Its difficult to explain why so many leading Western #epidemiologists and #virologists, against all advice from East Asia, still openly or indirectly suggest that "herd immunity" should be the ultimate strategic rational for Western governments responding to #Covid_19 /1
The contradiction of pandemic expertise is puzzling. The assessment of #China's top epidemiologists is crystal clear scmp.com/news/china/soc… Their colleagues in #Southkorea, #Taiwan, #Sinpapore, #Hongkong and #Vietnam certainly agree 100% to reject the notion of "herd immunity"/2
China's 82 (?) years old hero-scientist Zhong Nanshan notes: "Vaccination is the way to acquire immunity. Herd immunity won’t work – the cost and sacrifices are too huge,” ... referring to the situation when a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection."/3
"Zhong said it was possible that the coronavirus ... would not be eradicated in the short term. “This disease can’t be eliminated”, “It will continue to spread for a long time, but probably will not cause a large scale outbreak.""/4
"Based on the current spread of the coronavirus, some epidemiologists have estimated the critical threshold for achieving herd immunity at about 60 per cent.
But Zeng said that was too high a price to pay.
“How many lives do we have to sacrifice for that 60 per cent?”" /5
But Zeng said that was too high a price to pay.
“How many lives do we have to sacrifice for that 60 per cent?”" /5
There's no plausible explanation to make sense of the huge contrast between epidemiologists in Asia and the West. But the public and journalists should not stop to inquire this matter. We need a good explanation for the biggest failure of science and policy advice in decades /7
Epidemiologists, perhaps, simply can't imagine suppression as alternative? It was the Imperial College study which popularized the notion of "suppression" in the policy discourse, although testing was discussed internaly by UK but deemed impractical nature.com/articles/d4158… /8
Critical security studies offer another way to understand this contrast. To simplify, there are two modes of how modern states operate. "Biopolitics": Foucault observed that disciplining bodies/the optimization of life is at the core of modern politics criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/mic… /9
The alternative is "Necropolitics". Mbembe defines sovereign power as the control over mortality, manifested in the deliberate abandoning of the right to live of a large share of global population, which is a prominent concept in postcolonial studies muse.jhu.edu/article/39984 /10
The differences between policy debates, expert advice and actual repsonses by governments in Asia and Europe/US do map neatly onto the difference between biopolitics and necropolitics. And that's not a surprising finding for critical security studies wiley.com/en-us/Developm… /11
Different experiences also may explain different levels of awareness: As "Asian" epidemiologists perhaps due to the 2003 Sars-experience (successful suppression of another #coronavirus) reject "herd immunity", their governments implement suppression very consequently. /12
Western govs really missed the coming danger, were responding much to late and still lack the "tools" to press down the reproduction rate of #Sars_cov19 after the lockdown is lifted, while many experts have talked and still do talk about "herd immunity" /13
This East/West contrast is puzzling, and is further illustrated by the fact that few Western governments have a clear suppression strategy aside from a lockdown. Correspondence between scientific advice and political (in)action during this pandemic is obvious @SavageEcology /14
Differences in policy advice also correspond with outcomes. The data about any relevant epidemiologic indicator show that the early suppression approach is by far superior ft.com/coronavirus-la… It's time to quickly rethink Western epidemiologic practice and policy advice /15
