Science staff and students at Massey University in Aotearoa New Zealand are fighting to save their jobs, and their studies.

The cash-strapped university is proposing to slash science courses from its Albany campus, which would hollow out a new high-tech building full of specialised labs.

It is part of Massey’s scenic grounds on Auckland’s North Shore, which are shrouded with an air of uncertainty as proposed job cuts hang over this campus.

More than 100 jobs are on the line at Massey, the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) says, including from the schools of natural sciences, and food and advanced technology — programmes that would cease to exist in Auckland.

Only a year ago, a new Innovation Complex opened its doors in Albany, reportedly costing $120 million. The university would not confirm the price.

It was to be called the Innovation and Science Complex, but the science part of the name was quietly dropped, although it remains on some signs in the building.

Professor Dianne Brunton — a specialist in conservation biology whose job is on the line — showed RNZ what the complex had to offer this week.

Building for the future
“This space — all of these labs, the whole building, really, is a building for the future, a building for the next 20 to 40 years,” she said. “And [for the] students and the staff and the growth we’ll see in the sciences here on the North Shore, where the population is just ballooning.

“It’s not going to stop. It’s just going to keep going.”

Staff and students have until Friday to have their say on Massey’s science proposals as the university deals with an expected shortfall of about $50 million for the year.

“We were in little huts. They were temporary buildings and they were fitted out,” Professor Brunton said of the previous office and lab space.

“They were like Lockwood houses, if you remember that far back. They’re little prefabs, but they worked.

“In fact, some of the best covid work was done on that campus by researchers that were here with us then, and they’ve since gone.”

Professor Brunton said Albany staff were determined to offer solutions to the university, and work with it so they could remain, including on how they pay to use their space.

Floor space rented out
Massey effectively charges rent for floor space to its colleges, and science takes up room.

“There are some solutions to that and one of them is to have biotech companies in. We’ve had a number of biotech companies working in the molecular lab, basically leasing it out,” Professor Brunton said.

“We’ve got lots of ideas about other things, but the instability that we’re seeing at the moment makes that a bit tricky.”

The Innovation Complex is an award-winning building, and a leader in its field.

“It’s not just a science building — make that clear. There’s lots of student space, work space, flexible teaching space, but really state-of-the-art, really efficient labs,” Professor Brunton said.

Among its jewels are a chamber for detecting spider vibrations and a marine wet lab which allows for experiments using live animals thanks to a reticulated salt water system.

In the previous buildings, buckets of salt water sourced from the sea had to suffice.

Specialised spaces
Professor Brunton said she did not know what would happen to specialised spaces or equipment if the Massey proposal went through.

“Some of these pieces of equipment are not the kind a local company could come in and use.”

Staff had to have hope the proposal would not go through, she said.

She also raised concerns about the quality of the financial information made available on which staff and students could make submissions.

Many students are in limbo due to the threat to cut courses from the Albany campus.

Third-year food technology student Cynthia Fan, 21, said those affected were trying to prepare for exams, while worrying about where they would be next year and organising submissions.

Under the proposal, food technology students were among those who might have to continue their studies at Palmerston North, unless Massey decided to stagger the cessation of the courses in Albany.

“The thing that really sucks is I have no idea and we have no idea. The uni has said that they will not speak to students,” Fan said.

Fan would like to see the university focused on helping its students.

“I think in the first week [after the proposal was announced] everyone was hard panicking. I think a lot of people missed lectures because they didn’t have energy.”

‘Financial sustainability is urgent,’ university says
In a statement, Professor Ray Geor, pro vice-chancellor for Massey’s College of Sciences, said the university’s financial statements were inspected and approved by Audit NZ.

“During a financial year, it is expected there could be adjustments. Additionally, during the close-inspection focus of the proposal for change processes, we expect there will be refinements of information,” Professor Geor said.

“Organisational finances are never static. However, we are confident that adjustments will be minor and not substantive to the financial drivers for the need for a proposal for change,” he said.

“As we are funded by taxpayers, part of being a financially responsible organisation is exploring revenue streams, as many tertiary education providers are doing within New Zealand.

“Staff can provide avenues for exploration and the College of Sciences will consider all feedback. However, the need to reduce costs and generate income to ensure financial sustainability is urgent for this year and for the near term — 2024-2027.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

If … gets up your nose, picket.*

This month, Radio New Zealand listeners were treated to not one but two science stories about nose-picking! They make good fodder for a discussion about the practice of science.

Self-Vaccination?

The first item – Science: Fun-seeking bees, nose-picking primates, death-telling smartphones – was on 2 November, with Siouxsie Wiles. The 26 October 2022 academic story referred to here (A review of nose picking in primates with new evidence of its occurrence) is: “Nose picking (rhinotillexis) is a common behaviour in humans which remains, however, poorly studied. Several species of primates are known to pick their nose and ingest the nasal mucus suggesting that this behaviour may actually be beneficial and showing it is not restricted to humans.”

True to media form – ie the impulse to editorialise – the by-line for the podcast refers to the “bad habit of picking and eating what they find up their nose”, even though the story referred to suggests that it might be a good habit!

Siouxsie Wiles says: “Another study starting with an observation … Actually [nose-picking] is quite common in primates … so as for why people and animals might pick their noses, there’s lots of speculation … maybe it’s something to do with our immune systems, maybe ‘self-vaccination’.” While the key observation is that nose-picking is a widespread practice, the scientific paper pays particular attention to the habits (and physiology) of a group of lemurs who take the practice to an extreme level.

This story represents good science, because it starts with an observation which raises an immediate question: ‘Does nose-picking benefit primates?’; and that question’s corollary, given that humans are primates, ‘Does nose-picking benefit humans?’. The scientific process here doesn’t seek to extend the observational stage; rather it moves on to the all-important speculative (ie hypothetical) stage which is the essence of good unapplied science. Science is, more than anything, a creativediscipline. Its essence is speculation: though not ‘idle’ speculation; some observation should come first.

We should note that the observation of an enduring habit – for example, nose-picking – doesn’t necessarily mean there is a benefit. It could be that it’s just a habit that is neither beneficial nor costly; but even then, if primates just do it for fun (even just a little bit of fun), then that fun is, of itself, a benefit. And, if the practice turns out to be costly rather than beneficial to primates, there might still be a wider evolutionary benefit; namely a costly practice to one species may provide a benefit to that species’ host or habitat, and therefore an indirect long-term benefit to the species. If a practice survives for a long time, then – one way or another – it is likely to be beneficial, even if the only benefit is ‘a bit of fun’.

The final stage of the scientific process is the ’empirical testing’ phase, the phase that creates the best possible opportunity to disprove a hypothesis. In the above example, the story hasn’t reached the testing phase; so the idea that nose-picking confers some form of immunisation benefit to primates is ‘undisproven speculation’. It’s a plausible working hypothesis though. And if the authors knew of – or could have thought of – a better hypothesis, then they probably would have. Scientific ‘truth’ is the most plausible (and robust) undisproven explanation for some observation; it is not absolute truth in the way that mathematics is.

In this regard, it is pertinent to note the role of hormesis in enhancing a person’s life-expectancy. Hormesis is a concept which featured in the NZ Listener article ‘Elixir of Youth’ (12 Nov 2022); an article discussing Nicklas Brendborg’s book Jellyfish Age Backwards. The idea is that small exposures to stressors teach our bodies to manage stresses, creating degrees of immunity to all sorts of potentially harmful (indeed fatal) traumas, such as (but not only) attacks by viruses.

In this context, Siouxsie Wiles said on RNZ earlier this year (23 Feb): “The lower the dose [of the Covid19 coronavirus] you get, the easier time your immune system will have at getting rid of the virus.” Low-dose exposures would be examples of hormesis; so, getting a low dose of a stressor such as a pathogenic virus would be better than getting no dose of that virus.

Before moving on to the second story, we should note that the featured practice – by a group of lemurs – was to extract material from the upper nose and to then swallow that material. There are other aspects of nose-picking which could enhance the flow of micro-organisms to or through the body; in particular, the introduction of organisms from previously touched surfaces. We also need to note that the actual benefit of a practice may not arise from the more obvious aspect of that practice; for example, the benefit arising to the lemurs – if any benefit – may have arisen from the injection of material into the nose rather than from the extraction and ingestion of material from the nose. When a beneficial habit has multiple aspects, it may be only one of those aspects which is beneficial; further, another aspect of that habit may be harmful, though it is almost certain that an enduring habit has net benefits for the evolutionary success of a species.

Dementia?

The second story was on Sunday Mornings, 6 November 2022, James St John: picking your nose may increase risk for Alzheimer’s and dementia. And there was a follow-up the following week: James St John: your nose-picking questions answered.

This story illustrates a number of suspect practices in science, or at least by scientists. And the author intimates the ongoing difficulties with scientific practice.

At first sight, the two stories are contradictory; nose-picking is ‘good for you’ in the first story but ‘bad for you’ in the second. But a habit can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’; though, as noted, the survival of a habit suggests that the good prevails over the bad. It should also be noted that the stories look at two very different aspects of nose-picking; the first story focuses on the ingestion of ‘nose-matter’ whereas the second sees the nose as a passageway through which harmful bacteria may reach the brain.

The James St John story starts (2’40” into the podcast) with an observed “association” (ie correlation): a type of chlamydia bacteria is significantly present in the brain plaque of people who have died with Alzheimer’s disease. (Presumably the observation is ‘sound’; namely that people with the same age profile who have died without Alzheimer’s have been observed to not have anything like the same levels of chlamydia bacteria.) Correlations turn out to be coincidences in some cases, though it looks like coincidence can be ruled out here.

Non-coincidental correlations commonly may have three plausible interpretations. In the case, first is the possibility that the chlamydia bacteria caused the bacteria. Second is the possibility that otherwise diseased tissues served as an excellent habitat for the bacteria; ie causation is reversed. Third is a variation of the second; in this case the bacteria were serving as a defence against the disease, or the disease’s excesses. (This latter example is like the case where a war-zone is likely to draw doctors and nurses to the scene; it doesn’t mean that this correlation between doctors and death is evidence that doctors are causing the excess deaths of war.)

(A well-known health example of suspect science has been the correlation between cholesterol and heart disease. We now know that there is ‘good cholesterol’ as well as bad cholesterol, that ‘bad cholesterol’ arises from means other than the ingestion of animal fats, and that the demonisation of dietary fats distracted us from seeing the dangers of sugar. Many experiments sought to establish causal links from dietary fats to heart disease; many of these were flawed, while other explanation went unexplored.)

In the St John story, an experiment was done on mice, to address this correlation issue. The overdose of bacteria given to mice indeed did harm those mice. It doesn’t really tell us much about the context of chlamydia in Alzheimer’s victims; certainly, no humans were injected with chlamydia, as the treated mice were.

Science is at its worst when scientists make assumptions which are really culturally-conditioned interpretations. Such assumptions become received ‘truths’; when converting interpretations into truths, scientists abuse their authority. (This problem can be particularly bad in forensic science, where expert evidence is used to convict or exonerate a defendant. See this 16 November RNZ story, with particular reference to the ‘science’ which was responsible for the original conviction: Science: Could a gene mutation help free a convicted killer?)

The assumption of this type mentioned in this story is the ‘sterile brain’ presumption (4′, and especially 17’15” into the podcast). St John narrates that, while it is now-accepted that the brain is full of bacteria, as recently as 10-years ago, it was simply assumed by (most) scientists that the brain was sterile. (This kind of assumption, especially by trusted experts, is common. If we do not know that there are bacteria in healthy brains, they [and hence ‘we’] assume that there are not bacteria in healthy brains. It’s all about where we put the word ‘not’ in the sentence. Not-knowing does not mean there is nothing to know.)

This assumption – the sterile brain – constitutes an interesting echo of the scientific interplay between germs and environmental ‘miasmas’ as the accepted principal source of disease. In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that just about all diseases which we class today as ‘infectious’ were assumed to be the result of airborne contaminants. The big debate was the extent to which these contaminants (‘miasmas’, not ‘germs’) were transmitted from the environment (especially stagnant environments ‘soiled’ by human waste) or from other people. In the case of the ‘other people’ explanation (‘contagion’), the accepted remedy – tried and tested during outbreaks of Plague – was quarantine. Ineffective quarantines were taken as evidence, even proof, that a disease was not contagious.

While the environmental assumption prevailed (as assumed truth) for most of the nineteenth century, in the years from the 1870s to the 1920s the assumption came to be reversed, as ‘germs’ replaced miasmas as the ‘bad guys’ in the disease process. As the germ theory superseded the miasma theory, the emphasis in epidemiology – correctly in many cases – switched to non-respiratory forms of transmission. Plague came to be seen as principally transmitted by fleas, and surfaces (rather than exhaled breath) came to be emphasised as the source of germs. (It was amusing to see in This England, portraying the first months of the Covid19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, how scrupulous people became about hand-washing, and how they continued to mingle unmasked in crowded indoor spaces. And note this RNZ story: You’re probably cleaning all wrong, according to science, 22 May 2022.)

Anyway, the twentieth century triumph of the ‘germ theory of disease’ meant that microbes – for example bacteria, viruses and fungi – came to be seen as ‘the enemy’ rather than as important parts of the Earth’s ecosystems. So, when bacteria were found in the brain, they were ‘assumed’ by scientists to be a malign presence. The reality of course is that such micro-organisms may be good or bad (or neither) for us; and when they are being bad for us, they may be being good nevertheless for the wider ecosystem.

