Cassandra Voices

Tag: “thinking

  • This Is The Leg I Use When I’m Thinking

    His blue look was on the ground, as though it held the reason for the last five minutes. She took him all in. The hair was wavy on top and cropped tight at the sides, sprinkled grey. He looked down at her on the step. Are you ok?

    My hero? she ventured.

    From her seat on the steps in the archway, she watched the rain come fast and heavy on the lane.

    He laughed, lowered his head and folded his arms, looked at his shoes then at the rain, searching for the next thing to say.

    We should bring you to the hospital.

    No, she said. No hospital.

    The steps led up to what looked like two apartments with dark, imperious doors. Across the lane, the open back door of a commercial kitchen, wheezing steam, chattering work and a churning smell of Italian food mingled with the food bins parked by the door. The rain was the type that felt like God tipped over the sky and the blue was washing away. She loved it. She wanted to ride down a newborn river crashing through the buildings, forests, mountains, meat till she reached the ocean and swallowed it. But she had just been hit by a car so instead, she wanted her seat.

    Do you live near here? he said, biting his lip.

    He sure wore that black suit.

    Sorry I slapped you, she said.

    Ah, he waved his hand. You were in shock.

    Ask me the next thing.

    Are you drunk? he said, smirking.

    No. I just want to go home.

    It’s just I saw you in the restaurant –

    I want to go home.

    I’ll take you.

    No, she said, trying to rise.

    She stopped because she lacked the strength, so she concealed it by instead shifting to fish out her purse from underneath her.

    Were you drinking? he pursued, worrying his lip again.

    Ignoring him, she lit a cigarette, and blew a drag at him, careless, spent. With something like tiredness, her long lashes closed slow and long on him. She felt languorous, suspended for an unknown interval, free and anonymous on a step behind the rain. Her head rested on the wall.

    A pack of girls in hotpants skittered trilling and swearing through the alley like a fuckle of turkeys, their jackets held high over their heads as umbrellas. Celine could taste blood on her tongue.

    Gimme one a’those, will ya? he said, dabbing his face dry with the cuff of his jacket.

    His finger grazed hers when he took the packet – a shock of intimacy worse than his manhandling when he cowboyed her clear of the road, away from the traffic and chaotic onlookers. Snatching her lighter from the air between them where she threw it, he moved closer. Her palm massaged the hip that caught the bumper. The car that hit her threw bawls of abuse out the window, taking her for drunk as well. It struck her how much taller than her her rescuer was when he was close, the way trees get taller when you walk toward them.

    So what are you fallin’ all over the place for? he said, squinting down at her.

    Fuck off, she said, quietly.

    He laughed. Is it your birthday or something?

    She looked at him.

    Well, you’re all decked out in leopard print and silk and eating alone in a restaurant. And falling all over the place drunk.

    I’m not drunk, she said, emphatically flat.

    Really? he smirked.

    And I’m not engaging your asshole-ishness either because if I do collapse and start spitting up blood you’ll know I’m not drunk and that yes, you tool, I have a condition. Tachycardia.

    I don’t care.

    Jesus.

    Because you’re just so fucking beautiful I can’t think of anything else.

    She laughed, a great blart of a belly laugh.

    Fuh – I haven’t laughed like that in a while, she said.

    Well at last, he beamed, A fuckin’ smile outta ya.

    You think this is funny?

    I do, a bit, yeah.

    She spiked him an awful look.

    He retreated and exhaled, letting the air flupper his lips like a horse.

    The rain was thunderous on the cobblestones and rooftops.

    And I’m not a l-lady, she stammered, I’m a strong woman. I’ll take it from here.

    I’m Bob by the way.

    Ya. Call me a taxi, will ya?

    I can drive you.

    No.

     

    Bob followed Celine’s taxi in his car without her knowledge. It brought her through Shantalla and dropped her at the University Hospital. The night was dirty green and umber with trees and street light. He parked outside Mr. Waffle and watched her in the mirror walking away from him toward the building where she was born.

