The Predictable Pyres of India

The pyres of India are burning on overtime. Each day is a new record of people dead or infected. Battles rage over medical oxygen. People reportedly die in the streets. Things aren’t going very well, to say the least…

It’s a travesty. A tragedy. Naturally. But I have a hard time feeling sad about it. I find sympathy in short supply for the beleaguered Indians. Because this development isn’t surprising to me. Not one bit.

Seeing as the memory of the public, and the internet even more so, is spotty and inconsistent at best, let’s remind ourselves of a few of the scenes we’ve seen out of India for the past few months. Religious holidays attended by tens of thousands. Bathing in the Ganges, as just one example. Or why not look at the ongoing farming protests outside New Delhi, that have been crowded and tumultuous since September. Or the sometimes raucus demonstrations against violence on women.

If there’s one painfully apparent lesson to all these occurrences, it’s that it has proven near impossible to instill a practice of social distancing upon the subcontinent. For practical, financial, religious, habitual, and demographical reasons, surely. But also for a lack of leadership and discipline. I loathe to use the s-word, but it seems clear that India has failed to adapt to the current pandemic. And now, the country is paying for it.

And all the while, the Bharatiya Janata Party, with prime minister Narendra Modi channeling the same wavelengths as Bolsanaro or Trump, beats its chest and proclaim the pandemic defeated through sheer force of cultural virtue.

It’s easy to condemn, from up here in a Norse ivory tower, as a privileged westerner. It’s easy to judge when we here have the opportunity and capacity to properly socially distance until the vaccines are doled out sufficiently. But no matter how easy it is to sneer at foreign social norms that have been unable to adapt to a new world order, the facts stay the same. India is on its knees. On Friday, India sported nearly 400’000 daily cases. Nearly half a million people in just one, single, solitary, day. And those are confirmed cases, mind you. I imagine there being quite a few unconfirmed ones as well in a nation as financially and socially diverse as India.

And I have not a tear to shed. I’m sorry, maybe I’m callous, but I can’t. Because from what we’ve seen out of that nation, this seems naught but fair. No; people don’t deserve to die in droves because they’re unable or unwilling to distance themselves from each other. No; people don’t deserve to die because their elected leadership is a criminally belligerent nationalistic mess. But what do you expect? The virus doesn’t care whether you’re too poor to socially distance, too pious to avoid public gatherings, too easily fooled to elect capable leadership, or too uninformed to undertake proper precautions. Those are all relative terms which an absolute plague doesn’t give a fig about. And if it can get you, it will get you, regardless of your finances, education, religion, or intelligence.

To add insult to injury, with every unnecessary or easily preventable infection, the state of the war on Covid deteriorates with new mutations, creating a steeper challenge for governments and doctors and nurses to stop the spread. So, not only is it a tragedy that Indians are dying en masse, but also that by doing so, they’re putting everyone else at greater risk too.

So in lieu of sadness or sympathy, I feel frustration and anger. And it doesn’t matter if that’s unfair or cruel or mean. Because the plague’s running rampant in India. The implications of which are thousands of dead, and an increased risk for the rest of the world. The reasons for which is a population of people incapable or unwilling to take precautions. Which in turn can be traced back to a government or society that has proven utterly unprepared to handle and unwilling to adapt to handling a pestilence like this. Whoever you want to blame, be it Modi’s and the BJP’s leadership, the socially dependent and tight-knit communities, the dense demographical and socioeconomical circumstances, or the recklessness of an uninformed public, the results are the same. Dead people, and a biological wild-fire out of control. All of which we could see coming a mile away.

/Sebastian Lindberg 5/4-2021

The Vaccine Roadclot

Vaccines: The single-handed reason that saying “bless you” when you hear someone sneeze no longer signals a genuine fear that that person might drop dead any moment. A scientific marvel that slowly but surely, disease by bloody disease, mutation by soddin’ mutation, is turning the human race immune to the vehement embrace of Grandfather Nurgle.

Vaccines are neat! Especially so one year into the Covid plague, with vaccines on the horizon that promise a return to social interactions, movie theatres, and late nights at the pub.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, as of time of writing, Thailand begrudgingly agrees to continue to use the AstraZeneca vaccine, after shortly joining a slew of nations that have halted the Astra inoculations. Just as there’s an acute vaccine shortage all ’round the globe. Just as China is setting its diplomatic hooks into populations and nations with offers of its own Sinovac vaccine.

