C.L. has a great piece on PandaCons over at his place:
In epidemiology, however, this sort of pro rata flimflam just won’t do. Unlike Australia, America is not an island continent with an oceanic moat; it doesn’t have nine governments but more than 50. Precisely because the United States isn’t largely unpopulated – New York City alone has more people than New South Wales – the matrices of infection cannot be easily mapped or so lazily contrasted. There is no point trying to score cheap coronavirus points by comparing ourselves to other nations because – excepting New Zealand – no serviceable comparisons exist.
He is right on the money. However, I don’t think Claire Lehmann is in any respect a conservative, though Gray Connelly is very definitely. I’m happy enough to give Gray a pass on this, we have to accept that on some matters, we are going to disagree in our practical deliberations even when we may be coming at the matter from the same or similar principled background. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we shouldn’t point out their misjudgments.
Quite.
There’s enough flimflam associated with epidemiology by its practitioners already.
We always imitate the Americans.
Except in fascism. We are miles in front of them.
World leaders in fact.
Indeed, Roger. They are statisticians with a rudimentary grasp of medical matters, at best.
Entrail readers with the power to destroy lives, at worst.
And by gifting our CHOs with virtually unquestionable emergency powers our parliaments have, wittingly or unwittingly, made the epidemiologists the arbiters of our freedoms.
Note well that not one Australian epidemiologost co-signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which warned that the impact of community lockdowns on physical and metal health were worse than the virus and called for focused protection of the vulnerable instead, which was public health policy re epidemics up until early 2020.
Not one.