Doctor and activist


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Category: Public Health

20/03/2022

The Smoke Screen Recurs.

20 March 2022

An article in the Good Weekend 19 March notes that screening services such as Netflix have a lot of smoking in their movies.

There was a lot of placement of smoking in movies for many years and in the 1920s and 30s there was more smoking in movies than in real life, which was probably not a coincidence.

Steve McQueen smoked in ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ and like Yul Brunner, Humphrey Bogart, Betty Grable, Paul Newman, and John Wayne was in the many Hollywood stars to die of lung cancer. 

In the 1950s and 60s tobacco companies sponsored many TV programs, such as the ‘Jack Benny Show’ (comedy) and ‘Gunsmoke’. Walt Disney, Larry King, Moe Howard (3 Stooges), Larry Hagman (Dallas), Chuck Connors (The Rifleman) and Ed Sullivan were some of the TV stars to die of smoking-caused cancers.  Some musicians to die were Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Duke Ellington, George Harrison and Sammy Davis Jr.

The heath activists managed to get rid of tobacco advertising in Australia in 1976, but sponsorship, which was cheaper than actual advertising and got much more coverage lasted until after 2000. In the US activists drew attention to product placement in movies where brands were displayed or whole characters written to publicise smoking and fund movies.  Product placement by tobacco was banned in Australia in 1992 and in the US in 1998, unless historical figures were known to smoke.  

But now smoking in movies is rising again, and it seems to be worse in streaming services like Netflix.  Smoking does not seem to be increasing yet, but with vaping acting as a new gateway to smoking, the battle ain’t over yet.

From the ashes: Smoking’s curious comeback on the silver screen

Once the epitome of Hollywood glamour, cigarettes were all but snuffed out in films and TV shows by the turn of the millennium. Now they’re making a comeback. Plot-driven or something more sinister?

By Tim Elliott  Good Weekend   March 18, 2022

Smoking has made a furtive, and somewhat puzzling, comeback in recent years, something one US veteran anti-tobacco activist says is not random: “Nothing in Hollywood happens by chance.” 

When news broke, in mid-2021, that the cult turn of the millennium TV series Sex and the City was to return, the world’s entertainment media suffered a brief bout of tachycardia, the kind of hand-flapping hysteria that could reasonably be expected to herald the return of another well-known cult figure. The excitement was understandable. The new series, called And Just Like That, promised contemporary viewers everything that had made the original show so effortlessly watchable; cheeky humour, exceptional shoes and a non-threatening dose of prime-time friendly transgressiveness.

Yet there was one facet of And Just Like That which got special attention: one of the lead characters, Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), was smoking again. “Why, decades after she quit the habit, would Carrie return to it?” asked W magazine. A headline in New York magazine read: “And Just Like That … Carrie Is Smoking Again.” “Carrie’s smoking again!” the Daily Mail yelped.

Such head-shaking suggested not just disapproval but bewilderment. The common consensus was that, thanks to decades of pressure from anti-tobacco groups, smoking in TV and films had all but disappeared. In fact, smoking has made a furtive, and somewhat puzzling, comeback in recent years. Agent Smith lights up in The Matrix Resurrections; Kate Winslet vapes in Mare of Easttown; and Christina Applegate’s character Jen sparks up in the woman buddy show, Dead to Me. There’s plenty of smoking in the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy and in Orange is the New Black, and also in Modern Family and Law & Order: SVU.

Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw resumed her smoking habit in the latest Sex and the City series, And Just Like That.

The fug that all but envelops The Queen’s Gambit, which is set in the mid-1950s and ’60s in the US, could plausibly be excused: after all, in 1954 a full 45 per cent of Americans smoked, that country’s highest level. (Australia reached its peak – also 45 per cent – in 1960). But smoking is also popping up in contemporary films, and especially those aimed at kids: a 2019 report from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the number of times tobacco use appeared on-screen in PG-13 films jumped 120 per cent between 2010 and 2018.

So what’s going on? “It’s not totally clear, but we’ve got a few ideas,” says Professor Stanton Glantz, a veteran anti-tobacco activist and founder of Smoke Free Media at the University of California, San Francisco, which tracks the incidences of smoking in movies and video. “One thing for sure is, these are not random creative decisions. Nothing in Hollywood happens by chance.”