There’s got to be a good reason to cease vaccinations though, right? Rumours abound that the British AstraZeneca vaccine is causing blood clots, rumours that Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Iceland, (and just ahead of publications also Sweden), and briefly Thailand, have all taken to heart. But according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), there’s no reason to believe that the 30-some cases of blood clots among some 5 million Astra-vaccinated people in the EU is anything but a coincidence, and just represents the normal amount of blood clots among the general population. But why then has at least (at the time of writing) nine countries world wide halted the use of the vaccine if the clotting is perfectly natural?

Let us take a look at a few what-ifs to sus out what to make of this controversy. And to do that, let us make some working assumptions. From conversations with doctors, I am lead to understand that stage three trials of vaccines are usually composed of some 30’000 people. Once these 30k have been vaccinated, you document the found side-effects and what level of immunity the vaccine affords, and presto it’s off to the races.

Potential circumstances #1: It’s as the EMA and WHO says. The reported events of blood clots have nothing to do with the Astra vaccine. It’s just stupidity-hysteria. If you don’t have a pharmacological degree or an administrative responsibility for human civilization to survive a deadly and stupefying plague; trust the authorities and shut up.

Potential circumstances #2: AstraZeneca found among their 30k testers the possibility that the vaccine could cause blood clots. Which means, that eventuality should have been on the package. Which means that Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Belgium, and all the rest knew the risks. Bitching about it now seems immature. There’re always risks with pharmaceuticals. All medical drugs are basically poison. They’re just hopefully the right kind of poison at the right time. In such a scenario; chin up and shut up and get on with the program you reactionary twits.

Potential circumstances #3: The blood clots are caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine, but the odds are real fucking low, seeing as they didn’t even show up during testing. If a side effect is to reliably show up during stage 3 trials, the odds of them occurring must be higher than 1 in 30’000 cases. According to the data that this hysteria is based on, the odds are 30 in 5’000’000 of clots occuring. In shortened form, that’s 1 in 166’667 cases. Obviously, it’s possible for Astra to have missed that eventuality in QA, considering it’s more than five times rarer than the least probably side effect that you can expect their trial runs to find.

Potential circumstance #3.5: Okay, we need to keep in mind that people are absolute garbage at internalizing statistics. We’re shit at it. Just plain suck. Confirmation bias, a lack of perspective, and an inability to understand numbers over like 20, makes us woefully ill-equipped to accept long odds and probability. I mean, if we were any good at it, there’d be no money in gambling. But there is! There’s a metric shit-ton of money in gambling. Which would indicate what I’ve been saying: That people are incapable of understanding basic statistics.

So what when you have a vaccine, a vaccine that’s supposed to save human civilization from a slow smother, and the idea is that you’re going to vaccinate some 70% of the world’s population, you’re going to come across some weird effects. Inevitably. Even the really, really, really, really, really, REALLY, unlikely ones. It makes a statistical impossibility a practical inevitability. And that’s fine. It’s okay if thirty people have complications if it immunizes 3.9 million people (seeing as the Astra vaccine is reportedly like 78%-proof) from a deadly disease. How deadly? Well, assuming that all 3.9 million of those people would otherwise catch the bug, it would save 86’848 people. And that’s not counting all the people that those 3.9 million might pass the bug on to. So what we’re weighing here is 30 lives against over 86’000 lives. That’s not even a contest for any responsible government.

In which case, stop being such fucking reactionary babies, you immature shits, and cease your virtue signalling during a global crisis, please okay thanks and bye.

Potential circumstance #4 (the least likely one): AstraZeneca has lied about their stage 3 trial results, and there’re a bunch of problematic side effects that their vaccine can cause. And if so, fuck ’em. Burn AstraZeneca at the stake of public opinion. Chase them off across the English Channel and let them peddle their poison to the politically proven pinhead population there.

Look, things aren’t ideal. The world is not an ideal place, even before the Wuhan Virus gummed up the works. We’re tired of staying at home, we’re sick of social distancing, and we’re fed up with restrictions. Even we who aren’t stupid enough to still believe it’s all a hoax. Everyone wants this nightmare to end. And the solutions aren’t always going to be gentle or nice. The AstraZeneca vaccine is proving itself to be a problematic one, seeing as it can cause a pretty rough flu reaction (especially among those that have already had Covid-19). But it’s still better than the alternative. And even though there’re plenty of different vaccines out there (Moderna, Pfizer, Sinovac, Sputnik V, etc.) everyone’s raging for doses.

We’re not spoiled for choice right now. We need to take what we can get to make it through this global crisis. And we can either whine like little bitches about our world not being perfect, or we can nut up and shut up and get on with the program. You can either be a trooper and do your part by getting vaccinated if/and/or when one is made available to you, or you can be a Belgian baby about it and whine that someone once told you that maybe there’s a statistical impossibly small chance that doing your diligence could maybe be dangerous to you personally. It’s your call.

