Decision by some govts - eg Irish - to pause Astra Zeneca now, and invoking the 'precautionary principle' seems very odd. And the wrong inference to draw from invoking the precautionary principle.
This is not a vague notion of 'taking precautions' [eg eliminating the risk of health problems or death by blood clots].
The idea is to weigh up the costs of being wrong when you take two competing views and the decisions that flow from them, but you don't know the probabilities attached to each event.
Costs of the AZ vaccine being unsafe, and causal in generating these blood clots, if you assume incorrectly that this is not the case and proceed apace is that a very small number of people experience problems, and a very large number of people avoid death and disability.
Costs of being wrong on the other side, of the AZ vaccine being safe, and not anything to do with these blood clots, are much larger, when you incorrectly pause the vaccination program, are that a large number of people die or are made disabled.
The latter error far outweighs the former error. So on the precautionary principle the vaccination program should proceed.
That's not quite the end of it. There are worries that if you are not shown to respond to concerns about vaccines you deter take up and undermine trust. But there are many similar risks on the other side, of undermining credibility by killing people for no reason.

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More from @t0nyyates

17 Mar
Book idea: 400 pithy claims about monetary policy and public finance, all wrong, with me writing 'nope' in reply and no further comment.
I think I could pull this off.
'Keep interest rates at zero forever.' Nope.
Read 8 tweets
16 Mar
This piece is a terrific read. But I am not sure that it helps. Unless infotainment helps. Which I suppose it does.
Is it a contribution to get unnamed sources to tell us how they felt? It's a classic ploy of the political correspondent to turn a holding to account exercise into a how did you feel exercise. And a drama composed of 'pivotal moments'. We like reading about pivotal moments.
Some telling moments compressed out of sight. The obvious - understandable - lie that Johnson was fine and working on his in box 'has been put down to a mix up'.
Read 4 tweets
15 Mar
At the root of this are two questions 1) are there different objectives, including different attitude to risks? and or 2) are different bodies making judgements of different quality given the data we have currently?
I don't think you can say that other bodies are above criticism because they might just have different approaches. 2) is a live question, and IMO, given available evidence, there isn't a reasonable alternative objective that would justify the response [to the blood clot issue].
Read 7 tweets
14 Mar
So my 'a year ago' tweet is 'a year ago you might have thought that after a year you would have a way to join up epidemiology and macro to chart the way out of social distancing as vaccines roll out. But no, we haven't.
You might say - ah, come on, it's almost over, what's the point now? But actually all the more point as we are approaching a situation where genuine trade-offs between £ and wealth are in play again.
And we could also be using it to fine tune the lockdown release; weigh moral and £ priorities as the vaccinated expand the risk budget. Who gets to resume what aspect of normal life when and why?
Read 4 tweets
7 Mar
The covid triangle article in the FT is really something. It would be really interesting to try to build inequality into a macro-epi model somehow, to grapple with the aggregate wealth and health consequences of inequality during a pandemic.
Obvs this is what makes a post pandemic budget that attempts no recompense for what happened, nor any recipe, nor even a conversation about what to do about mitigating some future pandemic, frankly obscene.
It's also not rational from the point of view of those at the top of the pile, even if you assumed they had no sense of altruism or social justice.
Read 4 tweets
6 Mar
Random thread.

I fancied picking up the violin again, after we dug one out of my in laws. I only made it to grade 3 before giving up. But in lockdown one, I was entranced with 'Ashokan Farewell' which Ken Burns plays to death during his doc on the civil war.
So I am trying to play it. Here is a version of it on the interweb [not me obvs]:
Interesting thing is that though it sounds to the uneducated ear to be located in the period, it was composed in 1982.
Read 4 tweets

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