Cigarettes and movies have been inextricably linked for generations. Ever since the advent of the talkies, tobacco companies have understood the power of film to shape cultural norms. In the 1930s and ’40s, tobacco companies paid Hollywood stars to appear in cigarette ads and smoke on screen. In return, the studios received funding for film advertising. Some actors, including Joan Crawford and Carole Lombard, appeared smoking in posters that promoted both the film and the brand of cigarette.

In the 1950s and ’60s, tobacco companies shifted their focus to television, spending hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring popular programs such as The Jack Benny Program and Gunsmoke. Steve McQueen smoked in Wanted: Dead or Alive. Peter Gunn smoked. Even the Flintstones smoked. In 1962, the American television network CBS assured tobacco companies that the TV set “is the greatest cigarette vending machine ever devised”.

In the early 1970s, however, regulators in the US and Australia began banning cigarette advertising on TV and radio, prompting the tobacco companies to turn their attention once more to the movies. Product placement became rife, with Big Tobacco paying millions to have its brands on screen.

In 1982, Superman II featured a classic fight scene in which Superman is thrown into a Marlboro truck by General Zod. In 1989, Philip Morris paid $US350,000 ($472,000) to have its Lark brand featured in the James Bond film Licence to Kill.

Some companies were literally throwing cigarettes at actors: in 1984, American Tobacco supplied more than $US5000 worth of cigarettes to the set of Beverly Hills Cop. “I do feel heartened at the increasing number of occasions when I go to a movie and see a pack of cigarettes in the hands of the leading lady,” Hamish Maxwell, then president of Philip Morris, told a marketing meeting in 1983, adding, “We must continue to exploit new opportunities to get cigarettes on screen and into the hands of smokers.”

Such marketing has been phenomenally powerful, not only at creating new smokers but at manipulating reality. “You often hear these days that, ‘Oh everyone smoked in the 1920s and 1930s,’ ” says Glantz. “But it turns out that people back then smoked less than they did 10 years ago. The reason people now think people smoked so much then is that the movies back then had so many people smoking.”

Paying for on-screen product placement was banned in Australia in 1992, and in 1998 in the US. By 2007, according to the CDC, smoking on screen was at an all-time low: virtually the only people you saw puffing away were historical figures whose persona was inseparable from their habit: Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro or King George VI in the 2010 film The King’s Speech, in which he’s frequently depicted lighting up as he struggles with his speech impediment.

But smoking soon rose from the ashes. According to the CDC, tobacco use in top-grossing movies jumped 57 per cent from 2010 to 2018. Meanwhile, in the real world, smoking rates in the US were going in the opposite direction, from 19.3 per cent in 2010 to 13.7 per cent in 2018. The CDC didn’t attempt to explain why there was more smoking in films, but it would be naive to think that Big Tobacco had simply walked away from the movies.

“If you see a pack of Marlboros on screen, someone would have had to approve that,” says Glantz. “It doesn’t get in there by accident. How exactly it gets there, we don’t really know at this stage. There are still product placement companies, but they all deny they work with Big Tobacco. But if you see smoke, there is a fire.” (A spokesman for Philip Morris in Australia said the company does not engage in product placement in movies or on television.)

Streaming services aren’t bound by regulatory agreements, which is how shows like The Umbrella Academy managed to include cigarettes in every scene of its latest season.

Streaming is a big part of the problem, according to Glantz. Every year the tobacco companies must certify to the US Federal Trade Commission that they haven’t paid for their product to be placed in movies, TV shows or video games. But the agreement doesn’t cover streaming content, the enormous quantity of which makes it all but impossible for anti-tobacco groups and regulators to monitor.

“The cynic in me says that tobacco ads have been so curtailed globally that the tobacco industry must have a role in it,” says Becky Freeman, associate professor of public health at the University of Sydney.

“But then, given how many productions are involved and the sheer number of people, it seems unlikely there would be big money changing hands without someone leaking about it.” Freeman believes it’s more likely that streaming services are using smoking “to stand out from the big budget movies, and to appear more ‘indie’.”

Some streaming services are more “indie” than others. Despite a pledge to limit smoking on screen, Netflix remains the worst offender. (According to the Truth Initiative, an American anti-smoking group, scenes involving smoking tripled in the latest season of its superhero series The Umbrella Academy, which managed to include tobacco in every scene.)