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/3-2021

A Self-Prescribed Collapse

“We didn’t get any support to help test our employees, we didn’t get any protective equipment. They didn’t help us to do what they wanted us to!”, the chairperson of the lobby organisation for private health care services in Sweden whines. According to her, their businesses were left out in the cold as soon as the pandemic spread. They had to fend for themselves like the poor little helpless babes they now claim to be. They were abandoned in the midst of a oncoming pandemic, according to their version of events.

Recently, a study from the Swedish health care inspection (IVO) painted a stark picture on the state of the Swedish geriatric care. The institutions that are supposed to care and tend to the elderly, where the vast majority of Sweden’s disproportionate high number of Wuhan Virus casualties can be found. According to the report, old people diagnosed with the disease were oft-times given sedatives, painkillers, and locked in their rooms to die. To hand-wave away potential criticism, the geriatric care units locked the doors so that families couldn’t visit their old ones. Meanwhile, the unprotected employees and carers cycled through the wards, spreading the infection like wildfire.

The elderly were left to die. Hooked up to drugs and shut away in their rooms. Not by the Swedish state or the public health ministry, but by the health care administrations, private and public, across the country.

And according to the public and private elderly home administrators, they didn’t know any better. They had no means to do any better. Their hands were tied and they didn’t get any help. So they left their clients to die. Because, apparently, that was the best they could do without the stern government hand to guide them. They say that they didn’t know any better.

If that was their best idea, I hate to imagine what their bad ideas looked like…

The private and county municipal health care industry in Sweden has faltered. The pandemic was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And they’re not alone. Reports of business sectors falling apart are abundant. The taxi-cab industry clamours that it’s bleeding and demand government aid packages to stay afloat. Same goes for hundreds of gas stations across Sweden. And yet, it seems that the country is doing much better economically than most others in the western world, where big and small private businesses are snuffed out en masse.

The Wuhan Virus, Covid-19, the novel corona virus, the new plague, is proving to be the death knell to many of our social and financial institutions.

These stories might come as a shock to most. Maybe not strictly as a surprises any more, after a year of lockdowns and a new modus operandi for the world, but certainly something worthy of lamentation. What you took for granted, this consumerist society, the service industry, the very fabric of our post-modern world, is cracking under the pressure of a pandemic disaster.

To me, however, it gives a rise to nothing but anger and derision. Because we knew that another pandemic was coming. We had near misses for several years counting up to this Wuhan Virus. We had the avian flu, the pig flu, SARS, all potential killers. We dodged them, for the most part, but you can’t stay lucky forever. And what did we do? Did we prepare? Did we stockpile protective equipment? Did we build safeguards against economic lockdowns? Did we train the public pre-emptively on how to deal with a potential plague? Did we adjust our health care services to match a looming eventuality?

No. We did not. We knew it was coming. Scientists and doctors knew it was coming. And our leaders, us the public, didn’t want to listen. We wanted to carry on like always even though every single one of us that knew better told us that it wouldn’t always be so.

We were told. The public was told. Politicians were told. The media was told. And we didn’t listen. We made no adjustments. The health care services around the world didn’t stockpile materials. They didn’t shore up the turnover of employees. They didn’t put safeguards in place. Because that would have cost money. Our politicians didn’t push the issue. They didn’t pressure the health care industry to prepare. They didn’t push the markets to invest for a pandemic winter. Because being a storm crow won’t win you any votes. And so, our gutted public health care advisory boards were left, toothless, to set up contingencies on their own. Without respect or attention paid by the rest of society. Because the looming threat of pestilence was their problem, we dismissed.

And now we, the industry, the public, the politicians, the markets, wail and whine at the public health defenders that they haven’t done enough to protect us. Even though we all knew damned well that our margins weren’t enough to handle the strains of a crisis. We knew. The health care industry which constantly cuts corners and personnel to mitigate fiscal concerns knew. The politicians who threw away stockpiles of medical protective equipment because the storage of it turned costly knew. The markets that continually rely on the wild and unsustainable consumption of goods and services knew. The banks that provide loans to businesses under circumstances that weren’t sustainable or resilient enough to withstand a plague knew. The public lulled into laziness and complacency knew. We all knew that the centre wouldn’t hold come a real disease.

And now we complain when our margins aren’t enough to withstand a plague. Now we shift blame while we full well know that the paradigms and systems we have laboured to maintain couldn’t sustain this kind of inevitable event. We knew we should have changed, we should have evolved, but we couldn’t be arsed to. It is almost as if we’ve actively exerted ourselves to create and propagate a society that can’t handle the stresses of inexorable disaster. This isn’t the first time a confluence of calamities have steam-rolled civilization. It will not be the last time either.

