Thread by @afairweather

Thought experiment: what would our collective response to the pandemic have looked like if the mortality curve were reversed - i.e. babies were the most likely to die, then infants, then toddlers. We all know it would have been an entirely different story. But why? 1/

The idea that we see old people as "disposable" has never been more true. You have anti-lockdown advocates sayings, out loud, "these people are older than the life expectancy of their country so fuck 'em". 2/

I'm not a traditionalist - I don't think older people deserve default respect - but the level of callous discounting applied to the lives of the old (and the sickly) has been pretty shocking 3/

Now that I have a baby of my own, I appreciate people's knee-jerk emotional reaction to children dying. I get it. I also understand that measures like QALY do matter. But we've done a terrible job of appreciating how many people in their 60s have lost 20 good years of life. 4/

What's even worse is that some people are so hardened to Covid deaths that they've actually told me "the > 500 children who have died of C19 here in SA were sick already". It turns out discounting lives of any kind makes people more generally callous. Not that surprising. 5/

We're still mid-pandy so I don't want to overstate this, but the next one is *just as likely to happen* in 2023 as it is in 2053. Risk does not care about calendars or ages. The next virus could kill mainly children - many do. The 1918 pandemic killed mainly 25 - 45-year-olds 6/

We need to fix this plague of misinformation & disinformation that has infected our global society. Otherwise the next pandemic, which could kill kids or people in their prime, will be just as bad or worse. 7/

The idea that anyone could say "the virus only kills 3 babies out of every 1,000" might sound appalling, but given enough propaganda & enough division, I'm confident that this could happen. Let's work together to fix our ability to talk about this stuff. Our species depends on it