    He shadowed her to the ICU. In an open plan of a dozen beds, she rounded a corner and was gone. Staying hidden, he spied out from the corner and saw her. Four beds down, stopped at the one near the window. The bed contained a small figure, a child.

    As she faced the bed with slumped shoulders, Celine’s expression was sombre. Her heart separated through water. She stood still at the foot of the bed and raised a hand to her mouth.

    You won’t let me leave, wee one, she whispered to her fingers.

    The child’s small, closed eyes, with the tubes up her nose and down her mouth. Her daughter hooked up to the Matrix, and not the Ribbon, where it was easier to spend time with her. Celine softly traced a curl on the sleeping forehead. With soundless poise, she placed herself on the plastic grey seat next to the head of the bed, and lightly rested her hand on the bedspread. The night drank the place down. Beyond the window, it painted with hate.

    You can’t out-G me, she said to it. I’ll hate you dead.

    She wished she knew what she thought. In that moment she was blessed with the truth that it was not possible to know anything, not even that you didn’t know, because you often did and had no excuse. And what did knowing and not knowing at the same time do to each other? Give birth to something, anything you wanted. She wanted freedom. In that moment, she had it. But the guilt of having it swept in to rob her of it. Nothing after nothing, and she was herself again, for the first time that day, without self, nobody, happily, with all the answers and no way or wish to convey them. She was without her body, left with a voice that would not speak, wiser than her and uncontrollable until the time called for it, and it just came to cut through the ugly and vulgar. She almost worshipped it. She hesitated to call it truth, in case it taught her a lesson in manners about labelling and chose never to speak to her again.

    Christ, anything but that, she prayed.

    No, it wasn’t gone. It would hold its peace. It would hold all the pieces.

    Maybe it will be today, she thought. On your birthday, Polly, pet. I’ll be there to welcome you. Here or there, in the next place. Don’t be scared. Ever. When it comes time to go.

    Polly hadn’t moved. Not a twitch or a sniff, in her deep sleep. Did she sense her mother? Celine did not aspire to that level of vanity. She loved her daughter, she wasn’t in love with her, and didn’t expect the same in return, she didn’t expect any love.

    It will cleanse you, she said silently, covering her mouth with her fingertips again, afraid that the world might see the words.

    Your death, love.

    Something selfish made her acknowledge death; where it was in the room, where it came near and pulled up a chair. It carried the details, and the world’s ‘reality’: the floating world, a weaponised litany of details masquerading as facts, aiming her memory at her with diagnoses, prognoses, projections, reflections, incompetence, fallacies, failure, contingencies, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, deny God, deny faith, accept death, a reality that did not accept the agency of free will, but stole it and sold it back in the form of vanity branded as truth. Untraceably, one’s own truth. Good or bad.

    Details. She didn’t want charts, names of medicines, names of doctors, nurses. Let death slobber over those. But she had them. Like a disease, she couldn’t get rid of. If she had them, Polly didn’t have to have them and if Celine tossed them, they’d be far from Polly. Either way, Polly was free. Either way. She would be free.

    And with that endorsement, Death reached a hand out toward her child. Celine caught the wrist. It was like catching solid air. It struggled. She put its fingers in her mouth, and bit down. They slithered down her throat and fizzed in her oesophagus. Peristalsis saw them to her stomach where they were corralled in a dance of digestion. She swallowed all the death in the room. And felt better.

    The pain of envy struck Celine’s breast. Polly was closer to birth, and therefore death, and was the only guide Celine had to her own point of origin, the point in space and time where she was born. Yes, Celine was caught in vain self-preservation and all its grey shades. With a shock, she realised that it had been here in this very building, thirty years ago in two days time. Celine was born into this on September 17th 1988, perhaps on this very spot. It was violent genius, divine.

