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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
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
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 9
"We will take your baby and deport you without her.”

Blockbuster new report from us @RefugeesIntl and our partner @humanrights1st documenting shocking stories of asylum seekers unlawfully disappeared, abused, and expelled by Trump's @CBP and @ICEgov.

Read on. 🧵 Image
Our teams interviewed numerous asylum seekers who have been unlawfully expelled from the US to Costa Rica, Panama, and their home countries (where they face real risk of persecution or torture, likely constituting refoulement).
We found a consistent pattern of government abuse and deception intended to subvert legal oversight and to deny people's rights.

Some of these accounts appear consistent with the practice of enforced disappearance under international law.
Read 17 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
May 4
Teachable moment here.

I don't love using the term "humanitarian principles" b/c it sounds like an ethical creed.

That's not what the principles are. They are fundamentally a *tool* to enable safe humanitarian access.

A tool refined by years of hard lessons.

Quick🧵
Saying something "contravenes humanitarian principles" rarely persuades non-humanitarians.

When I was in government, that approach never worked.

Instead I would argue for why supporting independent, neutral humanitarian action *stood the best chance of operational success.*
I see the principles as two pairs:

The *what*: hum'n action seeks to protect life (Humanity) on the basis of need alone (Impartiality).

The *how*: hum'n action does not take sides in a conflict (Neutrality) and operates apart from political & military objectives (Independence) Image
Read 10 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Apr 24
More an amputation than a major re-organization.

The core structure of @StateDept remains intact and mostly unchanged.

But they amputate the US government's foreign aid capacity and eviscerate other soft-power tools.

A 🧵
Here's a cross-walk of the prior State org chart to the new one released by Rubio (links to both below).

🟥 items appear to be fully eliminated.

🟨 items are retained but reshuffled

🟩items are new to the org chart

New: state.gov/wp-content/upl…
Old: 2021-2025.state.gov/department-of-… Image
Image
DepSecs unchanged.

5 of the 6 undersecretaries unchanged; 1 eliminated and replaced by a revising the foreign assistance budget director (Marocco's old job).

Primacy of the regional bureaus is preserved/reinforced.

No cuts announced to overseas posts.
Read 17 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Mar 31
Aid leaders have been warning for 2 months that the gutting of @USAID would leave US unable to respond to major global disasters.

We are now seeing that play out in real time with the Myanmar quake - reality is calling bullshit on the Trump admin's narrative.

🧵
In today's press briefing @statedeptspox bizarrely "rejected the premise" that a meaningful US response requires USAID staff "to be physically there."

As the guy who used to deploy those teams - this is total nonsense.

You can't conduct search-and-rescue virtually. Come on.
The reality is that other countries began deploying their teams immediately - and the US would have too, under any prior administration (including Trump 1).

But Elon, Pete Marocco, and Rubio have wrecked the USG's ability to do this.
Read 12 tweets

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