/220/ Aufhebonus Bonus
Added 2021-10-26 06:01:01 +0000 UTCResponding to your questions, comments & criticisms.
It's a big mailbag this time round, including plenty on Covid (lockdowns, vaccines, etc), incels and dating culture, breaking out of neoliberalism's clutches, and much more.
–––
Bungacast will be live in New York on 19 November. Come see Alex Hochuli in conversation with Adam Tooze & Amber A'Lee Frost. Tickets at Eventbrite
Comments
which is an entirely misleading representation of the vast and diverse group of people who are skeptical about the vaccines, the virus, and/or corporate and governmental responses to it. I've always appreciated all three of you, and I continue to, but Phil you in particular have a rare and special stubbornness around issues you believe in even (perhaps especially) when large factions of the left would accuse you of being right-wing for them, such as your position on Brexit for example, and I just want you to know that I think it's important and I appreciate your honesty and courage. And thank you to all of you for even being willing to talk about this shit in a time when other media people are being censored and even taken off Patreon and YouTube and so on for talking about it at all, whether or not what they're saying is true.
Samantha Geovjian Clarke
2021-10-29 04:23:39 +0000 UTCThank you Phil for standing firm against vaccine mandates, especially in pushing back against comparing what's been happening with covid vaccine passports and such like with the kinds of vaccine requirements we had for school attendance prior. I think both sides of the political spectrum have had their own ways of falling for a false partisan line on this issue, but the left in particular has been far too inclined to avoid the subject or even avoid thinking about it out of a fear of being associated with the Q-Anon Trump supporters
Samantha Geovjian Clarke
2021-10-29 04:18:18 +0000 UTCHello Bungacast, Infectious Disease doctor from Melbourne again. Based on your response to my Aufhebonus episode recently I think I’ve been misunderstood and will try again! This will be a bit long, sorry. I originally wrote to suggest that your discussions about COVID would be more interesting if you were better informed about the medical and healthcare impact of the disease, and also if you recognised the variability in the policies grouped under a general banner of “lockdown”. You seemed to interpret my comments as a defence of Australia’s COVID policies, but that wasn’t my point all. My point, to be a bit blunter about it, was that I’ve found most of your discussion about COVID both directionless and badly under-informed. Critiques of COVID policy responses from the left are clearly needed. Those critiques need to be informed by, among other things, some understanding of the natural history of the disease, and of how hospitals and healthcare systems work. Otherwise they’re incomplete and undermined by inaccuracies. I should also clarify the perspective I’m speaking from. I have absolutely no role in COVID policy. I’m a hospital doctor, relatively junior (only 12 years of training!) and I work in infectious diseases, which is not the same as public health. Infectious Diseases is a medical specialty that involves diagnosing and treating infections. Most of us, myself included, work in public hospitals treating infections such as tuberculosis, meningitis, HIV, and so on. We also care for people with all sorts of other medical problems - leukaemia, organ transplants, trauma, or any kind of problem that needs surgery - as these patients frequently get infections. Lately, we have all been treating COVID patients as well. We provide direct care to patients with COVID, and also give advice to frontline workers of other specialities. I have looked after COVID patients on the ward in the first and second waves before vaccines were available, and also now, with close to 80% double-vaccination rates, so I am familiar with the experience of patients in both contexts. But there is also a very large part of my job that has nothing to do with COVID at all, and I’ve seen the impact on other healthcare processes and outcomes for my other patients. My point is that I am not an expert, but I have a sense of what it’s like for people who are sick or die with COVID, and for the huge population of people who have any kind of health problem during a pandemic. I think the impact on these people is completely absent from your analysis. The frank numbers – death tolls, long-term complications – are also absent. On the rare occasions death is acknowledged in your discussions it’s usually with some reference to “overstated” death tolls and “pre-existing conditions.” Quantifying excess death is complex and rich academic territory if you’re willing to engage with it in good faith, but again requires some kind of effort to understand how this data is collected and interpreted. Regardless, if you’re claiming the numbers are fudged to the numbers tune of millions of deaths worldwide and tens-to-hundreds of thousands in the UK, you should be upfront about that, and it warrants debate and perhaps its own episode. If you’re not making that claim, then your policy arguments are confused and half-formed as they don’t include discussion about the fundamental issues of sickness and death. Many people have drawn parallels to road safety or drug policy to demonstrate that we make judgements about risk, freedom and “acceptable” rates of morbidity in policy all the time. But these discussions can’t be taken seriously if morbidity is disregarded entirely. There is also a broader societal impact that you have never engaged with. My view is that a functioning public healthcare system is essential to a functioning democracy. The fact that access to healthcare is contingent on employment and/or personal wealth in the USA has always struck me as fundamentally undermining to democratic process and one of the most powerful mechanisms of exploitation of workers. Poor health, poverty and social marginalisation are intrinsically linked and it’s not possible, in my view, to have a meaningful discussion about democratic process and liberty during a pandemic without acknowledging the cost of ill health and death, and considering who bears the brunt of that cost. My other gripe is that your critiques of COVID policy are impossibly vague. To repeat a point I attempted to make originally, Australia does not have a unified COVID policy, and using “lockdown” to refer to distinct policies in different states, let alone countries, is meaningless. “Lockdown” is not a single coherent policy type and critiques of lockdown should be specific and detailed. You pointed to Australia’s strict border closure, which led citizens or family members stranded abroad. I agree this is a bad policy! It’s a specifically bad policy. There are many examples of such specifically bad policies and, in my view, there are some specifically good ones. They should all be up for debate. Furlough pay, mask wearing, closure of face-to-face retail, closure of clubs, closure of schools, “work from home” orders, gathering size limits, outlawing of public protests – these are distinct entities with different impacts. Even if your position is to have no restrictions of any kind, it should be possible to articulate this clearly. In any case, COVID policy is clearly an evergreen podcast topic. I have plenty of opinions about different elements of COVID policy, and from the comments it looks like lots of other listeners do too. But some clarity about the terms of the discussion are needed. I hope future episodes about COVID will have a clearer focus on specific questions: vaccine mandates, mask wearing, schools, public healthcare funding and staffing etc, and that you can include some recognition of medical and healthcare perspectives. The offer to clarify some of these point stands. Finally, your comments about loss of respect for expertise might be correct, but it’s a change you seem to actively support and I think you’re wrong to be gleeful about it. I’m relatively young, female, and frontline medical care is not especially glamourous, so I assure you I’m not inundated with waves of respectful deference from day to day. Giving advice and having it rejected some of the time is a normal part of the job. But in my experience most people find it very difficult to make decisions about their health without guidance from someone with training who they trust, and being able to seek help from an expert is comforting to most people when they are unwell. “Doing your own research” without years of education is just as difficult as it sounds and is not a responsibility that everyone necessarily wants to take on for themselves or their loved ones.
AM
2021-10-28 13:29:28 +0000 UTC