The major studios also have policies that aim to restrict the amount of on-screen smoking. The strictest is Disney, which banned it in 2007. Thus its 2021 film, Cruella, which features the ghoulish De Vil without her signature cigarette. But all of the studios – even Disney – make allowances for creative licence and historical accuracy.

Kate Winslet as Detective Sergeant Mare Sheehan vapes in the crime drama, Mare of Easttown.

“Smoking was so widespread in the 20th century that it would be inauthentic not to show it in a drama set in that period,” says novelist and screenwriter John Collee. Collee, whose credits include Master and Commander, Happy Feet and Hotel Mumbai, is writing an adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestselling book, Boy Swallows Universe, which is set in Brisbane in the early 1980s among working-class criminals and journalists. As it happens, the movie will include a historical figure called Slim Halliday, who was a member of the Brisbane underworld and an enthusiastic smoker. (Spoiler alert: in the film, Halliday dies of lung cancer.)

The problem for groups like the Truth Initiative and Smoke Free Media is that smoking in movies often signifies recklessness, and being reckless is cool.

History aside, smoking holds a strong stylistic appeal in cinema, which, says Collee, uses a “Freudian kind of dream language, where some things signify other things”. In Mad Men, the popular series about hard-living advertising executives in 1960s New York, smoking stands in as moral commentary, a metaphor for lead character Don Draper’s shadowy past and heedless chauvinism.

In the 1999 movie, Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s character, a poisonously disillusioned soap salesman named Tyler Durden, smokes so greedily it’s as if he’s eating the cigarette. “His smoking is like saying, ‘Here is a guy who doesn’t much care for his own survival,’ ” Collee says.

In Mad Men, smoking stands in as moral commentary, a metaphor for lead character Don Draper’s shadowy past and heedless chauvinism.

The problem for groups like the Truth Initiative and Smoke Free Media is that smoking in movies often signifies recklessness, and being reckless is cool. The bottom line, says Collee, who worked as a doctor before becoming a writer, “is that, unlike a public health announcement, a drama is essentially non-didactic. To a certain extent, you have to trust your audience to discriminate between a good thing and a bad thing.”

In the 2012 Judd Apatow film, This is 40, the lead female character, Debbie (played by Leslie Mann), has a sneaky smoking habit, puffing away near the bins out the back of her house. When her teenage daughter Sadie discovers her, Debbie is aghast and promises to give up. Like Debbie, today’s filmmakers have been busted smoking. Like Debbie, they have promised to give up. Like Debbie, their heart’s not in it.

Everyone has different ideas about how to fix the problem. India tried to ban all smoking scenes in Bollywood movies in 2005, but failed thanks in part to opposition from the creative community, which argued that it would curb artistic freedom. Instead, all scenes involving smoking are now accompanied by a caption at the bottom of the screen warning viewers that “Smoking is injurious to health”. In Thailand, meanwhile, the act of smoking and cigarette packs are pixelated.

Stan Glantz has long advocated, unsuccessfully, to have all movies with smoking scenes rated R. But prominent Australian anti-tobacco campaigner Simon Chapman believes this would be a mistake, not only because it’s unfeasible (would a minor character smoking one cigarette trigger an R-rating? What about scenes that depict smoking negatively? And what 15-year-old kid takes notice of movie ratings anyway?), but also because having health advocates dictate the content of movies is a really bad idea. “This kind of approach just seems a bit North Korea to me,” he says.

Some of the most memorable anti-smoking messages have come from within the film industry itself. In 1985, the actor Yul Brynner, who had been a smoker since the age of 12 and was then dying of lung cancer, appeared on Good Morning America, imploring the viewers: “Whatever you, just don’t smoke.”

Some of the smoking scenes in The Queen’s Gambit may not have had quite the effect Big Tobacco was hoping for.

 Then there is the hit series The Queen’s Gambit, in which sassy chess prodigy Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) rises up the chess world while battling booze and drugs. In one scene, Harmon, hitting rock bottom, stumbles around her house, hopelessly hungover, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She heads to the fridge and grabs a beer, then dances around the kitchen to Shocking Blue’s Venus.

As the song hits full stride – “A goddess on a mountain top, was burning like a silver flame” – Harmon twirls, cigarette in hand, smoke in her hair, and promptly pukes in the sink. Not quite the product placement Big Tobacco might have hoped for.

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18/03/2022

Vaping is Now Endemic

18 March 2022

It gives me no pleasure to say that vaping is endemic, or that I told you so.