The central theme of the James St John story is that an excess of bacteria (in, for example, the brain) creates a harmful imbalance, and that such imbalances of excess are the likely causes of conditions such as Alzheimer’s. Scientists, biased by their past presumptions, still seem more concerned by imbalances in the form of bacterial surpluses than imbalances in the form of bacterial (or viral or fungal) deficits. It is as plausible that restraint from picking our noses contributes to a dangerous deficit of certain non-chlamydia microbes as it is plausible that nose-picking contributes to a dangerous surplus of chlamydia bacteria. Imbalances can arise from not doing things as well as from doing things.

At the very end of his RNZ interview (17’30”) St John states that bacterial imbalances in the brain are likely causes of other conditions (including ‘autism’). And he intimates that microbiota in the brain (and elsewhere) are essential (and not just superficial) to good health. Nevertheless, a century-and-a-bit of the predominance of the germ theory has introduced a ‘yuck’ factor into the assumptions of both the scientific community and the general public; a yuck factor that has been exploited through the effective marketing of cleaning products, and our inclination to ‘deep-clean’ whenever some pathogen threatens. Interesting cases of ‘yucky’ but effective medical procedures that we show some reticence towards are maggot therapy (see Medical maggots for wound healing and The curious science of war, both RNZ) and faecal transplants (A coup for poo: why the world’s first faecal transplant approval matters,Guardian, 12 November 2022).

(Note on autism. In its severe form, this is a debilitating condition which manifests as extreme neuro-incapacity, and is almost certainly linked to deficits in the microbiome. However, autism in its almost benign ‘neuro-diverse’ form has become somewhat fashionable in recent years. While diversity is indeed good, and many more people may be ‘on the spectrum’ [with emphasis on the high-functioning end of the spectrum] than we hitherto assumed, it is important that these benefits of neuro-diversity do not become a means to minimise the condition in its previously-recognised severe forms.)

Conclusion

The first nose-picking story represented good science, but not the kind of ‘science’ that purports to distinguish truths from canards. It explains to us why we might be in the habit of doing something, and how that habit might be beneficial despite the yuck factor conditioning us to presume otherwise.

The second story represents both problematic science, and redemption. It indicates how much of what scientists have believed (and still believe) to be ‘truth’ is really biased interpretation. The redemption is the cognition that scientists can formally overturn formerly-assumed truths; and that the assumptions around the necessity for ‘sterile’ environments are indeed being overturned, albeit slowly.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

* This was a placard in the ‘Tania Harris’ anti-union protest march of 1983. The ‘…’ in that placard was Federation of Labour president (Jim) Knox.

A scientific hypothesis is a claim that is both plausible and ’empirically’ testable. A hypothesis is the first part of the process of pure science. The second part is to actually test such claims. Claims that survive the rigour of testing become scientific knowledge, a subset of ‘knowledge’. (Not all knowledge is science. If I want to understand the phenomenon of ‘gaslighting’, I would turn to Shakespeare’s Othello rather than to the academic literature of psychology. Much important knowledge comes to us through literature. And accounting concepts are derived as much from pure reason as from observation.)

Knowledge is not the same as ‘truth’. Truth is much harder to pin down, and anybody who claims to have privileged access to objective truth should be treated with caution. Applied science represents the use of scientific knowledge for some utilitarian purpose; and in the process, it represents an ongoing testing of that knowledge. Claims that fail the testing process must be either rejected or modified; rejected hypotheses fall into the category of ‘falsity’. (Though falsity is itself a bigger category than rejected claims. Literary fiction is, by definition, false. Very little that we read is either ‘pure fiction’ (falsity) or ‘pure non-fiction’ (truth). And false information is not necessarily useless information.) Narratives are stories that combine knowledge, conjecture, imagination, and belief; none of these represents objective truth. Narratives are closely related to ‘myths’, though both words have pejorative meanings, with ‘myth’ tending to be the more pejorative. Another word that is even more pejorative is ‘agenda’.

The Bible is a set of semi-coherent narratives which form the basis of a ‘faith’.

Claim on Newshub 6pm News 14 July: Facemasks

A young man without tattoos or swastikas or any other markers that might suggest he has an agenda said of facemasks: “I think our immune system is a bit weak because of wearing them for so long, so I just stopped wearing mine”. The italicised part represents both a belief and a scientific hypothesis. Yet I sense that Newshub was quite brave to include this claim in the above clip. While it probably represents what many people have been thinking, it’s the first time I have heard anything like that on mainstream media.

For whatever reason, the media have been extremely reluctant to give airtime to any narrative that counters what many would call the Michael Baker narrative (and also in the above Newshub story). The ‘Michael Baker narrative’ (named here after its best-known proponent) is said to be ‘science’, and is understood by many to be the only scientific narrative. Therefore, giving any credence to an alternative narrative opens a media organisation to the accusation of being anti-science.

In the name of good investigative journalism, Newshub now needs to ask a number of familiar proponents of New Zealand’s mainstream (‘Michael Baker’) narrative to comment on what the young man said. And, if they pushback on the young man’s counternarrative re the optimal use of facemasks, then these ‘experts’ should be asked to cite evidence rather than authority. In science, a hypothesis can only be rejected through the use of evidence.

In my Covid 2022: Sweden versus South Korea, Europe, Asia, I presented chart evidence that refutes an aspect of the Baker narrative.

Story on Newshub 6pm News 14 July: Electroconvulsive Therapy

“Sidney told the commission how he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) every day for about six months. ‘We couldn’t even engage with Sidney, he was on another planet,’ Cherene said. As well as ECT, he was over-medicated, physically abused and locked in a room by himself for weeks at a time.”

These abuses, which took place over many decades, were done in the name of applied science. This is a case (as with climate change) where scientists say that their profession was ignorant of the truth for many years but are now the arbiters of their disciplinary truth. The truth is that there have always been alternative narratives in science, and that those who pursued one narrative were always aware of other narratives. These abuses were done, knowingly, by applied scientists.

Sadly, I do not sense that the psychiatric profession has done nearly enough reflection on this episode in their history. Are mental health doctors still making egregious mistakes today? This century, the most appalling drug scandal in the world has been the prescription of fentanyl (especially in the United States) to vulnerable patients as a mental health remedy; prescriptions by doctors, applied scientists, that have been tantamount to mass manslaughter.

(As an aside, when I was a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I played hockey for my school and for Massey University, in Second Grade and Senior Reserve. One team which I remember playing was Lake Alice, arguably the worst of New Zealand’s past mental health institutions. The hockey team was made up of both staff and inmate patients. Generally, the team loved their hockey games, though a couple of the players interpreted ‘good fun’ as belting the ball anywhere, as hard as they could. I played ‘left-half’, which meant that I was required to retrieve the ball. At Hokowhitu Domain, that may have meant having to circumnavigate two other games on adjacent fields.)

The Herd

Some quotes from this 2022 book by Johan Anderberg, about how a cautious Scandinavian country (Sweden) briefly became the flagship of pandemic liberty; and then, once ‘mission creep’ took over in the mainstream political response, became something of a pariah state.

“The world had witnessed a historic event without really reflecting on it. And the historic event wasn’t actually the pandemic – we had lived through those before. What was unique was our reaction. The world had stopped.” [p.184]

“Which was the more cautious path? Shutting down all of society in a way that had never before been tested? Or waiting?” [p.291; the issue around facemasks is that, in reality, no scientist has ever tested the proposition that ‘our immune system weakens as a result of prolonged use of facemasks’.]

“The fact that critics in several cases were censored by large American platform companies was perhaps less significant than the ways in which, early on, influential journalistic institutions in the US and Europe – such as The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, as well as the big German media outlets – chose to equate those who expressed lockdown scepticism with a general contempt for science.” [p.292] We might add ‘facemask scepticism’ was also an important part of the Swedish scientific approach, and in 2021 was an important part of the criticism of Sweden by the Anglo-German herd.

No narrative about Covid19 can ever be scientific unless it addresses the positive Swedish experience in 2021 and 2022. In December 2021 “Swedes were enjoying freedoms that citizens of other countries were denied. And still almost no-one wore a facemask. Once again, Sweden stuck out. But there were no longer any foreign journalists at the Public Health Agency’s press conferences. No Americans, Brits, Germans or Danes asked why schools were staying open, or why the country hadn’t gone into lockdown.” [p.299]

Mātauranga Māori (ref. Playing Favourites with Professor Rangi Matamua) [RNZ, 18 June 2022]

This is a knowledge system that mixes applied science with myth. The observations around the stars – especially Matariki – resulted in a Māori calendar as good as any other; probably better than Julius Caesar’s calendar which forms the basis for today’s universal calendar. Like Johannes Kepler’s observations of the planetary motions, this was valuable empirical science.

But, when it came to explanation, Isaac Newton was able to take astronomy to a higher level; a level which made possible today’s communications’ satellites and the orbiting James Webb telescope. For explanation, Mātauranga Māori naturally turned to myth to complete this story. Indeed, all peoples do that. To explain why the ‘Big Bang’ happened, science must give way to myth, to form an origin narrative. In the case of Matariki, Mātauranga Māori ascribes a different god to each of nine stars.

There is no conflict between Mātauranga Māori and science; just as many scientists are men and women of religious faith, and see no conflict. There is more to knowledge than science.

Finally, back to Facemasks

My conclusion is that facemasks should be used during the acute phases of a respiratory epidemic. I will be wearing mine – as per Michael Baker’s recommendations – at least until the government allows me to receive a vaccination booster. I understand that my previous immunity to Covid19 has waned significantly.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

One of the major themes in my life, as a baby-boomer growing up in the 1960s, has been the relationship between ‘man’ (aka humankind) and ‘nature’. Science – especially applied science, and western philosophy – was presented as a progressive economic project which involved ‘taming nature’. And indeed there were successes, many of them arising from a wholehearted commitment to applying the ‘germ theory of disease’. It was in the 1960s that, with the help of television advertising, fastidious cleanliness became a key attribute of ‘civilised’ man or woman.

(The present version of this economic project is the emphasis of education as being a ‘means to a job’, and the highlighting of STEM – science, technology, engineering and maths – in the curriculum.)

The post-WW2 (World War 2) epoch was characterised by the new magic of ‘antibiotics’; it’s all in the ‘anti’ part of the word. And in the idea that we would soon escape the earth’s gravitation and land a man on the moon. It was a heroically progressive age.

It was also a time of pushback. With our nuclear weapons we could destroy nature; or at least our earthly habitat. We still have that capacity. With DDT in the 1960s, we had the makings of a ‘silent spring’. Ecology became the new ‘left-wing’ science of nature; a counter to the perceived right-wing social science of economics, with its ‘physics envy’, and mathematical gymnastics that have been described as ‘autistic’. Eastern philosophies and religions came into fashion.

Malthusian thinking also came back into fashion; classical political economy meeting the new political ecology. The earth could carry only so many people; surely less than eight billion? But there were critiques of that kind of thinking, more nuanced and more hopeful, such as Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971). This critique of unsustainable growth economics aroused my interests in ecology and economics.

Three other very important books from the 1970s should be cited here, too. First, the Social Limits to Growth (1976) by Fred Hirsch, who sadly died later that decade, still a young man. Hirsch showed, among other things, that primitive capitalism itself eroded the social capital which its success depended upon.

Second, I read James Lovelock’s short 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth, in which human agency is treated very much as a potential nature-enhancing regulating mechanism within the life-force of planet earth. The earth, as nature, could be understood as a single living organism. This contrasts with a liberal-mercantilist worldview which treats the nation-state as a living organisation; subserving individual rights to the economic and political strategies of the officers of the national waka, the ship of state.

Third, a book written in 1976 – Plagues and Peoples, by William H McNeil – which I only read in 2020. This was macro- and micro-ecology writ large. (See my Microbes and Macrobes; lessons from biology and history, 8 Dec 2020.) And writ with humans in their context as a species embedded in nature. Humans do not at all represent the apex of nature; rather humans are subject to the predation of macropredators – such as the one wreaking havoc in Eastern Europe – and micropredators such as SARS-Cov2 and many much worse. Life is life a game of ‘paper, scissors, rock’; none is on top.

The end of history has not come. Everyman has not won. That idea was, at best, naïve. We live with nature, not over nature. We settle with nature; and we settle in nature. We adapt to nature, and that includes learning about nature, complex nature, and vaccinating or otherwise insuring ourselves against the episodic excesses of nature. When we try to banish nature, it comes back to ‘bite us on the bum’. Hence the existential threats which we call the ‘climate crisis’. Then there is the idea that we can sustain ourselves from micropredators through the ongoing application of measures such as social distancing, retreating to our domestic castles and our internet devices, wearing facemasks, and banning foreign-domiciled intruders from our national territories.

The Old Normal

The way we lived before 2020 was problematic in many ways, but not all bad. We took much of the good stuff for granted, converting natural systems of regulation and renewal into – in our minds – simple inconveniences. Bugs – visible or microscopic – became ‘disgusting’ but otherwise a natural part of life. Most of us would get a ‘common’ ‘head cold’ most years, usually in winter. When we got a really bad ‘cold’, we would call it ‘the flu’. We accepted these inconveniences grudgingly; we might even go to the trouble to take an annual flu vaccine, if it was ‘free’. For most of us the cost of such sickness was a few days off work, and the price of a few medicines from the local pharmacy.

We could get more seriously ill, of course. Indeed the vast majority of us accept that individual death is integral to the systemic sustainability of nature. Most of us – but not all – would die old. That was our contract with nature.

We also came to learn that our gut germs – though disgusting – were more beneficial to us than harmful. And we learned that we are mildly intolerant to many of our staple and nutritious foods; the likes of wheat, milk, fodmaps, and nightshades. We adapt to these foods, rather than eschewing them. We find our balance points – enough, but not too much – and we train our bodies to tolerate ‘a bit more’.