    Polly or Celine. One or the other would go. The old way. Barter. No. Not that way. It was what Celine would mean it to be. For one to live, the other did not have to die. No deal of Celine for Polly. Or the threat of what no intervention would bring – Polly for Celine – with nature favouring the robust. She appealed neither to the god of nature or the one who was supposed to control it. She blessed herself and thanked whatever was the most honourable aspect of God, the one who protected the meek, for her life and for Polly’s. She had always accepted Polly’s immortality. For the first time she was able to accept her mortality, two years into her small but powerful life. If Polly lived, her mother would live. If Polly died, her mother would die, she promised God. But she swore neither of them would die and she put her foot down.

    If she dies, she said to God, I’m coming for you.

    Bob, watching her from the corner, saw a small curly brown head on the pillow above a face of rosebud features. A potted plant sat on the bed stand. He was struck by its dark green leaves and bright red flowers, a liminal vigil above its small human ward. What he saw – mother and daughter – he couldn’t process at that moment, and slipstreamed into an oblique thought.

    Bob considered the watering of a potted plant, why it could never be a good thing to pour water from a jug down on top of the soil. It would only wash the nutrients away after the manner of a flood. For another thing, if plants were sentient, and he had some doubt as to whether they were not, it would become distressed, and he couldn’t abide the thought of that. For the overall health of the thing, at least, it was better to be gentle with watering, like rain, as gentle as nature is when it waters. Even heavy rain distributes water evenly, hitting the ground lighter than a jug’s spout aimed at a stem.

    The roots took in water from below, he acknowledged, watching Celine’s face. The leaves took in light from above.

    Be water, said the martial artist once.

    And the meek inherit the earth.

    Feature Image: Kaique Rocha

  • Lockdowns: “Thinking in One Dimension”. Podcast Interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta.

    Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-ii-100102849

    Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep4-lockdowns-thinking-in-one-dimension-with-guest/id1728086643?i=1000648655188

    In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected.

    This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, whose modelling assumed Covid-19 had just arrived in the West and that we had no cross-immunity from other coronaviruses against it, meaning it would kill almost one in a hundred of those who contracted it. For reasons still inadequately explored, the U.K., Irish and most Western governments – along with many in the Global South – followed Ferguson’s (and others’) doomsday prediction and chose untested lockdowns in anticipation of a vaccine – a containment strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, as opposed to a (Chinese-style) elimination strategy.

    Sunetra Gupta has been vindicated in her assessment that Covid 19 had been circulating far longer than initially understood, and also that it had a much lower fatality rate than Ferguson and others assumed from limited data. Moreover, it was obvious that this social experiment would cause serious harms, while its inability to contain the virus was unknown.

    Sunetra Gupta did not take lockdown lying down. She and a number of academic colleagues authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, advocating for an end to lockdowns, and promoting the targeted protection of the elderly – who were by far the most susceptible to death from the virus.

    What followed was not, as she hoped, a civilised discussion weighing the costs and benefits of each strategy, but abuse and even an attempt to have her silenced.

    Sunetra Gupta argues that what we experienced with lockdowns represented a distortion of the precautionary principle, arguing:

    I think that people were incorrectly assuming that they were applying the precautionary principle to all of this. So they were thinking, okay, well, you know, the worst case scenario is what we should be going by. And that’s because they were thinking in one dimension, which is we’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop this pandemic from unfolding, because it is compatible with the idea that 1% of the population will die if it just unfurls. What they were missing was the fact that these very measures that they were seeking to employ to stop the spread were ones that came at a very huge cost – and that was known at the time – what we didn’t know is whether those measures would stop the spread. And even if they did, what effect that would actually have eventually on the final death toll. But what we absolutely knew for certain – because it was happening in front of our eyes – is that these lockdowns would cause people to die. People were already dying from not being able to sell toys in the pavement in Delhi and being told to go back home to their villages, so the costs of lockdown were known, the benefits of lockdown were completely unknown. And under those circumstances, what you should be doing if you’re adopting the precautionary principle is to not go with lockdowns, but think of other solutions.

