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Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
@JeremyKonyndyk
Dec 29, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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Haven't weighed in on COVID much lately but I'm seeing this video in my feed quite a bit today and I'm rankled. So for old time's sake:

This is a careless and misinformed reply by Collins that buys into the lazy "closed vs open" binary framing preferred by the Barrington crowd.
Did "public health" shut down rural Minnesota to save urban NYC? No.

Early on when virtually nothing was known about a disease that was massively flooding ERs (& morgues) around the world, US states implemented stay-at-home guidance for a few months to protect their hospitals.
Governors made those decisions, and they did weigh econ & other factors alongside.

Turns out it's not good economics for a hospital system to collapse!

And there was no reason to assume that what was hitting big cities wouldn't ultimately hit rural areas too.
BTW rural communities in 2020 had similar COVID death rates to urban metros.

Lower than huge cities, higher than other metro areas, and higher than the overall national average.

So applying precautions to rural areas was wise. cdc.gov/nchs/products/…
Image
By early May 2020, the CDC (public health!) had prepared detailed guidance for risk-based, phased re-opening of schools, business, day cares, etc. Not a simple open/closed binary.

The White House spiked it. Trump wanted a full re-opening.
apnews.com/article/virus-…
This led to total incoherence between state and federal levels amidst a 2x+ summer surge in infections.

So as schools had to make decisions about opening for fall, cases were exploding. In December, they were 3x+ higher. Hard choice for parents/teachers.
There was plenty of debate at the time about trade-offs. CDC actually did issue guidance on safely re-opening schools - which Trump then trashed publicly.

Rather than attempt to support and resource safe re-opening, he just pushed a return to normal ops.
cnn.com/2020/07/08/pol…
The choice didn't have to be open vs closed: it could have been to invest in safely reopening schools (more testing, enhanced support to schools, etc etc). I wrote about this at the time:




Not going to further relitigate the schools debate here but the essential point is: these were not binary options.

Public health guidance sought to manage risk in order to reopen in a safe & incremental way.

Trump rejected that, and pushed a false binary choice.
So Collins gets the history wrong and the public health wrong. It was not "public health" pushing the choice between open vs closed, it was Trump.

"Public health" was trying to reconcile COVID precautions with restarting schools, biz, etc - and that guidance was shot down.
It's easy to second-guess hard decisions made in the fog-of-crisis period when stakes are high and good info is scarce. And plenty we should learn.

But don't rewrite history in the process...
There is a concerted disinfo effort on the right to undermine "public health" by blaming it for all COVID-related grievances and airbrushing what Trump and other pols actually did.

Collins' answer naively plays into that. Unfortunate.

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More from @JeremyKonyndyk

Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 24
Over 1000 cases barely a week past detection.

Soon to be the 2nd largest Ebola outbreak ever, and echoing the 2014 mega-outbreak in all the worst ways.

A thread outlining the huge challenge that looms, and some thoughts on what must be done:

The effort to contain this outbreak starts with four strikes against it:

Momentum

Location

(Lack of) Medical Countermeasures

Weakened Global Response Capacity

Let's look at each.
Momentum:

The >1000 cases so far are undercount; # still rising fast as true scale emerges.

For context, the huge West Africa outbreak in 2014 was detected at 49 cases and rose to 208 a month later. So this one starts off *much* bigger. who.int/emergencies/di…
Read 15 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 18
It is pretty unprecedented for WHO to declare a PHEIC so rapidly after detecting an outbreak, but it is absolutely merited in this case.

This is a scary one.

Why?

- Very late detection
- Difficult context
- Limited countermeasures
- and global response tools got DOGE-d

🧵...
It's instructive to compare this against other major past outbreaks.

The largest Ebola outbreak in history, West Africa/2014 (which I worked on for @USAID), was detected at a far earlier stage (49 cases / 29 deaths) than this one (246 cases/65 deaths).

Deaths are now >88 and ⬆️
This one has already built up more momentum at time of detection.

Worrying because Ebola risk and response scale in an exponential, not linear, fashion.

Each extra uncontrolled case means tens of more people potentially exposed in super spreading events.
Read 18 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Apr 9
To mark the 6 month anniversary tomorrow of Trump‘s deal to end the war in Gaza, we at @RefugeesIntl teamed up with humanitarian partners to assess its humanitarian impact.

The headline: it is failing. But political will could salvage it.

🧵 Image
The problem is not the plan itself; the problem is an execution failure.

Many of the humanitarian and civilian protection commitments of the plan are good & right.

But they are failing - and the deal's guarantors (the USG foremost) are letting that happen.
Getting the humanitarian components right is a crucial proof of concept for the wider deal, and a confidence building measure toward future steps.

If those elements fail with impunity, it is hard to see how disarmament & political/governance elements could ever succeed.
Read 9 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Feb 26
Hugely important ruling.

DHS has been abusively sending migrants - including refugees and others protected from deportation - to unrelated third countries.

We @RefugeesIntl have been partnering with @humanrights1st to expose these shady arrangements: thirdcountrydeportationwatch.org

🧵 x.com/rparloff/statu…
The core of US and global refugee law is non-refoulement - the principle that people fleeing persecution must not be returned to face that harm.

DHS uses 3rd-country deportation agreements to circumvent those and related laws.

And also to coerce migrants into self-deporting.
In one such case, DHS was barred from deporting a man to Gambia because he would face persecution there.

DHS deported him to Ghana instead, and Ghana then deported him to Gambia.

DHS is outsourcing refoulement. Image
Read 9 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Feb 5
A year has passed since @elonmusk began the wood-chipper-ing of @USAID.

Since then, global humanitarian funding has collapsed by almost 1/3, mostly due to the Trump/Elon cuts.

Vast suffering has ensued.

🧵
US relief aid collapsed from $14bn in 2024 to just $3.7bn in 2025.

This meant global humanitarian relief reached 25 million fewer people, even as the number of people needing aid rose.

We at @RefugeesIntl have a new report that assesses the emerging human toll. Image
To start with the obvious:

The Trump-Elon cuts are killing people.

In crisis settings around the world, aid groups and journalists are documenting deaths that are directly attributable to the aid cuts.

nytimes.com/2025/09/20/opi…

propublica.org/article/kenya-…

propublica.org/article/trump-… Image
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Read 15 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Dec 30, 2025
Great to see major US investment into UN pooled funds!

But - $2bn is a tiny fraction of needs; US humanitarian funding in 2024 was $14.1bn.

So this is a very welcome step but comes nowhere to close to filling the life-threatening gaps *the US itself created* this year.

🧵
US funding and humanitarian diplomacy have supplied the backbone of global emergency response for decades.

Both collapsed this year with the closure of USAID.

The result so far has been preventable death, starvation, disease on an extraordinary scale.
The effects are huge.

Our teams @RefugeesIntl are seeing impacts of the US aid cuts everywhere.

One grim recent example below from our recent report on Tigray. There are many, many more instance like this.

Efficiency matters, but so does scale.
refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…Image
Image
Read 10 tweets

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