THEY mean by that is ‘we need to allow everybody to get infected, there is no other way’. In other words, not living with…

Friend, very fit and strong, collapsed and was taken to hospital, barely breathing and with little detectible pulse. In hospital had seizures and went into cardiac arrest. Is still alive, the cause they now believe was septic shock…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

Insight did a program on living longer. All the usual hypotheses, diet, exercise, attitude, supplements etc. Nobody mentioned infection. I would bet avoiding infection is a key to longevity. Most chronic disease is likely infectious in…

All-cause mortality and excess deaths seem the main window into public health impacts of Covid now? This week’s NSW epi report. https://t.co/wfu4zV67J2

Social brain surgery Social policing Social electrical work Social commercial jet flying Social building scaffolding Social legal representation Social media. Why does that last one not strike us as ridiculous, like the rest of the list?

A photo from a regional newspaper. And current NSW Health advice. The gap? Total absence of political leadership in public health. https://t.co/9nWd7OUaJc

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

Saying Covid is a Class 3 Biohazard (more a laboratory classification) isn’t as powerful I think as noting it’s a Category 2, 3 AND 4 condition in the NSW Public Health Act. Being in public with a known Category 2, 3 or 4 condition without…

There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear people still look to them to lead. The most fanatical libertarians…

Just another heads-up for anybody on Threads that this account isn’t me. I’m not on Threads. Those going there because they think it’ll be some new dawn? It took all of a day for this bullshit to get started. https://t.co/R9cRGojjLO

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

Which other diseases require vaccination every 6 months for protection? And of those, which had the vaccinations scaled back to deliberately use infection as a protective measure?

Well this is a change. People dropping dead of infectious disease is newsworthy again. https://t.co/fPGHstSWdF

I don’t want to live my life in fear (of public health).

The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an account blatantly posting details of peoples’ personal lives…

What ‘fatigued’ means here is ordinary people are sick of doing the job leaders are supposed to be doing, for them. They were sold vaccination alone as a way back to ‘normal life’, and it failed because other public health processes are…

WA provided free flu shots. Public health is about government doing its job. It’s a disgrace that people are having to pay for their own Covid testing, in Australia, and funding their own privatised lockdowns, with their sick leave. During…

We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and for us it means ‘being there’. But it’s not actually clear what…

More suggestive evidence that much chronic disease may have an infectious origin. And that vaccination for one disease may have significant benefit for other diseases, including chronic conditions. https://t.co/ZbkKXfaNag

Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social phenomenon. The resistance you get is for violating social norms. People are literally terrified of varying from ‘what everybody else…

I’m not even a fraction as shocked the Commonwealth Games was cancelled as I am we cancelled public health for Covid.

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

From the John Snow Project. You'd expect the Ayn Rand groupies to turn a pandemic into a hospital capacity argument. But a LABOR government? Their primary vote was already dire. Many rusted-ons will never forgive this.…

One of the findings of the Robodebt RC was that senior public servants failed to act on appalling government decisions. What's enabling the Albanese government's current refusal to do public health for Covid is the non-action of senior…

That feeling of powerlessness in the face of obvious stupidity, that many of us feel for Covid, is what most of the world has felt about us for generations. They’ve had ‘endemic’ disease foisted upon them their whole lives. We are now them…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

I do a one-Tweet version of my threads. For today’s, do we tweet these facts to share the facts? Or are we really asking why nobody is paying attention to them? I think the latter. We’re looking for (or trying to create) a social…

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs…

In this case the ‘mystery’ seems to be just that he hasn’t revealed publicly what his illness was. Though that in itself is interesting, because ‘I had the flu’ or ‘I had a heart episode’ etc. isn’t particularly explosive in the privacy…

The article doesn’t mention that knowingly going into public with Covid and not taking precautions, in NSW at least, is an offence punishable with up to 6 months in jail, under the Public Health Act. Covid is a Category 2, 3 AND 4…

Can you think of one human thought, behaviour, feeling, word/phrase, object or trend/fashion that isn't copied/imitated from somebody else? https://t.co/EPuDKmkI0Z

State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions are equally as good as examples. Your most popular team…

Does anybody seriously think that ploughing through 3-year electoral cycles driven entirely by popularity polling is going to progress any of our problems at the speed that’s required? The Albanese government’s vision is predominantly…

B A Van Sise. I challenge anybody to demonstrate an entirely original piece of work, or thought, or feeling. Or anything. AI shows again that the most fundamental human act is to copy. To imitate. https://t.co/64pl5uuMXp

One response from the travel-fetishists is that 'humans have always loved to discover'. Like everybody who flies off on holiday is a new James Cook. All the places they travel to were discovered long ago. They mean discovering themselves.…

Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisions. They see organisations collapsing, flailing with the…

Even the name, "NSW Health", reflects a time when health was a public thing. NSW had (or didn't have) health. Now sitting there unable to do anything because populist elected morons sideline it in favour of their own petty careers, through…

‘Fascism’ is one of those words sprayed around with abandon on social media. The 20th century’s two most famous fascists here. In reality fascism is just populism, in its endgame. Both hugely popular leaders, and came to power using…

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to…

Now for personal irresponsibility health. https://t.co/lyQxkrcjk3

The bewildered cries of ‘why is nothing being done about Covid?’ are a marker of privilege. For most of the world this is standard, they have ‘endemic’ disease foisted on them all the time. We’re all the developing world now. The Economy…

The genius of Gravity was to replace space, with place. The movie makes you feel the void at the heart of our culture. The absence of place. William Shatner when returning from orbit said the ‘final frontier’ is really the Earth beneath…

There is no 'pandemic fatigue'. There's a deliberately engineered resistance to public health. Countries fought wars under much greater privation for many more years, because that behaviour was led. All behaviour is led.…

Another perfect example of how 'lockdowns' never ended. They were privatised. When governments surrendered responsibility for housing and energy, both were privatised. The same has now happened for public health. 'Living with' a pandemic…

Never believe the libertarian schtick about individual freedom. Nobody is more slavishly devoted to their leader than a libertarian. All humans follow social status hierarchies. None more than those who say they don't.…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

Politicians heap praise on service personnel for 'putting their lives on the line'. And fair enough. Right now I'd add teachers, childcare and healthcare workers, and a whole range of other services, working in a soup of infection every…

Can somebody explain what this means, precisely? From: https://t.co/ILRwsuGJCA https://t.co/BPFdYdqyEl @NjbBari3 ?

Both Covid and climate change are symptoms of a stalled industrial revolution. The last industrial revolution was a response to desperate social need, it was a social movement. We misunderstand it as ‘economic’. Massive social problems are…

The Black Knight is clearly our public health role model now. Those limbs grow back, right? Sword immunity? https://t.co/tuxWaWz2oW

People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how societies work. Public health has to be led as a ‘trending’ thing.…

Public health was never health for a majority of people, and lock up or treat the damaged, the 'vulnerable'. It was a recognition that no system can ever be stronger than its weakest link. What's vulnerable is the public itself, not just…

What's a Junior Medical officer? https://t.co/1858OjDuHr

I was pleased to find this body of committed scientists calling for a dramatic reduction in the ridiculous amount of flying and travel. https://t.co/aMiLlEMo3Q

Nobody originally thought glandular fever could lead to multiple sclerosis. It even had a cute name, the ‘kissing disease’. Imagine if minimisers are wrong about Covid, if its long-term chronic impact is similar, or worse. We’re infecting…

Re-watched the Nuremberg Trials the other day, with newly discovered audio of the hearings. Echoes of present times, with populists (Trump, Robodebt pollies) in the dock for egregious trashing of national leadership. It made me think about…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

If public health isn’t about preventing infection, what’s left? Allowing infection to generate data to attract funding for work about infections?

Chronic infection interests me, as a major (dominant?) cause of chronic disease. I seem to be a carrier of HSV-1, have had the odd cold sore since my teens. Would really love to be free of it. There doesn’t appear to be a way? Once…

‘Living with the virus’ is not going well, for the touring music industry. As artists say in this piece, nobody is talking about it. https://t.co/ED5JmROvmQ

A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we don’t see obviously urgent action on urgent social problems.…

Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to challenge that seeming a good thing to do, because doing that is…

Yes yes yes. Infection is the key to unlocking much of our understanding of chronic disease, I’m certain. Get every vaccination you qualify for, you don’t even know what other conditions it might be protecting you from. And avoid…

What was the reason the federal and State health departments weren't chosen to do this job? They surely have this expertise, it's one of their core reasons for existing. I think this is a vital question for Australia. There may be a simple…

These are the 4 stages the Doherty Institute were asked to model when we opened up in late-2021. Two important things to note here I think (we need to revisit that stage of the pandemic, as the promised Royal Commission that will probably…

Excellent. And while we're putting the spotlight on consultancy, again can we ask why critical pandemic planning in Australia was outsourced to the private sector? We have health departments. https://t.co/sFfRxqoqWw

Reality-based politics. Insurance prices risk. If politicians do nothing to combat risks, for climate or Covid for example, insurance will go up or be removed entirely. (Check your communicable disease exclusions on your own policy.) Votes…

A colleague has had Covid 5 times. Has a range of things going on medically now, including total exhaustion. Has no sick leave left. The dominant response they get from others, including supervisors, is that they're some sort of…

Paul Ewald’s application of evolutionary theory to public health is an incredible new way to look at it. And his views on chronic infection causing most chronic disease are even more fascinating. https://t.co/rhoDZbGHBd

From the Australian government’s information sites. We need to continue to fight the spin that replaces our focus on infections, with hospitalisations, severe illness and death. There’s wisdom and bitter experience in defining epidemics…

Acute infection is an on-ramp. Long Covid is still that on-ramp. There’s a much longer Covid in play. Chronic infection is the window to most chronic disease. https://t.co/kQ24nca2rl

I need a licence renewal and they’re requiring a new photo. I don’t believe there’s a way to have that done without removing your mask, they’ll only photograph indoors? Anybody been through this?

From an evolutionary biology perspective, where are we at with vaccines that mostly just suppress severe disease? Do they create the conditions for evolution of variants, and facilitate viral reservoirs?

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make…

The greatest progress against scourges like cholera and malaria was a focus on the way those diseases are transmitted to people. The name ‘infectious disease’ tells you what to target. The infection. We don’t fix road accidents with…

I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entirely different if you use reality as the framing, rather than…

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

Trying to find the graph posted here the other day showing mortality rates for 19-40 year olds, with the big red bars at the end for 2020-22. Anybody?

Today at work. 'So when are you going to stop wearing that mask?' 'When the pandemic is over.' 'But it will never be over, we're living with it.' The replacement of public health with propaganda now bedded down.

“HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria shouldn’t be labeled as “just” epidemics or endemic. They are pandemics that have been beaten in rich countries. Allowing them to persist elsewhere is a policy choice and a budgetary decision.” /1…

We’re seeing old privatisations now having to be bailed out with massive amounts of public money. In electricity, in water, in gas, in housing. Now we’ve privatised a pandemic, and we’ll have to ‘socialise the losses’ there over the next…

Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government. But a pattern is appearing, and it's not a good one. /1…

The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an unlocked door to our own democracy, eating it from the inside…

Call me a plonker, but "Prevalence will rise and fall, influenced by seasons, school holidays and new subvariants, but it will always be pulled back towards the equilibrium level" sounds like the definition of epidemic disease to me, not…

And this is why pandemics have always been defined by infections. Not by the disease these infections cause. https://t.co/7Gb2zIrozQ

About 5% of any group of any size determine what everybody else does, through imitation. The constant calls for ‘the people’ to be smarter, to do things, are the framing we need to avoid. It’s the framing that says society is just millions…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

Again, voting changed nothing. Even isolating infected people is standard for many infectious diseases. That's the 'normal'. Try turning up to work with whooping cough. https://t.co/XEnwKSPvqG

The thing about propaganda and slogans is that the language is content-free. Take “we’ve got to learn to live with Covid-19 and return to normal”. Ask anybody who says that what it actually means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s actually…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern societies run on expertise, they’d collapse in an instant without it. But expertise has zero coordinated power to shape what’s…

Is anybody making N95/P2 respirators that aren’t medical-white? Anti-masking is a social phenomenon, I’ve seen in my own experience that it’s easier to convince doubters to mask, if the masks aren’t white.

If I thought Covid was over, I don’t think I’d spend my apparently vital new freedom coming here every day to tell everybody that Covid is over. ‘Covid is over’ is just one more team in the team sports. The most cult-like of all the teams.

Two years ago, 18 minutes and 10 seconds into this presentation by the Doherty modellers, the previous PM interrupted to reinforce that what they were presenting meant 80% vaccination made Covid ‘just like the flu’. No it didn’t. /1…

The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro project proposed. Lake Lyell, as an example. /1…

One of the great things to learn from Rachel Perkins’ wonderful Australian Wars series, is how much the very existence of the States was just as a mechanism to manage the massive land grab of that time. European Australians have always…

I think it’s fine to say we’re all ‘living with’ the harsh Australian sun. It meant world record amounts of melanoma with ‘healthy tans’. But we learned to live with it in a smarter way. We can do the same for air and infection, we’re very…

The continuing farce of a Labor government adopting a one-page public health strategy from a free market think tank. We need an 'Anthony' - GBD' shirt. https://t.co/DSDsEwqCDr

Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The gap is in the other direction. The continent is broken, and we…

To me one of the clearest ways to see the political kneecapping of public health is to compare basic infection control guidelines for other infectious diseases, with Covid. This is for influenza (NSW). Has been this for years. #auspol…

The whole 'MSM' thing is a bit weird. Nobody I know who's young consumes any MSM now, and hasn't for years. It's an older person's obsession, from the days when MSM did constitute a sort of public square. That's long gone. Splintered into…

RN, the Snowy 2.0 stuck tunnelling machine. A political brain fart project which hapless engineers now need to try to make work. Listen to the gotcha attack, like an opposition leader trying to find a 'black hole' in a government budget.…

What nobody says when prices skyrocket because of lack of supply, of anything, is that it’s really just extortion. The owner of the scarce supply could just sell what they have left, at usual prices. Economy piffle words allow them to…

If you could organise public health action into a battle between two teams played out over a season, culminating in a grand final, we might actually defeat Covid.

