Thread by @HZiauddeen

This thread by @BallouxFrancois troubles me for several reasons, first and foremost because he is now advising our health secretary Sajid Javid.
The central message of his 🧵is that COVID is inevitable, we're all going to get it, let's just get on with life.
1/23

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1475567604504973318

To be fair, he's not saying anything here that he hasn't said before. It is more troubling because he seems to have the ear of a govt (& media) that doesn't want to do v much to control the pandemic.
I'd like to draw your attention to the seeming reasonableness of the 🧵.
2/23

He says:
'This is not an easy message to convey',
'it gives me no joy to announce (this terrible news)',
'in an ideal world I wish we could have'
'Pretending we remain in control, of sorts, is just becoming too costly'
3/23

He presents as inevitable and unavoidable that everyone will inevitably get COVID, many will get it more than once. Anything you do, like wearing a high quality mask, will merely postpone the inevitable. And 'Vaccine protection against infection is meh'.
4/23

But it's ok 'There's also no moral failing in catching a respiratory virus. It's OK; it's life, which sucks at times.'

Which is a relief. What people who've had COVID struggle with most, is not the acute suffering, death & LongCOVID, it's the crippling moral failure.
5/23

'I believe it is time to give in soon'
'Pretending we remain in control, of sorts, is just becoming too costly'

His view is that we have reasonably high vaccination rates, we've got a couple of treatments, it's time to give in.
6/23

'I believe it is time to give in soon'
'Pretending we remain in control, of sorts, is just becoming too costly'
'I believe that we, as a society should try to extract ourselves out of the pandemic fairly soon'

The last presumably by pretending instead that it is over.
7/23

However he adds:
'I wouldn't want to dictate anyone's behaviour', and I fully respect that some may need a bit longer before they feel ready to resume a 'normal' life.

The thing is that pretending that things are normal will be dictating a lot of people's behaviour.
8/23

A lot of people will have to do what the government and their employers say that have to do e.g. go into the workplace without any safety measures.
People who are concerned about the restriction of liberty caused by lockdowns, should be concerned about the same here.
9/23

And fully respecting 'that some may need a bit longer before they feel ready to resume a 'normal' life.', is just frankly insulting and dismissive. The problem is not that people don't 'feel ready'.
There are loads of people who just can't resume 'normal' life.
10/23

The disabled, the CV/CEV, including those who have become so during the pandemic, these are people for whom there isn't the option to return to normal life. These are people who have been shielding for the most part of 21 months.
11/23

The less we do to control the pandemic, the more at risk these vulnerable groups are, the more restricted their lives become.
There is a camp that believes that this is a price that They are very happy for the vulnerable to pay so that They can have their freedom.
12/23

I think most of us want a world where the vulnerable can have their lives to the fullest as well.

Even if we don't explictly think this, we recognise the vulnerable are not some separate group in society, they are our parents, children, spouses, friends & colleagues.
13/23

This brings me to the sinister implicit message in this thread. Saying COVID is inevitable is saying that more people will die, more people will fall, more will be disabled. Getting it more than once, increases the chance of these outcomes.
14/23

As @LucyCheke pointed out, that is what makes this 'not an easy message to convey'. If everyone is going to get COVID, then a percentage are going to die and become disabled, with LongCOVID and other conditions.
15/23

https://twitter.com/LucyCheke/status/1475574871467999235?s=20

With exponential spread and high transmissibility, these will not be trivial numbers.
For those who are at higher risk, their only option is to shield, till as such time when the pandemic has burnt out.
The losses along the way in many respects will be huge.
16/23

The other sinister bit of this is the idea of inevitability, that this was meant to happen and was always going to. Like this was a natural truth that we have just needed time to wake up to.
17/23

https://twitter.com/HZiauddeen/status/1414236543137591299?s=20

'it's time to give in' is presented as consoling 'you fought well but it was a foregone conclusion, now time to give it up and move on.'
A lot of this inevitability was manufactured with the complicity of people who espoused & still espouse views like Francois'.
18/23

I still think it is possible to turn the course of the pandemic towards a less destructive trajectory, even in places like the UK and the US. Less destructive is not going to be good, but it's going to be less horrific than the route of 'inevitability'.
19/23

But there is definitely an increasing inevitability, not mainly because of SARS-CoV-2 but because of the political climate and the many forces aligned against even the most basic of public health measures.
20/23

So to summarise Francois' message:
COVID-19 is inevitable, we're all going to get it, so let's just stop trying and get back to life as normal.
Some of you will die, many of you will fall ill, many of you will develop LongCOVID.
21/23

Those of us who have the means to have a choice about how we live, whether it's getting back to normal or live a partly/fully shielded life in reasonable comfort, will be ok. Those of us who don't, well sucks to be you.
22/23

Those of you who're disabled, CV/CEV, you don't really figure in this.

Because folks, SARS-CoV-2 is inevitable, not because of the pathogenicity of the virus but because of the virulence of the humans it lives amongst.
23/23

PS: I await the fanboys. Maybe today is the day I start blocking people on Twitter.