When learning about nature through formal science, we tended to focus on the more serious end of the spectrum of nature-induced ailments; hence nature presented itself to career scientists as a foe to be overcome. We learned much less about the recurring minor ailments which we take for granted.

Most of us never learned that the viruses and other microbes that cause illnesses have evolved into acceptable equilibria; evolved from ‘novel’ forms that could create havoc amongst one or many species for a short or a long period of time. The unfamiliar yet familiar things we take for granted almost always have fascinating backstories. We have encountered our pathogens in the past when in dangerous forms, and have adapted to them, reducing their habitats, and suffering their foibles. Our historical memory is mainly confined to the most severe episodes; to the 1918 flu pandemic rather than the 1957, 2009, or 2017 episodes. And to the second plague pandemic – which started as the ‘black death’ – rather than to the third plague pandemic which in 1900 created havoc in Sydney and briefly visited Auckland. Plague is less of a threat to humans today, thanks to antibiotics, and thanks to the long gaps between waves of disease; though it still kills lots of rodents in their burrows.

Rarely do we think that such microbes could be doing us some favours. Dr Richard Webby – a New Zealander living in Memphis, USA – has been interviewed at least twice on RNZ during the current pandemic. He says (Flu season could follow hard on the heels of Omicron, 20 Feb 2022): “We do think that once you get one virus there is a period of time where you’re less susceptible to other viruses that are trying to get into that same part of your body”. The observation is pure ecology, that the human respiratory trace is a ‘habitat’, and that an occupied habitat represents a form of protection from intruders. Better to be occupied by the ‘lesser evil’ than to be open to the greater evil.

A very worthwhile scientific hypothesis is as follows: many of the microbes that annoy us, in the process of being annoying, may be actually protecting us from more serious micropredators. And, in doing so, they may inhabit spaces in our bodies that, in effect, represent a ‘no vacancy’ sign to other potential occupiers. And they may generate co-immunity – or cross-immunity – meaning that they may act like natural vaccines, building defences against their more dangerous first and second cousins.

Thus, in the old normal, and according to the undisproven hypothesis above, exposure to viruses saved us from viruses. (Science works through falsifying – disproving – hypotheses. Thus, in science, ‘truth’ is a body of hypotheses that have been subject to testing, and that have not so far been disproved. True scientists are never arrogant enough to act as if they are our guardians of truth.)

Disturbing the Old Normal in Unforeseen but Foreseeable Ways

In terms of the Covid19 pandemic, we humans are not the foe or rival of any of the variants of the covid virus. We are a host species of these coronaviruses. The principal rival of omicron-covid is delta-covid. Yes, nature – the circulatory system of nature – can be served by the extinction of species, such as smallpox, or variations of species, such as delta-covid. Already, omicron-covid may be well on its path of evolutionary conquest; the mutating journey of a novel – probably hybrid – coronavirus to becoming humans’ fifth common ‘common cold’ coronavirus. (And see my reference to a BBC story about the ‘common cold’ ‘booting out’ covid: Common Cold exposure may be, in effect, a partially effective Covid19 vaccine, Scoop 8 Apr 2021.)

Charts done recently (see Respiratory Viruses: Seasonal Mortality Compared, Evening Report18 Feb 2022, noting the cited European countries) show that the pattern of human mortality associated with the most recent covid wave in Europe already looks much like any other virus that visits Europe in the winter or early spring.

Maybe nature can be best served through the extinction of humans? Not necessarily, though this could happen, as nature responds to the anthropogenic stresses that it faces. Taking optimism from the Gaia hypothesis, through reasoned thought – humans, like microbes, can act relatively quickly to correct threats to nature. Being able to do so doesn’t necessarily mean that human will actually do so, however.

In defending ourselves against a new micropredator, SARS-Cov2, the last thing we want to do is reactivate – to re-arm – former dangerous viruses that we got used to, and which got used to us. Immunity to certain types of viruses may be short-lived; and is maintained by regular – eg seasonal – re-exposure. Indeed, this cycle of waxing and waning immunity is one of the principles behind the annual influenza jab; the jab that, ‘under the public health radar’, lengthened many ‘first world’ lives after it was introduced late last century. Further, influenza jabs are not the only vaccinations that offer a considerable degree of immunity while falling short of giving lifelong immunity. The word ‘booster’ preceded the word ‘covid’.

The fortress behaviours that may protect us from an immediate micro-threat can, if persevered with, also be the measures that undermine the misunderstood old normal. Indeed, it is tempting for us to think that these barrier protections, by keeping out the adapted old-normal viruses, will actually confer on us additional benefits. Under this ‘any germ is a bad germ’ idea, more cleanliness is always better than less cleanliness; the safest environment is a sterile environment. The idea becomes that, by providing explicit and indefinite barriers from nature, we – a part of nature – can become a whole lot healthier. Better to divorce from nature than to be married with nature.

The ‘scrub it within an inch of its life’ ethos – which was the ethos of 1960s’ consumerism – well and truly returned in 2020, when anything that may have come into contact with the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus had to be “deep-cleaned”.

My recent chart analysis on Evening Report – Covid19 Deaths and Facemasks: some rich countries compared, 24 Mar 2022 – indicates that the countries with the fewest pandemic excess deaths in 2021 (especially Denmark, Sweden and Finland; the text also mentions Japan) are the countries which had the lightest facemask mandates. Generally, the Scandinavian countries imposed the least facemasking requirements; they also tended to impose the least of other types of public health restrictions.

The website ourwordindata.org/coronavirus has data series for pandemic outcomes and policies, including measures for mask-mandating, and a ‘stringency’ index. My charts show excess deaths alongside published Covid19 deaths. Although Denmark in particular has had high covid infection rates, it has had excess deaths lower than its southern neighbours. Sweden, with less mask use had even lower death rates than Denmark in 2021/22; although Sweden did have more deaths in 2020.

Generally, the data supports the hypothesis that public health ‘protections’, such as mask-wearing, should be brief – otherwise populations become vulnerable (more naïve) to future waves of coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses. (Greece is a country of particular concern, which imposed strict mandates, and managed to stem the Covid19 tide through most of 2020. See the fourth chart in my Ages of People Dying in excess numbers during the Omicron Wave of Covid19, Evening Report 17 Mar 2022.)

Don’t Throw out the Baby with the Bathwater

My analysis suggests that most countries with high enough incomes to impose expensive public health mandates indeed ‘threw out the covid bathwater’. They also threw out the ‘old-normal immunity baby’. The health and other consequences of governments (and their retinues) working against nature rather than with nature may be quite long-lasting. Nature includes us. For the most part, the rest of nature is our friend, and our home; though not always an easy friend with which to cohabit.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Science, in the not-so-recent-past, has often had a bad press. It’s been personified, particularly by the political left, as Frankenstein, as agents of capitalism, classical liberalism, colonialism, sexism (yang over yin), eugenics, and god-like pretension. More recently though, in the zeitgeists of climate change awareness and covid, it’s had an unusually good press; although we retain this persistent worry that viruses such as SARS-Cov2 may be the unwitting or witting result of the work of careless or evil scientists.

Science is simply a method of acquiring knowledge; a method that complements other methods, such as direct observation, thematic storytelling (literature, humanities), and abstraction (eg mathematics, accounting and law). And applied science is the process of creating technologies and other interventions which make use of scientific knowledge. Almost no knowledge is absolute; knowledge, whether derived from science or otherwise, is contestable. The only kind of absolute knowledge is that of tautology, with the most important tautologies being those that make up the discipline of mathematics.

The mantra we hear much of these days is: ‘the science tells us …’. Actually, the science doesn’t tell us anything; rather scientists tell us things, and scientists are people with the same human foibles as other people. This idea of science (and therefore scientists) being the ‘arbiters of facts’ is what I call ‘scientism’. It is no different to the old medieval idea of popes, and archbishops, and ayatollahs as being the possessors of facts; the arbiters of truth. It seeds the idea of uncontested – indeed incontestable – truth. It is the idea that ‘facts’ represent truth, and that there cannot be ‘alternative facts’; it is the idea that if some statement (ie ‘claim’) conflicts with what the authorised science says, then that claim must be false.

This philosophy of science as absolute truth – ‘the facts’ – is practiced and supported by ‘scientistes’ (as I call them). Scientism is the religion of science; the ‘faith’ of science. Many people we call ‘scientists’ may also aptly be called ‘scientistes’; they practice their science as a faith as well as their approved method.

Scientific knowledge actually consists of ‘explanatory hypotheses’ which are ‘undisproven’. (This statement is an ‘abstract truth’ or tautology; it represents a ‘definition’ of science.) Thus science is a deductive method, where potential truths derive from theory, and are subject to testing. Scientific hypotheses may or may not be currently contested – in full or in part. But, to be scientific, the must be capable of being contested; and a resolution to such a contest should be conceptually possible, using the method of direct observation. The resolution need not be the discarding of one hypothesis in favour of another; it may be a synthesis of the contesting hypotheses. (Is ‘light’ made up of waves or particles? It turns out that the best current answer is ‘both’.) We use scientific knowledge – undisproven hypotheses – to make predictions; ‘making predictions’ may be to test hypotheses, or we may perform actions – or implement policies – on the basis that this knowledge is most likely true.

We might note that the concept of evolution in science is a tautology; it essentially says ‘what survives best survives best’. The disputes that involve evolution are around the initial origins of ‘things’ (such as the origins of life, or of matter); or around the mechanisms of evolutionary change, including whether those mechanisms involve intervention. (Charles Darwin prefaced ‘The Origins of the Species’ with a discussion about domestication, in which humans were the external agents for the evolution of domesticated species.)

A most useful metaphor for science is the ‘table’. Explanatory hypotheses that may be true – that are undisproven – sit on this table of potential knowledge. Scientific tension exists when there are two or more hypotheses on the table, both (or all) purporting to explain the same observations. A scientist welcomes alternative hypotheses, because science is all about testing and revising current knowledge. Scientistes, on the other hand, do whatever they can to prevent the emergence of alternative facts. Scientistes are invested in one set of facts, and – in line with human nature generally – are not happy to ‘write off’ past investment. Leading scientistes distil their wisdom into texts, which become ‘the truth’. In medical ‘science’, the truth for nearly two millenniums was revealed through the second century writings of Galen, arguably the greatest scientiste of all time. Ordinary scientistes, like priests, simply perpetrate or perpetuate the teachings of their antecedent mentors.

For practical convenience, science is divided into sciences, or scientific disciplines. The first division is into ‘natural science’ vis-à-vis ‘social science’; sometimes called ‘hard science’ versus ‘soft science’. The former includes physics, chemistry and biology. The latter includes economics, anthropology and psychology. By definition, these are empirical (subject to testing by observation) rather than cultural. However the practice of many people who are employed as ‘scientists’ may indeed include a cultural component; a component that reflects a belief system.

Belief systems can be regarded as forms of literary truths; truths which will typically conflict with other belief systems, and which by their very nature cannot be resolved as true or false. There are other kinds of literary truth: in particular those of ‘fiction’, such as the works of Shakespeare that uphold certain universal themes about human behaviour; and those of ‘non-fiction’, in particular history texts (historiography) which are highly contestable, and which often convey as much information about the zeitgeists and beliefs of the historians as they do about the times and mores that are being investigated.

Abstract truths may take the form of a tautology – true by definition or (as in algebra) by logical extension. Or they may arise from a belief system: for example, a set of laws such as the ‘Ten Commandments’ or ‘Sharia Law’; or an accounting methodology such as the ‘double-entry bookkeeping’ as practiced by the medieval Venetians, and attributed in particular to the renaissance texts of Luca Pacioli.

Belief systems can be overlayed, possibly in contradictory ways. It is perfectly possible to believe in both Christianity and primitive capitalism. It is also possible to believe in Christianity and be implacably imposed to primitive capitalism. (To avoid discursion, we may think of primitive capitalism as unevolved or unreimagined capitalism. See my Who’s The Thief? for a way out of unevolved capitalism.) While purely religious belief systems are not contestable, systems such as primitive capitalism – based on legal and accounting constructs around ‘property’ – are contestable but not in a strictly scientific sense. More in an ethical sense.

Who are Scientists?

Babies are scientists! Babies are unencumbered by previous investments, previously formed beliefs, so are free to learn about the world by forming hypotheses, testing them, and rejecting or modifying the hypotheses that don’t meet their evidential tests.

• Babies resemble tiny scientists more than you might think, PBS, 2 Apr 2015
• Every Child is a Scientist, Wired, 28 Sep 2011

In an important sense, a scientist is anybody who revises what they believe to be true in the light of changing evidence. Police detectives are – or at least ought to be – scientists; yet, as a group, they have had a reputation for tunnel vision, for pursuing a single line of investigation while downplaying information that questions that investigative line.

Yet we normally think of scientists as people who are employed with a role labelled ‘scientist’, and as specialist scholars or practitioners within a scientific discipline such as physics or economics. Many people with this moniker are people we do not trust, in large part because of who they are employed by, or who they might hold an allegiance towards.

Any ‘scientist’ who instinctively acts to keep ‘alternative facts’ off the ‘table of knowledge’ is a scientiste rather than a scientist, whatever their formal title might be. They may have been corrupted by their employers’ belief systems; or by their own. Indeed their own belief systems might attract them to employers with compatible belief systems. Scientistes are the knowledge gatekeepers of liberal polities.

Another problem with scientific truth is that of ‘narrow-vision’. One test of a scientifically-informed policy relating to Covid19 might be that it minimises the number of people who die of Covid19, while neither caring about the number of people who die from (ie, as a result of, directly or indirectly) Covid19, nor being interested in non-fatal consequences of Covid19. The informing scientists may be unbiassed with respect to a belief system, but unintentionally biassed through an overly narrow criterion of the success of an intervention they support.