    Image: Andrea Piacquadio

    Universal Influenza Vaccine

    Some years ago, Sunetra Gupta and colleagues theorized that parts of the influenza virus ‘targeted by the immune system are, in fact, limited in variability and acts as a constraint on its evolution.’

    The current, relatively ineffective, vaccines against it, have to be updated every year to catch up with changes in that virus. She reveals to Cassandra Voices that ‘we now have the ingredients to make this [universal] vaccine.’ This will mainly address endemic influenza which kills almost half a million people, including a high proportion of infant babies, every year.

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta argues here that the possibility of an influenza pandemic was ‘actually eliminated a long time.’ She bases this assessment on how until 1918: ‘we experienced influenza only in pandemic form, just because of the demographic characteristics of the time. But since 1918, we’ve had influenza as a seasonal, regular endemic occurrence.’

    Today, she says, we are ‘all regularly exposed to influenza,’ giving us protection against severe disease.’ She further argues:

    What happened in 1918 was that, in my opinion, there had been no flu around for thirty years. So when the virus arrived, people under the age of thirty were extremely vulnerable. And that’s why you saw such high death rates in young people. People over the age of thirty were more protected.

    She says it’s true, to an extent, that international travel predisposes us to pandemics, but, paradoxically, ‘we are regularly exposed to different viruses, which gives us a wall of immunity against these emerging threats.’ She assumes that without regular exposure to the other seasonal coronaviruses ‘we would have been more susceptible’ to COVID-19.

    Based on her evolutionary theory, she had predicted the Swine Flu pandemic (that generated unwarranted hysteria) of 2009 two years before it hit. She says she ‘wasn’t the least bit worried in 2009 because, first of all, I thought even if it weren’t basically identical to the 1918 flu, that most of us would have a considerable degree of immunity against severe disease.’

    Contrary to Bill Gates, who claims the world must create ‘a fire department for pandemics’ to avoid catastrophic outbreaks, Sunetra Gupta says ‘we don’t need to panic to the degree that we do about new pandemics; what we need to do is to be clear headed and rational and try and think about ways of protecting those who might die or might be severely ill and hospitalised from these pandemics or these events.’

    The Role of the Epidemiologist

    The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum wrote in Pandemic Century – One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris (2019) that ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as risky, it is medical science, and the science of epidemiology in particular, that is often the source of irrational and often prejudicial judgments’. Then in 2020, the Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt claimed that epidemiologists see their function ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore, if they say it is one hundred times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s okay.’

    Sunetra Gupta argues:

    the role of epidemiology is to provide a conceptual framework within which you can understand what is happening and, rather than preventing pandemics or epidemics, which I’ve always been skeptical about, what you want to prevent is the death or the consequences of these events.

    She reckons: ‘it’s a hubris, really, as we saw to think that you can stop the spread of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.’ However, ‘where you can intervene is to try and prevent the consequences of that spread, in that you can protect the vulnerable, or at least try to. But the idea that you could stop the spread was, I think, extremely misguided.’

    She calls for greater resilience in the health system, pointing to the nefarious influence of neoliberal capitalism on public health.

    If you’re trying to maximize what they call efficiency, you end up with these big hospitals instead of sort of more local, smaller units. And that creates the conditions for vulnerable people to be exposed more easily to the virus.

    Professor Neil Ferguson.

    SIR Model

    Unlike Neil Ferguson, Sunetra Gupta’s team made no assumptions about the infection fatality rate in March 2020. She now says:

    The purpose of that paper was to show that you can take a simple model, an epidemic model, which applies to coronavirus or any virus that gives you some level of immunity for a certain period of time, at least in the case of coronavirus. Of course, that would be short. Measles would be long. But any such model, which is called an SIR model – simply because people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recovering – you can fit a model like that to the available data under a very wide range of infection fatality rates.

