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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
Jul 12
The pier was an expensive, shiny-object solution to a fundamentally political problem: Bibi was restricting aid access and Biden wouldn't deploy real leverage to change that.

The pier was a way to signal action on aid while avoiding the real obstacle.

🧵
This chart shows UN-verified aid & commercial inflows since October. The pier ("JLOTS") barely registers - just small slivers in May and July.
ochaopt.org/content/report…
Image
Vastly more impactful than the pier was the opening of the Erez West crossing into northern Gaza.

Netanyahu only agreed to this under intense US pressure following the World Central Kitchen attack...validating the premise that pressure delivers, while shiny objects don't. Image
Read 15 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Jun 17
Just back from a Gaza-focused trip to Egypt/Jordan/Israel.

Key takeaways 🧵:
- Aid push in March/April made progress against famine
- Rafah offensive then wiped out much of that progress
- Huge obstacles remain on access & last-mile distro
- Little progress on aid worker safety
.@JesCMarks and I conducted hours upon hours of extensive interviews with Palestinians who had fled Gaza and (remotely) with others still inside; with staff of aid agencies working in Gaza; with Israeli & Jordanian govts; and with USG humanitarian & diplomatic officials.
We heard credible firsthand accounts consistent with famine conditions in March/April.

But also that the uptick in food deliveries from late March thru April - following the @theIPCinfo famine analysis and ICJ order - then blunted the descent toward famine in the north.
Read 19 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 24
Rishi Sunak staked his leadership on extreme, illegal anti-asylum policies.

This proved to be a legal and political fiasco and ultimately a failure. He is on track to lose in a landslide.

There is a lesson here!

🧵 theguardian.com/politics/artic…
Conventional wisdom across western democracies for the last decade has assumed that performative "toughness" on asylum is a political necessity.

The center/left has accepted this toughness/deterrence framing by the far right, and the debate is over how inhumane to be.
Just look at the border asylum debate in the US, and Biden's reaction to it. He warns of "chaos" and calls for "tougher control."

He has issued questionably legal restrictions on asylum access, and is on the cusp of issuing yet more.
Read 9 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Apr 2
There are no words to adequately convey the rage heartbreak of the Israeli govt murdering 7 aid workers.

First and foremost, my deepest condolences and full solidarity with @WCKitchen, @chefjoseandres, and the families of the 7 heroes who gave their lives feeding Gazans.
These were targeted hits on clearly marked humanitarian vehicles whose movement had been cleared with the IDF.

Clearly forbidden under international law. A total violation of IDF's legal obligation to distinguish non-mil objects and protect aid workers.
This is not just a grave IHL violation, it is a clear war crime. Part of a clear pattern of IDF striking humanitarians routinely since early in the war, while refusing refused repeated calls to set up a functional deconfliction system that would actually protect humanitarians.
Read 18 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Mar 19
Is famine in Gaza "looming" or "imminent" or "underway?"

What do terms like that mean in practice?

A quick primer on famine terminology, technical jargon, and plain language.
Humanitarians tend to be very cautious in using the term famine - it has a lot of power and shouldn't thrown around casually.

But that can lead to some confusion for laypeople.

Not to pick on Martin, but his statement ("imminent") is a good example.
Why is famine only "imminent" (i.e. not yet underway) if hunger and malnutrition are at famine levels and children are starting to die of starvation?

Because this verbiage refers to a formal famine *declaration*, rather than famine conditions per se.
Read 9 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Mar 18
A 🧵 on today's horrifying @theIPCinfo report on famine in Gaza.

In my 25 years as a humanitarian this may be, pound for pound, the grimmest analysis I have ever seen.

All the more indefensible since the December projections made clear this was coming.

ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-websit…
What makes this report so uniquely grim?

Starvation is astonishingly pervasive - touching the entire population. Typically (e.g. Somalia 2011) famine affects a subset, not the whole.

Rate of deterioration - never seen a population go from stable to famine so quickly.
Also unique - complete absence of natural factors. Typically famine emerges from mix of natural and man-made factors. Somalia 2011 was mix of war + sanctions + worst drought in 50+yrs.

This famine is purely man-made. Which means the only solutions will be man-made as well.
Read 13 tweets

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