The scientiste problem is not just about biassed science; it’s also about the cheerleaders for scientism, who may include politicians, public servants, and journalists. Cheerleaders, inclined towards popular belief-systems, may express ‘confirmation bias’ towards certain kinds of scientific ‘facts’ relative to alternative scientific facts. They may not ask questions that do not align with the favoured narratives.

An interesting article of the bad scientist good scientist genre is ‘Reality Check: Vax Vexation’ by Stephen Davis (NZ Listener, 4 Dec 2021, p.12) which focuses on the Public Health Policy Journal, which is edited and published by ‘discredited’ scientists. (I use quote marks as a sign of my neutrality on this matter.) My sense is that much of the ‘science’ in this journal might be regarded as non-science or nonsense by many scientists; but much science published in other journals also reflects an agenda.

Indeed some bad science is used to push one agenda that I’m supportive of; namely that of concern about anthropogenic climate change, a reality which it is difficult to argue against based on the evidence that I’m aware of. Nevertheless, as an economic historian, I was disappointed by the infamous ‘hockey stick’ chart, that entirely removes the Little Ice Age which peaked in the seventeenth century, and has been widely argued to be an instrumental factor in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, especially in Europe. (A very worthwhile book here is Nature’s Mutiny by Philipp Blom, Picador 2019, about “How the Little Ice Age transformed the West and shaped the present”. Some people have played down the Little Ice Age by suggesting that it was mainly a northern hemisphere phenomenon; the state of New Zealand’s glaciers at the time of James Cook’s first voyage – 1769 – would suggest otherwise)

Another example of bad science good science rhetoric was Al Jazeera’s The Campaign Against the Climate (17 Apr 2021) where ‘bad scientists’ upholding naked capitalist agendas with pseudo-scientific falsehoods were pitted against good publicly-spirited agenda-free scientists. If only it were that simple! Actually, the requirement to look after Planet Earth is a difficult-to-contest ethical truth; the climate science is useful, but by no means the only reason to induce better behaviour.

An interesting and accessible recent discussion about science was Steven Pinker’s RNZ (27 Nov 2021) interview with Kim Hill: Steven Pinker: why being rational is human and matters now. In a poignant moment at the end of the interview, Pinker acknowledged the important scientific career of the late Emeritus Professor Michael Corballis, who, apparently, “some senior academics say Corballis was the best chance Auckland University has ever had to snare a Nobel Prize“. Sadly, for this distinguished world scientist aged 85, half of the references in his Wikipedia page relate to events in the last few months (see the letter Corballis co-authored, In Defence of Science, which referred to Mātauranga Māori.

(Mātauranga Māori is largely a mix of generalised inference from direct observation [the inductivemethod], much of which complements and facilitates science, and thematic storytelling which conveys ethical truths and true human foibles. That is not to claim that Māori before colonisation never used the scientific [deductive] method; rather it is to acknowledge that valid knowledge – truth – is much more than explanatory science, and that oral traditions of knowledge cannot easily convey methodology.)

Questions in need of an Improved Knowledge Base

I will mention four.

First on human origins, very little of what I have read properly acknowledges that a very large proportion of humans in the past will have lived, as today, in low-altitude habitats. The anthropalaeontologists don’t deny that sea levels are up to 100 metres higher today than they were between 90,000 and 10,000 years ago; but they continue to favour inductive reasoning based on available evidence (very little of which was from low-altitude habitats for the essential reason that those habitats are now under water), while showing little interest in more speculative theory-informed possibilities about the coastal lives of early humans.

Second, when it comes to epidemiology, there still seems to be a scientific bias in favour of explanations for epidemics based on the unique characteristics of micro-pathogens rather than in favour of explanations that focus on the different vulnerabilities of host populations to the likes of viruses and bacteria. Thus, I have yet to see any stories trying to explain why, in 2020 before new Covid19 variants emerged, Eastern Europe suffered much worse than Western Europe in late 2020 despite the west suffering much more initially; and I have seen few attempts to explain why South America was so vulnerable.

Third, there are many matters in economics that could be better understood by better practice in economic science. The one I will mention here is about the causes of inflation; and the alleged role of low interest rates in causing inflation, and of the widespread conviction that intervening in the market to raise interest costs will somehow make inflation go away. The commonsense approach is to see inflation as analogous to physiological pain, knowing that pain can have many possible causes. The ‘one remedy’ answer for inflation is no more scientific than was Galen’s famous blood-letting remedy for many types of medical ailment. Further, we only have to look at the relationship between interest rates and inflation in New Zealand (and elsewhere) in the years before the 2008 global financial crisis; then, higher interest rates were raising both general inflation and especially house price inflation.

Finally, an accounting matter. How can we know how much income-tax is paid by any New Zealander, and by all New Zealanders? It’s a question with no scientific answer, because it depends on the legal and accounting systems adopted. And these systems, as noted, are derived culturally, not scientifically.

Philosophers of Science

I will finish this essay by noting three classic works on the philosophy of Science; all works I learned about in my higher education.

The first work remains the seminal text on the scientific method, and was published in Nazi Germany in 1934, and translated into English in 1959. It is of course Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. We should note that Popper (born in Austria) was not a Nazi; he indeed also wrote a classic discourse on political liberalism – The Open Society and Its Enemies – while living as a political refugee in Christchurch, New Zealand. Popper will have been well aware of the Methodenstreit – the Battle of Methods – in economics in the 1880s, in which the deductive method promoted by the ‘Austrian school’ of economists was pitted against the inductive method favoured by the German ‘historical school’.

The second classic work on science was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1962), which introduced the notion of ‘paradigm-shift’. Thus the reality is that most professional scientists work within paradigms all their careers, and that there is an innate conservatism within such scientific work. Scientists tend not to ask questions that might lead to uncomfortable answers; they build safer careers working within already well-researched territory.

Finally, Imre Lakatos introduced the idea of ‘Research Programmes’ which had a hard core, and a soft periphery. The hard core really represented a ‘scientific dogma’ (yes, it’s an oxymoron), a quasi-scientific belief system (doctrine) which was protected from the usual scientific methods of falsification. The Research Programme could, however, evolve in relatively incremental ways, through allowing changes to its soft outer veneer.

I have little doubt that Michael Corballis was familiar with the works of these three philosophers of knowledge. Of course, their works and his are subject to the principle of scientific contestability – subject to revision through argument and through counter-example – as are any works in the field of knowledge.

One of the ‘pseudo-sciences’ that Lakatos identified was ‘neoclassical economics’, which, at its core and as is practiced by its practitioners, is very much a doctrine – the doctrine of economic liberalism – rather than a science. Yet economics comes up with many useful hypotheses which are often tested, though not always rejected or modified when the scientific method suggests they should be. Take my example about inflation.

Indeed economics, which models itself on physics, contains truths that are more analogous to pure mathematical truths; truths that might be called advanced tautologies. An important such truth forms the basis for cost-benefit analysis: it says that if the benefit of doing more of something outweighs its ‘marginal’ cost, then more should be done. Otherwise more should not be done, and possibly too much of that something has already been done.

Coming back to the biggest scientific issue of 2020 and 2021, this core economic truth can help answer the question as to how long a nation facing a pandemic emergency should continue to stay in protective quarantine, or for how long people should continue to wear facemasks in confined public spaces. By definition, an emergency public health mandate has clear short-term benefits that outweigh its short-term costs. But, when it comes to the question of extending such an authority-led measure, calculations of diminishing benefits and increasing costs come into play.

Conclusion

There is much more to knowledge than science. Nevertheless, the scientific method has proved to be a major contributor to modern knowledge, both through the wonderful and otherwise unknowable insights into nature that it brings, and to the technologies and other human interventions which contestable knowledge makes possible. Science should neither be denounced nor deified. Scientism is not science. Scientific knowledge is contestable, by definition, and is tested and modified through observation and measurement.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

It’s a known known that the late Donald Rumsfeld’s principal legacy to the world is the following quote:

“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

I might say that there are also unknown knowns, nuggets of truth buried in archives and barely read books and articles.

When it comes to known unknowns, there are two basic types. The first are questions posed for which we do not yet have any plausible answers. This could be due to technical (eg measurement) difficulties, or economic difficulties (the expected cost of finding answers being too high). The other type is because at least some people don’t want the questions answered (and may even place embargos on finding answers), or because the possible answers simply do not fit the prevailing filter through which the questions are framed in public discourse.

Re unknown unknowns there are also multiple categories. First there are cases where questions have never had reason to be posed, cases beyond the prevailing human imagination. These are genuine unknown unknowns; things that are true but that none of us had the capacity to imagine. I can offer no present examples. A past example is the electric light bulb, which could not have been imagined even by Julius Caesar. (Although the light bulb could have been imagined well before it happened; for example, after the scientific work of Michael Faraday.)

Then there are questions of wilful blindness, questions which verge on the final category of known unknowns. Third are the black swans, events that happen ‘out of the blue’ or ‘out of left-field’; but which were predictable ‘with hindsight’! Black swans represent something akin to wilful blindness; they are events that were genuinely unexpected, and for which the precise form of their manifestation could never have been predicted. Covid19 is a black swan. (Note that ‘black swan’ is an unfortunately ironic term. It was either first coined – as a metaphor – by someone who did not know that black swan birds exist, and are the normal type of swan in some parts of the world, including ours. Or it was coined because the ‘coiner’ believed that, for almost everybody except themself, actual black swans were unknown. In reality, black swans are not black swans, and they have been known in Europe since the seventeenth century. Nor are the black-white swans I saw on the island of Chiloe; I was not expecting to see them, but one reason people travel is to discover things that other people already know.)

(That the Taliban would rule over the whole of Afghanistan as soon as July 2021 was a black swan as recently as June 2021. It was not conceived of as even a possibility, except – maybe – by the Taliban themselves.)

Related to these unknowns are the unseen – or ignored – red flags. It is missed red flags that create black swans, such as Covid19. And – I would argue – our failure to adopt joined-up-scientific thinking re the known facts about Covid19 and related viral diseases, means that there are more black swans lurking. The most important red flag that I would mention in this case, is the present apparent loss of natural immunity to respiratory viruses; loss of what I will call ‘community respiratory viral immunity’ (CRVI). CRVI is not a binary concept; it’s a level of community immunity that, like the economy, has for the most part grown over time. Natural variation of immunity rises (or diminishes) through the changes in the pathogenic environment, rather than through interventions such as vaccination. (The economic growth analogy of a temporary loss of community immunity is a recession.)

The problem in New Zealand at present is epitomised by the way we report about ‘Delta’, a highly transmissible variant of the SARS-COV2 virus that causes Covid19; this ‘comms’ problem is perpetrated in particular by our technocrats, our bureaucrats, our ‘policrats’ (narrative-framing politicians), and our mediacrats.

Before discussing this further, I need to emphasise that New Zealand’s present ‘Level 4 lockdown’ is absolutely the correct emergency policy measure for the present outbreak in New Zealand of Covid19.

The Delta-Bogey and the Missing Science and CW2 (Covid-War 2)

The dominant narrative in Aotearoa New Zealand is that Covid19 – which we (the New Zealand ‘team of five million’) defeated in battle in 2020 – has morphed, like some demon – into Delta. And that Delta is a seriously mean beast. In creating Demon Delta, we implicitly treat its predecessors as comparatively harmless. Yet by far the majority of Covid19 deaths in the world have been caused by non-Delta variants. (If this latest outbreak had been identified as non-Delta, we should have been more – not less – alarmed; it would probably have come from South America, where Covid19 has most affected, and where Delta has been least present.) In this narrative, populations have four weapons at their disposal: macro barrier methods (lockdowns and quarantines), micro barrier methods (hygiene practices, including facemask wearing), contact tracing, and ‘silver bullet’ vaccinations. (By ‘silver bullet’ vaccinations, we mean that – after a course of vaccinations – a person may be classified as ‘immunised’; this is how we understand, for example, measles vaccinations.)

In this narrative, the implicit counterfactual is that the adverse consequences of a Delta outbreak are much greater than of an outbreak of the South American versions of Covid19, or of the original Wuhan version. While we have heard much about the greater transmissibility of Delta, I have heard of no scientific studies that compare Delta and non-Delta strains in fully comparable populations. (All scientific pharmaceutical trials require that drugs be tested alongside ‘control’ treatments.)

This predominant narrative may be called Hypothesis One.

There is a second obvious hypothesis (Hypothesis Two): that (i) Delta is substantially the same as previous versions of Covid19, though just enough more transmissible to displace other variants in circulation in the same environments (like grey squirrels displacing red squirrels), and (ii) from late 2020 – and especially in 2021 – populations have reduced CRVI (community respiratory viral immunity). (There is another possibility, an in-between hypothesis, that Delta is significantly more harmful than other variants, and that its impact is exacerbated through many current host populations having reduced CRVI.)

An extension of Hypothesis Two is that immunisation by vaccination may not be permanent. (It is a known known that measles immunisation is permanent, but that immunisation against influenza is temporary.)

In summary, Hypothesis One is that the major problem leading to ongoing mortality and morbidity is the more aggressive behaviour of the enemy (of Delta). Hypothesis Two is that the major problem leading to ongoing mortality and morbidity is the reduced CRVI of the population.

The counterfactual to the first hypothesis is that the Covid19 pandemic would be in its endgame, were it not for Delta. The counterfactual to the second hypothesis is that the outcome of New Zealand’s August 2021 outbreak of Covid19 (and recent Asian outbreaks) would be much the same – serious – whether or not this was the Delta strain. Both hypotheses predict that – without appropriate policy responses – there will be problematic levels of mortality and illness.

