Interview on @enca Mon 4 May on nicotine, Remdesevir, lack of evidence base for government smoking restrictions, not trusting FDA too much, and generally epistemic responsibility
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Tag Archives: COVID-19
At 17:00 today South Africa time I’m part of a panel, “Pandemic and Policy”, organised by the Cambridge Dept of History and Philosophy of Science #epitwitter @ujphilosophy @ujmedia
17:00 South Africa, Europe | 16:00 UK | 11:00 US East
https://zoom.us/j/93201666974?pwd=cWhoWkhhVjNSazBjRHpzaGlKN1pPdz09
Meeting ID: 932 0166 6974 | Password: 756567
From the organisers: “The threats of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and the effectiveness and harms of the social policies meant to mitigate these threats, rapidly became the most important scientific issues in many years. This session will analyse the pandemic and policy response from a variety of angles. Topics will include the nature and empirical basis for the relevant epidemiological models, the difficulties with exporting policies out of European contexts, and the challenges of democratic citizen science in a context of lay conspiratorial skepticism of science.”
Panel
Elizabeth Anderson, John Dewey, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Alexander Broadbent, Director of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge, University of Johannesburg
Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy, University of South Florida
Chair
Jacob Stegenga, Reader in Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
To join:
Please join us on Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/93201666974?pwd=cWhoWkhhVjNSazBjRHpzaGlKN1pPdz09
Meeting ID: 932 0166 6974 | Password: 756567
While it’s not my go-to source of health news, the Daily Mail is reporting that 322 Brits under 45 have died of COVID-19 #epitwitter
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8290353/ALEX-BRUMMER-Madness-45s-work-economy-burns.html – ALEX BRUMMER: ‘Just 332 under-45s have died in UK from Corona. It’s madness to keep them from work while our economy burns’
Here is the graph they present:
At 18:30 South Africa time I’m part of a panel: “Ethics and Applicability of the Social Distancing Model in the Global South” organised by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law #epitwitter @ujphilosophy @ujmedia
South Africa, W Europe 18:30 | UK 17:30 | USA East 12:30
To join the event, RSVP here
From the organisers:
“Having first emerged in high and upper-middle income countries (China, Europe, USA), the dominant response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been to try to ‘flatten the curve’ through social distancing, while buying time to develop vaccines and cures. Almost all affected countries in the global north have pursued this strategy, with only a few exceptions such as Sweden, which has refused to order social distancing. It is too early to tell if Sweden will pay a heavy price for its heterodox approach, just as it is too early to know the social and economic costs of social distancing edicts in the north. However, at a moment when the pandemic has begun to shift to the global south, it is appropriate to reflect on the trade-offs of the social distance-dominated mitigation model, as well as its applicability across all environments.”
Read more… | RSVP here to join the event
Panelists
Professor Alex Broadbent, Director of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge; and Professor of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)
Professor Margaret Gyapong (BSc, MSc, PhD), Director, Institute of Health Research, University of Health and Allied Sciences (Ghana)
Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi (MBChB, MSc, PhD), Executive Director at the African Population and Health Research Center (Kenya)
Professor Alicia Yamin, Senior Advisor on Human Rights at Partners in Health; Senior Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; and Advisor at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation and the Bergen Center on Ethics and Priority Setting (United States)
Moderator
Professor Jackie Dugard, Scholar in Residence at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law; Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)
‘Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover’ reports @Telegraph
What is fascinating for me is the regularity with which senior people are demonstrating how hard it is to keep lockdown. This instance is of course particularly satisfying because Ferguson is the global proponent of lockdown and because this particular embarrassment demonstrates how invasive these restrictions are.
Also it has a wonderfully British flavour about it… both the outrage and the immediate resignation
Boston Review: ‘COVID-19 has revealed a contest between two competing philosophies of scientific knowledge. To manage the crisis, we must draw on both’ says @JonathanJFuller #epitwitter
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/jonathan-fuller-models-v-evidence
‘How do the coronavirus models generating these hypothetical curves square with the evidence? What roles do models and evidence play in a pandemic? Answering these questions requires reconciling two competing philosophies in the science of COVID-19.’ Great piece which will still be interesting a week, month, year and decade from now, unusually at present.
Lockdown will lead to 29 times more lives lost than the harm it seeks to prevent from Covid-19 in SA, say SA actuaries in @FinancialMail – and that’s a conservative estimate
‘EXCLUSIVE: Lockdown disaster dwarfs Covid-19, say SA actuaries’ https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/2020-05-05-lockdown-disaster-dwarfs-covid-19-say-sa-actuaries/
It’s becoming hard to keep up with this stuff – there seem to be more and more voices suggesting that the costs of lockdown may exceed the costs of COVID-19, by some measure.
A lot depends what we compare lockdown to, and one bugbear of mine is the tendency to dichotomise the question: lockdown or bust. But the real comparison is between lockdown and some other measures, short of lockdown, but nonetheless somewhat effective. The cost/benefit ratio of these intermediate measures may be more favourable then lockdown for Low/Middle Income Countries, even if they are not in High Income Countries.
“…regardless of government interventions [, after] around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential”.
Freddie Sayers of Unherd interviews Michael Levitt (a Nobel-prize-winning non-epidemiologist) on a purely statistical observations of the pattern of the epidemic. Given that the only way we have of measuring effectiveness of government interventions is statistical, that’s interesting. The fun stuff (epidemiological and statistical) comes in deciding whether the correlation is causal. But there’s been no progress with that, in my opinion; in fact for me it is here that the epidemiological profession has disappointed me – it is at if epidemiology has forgotten everything it ever taught itself about causal inference. Against that background, this is ought to give pause for thought.
Wall Street Journal: ‘Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives-is-most-places-the-data-say-no-11587930911
I can’t vouch for the methodology here; I’m sharing for interest. To be honest I’m sceptical about evidence about effectiveness of lockdown in general – it’s going to be tough to figure out and may require a lengthy progress. Anyway, I do predict we will see more of these kinds of claims, and even if they are flimsy, so, to be frank, are many of the claims made about locking down. Perhaps the most interesting thing going on right now is that there a change in what seems obvious. Things that formerly spoke for themselves no longer do. From the perspective of someone who thinks about science, that is fascinating. It’s part of what Kuhn called paradigm shift.
VIDEO ‘Lockdown is a luxury’: Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity
CPEMPH 