If you aggregate the number of people who will be maimed and die in generations to come, allowing a novel infectious disease to become permanent (‘endemic’) ranks higher than any historical dictator or genocide for death and suffering.

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1…

Letting everybody catch a serious vascular disease, it's no biggie right? We don't have many blood vessels?

Yep. The disease could be controlled, in a nutshell. That's what 'living with' disease has always meant. Only one has ever been eradicated, the rest were controlled. https://t.co/amRWjJ9460

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid,…

The very best thing we can do for a health system already under strain with an ageing population, is to let a pandemic run in an uncontrolled way. https://t.co/4ZAf3LHySH

And exactly as expected, the push for an inquiry predicated on concern for damage to the economy. Not on the collapse of public health. The economy is humanity’s most lethal fiction. https://t.co/XDXVSF7i0H

Worth pointing out every day that 'balancing' the economy against public health action led very quickly to 100% action for the economy, and 0% for Covid. A politician who uses the word 'balance' is lying, always. Climate change already…

Saul’s work shows something much more important than just how to do renewables. It fundamentally upends nonsense about the economy as a whole. That ‘business’ drives it. Households drive the economy, businesses are just rent-seekers. Try…

Some cavalier physicians have had the ear of governments during Covid. Pre-pandemic barely a third of physicians even bothered to wash their hands, in hospitals. We shouldn't be surprised at the collapse of infection and disease control.…

I feel the whole living with the virus fantasy hangs by one thread only. The (relative) efficacy of current vaccines against severe disease. If that were to fail what do people think might happen?

What we need is autonomous public health technology, where the human error rate is currently running close to 100%. https://t.co/0BDplc9NPJ

None of this happens. In the UK kids are told to go to school when they test positive. Nobody is isolating (or even testing) anywhere I have any contact with, in any workplace or school, unless they're so sick they can't stand up. (From:…

Lawn mowers and other motorised garden tools are now shifting hugely to electric, in sales. A very macho area, like cars. But nobody turned garden tools into a team sport. That's how the wreckers win, they turn issues into team sports.…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

What is the current data/thinking saying about longevity of vaccine efficacy against severe disease? If that does fall off a cliff too, does it mean those with vaccine-only immunity are at increasing risk of severe disease? @ejustin46?…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

7.6 million people are waiting for basic medical treatment in the UK. Living with the virus. The economy is a fast-track to extinction.

There’s been a surge in demand for private health in the UK. This is classic Thatcherism. Run the public option into the ground and drive people to the private option in desperation.

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

What I know, because I looked, is that for many diseases we vaccinate against, mortality hasn't historically been high. Public health used to focus on preventing infection and disease. Now it seems to be about...actually, what is it now…

The idea of being at war with your own institutions is one the US and UK are exporting to the world, mostly through social media. Nobody is winning, it's like a lethal social infection. https://t.co/JogeJWxUhh

Listeria, mostly ‘mild’, treatable with antibiotics, tends to only make ‘the vulnerable’ very sick. And yet…many millions and many regulations are used to protect the public from this disease. As they should be. Public health exists, just…

Public health is terminal because the public died somewhere in the 1980s. Replaced by a market of individuals, an economy. There is no public in the economy, it would be seen as anti-competitive.

Everything points to this entrenching everything we did WRONG for Covid. Attacks on federalism are common messages i.e. undermining State bodies that actually run public health. https://t.co/LkN1Qe0Krm

Here's what a Health Minister used to look like. Introduced Medicare, and first disability services law, plus offensives against tobacco and alcohol, and a world-leading strategy against the HIV pandemic, now close to eliminated in…

You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a year ahead of the official review report. /1 We began the…

While we keep seeing individuals and groups as two separate things, the libertarians will win. They’re one thing. Groups are made of individuals, individuals exist only because of groups. Groups are one ‘phase’ of individual life. Like…

The framing is obvious. The inquiry isn’t about mass infection and death after late-2021. It’s about the ‘sacrifices’ (public health measures). Whether we did too much. https://t.co/MLy7AujZro

It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But…

‘Factors’ is really saying ‘we don’t know’. For so much chronic disease that don’t know will be infection. https://t.co/c09cUehbJG

If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are in a STEM death spiral, a self-reinforcing implosion. /1…

States acting ‘unilaterally’ is actually federalism. Our constitutional system of government. And all those public health measures are…public health measures. Constitutionally the authority of States to apply. https://t.co/wWUt2ZEgGP

Hospitalisations. I think many of us in the community aren’t really focused on that, but more on just how sick so many of the people we know are, and who aren’t getting better. Mostly at home, or even turning up to work, sick.…

Friend currently at a public health conference. Only one masked. Nearly 50% of presentations on Day 1 cancelled due to mysterious inability of presenters to attend. One speaker referred to a 'post-Covid world'.

This is the actual rationale for a proper CDC. As we do for bushfires, you hand it over to experts so that there's no votes in play. Nobody gets to play politics with public health measures. https://t.co/hxflEbhhCo

What nobody says is that one member of the family DIDN’T freeze to minimise risk. They filmed it. They even moved around to get better camera angles. That’s our social media world, even emergencies are just great platforms for curated…

About 20 times as many Australians died in 2022 of Covid than died in the Vietnam, Korean and Afghanistan wars combined. On current trends we'll equal Australian deaths in 7 years of WW2, in 2 years of 'living with' Covid. No politician or…

A great insight. In countries like Australia with great public health procedures and history, when a pandemic strikes, the public have almost no experience of the disaster of mass infection. So the disaster they *feel* is the public health…

This is such an important anti-minimiser point. 'Covid only kills old people'. Nearly all diseases only kill old people. https://t.co/BpCWUTMfLH

The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that what we call travel today really only began in 1950. The first jet airliner arrived in 1949. A lot of this is down to WW2. /1…

If we’d had more stories like this in 2020 and 2021, the minimisers would have had a much harder job. But they have rat cunning, they made sure there was no access to hospitals for journalists. https://t.co/EoModUTDxv

One of my favourite Tory UK slogans is ‘levelling up’. They mean ‘we’ll reduce inequality by making everybody else as rich as us.’ Like saying ‘you can all climb Everest now, we’re going to fill the space around it with 6000m of gravel.’…

Sunak’s Tories are jettisoning much of their climate change action, in favour of ‘practical’ net zero. There’s one of those weasel words, like ‘balance’. Means do nothing. In ‘balancing’ Covid action against the economy, can anybody…

Coming back to this, the ABC has done a great job here, showing how public health used to be done. Leaders didn’t baulk at public resistance, they pushed through. But then, social media wasn’t a leviathan organiser of mass dumb for them to…

It’s some chutzpah to say people being unable to visit critically ill family members in hospital was the problem in the early pandemic, rather than the absence of public health that allowed them to get infected in the first place.

You can’t see it more clearly. Social media is now running our societies. Which means anybody who can generate the likes, is in charge. Look at Trump. This, for the Voice debate, where an ex-Neighbours star is easily the dominant…

Getting viruses out of your body seems a bit like trying to extract the yolk from a scrambled egg. https://t.co/3ORwAKH2cB

Tedious, but I screenshot the actual headline and then include the link in the message body or alt text. https://t.co/TprLJODc38

The greatest threat to the economy that public health measures represented was the rediscovery of a public, community focus to our economic activity. The hysteria over ‘lockdowns’ was the economy’s counterpunch.

Employer-led public health. Employer: Where should we have the Christmas party this year? Me (masked): how about the Italian? It has outdoor dining. Employer: I don’t feel like Italian.

The growing use of 'short illness' and 'mystery illness' in death announcements. Is the former a privacy thing? I don't remember that being such a concern previously. 'X died of cancer' for example wasn't ever a controversial thing.

How stupid and sloganised the world now is, that anybody ever believed kids would be traumatised by not going to school. https://t.co/E9ulmzigpn

Had lunch with a friend today, who'd been at a funeral. The deceased was happy and healthy, and then developed a bad case of strep, and died in a matter of days. Have to wonder what the death certificate will say, and how close to actual…

I’d be fascinated to know how much of the gain at every age level is the reduction of infectious disease. Sanitation, antibiotics, vaccination. https://t.co/4uodfFlmVw

Nobody highlights the doomed collision course between a politics of individuals and the basics of life on Earth better than Lewis Thomas. https://t.co/xLHy0V2YOU

War as we know it is mostly a European disease. The clash over territory, that entire continent never lets up on it, going back centuries. The US owes its existence to that obsession, its dis-united States were all European fiefdoms.

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will always win, because it breaks the feeling of trust that things…

Very relieved that everybody I know who’s had Covid multiple times is ‘not susceptible to an infection’. We’ve had several years now of RCTs for hybrid immunity, and the infections just keep coming. Can we demand a projected end-time for…

This is the problem, which nobody will confront. Social media is a wrecking ball, a corrosive assault on the trust that is the glue that holds all societies together. What we need to do to fix that is already pre-weaponised by the same…

Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the…

I recommend everybody attend their local council meetings, to see firsthand the incredible damage social media is inflicting upon societies. It’s the front-line of a collapse that’s happening frighteningly fast.

They don't have a clue what to do, because nobody does. It's like reading tea leaves. People who defend 'the economy' can't explain one thing about how it works, when it stops working. There is no 'it'. It's a handful of indicators…

Genuinely curious what people make of this analysis. @KarenCutter4, @NjbBari3, @jeffgilchrist @GidMK @YouAreLobbyLud and anybody else? https://t.co/LjOlBzbCL5

Modern conservatives NEVER let up on strategy. It was reported on RN this morning that Abbott has re-ignited these same calls, post the referendum. To them 'divisive' means anybody not applauding colonialism. They saw the Voice as a Trojan…

So if it is once every 5 years on average, it's an interesting contrast with once per year on average being described as a good outcome, for Covid. I think it's fair to say Covid is an even more dangerous disease, as well.…

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

We’re getting nowhere with Covid talking about health and disease. The rich buy enclaves for that. This is really a story about clean air. Look at how (regular) amendments there stalled over 30 years ago, in the US. The same time climate…

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables.…

I don’t think anybody begrudges any musician playing until any age. The issue is more them occupying a cultural space created for adolescents, when they’re 80 years old. https://t.co/RKrUOy9uHM

Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occupied for centuries, the adult world. He missed I think that…

We can't vote our way out. Everybody will vote for the economy, which is our problem. https://t.co/A05AF3VD4d

Listened to an excellent discussion about clean air chaired by @dom_ma and including @c_s_wallace. A key topic for discussion was how to de-individualise public health again, to get scale and traction on topics like clean air. I think the…

Dear AHPPC, CMO, National Cabinet, and other purveyors of hybrid immunity. A question about my mum. She’s 80. Doesn’t have great lungs, but lives a good life. Her doctor says Covid might kill her. She’s been isolating for nearly 4 years…

It's nice NSW Health acknowledges we're still in a pandemic, and not 'post-Covid', as many others say. Pretty telling that our only indicators of infection now are who turns up half-dead at ED, and sewage treatment plants.…

I'm still stuck in the part of the Covid maze too where hybrid immunity is given as the way out of the pandemic, and in the same breath its advocates say 'but we don't suggest people should become infected'. https://t.co/KKj8K3GkQz

Yep, we’re repeating the 20th century. Begin with a pandemic, with chronic disease impacts that will fill much of the rest of the century. https://t.co/jSpFppssC0

Lewis Thomas had a wonderful mind. If we’d combined these insights with a focus on public health basics like clean water and air over the past 100 years, I think we’d have an entirely different health system right now, and far healthier…

Antibiotics and vaccinations made us complacent about infectious disease. We’ve wasted antibiotics raising animals, and on human infections that were easily preventable with basic sanitation. Here’s a counterfactual, how the last century…

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it…

If we’re protecting the vulnerable, it appears that means everybody under 80 years of age. https://t.co/nTlNqKbeSV

“Hey, at least you’re not dying” has as much public health ambition as drinking from a urinal trough.

The Alice in Wonderland world of a privatised pandemic. Where you’re told repeatedly the pandemic is over, infection will end infections, and in the same breath ‘please wear a mask’. https://t.co/gGcWcHz9t9

What is the 'mainstream culture' of Australia? Just about everybody who says this is already part of a cultural minority here, and lives in a 'mainstream' suburb like Toorak. https://t.co/7mTGJBW7S4

The utter contempt for public health and basic adult responsibility from politicians being revealed here was also matched in Australia, but we will likely never get an Oz enquiry to see the details. https://t.co/nwX4dN8KLR

We're still following the 'strategy' from a free-market think tank, instead of 150 years of public health precedent. Still waiting to hear the last pandemic we used hybrid immunity against. Still can't find it in any textbooks or…

I periodically re-post the GBD, so somebody can explain how it's different to our national Covid strategy. (I find them to be identical.) And also to explain why a left-leaning government is using a free market think tank's one-pager,…

The UK Covid inquiry is vital to show at last that politicians were actively undermining and ignoring basics of public health. Millions have died. You or I would be in prison for the rest of our lives. https://t.co/MpIU90f5PR

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote…

We're sadly relatively close to a time when there will be no living Beatles, Paul and Ringo now both into their 80s. Why I think there's a lot more meaning to this socially and culturally than is often said. /1 https://t.co/yshh7YOhfn Yes…

It’s really beyond me why anybody would still buy a full-ICE car. If you have range anxiety, buy a hybrid. They perform better, use half the fuel, and cost not much more, quickly amortised in saved fuel. Fuel prices magnify these…

I see the usual ‘nothing to see here’ minimisers have been trotted out for the current wave, repeating the same ‘it doesn’t appear to be severe’ gibberish. Maybe people are just in hospital for the great food. https://t.co/xuuEbxoQyH

Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That number is projected to double by 2032. That capacity is already…

I wonder if it will include defining a pandemic as how many spare beds you have in hospitals. https://t.co/TOKCxteU4m

The dog whistling of this inquiry is about the ‘role of the States’. Code for ignoring the actual function of federalism and public health. It’s conservative anger that any ‘lockdowns’ were allowed at all, when their beloved National…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

Education has never been a growth industry in the Dumb Country, nobody wants to say it. Unless it's job training employers are too entitled and lazy to pay for themselves, and/or a river of international student fee gold.…

This is the Alice in Wonderland pandemic strategy again. A strategy that says we'll drive this pandemic away with hybrid immunity, through 'natural infection'. But please avoid infecting anybody. https://t.co/gxYTPUFKdf

