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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
Sep 10
When is an "aid project" not actually an aid project?

Well, recruiting staff through an anti-Islam biker gang is usually a pretty clear tell.

Beyond the outright insanity of this, it also reveals something important about the agenda behind the GHF. 🧵
At first blush this story almost seems too outlandish to be real. Full disclosure - I was skeptical when I first hear these rumblings a few months ago.

But BBC brings the receipts. And the receipts are flat-out nuts (this nugget about gang leader Johnny Mulford is priceless). Image
Who is Mulford, the lead GHF security subcontractor?

He's a biker gang leader who was formerly debarred by the Pentagon for "bribery, larceny, and making false official statements" related to contract kickbacks.

Not who you'd want near an aid project.
jagcnet.army.mil/Sites/Procurem…Image
Read 16 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Aug 30
All week the Israeli govt has mounted a major PR push against @theIPCinfo's Gaza famine declaration.

The @IsraelMFA pushback reveals a basic ignorance (perhaps willful?) of how famines work and how the IPC declares them.

Today the IPC responded. Let's take a look. 🧵
The GoI has a thin slide deck of bold-font attacks with no links to supporting data.

The IPC reply has 6 pages of explanatory text plus a new table of additional malnutrition analysis (on top of their original 56-page report).
ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user…
ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user… Image
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The GoI's claim on mortality analysis completely ignores actual IPC guidance & analysis.

IDF restrictions prevent a comprehensive mortality survey in Gaza.

So the IPC was very up-front that it used an inference approach, and thus declared famine "with reasonable evidence." Image
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Read 15 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Aug 26
Thread incoming on famines & and mortality data.

tl;dr: the Gaza declaration rests on inferred mortality b/c it's impossible to collect good mortality data.

*just like all 3 other famine declarations since 2011*

Meaning no "lowering the bar" for Gaza.

Let’s get into it…
A famine declaration assesses food deprivation, malnutrition, and mortality.

In Gaza the food deprivation metric has been clearly met for quite a while.

The malnutrition assessment is solid too (per my earlier threads).

But there is limited data on deaths. So, what to do? Image
Famine analyses OFTEN encounter incomplete mortality & other data.

Almost invariably, famine risk arises in context where conflict and political obstacles prevent comprehensive data collection.

In Gaza, mortality data is very poor outside of trauma deaths.
Read 16 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Aug 22
I'm getting a lot of questions about this (false) claim, so let's do a wonky deep dive on how willfully wrong @Israel is on this.

Right off the top: this is the EXACT SAME THRESHOLD that was used in the Sudan famine declaration last year.

Not any lowering of the bar for Gaza.
The MUAC threshold is used in cases like Sudan or Gaza where access is limited and full weight-for-height studies are not feasible.

Here is the relevant portion of the Dec 2024 famine analysis for Sudan, using the same MUAC >15% threshold. ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user…Image
IPC guidance very explicitly allows for these two approaches to assessing Global Acute Malnutrition in a population:

- weight-for-height analysis
and
- mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC) screening

MUAC is used when access constraints prevent a full weight-for-height survey. Image
Image
Read 13 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Aug 22
Starvation in Gaza has been building for months.

The Famine Review Committee conclusion on famine is compelling (more on that below).

Principal responsibility lies with Israeli aid obstruction - but failure of US & Europe to use *any* real leverage on this is also stunning.
🧵
The evidence for a declaration is persuasive.

There has been evidence of severe food deprivation going back to last year, mainly due to Israeli restrictions.

It got exponentially worse from March '25 onward, after Israel instituted an aid blockade that it has yet to fully lift. Image
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Malnutrition evidence is also solid, notwithstanding the armchair experts who misread the IPC thresholds.

Say it with me: a MUAC level over 15% is IPC famine territory.

Moreover the rate is continuing to rise to even grimmer levels. Image
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Read 15 tweets
Jeremy Konyndyk Profile picture
Aug 22
For months, folks on this website have pushed a set of "gotcha" tropes to debunk the existence of famine in Gaza.

In fact they are mostly debunking their own credibility on famine dynamics.

As we await tomorrow's IPC report, here is a pre-buttal 🧵of some of those tropes.
Most of this denialism comes from armchair experts who have never worked on hunger emergencies.

FWIW, I directed USG famine prevention efforts for:

- South Sudan 2013-14
- Yemen 2015-16
- Ethiopia 2016
- Nigeria 2016

Plus a lot of smaller ones.

On to the gotchas...
Gotcha 1: This starving kid is next to a parent who isn't starving! Clearly a ruse!

Why it’s BS: The nutritional needs of growing children make them far more vulnerable to starvation than adults. They invariably starve earlier.

Good overview here: telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…Image
Read 15 tweets

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