Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Channel 4 News"
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The professor seems to regret the job the US has done. Yet it was Europe who gave them the job, because if they really did want to see better outcomes and a multipolar world, they could have put much more into NATO---perhaps enough to ensure that the US would not be the conductor running the entire performance, but more like the concertmaster sitting amongst them, leading them but with much less authority. In choosing not to do so, Europeans were shrewd in some sense because it left them free to focus on quality of life, social stability, health, and other things instead. But wouldn't it come in handy in the present century to be part of an even stronger NATO, a more balanced one, and one that for that reason would meet with more success in its global security efforts? Such a NATO might have kept Putin out of Crimea. As it was, he guessed easily and correctly that it wouldn't say much nor say it for very long.
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 1%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. It would also free up things like masks and medicines for those who need them most, including medical workers. To isolate those most at risk for, say, half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand, versus having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar (or greater) number of lives and an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly (whichever anglosphere nation we inhabit) not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience.
And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a sudden massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The UK national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and will also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean considering how many lives we permit (or cause) to be ruined in favour of the uncertain chance of saving a single one. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones. As Orwell said, "It is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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@Martin Baldwin-Edwards
"Safer"? His constituents, the people of North East Somerset, who elected him and then re-elected him with a strong majority, are thus lovers of violence, you say? He's violent, and was selected by violent supporters to do violent things? HIs presence in the House of Commons threatens the safety of the UK?
Yes, just look at what a menace to public safety he is, stretched out weakly in a naff suit on a green bench. Children cry, women flee, and stout-hearted but unarmed men tremble at his sight.
A grateful nation extends its honours to you for your penetrating vision. Fools are they who call you brainless, callow, and contemptibly destructive of the language. You, sir, are truly a British, nay, a world hero and in no way one of the most idiotic [here a bad word is deleted] who ever walked the face of the Earth. The entire globe is safer for your wise pronouncements. I humbly thank you.
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You resort to the same "so you're saying" tactic as the interviewer.
Nonsense. If that's what they tell him, and he says that's what they tell him, his statement is accurate. He makes no claim about billions of men---your choice of punctuation between the two sentences you quote is your own, not his. One could insert a comma, semi-colon, or dash. (Anyway, though I'm asserting he was generalizing little in this instance, generalizations can be valuable; thus if one wishes to refute or even merely attack them, the attempt must be made on the basis of demerits shown to be inherent to them, not on the basis of the worthlessness of generalizing.)
I know a doctor who treats young people for their problems. He tells me something similar. He says many of his young male patients tell him they are ashamed of their maleness and see it as inferior to femaleness. Unsurprising, considering several decades of the media, schools, and other areas of culture and society telling boys and men how terrible they are. And this generation of men and boys are for the women of like age the men and boys from among which non-lesbians must select their partners. Not very appetizing, I would think.
It's hard to see sexism where you believe it can't exist. It's hard to believe it can exist when it's in your interest to disbelieve it. Cheers.
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Some commenters are mad about the now-rejected herd immunity idea floated by the Chief Science Advisor's (it was his idea, not the government's). He's dropped the idea because of flaws in it and many loud objections, but it was nothing sinister. At face value, it sounded like an effective way, and possibly a noble way, to save hundreds of thousands of lives. It's no wonder to me at all that he raised it for discussion.
It wasn't about infecting everyone. The idea was to isolate the elderly, whom it kills much more frequently, and then let the younger people catch it. The death rate for them might be similar to that of a seasonal flu. Once that was over the old could rejoin an immune nation and be spared the illness entirely. The idea was to save many lives, perhaps the better part of a million. The virus also could not return the following year, as the Spanish Flu did.
I'm not saying it should be done but neither does it sound the least bit sinister. Perhaps it would save many lives. What people probably didn't like about it was that it would spare many seniors at the cost of a much smaller number of younger people's lives, amounting to a sacrifice of the young for the old.
The question was along these lines: Is it more preferable that 200,000 younger people and 50,000 older people die, or that 50,000 younger people and 800,000 older people die? The totals are 250,000 and 850,000. I'm not saying these are the right numbers, but this is the sort of thing he had in mind. He's the Chief Science Adviser, not a supervillain.
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