Routing urgent action through the popularity-based electoral process is going well. There are things that need to be objectively done. They won’t be done if we have to go through the farce of making them popular first. Nobody votes on…

Go households, the industry has politicians in their pocket. Households are already bypassing this farce, they are and always have been the heart of any economy. A grid dissolves the distinction between local and global action. Keep…

It was patently obvious this was the rationale for re-opening schools here too. Business needed its childcare back. The academics and health professionals who provided a human shield for this clearly political act should have a Wall of…

Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in a funny way. The energy grid is Shakespearean. Have a look at…

Somebody suggested the other day that the fact an ICE is rarely even 30% efficient 'makes it the same as solar panels'. Yeh, nah. https://t.co/42t8bK4zUb

It’s the self-censorship that’s so hidden. Somebody at work returned from a long holiday, over a month. Regaled everybody all week about what a fabulous time they had. Confided in me this morning that they spent over a week of it in bed…

I believe Covid is the first disease in recorded human history that humans have deliberately chosen to ‘live with’. Because that’s an empty slogan, it deliberately disguises two fundamentally different meanings. /1 We have of course had to…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

The fallacy that you can ‘protect the vulnerable’ without protecting everybody else. Most of the cases appear to be staff, who of course have to move in and out of the facilities constantly. https://t.co/lpQ9zuG1g1

Add ‘overreach’ to the slogan lexicon, the new ‘balance’ or ‘proportionate’. The great push around the world in the review of Covid action, including here. To ensure public health action is never permitted again, only the economy. As if…

Risk management for the sensible, since nobody else is doing it. Say hybrid immunity turns out to be real. (Like unicorns.) Much better for you to let the Infinite Covids get all of the infections, so you can emerge from the pandemic…

While some debate this at the immune system level, the broader point is that seemingly mild acute infection can lead to catastrophic longer-term impact. Nothing about EBV (for example) suggested MS. We need risk management, it's not a…

My constant thought too, that we have no way of predicting long-term health impacts. No way anybody thought H.pylori would cause stomach ulcers, or EBV would cause MS. It's criminal that we're not using risk management to approach this,…

A friend has had to leave work for the second time due to the same ‘mysterious’ illness, suspected mini-strokes. May never return, and can’t afford to retire. I doubt anybody is even looking for possible links to earlier Covid infections.

What great project(s) are our nations engaged in that require us to push aside action on climate change and Covid? Can anybody name one? If something else is more important than heading off incineration and infection, what is it?

More people wear masks to mow the lawn now in Australia than in hospitals for infection control. https://t.co/PvInQ7G63G

The casual indifference to infection, ‘living with’ infection, began just over a century ago. It’s monumental hubris. Microbes own this planet, not us. Infection was once our greatest foe, we had whole schools of tropical medicine devoted…

It’s frustrating that it’s not more obvious that ‘the economy’ is just ‘the market’. A social invention, a fiction, pretending humans live as isolated individuals. They never have, and never will. The proponents of the economy don’t, they…

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That's why we invented the idea of the public, to recognise that inter-relationship at the heart of every society. If we don't protect the weakest links, the whole lot collapses. The economy…

As night follows day, with any mention of something being done about Covid, the usual suspects appear to reassure everybody that we should do nothing, except get vaccinated (which most of us don't qualify for). It would be interesting to…

There are wholesalers of SARS infection (e.g. schools, workplaces) and retailers (households). The supply chain for infection isn’t being controlled at all, at the wholesale level. Public health is the management of the supply chain of…

We can still do public health. Unless, as with immigration, some idiot politician has turned it into team sports. https://t.co/qvxhG9ocmb

Again, socially the only reason we had 70 years of pretty good public health practice was that 2 world wars and an earlier pandemic suppressed existing social hierarchies enough to open a space for a public to emerge. Without those, the…

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

The 20th century made massive progress in public health, schooling, and a whole range of other public things, for only one reason. Wars destroyed existing social hierarchies. Only the near destruction of society itself allowed progress to…

A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, allowing us to live by trusting others with expertise in other…

For educated people, too often a cause is seen as politics. Protest, mostly. Expressing feelings like anger in dramatic ways. Bad people don’t care about anybody else’s feelings. Power is seduction, persuasion. Strategy. Bad people plan,…

All major progress in history comes from catastrophe, the only force strong enough to break social hierarchies. That’s what happened in the early-to-mid 20th century, and why we got 70 years of public health. Now over, until the next…

On the best scientific advice, updated vaccines will be used to restrict deaths in aged care hopefully to only a few thousand, while the rest of us get more healthy natural, free infections. https://t.co/5uzb706rIA

I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to renewables is a no-brainer. But it’s the social environment that…

If we take the ideas of economic politics at their word, Tournier shows that we’re on the right track. But those who promote it have hijacked it, for their own ends. We see it with Covid, how healthy populations are also good economies.…

I don’t ‘stand with’ anybody or anything. I refuse to play team sports with lives.

'Everybody I went to Robbie Williams with has Covid!' [much laughter] 'I went to a funeral and everybody who was there now has Covid, if I start coughing you'll know why.' [more laughter] 'So, let's talk about the Christmas party'.…

Another KPI for the health of our democracy. https://t.co/eldCk2aaV5

The transformation of public health into ‘at least you’re not dead (yet)’ and ‘we still have spare beds’ is a disgrace that any health professional who associates themselves with should carry with them until the day accountability arrives.…

The embarrassment to now be lagging the US in public health action. https://t.co/dCbIG9QaIc

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

The anti-government conservatives worldwide are trying to start culture wars over nuclear power. If they win government it’ll have to be big-government owned and operated. Nobody else will touch it, it’s far too expensive, and there are no…

And again, conservatives who do this are snookering themselves. Nobody wants to invest in coal or nuclear plants. Their only alternative is governments building these plants, a ridiculous and punitively expensive fantasy.…

‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow seeds of doubt in peoples’ mind, and leverage that doubt for…

And just on this, under the NSW Public Health Act, Covid is a Category 3 condition? Knowingly returning to work while likely still infectious, we should expect significant precautions will be in place? https://t.co/fQvs9TUxyv…

Many will remember this cringeworthy press conference, where the CHO was allowed out for a brief chat, with deeply uncomfortable body language from the alpha political males behind her. Maybe one for the Premier to contemplate from his…

Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of life) is about people copying other people is…

This one angers me. Australia, a public health beacon pre-pandemic, led by anti-government ideologues who made us buy our own tests, in a pandemic! All while prioritising massive tax cuts to the top end of the income distribution. #auspol…

Australia’s healthcare costs during the pandemic were dramatically lower than comparative countries, but also we had much better health outcomes. That’s because we used public health (for a while), rather than just dump the infected on the…

‘Look after yourselves’, is there any more graphic illustration of the train wreck public health now is in Australia? Of the substitution of public health with political ideology? #auspol https://t.co/ucqsggUIHd

Those still confident elections are a valuable tool for democracy only need to look to NZ. Where several years of sensible governance now flipped completely back over to the regulatory capture of small government ideologues, funnelling…

Public health is being dismantled by the same people and for the same reasons as public schooling, public electricity, public water, public banking, public transport, public libraries and public roads. The inaction on Covid is a late…

There is no deeper form of violation to the human body than infection. It can even mess with your DNA.

All social evolution: 1) Catastrophe (natural or human made) 2) Institution invented to manage if it ever happens again 3) Institution governs human behaviour, sometimes for generations 4) Absence of further catastrophe makes institution…

Heart disease showed an epidemic pattern in the 20th century. Prior to that time it was an uncommon cause of death. Some attribute this to smoking, though the timelines don't really align, you'd expect significant lag between the curves.…

We have a vax-only pandemic strategy where most people don’t qualify for vaccines. And we’re targeting only severe disease presentations and deaths, and have had record numbers of both.

I don’t take a serious look at anybody elected, even though many are decent people. Nothing is gained by us having to route everything we need done through a popularity contest. They all end up slaves to popularity, and then victims of it…

Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1…

Pockets of brain-dead morons have had far greater political success in this pandemic than groupings of our finest minds. The morons were skilfully led, by vested interests who knew to turn it into a social/cultural war. Into team sports.…

There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging with them here because the team sports is so fanatical. But to…

Is this maybe a canny move? Third party content providers have been complaining for years that nobody clicks through to the origin site any more. Now they'll have to, if they want to know what the posted link is about. Might keep them…

The Resolution Foundation in the UK has provided some fascinating data that show one thing very clearly. That 'politics' is always just social groups battling for different status and thereby share of society's resources. A few examples…

Still not seeing any critiques of AI that aren't just memories of a Hollywood movie somebody has seen.

The opposite of ‘divided’, as in ‘Australians are divided’, isn’t ‘united’. It’s disinterested. Division generates attention and disagreement on things nobody cared less about or even knew existed. It’s a political strategy, to generate…

In terms of death and suffering, deliberately entrenching a new ‘endemic’ disease is a worse crime against humanity than any war or genocide. Because it will keep killing for generations. Our lifestyle culture thinks only of the present…

Using the risk management lens that should have been applied from Day 1, if Covid does create longer-term serious chronic disease, the world is already fucked. We’ve infected everybody. That level of disease to come over the next century…

EBV alone should have alerted us to the potential dangers of chronic infection. Infecting up to 95% of the global adult population, asymptomatically. We’re ‘living with’ it. And it’s becoming clearer all the time what a terrible housemate…

Any Australian Health Minister who said even a fraction of this would be fired. We're completely trapped inside the popularity bubble of electoral politics. Nobody will say even the most obvious things, for fear of scaring the horses.…

It’s a pathogen pile-on now we’ve replaced public health with tax cuts. https://t.co/DmcFt3hdnt

Paul Ewald talks about the need to live with pathogens by engineering their evolution towards mildness. (Something that won’t happen by itself.) Rather than doing nothing or trying to eliminate the pathogen, you *domesticate* it. /1…

Like all the let it rippers, plenty of weasel words about difficult balancing acts. There was no balancing act, from Day 1 they looked for any way to undermine public health action, which they saw as a threat to the economy. Ditto here in…

At the UK Covid Inquiry lots of the usual tosh about ‘balancing’ social and economic impact against public health action. Public health IS that balancing. That’s why it was invented. By those with economic power, to save their economies.

I’m not alone in the community I know, in fearing a hospital stay now, because of the risk of catching Covid. This is an inexcusable disgrace. https://t.co/9Hf9OD5xHv

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

None of the States are likely to break free from the national ‘strategy’. Groupthink and group loyalty, at National Cabinet. It’s why Morrison invented it, to bypass public health infrastructure. https://t.co/E3UHNCQNr4

The income share of the top 0.1% of key (and representative) English-speaking societies. This history is usually written economically. But it’s much more interesting than that. A thread about the real origins of ‘the economy’. /1…

Spot on. The anti-public health mass movement is one of abject terror at doing something different to what everybody else is (or isn't) doing. https://t.co/m2C9jz0Zrl

Covid minimisers weren’t just content to stop action on Covid. They’ve thrown the entire public health system into reverse. https://t.co/ZqepMfMOh1

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

10 hours after the Pfizer XBB1.5, not even a sore arm. I never have reactions to vaccines, even mild reactions. I used to wonder if it was because I have a compromised immune system, which isn’t even registering them ;) But am very…

The idea of ‘hybrid immunity’ seems to draw heavily upon human experience with influenza. A vague hand-waving idea that through living with it for centuries, we eventually reached a workable equilibrium. Couple of questions about that, for…

When somebody asks ‘why are you wearing that mask?’, they’re really asking why you’re violating the unspoken laws of the groups you live in. It’s a direct window into the machinery of how societies work. Societies don’t process…

It didn’t seem to register that people already caught colds 3-4 times per year, when we were rolling out hybrid immunity. Nobody was getting immunity to colds after years of repeated infections. And colds don’t fuck with your vascular…

Progress was described as people now averaging about one Covid infection per year. That appears to put us still way behind flu in terms of lower frequency of infection. Covid is also deadlier than flu, so we’re infecting people (on…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

Hands up who wants this as their attending physician in hospital. https://t.co/h3ola5Yy3i

If you watch the start of a professional car race, you’ll see something you never see when a red light goes green on an ordinary road. All of the cars head off simultaneously. There’s something very interesting about why this happens, and…

Extraordinary that this statement could come out of a School of Public Health. How long have we known that Covid kills orders of magnitude more people via transmission than virulence? Full population infection as a lower ‘health risk’,…

Some say our decline in vaccination rates for all diseases is due to ‘vaccine fatigue’. It seems pretty lively to me, plenty of energy. https://t.co/Me76sUX0kP

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

The speed of change with renewables is breathtaking. Almost a dramatic story every single day. This one is huge. The savings to households and businesses will be significant, and much more. Link in alt text. https://t.co/zF1EWcWTYn

Your individual actions in halting chains of transmission have global effects. ‘You do you’ is also ‘you do everybody’. The great lie of our politics is the idea that individuals and societies are two opposing things. There are no…

Superb piece tracking the shifting frames throughout the pandemic, to relentlessly dismantle public health efforts. All I’d add to it is that we should have seen this coming, we’d lived the same techniques for 30 years, with climate change…

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

The discussion this year where people with serious expertise in public health said catching Covid on average once per year means we’re winning. Imagine saying that for any other serious infectious disease, like malaria, or dengue, or…

I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession. But because law is a way of thinking. A story about Judge Judy…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

Just as the simplest solution for Covid is to dramatically cut back its transmission, “the most effective solution to reducing both the climate and health impacts of aviation is to fly less.” https://t.co/tquDopgYn1

The successes against HIV were about incredible anti-virals, AND preventing spread of the infection. Humans have been doing this with infectious disease for a long time. The Covid debacle of vax and relax is entirely a political attack on…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical…

Watching this series extension of the original movie it struck me how similar the narratives should be for possession and infection. Infection literally aspires to and often does possess your body. But there are even more resonances. /1…

Read this piece if you want to see just how deeply infectious pathogens may be invading us, and how almost impossibly complex it can be to identify and treat them. Chronic infection is, I’m absolutely sure, the greatest untold story of all…

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

I wonder if the era of the belief in ‘speaking truth to power’ is drawing to a close. Pilger was very much in that tradition. A problematic belief that power and truth are two separate domains. We’ve seen this with Covid. /1…