I spent 20 years more or less full time trying to get smoke-free air, which equated to fighting the tobacco industry, who were dedicated to selling as much tobacco as was possible with no regards for its health effects.

As I attended endless conferences at my own expense, there were parallel better funded conferences on the Quit issue, where a second tier of anti-smoking professionals went to conferences on nicotine replacement strategies. 

Some of them ran Quit clinics on the model that people would come to them saying “I have a tobacco addiction problem, please help me wean off nicotine”.  The Health Dept. set up and funded quite a number of these clinics. The tobacco industry did not object as they made little difference to the number of people who smoked or the ubiquitousness of the habit, and allowed the government to say that it was doing something, avoid doing something more useful and continue to get the tobacco industry’s political donations.  As an enthusiastic smoking activist, I visited these clinics.  I was always warmly welcomed by the health promotion staff running them who were always up to date on the latest tobacco control literature and happy to talk.  It took me a while and some direct questioning to realise that the model was flawed; very few people came to the clinics and the staff were well read because they did not have much else to do.  Eventually the government stopped funding them.

When the activists had reduced the credibility of the tobacco industry to laughing stock, and the deliberately long contracts of the sponsored sports and other apologists had run out, we managed to get rid of the advertising sponsorships and get smoke free air (with a generous definition of ‘outdoors’ to allow smoking in poker machine areas in pubs to keep the money engine ticking over). This was in 2000.

The vaping technology was being improved as part of this parallel Quit universe, and its medical protagonists were grateful that there was less tobacco use and hoped that the world would perceive their Quit efforts as the last stage in mopping up the smokers remaining, and they could take more of the limelight.  Seeing the whole world from a Quit smoking perspective and possibly having attended a few well-funded conferences, they concluded that vaping would be good for quitting, and because it was much less harmful than burning leaves, it was a step in the right direction.  The assumption that the only use of vaping was to get smokers to quit was naïve in the extreme.  Some of the vape makers are the same companies that were happy to sell cigarettes, and now there are as many people starting smoking from vaping as leaving smoking for vaping.

But the key to vaping is that it is a new consumer product, with the potential to do immense public heath harm and to make massive profits.  The economic engine is in place, the government apathy continues helped by the naïve abovementioned Quit doctors.

In the fight against tobacco, the fact that the ubiquitous ads affected children was self-evident, but like everything in the tobacco wars had to be proved, so a study was done which showed that the brand preference of kids was not the same as adults, but the brands chosen by kids were the ones most advertised.

But now marketing is much more sophisticated. Social media allows targeting by age, gender, location and even personal opinions and preferences.  So kids can be reached without adults even being aware, and this is what has happened.  Vaping has become ubiquitous, just as we were achieving a smoke-free generation.  Now vaping will have to be shown to be harmful, rather than have to be shown to be safe.  So the research will take years, be denied by its industry protagonists, and be subject to the venal indolence of the political process. Inhaling solvents with random additives is likely to be harmful, but this of course is not ‘proof’.  The industry should have had to prove it was safe before it being released, but because the Quit people allowed tobacco to be the bar that it had to beat, it became legal without scrutiny, and now has become ubiquitous without being noticed.

I was therefore not happy but not surprised to read a schoolkid talking about vaping, and sadly he was also realistic enough to assume that the government was not likely to be of much help. Here is his article.

Vaping, a constant craving for too many of my school friends

Ari Katz, High school student

March 15, 2022, Sydney Morning Herald p19

It started as a novelty, a bit of harmless fun. The snap, crackle and pop of each nicotine-fuelled hit was exciting, enticing. The headspin was a new experience. We felt rebellious, revolutionary, cool. Vapes then started appearing at parties, the beach, the cinema.

But when friends started vaping regularly in the bathrooms at school, it became clear this device – resembling a coloured pen, bright and slim (concealing the fusion of wires, batteries and chemical compounds) – was here to stay.

During assessment-intensive periods at school, vapes act as a coping mechanism, a seemingly indispensable form of stress relief. Is this really the way we want our youth to be dealing with the challenges life throws at them?

The highly addictive, flavour-filled substances in vapes are engineered by profit-hungry foreign manufacturers who, I fear, pay little attention to the long-term health implications of their product.

