I share this Tweet, which is an angry reaction from someone well known to me to Chris Whitty's suggestion that we should just get on and accept Covid deaths, as we supposedly do flu deaths:
Like the deaths attributed to flu, which aren't seen in such numbers in the Nordic countries where income is distributed more fairly: Covid is a disease of poverty.
So @CMO_England is telling us to learn to live with poverty. And that's why he must go. https://t.co/SapqFivCAU
— Jacqueline Murphy (@drjawalsh) April 2, 2021
It would seem that Chris Whitty's ignorance of flu deaths is pretty staggering. This was a tweet from earlier this year on this issue, using ONS data:
This data suggests that the annual death rate from flu is not high. Perhaps this is evidence of the vaccination strategy for flu working? I wonder if wearing masks, distancing and hand washing practices this past year will have a positive effect on eliminating flu? pic.twitter.com/R38DOsEKdC
— Phil Nedin (@NedinPhil) February 20, 2021
Flu deaths are actually very low. Maybe we would live with them. Deaths from pneumonia are not low. They are what Chris Whitty is asking us to live with. They are abnormally high in the UK. And there is an explanation for this. See this letter in the British Medical Journal. But perhaps most tellingly note this journal paper from Martin McKee, also noted above. The abstract says:
Many European countries experience a seasonal excess in deaths each winter compared to summer. The magnitude of the excess is greater in the United Kingdom than in many other European countries. Examination of the data for Northern Ireland indicates that myocardial infarction, respiratory disease and stroke exhibit the greatest increases during winter. Excess deaths from these conditions are closely associated with low environmental temperature.
What does that mean, because let's be clear that there are many places cooler than Northern Ireland? Lower environmental temperature means that people have cold houses. And why do they have cold houses? Because they cannot afford to heat them, that's why.
In other words the deaths from so-called flu are actually from pneumonia and the incidence of this flu is heaviest amongst those in houses that people cannot afford to heat. This is, in that case, a disease of poverty.
And it is as a disease of poverty, hitting those on low income and from minority ethnic communities the hardest, that Chris Whitty is asking us to accept Covid 19 deaths.
That angry tweet is more than justified in that case.
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First of all, I should make it clear that I’m not an ultra right libertarian who places his right to go to the pub above the rights of others to avoid being infected with a potentially lethal virus. I’m not in any hurry to end this lockdown.
However, to be fair to Chris Whitty, he is saying, if I understand him correctly, that we don’t have much choice other than to live with the new virus. Probably, he should have been more specific and not lumped all deaths from respiratory infections as “flu”, but his argument still stands. There is a problem with adequate vaccine supplies at the moment but this will rapidly change in the months ahead. This time next year we’ll have more vaccines than we can possibly need. So there is no reason why we have to accept a continued high death toll.
The main problem is likely to be vaccine scepticism. However, we won’t be able to compel everyone to do the right thing.
So short of immediately abolishing poverty which most of us in the Labour Party have spent our lives working for, and is unlikely to happen in the next few years, what would be your solution?
There is a problem with this logic
It is that Covid 19 grows exponentially
You and Whitty are assuming that it can be controlled in linear fashion, but that is not how it behaves
The consequence is that your logic does not follow
My solution – keep seeking to eliminate – which requires a much stronger effort in schools, workplaces and public areas – especially around air flow
Poor but very nice Danny Dorling will get short shrift from Matt Hancock on this issue. His disdain for Danny is well known.
As for Chris Whitty – now is the time for another hoodie to call him out. In one statement Whitty has confirmed that Timothy Snyder’s ‘inevitability politics’ hypothesis is correct.
There is nothing inevitable about Covid except the way it is transmitted and how it kills. I feel that many of these deaths from pneumonia and Covid were avoidable (such as Sunak’s stupid summertime policy which should have been called ‘Eat out to check out’).
If you want privatised energy companies to make a profit, people need an income to heat their homes. But when you’ve been cutting benefits and want your voters to be cheap labour for the market and to ‘compete’ it does not really add up does it?
This is because increasingly the shower of shit who run this country (our elected members) who are very highly paid to mismanage our country have NO IDEA how ordinary people live.
It’s shocking – it really is. Like one of you respondents recently said ‘There’s none so blind as those who refuse to see’.
Hancock does not want to see
I am not sure Whitty does either
Danny does – although we don’t always agree, and correspond quite often