Important thread from the WHO, which ends with questions. I’d add this one: when will we remove the management of infectious disease from all possibility of interference by elected politicians? We already don’t let them manage bushfires, a…

This particular straw man, that Covid can't be eradicated (which nobody has even tried to do for about 3 years) has a lot of miles on the clock. All infectious disease can be CONTROLLED. Just as you can fix potholes on roads, without…

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

This is the game-changer. The data that shows conclusively that you don't 'live alongside' pandemics, they destroy your economies. The ECONOMIC data is in, and it's *already* a financial catastrophe. As large as the GFC, and still growing,…

It's this herded like cattle side of travel that makes me seriously doubt that anybody really enjoys it. https://t.co/gFFpTO6ize

It was Lynn Margulis I think who said all life is really bacterial. That the huge variety of flora and fauna on Earth is all the product of microbial activity, mostly bacteria. This matters fundamentally in a pandemic. The example of…

In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done in the past 4 years. Because he's firmly in the cooker camp,…

What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have noticed that the rest of the world is getting closer to Australia. Why that's happening I think is a powerful lesson about pandemics…

"If I were going to put my money on it, I would bet that by 2050—hopefully earlier—we’ll have found that more than 80 percent of all human cancer is caused by infection." Paul W. Ewald

I dream of a fantasy all-purpose anti-viral/anti-bacterial drug. That humans could take say once per year. And which also targeted persistent infection. I suspect many if not most of the chronic problems confronting health systems would…

Eldest child just finished uni. Most of the campus experience ruined by Covid. Next child starting this year. Unis are drunk on the Kool Aid of hybrid immunity so the experience will be ruined for them as well. Forced to choose between…

Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that…

Good people often speak (here for example) as if there’s an authority somewhere, that they appeal to, to change things. Bad people speak that authority into existence. Good people need to understand that power is not something somebody…

Big fan of Elsa, but I suspect Santa brought her what he brought so many others this Christmas. A healthy dose of Covid. Still, at least we’re ‘living our best lives’, in bed with fevers and vomiting and shitting over toilets.…

I'm still uncertain why somebody paid a pretty decent salary as a public health professional might offer the advice 'just get infected' during a pandemic. I feel they should probably find other work? If that's what public health is, why do…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

Into our 5th year of the pandemic, and still the belief is out there that people have to choose between wealth and health. Like those aren't ultimately the same thing. https://t.co/by7QIyipce

The hybrid immunity true believers need to tell the public how long this farce is going to continue. They were out in force again yesterday with their schtick about hospitalisations and severe disease. A pandemic is defined by INFECTIONS.…

This seems written as if people have a single infection. The studies I've seen here are about having *multiple* 'mild' infections and the increased LC risk from that. Just as a person having multiple minor heart attacks is probably not OK.…

This is a hybrid vehicle. A hybridisation of combustion and electric power. Just like hybrid immunity. A hybridisation of public health, and bullshit. https://t.co/5cVOX7tyoX

It's this pretty basic science by somebody with expertise in the area that seems remarkably absent in just about every official public spokesperson about Covid. https://t.co/ndYccw5tLV

I believe it's still illegal in NSW to go into public without 'reasonable precautions' if you know you have Covid. Punishable by up to 6 months' in jail and/or a fine. Section 52 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/B8f4L7yonV…

Let’s not call it vaccine hesitancy. Let’s call it the ongoing, deliberately engineered collapse of 150 years of public health. https://t.co/om0jk6mO5n

The better you do a job, the more invisible you will tend to be to those who benefit from your work. The reason public health is being trashed with minimal complaint is that many never even knew it existed.

Prematurely ending pandemic action for Covid created the illusion that ‘lockdowns’ hurt the disadvantaged. What actually hurt them was privatising public health action, which the disadvantaged of course are completely unable to afford to…

A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting…

It’s called federalism. It’s our constitutional structure. If a State has a unique set of disease control challenges, it should be able to respond appropriately, not using some standard formula imposed from a national level. Pandemics are…

Opening a border during a pandemic should be as problematic as closing it. What about NSW acting unilaterally in late-2021, ignoring the nationally agreed elimination strategy? Should States be stripped of decision-making power only if…

No matter what you post, the dominant interest in it will be the degree to which it can be used as ammunition in an ongoing battle somebody’s team is having with some other team. I’m not sure we see this.

The UK has some of the best public data. And some of the worst outcomes on measures of the health of public life in the developed world. Information is not what drives societies. (And look at how magnificently its public servants work,…

Embarrassing that solar farms can be rejected because of 'scenic quality'. Anybody who's lived near a coal plant knows impact on the view was never a consideration for those. Humanity is running out of time. https://t.co/mnvhtHNGn3…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

Even reputable medical people defend Covid inaction by saying 'most people' aren't at risk. Most people aren't at risk of MOST DISEASE. If this had been our risk assessment approach pre-Covid, we'd have been doing pretty much nothing,…

You can’t ring-fence people in a society. Whether ‘the vulnerable’, or anybody. Not just for moral reasons, it’s not PHYSICALLY possible. Society is not the interaction of people who exist independently of other people. Everybody is…

I have several friends who are GPs, whose attitude towards Covid I’d describe as professionally negligent. Because I believe nearly all human behaviour is social behaviour, it seemed worthwhile to talk about why they may be like this. The…

It's SO important to understand that our Covid debacle is not a decision to do nothing. It's a decision to privatise the action. Society wouldn't function with no action. As Alcoa shows, that's as stupid economically as it is medically.…

If you eat it, the safety compliance standards are rigorous and brutal. If you breathe it ? Bad luck. https://t.co/P0qrXp6itU

The comfort space of ‘living with’ infection is less than a century old. And it was brought to us almost entirely by public health measures. The exact thing we’re jettisoning now, to try to ‘live with’ infection. Those who ignore history…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

It’s the re-activation of past public health threats which show most clearly that our Covid strategy was both not public health as it should be done, and an assault on public health itself. It’s one movement. https://t.co/J6RlzmssGE…

Can we run a book on how long it takes for our prominent local minimisers to appear to reassure everybody that there’s nothing to see here? https://t.co/r565KsmZkx

A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great, a variety of ailments there, but not enough to prevent her living a good life, albeit at a slower pace. She wants to celebrate it…

Just as we don’t allow some people to speed on roads just because they like driving fast, we shouldn’t even need to discuss why it’s ok for some to spread infection freely, while others are trying to avoid it. ‘Most’- most people never get…

Those labelled as Zero Covid seem to be arguing for disease control. I’m not aware of anybody in history arguing against disease control, for serious disease. Those who believe in hybrid immunity need to specify when it will happen, and…

A measure of the dead-end of our ideas about democracy as everybody debating everything, all day every day, is that we’re STILL sitting here with this pending catastrophe, arguing whether it even exists. We can’t vote or debate our way out…

The common minimiser theme, that they and their friends and families want to have their social lives back, and ‘Zero Covids’ are free to continue to obsess about Covid alone. There’s a very recent public health shift that highlights how…

If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and…

Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are…

Covid was more fuel for the same libertarian bonfire, that had already made its way through education, transport, government in general, and all of our other institutions. Public health is one of the last dominos to fall.…

The vax-only ‘live with the virus’ strategy was actually an anti-vax strategy. It was a libertarian assault on public anything, including vaccination, and other public health measures. https://t.co/5ZSbqTiYrb

The pandemic is part of a long political tradition. The 70-year assault on all things public, the privatisation of society. Public education, transport, housing, roads etc, had already fallen. Public health was just next on the list.…

We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of government, and the other argues to get rid of most of it. A thread on why it’s a fake debate. /1 https://t.co/JWYRBTxtOS Sometimes you…

Living with the virus is a sham. People pretend to be doing it. I haven’t met anybody yet who welcomes a new infection, cricketers included. The whole thing is a pantomime, the emperor is wearing no clothes. https://t.co/gx22vGRKpe

Societies are social. King Charles’ prostate treatment has caused a surge in interest from Brits about prostate health. Humans live in social status hierarchies, following the lead of the dominant status individuals in their groups.

A dreaded day, highlighting the privatisation of public health. An important family gathering, that will have nowhere near adequate protections against Covid. I’ve pushed as hard as possible, without fracturing relationships. All because…

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

Driving a pandemic infection into peoples’ homes was the public health equivalent of open sewers in streets. https://t.co/YZKOrwAOEU

One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. Like LEGO blocks stuck together. It’s absolutely not how…

The Project, interviewing the head of Jim’s Mowing, a prominent lockdown critic. Interview begins with the host saying the pandemic ended a year ago, and nobody wants to think about it any more.

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the…

Yep. And the LNP dismantled earlier attempts at universal health care once, under Fraser. They despise it. Now the ALP needs to remove the massive public subsidy to private health insurance, another LNP Trojan Horse designed to destroy…

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies…

A teacher friend maintains a CO2 reading in the low-500s in a classroom full of primary school children, using open windows. Also bought 2 HEPA filters out of their own money. 4 years of teaching like that, never infected. /1 This was so…

I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

Older people generally follow medical advice pretty faithfully? Why are we seeing such terrible vax numbers in aged care? It seems important that we know. https://t.co/eA5CKTKufT

Haven't looked at analyses for a while. Are we saying the original vaccines that the young received are still providing protection against severe disease and death? Or are we saying they're young, and that's the protection?

The hilarious nonsense of ‘the economy’. It’s said to be a market, where supply and demand regulates the exchange of goods and prices. But it never does that, unless you regulate it. And everybody agrees ‘competition’ is what fixes…

Tabloids embody an essential truth. That there is no distinction between the individual and the collective, the specific and the general. Once you really understand that, you can change the world. https://t.co/2p6kOHRCVN

h/t to everybody daily maintaining their own shelters from infection. A society that weaponises the most basic act of sheltering from harm so people can go on cruises doesn’t deserve to survive. https://t.co/GFOTWJsv82

Chronic disease is like the perfect medical crime. The cause is usually long gone by the time the disease manifests, and nobody links the two until it's much too late for most.

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

I hadn’t realised the UKHSA was still doing these quarterly reports. Imagine using a vax-only public health strategy, with those VE numbers. Appalling? https://t.co/3MMtNSkCcJ https://t.co/qKWs3WHVzF

Pre-Covid nobody wanted to live with colds or flu. Our Covid strategy was based on an already dysfunctional public health situation, that tens of billions was being spent to try to fix. https://t.co/SRJRVRfY2x https://t.co/eFlq7eR6Nv

Pathogens often follow a similar pattern to human societies. An invasion stage, with a lot of deaths, as pathogens fight to occupy territory (our bodies). Followed by a long occupation stage, where casualties shift to ongoing chronic…

Brilliant initiative. And it would have been even without a pandemic, enormous numbers of days are lost across society to airborne infectious disease, every year. Air quality in general is also appalling in many locations.…

The hijacking of public health by politics is nowhere clearer than in the bloody-minded reluctance of expert vaccine advisory bodies to recommend vaccination. Politicians won’t allow an advisory committee to exist now that doesn’t tell…

I spent a bit of time over the weekend reading research literature on hybrid immunity. Specifically for Covid, but also any other reference to it. A very contentious topic, and reading the literature you could come away being convinced…

We spent 150 years taming many of of our infectious disease threats. 4 years of free market fuckwittery is unravelling it fast. https://t.co/nC6Ug72zs4

I asked somebody the other day if wearing a mask was more of a hassle than hanging over the toilet bowl projectile shitting and vomiting. https://t.co/fDFrvlu9Uv

Michel Serres wrote of how noisy the body is, and how not hearing that noise is normal functioning. Social media is a pathology, surfacing and mobilising noise that societies need to be sub-audible.

Won’t need to phone a friend here. It’s the conservative way to undermine universal health care slowly. Also, let’s stop calling it private health insurance, billions of public dollars fund it every year. Ditto for billions to private…

We need a graphic designer to capture the dog chasing its own tail nature of hybrid immunity. Where you infect everybody, to try to create population immunity, and the act of infecting them facilitates evolution of new variants.

I may have just missed it, but I was waiting yesterday for somebody to headline this as ‘Albanese finally manages to get somebody to say Yes’. https://t.co/aNGa1dLuL6

That shift since 2021, to say that peoples' social relationships (often described as their 'mental health') have to be balanced against their risk of infection. Public health was invented to create a clean PUBLIC space, so that balance…

A person who is vulnerable to Covid catches it from those who aren’t as vulnerable. The safety needed for the vulnerable is therefore the safety needed for everybody.

A lot of people who swallowed the living with viruses slogans ask ‘what else can we do?’ We can do what we’ve always done, throughout all of history. Stop diseases spreading in communities. That’s it, it’s not tough to understand.…

We need to take back control of the overall narrative of this pandemic. That we’re now living with Covid because anything else was impossible. That outcome, that surrender, was planned from the start and succeeded. It was politics, pure…

The basic public health fact that every family in every community has a touchpoint in a school? That’s where the most mixing happens? Adults don’t need to go there, the kids bring it home? That’s been the only uncontrollable entry point…

In a personal responsibility pandemic, casually allowing yourself to get infected and spread it to others is the same as pissing in a public pool. You can't fence the piss off to only one section of the pool. Your infection is everybody's…

My wife and kids are part of the cascading health and social problems that are still multiplying from shoving teachers and kids back into schools with zero Covid protections. The big push is on to prevent any future public health action of…

Children as spreaders of respiratory infection described as a 'Dickensian' slandering of them!! Public health began around the time Dickens died (1870), I've marked the spot with a red arrow. People were fed up with losing their kids to…

I'm still happy to bet that most of our chronic diseases will be found to have an infectious origin. And that 'living with' the infections is what does the damage. Nothing violates a body more than infection. https://t.co/MDNcxHNm68

This is how seductive seeing society as an economy is. I don’t actually think more competition is the answer to grocery prices. That’s part of the mythology of market economies, that they operate via competition, adopted by all sides as an…

4 Corners excited some last night because it went into bat for their team. The ‘big corporate market power price gouging’ team. Except none of it made sense. Nobody asks how you get power in a market, which is supposed to be a mechanism to…

We have people who actually work in and study schools who have disproved that lockdowns caused major harm to students. In fact in many cases it was the healthiest they'd ever been. Whereas right now they're a constant sewer of infection.…

A friend just telling me about his first ever Covid infection, right now. I asked where he caught it. In hospital, caring for his father in the last week of his life. Well done NSW Health, icing on the cake in this sad week for him.