What began as youthful self-discovery and experimentation has descended into a state of unfettered addiction among the adolescents – boys and girls – I know, some as young as 12. This is because vapes are too accessible, too easy. For me, having seen this obsessive relationship with vaping in all types of peers, including those who excel in sport or academic work, the extent of the issue becomes overwhelmingly clear. Vape addiction does not discriminate – everyone is susceptible.

So why should you care?

A Victorian father is warning parents about the dangers of having vapes near children after his son was hospitalised with what are believed to be the effects of smoking one.

The full negative health implications of vaping are as yet unknown. But the concern is that the recurrent inhalation of chemicals will do significant damage to the underdeveloped lungs and brains of teen vapers. However, from my perspective, far worse is the impact that this dependency and incessant craving has on the mental and social wellbeing of my peers. Teen brains aren’t prepared for the burden of addiction.

We know adults are largely oblivious to the scale of the problem, so how can we ask for help when we know the first reaction of the unprepared parent is likely to be a reprimand rather than a helping hand?

The cognitive dissonance of knowing vaping is harmful, while not being able to stop, is taxing on the mental wellbeing of adolescents. We have little experience of addiction and are not taught to deal with it. We know it’s harmful, we know it’s toxic, but we can’t stop.

Vaping is no longer a fad; the fun has been over for months now. From what I can see in my circle, few people who vape actually want to vape.

Government education campaigns will be largely impotent against the vape culture because addiction, by nature, does not just end by the push of a button. It takes personalised support, resources and encouragement to curb the dependency. Where is all this when we need it?

Vulnerable, developing brains are suffering at the hands of an insidious device, yet this challenge is only now starting to receive attention.

Seeing friends and peers suffer is shattering. This is Australia’s future we are talking about.

Ari Katz is a high school student in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs

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24/02/2022

Loneliness and its solutions

25 February 2022


I sometimes watch Foreign Correspondent on ABC TV and by chance on 15/2/21 I came across this excellent programme on loneliness in Japan.


The ABC correspondent there looks at loneliness in the Japanese population from older folk dying alone, to younger people simply withdrawing from society.


Some of the older ones had no family or jobs. Some of the younger ones were so pressured to succeed and felt that they had failed, so simply withdrew from society. It seems that the pressure on kids all to be CEOs is an absurd and unachievable objective.


I am not sure that the situation in Australia is as bad, but I thought about some of my patients and could think of half a dozen immediately. With some of them , I am one of the only two or three people in the world they have any contact with, their relationships are tenuous.


None of them started with mental health problems. Here are some examples:


A 60 year old man worked for a security company looking after an insurance company. He was doing surveillance for them, but it took over his life as he was contacted 24 hours a day for various crises. Case management employees having conscience over what they were doing had to be rescued from self-harm in the toilets. Enraged claimants with refused claims threatened to blow up the company offices with cans of petrol. He saw staff high-fiveing as some claimant got a derisory settlement when they deserved and needed a lot more. It went on like this for years. When he said that he could not do this anymore he was treated as badly as any of the people he had dealt with. He told me this story, and I had hoped that with his considerable management skills and experience, he could be put into a less stressful position. But he deteriorated. Everything reminds him of the corruption of the world. He is estranged from his wife and they communicate with post-it notes on the frig. He goes for a walk at 11 at night so he will not have to speak to people in the street. One son has stuck by him and visits daily, and will build him a self-contained unit in his new home.


Another patient is a 62 year old ethnic taxi driver who was so badly bashed 11 years ago by a gang stealing his takings that he lost an eye, has never worked again and never recovered mentally or physically. He was divorced; lives alone and sometimes will not even answer the phone.


One is a 42 year old foreign student who came to study theology, wanting to become a pastor. Her English is not great. She is a trifle unworldly, and thought that the world is basically kind and people look after each other. She had a casual job in a motel and her boss asked her to move a bed down the stairs between floors. She said it was too heavy and she could not, but he threatened to sack her. She did it and got an injury to two discs in her back. She was frightened to have surgery, so was in agony for a couple of years and eventually agreed. She had minimal surgery, which was not successful. The insurer decided that she was not complying with what they wanted so refused to pay her. She was effectively broke and homeless, so an old lady from her church offered her a bed and food. But she lives a long way away and up a drive that is hard for my patient to walk up. She was effectively trapped. As a foreign person she did not even have Medicare for the minimal psychological help it offers (6 visits a year). Her mental health deteriorated and she shunned all outside contact, and would not even answer the phone. She has gone home to her family- I can only hope she improves there.