Policy Implications

Both hypotheses require policies of ’emergency lockdown’ and, if available, ‘vaccination’. (Fortunately, we do have available effective vaccinations which target the SARS-COV2 virus; had these vaccinations proven to be ineffective, then we would further emphasise ’emergency immunity management’ policies such as lockdowns.

There are two important policy differences, however, depending on which hypothesis is more true. The first policy difference relates to how populations should behave outside of periods of emergency lockdown. The second is about the ongoing vaccination programme.

In Hypothesis One, Delta is the problem, and success is the ‘elimination’ of SARS-COV2 (whereby SARS-COV2 goes to the same place that SARS-COV1 – in 2003 – went to), aided by the immunisation by vaccination of the population.

In Hypothesis Two, reduced CRVI is the problem, and success is a level of community immunity that would tolerate SARS-COV2 circulating in future as another seasonal ‘common cold’ coronavirus. And success means adopting practices – including regular vaccinations – that extend CRVI levels in the population. (The good news here is that regular Covid19 vaccinations should reduce illness from other endemic viruses by facilitating high CRVI levels. Good for labour productivity as well as for general wellness.)

CRVI

What exactly is community respiratory viral immunity? It’s probably not quantifiable as a precise metric, but is a real-world parameter that rises or falls under different conditions; and it’s a community attribute that, ideally, should be optimised but not necessarily maximised.

The key idea is that it is a measure of general immunity to an important class of pathogenic diseases, and not immunity to a specific respiratory virus. And it should be understood as a population measure, rather than a measure of an individual person’s immunity.

CRVI increases with exposure to respiratory viruses in aggressive or attenuated form. It relates to what might be called the ‘common’ classes of community viruses: influenzas, coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, and other similar viruses such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Novel viruses (such as coronavirus SARS-COV2) can be classed as ‘aggressive’ (mainly because they are unknown to our immune systems), though some may be more aggressive than others (eg SARS-COV1 was more lethal than SARS-COV2). Attenuated viruses can be classed as those which have evolved to be less aggressive, forming equilibriums with populations with given levels of community immunity. And the label ‘attenuated’ can be used to describe the deactivated viral sequences that constitute the active ingredients of our vaccines. Vaccination against community viruses is a relatively recent episode in the wider history of vaccination; until 2020, only influenza vaccinations were in place for this viral class, and even they are comparatively recent (ie, in practice, influenza vaccinations are twentyfirst century interventions).

Over the history of humanity, CRVI has increased, and necessarily so. As more community viruses circulate within human populations (ie become endemic to humans) – typically viruses passed to humans from other species for which they were already endemic – then CRVI levels increase due to accumulated exposure to ever-greater-numbers of these virus species. Thus, in 2019, CRVI levels in human populations throughout the world were probably at the highest level that they had ever been in human history. Indeed, the main driver of rising CRVI levels in recent decades has been the decreasing cost and increasing convenience of international air travel. Another important driver has been the introduction of annual influenza vaccinations.

CRVI levels are generally higher in urban populations, and highest of all in the world’s metropolitan cities; cities which are both densely populated and within close reach to international airports. One of the most important unknown knowns (or at least ‘little known’ knowns) in this regard is the difference in community immunity levels between different homeplaces of young men called into the United States’ military in 1917, the year that a new H1N1 influenza virus started to circulate in the United States. The weaker – indeed ‘weedier’ – city boys proved to be significantly more resistant to the virus than the muscular young men from the farms and the provincial towns. (Refer to The Pandemic Century (2019), by Mark Honigsbaum.)

An important feature of CRVI is that it wanes when not fortified by ongoing exposure to community viruses. CRVI is nuanced, in that if fortified mainly by rhinoviruses in one year, then populations become a little more susceptible to serious illnesses from influenza viruses in the following year. Nevertheless, exposure to one class of community viruses probably gives some degree of resistance to other classes of community viruses.

So, under Hypothesis Two, in early 2020, global population CRVI levels were very high. The result was that Covid19 illness – caused by the then novel coronavirus SARS-COV2 – was resisted by the younger infected population, including the middle-aged-populations which represented the majority of airline passengers. Thus the major health consequences were faced by the older and comorbid populations who were less able to mount the requisite immunity responses.

However – and under Hypothesis Two – the important but not understood story of 2020 was the unusually rapid waning of CRVI levels in (now largely physically disconnected) human populations. This waning was a result of restrictive behaviours, mandated and unmandated. Restrictive behaviours include both mandated isolations, and personal barrier restrictions (such as physical distancing and the widespread use of facemasks).

Under emergency conditions, a loss of CRVI is the necessary price we must pay in order to minimise – if not eliminate – a dangerous pathogen. This elimination was achieved with SARS-COV1. The under-recognised challenge is to – as best as possible – start to restore CRVI levels as soon as emergency conditions are lifted (and, as part of this, to fully lift domestic emergency mandates as soon as a novel virus has been suppressed).

Part of the CRVI restoration process is of course vaccination, and it is probable that booster influenza vaccinations did to some extent increase our abilities to resist new outbreaks of Covid19. Of course vaccines that specifically target coronaviruses – and SARS-COV2 in particular – would have much more impact during a coronavirus pandemic; and the beneficial side-effect of coronavirus vaccines is that they most likely reduce populations’ susceptibility to the other community viruses that give us colds and influenzas.

It is now possible to talk of the ‘benefits of complacency’. ‘Complacent’ barrier behaviour – though not so much complacency towards contact tracing – helps to restore CRVI, and prepares populations for the next (or next wave of) community viral infection.

Hypothesis Two states that the major single factor in the severity of outbreaks of Covid19 since the middle of 2020 has been the loss of CRVI, and not the increased virulence of the evolving viral agents.

1917-19 Influenza Pandemic

It is worth digressing here to note the epidemiology of the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1917-19; the pandemic best called the ‘black flu’, though more commonly (and inappropriately) called the ‘Spanish flu’.

This pandemic essentially hit the world in three waves, with the second wave being the most severe. In New Zealand the probable fatality rate was about 0.8% of the population, though ‘officially’ it was more like 0.4%. (We note that the present official fatality rate of Covid19 in the United States state of New Jersey has, just this month, surpassed 0.3%.)

The first wave of this pandemic appears to have begun in the United States, and its spread was almost certainly facilitated by the mobilisation of conscipted troops, as the United States entered World War One (WW1). However, another variant of H1N1 influenza had been emerging in China, and it seems that, on the Western Front, the two versions fused into a new super H1N1 variant, the ‘second-wave’ variant that was brought to New Zealand by returning soldiers. (The best source for New Zealand epidemiological information is the second edition of Geoffrey Rice’s book Black November. And we should note that evolution – of viruses as well as larger creatures – is about hybridisation [fusion] as well as through descendant mutation [fission].)

The earlier variant had however circulated in New Zealand in the late winter of 1918, with some severe health outcomes, but also raising the effective CRVI in those parts of New Zealand that were affected. When the big second wave hit in November 1918, two groups suffered least. First were those – such as Ngāti Porou – who implemented local quarantines. Second, were those in the places most affected by the first wave. After the short emergency period (essentially the month of November 1918) people reverted to normal life – or as near to normal life as possible in the month that WW1 ended. CRVI levels were clearly very high by New Year 1919, so when the slightly attenuated third wave hit in 1919, New Zealand was barely affected. Australia – which had imposed a full quarantine in November 1918 – suffered much worse in 1919 than New Zealand, though not as badly as New Zealand had done in 1918. Clearly, New Zealand had – for that time in history – very high levels of CRVI in 1919; ‘herd immunity’ to influenza, and most likely a higher than normal immunity to other community respiratory infections.

The ‘black flu’ pandemic was an event that featured both a more virulent muted version of the H1N1 influenza virus, and significantly varying levels of community immunity to respiratory viruses.

We note that in the present pandemic, both Hypothesis One (a very lethal variant of the virus) and Hypothesis Two (waning CRVI levels) may contribute to the story. In 2021, however, the Hypothesis One story (the ‘delta’ story) seems less convincing; I suspect, because the newer more aggressive variant is a descendant (fission) variant, not a fusion of two already aggressive variants (as was the case in 1918).

Hypotheses One and Two: the Evidence

To start with, we need to look at the big European second wave of Covid19, in the northern autumn of 2020. By then, there was increased knowledge of Covid19, improved testing and contact tracing, and renewed use of barrier interventions to viral circulation; all of these should have reduced the impact of the second wave if the virulence of the virus was the main determinant of the level of deaths and serious illnesses. But none of the new ‘more transmissible’ variants were present at that time; Covid19 was not more virulent then. (‘Alpha’ was the ‘Kent variant’ that surfaced in England in about December 2020.)

Instead, what happened was that, in late 2020 in most West European countries, the death rates were similar to those of the preceding spring wave. Spain was different; its fatality rates were significantly lower. Of most importance for this analysis was East Europe, within the European Union. There, where, in the spring, barrier methods had largely kept Covid19 out, fatality rates soared in the autumn to levels much higher than in West Europe. It was the same virus in both parts of the European Union. This picture negates Hypothesis One, and strongly supports Hypothesis Two. The major determinants of Covid19 death in Europe in late 2020 would have been varying CRVI levels, lowest in the east due to its successful earlier precautions, highest in Spain. Whereas summer complacency in the Czech Republic (where CRVI had become dangerously low) undoubtedly contributed to the problem, summer complacency in Spain most likely contributed to the solution, by boosting CRVI there. We also note that, for the most part, younger people were more likely to die from Covid19 in East Europe. This is consistent with lower CRVI levels there and then, rather than greater levels of complacency (unlikely) being the problem in East Europe. By September 2020, Covid19 was a known known, no longer a ‘black swan’.

In the Americas, throughout the pandemic, piecemeal barrier protection almost certainly reduced the peaks of the outbreaks, but also brought about depressed CRVI levels. We see that, in the United States, the timing of outbreaks in the ‘blue’ (Democratic) states (where barrier controls were most followed) and the ‘red’ (Republican) states (where barrier controls were most resisted). In general, the new outbreaks started in ‘blue’ states (with less CRVI), and eventually moved on to red states (with higher CRVI than blue states, but less CRVI than in 2019). In the very latest outbreak, though, the blue states were saved through higher CRVI arising from much higher vaccination rates; the present outbreak is accentuated in the red states.

Hypothesis Two predicted that, in 2021, Asia (which had imposed the most effective barriers in 2020) would be very vulnerable. That has come to pass. And – as in Indonesia today – the age profile of fatalities has been coming down, suggesting that levels of CRVI in Asia in 2021 are even lower than in Eastern Europe in late 2020 and early 2021. The tragedy of Indonesia is that even very young children are dying.

Further, in Asia in 2021, those countries unable to implement sufficient barrier protections (such as India), have seen short (but severe) outbreaks of Covid19, this time with the Delta variant of SARS-COV2 featuring as a circulating virus. An extreme case of this is Afghanistan, already in political turmoil when Covid19 hit in June this year. Briefly, Afghanistan in June – as Nepal in May – was amongst the worst affected countries in the world. But now, in August and with even greater political turmoil, Covid19 seems to have largely disappeared. It looks like Afghanistan has experienced a dramatic boost to its CRVI status.

The present outbreaks in Australia are proceeding differently from those of 2020. The popular narrative is that of Hypothesis One – that the people are now up against a more vicious foe, a devil called Delta. But the manner of the more lethal spread of Covid19 in the young population is more suggestive of low CRVI levels, as in East Europe late in 2020. The (counterfactual) control here is the United Kingdom, and West Europe. In these places CRVI has largely been restored (though, as in Israel, may be waning due to the earliness of its jabs). There, Delta has behaved more like a pussy cat than a devil, infectious but not lethal. In the United Kingdom, CRVI was largely restored by vaccination, but the removal of mandated barrier protections will be ensuring that vaccination-induced CRVI is being enhanced by renewed community circulation of seasonal (non-novel) respiratory viruses. Australia – especially young Australians – have substantially less CRVI protection from serious illness.

Eastern Europe is an interesting test case; it seems to have been immune from Delta so far. However, waning community immunity may see it vulnerable this coming northern winter.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the rapidly imposed emergency measures should – after a few weeks – repel the current outbreak. The challenge will be for us to substantially restore CRVI levels, in time for the southern winter of 2022. While vaccinations this year – and 2022 booster vaccinations for the more vulnerable – will represent the main part of meeting this challenge, a high dose of Level 1 barrier-complacency this summer (but not QI-code complacency, for contact tracing) should help to keep the unvaccinated somewhat safe, the rest of us safe from them, and should help the vaccinated to hold on to raised CRVI levels through next autumn. It means that, once back to Level 1 (no community presence of Covid19), we should be encouraged to remove our masks – and to enjoy mixing and mingling – at least until another border-infringement outbreak occurs. And, when international travel is once again opened up, our priority should be to maintain – and extend – high levels of CRVI (community respiratory viral immunity). Low CRVI means lots of infections, many serious, and not all Delta Covid19.

Conclusion

The evidence, at least as I have presented it, comes closer to disproving Hypothesis One (the aggressive Delta hypothesis) than to disproving Hypothesis Two (the deficient CRVI hypothesis). I would like to see, in the media, a proper scrutiny of both hypotheses. Until this happens, the attention that community respiratory viral immunity requires will be negligently missed. The likely truth that is Hypothesis Two will remain a known unknown.

