Thread by @1goodtern

So it turns out that the ukhsa *are* afraid of the same thing I am.

But their solution to the problem is terrifying.

A quick thread about what this seemingly nonsensical post of theirs means....
🧵

https://twitter.com/UKHSA/status/1961452961164370412

This official statement says that the vaccines won't be less effective than the virus.

Now that may sound like gibberish or a typo, but it's not.

The ukhsa have one aim here, and it's not one they often say out loud.

They want to prevent a situation where a health problem like an infectious disease poses an *acute* threat to the economy.

What does that mean...

The ukhsa was set up partly to prevent the situation we saw in 2020 and early 2021.

At those points, we had to shut down sectors of our society to slow the spread of a disease that was threatening to overload our hospitals and cause a catastrophic system failure.

It's worth understanding this part.

It wasn't the death toll they were worried about.

It was the fear of the system breaking.

What's the system....

The system is supply chains, supermarkets, distribution, essential industry, hospital, toilet roll, petrol at forecourts... the essentials that people need to make life work...

And as soon as they're not available people start to realise how fragile the system is, and there's panic.

So the ukhsa was set up to ensure that this *didn't happen again*.

Remember that.
Hold it in your head.

Because after the first emergency and panicked response from government and flawed lockdown in 2020, there was what they hoped would be the *last emergency and panicked response and flawed lockdown in 2021.

Why did they hope it would be the last?

Because they thought that vaccines would prevent reinfection well enough for there never to be an emergency threat to the whole system again.

But vaccines didn't prevent reinfection.

What did they do?

They made death and serious illness during the first two weeks of infection less likely.

They still do.

So what do vaccines do?

They *prevent the strain on the system* and danger of emergency and overload.

And here's where we come back to this:

The ukhsa gave up on *vaccines* as a method of preventing the system overload.

And they started relying on *infections*.

Remember:
This is about preventing the *overload*, the massive emergency strain on the system that might cause the system to collapse or require a shutdown.

So as long as a variant does not cause a wave that *overwhelms* hospitals with disease, they see it as beneficial.

Which is why they think that a variant will be as effective as a vaccine.

But what you may not know is that the ukhsa is stuffed to the gills with people who view covid as unstoppable and essential.

They ignore and lie about the proven long term illness caused by covid.

They deny the true prevalence of long covid.

They hide the data on long covid.

They lie about transmission.

But they are still afraid of one thing that I'm afraid of:

That if there is a long enough gap between covid waves that a huge group of people will be vulnerable to serious acute illness, causing a threat to the system.

And the only way they know how to prevent that is *small waves of infection* that cause just enough infection to prevent the crashing paralysing wave.

But they're ignoring the accumulating problem caused by all those infections.

Why?
Because it doesn't pose an immediate obvious threat to the system.

Or does it.

But there's three more factors that are important in the ukhsa story.

First, it's an agency, so they're fighting for funding with other departments.

So they need to justify their existence.

So actually it's in their institutional interest to *not solve* the problems of infectious disease.

Secondly, they're a *security* agency.

So they're riddled by secrecy and threat and power and control.

They're also riddled with mediocrity, bureaucracy, incompetence and political and medical bias.

This was an agency set up by *Boris Johnson*.

A fish rots from the head down.

Leaders were appointed who would stick to the government line.

The agency does what *the government wants*.

And the agency somehow became run by people who are obsessed, possibly clinically obsessed, with hand hygiene.

The denial of airborne transmission of infection was a convenient bonus to a government who wanted society to stay open without changes or caution.

So it's a broken agency

An agency that wants you infected.

And, yeah, they follow me, so I hope they're reading this.

Oh, one more thing about this.

It may look like a typo, but, yes, it's truly what ukhsa believe.

And that's the part that makes me even more angry, because they believe this, but they rarely make it known.

They normally hide this strategy, or blur it, or avoid talking about it.

So this is a slip of the mask, but I think they should actually own up to this.

They should own it.

But they're a security agency, so lies are in their blood.

And so is covid.