One is a 39 year old from a religious and teetotal family with a high sense of ethics. He was a top salesman of a computer company and became aware that they were ripping off some customers. He drew this to management’s attention, but they declined to do anything and he was labelled a whistleblower. Management supported him by putting out an email asking that he be supported for his mental health issues. He felt that this ostracisation was the end of his career, because he had asked them to behave ethically. He was certain that no one in his tight top group will now employ him, so he withdrew and started to drink to lessen the pain. His family then rejected him because of the drinking and his sales friends are estranged also. The psychologist gives him Cognitive Behavioural Therapy exercises and I try to get him to drink less and somewhat ironically counsel him that you cannot withdraw from the world merely because the baddies generally win. He lives alone, answers the phone and is just able to do his own shopping, but is not improving much.


These are just some examples that I know. Coasting home as GP at least keeps you in contact with life. The point is that many people have broken lives, but just keep living. None of these examples have done anything wrong themselves. Is a sense of ethics a mental illness?


As everyone has to ‘look after themselves’ in a consumer-oriented society, more people will fall through the cracks, especially as the gap between rich and poor is enlarged by pork barrelling which puts resources into areas that need them less, tax breaks for the rich, subsidies for private schools and private health insurance, derisory welfare payments, and insurers allowed simply to refuse to pay without penalty.


People need basic support with universal housing and universal health case. They need jobs or at least occupations and an adequate income to survive. And we need outreach and support services that can be called upon.
When people say, ‘There are not enough jobs’, they are taking nonsense. Anyone can think of many worthwhile things that need doing. And there are plenty of people who would be happy to do them. The problem is that in a world where nothing can be done that does not make a profit, a lot of things that need doing are not done. That is where the policy change are needed. We cannot simply look at the money and see to what level existing activities can be maintained. We need to look at what needs to be done, and then work out how to achieve it. We need to decide that everyone has a right to live and those who have a good life will live in a better society if everyone can share at least a basic quality of life. There has to be recognition that the ability to be profitable need not be the overwhelming criterion for what is done. Tax may go up, but if there is real re-think of priorities, it is not likely to be all that much.


The link to the ABC program that initiated this tirade is below.
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/foreign-correspondent/series/2022/video/NC2210H002S00

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16/01/2022

Djokovic goes to Gaol or exile while Hillsong goes Scott-Free.

16 January 2022


Today Novax Djokovic is in Court trying to stop Immigration Minister Alex Hawke deporting him before the Australian Open Tennis starts tomorrow. For those who don’t follow tennis and have been sleeping under a rock, he is the number one seed and if he wins, he will be the first player to win 21 Grand Slam tournaments and as such, the Greatest tennis player Of All Time (GOAT).


Last time he went to Court he won, because the issue was whether the government or Djokovic had done the wrong thing in the visa application process. He won with costs and the government was heavily criticised by the Court (not to mention the rest of the world).


This time is different. Minister Alex Hawke, a young ambitious religious Conservative right-wing numbers man has excluded him in that he is a danger to the population from an infectious point of view, and because he is known to be anti-vaxx and will give publicity to that view. The Court decision is totally stacked the Government’s way because it only has to decide whether the Minister has the power to do this, and the legislation is written so that he would have this power and the meddlesome courts could not interfere. So what is likely to happen is that the government’s position will be upheld, Djokovic will be deported and Australia’s appalling immigration policies will be seen for the arbitrary farce that they are- beyond the rule of law.


The fact that ATAGI (Aust. Technical Advisory Group on Immigration) said that previous infection within the last 6 months could be a reason for vaccination exemption, that Djokovic had had such an infection and that a blind medical panel said that he was safe to come has been ignored. (‘Blind’ in the sense that the panel did not know the name of the person whose file they were reviewing). The point is that he is very unlikely to infect anyone, not to mention the fact that the virus has already escaped and there are few preventive measures in place. Anyone in Australia can fly into Melbourne and go to the tennis with no tests of anything and case numbers of omicron set new records every day. Djokovic has not trumpeted his anti-vaxx views, though one could argue that these are already well known. There is a whole industry telling us what famous people do and think, and that was before the anti-vaxx lobby.


