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27 Apr, 4 tweets, 2 min read
in which I try to impart just how urgent it is that the West gets its spare vaccines to India (and starts making more vaccines to get ready for wherever the next India is) unherd.com/2021/04/india-…
Note: I use the IHME estimates for daily new cases in India in this piece. Someone's pointed out to me that those estimates are based on an implausibly low infection fatality rate, ≈0.05%, which would change the numbers: healthdata.org/sites/default/…
A plausible lower bound might be the Imperial model, which is around 1m new infections a day, rather than 10m ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-…
this is the thing! If you're umm-ing and ahh-ing about approving some vaccines over a one-in-a-million risk of some negative outcome, then get them on a sodding cargo plane to India. *Right now.* Don't wait six weeks while you do some fatuous safety test

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More from @TomChivers

Tom Chivers Profile picture
29 Sep 20
editors are great right up until they change the words you've written. if i'd wanted different words I'd have written them, god's sake
what if I *like* empty qualifiers, hmm, did you think about THAT before taking them all out
JUST BECAUSE IT MAKES THE PROSE BETTER IS NOT AN EXCUSE
Read 4 tweets
Tom Chivers Profile picture
24 Sep 20
re Oxfam's carbon inequality report, which said the richest 1% accounts for 50% of emissions oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/hand… it says "We assume …that emissions rise in proportion to income". Doesn't that mean its findings are automatically implied? If the richest 1% get 50% of income…
…then the model will automatically say that they create 50% of emissions? I mean it's probably not *wrong*, it's just a bit weird, like saying "if we define the most handsome people as looking the most like Tom Chivers, then we find that Tom Chivers is the most handsome person"
which again is a slightly strange way of arriving at an obviously true conclusion
Read 5 tweets
Tom Chivers Profile picture
22 Sep 20
On the "false positives on Covid tests mean that there's no evidence of a second wave" theory that's been going around, and why that is, I'm afraid, flat wrong: unherd.com/2020/09/do-we-…
It’s worth noting that while I’ve used 1% in my example as for the false positive rate, as @andymoz78 points out, the true figure cannot be higher than 0.08%, because that’s the TOTAL number of positives, false and true. So the real problem is smaller than my piece suggests
further reading: here's @whippletom on the same subject. His piece is excellent and clear, but I'm mainly tweeting it to clarify that he and I are two separate people who both happen to be called Tom and to have written articles about false positives thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/c…
Read 4 tweets
Tom Chivers Profile picture
17 Sep 20
this is seven times the ZOE symptom study's estimate (covid.joinzoe.com) so I sincerely doubt this to be true. Plus, Dr Costello says in his next tweet that Whitty is *not* advising a two-week lockdown. I suggest deleting this tweet
ah, I see Jim is there ahead of me
very annoyingly, also, Dr Costello has posted his correction-tweet, but not only NOT deleted the original, he hasn't done the correction-tweet as a reply to that original, so people seeing the original will have no way of knowing that he's already rowed back half of his claims
Read 4 tweets
Tom Chivers Profile picture
15 Sep 20
testing anecdata, for those interested: I post my vaccine trial tests on Friday; I usually get a result by Sunday. My most recent was sent on Friday but I only got my result today.

(Possible confounder: I forgot to put one barcode on this time so maybe that slowed it down?)
and to be clear: the Oxford vaccine trial (which I'm in: unherd.com/thepost/the-pa…) uses normal PHE testing; if my test comes back positive, I have to inform the trial, and self-isolate as normal. I'm not in some special testing regime, it all goes through the usual system
ANECDATA: I've been submitting a test every Friday for three months. I've now looked back through them, and until late August they all came back by Sunday or Monday. Now it's Tuesday or Wednesday every time.

We can't really base any conclusions on this but I found it interesting
Read 4 tweets
Tom Chivers Profile picture
14 Sep 20
Re Keir Starmer: his children are 10 and 8 years old, I think. They will probably have started school last week. Colds always rush around school in the first week of term, and fever is one of the core symptoms, so almost every parent will be self-isolating in the next few weeks
[this said with the sad foreknowledge that this is my soon-approaching fate: my eldest just started back, and we're expecting the first case of sniffles any day now.]
this is indeed the problem. Kids will be in and out of school for as long as the testing regime is buggered
Read 4 tweets

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