Thread by @HZiauddeen

🧵Some reflections on the responses to this thread👇

This is about some of the criticisms I received for this thread. This is not meant to be a massive subtweet, apologies if it feels like it. I think that some of the points raised were worth airing and addressing.
(1/30)

https://twitter.com/HZiauddeen/status/1439730298930012161

1. A fair few people took 'the people in power' to mean the government. I certainly do include the govt in this category but it's not just the government. There are a lot of powerful players who are not part of the govt and we have known about them for a long time.
(2/30)

A COVID example: the Koch Brothers, AIER and GBD (check out @NafeezAhmed's work for @BylineTimes)

Even if we don't consider this, we know that our current UK government has a lot of wealthy people who we know are serving their own interests while in govt.
(3/30)

This is not unique to the UK govt by any means.
If we don't consider at least the latter model, then we're working with a very naive idea of both what the govt is, who all the people in power are and what the many motivations at play are.
(4/n)

Ok, but sticking with just the govt:
2. Some people's view of government is of a well meaning if incompetent and inept institution that is doing it's best and has managed to do some good things and surely deserve some credit. 'Sure there have been some blunders but c'mon.'
(5/30)

I wonder if this in some ways relates some ways we tend to think of groups:
-in terms of their constituent people and their interactions and what kind of consensus values and goals they come to. This is very complex and exhausting and impossible beyond a few people.
(6/30)

Large groups, like companies but also cults, actively create group values & goals 'this is what we stand for, this is what we are about', not usually by consensus though
-or just the whole group as a person e.g. think of the govt as we would think about an individual.
(7/30)

This is not to say that we have some sort of anthropomorphic personification of govt as a person in our head. I mean that we think about the govt in the way we think about people e.g.
-We expect it to be well intentioned
-We expect its actions to make linear sense.
(8/30)

-We expect it to feel shame and guilt
-We expect it to be a consistent whole
I'll focus on the last one because it is something that many of us struggle with when it comes to other people. Most of us are not consistent coherent wholes.
(9/30)

We are a bunch of contradictions & inconsistencies that manages a show of coherence enough of the time. But we really struggle when other people are not consistent wholes. 'How can you be a good person if you believe/do that?', 'A bad person couldn't do that good deed.'
(10/30)

Faced with difficult inconsistencies in people, we tend to either ignore the inconsistencies that we do not like or reject/avoid the person.
Thus, 'the govt has done a lot of good things, therefore they cannot be truly bad.'
(11/30)

But the govt is not a person, it is a disparate group and can simultaneously be pursuing multiple goals that may be completely contradictory, with varying degrees of competence and coordination.
So it can simultaneously be doing good and bad things.
(12/30)

Also 'the govt is doing some good things' is a bloody poor show when you consider that its job (with the power & resources it is given) is to do good things for its citizens e.g. keep them safe & healthy. It doesn't get points or stickers for doing its job.
(13/30)

3. Clearly a lot of people think that the govt has done a lot to fight the pandemic and indeed some who think that it has done too much and should never have 'gone overboard' like this.
After all they have rolled out vaccines and instituted lockdowns haven't they?
(14/30)

This is part of what I meant by low expectations. Remember that so far the govt pandemic reponse has led to 150,000 deaths. This is what has has happened because of their partial interventions. It was always possible to do much better.
(15/30)

And sadly, we have plenty of international examples of how much better things could have been, not just in terms of lives saved but the amount of life we could have had.
So rolling out vaccines is great but there's so much more that could have been & still can be done.
(16/30)

4. The misinformation and disinformation has worked very well. It's surprising how wanting to control transmission is seen as wanting lockdown, no matter how many times we say that we want to avoid lockdowns and the way to do that is by controlling transmission.
(17/30)

This means that conversations about trying basic measures like masks are immediately derailed by the anger and worry about 'endless lockdowns and restrictions.'
(18/30)

5. There is a powerful assumption that those arguing for controlling transmission, just want to stay in lockdown because they are anxious or find it convenient and they don't care what happens to people who are badly affected by lockdown.
(19/30)

Inherent in this is the belief that people must be acting for their personal benefit as there is no reason they could be acting for the benefit of others.

(20/30)

There is also a peculiar form of attributing causation: If you call for X to be done and then the govt does X, people who oppose or have concerns about X assume that you must have caused X to happen, just by calling for it on Twitter/elsewhere.
(21/30)

6. There was point raised that I was contributing to vaccine hesitancy because my thread undermines trust in the govt. Even if I might have such reach and influence, trust in govt is complex and multifaceted.
(22/30)

It is fundamentally the govt's job to win the trust of its citizens and the success of our vaccine roll out cannot be readily attributed to trust in govt. In as much as it is related to trust, I suspect it is more trust in the NHS.
(23/30)

Btw there is very real vaccine hesitancy related to lack of trust in govt and healthcare authorities in some communities, based on prior negative experiences as members of marginalised groups. These predate my Twitter thread by decades, if not centuries.
(24/30)

7. I do think we need a better understandng generally about what our govt has done through COVID and how little it has done to actually control it. And to have this, we need a better understanding of how exactly our govt works.
(25/30)

One comment that really brought this home was one that said that clearly the UK govt had done much better than other countries as many poorer countries had not managed to get very much vaccine supply.
(26/30)

There is a whole nasty tale as to why poorer countries have very limited vaccine supply and it's not so much about their govts failing to acquire vaccines than it is about the role played by the UK and other western govts in heavily undermining vaccine equity.
(27/30).

So please don't think the UK govt has done even a passable job at controlling the pandemic. Yes, things could be worse than 150,000 deaths without their efforts but 150,000 is horrible and so many of these would have preventable.
(28/30)

But more importantly consider the wider context: Brexit and its horrific impacts, cuts to universal credit, fuel shortages, food shortages.
And if it's hard to tell with COVID, Brexit is lot easier for understanding the 'people in power' & the multiple factors at play.
(29/30)

If we need to understand what is happening around us with COVID, we need to understand the wider systems involved and to consider the experience of people who are less privileged than us, in those systems.
(30/30)