Barrier methods – macro and micro – work in emergency contexts, much as cortisol reduces stress and anxiety in these contexts. But, out of these acute situations, excess cortisol becomes a source of ill health. Barrier infection blocks all of the community viruses that support CRVI levels, making us over time more vulnerable to community infections, and making those infections more dangerous. On the other hand, annual vaccinations for influenza and coronavirus will substantially extend CRVI levels, making us generally more healthy with respect to both influenza and common cold viruses. In the United Kingdom and West Europe, Delta Covid19 shows all the signs of becoming – in a few years – another common cold coronavirus.

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Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

contact: keith at rankin dot nz

2020 has been the year of the scientist, or at least the public health scientist.

Science is a method, not a discipline; it includes social science, because social science does at least notionally apply the scientific method.

While being about the discovery of truth, the scientific method implies that truth (with the exception of identities such as mathematical truths) is unattainable. With the scientific method, ‘meaningful’ propositions are either false or yet to be falsified. The latter ‘yet to be falsified’ propositions are regarded as provisionally true.

The word ‘meaningful’ here is a technical word; it relates to propositions that are capable of being tested by ’empirical’ evidence. It does not relate to certain other propositions, which are easily understood (but not meaningful in a scientific sense), such as these:

• my favourite colour is ‘green’
• Mr X is a bad person
• God exists
• my Christmas present is more valuable than yours
• accounting Method A is better than accounting Method B

The latter example could be regarded as meaningful if an agreed criterion for ‘better’ is provided. But two different accounting methods can both be 100% accurate.

The Good

William McNeill (Plagues and Peoples, 1976) tells us that the suppression of the Third Plague Pandemic was probably the most important achievement, ever, in public health applied science. Most of us know nothing of this, precisely because the Third Plague Pandemic was suppressed.

This was a supreme effort that took place only when (in the 1900s’ decade) ‘germs’ were only just coming to be understood as the principal causes of infectious diseases. Further, it was only this event that enabled the more infamous Second Plague Pandemic to be adequately understood.

First, we must note that ‘plague’ is the name of a disease that comes in two main forms: ‘bubonic’ and ‘pneumonic’. Bubonic plague is spread by fleas which live on burrowing rodents – which may include rats – for whom the disease is endemic. The more lethal pneumonic plaque is spread much like Covid19, person to person and often through super-spreader events. Unlike Covid19, plague is treatable with antibiotics. But it must be treated quickly; case fatality rates for pneumonic plague were about 90 percent, and fatality could take place within a day of infection.

The first plague pandemic occurred between the years 550 and 750, affected mainly in the Mediterranean coastal areas, and most likely originated in Central Africa.

The second plague pandemic originated in the steppes of Central Asia in the 1330s, and finished in Manchuria in the 1920s; the Manchuria outbreak was the last substantial outbreak linked to that Central Asian contagion reservoir. The most renown episode within this pandemic was the European ‘Black Death’ of 1348 to 1352.

The third plague pandemic originated in the borderlands of China, Burma (now Myanmar) and India in the 1850s. It festered in China’s Yunnan province until it spread to Canton (now Guangzhou) and Hong Kong in the 1890s. From Hong Kong, it spread – via tramp steamers, ship rats and fleas – to seaports all over the world, much as Covid19 spread across the world via people in aeroplanes. While largely suppressed by the 1920s, significant late outbreaks linked to that initial Yunnan source took place in North Africa after World War 2, and in Gujarat, West India, in the early 1990s.

Among the most significant transmissions were those in California, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Sydney. The plague came to New Zealand from Sydney in 1900, with an estimated death toll of 7 people (and many thousands of rats). My partner’s great-great-grandfather was a member of the Auckland Health Board that successfully managed the plague outbreak here. The death toll in Australia was about 500, mostly in the Sydney area.

The scientific work was done mainly in Hong Kong and Bombay. It was only then that bubonic plague was scientifically linked to rats and fleas. Ironically, that gave us this huge mental picture of the medieval black death as being linked to medieval poverty, with homes in Europe in that time supposedly infested with rats. Yet few pictures from the time show rats, and transmission patterns away from seaports were inconsistent with rats and fleas as being the only vectors of the disease. It now appears that the Black Death was mainly pneumonic plague, spread person to person by superspreaders. This pattern of transmission was particularly evident in the 1924 Los Angeles outbreak of pneumonic plague.

The third plague pandemic was suppressed – much as the SARS1 coronavirus pandemic of 2003 (more lethal than SARS2, Covid19) was suppressed – through a mix of excellent scientific work and the political will to implement the scientific requirements. (Political overkill did take place, however, especially in British-ruled Hong Kong and India, and with little compensation for those who lost their homes and their livelihoods.) Had that pandemic not been supressed – had pneumonic plague got out of control like the SARS2 coronavirus did in 2020 – the modern world as we know it would have collapsed. In the pre-antibiotic era, this pestilence – both lethal and highly infectious – could have halved the world’s population had the science not prevailed.

Unfortunately, as a result of the third plague pandemic, a number of new plague reservoirs formed last century – in Argentina, Peru, South Africa and North America. The North American reservoir covers at least the western two-thirds of the United States. Most human cases in the United States these days occur in the western one-third (and are cured), and in the public estate rather than on farms; farming practices help to minimise the risk of the disease from overflowing from the burrowing rodents into urban human populations. Nevertheless, the fourth plague pandemic, when it comes, will most likely start in the United States, some time after antibiotics have become ineffective and public order has already become tentative.

The Ugly

Many very bad things have been done in the name of science. Eugenics is an applied science that became central to our way of thinking, especially around the years 1870 to 1930. Eugenics is the science of artificial selection; the ‘survival of the fittest’ enhanced by experts deciding who is fittest, and henceforth who may be permitted to breed.

Eugenics is not false – in the way that alchemy is false. Eugenics is indeed widely applied in farming, and other breeding programmes such as thoroughbred racing horses and pedigree breeding for home pets.

In humans, applied eugenics was called things like ‘the improvement of the race’. It formed a pseudo-scientific basis for racism. Eugenics was ‘pseudo’-scientific because it was built upon cultural premises about what constituted fitness, and it was built upon a past lack of understanding by scientists of the importance – indeed the biological fitness – of diversity. (We note that eugenics, applied in farming, is also problematic in this regard. Eugenic practices have substantially reduced the diversity of our food crops and domesticated animals, increasing our vulnerability to animal and plant pandemics; and, potentially, to human pandemics.) Good science requires imagination, and few scientists 100 years ago were able to imagine the importance of biological diversity to the fitness of the biosphere.

Eugenics became a cultural-scientific enterprise that built on a particular interpretation of Charles Darwin’s published works on biological evolution. While Darwin himself should not be understood as a eugenicist, the ‘father’ of ‘scientific’ eugenics was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. Further, eugenics conflated in the Victorian upper middle class mind with the ‘Social Darwinism’, an emergent social pseudo-science championed by Herbert Spencer.

The False:

Science is the practice of forming provisional truths through the elimination of verified falsehoods. In practice, this process doesn’t really work. In social science, it is almost impossible to definitively assign a proposition to the scientific dustbin.

In physical science, falsification has also proved problematic. Doctors – practitioners of medical science – clung onto the idea, long after the miasma theory of infection had been disproved, that they did not need to work in sterile environments. One result was that – in New Zealand in the 1920s when it became normal for women to give birth in hospitals rather than in the home – while the infant mortality rate went down, the maternal mortality rate increased. The problem turned out to be doctors bringing infections with them from general wards into maternity wards.

More generally, the big dichotomy in nineteenth century medical science was the ‘miasma theory’ versus the ‘germ theory’ explanation of infectious diseases.

The miasma theory became the mainstay of medical practice for nearly two millennia, following the second century writings of Galen. The theory prevailed until the 1880s, and was still widely believed at the time of the onset of the Third Plague Pandemic. Miasmas were essentially ‘bad airs’ arising from the ground, especially disturbed or filthy ground. One reason for the ongoing belief in the miasma theory is that it did suggest quarantine and environmental cleanliness as remedies, and these remedies were often effective.

The competing germ theory (or ‘contagionist’ theory) was first proposed in the sixteenth century, and had many adherents by the eighteenth century. (The case for quarantines was even stronger under the germ theory than under the miasma theory.). But in the nineteenth century, medical science took a major setback; the germ theory was falsely falsified.

William McNeill tells us (p.271) that: “French doctors, when yellow fever broke out in Barcelona in 1822, seized the opportunity to make a definitive test of the contagionist as against the miasmatic school of thought. … They concluded that there was no possibility of contact among the different persons who came down with yellow fever in Barcelona. Thus contagionism seemed to have been fully and finally discredited.”

McNeill continues to note that the problem was that “no one as yet imagined [my emphasis] that insects might be carriers of disease”. And that “British liberals, in particular, saw quarantine regulations as an irrational infringement of the principle of free trade” and lobbied strongly – and largely successfully – for ‘the economy to be prioritised’. This was in the early years of systematised classical political economy; later the same mercantile lobby prevailed during the Irish potato famine.

An important consequence of this false falsification of the germ theory, is that when John Snow discovered that the mid-century London cholera outbreak was caused by contaminated water, his findings were largely ignored. The end of the prevalence of the miasma theory in medical science only came when Robert Koch in 1882 physically and definitively identified the bacteria which caused cholera.

In 2020 our own Siouxsie Wiles has promoted in New Zealand the John Snow Memorandum which strongly lobbies for politicians and administrators to take Covid19 seriously.

The Expedient

Science – including social science – has become a career for many of our brightest minds. But the necessity to build a career can get in the way of the quality of the science. Further, every now and again, career scientists get much more public attention than they would normally get. Even more important than their new-found media exposure is the fact that these scientists suddenly find that they have the ear of senior decision-making politicians; a select few scientists become public warriors with a cause, rather than cloistered academics researching on the margins of public attentiveness.

One important example of this phenomenon was the ‘dry’ academic leaders of economic liberalism in the 1980s. (Paul Krugman – himself having a second career as a media economist – has widely discussed the compromises that career-building places on scientific truth in the social sciences.) Treasury in New Zealand at that time preferred to recruit economists from the ‘dry’ universities, or people who had graduated in other disciplines and could subsequently be inculcated into 1980s’ Treasury ways of thinking. And the worse the economy got – thanks to the recommendations of these very people – the more politicians and media looked to these dry economists for explanations and solutions.

In public health today, different countries have adulated different schools of public health. The Swedish public health school has been diametrically opposed to the New Zealand public health school. Yet both schools’ leaders have been subject to a sharply heightened media exposure and sense of becoming the military generals of the Covid19 battle. And that can compromise good science.

In the ‘battle’ against Covid19, there are essentially four pre-vaccine ant-covid measures: lockdowns, border management, contact tracing, and mask wearing. All almost certainly play a role, but the ways these different measures interact can be complex, and unhelpful messaging – much coming from scientists – has contributed to the pandemic. The scientists in particular understand their disciplines, but not the wider pictures of peoples’ lives.

Economics can help here – but not the dogmatic kind that ruled over us in the later 1980s and early 1990s. The principal is that an action should be taken if the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost of that action. The result of this principle is that restrictive policies should be proportionate as well as effective.

It appears that New Zealand was effective, early, through its lockdowns (through the system of emergency levels); then, border management and contact tracing became critically important to New Zealand’s success in ‘eliminating’ Covid19. In New Zealand, these measures were sufficient; there has been no evidence that community mask-wearing has had any additional effect. Where an unpopular measure has minimal benefits (and masking in New Zealand is revealed as unpopular by the general absence of voluntary masking), it violates the economic principal of balancing marginal costs and marginal benefits. Only politicians, not scientists, should be making these kinds of economic decisions; and the politicians need to be taking advice from a range of relevant perspectives, and not just advice from one group of scientists.

In Taiwan, and some other East Asian countries, the critical measures have been border management and contact tracing. In the absence of lockdowns, masking in crowded indoor environments almost certainly played an additional role in the early stages. But, when a country has eliminated the virus from community transmission (as both New Zealand and Taiwan have), the compulsory wearing of masks can make no difference; and compulsion itself has significant costs, in some cultures more than others. In countries without community covid, the compulsory wearing of galoshes or codpieces would have the same impact on Covid19 as the wearing of masks.

The general application of the economic rule – about marginal benefits and marginal costs – is that contextually ineffective measures should never be taken except under formal emergency conditions that are by their nature characterised by a lack of information, ie a lack of knowing in which contexts the measures are effective.

The expedient approach is to delegate power to disciplinary experts, whose lives are themselves necessarily structured around expedient careers choices. And the expedient approach tends to be to overregulate, rather than to seek an optimal balance; and it doesn’t always remove regulations when they are no longer sensible. On the latter point, all emergency-type rules should always be time-limited from the outset, albeit subject to time extensions.

Summary

Science plays an important role in our lives, and sciences have much to offer as we seek to improve our lives, and seek to address circumstances that threaten our normal lives. But science is fallible, and no science contains the whole truth about the particular situations we face as we navigate our lives individually and collectively. Sometimes, big mistakes are made in the name of science. Truth is provisional.

To understand the world we live in, it is important to read books written in different time periods. Older literature does not have access to the latest research and currently fashionable tropes, and they may include some expressions that would be censured today as sexist or racist or similar. All periods in time have blind spots, and books written decades (or even centuries) ago can help readers to see the blind spots of our present times.

In 1969, microbiologist John Postgate wrote Microbes and Man. Seven years later, world historian William McNeill wrote Plagues and Peoples. Both are insightful contributions to human knowledge, written in an era of scientific hubris, and at a time in which ecology was coming to be understood as an especially important discipline that cut across more traditional scientific disciplines, including social sciences such as economics and anthropology. Postgate describes his book as a text on economic microbiology [his italics].

