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Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
@JeremyKonyndyk
Dec 29, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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
Aug 10
Always illuminating to check whether accounts using other crises to downplay Gaza have *ever* otherwise shown concern about those crises.

Almost invariably: nope. Just a clumsy, cynical attempt to dunk on Gaza activism.

Let's dive into the levels of bad faith at play here:
🧵
First, the receipts:

@IsraelMFA has NEVER before shown concern about the humanitarian crises in Sudan: x.com/search?q=sudan…

or Afghanistan: x.com/search?q=afgha…

or DR Congo: x.com/search?q=congo…

or Yemen: x.com/search?q=yemen…

It just wants to use them as props.
That's pretty grotesque in its own right.

But now let's check how much the government of Israel has donated to those same crises over the past few years.

From everything I can find, the answer seems to be:

*zero*
Read 10 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jul 29
The world's famine alert system is warning us – in the starkest possible terms – that any remaining window to avert mass starvation deaths in Gaza is about to close.

A quick dive into what the report tells us:
This confirms what media reports (and frankly anyone with eyes) could see over the past week: a famine unfurling in Gaza.

While this is not (yet) a formal famine declaration, it signals that one is likely coming.

Importantly, formal declarations ALWAYS come after the fact.
Famine declaration is a lagging indicator.

By the time data can be collected proving the presence of famine conditions, those conditions have invariably been in place for some time.

In the 2011 Somalia famine, half of the 260K people lost had already died prior to declaration.
Read 14 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jul 26
Netanyahu has used aid diversion claims as pretext for massive obstruction of aid to Gaza.

Now we learn the IDF had briefed his team that these claims were false (as aid groups have long argued).

This constitutes further evidence he is using starvation as a weapon of war.
🧵
Humanitarian groups have long denied that their aid is being diverted at any significant scale.

My organization dug into this last year and found no evidence for the Israeli govt claims. refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…Image
Image
US envoy David Satterfield - a savvy, hard-nosed diplomat and no one's idea of a bleeding heart - has consistently said the same.
Read 6 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jul 24
As a longtime humanitarian who has battled famines and hunger crises, I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality.

A thread on famine momentum, famine response, and what it means for Gaza today.
The latest reporting shows telltale signs of rapidly accelerating mortality - the kind of classic famine scenario we know from places like Sudan or Somalia.

Barring a massive reversal of Israeli policy, there is a little standing in the way of total collapse.
Throughout last year Gaza ebbed and flowed at the brink of famine, but never passed the tipping point.

Israeli aid obstruction kept Palestinians perpetually underfed but always relented just enough to avoid mass hunger mortality, as we wrote last Sept:
refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs…Image
Read 14 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jun 4
For days, GHF and its defenders tried to "debunk" the massacre claims by arguing "but this didn't happen *at* the GHF sites."

As we know, the people killed were in the crowds walking long distances through IDF perimeters TO REACH THOSE VERY SITES.

Which GHF now...admits.
The whole episode says a lot about the sincerity of whoever is pulling the strings at GHF.

First instinct is to put out a gaslighting press release denying the massacre reports, while pretending that whatever happens outside their perimeter has nothing to do with them.
Only after *another* massacre (which they also initially try to debunk) does GHF belatedly acknowledge that...maybe...there are some issues with an aid model that forces huge crowds of hungry people to cross long distances and then clusters them along IDF force positions.
Read 4 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 27
Seasoned humanitarians do not operate this way because it's a terribly risky and ineffective way to deliver aid.

Quick 🧵 on what seems to have gone wrong, and why nothing about today's events was surprising.

(subtitle: humanitarians know stuff, actually)
One thing that relief workers learn early is that managing desperate crowds is TOUGH.

So you generally try to deliver aid in a way that avoids drawing more people than you can manage and serve at a given site.

More sites = smaller crowds = manageable distribution. Not this: Image
The GHF model is the total inverse of that.

Rather than dispersing people across many sites, GHF concentrates them at very few sites with very grandiose aspirations of serving huge numbers.

As evidenced by today's chaos, GHF had no plan for what that would mean in practice.
Read 15 tweets

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