Djokovic is not as popular as the ever-smooth Federer or the rougher battler Nadal, but his public image seems that he is a nice guy, if occasionally misunderstood and pretty ruthless in his quest for the top. Darker mumblings about his unsportsmanlike use of injury rules and mind games have surfaced from a few columnists recently, and one might wonder why. But this is all irrelevant. The government is excluding him ostensibly because he is a risk of infection (absolutely minimal), or that he will stir anti-vaxx sentiment (where the controversy has already done more for the anti-vax cause than his winning of the Australian Open would ever have done).


The real reason is that this government wants to look tough on border control and quarantine, having made a complete mess of the COVID epidemic, with outbreaks due to ‘careless’ border policy, (were there Hillsong groups on the Ruby Princess?), lack of purchase of vaccine, poor management of aged care facilities, and now a ‘let ‘er rip’ policy supposedly to help the economy. Today’s Sun Herald front page announces that ‘71% want Djokovic sent home’. So some hairy-chested populism is the order of the day.


On page 6 of the same Sun Herald (see below) NSW Police decided not to fine Hillsong church after videos were seen of people singing and dancing at a Hunter Valley religious camp. NSW State Health Minister Brad Hazzard is quoted as saying that the singing and dancing ban does not apply to religious groups, though it does apply to recreation facilities, nightclubs etc. Presumably a religious recreation camp is OK, but a non-religious one is a big problem. The fact that the same article notes NSW had 48,768 new cases, 2,576 in hospital, 193 in ICU and 20 deaths yesterday presumably is also irrelevant.


Is it relevant that Scott Morrison and Alex Hawke are members of Hillsong and NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard is in the same Liberal party?

Craig Kelly has called Djokovic a ‘political prisoner’, and for once I agree with him.

If the Court agrees to deport Djokovic because the Minister said so and they cannot appeal it, it will show the world the arbitrariness of Australia’s immigration laws and the government may win a populist victory at the cost of further damage to our international reputation.

As a tennis follower who saw the US Open final, I am of the opinion that Medvedev will beat Djokovic in the tennis if they play, but it looks as though political stupidity has game, set and match.

Hillsong let off as NSW posts 48,768 new cases and 20 deaths
Sally Rawsthorne, Sun Herald, 16 January 2022
NSW has recorded 48,768 new COVID-19 cases and 20 deaths on the third day positive rapid antigen tests are included in the daily infection numbers.Of the new cases, 21,748 were self-reported from at-home tests and 27,020 were from PCR testing.There are 2576 people in hospital with the virus, of whom 193 are in intensive care units. Eleven men and nine women have died from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours.Yesterday, police confirmed they had decided not to issue a fine to Hillsong church for a camp in the Hunter Valley, after videos of attendees singing and dancing without masks sparked public outrage.‘‘NSW Police have attended an event in the Newcastle area and spoken with organisers. Following discussions with organisers and after consultation with NSW Health, no infringement will be issued,’’ said police in a statement.‘‘Event organisers are aware of their obligations under the Public Health Orders, and NSW Police will continue to ensure ongoing compliance.’’NSW’s Public Health Order prohibits singing and dancing at music festivals, hospitality venues, nightclubs, entertainment facilities and major recreation facilities.Health Minister Brad Hazzard said while the order does not apply to religious services, it does apply to major recreation facilities, which is defined as a ‘‘building or place used for large-scale sporting or recreation activities that are attended by large numbers of people, whether regularly or periodically’’.‘‘This event is clearly in breach of both the spirit and intent of the order, which is in place to help keep the community safe,’’ he said.Hillsong said the camp differed from music festivals and the organisation was committed to a COVID-safe plan.‘‘Our camps involve primarily outdoor recreational activities including sports and games. We follow strict COVID procedures and adhere to government guidelines,’’ it said.‘‘Outdoor Christian services are held during the camp but these are only a small part of the program.’’It said the video of attendees singing and dancing represented ‘‘only a small part of each service’’.Yesterday, the state government announced its rent regulation would be extended by another two months to March 2022. ‘‘Small business is the engine room of our economy and we need to make sure we support impacted businesses through this latest Omicron wave,’’ NSW Treasurer Matt Kean said. ‘‘With staff shortages and reduced foot traffic, many businesses are struggling at the moment but the ability to negotiate rent will give them a buffer so they can keep the lights on now and recover more quickly.’’Business tenants can access rent relief if they have an annual turnover of less than $5 million. Rent relief has the same eligibility criteria as the discontinued JobSaver and Micro-business Grant programs.It comes as almost 1000 NSW Health workers have resigned or been sacked after refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19, placing further pressure on the hospital system that has seen coronavirus patient admissions almost triple within a fortnight. As hospitals and general practices are overwhelmed with surging cases and almost 6000 healthcare workers are isolated across NSW due to COVID-19 exposure, the state’s health department on Friday confirmed 995 of its 170,000-strong workforce had resigned or been stood down after refusing the vaccine.