Public health is an ecosystem of ideas, practices and behaviours. Dismantle it in one place, and it unravels everywhere else. https://t.co/fOrGCAu2jL

Do we think the local 'missing school is worse for kids than infecting them with dangerous diseases' loons anticipated sending kids to school with measles too? I'm sure they'll line up behind it. https://t.co/9zWLQL3TMD

The huge number of summer infections again makes laughable the attempt to shoehorn Covid into a winter seasonal cold and flu narrative. @zalaly's suggestion to make Covid experience the new cold and flu baseline as well in terms of public…

I already saw somebody say thank goodness it's only Florida. Measles won't cross State boundaries, hey? Whatever happens in Florida, stays in Florida? You do you? https://t.co/ETKw1EbzEu

Ignoring basic public health for Covid was clearly going to damage our approach to all infectious diseases. The required habits to defeat pathogens are common to all of them. Weaponising those habits as restrictions on freedom has broken…

Let’s reframe all the immunity debt stories as ‘hey we managed to stop a lot of infectious disease from circulating between 2019 and 2022. How could we continue that?’ Rather than ‘the poor kids missed their infections.’…

The assault on public health with Covid was a fundamental shift in all social behaviour. Public health is a social technology. Cookers used the pandemic for recruitment and massive strategic expansion. We’re seeing the result everywhere.…

The all-out assault on Google search by search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing is a story that should be front page news. In a world where we outsource expertise to the web, Google Search is our gatekeeper. If it becomes compromised,…

Somebody slept through the early pandemic. https://t.co/zvSZzR9oSS

Unsurprisingly the vulnerable, whoever that is, can’t be separated from the rest of us. That’s why we invented public health, recognition of that fact. https://t.co/78Q0fCLVc7

Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough. That we’re simply ignoring what a pandemic actually IS. We…

I find trained immunity a far more interesting phenomenon than hybrid immunity. Have been getting every vaccine I qualify for, for any disease. And varieties of Covid vaccines. Chronic disease is infection-driven, I’m certain. h/t…

At a time when collective action is almost non-existent, we have the strange apparently counter-evidence of huge masses of people acting in a coordinated way. Thoughts on living in a ‘majority’ society, and why it isn’t anything like a…

Nobody talks to the actual schools and teachers. The useful idiots who speak on schools instead don’t know a thing about them. https://t.co/6p9OOQUqaq

Australians are used to ‘conditioning’ the air they breathe. Have been for decades. And their attention shifted to clean as well as cool/warm air, well before Covid, because of bushfires. Clean air for Covid taps into something we were…

Watching the Welsh leg of the UK Covid inquiry, and a woman describing her husband early in the pandemic, falling at home and breaking his leg. And pleading with her not to call the ambulance, because he feared contracting Covid in…

Senior doctor at the UK Covid Inquiry in Wales, a sufferer with Long Covid long before it even had a name. Saying that the critical need is to be mindful of the long-term impacts of acute infection when dealing with a pandemic.

Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and priorities. There are no easy answers for how to manage a…

The irony of life today is living under a political belief system of extreme individualism, which in reality is the exact opposite, societies driven by a pathological social conformity. Libertarian leaders run obsessive mass-cults, with…

The 'free market' LNP boosted this industry to undermine universal health care. It's not 'private' insurance at all, it's subsidised every year with billions of public dollars. The free market has already decided it's a dud. Let it…

It's still not 100% clear if trying to force Covid to behave in a flu-like pattern is due to the institutional inertia of the Department of Health, which is geared for that already, or political direction. Maybe both.…

70% of those infected with polio are asymptomatic. 25% get mild disease. And yet there was a global effort to eliminate, and now eradicate, the disease. Because once upon a time communities didn't partition themselves into 'normal' and…

Lots of data analyses focusing dutifully on the political framings of this pandemic, around severe disease, hospitalisation and death. I refuse that framing. The data tells a different story, for infections. All charts from:…

Discussing Covid with a friend this morning, who said “the whole world has moved on.” This is the delusion, that reality will be what people decide it is. Reality will decide how Covid (and climate change) end. Nothing anybody says, no…

A bit funny that somebody thinks we still have an automotive industry. And funny that the LNP closed it down. https://t.co/zgw0fZY7pn

We need to talk about disease eradication. Those delighted with the uncontrolled spread of Covid often justify it by saying nothing else can be done, that it can’t be eradicated. Like most public narratives in this pandemic, that’s a…

We need to eliminate Covid. And no that doesn’t have to mean eradicate it. It means stop it spreading in communities. Which is effectively the same thing, for those communities. It is what we’ve always done, for serious infectious disease.…

‘Common cold’ is a normalising term hiding a public health problem. Viruses given too-easy access to hosts. Clean air is always the last public health hurdle to fall, because it clashes with economic crowding of people in workplaces and…

Why persist with Covid questions? Because our greatest achievement in history was the invention of public health. Nothing else comes close. We went to war on infections, and suddenly people lived twice as long. Living with infections is a…

Beautiful formulation. It takes a lot more time, money and energy to manage an epidemic/pandemic state than a disease elimination state. It’s why elimination of disease was central to democracies, until the madness of ‘living with’ Covid.…

Switzerland, Sweden and Spain were neutral in both world wars, useful for excess death analysis. See the stabilisation in excess deaths from the mid-20th century. That’s when public health institutions fired up. Politicians sidelined these…

Love this, courtesy of @ActuaryByDay I think we can see here the dramatic impact of the escalation of public health work post-WW2. Constant declining death rates from mid-century. Also the outlier Covid then became, largely from countries…

I’ll listen to stories about hybrid immunity when there’s clear evidence of significant, sustained reduction in cases. Of infections. I read that vaccination that targets mostly severe disease has been followed by reduction in infections…

This was where I first saw the idea that vaccinating against severe disease can still lead to effective disease elimination. The (flawed) idea of ‘sterilising’ immunity is actually the root of vax-and-forget public health. /1…

“In reality, the spectrum of protection might best be framed as the extent to which vaccination prevents transmission of the wild-type virus or bacteria.” Immunity doesn’t end epidemics or pandemics. You have to stop transmission, immunity…

Remember the days when a threat to anybody in a community was perceived as a threat to the whole community? https://t.co/iC5TzQaarV

If you call something a 'business cycle', it's allowed to put your society through eternal waves of delusional enthusiasms and crashing recessions. Not coincidentally also an epidemic infectious disease pattern. Uncontrolled societies…

Housing another example of how post-WW2 institutions created what we call public life. And decades of unprecedented peace, health and prosperity. Then pulled apart gradually from the 1970s, with the politics of the economy and free…

The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at…

The UK is such a sad contrast of superb public health data and complete political disinterest. https://t.co/LsiqIriZZJ

Prevalence data from the UK. Infections. This is what we need to see to determine if the pandemic is waning, pandemics = number of infections. This looks promising, though it’s sampling, not widespread testing. But promising. /1…

This proliferation of infectious outbreaks from multiple pathogens is often attributed to immune damage from Covid infection. I think it could also be a much more lax public health response to all infectious disease, also a Covid…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

EXACTLY this. The idea Covid can’t be contained or controlled was just political sloganeering, not public health. We have always been able to control spread of disease in some meaningful way. https://t.co/VMev7rkVRg

“The use of existing childhood vaccines, such as MMR, in combating the surge of COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality, is potentially a low-risk, high-yield measure for all populations until the pandemic curve shows a permanent…

So my understanding is, even if you’ve had measles, you should ask your GP for serology to test your current immunity, and get MMR shots if it’s wanting. That seems to even be the official advice. As a bonus you might get heterologous…

NSW Health advice. This is my age group. My mum tells me I had a humdinger of a case of measles in the late-60s/early 70s. I'm guessing this means they would assume I'm immune and no shots required. But even this varies between countries.…

Everything I read of the history of infectious disease (a context lacking in Covid times) suggests that immunity has never been the critical factor. Control of the spread of infection is the key thing. Even vaccination has only been…

I keep coming back to immunity in my thinking around Covid, because we’re continually forced into a dumb binary between immunity and prevention of infection. Social media does that, it turns every issue into a binary, with a team at each…

Actually something that WAS the result of lockdowns. But the lockdown hystericals won't mention that. Pausing our economic lifestyles made us all much healthier. What does that say? (https://t.co/tTDgtPdIyN) https://t.co/hzlQNbb7Br

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the…

Saying a pandemic is over if you have spare hospital beds available is what you might call the 'reverse burden of proof' approach.

In a city today, everybody unmasked. Thinking about the catastrophic impact on societies if the longer-term impact of SARS2 infection is serious. Societies won’t survive. Anybody who says they know that won’t happen is making it up. Public…

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

The LNP at the time said government shouldn't 'pick winners', leave it to the market. The same fallacy that says democracy is what 'the people' decide should happen. Groups of people don't decide anything. In markets or democracies. All…

1967 photo showing industrial waste pouring in an uncontrolled way into the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, Ohio. Short lesson here for us in the speed of essential change, in our case with clean air for Covid and other diseases. 1/5…

An alien anthropologist would study us and surely ask, where is everybody going? https://t.co/pz2aYDLQfP

It's past time political libertarians found a country without a State, and moved there. Unsurprisingly there are none. And those with the weakest States are violent, poor and diseased. Our community should say enough to our public…

It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many ways these aren’t distinct things, so it’s not just trading in analogies. Both involve questions of individuals and populations. But…

Not sure why somebody would ask a physicist this. But from a public health point of view, a pandemic isn't defined by hospitalisations. https://t.co/vVDaKLjfTf

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

Seeing the great summaries of durability of immunity from different vaccines in the paper from @vipintukur prompts a few questions. 1) Given that for most vaccinations protection is <20 years, why aren’t adults required to get more…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

The ‘common cold’ is around 200 distinct viruses. Which adults catch 2-4 times a year, and children 10 or more. This is the endgame of disease normalisation, first to lump 200+ infections under a single ‘common’ moniker. And then to allow…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here…

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example…

Ventilate schools. It collapses the infectious disease networks out into the community. https://t.co/1dUrXMZcok

Fewer than 1 in 3 health workers in the NHS bothered to get an autumn Covid booster shot. Health care workers refusing vaccines. You can’t get a better illustration of broken societies.

The belief that Covid is everybody’s problem to solve, spreading everywhere, is the main reason nothing is being done about it. Covid minimisers use that belief to portray the situation as hopeless, so we just need to live with it. Social…

Brooke nailing the immense power and also emotional uplift understanding the network dynamics of societies will bring you. And also how our belief that all problems are everybody problems leads to nobody doing anything.…

Covid minimisers are a classic case of a network structure, mistaken as a society-wide phenomenon. They’re a *tiny* number of players, who form hubs that then feed skinny networks out into society. Creating an illusion of mass support.…

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

Many (including me) are wary of politicians raiding super to avoid public spending on essential services and infrastructure. But in many ways it’s like running a private health insurance system in parallel with a universal health insurance…

Look at the date. We knew we had to target hubs (‘epidemic engines’), at least 3 years ago. It’s not public health rocket science. It was transformed by political minimisers into the idea we had to target everywhere, all of the time. To…

Acute infection is just the on-ramp. It’s literally the same as human colonisation. The initial battles create high acute deaths. Then the settlement period is a continuous parade of chronic disease and death. Colonised peoples for example…

People who want to use public health methods to defeat Covid petition politicians. Minimisers bypass all of that and create networks. They’re winning by a mile. Victory against Covid, itself networked, will only come from other networks.…

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which as many South American countries can attest, just leads to marauding gangs running the country. /1 https://t.co/Y0OyGwjdCA The…

Those who say ‘not all boomers’ are correct too. Like everything else, wealth is networked, concentrated in a small number of hubs. Many boomers in fact have been hopeless savers, and will have difficult retirements. 1/3…

Extraordinary that nobody did these basic sums during the super-for-housing debates. Returning essential public services to public ownership and management is the best way to make life better for young people. https://t.co/qVX2RR9ucs…

All change is led. So yes, it's not true an entire generation conspired to do this, no groups act in that way. But they have consistently, for 50 years, voted for the people who did. To pretend there's no culpability here is disingenuous.…

Overheard at a school drop-off, one mother speaking to another. “Every other bloody person sends their kid to school sick, I can’t have a day off, she’s coming to school.” Privatised public health.

What I call team sports. Political parties are like peoples’ Ur-teams, their foundational team that shapes all of their others. You can waste a lifetime arguing topics with people, who really are just arguing for a team. There’s no actual…

ffs, can we stop counting the angels on the heads of pins and just go back to preventing widespread infection and disease? How did this ever become something to argue about?

From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view, the deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix.…

If even a small number of vulnerable people are dying of a disease, that they catch from people who aren’t vulnerable, the response has to be targeted at all people. It’s everybody’s disease. That’s why we have a childhood vax schedule,…

The wonder of vaccines has been replaced with the wonder of infecting everybody over and over again, and them celebrating it. So much cheaper, and less damaging to votes. https://t.co/YtvhqIKtoS

When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what…

From Bob Hawkins' Substack (link in last Tweet). UK. Are we seeing 'increased immunity from vaccinations and infections'? Do coronaviruses have that sort of cumulative immunity? The specific metric here is obviously severe disease, not…

One of the brilliant reframings in @DrCameronMurray’s book on Australian housing, which I hope I’m understanding correctly, is the mistaken idea that housing is in fact a market to begin with. /1 https://t.co/5kG98SiyWc Because the stock…

Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competition’ i.e. taking down all ‘monopolies’, is some intrinsic good.…

At some times there have been up to 79 coal ships queued off the coast of Newcastle, very close to shore. Nobody much cared, it was a curiosity. Australia is on a fast-track to becoming an international laughing stock.…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

Now staying away from people while infected with Covid is an 'abundance of caution'. In NSW not doing that makes you liable for 6 months in jail and a large fine. Clause 52, Division 2 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/ODIVaHAaW8

The reason we jumped straight from emergency action to ‘personal responsibility’ public health (i.e doing nothing) is because the next step was basic workplace, enforced WHS. It’s criminal that this step was bypassed, deliberately.…

But...but..what about the votes? Politicians cowed by a tiny number of loud and unhinged cookers. Derailing not just this pandemic response, but the entire public health system. https://t.co/0lmYJbUK3t

Fun to remember that our ideas of democracy and free markets assume the optimum outcome will be to allow everybody the freedom to figure everything out for themselves. https://t.co/aa2HTZWAZO

UK data. 'Endemic' disease has always meant the disease left over when the well-to-do have looked out for themselves. It used to be at a country level, now it's shifted to being the domestic definition as well. From:…

Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the shift to EVs. The combustion car was a critical locus of agency…

Helping somebody find this card is a good thing, what’s disturbing is how social media platforms have become the most intimate, granular infrastructure of our social lives. Entire communities are increasingly being run on these platforms.…

Both of the big news stories of the past 3 days implicate social media in crimes against civil society. This one, and the Higgins/Lehrmann/Channels 7&10 court case. Enough is enough, it’s time action was taken. /1…

From a recent Independent SAGE update. A great group, I’m not interested in pile-ons of any kind. But what’s striking here is the timidity, the surrender. If this summary analysis is true, we have Covid on the ropes. NOW would be the time…

Can I claim for specialist consultancy through Medicare even though I'm not medically qualified? https://t.co/NpBSE926ey

The unbelievable fantasy of immunity debt ideas is that we all somehow missed out on catching a laundry list as long as your arm of infectious diseases, in only a few months of ‘lockdowns’.