I think it is beyond the pale when the likes of Eva Nilsson Bågenholm, the chairperson of the lobby organisation of the private health care sector to whine and complain and shift blame. I think it is beyond the pale of the likes of her, in charge of safeguarding our elderly, to claim that they didn’t know what to do when disaster eventually hit as everyone knew it would. We all knew this was coming. And we collectively chose to shove our heads in the sand, to keep cutting corners, to keep slimming the margins.

The doctors and epidemiologists don’t deserve our scorn. We should instead look into the mirror. We deserve to feel absolute and utter shame because we chose to disregard history, the storm crow advice of the WHO and national health care advisors. And now we’re proving too cowardly to face up to our own lack of foresight.

The pandemic’s humbling effects aren’t the fault of doctors and medical professionals. They simply work for us, the democratic public. It is not their fault that we hamstrung their efforts. The fault is our own.

/Sebastian Lindberg 1/12-2020

Offended By Science

“I didn’t recognize myself in their depiction of 70-year olds”, the poor victim on the radio show explains. “I felt offended. So it was my right to sue them.”

Them, in this case, being the Swedish Public Health Ministry (Folkhälsomyndigheten). Because according to the Ministry, 70-year olds should sequester themselves away from social interactions to prevent Covid-19 infection, seeing as the elderly are particularly sensitive to the effects and complications that the Wuhan Virus can cause.

According to this 70-year-plus old psychologist, the Public Health Ministry have discriminated against him and his peers. Stigmatized them. The internationally controversial Swedish Public Health Ministry, which has earned global ire for the country’s lax Covid restrictions and high number of deaths at elderly homes, have treated them unfairly.

Imagine the brass balls of privilege of this Boomer, to initiate legal action against the public agency whose job it is to keep him alive and healthy, for doing that very job. We have seen this sort of behaviour in the US, with violent protests against stay-at-home orders and mandatory masks. There, we have seen people take up arms and threaten violent insurrection just because the state doesn’t want them to die and spread a deadly and degenerative malady. We have even seen the US federal authority on infectious disease, Doctor Anthony Fauci, receive death threats, because he has prioritised fighting a deadly virus over pandering to malcontents with the cognitive capacity of angry muppets.

Naturally, the US is worse. Big surprise. But I did not expect to hear from this sort of querulant in placid, passive lil’ old Sweden.

I get disagreeing with restrictions. Or the lack thereof, as Sweden has been accosted for by neighbouring countries. I have also said my piece on the mandate of masks among the public. Fact is we won’t know the “right” way of dealing with Covid until we’re done with it. Probably not even then. By contrast, I also understand the introduction of restrictions on the market economy to avoid catastrophic spread. Depends on whether you value economic growth or human lives, really. It’s a matter of priority, and I know very well that some prefer their stock portfolio’s over the health of random schmucks. The 1%, and those that desperately want to belong to it, didn’t go away just because a plague erupted.

What I do not understand is how you can claim that statistically relevant biological information can be construed as discriminatory. What kind of ass-ward pageantry is that?! How can you argue with any sliver of intellectual honesty that doctors discriminate against you when you’re part of a demographic that suffers particularly from the new influenza strain? It is factual, statistical truth that the elderly suffer the worst. We saw that back in March and April. The intensive care units around the world were filled to the brim with people around the age of 70.

Imagine being so privileged, so belligerently entitled, that you think that the scientific field of epidemiology is assaulting you. Personally. With science and statistical analysis. It’s like a fat person seeking judicial arbitration against Newton for formalizing the theory of gravity. I’m not saying a Boomer is the only creature that in its natural habitat can accumulate this amount of egocentrism, but… ‘lo and behold. Now, most of the elderly that I’ve spoken to or observed following the restrictions either can’t mentally adjust to them, or blatantly don’t care whether they live or die. But as of yet, I hadn’t encountered anyone that would even conceive of screaming “unfair!” at the face of a pandemic response figures.

And yet, here we are. With the government agency tasked with safeguarding the citizenry and society in the face of a pervasive new bug. They labour without a national stockpile of protective equipment, against market forces that have hollowed out the healthcare industry to its bare skeletal structure, against a public that is desperate for things to go back to a normal that was intrinsically unstable. And whether they’ve been right or wrong in their labours, whether they’re failing or succeeding, I do not believe for a minute that the Swedish Public Health Ministry is “out to get” the elderly or infirm. Yet, they have to receive, react to, and handle egocentric complaints like this.

Speaking of “unfair”…

/Sebastian Lindberg 24/11-2020