The main theme of Plagues and Peoples was the hitherto understated impacts of ‘microparasites’ – and the various diseases they caused – on human history; particular emphasis was places on lethal epidemics, biological adaptation, and the ongoing presence of once-epidemic diseases as endemic childhood infections. McNeill was seeking to rebalance history, much of which had hitherto been about the activities of macroparasites [his term]; in doing so, McNeill intimates a new linguistic apparatus – a new discipline, if you will, of global human ecology that may be called ‘macrobiology’, an analogue of the established disciple of ‘microbiology’.

McNeill’s premise

Animals are subject to predation from without and within. A predator – as we traditionally use the word – eats other animals. And a micropredator eats animals from within; that is, a ‘microbe’ which consumes its ‘host’ and must then find another host if it (or its genes) are to survive. A better strategy than predation for a microbe is ‘parasitism’; a parasite consumes food produced by its host, while still allowing its host to lead a healthy enough life. Likewise, it may be a better strategy for a ‘macrobe’ to be a parasite than to be a predator. (We might think of an eagle as a predator, and a vulture as a parasite.)

Early humans were subject to macropredators, and of course, as hunters, were themselves macropredators. In addition, certain environments were more subject to potentially dangerous microparasites than others, and these areas were very difficult for ancient populations to populate. Nevertheless many of these more dangerous places would be populated, eventually, due to pressures of population growth; after a number of epidemic ‘die-offs’ the associated maladies would eventually become endemic childhood diseases. Microparasites had evolved to become less lethal.

As humans became better at fending off animal predators, then other humans would displace animals as predators of people. This would generally take a form more like ethnic cleansing than cannibalism; human macropredators would acquire the lands – the territories, the economic bases – of vanquished peoples.

A critical change took place with the advent of agriculture; in particular as a result of the availability of more food per person. Farmers – often weakened by endemic microparasites, and working many more hours than their forebears did as hunters – would be obliged to share the fruits of their labours with emerging macroparasites; eg raiders, warlords and landlords. Such peasant farmers, then, had to share the fruits of their labour with two sets of parasites. Frequently these farmers would be enslaved in one form or other, for example as serfs; at other times they would be nominally free but would be subject to the substantial rents and taxes that were required to support macroparasitic lifestyles.

Microbes and Macrobes

As Postgate emphasised, many microbes (ie micro-organisms) are neither harmful nor pure parasites. Many are beneficial – maybe essential – to their hosts. (McNeill understood this of course; but his main theme was parasitism, and the human social coexistence with parasites that would become a necessary feature of human civilisation.) While humans (and other creatures) provide sustenance to microbes, many microbes perform vital services to their host organisms and host species. The analogy here is with ‘environmental services’, a phrase that was not in the lexicon of 1976.

We can think of microbes as falling on a spectrum – with micropredators at the bad end (eg with a score of 1, on a scale of 1 to 5), microparasites closer to the centre (eg with a score of 2), and microservants (with scores of 4 and 5). All are microbes. An organism at level 5 on the microbial spectrum could be regarded as a micro-altruist (microaltruist), existing without a shred of self-interest.

Thus, to pursue the McNeill premise, human ‘macrobes’ are people who fall on a comparable spectrum. First, we need to divide people into two ‘classes’, principals or hosts who are equivalent to the farmers mentioned above, and macrobes who depend on the economic outputs of their hosts.

On the macrobial scale, a macropredator would score a 1; a pure macroparasite would be a 2. An altruistic servant with minimal economic appetites – a devoted servant – would be a 5. The challenge is, in today’s world, to identify today’s many macrobes, and place each group of them on this spectrum. My focus will be on whether contemporary macrobes score a 3 (mainly a feeder, though providing some useful services), or a 4 (principally a provider of beneficial services or investments, though in return for the right to feed well).

Principals

From a microparasitic perspective, the host species – eg people – represents the ‘principal’ upon which the dependent microbes sustain themselves. From McNeill’s human macroparasitic perspective, certain people are the hosts, and other people are the dependent macrobes (with the proviso that macrobes, as people, will likely be hosts to other macrobes).

For McNeill, writing as a historian of pre-modern and early-modern times, identifying principals and macroparasites was quite easy. Principals were communities of peasant (or enserfed) farmers, and their associated artisans (such as blacksmiths, thatchers and brewers). All others – especially lords, bishops and kings – were dependent macrobes, including their vassals and personal servants. The productivity of principals was maintained by long working hours; principals would spend say half their working time providing for themselves, and the other half providing for their macrobes and microbes.

In a twentyfirst century context, therefore, principals are essentially farming and lower class communities – especially the essential workers who constitute the food supply chain. There are provisos though – so ‘agribusiness’, as we usually understand the term, is for the most part not a ‘principal’ occupation. We also note that people today can ‘wear two hats’; for example, family farmers – essential to the food supply chain – may also be macrobial speculators in property and financial assets.

Thoroughly Modern Macrobes

The most important modern-day macrobes are the professionals, the managers and the bureaucrats; and the corporate business sector, called by John Kenneth Galbraith the ‘planning system’ – in distinction from the ‘market system’ (described in The New Industrial State [1967] and in Economics and the Public Purpose [1973]). Managers are our modern-day vassals.

Of particular interest is the distinction between category 3 and category 4 macrobes. Category 4 macrobes are principally servants – providers of services or goods that people actually want or need – but who nevertheless expect to be reasonably well fed. Most teachers, academics, scientists, doctors and nurses, information professionals, manufacturers, builders and hospitality workers would fit into this category.

Category 3 macrobes, while providing some services, are principally in business or management to make (or save) money for themselves and their organisations. They are exploiters. We can see this kind of macrobial activity clearly in the beverage markets, tobacco, and big business fast food. In effect businesses like Coca Cola and KFC ‘mine’ their customers (using hard-sell marketing techniques) and frontline employees (exploiting power imbalances in the labour market). The marketing industry, by and large, is made up of professionals who provide services to category 3 macrobes.

In many organisations – including health sector and education sector organisations – the management take on a category 3 ‘mining’ approach to their customers and frontline (professional) employees. As part of this, they adopt an implicit accounting methodology that treats their productive employees’ salaries as costs, but their own remuneration as benefits. This is the epitome of the ‘planning system’ – macrobial capitalism – in which organisations’ managers compete with their shareholders for the financial spoils of exploitation.

Increasingly, we see category 4 businesses run using management structures copied from category 3 macrobial organisations. And in the public sector, too. Too many bureaucrats today adapt category 3 principals to their frontline workers (such as Work and Income case managers) and their ‘clients’ who require bureaucratic services (mainly for financial or compliance reasons). Further, since the global neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, governments themselves have come to treat costs as a purely monetary matter; they govern on the basis of minimising financial costs rather than on the basis of providing comprehensive benefits to the communities they nominally serve. Incrementally, modern democratic governments are becoming more like their macrobe category 2 pre-democratic predecessors; feeding more and serving less.

We may also note that those government (or government-funded) social agencies and social programmes which are largely ineffective, may be better characterised as category 3 than category 4, especially when their programmes of work are persevered with despite being ineffective. What may happen is that workers – often professional workers – draw an income from providing ineffective professional services; indeed, in order to ensure that their income is ongoing, it may be better that they do not solve the problems that they are charged to solve. The mental health industry is a candidate here; it provides salaries for many people, yet struggles to show evidence of general improvements in mental health. Treasury may be another such organisation. In the 1980s, Treasury became the most prestigious arm of government in New Zealand just as the economic problems it was charged to address became substantially worse. The worse the problems got, the more demanded and important they became.

With regards to ineffectiveness, we should take note of a recent book Bullshit Jobs (2018), by anthropologist David Graeber. A “bullshit job” is a job that, while it may well be well paid, delivers no overall benefits to humanity. These jobs do not represent naked parasitism; but should be classified as category 3, parasitic is essence if not in intent.

Categories of Macrobes, Examples

The following represent examples of the five categories of macrobes, in both ancient and modern times:

1. In ancient times, this category were human predators and conquerors. Principals (host victims) would fight or flee, for their lives. In modern times, we see a few examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing, one of the most recent being the plight of the Rohingya people of Myanmar.
2. In ancient times, this category were warlords (kings and princes), landlords, pirates, raiders, slave proprietors, and protection racketeers; and the vassals who worked for them. They were essentially thieves, though many provided some useful services. (Public choice theorists such as Mancur Olson – author of The Rise and Decline of Nations [1982] – distinguished between roving bandits [raiders] and stationary bandits [kings and aristocrat landlords].) In modern times, we may include financial speculators – especially real estate speculators – who intentionally adopt a parasitic lifestyle by buying and selling assets without necessarily adding value to them.
3. In ancient times, we consider the less malign versions of the above. And the precursors of organisations like FARC (Colombia), Hamas (Palestine), and the NPA (Philippines). In modern times, we include the ‘planning’ and ‘managerial’ systems of modern liberal democracies, and their transnational equivalents; we may include ‘the state’ in autocratic countries. As liberal democratic governments evolve cultures that mimic these capitalist ‘planning’ and ‘managerial’ systems, even democratic governments are shifting from category 4 towards category 3.
4. In modern times, these are our professionalised service organisations, and businesses in the ‘market economy’ which respond to people’s actual wants. The principal focus of category 4 macrobes is to provide services and goods to their host populations. In ancient times this category would include the various charities, mainly associated with religious orders (such as the Order of St John).
5. In ancient times, these would be ascetics, who would survive on alms and would perform some basic services, often of a spiritual nature. Buddhist monks come to mind. In modern times, category 5 macrobes would include minimum wage service workers – such as rest home workers – who choose to do underpaid service work because of their altruistic motivations rather than because of their lack of skills.

Summary

Following the argument of William McNeill in Plagues and Peoples (1976), host populations are subject to the activities of both microbial and macrobial agents. I have extended the argument by both allowing for the fact that many – indeed most – microbial agents are symbiont, meaning that they give to, as well as take from, their hosts; the result is, to a large extent, mutually beneficial exchanges between microbes and their hosts. I have also extended the argument by identifying modern as well as pre-modern macrobial agents; and noting that many of these macrobes (though by no means all) are also symbionts, providing valued services and goods to the people who feed them.

We cannot even get National Agriculture and Quarantine Inspection Authority (NAQIA) accredited laboratories up and running around Papua New Guinea for various lab testing our requirements.

These labs are used for testing water supply samples and processed food samples for public safety. But we want to leap frog over all the other things this country needs and do drug research.

Wow!

The National Institute of Standards and Industrial Technology (NISIT) is failing and cannot handle the local calibration of weights, thermometers and other standard measurement equipment so it needs to be outsourced or referred to the private sector.

It seems we have forgotten about the necessity of this associated enabling environment and are considering paying a start up entity for drug research.

Shocking!

Let’s say goodbye to our tax money! I mean, the government has just restructured an existing loan with the Bank of the South Pacific (BSP) and given us some breathing space so that K10.2 million is possibly just loose change that fell out of the Prfime Minister’s pocket while he was listening to their spiel.

I wonder if the EMTV news item, about Niugini Biomed justifying themselves, is reminiscent of how they presented to Prime Minister Marape?

Imagine if they were rambling like that in front of the PM too? Would he still buy it, hook line and sinker, with that poor presentation?

Right thinking Papua New Guineans would say NO to the Biomed proposal in its current form and at this time.

We have other pressing priorities!

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Today’s chart looks back to the years 1917 to 1920, using a sampling device I call the ‘Smithometer’. I have counted the weekly deaths of all people named Smith, from the beginning of 1917 to the end of 1920. At that time New Zealand was a country of 1.2 million people.

There are a number of death peaks due to World War 1, the largest of these being the Passchendaele battles of October 1917. Each peak represents a two-week period, effectively the middle of the week before the plotted week to the middle of the week after. For the Passchendaele peak we can say that the fortnightly death rate of New Zealand Smiths was four times normal.

We can apply that more generally, concluding that about 75 percent of New Zealand deaths in the period from 3 October to 17 October 1917 were due to WW1 activities; most notably the Passchendaele battle of 12 October.

The influenza pandemic hit New Zealand hard and fast, in mid-November 1918. Over two weeks the Smith toll was ten times greater than the baseline rate of 2.6 Smith deaths per week. (Note that the influenza figures are slightly muddied by the WW1 battle of Le Quesnoy on 4 November.) Otherwise it would look like a perfect spike in the chart. Also, a number of New Zealand soldiers succumbed to the pandemic while in Europe or the United Kingdom; the peak dates differed in different countries.

The overall influenza pandemic death toll of New Zealanders was somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000; that’s between half a percent and three-quarters of a percent of the New Zealand population. (Compare this to the likely worst case for Covid19 – Belgium – which will end up with a death rate from Covid19 infection at less than one in a thousand.)   Given that we already know about the severity of the 1918 pandemic, the surprise is how quickly the event in New Zealand finished. The chart shows that by mid-December 1918 Smith deaths were back to normal.

What will a Smithometer chart for 2019 to 2022 look like? First, we should note that Smiths today are a smaller proportion of the population, and a Smith sample would be biased against non-Pakeha.

However, we know that Pakeha are overrepresented in New Zealand in Covid19 cases, and – to the best of my knowledge – all deaths so far have been Pakeha. So far, not a single death has been recorded in Auckland, and the known incidence of Covid19 is 44 percent higher in the Pakeha-dominated South Island than in the North Island.

It is unlikely that deaths of Covid19 (ie deaths with Covid19 in the death certificate) will register on the New Zealand Smithometer, though they will cause a bump on a United Kingdom Smithometer.