Saying countries evolve to service economies as they get richer is just another way of saying somebody somewhere else is doing the dirty work for them. You eventually run out of people to do the dirty work. https://t.co/8OwLzp0UFo…

Tourism and travel seem like great ideas, until everybody else thinks so too. Nobody has ever squared that circle. https://t.co/DBywxwVLmj

I would like to hear health professionals on this claim. https://t.co/ajLlb8jIpy

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

I’ve had people who should know a lot better be completely oblivious to 1 and 2, arguing (with the deeper political beliefs I’m sure) that our only alternatives are 3 or 4, or mass disease. https://t.co/VJdlpSn7XP

Those authoritarian Chinese and their secrets about infectious disease outbreaks...err, oops. https://t.co/hnXBTL4Cfj https://t.co/4TLHoQ40G4

The GBD said ‘focused protection’ would lead to herd immunity in 3-6 months. It’s now almost 4 YEARS later. Did I miss the herd immunity transition? Imagine having signed this. To be proud of having brought Flat Earth science into public…

People spruiking social media as a solution. To anything. Platforms owned by the same billionaires who take away collective agency. Offering the seductive lure of social connection, and then monetising it. Read @doctorow on…

Imagine a climate scientist walking into somebody else’s workplace, and telling them how to do their job. They’d be told to fuck off. This is what climate scientists should be saying to climate deniers. It’s about respect for the work…

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

And of course healthy, multiple doses of Covid to build up their hybrid immunity. /s https://t.co/TafDgq33mO https://t.co/Axa7UyhEqu

I don’t wear PPE for Covid because I’m afraid of Covid. Just as I don’t wear PPE for dust or asbestos because I’m afraid of dust or asbestos. I wear PPE to stop breathing shit into my lungs.

Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes, I’m still on it. You can criticise unsafe driving, while still driving. And this is what’s at stake in the governments v platform…

We're living this mythology right now, with the continuous epidemic waves Raina said 4 years ago would happen, now described as an 'endemic' disease pattern. Endemic epidemicity. https://t.co/k70dlguEJz https://t.co/l2FnqoWAIj

My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go haywire, as he sees sometimes in Long Covid. There’s a social correlate of dysautonomia. Populism is social dysautonomia. /1…

Part of our mental health crisis is people simply being brutalised by bullshit jobs, and governments outsourcing public services to individuals to pay for, out of their own wallets.

The world is pushing back at being turned into theme parks. And this is a physical inevitability. Travel only works when hardly anybody does it. https://t.co/U7k7Abnm99

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

We only need to stop some Covid, to stop all Covid. Going back to Jeremy’s work nearly 4 years ago, on masks. But the same applies across most aspects of Covid. /1 https://t.co/AEBgD00M7b The expression ‘making the perfect the enemy of the…

In bizarro world news, if you want an air purifier in hospital to prevent Covid infection, it will have to be tested and tagged for safety first.

This is our social media-driven disease. https://t.co/6FtPNpZbBE

Powerful thread by Stephen in ICU, about how we’ve lost our way with infectious disease. That way was the outcome of massive institutional intervention post-WW2. Politics since then has been hostile to all institutions. Sadly only…

Many who still mask have discovered a health they’ve never had in their whole lives. It’s glorious to be free of colds and flu, for example. And in this they’re following a longstanding trend in Asia. 60% of the world lives in Asia. 1/3…

With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to Covid. Pooled risk means distributing risk. The exact opposite of what we’re doing for Covid. /1 https://t.co/W76Ixzb75c With Covid,…

Because some paediatricians and infectious disease doctors said them missing out on being infected and bullied at school was bad for their health? https://t.co/Ye0mijquyK

I think we need to be specific here. NSW *politicians* do this. NSW Health will do whatever their masters demand that they do. https://t.co/1K1V6ysaqL

It’s local government election day in the UK. Not democracy day. Elections are not democracy, they’re one mechanism of one tiny part of democracy that has grown to be a populist cancer on the entire idea. https://t.co/YgolSvGtUr

This platform funding the assault on public health practice. But yes, social media is the answer, ordinary people rush to defend it at every opportunity. We’re so dumb. https://t.co/yCQY73EmmG

Overheard somebody at the local hospital asking if they could have a private room, and being told sorry, they're currently being used for 'infectious patients'. Is that code for Covid patients? Or are private rooms often used as isolation…

Older people think it’s MSM, because that’s what they grew up with. Nobody young consumes it. Hardly any younger adults do either. https://t.co/n3a4XI2g9l

The ongoing battle to convince us that a few months of restricted social movement led to entire populations with plummeting immunity levels to a big list of diseases. Oh, and also flu is now an all-year disease. https://t.co/lUrwC9DWbG via…

Not once in my life did a doctor or anybody else tell me it was important that I get infected regularly, for my good health. Until Covid. 1/3 https://t.co/N5KGydc6IF Sure, my immune system may have been defending me my whole life from…

“We vaccinate all to protect the few, because we can’t identify the vulnerable." (Professor Michael Levin.) Applies to all public health measures, like masks, isolation, air cleaning etc. 1/2 We target everybody. Not only do we not know…

In the bed next to my mother’s in hospital was a very young woman, early 20s at most. She’d had a stroke. I’m sure very young people have strokes too, sometimes. But this is two 20 or younger I’ve seen just this year where I live. Things…

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

The visceral reality of a broken public. My elderly mother, on IV antivirals right now for hospital-acquired Covid, had a visit from a neighbour yesterday. (Please no sympathy, I don't use social media to transact personal life, I share…

If somebody had told me ‘hybrid immunity’ meant ‘repeated epidemic waves of infection’, I could have avoided several years of confusion. https://t.co/GLRCJLBp65

Target the hubs. Schools. Covid isn’t everywhere, you don’t need to shut society down. Just target where it breeds and spreads. And give the next generation clean air to breathe. Sounds like something a sane society would have been doing…

Political libertarianism has quite a foothold in Australia. Thanks to @ColinKinner for the tip-off on this one. This set of ideas is toxic to civilisation itself. And also laughably illogical and self-contradictory. These ideas must be…

Superb thread on whooping cough, showing how ‘living with Covid’ is a political weapon designed to undermine the entirety of public health. https://t.co/zQ7RWKBek8

Social media at work again. In networks, there is no local or global. Much of our civil unrest is being driven by activists overseas, using social media. In particular the political libertarians. Still agitating against public health, in…

Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our…

Hilarious story about the total nonsense of political libertarianism. The dominant politics of our time. The politics of adolescent kidults and their obsession with ‘freedom’ from any sort of adult responsibility. h/t somebody whose name I…

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven…

Checking again, what’s the best way to lodge a complaint to NSW Health about hospital-acquired Covid?

We're so house trained by this annual sacred ritual that nobody even questions why government is now a spreadsheet. https://t.co/oE6qJ89ncc

Hospital sent my mum home after a week of therapy for hospital-acquired Covid. Off the back of 2 weeks of treatment for serious heart and lung issues. Wasn't tested for Covid before leaving hospital. Did a RAT at home. Positive. Has an…

The job of any leader is to do the things that nobody wants to do. To make the unpopular, popular. If people already want to do things, they don't need to be led to do them. Populism is the cancer in every political system.

I’ve seen estimates that both in the US and Oz, people are getting Covid on average every 12 months. This factoid is trotted out to counter those who say people are getting infected multiple times per year. Is this the flaw of averages at…

Minimisers managed to blunt the comparison of Covid and HIV/AIDS by saying’ they’re not the same disease at all!’ The point never was that they were the same disease. The point was about chronic impacts of infection. /1…

Keeping in mind that for much of the 'intermittency', people are in bed asleep. 5 hours of national storage should be enough to do it. Coal-fired power's 'baseload' always just meant 'the minimum amount we have to *use*, so we don't have…

Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is the key thing to understand, if we want change. We need to…

The same social models repeat throughout history, just with different names. The landed gentry were once the great landlords. The Top 5 landlord occupations in Oz today are: 1. Surgeons 2. Anaesthetists 3. Internal medicine specialists 4.…

Parenthetically, wealth comes from social status. Ageing societies obviously will place a lot of status in medicine. They use a lot of it. All societies are social. In every detail. Unsee it. https://t.co/HCDffRxRrM

Instead of isolating the pathogen, we’re isolating the infected. This is a return to ‘leper colony’ public health. (Spinalonga in Crete, leprosy colony that closed in 1957.) https://t.co/zzRUNXdV4u

What happened when we made our last line of defence against infectious disease - medicine - our front line of attack. https://t.co/cITZJak3iR

“And yet it moves.” (Galileo) I sometimes advocate for something I call ‘reality politics’. Meaning politics that recognises that most of the things we argue about aren’t in our power to change. Our normal politics merely delays outcomes…

Political strategists know what they're doing. Just had another person ask me if I'm worried that always wearing a mask will damage my immune system, and make me susceptible to disease. That particular factoid has done splendid work for…

Looking at the latest UKHSA data on VE for bivalent and XBB vaccines. And I thought, yeh, this is crap. Then I remembered nobody is getting vaccinated anyway. So VE is effectively 0. Go us. The vax-only pandemic where we don't even vax.…

That’s why most other major buildings use HVAC, so you don’t have to turn temperature and fresh air into a binary. Put good HVAC in schools and watch the levels of disease plummet in the wider community. They’re critical hubs of infection.…

I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire lines’ - self-generated footpaths - are a great way to see it.…

Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. Being non-conformist rigidifies conformity further. /1…

In the heady days after WW2, when rebuilding societies rather than accumulating wealth in existing status hierarchies was central to our societies, we took real joy in defeating infectious disease. https://t.co/QQM5rYQHwj

When does the hybrid immunity kick in? Asking for a perpetually diseased nation. https://t.co/0xdYkOVaZi

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that…

What's most interesting here isn't discussed. *Why* households splintered during emergency Covid action. Were people avoiding risk of disease? And/or were they actually wealthier for the first time in forever, and looked to set up their…

Herding, whether animal or human, looks like everybody doing the same thing. But it’s not that - it’s everybody following a strict hierarchy. There are always leaders in a herd, and a hierarchy flowing from that leader. We can’t have herd…

A colleague shared scary medical symptoms. Vascular problems, their doctor is baffled. Sounds very Covid sequelae in flavour. I suggested they ask if it’s Covid-related. No interest. ‘You gotta die of something’. The exact words. People…

'Un-retiring'. Why would a retired teacher want to enter the shitshow of Covid-infested schools? Particularly as they're in a higher-risk age bracket for the disease? Only catastrophe will turn the minimisers around. History's main lesson,…

I eat a big bowl of porridge every day. Mostly because I love it. But also because of its proven efficacy as a prebiotic. Gut microbes seem central to disease. Much easier to prepare the 'soil' in the gut than to identify which good…

A reminder that in NSW if you go into a public place knowing you have Covid, and take no precautions against spreading it, you are liable for a jail term of up to 6 months. Section 52 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/z3m0ST1ltp

Most of what we call thinking is really imitation. Easily seen in citation networks. Like this one mapping RCTs on dietary fat in the prevention of cardiac disease. The big hubs are the most popular papers. Just like the most popular…

Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously it’s the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ you can find there. But you don’t understand it by sticking at the level of…

DIY public health is going well. In a friend’s workplace, a staff member was testing positive for Covid, but was still at work. When queried, they said ‘there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just Long Covid.’

The wealth and health of Australians improved immensely under ‘lockdowns’. And yet economic commentators still try to portray public health action as a catastrophe. It’s worth checking the think tank affiliations of all who make these…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9 Oops. In steady and quite spectacular…

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

I'm seriously curious what the staff of our State public health departments make of this ongoing orgy of infections. Because we live in 'open and free' democracies, they're not allowed to say. https://t.co/4V5xIuoLmw

I think we need to recognise the literal meaning of the term 'public health'. It means the public being HEALTHY. It doesn't mean 'the public not being in hospital or dying', as Covid minimisers have twisted it to mean. People are SO sick…

Many workplaces are relying upon NSW Health’s advice of ‘symptom-free’ people being allowed back at work. Not only is that public health gibberish, it’s also the least practical option. The same workplaces often require a doctor’s…

The ridiculous levels of illness in the community right now are coming up against 19th century command and control sick leave policies. The same command and control economy that caused this pandemic. Beginning with the idiocy of the…

Human activity is driven by desire. But we don’t desire the object of our desires. We desire something because somebody else desires it. It’s social, a rivalry. The love triangle is an archetypal form of this mimetic desire. And it extends…

We’re not making progress against our biggest problems because we have the wrong models of the societies we’re trying to change. (Beautiful network diagram of the whole Internet here, from: https://t.co/eyAcgxBXxy) /1…

Collective manias are perfect examples of how human desire is not the desire for something, but the desire for what somebody else desires. Manias are the exponential growth of this process. There’s not one way the object of desire explains…

All human activity is just social activity, even political activity. Which means the categories of ‘Left’, “Centre’ and ‘Right’ are meaningless, and need to be replaced with social descriptions. In reality Left-Centre-Right is a continuum…

Windows into populism. People don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social sorting process, to create teams and hierarchies. This is what fads and fashions are. Interior design, as an example. 1/6…

Pretty much the entirety of human history is ‘ok, everybody do whatever you like, and then when that explodes, we’ll come together at last and re-build from the rubble.’ Rinse and repeat. https://t.co/fH2E3g5NzX

“Academics, more than anyone, should understand that the future lies in services, not manufacturing. The good jobs come from what you know, not what you can make.” Ross trotting out the standard economic line. /1 https://t.co/1ntb6pFiYv…

Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigger problem than Hitler. Why we need the Chinese right now. /1…

The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in terminal decline. This applies at the level of whole societies too.…

Is vaccine efficacy in the infectious disease curriculum? https://t.co/oN988JEluO https://t.co/YPiJzwVK4g

Michael Mosley’s death was so often framed as him being tragically so close to reaching safety. What I don’t think is recognised with climate change is that the infrastructure we think will shield us from the heat, may not be able to. /1…

Our culture of adolescence worships the present moment. There is no history, no future. Just a lifestyle, of right now. Nowhere is this clearer than with nuclear energy. The wastes need to be stored for up to a million years. 1/5…

Somebody at work was discussing the 'spicy cough' this morning, whether it was worth catching it to get a day off. I said it rendered Linda Ronstadt incapable of speech. How to win friends. Follow for more tips.

