2) pre-existing conditions include asthma, mental health issues etc - all kinds of things that don't mean somebody is close to death. And someone in their 60s still has ~20 years of life ahead of them on average.

@MaajidNawaz 3) This is based on the erroneous assumption that lockdown causes economic damage - the truth is, covid causes economic damage, and countries that don't deal with covid get damaged the most (Britain has the worst death toll and the worst economic contraction in Europe currently)
@MaajidNawaz 4) the first paragraph of this contains some very skewed stats: most scientists agree that IFR is closer to 1% than 0.23%, and 60% vaccination/infection is necessary for herd immunity, not 30-40%
@MaajidNawaz 5) The Stanford study is a mess - it takes data from only 10 countries (not enough to draw any meaningful comparisons), and ignores those like Brazil where the result of non-lockdown policies has been catastrophic....
@MaajidNawaz 5)... Sweden has horrendous death rates compared to other Nordics (unacknowledged), and the study fails to consider many of the additional extreme measures taken in S Korea (testing to a degree not undertaken anywhere else in the world) that made lockdown unnecessary there.
@MaajidNawaz 6) This is tragic, but the 1493% headline rise equates to only 10 actual cases, up from 1 in 2019 and 1 in 2018. This should be viewed in the context of the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths that lockdowns have prevented.
@MaajidNawaz 7) I can believe this is true, and it makes me angry that more support wasn't offered to families by the government during lockdown. The furlough and SEIS schemes were good but many fell through the cracks.
@MaajidNawaz 8) Again, this is tragic and deplorable, but total numbers in the hundreds should be seen in the context of hundreds of thousands of lives saved.
@MaajidNawaz 9) These retweets don't support the claims you make in your tweet. Perhaps you meant to re-tweet something else?
@MaajidNawaz 10) As the first line of the article makes clear, 'Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic' - NOT 'due to lockdowns'.
@MaajidNawaz 11) 12) 13) Same issue - all of these are due to the pandemic, not due to lockdowns.
@MaajidNawaz 14) 15) Are we inadvertently harming ourselves through wholesale adoption of hostile state propaganda?

No. The evidence of the virus's lethality is abundantly clear in our own country.
@MaajidNawaz 17) The 'herd immunity strategy' has been tried in Sweden, which has had 10 times more deaths per capita than its neighbour Finland. It's simply not possible to get to herd immunity through infection without deaths on a massive scale.
@MaajidNawaz 18) a good argument against deciding things by referenda!
@MaajidNawaz 19) If immunity exists in some people, that would be wonderful. There's no reason for that to affect govt strategy, though.
@MaajidNawaz 20) Lockdown is expensive. But economic cost of not dealing with the virus even higher. All economic pain since summer is a result of govt incompetence in the spring - not pursuing an elimination strategy, opening up too early after lockdown 1 without a working T&T strategy.
@MaajidNawaz In summary, you haven't provided a single credible piece of evidence why lockdown (all the harm that it causes considered) is worse than not locking down, when the virus is raging and capable of killing hundreds of thousands.

More from Health

I think @SamAdlerBell in his quest to be the contrarian on Fauci gets several things wrong here. 1/


First, the failure last year actually was driven by the White House, the #Trump inner circle. Watch what's happening now, the US' scientific and public health infrastructure is creaking back to life. 2/

I think Sam underestimates the decimation of many of our health agencies over the past four years and the establishment of ideological control over them during the pandemic. 3/

I also am puzzled why Tony gets the blame for not speaking up, etc. Robert Redfield, Brett Giroir, Deb Birx, Jerome Adams, Alex Azar all could have done the same. 4/

Several of these people Bob Redfield, Brett Giroir, Alex Azar were led by craven ambition, Jerome Adams by cowardice, but I do think Deb Birx and Tony tried as institutionalists, insiders to make a difference. 5/
Some thoughts on this: Firstly, it might be personal preference, but I am not keen on this kind of campaign as I feel like it trivialises cancer. Sometimes the serious message gets lost because people are sharing pics of cats or whatever and the important context is gone.


More importantly, the statistic being used in the campaign is misleading. It says 57% of women put off cervical screening if they can't get waxed. But on further investigation, that's not accurate.

The page here goes on to say "57% of women who regularly have their pubic hair professionally removed would put off attending their cervical screening appointment if they hadn’t been able to visit a beauty salon."

So the 57% represents a concern not across the whole population of women, but only those who regularly get waxed. So how big of an issue is this across the whole population? And what else is stopping people getting smears?

I think campaigns for cancer screening are really tricky because there is so much nuance that often doesn't fit into a catchy headline or hashtag. It's certainly not easy and is part of a bigger conversation.

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