Dominic Cumming's is alarmed.
A few thoughts on covid…
A. I hope you’re all taking Vitamin D per previous advice. If not then start especially given…
B. The data on omicron is changing quickly but, like in 2020, the basics are much worse than you are hearing from most of the newspapers and ministers. Omicron is spreading much faster than delta did in a SA population that has already been widely exposed to covid. We don’t yet know how relatively deadly omicron is.
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Tom Wenseleers
@TWenseleers
A short thread with some thoughts & calculations of mine about Omicron. Still preliminary, so don't take any figures as final, but it's a start... 🧵
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December 2nd 2021
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C. The vaccine taskforce existed because of Brexit, the Vote Leave team in No10, Vallance pushing it, and DHSC collapsing Feb-April 2020 so bureaucratic resistance collapsed. This meant that me-Vallance-Sedwill-Sunak all told the PM to roll the dice instead of letting Hancock blunder around in what seemed an inevitably bureaucratic and slow EU process.
Many times this year I have pointed out that we should have been spending 2021 building on its success and extending the principles of high performance to an antiviral taskforce.
Instead, the PM a) decided to try to rewrite history and sent out Hancock to do this across the media (‘there was no herd immunity plan, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for…’), b) allowed normal Westminster entropy to 1) degrade the taskforce and 2) fail even to order enough antivirals, hence a quiet panic underway this week.
Yes, it’s always worse than you think. It’s a pandemic… killed millions… cost so many trillions… obviously when we have drugs that work governments will do everything to procure, manufacture, distribute… Right…? WRONG!
Further, the vaccine/drug effort should have been and should be more diverse. E.g Almost everybody targeted the spike, the most accessible part of the virus to the immune system. Proposals to target the virus in other ways have not been properly funded. I was looking through some 2020 messages this week and it is striking that this advice was given to us in 2020 but it has been ignored instead of funded in 2021. I’ve no idea what else might be a good idea but it is typical/depressing that many great scientists have argued for this but the bureaucracies have mostly kept funding narrow instead of diverse like they almost always do.
In a crisis like this where problems are new there should always be funding for ideas outside the mainstream. Remember, in spring-summer 2020 Whitehall bureaucracy scuppered funding for fast tests and had to be forced to change their minds by No10 after some young scientists came to us directly. The new tests worked. We secretly procured hundreds of millions — and of course Westminster has spent more time in 2021 complaining about our rapid procurement of tests in 2020 that have saved thousands than arguing for faster procurement of vaccines and antivirals to face the future! What was dismissed as ‘fringe’ is now mainstream. Also note that, for example, one of the world’s very best biologists and a CRISPR pioneer, George Church (Harvard), was experimenting with nasal vaccines in summer 2020. Diversity in funding is hated by normal bureaucracies but brings massive rewards.
As I’ve also said many times this year the most important lesson of covid is not even about pandemics. It’s that even after a disaster as big as covid, our political parties and permanent bureaucracies will prioritise business as usual over learning, even when many great officials want to learn — the system’s culture and incentives defeat them. When you accept this fact, which seems too awful for most to absorb, the world makes more sense. It’s also the starting point for figuring out what we should do next.
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Dominic Cummings
@Dominic2306
12/ So why are MPs accepting the lack of a public plan now for VTF viz variants? Especially when rumours reach me that the silent entropy of Whitehall is slowly turning VTF back into a ‘normal’ entity?
May 18th 2021
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I advise against relying on early weak signals of good news. For most normal families it’s been better to assume the worst throughout. As I advised a few weeks ago, it is wise to think about how your family will cope with the combination of supply chain chaos, covid, and No10 uselessness and lies.
For expert reasoning under uncertainty, follow people like Zvi who has consistently been ahead of — and exposed the errors of — official entities such as CDC, FDA, WHO, PHE, EU.
Also remember that the newspapers have a huge commercial interest in commuter traffic. They have systematically distorted covid news from the start and the owners call the PM to tell him certain policies hit their balance sheet and he listens and acts. This vicious feedback loop is not reported on for obvious reasons but it strongly affects YOUR information environment unless you try hard to seek information outside legacy media... (Yes there are of course some mainstream hacks doing a good job, even at the FT! E.g @jburnmurdoch)