We’re targeting ‘hybrid immunity’ with vaccines that always target old variants. And then nobody gets them anyway. Or, in a nutshell, we’re just letting people get infected all the time, to protect our lifestyles. https://t.co/BjyNCralvD

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

This hybrid immunity thing seems to hospitalise a lot of people. https://t.co/hM1RCo4pUq

In our modern sloganocracies, ‘levelling up’ is a favourite. The idea that inequality is addressed not by reining in the ultra-wealthy, but by pretending we can make everybody wealthy. It’s trickle-down, but without even any trickling.…

One of my favourite graphics of the pandemic. On the left we have the cause of the ongoing pandemic. Infections. Lots of infections. It’s why a pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not by hospitalisations or deaths.…

Friend who’s a nurse: “I’ve been in the health sector for over 15 years. I’ve never seen the current state of sickness, not even in the initial Covid outbreaks. It’s mind blowing.”

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

I’d prefer a mandated mask, over a mandated infection. The freedom stuff doesn’t understand that, that the refusal to do public health work mandates infection for the population. https://t.co/A2QwnYjn04

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

The greatest achievement in all human history was public health, including vaccines. Doubling life expectancies in about a century. It’s a measure of how lethal populism is that even that can become a team sport. To generate social status.…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

As I try to find anybody at all at work, I remain thankful for my mask. And remember their chuckling about masks.

This would be the same as Saudi Arabia in 1938 saying it wasn't going to drill for oil, it would sell sand instead. The future prosperity of this country and health of the planet being horse-traded for votes. Popularity-based governance…

Have to wonder if the social media team at NSW Health were tempted to save time by writing “it’s a shitshow out there”. https://t.co/qteeze9C2J

I sit less than a metre away from somebody at work who had classic Covid symptoms yesterday. Is at home with Covid today. A respirator and air purifier as always makes me about the only person left there to do any work.

Anybody else accumulating staggering amounts of sick leave days, by masking at work? Never been healthier. Nor has my sick leave balance.

In strategic terms, it’s time to promote and celebrate wellness. Pleading with people to mask and take other precautions hasn’t worked. Humans work on status. Make it about status. Good health is a status. https://t.co/IMSjbTZtJw

Remember when even footy codes cared about infectious diseases? Even now players can't share a drink bottle. https://t.co/hFNM8g1kQn https://t.co/Oozk2ZZlGk

You don’t ’speak truth to power’. Power doesn’t care or listen. You speak truth INTO power. We already won against Covid. It’s the minimisers who lost. A message from Puss in Boots. /1 https://t.co/ZRxHhEwtWG Pretty much all the narratives…

We are already winning. The minimiser position is all bluff. Mock those who worship infection, because it’s truly the most laughable thing humans have ever done. Celebrate being the healthy. https://t.co/LnkWjTR3Ze

That situation where you’re in a group, and somebody offers you a swig out of the same drink. And you don’t really like the idea of getting half a mouthful of their spit, but it would violate the group dynamic not to. Sociality dissolves…

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

Breathe your best air. There’s a vision for the 21st century. h/t @YouAreLobbyLud https://t.co/BBqrO35iOp

Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see through it, they hate nuclear. But like I always say, people act…

I love when minimisers say 'nobody is talking about Covid any more'. Like everybody has changed to a different style of coat, or shoes. Reality cares diddly squat for what's trending in our adolescent culture. What we deem worthy of our…

Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

Infected co-worker returns to work today, because they’re ’symptom-free’, and ‘we’re following the official NSW Health advice’. Has been away less than a week. The workplace is near empty because of illness. Should mop up what’s left of…

The person who normally sits to one side of me at work has Covid. The person who normally sits on the other has mycoplasma pneumonia. I'm sure this is how life was, pre-pandemic. In somebody's fevered imagination anyway.

My mum, the 80-year-old who got her first Covid infection courtesy of a NSW Health hospital, shared a story today. She went to have coffee with friends. 1/3 The friends have all recently been sick multiple times, all of similar age. Some…

Anybody who tells you they know the long-term impact of Covid infection is lying. There’s not a chronic disease with infectious origin where the pathogen was suspected at the time. Some of those are our greatest killers.…

The ALP is asleep here. GO HOUSEHOLDS. The LNP is circling to take that space now. Leaving the ALP with stalled big renewables and transmission line upgrade delays, while the LNP looks like the only household friend. https://t.co/12CdHey7LG

It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

One of the great Covid minimising tropes was how ‘lonely’ people get if they’re not allowed to mix socially. Our culture is always in plain sight. Sociality is our default. Being alone is the reality of all life. Even when being social.…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut through the fog of the completely redundant popularity contests we call elections. All those popularity contests do is weaponise…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

If only modern wannabe Kings had an actually useful agenda, like slowing climate change and Covid. We need somebody 'authoritarian' to bring about the changes needed, discussing and voting our way out is a laughable failure. Unfortunately…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

I shared the story of my mother here a month or two ago, 80, extremely vulnerable, a Novid until needing treatment in hospital for heart and lung issues. She then caught Covid there. I wrote to the healthcare body, who flick-passed it to…

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any…

Or in other words, this remains an epidemic disease, with no prospect of endemicity, unless by that we mean endemic epidemic infection. https://t.co/pp0D9PmT6X

A primary teacher friend has a kid in class today with known Covid (tested positive earlier in the week). Was off for a few days, parents sent the child back today, for the last day of term. Child still clearly has Covid, coughing and…

My town had one of its winter balls last night. At temperatures close to freezing, hundreds packed into an unventilated and barely heated hall, to breathe each other’s air for hours. I’d rather clean public toilets than be there.

More election favourites, from the UK. The winners always ‘promise to govern for everybody’. In reality they quickly govern for their favoured ideologies. They think those ideologies are what’s best, for everybody. Elections are us at our…

When you add research showing links between infection and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, infection is easily humankind’s greatest killer. We have people now spruiking infection as healthy for humans. People mostly interested…

If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad infinitum. Nonsense, of course. There’s a much simpler…

If you choose your social life over your health, will your friends be with you through the long years of chronic illness? Or will they party on without you? Sufferers of chronic disease I’ve met are some of the loneliest people on the…

Proust described the emptiness of ‘social life’, when the rubber hits the road. Our social lives are rivalries, disguised as connection. Chronic disease sufferers have little social life. They’re sick, and friends often abandon them as…

The social lives our societies have put ahead of our health will not care as that health fails. https://t.co/6jPegXb20Z

With Sam-I-Am as any Chief Medical or Chief Health Officer, and Covid as the green eggs and ham, Green Eggs and Ham is the story of our pandemic. https://t.co/LiLqVawhRT

Another idiot hashtag, yallmasking. Who cares? I’m masking, posting a photo of myself doing it will do diddly squat to change anything. I say idiot, because it derives from the idiot idea that social change comes by ‘mobilising’ people. No…

"It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.…

Popularity is like chronic infection. You can be so infected by the pathogen that it becomes normal life. When, ever, in history was the truth or the right thing the most popular thing? Peoples' whole lives are infected by popularity…

If you think social media is vital to beating a pandemic, ask yourself why nations are doing nothing in the first place, to fight the pandemic. SM crippled public health. Just as it did climate action. It's now monetising the 'resistance'…

Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those…

Slacktivism. I don’t really like the term, because it suggests there’s a better activism people should be doing instead (more on that in a second). But the idea we can use these platforms to change the world is dangerous in multiple ways.…

X Premium, the ‘blue tick’, is Stage 2 (and 3) of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification concept. Stage 1 is capture people with goodies (social networking). Stage 2 is strip mine the same people to sell to advertisers, and then start charging…

The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else. Except it isn’t. The same hierarchical structure shapes those conversations as exist off…

Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other teams. The team’s success becomes what is true. /1…

I provide a social networking perspective to help beat Covid (because it's a social phenomenon), and that perspective implicates social media as a major barrier to disease control. Somebody just called that perspective 'misinformation'.…

"...40% of social media users would give up their pet or car before they'd give up their accounts...This is not healthy behavior. Social media is currently designed for virality and addiction." 1/4 https://t.co/mOTQb5ywGM Ironically,…

When causes are pursued on social media, status hierarchies are set up within the crusading groups, as humans do off social media as well. For example, ventilation groups develop a hierarchy of bad to good to perfect ventilation. Or the…

As a plane goes down, would all the passengers talking to one another right the descent? Or hashtags like PullUp, or SaveUs? The idea that democracy is everybody talking to everybody else, all the time, is really just ‘flooding the zone…

This event should be a wake-up call to what social media-driven culture is doing to us. Who is Trump ‘fighting’? You can see how his entire political success is to turn everything into a fight. This is the team sports I Tweet about. Where…

If you applied for a job, and you said 'somebody tried to shoot me and it nicked my ear', would they put you top of the list? Elections destroy democracy.

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

The US is one of the most violent countries on Earth. Because it rejects basic collective regulation of its society. Without that, violence is the default. But there’s also more to see here. Why so many mass and other prominent shootings?…

Living with Covid wasn't just about Covid. It was a libertarian dog whistle to ignore all vaccinations and public health procedures. And here we are. https://t.co/UaeVoOWDEW

Remember at school if anybody yelled 'fight!', how people would come running from miles around? The social group who already owns the country doesn't need to fight. But fights mobilise those who don't own anything. https://t.co/vy2kByD8cd

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

Collapsing the public health response against Covid was often justified by saying we were being damaged by losing our social lives. But sociality is toxic to humans. It’s imitative rivalry. Team sports. The desperation to belong, to a…

Well before social media, the IT industry more generally was ‘disrupting’ all of our social checks and balances. So that it could monetise their removal, for revenue back to themselves. Silicon Valley culture is proud of this disruption.…

Does nobody cook any more? Ordinary home cooking, not Master Chef performative rubbish for SM? Does nobody make a sandwich for lunch? Was thinking about this in a lunch break this week. Once a week at work I buy my lunch. /1 A small treat.…

Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

Social media is making its way through the list of public health gains, knocking them down like ten pins. I was asked a few times this week what I’d do to save the world. I’d turn social media off. https://t.co/UCHnVIOQFX…

At a time when we’re facing a catastrophic shortage of young workers, and the young will never afford a home, HECS/HELP debts should be removed entirely. Conservatives gamed both education and health, to force a shift to privatisation.…

I call toxic sociality the underlying problem behind all of our other problems. And the vanguard of toxic sociality is social media. You can see in this student post that there’s dawning realisation. /1 https://t.co/aWP2zXeGHl…

Healthy friend in their 40s has Covid. Had the chills, then collapsed and was admitted to hospital with dangerously high blood pressure and heart rate. Intubated, and placed in an induced coma. Seems to be improving now. ‘Just a sniffle’,…

I think of this being the Health Minister, every time it dawns on me that we’re ready for another day of infecting the entire nation repeatedly, with the 3rd leading cause of death. https://t.co/JSAgxqkzFV

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

A colleague has just had her first baby. She’s very excited to bring it to the office on Friday to meet everybody. Two people in that office currently have walking pneumonia. This is the tragedy of politicians destroying public health.…

Any long-term cure for somebody here at work ready to cut their eyes out with a knife, because of post-Covid MCAS irritating them? Asking for one of the millions who swallowed 'smiles are back' public health.

I’ve not seen the BiVACOR discussed here, but we’re on the cusp of a possible medical revolution here? Clinical trials now underway. Nothing at the olympics comes within light years of the magnitude of this achievement. Daniel Timms should…

To me calling it 'Long Covid' is like calling the brain damage caused by football tackles 'long concussion'. We're sanitising the actual condition by making it sound like the permanent effect is an extended version of the acute injury.

Tesla badly needs to expand and refresh its range of vehicles. Anybody seen the $84 billion CEO? https://t.co/xofTy7cELl

I do wonder if part of being an ongoing Novid is getting every single vaccine I qualify for, for any disease. https://t.co/pZ3aQX3GzC

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray…

To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more rigidly conformist societies will become. /1…

Germaine Greer is almost universally unpopular now. Which is a sure sign she’s a truth-teller. Probably no better example of somebody who’s never paid any dues to conformity, or to non-conformity. A scholar, first and foremost, a ruthless…

Watching beach volleyball at the olympics. One of the Australian players described as having been recently sick, and battling a bit for breath. Not quite the level of stupidity of the 5 currently infected water poloists playing on…

The phone is the gateway between social media and reality. The tool that uploads everyday life into social media, and then allows social media into those lives to transform them. This isn’t a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a…

From all of those working in the infectious sewers that are schools right now, thank you. And thank you to those outside schools who cared and understood this urgent need, while resisting activist doctors. @CrabbBrendan @trishgreenhalgh…

I often see accusations of ‘activism’ levelled at those advocating for continued action against Covid. If those advocating are working in their area of expertise, they’re doing their job. It’s not activism to do your job, it’s…

Who grew up in an Australian classroom heated by an unflued gas heater? And can remember the drowsiness, an indication of the crap exhaust gases we were breathing? Nobody loses cleaning school air. Many don’t even have basic HVAC, which…

We still have the idea that societies operate using information. They absolutely don’t, they operate using status and conformity. People are ignoring Covid because their friends and family are. That’s it. Our guidance in life has ALWAYS…

This is social media at work. Not the ‘far Right’ or any ideology. The practical, simple mechanism of connecting people to each other. This is the paradox of sociality. The more we connect, the less cohesive we become. /1…

We allow mostly American billionaires to run these sewers deep into the heart of our most intimate lives, vacuuming up revenue from every industry, destroying the social fabric as they go. All completely unregulated. https://t.co/6fw1LBXpsS

Many workplaces have emergency procedures. There’s a clear hierarchy of leadership, using wardens. Without the wardens, people will sit there and die before acting. This is why ‘personal responsibility’ public health condemns entire…

The number one most useless thing you can tell a person who struggles with sleep, is how bad it is for them to not be sleeping.

Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’. By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opposite. A few notes about the use of hysteria. /1…

I would like us to see all of our problems as the outcomes of quite simple to understand human behaviour. To rediscover societies for what they are - 100% social. Not political, not economic. Social. Ordinary meetings show this, the same…

So often the socially popular thing to do ends up being a public health disaster. It's a lens to use to assess what's best avoided in the present day. https://t.co/uhUvu6BgiS

Remember real experts saying 4 years ago that Covid would never be an endemic disease? I’ve seen many experts who should know better doubting that ever since. Reality is not on their side. https://t.co/6oLFcUGZ6F

As well as the impact on their ongoing health, the economic dries could ask, how much did Australia invest in the training of these athletes? Only to have those trained bodies infected the minute they arrived? https://t.co/fjPLhPpdFf

“…not taking the requisite steps to gain control.” CONTROL. The team sports of social media transformed the basic public health idea of control into a rivalry between ‘zero covid’ and ‘infinite covid’. All we needed was control. We control…

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases. I feel the worm is turning.…

Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because they survived by having strong restrictions on much social…

As social media continues to fracture societies, we’re still fixated on the message, rather than the medium. Blaming one team, the ‘far Right’, so that our opposing teams have somebody to fight against. The medium is the message. 1/2…

Where are the hybrid immunity crowd? Nobody wants their Green Eggs & Ham now? https://t.co/v2qWUKR0Oc

Asymptomatic or 'mild' SARS2 infection may be reflecting immune suppression, rather than immunity. I don't think it's widely understood by the public that the symptoms for infectious disease are mostly generated by your own immune system,…

A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there. What happened next. /1 I wrote to the Health Care Complaints…

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

I don't think it was Steve I was on the phone with yesterday. My stepfather and sister also contracted Covid during the same hospital visit. It was a smorgasboard of Covid. https://t.co/yVzZs4lqOp

Social media has done this. When I was a kid you got the energy system engineers said was the best. Nobody even paid any attention to it. Involving 'the people' in critical decisions means no decisions are ever made. Just endless social…

"Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people." There's engineering genius at Tesla. It needs a new…

1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never really have. It’s actually not their job, to fix anything. /1…

The collapse of public health is leading to...the collapse of the public's health. https://t.co/kdBC2WSnFm

We have to be brave enough to say that much of what is being called a problem with our mental health is really just gaslighting. Brutalised by circumstances, we’re being constantly encouraged to interpret our inevitable emotional responses…

Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their…

The 'don't panic' first messaging for epidemics and pandemics is now our entire public health strategy. If this does spread widely, it'll be interesting to see how anti-vaxxers go. Difficult to pretend you have 'natural immunity' when…

Australians shouldn't fear mpox, we have excellent public health procedures. (Can anybody remember which storeroom we put them in?)

With a global mpox emergency, it may be time to dust off the CHOs and AHPPC. Or we could just go with celebrity doctors and social media influencers, like last time.

Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A travel culture is a pandemic culture. Ecologically pathogens are controlled by strictly controlling access to territory. But that’s all…

My apologies for the re-post. A technical issue. Attitudes to public health. Cholera epidemics in England in the 19th century prompted construction of 1300 miles of sewers in London alone. Using over 300 million bricks. At a cost of about…

If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing. The health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world,…

Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other peoples’ lives. That was 70 years ago. Do we want to imagine a Rear Window of a social media-dominated 2024? I think we should. /1…

Nobody pays attention to local government. Right now in NSW towns are looking at takeovers from social media groups. Some are naked Trumpians. Media in regional areas is dead, already destroyed by SM. So there’s no scrutiny.

When progressives counter populism with populism, they win. It’s taken them a LONG time to understand that. Of course nobody ultimately wins from populism, unless you link popularity/status with the social good. Like the Victorians did.…

Re-sharing this because I think it’s fair to say the public health situation went exactly nowhere with the hash-tag. To fix a problem, diagnose it. Covid is a relatively simple problem to fix. Cookers paint it as impossible. It’s how they…

I had to blink a few times. ‘Public health concerns’. Just like old times! Experts baffled. Any expert baffled by this should take up selling pictures of themselves on Only Fans for living. https://t.co/4bN8wf3O37 https://t.co/8IusfUfu0H

Important not to mistake means with ends. Yes we need to clean the air. But that’s the means. The end is we want to go back to controlling infectious disease. Rather than privatise that onto peoples’ immune systems.

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its…

Why did some infectious disease doctors go into battle for Covid rather than the public, in this pandemic? Always look for the social status game in play. Medicine and public health have slugged it out for years. https://t.co/NloDGHtWrf…

Bad faith actors take our ridiculous idea of democracy as everybody saying and doing whatever they like, and use it to destroy us. We’re doing this to ourselves. We are not free. We’re slaves to the tyranny of absent leadership. Death by…

Gigs were one of the dam-breakers for Covid protections. Rock stars have been mostly enablers of the destruction of public health. Drunk on popular adulation. In a culture now of saturation populism. https://t.co/GfPBinQeHn

Hub-network structure. A small number of people form hubs, leading thinking and behaviour. Our tendency to think of society as ‘the people’ means we often target public action at everybody, rather than focusing on the hubs. That’s why the…

Every single election we get excited for this or that team. Because all we’re interested in is the team sports. Then we’re bored and cynical between elections, because nobody was ever focused on anything practical, just the success of a…

The pattern I'm seeing in workplaces now is people have an acute infectious illness (nobody tests). They're away the bare minimum time, then come back. Then they're away again. And again. And again. They don't recover. The same symptoms…

The whole rationale for inventing public health was to avoid needing to 'balance' peoples' health with their social and emotional well-being. https://t.co/PIBQcFcMVP

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising. The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever…

Because it took longer here in Oz for the massive public health action after WW2 in the Anglosphere to surrender to resurgent social hierarchies. Disguised as 'the economy'. We're now rapidly trying to catch up with the pack.…

What SM has done to public health. A young colleague terribly sick, with a whole multitude of seemingly unrelated conditions. I suggested it sounded like MCAS. And that MCAS is a common outcome of Covid, to maybe ask their GP about. 'Covid…

‘The economy’ is the idea that societies will run themselves, if you don’t regulate them in any way. A political invention, not economic. The fiction is maintained only by vast quantities of debt. This, the US. 1/2 https://t.co/6LOG8nCPYB…

Several religious traditions speak strongly in their most ancient texts of prohibitions on debt, and of the control of pandemics. In an ‘economy’, all custom and tradition is abandoned. And here we are, up to our eyeballs in debt and…

A society has all of its habits at once. They’re all linked. When we decided to ditch public health for Covid, we ditched it for everything. Not an accidental outcome. Minimisers are shills for market-based societies. They despise anything…

There is extensive research on social collapse, it’s not just shock and awe social media language. (From me anyway.) Previous societies have been extensively studied, to identify causal factors. Here are 4 key indicators of collapse, seen…

Much of the enormous engineering of the Victorian era survives to this day and is often still functioning. It was targeted at the public good. Today if we get infrastructure at all, it’s most often like an episode of Utopia. Politicians…

In one image, the expiry of the post-WW2 consensus, to allow public health to run public health. The locus of authority now is all there with grim cross-armed impatience, in the background. No votes in public health now.…

Sadly there is no 'we' in an economy. If you set up a 'we' in a market, anti-trust laws and competition policy will pull it down. We can't live in an economy and have public health. https://t.co/1Xpa6hPpiS

Another work colleague has been off for nearly a fortnight, the third long absence for illness in 2024. Some sort of respiratory illness, has been to hospital multiple times. Has just been confirmed as having shingles now as well. Immune…

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

One of the hilarious myths of societies transformed into economies, is that ‘business’ creates social activity, including jobs. Business provides goods and services for people. It’s those same people, as customers, who drive business. Not…

Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have to be invented to explain why anything happens at all.…

Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, whining complaint. This is populism’s destruction at work. /1…

This is the UK. Schools were not safe, despite promises. So let’s just make them places of entrenched disease. The Infinite Covids will never admit they were wrong. They’ll maim an entire generation rather than do that.…

While society is conceived as an economy public health will never return. That subsitution was explicitly designed to remove 'public' everything. https://t.co/Yl6SXAUc5Q

There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a decade of destructive inaction. Elections are not about…

'Good news!', the boss said, 'we've found somebody to help you back-fill the 3 people away sick!' That somebody has just gone home sick.

A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could have designed a populist counter-movement, FOR public health.…

Only massive disruption shifts societies and their status hierarchies. China’s industrial juggernaut at work. Our possibly best hope for the rapid change needed. Politics as usual is just team sports. We’re not progressing an inch by…

Churchill addressing the US Congress in December 1941, to convince them to join the fight against Hitler. Later that evening he had a mild heart attack. He'd been under huge strain. He led on for years. Leaders could lead solutions to…

I’m sure if asked, would say ‘hybrid immunity’ is Australia’s strategy. Minus any vaccination. Infection is Australia’s strategy. It’s not a strategy, it’s the shutting down of public health. https://t.co/pgVmcy4140 https://t.co/7ZeTyDTgKH

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this…

A footnote to this. I don’t think many of the sick people in my workplace actually caught things at work. Nearly always it’s those with young, school-aged children who get sick. My Tweet was about the public health debacle we’re all…

@alvelda noting that the Great Barrington Declaration has become the de facto public health policy of the US and UK. Also now Australia. Powerful read: https://t.co/OtMowzWsoB https://t.co/SbjxKuSV48

There’s resistance to the idea that Covid is not everywhere, all the time. Social media’s team sports runs on sweeping apocalyptic generalities. Both ‘sides’ need that everywhere, all the time, to run their campaigns. Another way to see…

The same prominent voices outraged by Elle Macpherson’s ‘holistic’ cancer treatment have happily let the scientific fantasy of hybrid immunity for Covid smash the health of entire populations. With no scientific basis. Not even asking how…

If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

If you see a friend come back from an international trip or large event, Covid-free, it reinforces the sense of ‘maybe Covid is a spent force’. The importance of infection and disease patterns. Covid is not everywhere, all the time. That’s…

Social media is such a dulling of the brain that people will actively resist the simplifying of a challenge like beating Covid, based on its spread characteristics, because it removes the fuel for their team sports on these platforms.…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

'Endemic' diseases are normally only endemic to poor nations. It's not a disease pattern, it's a status pattern. Like some neighbourhoods are said to have 'endemic' crime. Usually poor, low-status neighbourhoods. 1/2…

What it takes is to stop blaming people for the absence of public health. It’s not ordinary people who switched it off. Nor can they switch it on again. It takes the recognition that the public health task is also much smaller than has…

Social media is not social networking. We had social networking many years before we had social media. Social media is the monetisation of social networking. An economy of ‘likes’. Networking replaced by influencing. Status games. 1/3 We…

I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily team sports dopamine against them. It won’t work, because the much bigger problem here is thinking about social media platforms as…

Reading a local FB group. Parents congratulating kids in a local team today, “even though 3 of them were really too sick to play”. I know one of those families. The kid has whooping cough. Personal responsibility public health.

What will they call the Royal Commission into the ‘infect everybody over and over’ scandal? The ImmunityDebt RC? CMOs and CHOs and AHPPC members in the dock? National Cabinet members escaped to plum consultancies from big donors?…

The libertarians are targeting local government, that nobody pays much attention to at all. Much of this is social media, from groups in the US. In my own town a Trumpian SM group is currently leading in local government election counting.…

In populism, you have an orgy of excitement for a year or more leading up to the election. Then disillusionment within months, not so much because the politicians have failed (which they do), but because everybody misses the team sports of…

The disgusting emptiness of much Western culture now is all there in the idea of ‘revenge travel’. This is why we refused to keep fighting a pandemic. Our entitled travel in the world was interrupted. So we took ‘revenge’ on that…

From 2020, I think we've mistaken means with ends, with Covid. The end was always disease control. Disease control shouldn't be permanent masking, or in some situations even permanent ventilation. /1 https://t.co/EUdkkxFt34…

I still have a hunch diet is mostly a dead-end in health science. Including with inflammation. The root cause will be microbial (which diet can of course influence). https://t.co/T63dAlDter

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about…

Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism. Exhibit A. The car industry. /1 https://t.co/nxSkCnfKwY China’s threat to Western…

All life is microbial. The illusion of 'living with' pathogens is only a century old. Infection has always been the greatest killer of humans. Now we advocate it as health care. https://t.co/aOd3KUu791 https://t.co/YY3CmuNS7a

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

I encourage everybody working in or closely associated with schools to share stories like these. What’s happening in schools is historically unprecedented. It’s criminal. https://t.co/DVisQDXjEK

Seen at a major teaching hospital in Sydney. Trouble at mill. Living with Covid seems to mean living without nurses and doctors. https://t.co/byjtIUoHjT

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

'According to science', hey. I feel we could see some special Twitter science in response, some calm-mongering to keep up an uninterrupted flow of healthy, natural infections. https://t.co/9nUhTNKd6n https://t.co/dXNORhuTid

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by…

Don't conceptualise children and disease. Just ask a primary school teacher, or a parent. Or a school principal who can't find any relief staff. https://t.co/rGeiobQYOa

There's a mythology around 'sterilising' vaccines. That they're like a silver bullet, allowing us to wash our hands (ha) of any other public health work. Measles a good example. https://t.co/wW6alVIlTu 1/4 https://t.co/e3H7frpagr The…