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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Jun 27

NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye:

"Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious with a potentially deadly condition." /1

What happened to that horror, with Covid? This was how the public used to think, when led by politicians who believed in public health. You cannot even imagine even 5 years ago the public being advised for any serious infectious disease to just go out and live like normal. /2

And some experts are leading this shift, it's...I don't have the words to describe the bloody-minded perversity of what we're seeing. The more of a disaster Covid becomes, the more these experts redouble their attempts to make everybody think Covid is just an inconvenience. /3

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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Jun 22

Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid.

1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections is like a government giving its military slingshots instead of guns and missiles. /1 #covid19

2) The madness of removing public health protections in this pandemic is driven by the access to cheap labour from poorer nations. Western governments are less concerned about their own citizens now because the neoliberal project of the past 50 years replaced nations with…/2

…a globalised ‘market’. There’s no need for a leader with neoliberal beliefs to look after their own population, if they can access workers for the Economy elsewhere. All workers then become equivalent, in a global race to the conditions found in the poorest nations. /3

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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Jun 21

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1 #auspol #covid19aus

It’s a beautiful schematic, from the ABS, showing the ‘lockdowns’ in Australia. What should jump out at you is that we spent most of the past two years not locked down at all. Look at all that white space. And the ‘NSW Lockdown’ was only some suburbs of one city, mostly. /2

Politicians deliberately conflated lockdowns with basic public health action, like contact tracing and the suppression of individual localised outbreaks. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers living through most of this time with my ‘freedoms’ mostly unaffected. /3

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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Jun 20

I’m loving the actuaries riding into battle against the Covid minimisers. Very short thread on deaths, based on recent analysis of US death data from covidactuaries.org /1

Covid minimisers switch between absolute and relative figures depending upon what they’re trying to minimise at the time. With deaths, very often absolute numbers are used when discussing who is dying from Covid, because those numbers show an overwhelming skew to older ages. /2

Which is excellent minimising fodder, because these are the ‘people who were going to die anyway’. The ‘dry tinder’, who with a bit of controlled burning (i.e. killing them) allows minimisers to declare the pandemic over. But the actuaries aren’t buying it. /3

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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Jun 10

The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1

The principle of a heat pump is to extract heat from one place, and pump it to another. The science amazes, for example there’s 85% as much heat in air at -18 degrees celsius as there is at +21 degrees celsius. That heat can be extracted and pumped inside, to warm us. /2

The key fact - there is always heat. Not to be confused with temperature, a crucial distinction. The heat pump extracts and concentrates the heat, with its compressor. And this is where we can cross over into an analogy with social media, that I think is more than an analogy. /3

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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Jun 9

I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don't always question. /1

Twitter and other social media mostly regulate behaviour using a customer service type of system. Individuals mostly have to complain, and if you're lucky claims are investigated, though rarely quickly. Sometimes algorithms moderate content, and sometimes actual moderators.../2

...are employed, but given the volume of information daily, it's all a bit tokenistic. Other Twitter users can also report Tweets that seem to violate rules, but again that's very hit and miss. I wonder if the community itself can be more active in regulating what goes on. /3

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💉💉💉 Dr Henry Madison

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