The important question, however, is the impact of Covid19 on the overall death rate, and for that we would want to go at least until the end of 2021.

In 2020 it is likely that the Covid19 influence on the Smithometer will be negative, because ongoing social distancing will most likely substantially reduce the rate of deaths from influenza and pneumonia.

So the question will be the extent of economic chaos in the wake of Covid19, and the extent that such chaos may translate into extra deaths. My guess, from having studied the Great Depression of the early 1930s, is that the overall effect on deaths will also be negative. (Certainly the New Zealand death rates did not rise during or after the 1930s’ Depression, though it could be argued that World War 2 would not have happened had there been no Great Depression in Europe; the Depression was an economic pandemic.)

At least in terms of deaths, I am also optimistic that there will be very little economic chaos in New Zealand in 2020 and 2021. I am expecting a soft-landing here, though not necessarily in Europe. The overall impact of Covid19 in New Zealand will almost certainly depend on what happens outside of New Zealand.

We will also need to be careful about interpreting global death rates in the 2020s. With the huge public health issues around unaffordable housing, around antibiotic resistance, around obesity, and substance abuse/addiction (eg opioids in the United States) there have been signs that First World life expectancy was already peaking. It seems to me more likely that, if life expectancy rates fall this decade, then Covid19 will not have been the main cause.

We have some reasons to be optimistic about how the world will turn out this decade, especially as Covid19 has caused many of us to reflect on improvements we will make to our own lives (and to our understandings of the weaknesses of the form of capitalism – based on private property – that we have taken for granted), rather than waiting for THEY (ie someone else) to fix things. One of the great legacies of the Great Depression – a legacy for the better – was the intellectual activism that it precipitated.

Covid19 will not be the short and sharp event that the 1918 (1919 in some other countries, such as Samoa) influenza pandemic was. It will be useful to run the Smithometer on the present period. It is possible that the overall impact of Covid19 on deaths will be negative, meaning that fewer deaths may occur in the 2020s than would otherwise have occurred.

PS
The chart shows higher 1919 and 1920 death rates than usual in the early spring of those years. That may be due to a return to regular patterns of deaths peaking as a result of the ‘winter flu season’. It will be interesting to see if that seasonal pattern persists into later years. Indeed, returning to this century,  possibly in this year’s northern hemisphere spring, many of the deaths have been of people who in other more familiar years would have died from other more familiar viruses.

Today’s first chart looks at death rates for six major countries. We see that Spain has overtaken Italy, and that France and United Kingdom are likely to catch up with these in a week. We also note that United Kingdom death rates, as reported have been understated; these are basically hospital deaths. All four countries are likely to end up with between 300 and 500 deaths per million people; that’s about 30,000 deaths in United Kingdom.

The United States and Germany are well behind, and likely to stay so; both are showing more signs of stabilising than are France and United Kingdom.

The most important story here is that of Belgium. Not only does it now have the highest death rate in the European Union – higher than both Italy and Spain – but it is far from having stabilised. It looks like Belgium is heading for 800 deaths per million people; nearly the one in a thousand that San Marino has already reached.

To understand the extremely high incidence of Covid19 in Belgium, it is necessary to read my yesterday’s story: ‘Europia’ and the Spread of Covid19. Belgium – especially central and eastern Belgium – is an important part of what amounts to the federal district of the European Union.

In this regard it is worth noting that the French covid story shows that France is a country of two halves. If you draw a line from Le Havre to Marseilles, the vast majority of France’s Covid19 cases are to the northeast of that diagonal line; in particular the parts of Frances that border Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. France did not get its viral load from Spain, despite Spain’s high incidence of Covid19.

This chart shows two other important stories. Compare Netherlands with Portugal.

We have been hearing in the international media that the Netherlands in particular is making it very difficult to set up an EU-wide financial mitigation process; and that they are blaming Southern Europe for creating the crisis, as they did for the 2012 Eurozone financial crises from which the south has not yet fully recovered from. I have written elsewhere about the role of Netherlands in exacerbating these crises by prioritising its mercantilist view of national economic progress. (Northern European Mercantilism and the Covid19 Emergency.)

In the present crisis, Italy and Spain caught the bug very early. Today Ursula von der Leyen – head of the European Commission since December – offered a profuse apology for the European Union’s complete inaction and inability to protect Italy. Indeed, in this case the European Union bureaucracy has been, at best, asleep at the wheel. Their performance in dealing with Covid19 has been substantially worse than that of United States’ President Trump.

Netherlands pointing the finger at Italy and Spain is very much a case of ‘The Pot calling the Kettle Black’. Portugal, while still having a hard time, has coped surprisingly well and far better than the Netherlands.

This chart shows that Canada, while having less Covid19 than Europe and indeed the United States, seems to be showing the fastest rate of increase of the countries shown. Canada very much left it too late to halt the spread of the virus. Ottawa City (federal capital, population 1 million) has had 14 Covid19 deaths so far, and 678 laboratory confirmed cases. 25 percent of cases are due to community transmission. (refer)

The final story from this chart is that both New Zealand and Australia have now reached China’s death rate from Covid19. Our deaths will increase further. 21 New Zealand deaths will have New Zealand at the South Korean death rate.

The final summary chart for the week shows that New Zealand cases are very much on par with the world as a whole, though death incidence is one tenth of the world average. The difference on cases is that New Zealand has stabilised – the thick black line is horizontal – whereas the world has not.

Further, New Zealand case statistics are almost certainly as reliable as those from Iceland and from Australia where there have been very high rates of testing, and presently have very low positivity rates. So, New Zealand’s level of coronavirus infection is already much lower than the unknown world average. It is that world rate that poses the biggest ongoing threat to New Zealand.

Today’s first chart looks at three Nordic countries: Iceland, Norway and Sweden. These give us a basis for analysis of underreporting of Covid19, in the main due to limited testing.

Yesterday, Norway was shown as a high incidence ‘recovering country’, even though it was less recovering than South Korea. Iceland, however, has had the worst incidence of Covid19 among the Nordic countries; though it has a low death rate. Iceland also happens to be a very small country with a very high testing rate. So, it’s a fair assumption that Iceland’s known incidence is close to its actual incidence of Covid19.

There is no obvious reason why the incidence of Covid19 should be greater in Iceland than in Norway. Yet the data shows Iceland’s incidence to be five times greater. This is likely to be the extent of the undercount of cases in Norway.

Known cases in Norway (which has flattened) are just a little higher than known cases in Sweden (which has not yet flattened). But deaths per capita in Sweden are four times higher than in Norway and Iceland. This suggests that Sweden’s undercount is much larger than Norway’s. Indeed it suggest that Sweden’s undercount is four times greater than Norway’s, which I have suggested is a fivefold undercount. That would make Sweden’s case undercount twentyfold.

This would mean that Sweden’s official count of 11,445 – multiplied by 20 – gives 229,000; over 2.2 percent of Sweden’s population. That would mean half a percent (five Swedes in 1,000) dying from Covid19, which feels about right.

Of course this is not the end of the matter in Sweden; it would seem likely that, eventually, ten percent of Swedes will contract Covid19; one million people. That is a likely final case incidence for a country for with a substantial amount of ‘natural’ physical isolation and a high normal degree of physical mobility.

Today’s second chart looks further at Sweden. It shows daily known cases, and daily deaths. The yellow lines represent seven-day moving averages. While there is a hint that the long period of exponential growth may be slowing, the proviso is that Sweden – more than any other country I have seen – treats Covid19 largely as a Monday-Friday phenomenon. Deaths in particular are very few in weekends, and last weekend was longer than most.

Sweden has become known as the country most dismissive of the Covid19 threat, and with the fewest restrictions imposed on its people. (Even Brazil has more restrictions, albeit mandated at the state government rather than the federal government level.) Unlike Brazil, there seems to be widespread support for its ‘economy-first’ approach; an approach seemingly led by its ‘public health’ bureaucracy rather than its elected politicians.

Sweden will not experience the tragedy that has been Spain, thanks to voluntary measures informed by Italy and Spain. Sweden stands in marked contrast to Norway and Iceland, both themselves major victims of the new corona virus.

Today’s chart shows the per capita level of testing performed in a number of countries. While the highest testing rate shown is Norway, we should note that Iceland has tested over eight percent of its population; too high to show on this chart.

A high level of testing minimises a country’s undercount of Covid19 cases. When the case:test ratio is low, we are assured that the known count is quite close to the truth.

Switzerland is one of the worst-affected countries, but has been able to contain its death rate through a very high rate of testing. France, on the other hand, is in the opposite situation, and may end up much like Spain. Italy has ramped up its testing, and is now getting far fewer cases than France or Spain. Italy still has a way to go, but will probably come out of the emergency in a better state than Spain, France or the United Kingdom. (Yesterday, Sweden had a higher incidence of known new cases than Italy.)

Australia and South Korea are the stars, with very high testing, and test results that are 98 percent negative. We in New Zealand have achieved higher testing rates than many countries, and the similarly low ratio of positive results assures us that we are shutting down the transmission of the disease. It is now looking as though New Zealand will have less than 10 deaths in total, not the 100 that I previously forecast.

We see Sweden and Netherlands sharply at odds with Norway, with Denmark and Finland coming somewhere in between. I think that the decisions of Sweden and Netherlands to put their economies first will reverberate against them, and that New Zealand could have a substantial export-led recovery, in part as a result of some other countries harming their economies by not putting their people first.

The United States is doing marginally better than the United Kingdom, on both testing and on test results.

At the bottom of the chart we see that Iran still has far to go before its Covid19 emergency is under control. Turkey is also very much on the watch list. Either it got Covid19 late, or it was late to discover that it had a substantial outbreak of the disease.

Brazil is a worry. A vast country of over 200 million people, over 25 percent of its tests are coming back positive, and its testing has only just scratched the surface. Is it mainly Brazil’s well-travelled elite who are getting Covid19, or will it spread through the favelas of its larger cities? Let’s hope that limited social mixing will contain Covid19 there. The worry is that people living in the favelas constitute a large part of the people who provide paid services to Brazil’s well-healed.

All the countries above Spain on the chart – though possibly excluding Ireland and Canada which have unacceptably high death statistics – are optimistically turning the corner. Those below New Zealand on the chart – with the possible exception of Finland – still have a long way to go.

New Zealand now has sufficient case data to get a sense of its regional distribution of Covid19. Surprisingly, Auckland is not dominant, unlike the main business cities in other countries such as London, New York, Milan and Sydney. Certainly, internationally, Covid19 is very much a city disease.

The New Zealand regional chart shows both total cases by region, and cases adjusted for identified clusters. The idea is that clusters could have happened anywhere, and in themselves overstate the community incidences in the regions with clusters.

We see that the regions with the highest incidences of Covid19 are those relatively affluent areas, which are the most Pakeha-dominant. (This is born out by ethnicity estimates, fore which minority ethnic groups are all underrepresented in the present Covid19 data.)

Auckland’s incidence of Covid19 may be surprisingly low in part because of its high ethnic East Asian and Pacific populations.

If we disregard the Ruby Princess cluster in Hawkes Bay, then 8 of the bottom 9 regions are in the North Island; the exception is the West Coast.

When New Zealand moves from Level 4 shutdown to Level 3 or Level 3.5, it looks as though all regions should be treated equally. Even Otago/Southland – the worst affected – is not dramatically worse than the other regions.

The second chart is an update of the one that compares New Zealand with Australia, Canada, and United States. We can see that New Zealand and Australian case data have converged, and it is likely to stay that way. Both these countries have very low percentages of positive test results; a ratio of cases to tests of less than 0.02; it is much worse in the USA where the ratio is 0.19. Canada has a case ratio of 0.05. New Zealand has tested 0.8 percent of the population, similar to Canada but less than Australia. The USA, which has tested less than 0.6 percent, clearly has a much higher unknown incidence of Covid19 than Canada, which in turn has a substantially higher unknown incidence than New Zealand and Australia.

It is looking increasingly like New Zealand and Australia will approach the winter in good health.

Looking at known cases of Covid19, as for Friday 3 April, we still see the dominance of the jetsetter enclaves – including the tax shelters of Europe. We also see the Norse ‘viking’ cluster of Norway, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands. And west‑central Europe in general. New Zealand’s incidence, shown for comparison, is very much lower. While the United States and United Kingdom do not feature, four British enclaves do feature: Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Montserrat.

When we move on to serious hospitalised cases, these British enclaves drop out of the picture, replaced by the French enclaves (Martinique and Guadeloupe), Iran, the rest of Scandinavia (especially Sweden), Ireland, and the United States. The new entrant countries are ones for which the known cases are almost certainly a smaller proportion of total (known and unknown) cases, compared to the countries that dropped off the chart. And the Netherlands has moved much higher up the chart.

For the final chart, we see the most seriously affected countries. The new entrants here include the United Kingdom and the Dutch/French resort island (in the Caribbean) of Sint Maarten (St. Martin for the French part). Countries prominent here have an actual caseload much higher than the known caseload, or are the countries that dominated the March headlines (like Italy, Spain, Iran). We note that the three Norse countries are missing from this last chart; while they caught Covid19 early and unawares, they have managed their case better than most, substantially limiting their serious cases and especially their deaths.

The USA features more strongly in the death chart than in the other charts. We can be confident that the American situation will be the big April news story, even if it continues to be worse than the USA in the likes of France, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden. And while New York is really bad, it will probably never be as bad there as in Milan and Madrid.

When it comes to serious and fatal cases, New Zealand and Australia are very much less affected than the countries featured here. Further testing data in New Zealand and Australia suggest that our peak will come much sooner, and at a much lower level, than in most of the countries featured in these charts. Just as well, with winter coming.