Doctor and activist
28/05/2020
Prime Minister, Scott Morrison is perceived to have done well in managing the COVID-19 crisis as, smarting from his bushfire debacle, he took expert advice. He has used the crisis to shut down Parliament and with his use of State Premiers as a sort of wartime Cabinet he has bypassed the Labor opposition. Now he […]
28/05/2020
Some of us watch the COVID-19 statistics with fascination try to work out which policies will stop the march of the virus. This has become all the more urgent as countries try to break the lockdown to restart their economies. The US has overtaken Western Europe (29 countries) in the number of cases by about […]
27/05/2020
It seems that COVID-19 affects not only the lungs, but the heart, kidney, brain, gut, clotting and blood vessels, and that a lot of facts are still not clear.Here is an article from ScienceMag from the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science.www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes
27/05/2020
27 May 2020
Sweden likes to present itself as a highly sophisticated welfare society where a caring State looks after all its citizens. But conservative governments have been quietly undermining its welfare system for some time, and this opening up of the country and talk of ‘herd immunity’ may be both hypocritical and very poor public policy.
The assumption that healthy people will not die, and the rest do not matter is a very callous moral judgement. The assumption that without normal commerce the economy will not function and thus it is the economy versus a few oldies welfare is a morally appalling position, which is creeping in by default.
When I was a NZ sheep and beef farmer standard practice was that the breeding females had a performance criterion. If they did not get pregnant before winter, they went to the abattoirs as they were too expensive to feed over winter.
Managers love performance criteria, and as Management now dictates political actions people now have to perform also. Not strong enough to survive a COVID19 infection? Funeral for you! It is assumed that the rest will be infected once and then be immune. And when most people have been infected so that the virus cannot propagate in the society, we (hopefully) have ‘herd immunity’.
Politics being what it is, things have to dressed up a bit. Less tests, fewer masks, omit certain types of hospitals, change the death certification. Do not state the policy bluntly, and give no mandatory orders from the top, but make it vague enough with scope for non-implementation of best practice and plausible deniability. Make concerned statements of good intent, select some good figures to quote, and praise the people for their fortitude. If the odd whistleblower says something and manages to get publicity, be surprised, deny, promise to investigate and call it a ‘one off’ case or situation.
Brave New World is here. The only surprise is that it has started in Sweden.
27/05/2020
Sweden likes to present itself as a highly sophisticated welfare society where a caring State looks after all its citizens. But conservative governments have been quietly undermining its welfare system for some time, and this opening up of the country and talk of ‘herd immunity’ may be both hypocritical and very poor public policy.
The assumption that healthy people will not die, and the rest do not matter is a very callous moral judgement. The assumption that without normal commerce the economy will not function and thus it is the economy versus a few oldies welfare is a morally appalling position, which is creeping in by default.
When I was a NZ sheep and beef farmer standard practice was that the breeding females had a performance criterion. If they did not get pregnant before winter, they went to the abattoirs as they were too expensive to feed over winter.
Managers love performance criteria, and as Management now dictates political actions people now have to perform also. Not strong enough to survive a COVID19 infection? Funeral for you! It is assumed that the rest will be infected once and then be immune. And when most people have been infected so that the virus cannot propagate in the society, we (hopefully) have ‘herd immunity’.
Politics being what it is, things have to dressed up a bit. Less tests, fewer masks, omit certain types of hospitals, change the death certification. Do not state the policy bluntly, and give no mandatory orders from the top, but make it vague enough with scope for non-implementation of best practice and plausible deniability. Make concerned statements of good intent, select some good figures to quote, and praise the people for their fortitude. If the odd whistleblower says something and manages to get publicity, be surprised, deny, promise to investigate and call it a ‘one off’ case or situation.
Brave New World is here. The only surprise is that it has started in Sweden.
23/05/2020
23 May 2020
I am not sure of the answer to this question. China obviously hid the facts initially as whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang revealed, later dying of COVID19 himself[1]. Dr Ai Fen of Wuhan Central Hospital also blew the whistle and has now disappeared[2].
China clearly suppressed information initially, and may not be telling the truth now, particularly on the numbers affected.
It used very authoritarian tactics and now claims that the infection of controlled. It seems hard to deny this, if we presume that millions of deaths cannot be hidden. The SARS virus was successfully suppressed with an unprecedented lockdown, and this would appear to be the same. Probably few other countries could have suppressed movement of people as effectively as China could, which is good and bad.
The initial cover up allowed movement to other countries which has allowed the epidemic to spread world wide.
Here is an Indian TV station calling out the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus for not standing up to China, and giving a pretty damning assessment of his actions, both in not getting the facts from China early and then ignoring their delays. The circumstances of his election to WHO seems to be a reliance on China’s lobbying at WHO, and also his debts to China from his role as Health Minister and then foreign minister of Ethiopia. He is contrasted with the previous head of WHO Health, a Norwegian, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, who called out China and embarrassed them over SARS, so China had an incentive to get a more malleable person in the job.
The TV station seems to have a good story and also claims to be daring and young, though it is owned Esselgroup, which is owned by Subhash Chandra, an Indian billionaire with links to the BJP. Things are not always clear in politics , but it does seem that the Director-General is a Chinese patsy.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1NGzmDVWxA&feature=youtu.be
[1] www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795, 7/2/20
[2] https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/whistleblowing-coronavirus-doctor-mysteriously-vanishes/
21/05/2020
21 May 2020
Readers may recall that I posted on this subject on 19/4/20, and had Dr Li as the original whistleblower on social media. He was an ophthalmologist who died of COVID-19. The origin of the virus was via the markets, but possibly via a bat research project in a secondary Wuhan research laboratory.
The document I used was cited but was from the web and not from a standard journal and sounded very plausible.
Now this document that again seems very plausible casts doubt on the previous story.
Presumably there will be a WHO investigation which will come up with a conclusion. This probably would have happened without the ham-fisted and tactless intervention of Morrison. Whether the US or China is deceiving us all may or may not become apparent. Both have quite a lot of prestige riding on the inquiry, and Trump needs someone to blame if he is win the November election.
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project-syndicate.org
The Fable of the Chinese Whistleblower | by Stephen S. Roach & Weijian Shan – Project Syndicate
10/05/2020
10 May 2020 As Australian political parties slowly and steadily dismantle Medicare to move us towards a privatised system American-style, it is worth noting the major feature of the American system. Everyone says it is a hopeless system. It depends what you want it to do. It is the world’s best system at turning sickness […]
03/05/2020
3 May 2020 In a move that will surely damage it credibility the Australian Electoral Commission has approved a name change for the ‘Involuntary Medication Objectors (Vaccination/Fluoride) Party’ to be called the ‘Informed Medical Options Party’. Amazingly this was under the Australian Electoral Act, as it did not allow confusion with another party, was not […]
30/04/2020
30 April 2020 People are asking why people getting sick with COVID-19 in aged care homes are not on ventilators. The reason is probably that the ventilators are unlikely to save them. One also needs to ask what is the Key Performance Indicator of an ICU. When I worked in them, it was leaving the […]