    She says Ferguson and his colleagues fitted the available data based an IFR of almost 1% because: ‘They were using data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and a few other bits of data from Wuhan.’ In such a model as this the two variables, she says, ‘are the infection fatality rate and when the epidemic occurred … So what we showed is what we were seeing could easily be the result of an epidemic that had already occurred [that] had a very small infection fatality rate. Or as Neil proposed, there was an epidemic that was just taking off and had a high infection fatality rate.’

    Later she was asked a guess about what the infection fatality rate might be. What she said, she stands by, that it was definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably close to 1 in 10,000. She adds, in hindsight, however:

    What I probably shouldn’t have done is given any answer at all, because the infection fatality rate is not really a number that you can think of in terms of the average across the population. So there will be parts of the world where, because there is [a high proportion of] elderly or people with comorbidities… [there is greater] vulnerability to death … So it is actually somewhat meaningless to think of the IFR as an average number, but it’s certainly not 1%.

    ‘What I was trying to do with that paper’ she says ‘is just to say, you can’t have that level of certainty in this situation.’ She agrees that ‘at the time you wouldn’t be able to discriminate between lockdown and the build-up of immunity and the contributions of seasonality. But now, because we have more data, you can and so it’s much more likely that we had built up what’s known as herd immunity in certain pockets or substantially it had accrued in certain areas.’

    She adds:

    We couldn’t tell then because we hadn’t done the experiment of lifting lockdown and seeing what would happen. But we did do that experiment a year later. And at that point you could discriminate between those two hypotheses. And I think what now I will say is that you can explain what happened almost anywhere in the world, using a simple model in which you accumulate immunity, but you also lose it quickly, which is known for all coronaviruses combined with the effects of seasonality. And that simple model … will explain qualitatively all patterns that we see.

    Gold Standard

    On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle wrote in The New York Times. ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s W.H.O. ties, the authors noted ‘Imperial was treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    Not long afterwards on March 24th, a report appeared in the Financial Times, quoting Sunetra Gupta to the effect that perhaps as much as half the UK population had already contracted Covid-19. However, the author of that article added that her group’s modelling was ‘controversial; and ‘its assumptions were have been contested by other scientists.’

    Despite their differences, Sunetra Gupta speaks of a respectful relationship with Ferguson, with whom she had ‘friendly chats’ during the period. There was ‘no disagreement’ about ‘the basic ideas and assumptions.’ It’s just that he said ‘he thought that their worst case scenario was more likely than what I was saying, which is that we didn’t know, and perhaps veering more towards [that there had already been] substantial waves in areas like London … But we both acknowledged there were a spectrum of possibilities. And until we had the full data, we wouldn’t know where we were.’

    She acknowledges, nonetheless, that ‘it’s hard not to have emotion about these things. But you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to think about whether an intervention is achieving its purpose and whether the collateral damage is too great or not.’

    ‘Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta says she had ‘a great time’ during lockdowns as she lives in ‘a nice house with a big garden, and my daughters, who were in their early twenties, came back home for six months.’ She now wonders whether ‘at some point someone should write a play called Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    She says that’s the point: ‘the lockdowns … were put in place by those of us who are privileged; [what] Martin Kulldorff called them the laptop classes … while throwing the poor and the young under the bus.’

    Regarding an extraordinary article in The Guardian by George Monbiot calling for ‘a time delimited outright ban’ on lies that endanger people’s lives, referring to people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta ‘who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic,’ she says she was ‘absolutely shocked that someone like Monbiot would claim to know more [than me] about how the pathogen spreads, about epidemic behavior and control measures.’

    She wonders, ‘why would someone with … no qualifications to speak of these things accuse me of spreading lies and misinformation … Why would he do that? I mean, it’s shocking.’

