Henry Madison. Profile picture
Oct 8 12 tweets 4 min read
Dramatic waning of effectiveness of vaccines, in a public health strategy that is vaccination only. The herd of elephants in the room for our Covid ‘strategy’. UKHSA data (see link at end). Symptomatic disease first. (Experts welcome to comment!) /1 #auspol #covid19aus
This data suggests it makes little difference if you were boosted, if AZ was your first 2 shots. Effectiveness against symptomatic disease near zero after 20 weeks in both cases. This was also the vaccine given to highest risk, older Australians. /2
Pfizer followed by Pfizer booster seems even worse than no booster. A little better with Moderna booster, but remembering again many Australians are still at 2 doses of any vaccine, thanks to the previous PM’s election campaign. And 20% effectiveness either way i.e. very low. /3
Moderna fares quite a bit better, if boosted. (More on boosters in Australia in a moment.) Symptomatic disease has been consistently minimised as an issue, but significant impacts on workforce absenteeism and LongCovid are bringing attention back to it. Hospitalisations next. /4
Effectiveness against hospitalisation may be marginally better if you’re not boosted, after 6 months (but may reflect vaccination demographics - older people more likely to be boosted). A range from 60-90%, which explains significant ongoing hospitalisation numbers. /5
Even at the upper end of that range, say 90%, with enormous infection numbers/transmission, that still translates into unmanageable numbers of people needing hospital beds. Now to bring the Australian context to this data, the herd of elephants in the room. /6
About 15% of Australians have not had even 2 doses of a vaccine, let alone a booster. Only just over half of Australians have had a booster shot, and only 15% have had 2 boosters. In a National Cabinet strategy of vaccination only, we’re not even doing that. /7
Even more seriously, by October (i.e. now) even boosted people are past the range of efficacy shown in the UKHSA data, which is 20 weeks. Both 2 and 3-dose Australians mostly had their final shots around April. So, what’s the plan? /8
Heading towards Christmas with existing vaccinations - our only real strategy - well past their optimum efficacy date. And many Australians significantly under-vaccinated to boot. The only mention I’ve seen of updating the vaccination strategy is talk of getting boosters…/9
…with our annual flu shots. Up to 6 or more months away. Jane Halton mentioned there’s talk of only buying enough to match how many flu shots are given annually i.e. nothing like even a majority of the population. All of this suggests Australia is about to experience…/10
…what the UK is now experiencing. Significant increases in infection and disease, including severe disease and hospitalisation, caused by waning immunity and absence of other protective measures. The initial hopium of vaccinating our way out of the pandemic could only ever…/11
…last as long as those initial vaccinations lasted. We’ve not only arrived at that point, it’s probably already behind us. /end

Link for UKHSA report: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

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More from @RageSheen

Oct 9
There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are now high schools. Not an analogy. /1 Image
I say not an analogy because this is actual anthropology, a comment about the cultural form and structure of our lives. We’ve had more than 50 years now of a politics that I call N=1 politics, to separate it from all of the hobby horses like ‘capitalism’, and ‘neoliberalism’. /2
Those other concepts have too much baggage. Best I think to stick to the fundamental fact, that it’s a politics that focuses on the individual, thus N=1. Or at least it says it does; it actually does nothing of the sort. Understanding the gap between the claim and the reality…/3
Read 23 tweets
Oct 7
Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things.

1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a type of theft. /1 #auspol
That frame works for them even as they sit on the opposition benches.

2) The only way frames get their power is through popularity mechanisms, like polling and elections. Populism. They shift popularity preferences. /2
I’m a broken record, but get rid of elections. Put the focus on what objectively needs doing in government, not on who can sell ideology in the most popular way. Most of the complexity of modern societies far outstrips all of the populist ideologies elected politicians apply…/3
Read 7 tweets
Sep 26
The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity. Libertarians know this, when they call for…/1
…individual freedom, they don’t actually believe that exists. They know it will appeal to disaffected people, who will then happily fall in behind (conform) with the leadership offered by libertarians. As a corollary, if we want social change, it’s worse than pointless to../2
…ask individuals to make it happen. They’ll support change if it’s led by somebody they want to conform with. Status. Also how libertarians get working people to support tax cuts, by making it about aspiration, status. ‘You can be rich too’. Why the conservatives use the…/3
Read 8 tweets
Sep 25
This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’ creating ‘bottom-up’ change. /1
Nearly everybody I know believes some version of that ‘the people’ rubbish, trapped inside the libertarian spider web of beliefs that is also woven into the DNA of social media. They seriously feel we can use social media to build social change. McLuhan always got it. /2
‘The medium is the message’. It’s not all that important what content circulates on social media, it’s the nature of the medium itself that creates the actual social change. If you provide widespread access to tools that allow the mobilisation of every belief, completely…/3
Read 7 tweets
Sep 20
We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed. /1
If you study the history of governance (a passion of mine), something that jumps out at you is that most of what we’re taught about it is a myth. The royal funeral this week was a perfect time to revisit this. The two main myths I think are crucial: /2
1. that democracy is the transferring of sovereignty from the monarch to ‘the people’, and

2. that democracy emerged as a replacement of royal power.

With 1, the idea that a group of people can have sovereignty is like a left-handed hammer. It’s an impossible object. /3
Read 18 tweets
Sep 19
More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it was a pivotal moment, for Covid too. /1 Image
That formality is often seen in our iconoclastic age, since the 1960s in particular, as unnecessary stuffiness that needs to be swept away. As the protector of privilege and oppression. But we’ve been here before, even within these traditions. The idol-smashers. /2 Image
The iconoclastic urge is always driven by the idea of a more ‘authentic’ existence. That resists tradition and custom as somehow stifling and preventing us accessing a more pure truth of life. But when you step back, all it generally is, is the refusal to engage in anything…/3
Read 21 tweets

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