    She says she tried:

    to ask common friends to tell him. You know what? Pick up the phone to me. I’ll explain to you. I mean, that’s what he should have done. He should have said, oh, why is she saying this? Maybe I should just pick up the phone to ask for an interview and get her opinion. And then … he’s free to disagree with it. Although from a position of someone who is not precisely qualified to make those judgments. So I find that kind of behavior absolutely shocking.

    ‘They Should Apologise’

    Sunetra Gupta says she has repeatedly called for debates, for example, with Neil [Ferguson] with whom she has only ‘ever had a respectful engagement.’ She expresses surprise ‘that places like the Royal Society didn’t put on more debates and instead ‘just toed the line on this and just went with the consensus.’

    She says:

    I have not been approached with an apology from any of [her critics at the time]. An apology on account of how they behaved, but nor, indeed an apology on having got a lot of things wrong … So they criticised me for wrong reasons, and they should now come and say to me, we are sorry. We now see that lockdowns are indeed very harmful and that school closures didn’t prevent transmission, or that vaccines don’t block infection. They should apologize to me, but they haven’t.

    She also has some harsh criticism for the way in which academia now operates:

    I think the circumstances now under which academia is expected to operate are ones that are conducive to people … forming these sorts of groups, consensus groups, because that’s how they fund their research … by reviewing each other’s grants and just generally agreeing with each other. And of course … some of these funds are coming through some form of philanthro-capitalism. Those are all features of the system which lend themselves to this kind of aggravation of an idea of a risk. And … there’s also the … huge temptation of putting yourself in the middle of it being the saviour … “I had to get a burner phone because I’m so important.” And, you know, “I was the one who delivered the world of this scourge.” Those are the sort of rather more simple … reasons why we saw what we saw, rather than some huge conspiracy.

    Reflecting on the period where she earned such publicity she says:

    I’d always hoped [it would be] through my writing, through my novels, not necessarily through science. So I know it’s not something I particularly find to be that gratifying because this is just sort of my job and … it’s caused nothing but distress to me and to my family; for my daughters, it’s been a difficult period to have to deal with this fame, notoriety, that I achieved.

    However, she doesn’t buy into the idea that the role of a scientist is simply to deliver the science:

    because I think that one can always hide behind one’s profession. I mean, the best example … I often talk about [is from] the film Mephisto [1981, directed by István Szabó], where the central character, the actor … has kind of accepted the patronage of the Nazis at one point [and] when he’s accused of that, just says, “please leave me alone. I’m just an actor,” … nobody is just an actor or just a scientist. It’s not good enough to say, “I’m just a scientist. I just do mathematical modelling and you know, whether lockdowns work or don’t work or harm other people, it’s none of my business.” That’s not acceptable to me.

    Childhood Covid-19 Vaccination

    Regarding the vaccination of children against Covid-19 she says:

    from the outset that there should never have been given to people who were effectively at zero risk of dying from Covid, particularly because it was never likely to prevent transmission for any more than a few weeks … so there was no logic. Again, if we talk about logic rather than anything else, there is no logic to vaccinating people who are not at risk if the vaccine does not prevent transmission.

    She links this policy failure to recent measles outbreaks in the U.K., and Ireland:

    we warned against this early on by saying one of the reasons not to vaccinate young children, even if it is completely safe, is because it doesn’t prevent infection. So it will create vaccine hesitancy against vaccines that actually people do need … we have limited resources, so it has an opportunity cost. And what we’re seeing in this country and across the world is … the diversion of funds that are meant to tackle these serious endemic diseases … And it’s very, very sad because it’s causing deaths and particularly in places, not so much the UK and Ireland, but … in sub-Saharan Africa or India, I mean, the infection control programmes and vaccination programmes have collapsed in many places, and this is going to lead to many more deaths than Covid, particularly in children, not to mention starvation and other issues.

    She does not, however, believe that the excess deaths we have witnessed in recent times should be attributed to Covid-19 vaccines, pointing to the example of Sweden ‘which doesn’t have many excess deaths, but did vaccinate its population.’