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13/01/2022

NDIS- An Unsuccessful Privatisation of the Welfare System

13 January 2022

I was never in favour of the National Disability Insurance System as I saw it as a defacto privatisation and reliance on a ‘market’ which would have another layer of assessors, who may or may not get it right in a single interview, the award of ‘packages’ of money which may or may not be enough and/or may or may not be wisely spend.  The greatest problem was that as a ’market’ it would be always liable to have glossy marketing to vulnerable families, with services delivered as cheaply as possible, by unqualified people and profits skimmed off.  The government coffers were topped up by increasing the Medicare levy, which just ensured that the private sector was given huge amounts of public money.

When I was in the NSW Parliament’s Social Issues Committee  which looked at the issue, a key problem was that there was no actual numbers of what the needs were for disability services. There were two ways of calculating it. The first was to add up all the people on benefits on the assumption that everyone who needed benefits was getting them. The other way was to ask the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the government-funded research body what percentage of the population had a disability and multiply that percentage by the population.  Their answer was many multiples of those on welfare, presumably either because their relatives or support networks were looking after their problems, or there was unmet need. 

It seemed obvious that:

  1. There would be a huge increase in demand when more resources were (at least in theory) available
  2. There would be a lot of bureaucracy that would waste a lot of money
  3. Those actually doing the job and who knew the needs at a practical level would  have less control so the decision making would worsen
  4. There would be a lot of profiteering
  5. Disability workers would face a race to the bottom in pay and conditions.

It might be noted that NDIS cuts out when you are 65, so the whole process restarts with recipients having to apply for a Disability Support Pension (DSP). The current government has boasted that it is putting only a third as many people  on the DSP as formerly.  My experience was that when the NSW government stopped all Workers Comp payments after 5 years, many people who had been on this support for 5 year at least had to apply for the DSP. Figures were rubbery as the NSW government did not want to know how many people were simply tipped off income support, but the best estimate was that about 20% got the DSP and the rest had to go on Jobseeker. I wrote a lot of detailed medical reports for people who were still unable to get the DSP, and then the government wrote to me and said that I could only charge a very modest Medicare amount to write such reports, so presumably doctors will not be able to take much time on them.  I cannot write them in the time that the allowance pays.  I had one patient who was 61, ethnic, unskilled and illiterate in English who had been on compensation for a back injury 13 years and was carer for an invalid wife and was refused the DSP despite my best efforts and put  into the ‘mutual obligation’ multiple job application system.

But to get back to the NDIS itself, I recently chanced across this article recently from an old issue of Green Left Weekly- a personal story.  It seems very credible.

My view is the NDIS needs to be abolished, but it will be very hard to rebuild a public welfare support system against a well-funded and established private lobby that is making a fortune and has at least one major party ready to undo any efforts in this direction.

NDIS is also making life harder for disability workers

Janine Brown, Melbourne, February 8, 2019, Green Left Weekly Issue 1208

I am employed as a disability support worker by a council and, since the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), I will soon lose my job. This is my story.

I am in transition to becoming “self-employed” with an ABN (Australian Business Number), which makes me a small business, and enables me to sign individual contracts with each client.

The other alternative was to become an employee of a private company that has contracts with NDIS clients.

From these two bad choices, I decided to go with the former.

We have been told that NDIS will be much better for hundreds of thousands of Australians. But is it?

Once families receive NDIS funding, it is their responsibility to make the choices for their child or adult family member and manage their finances over a 12-month period.

The idea that they are in control of the life choices of their family member may sound appealing. But the stress levels rise with the amount of bookkeeping required and when it is difficult to clearly define their needs.

Parents are encouraged to employ an advisor, but that person is paid for by the funding for their family member. That NDIS planner will recommend “one of theirs”, someone who will ask many questions and tick many boxes but who doesn’t really know the needs and interests of the person concerned.

I was once supporting a child at home when the NDIS planner was interviewing his parents. One of the questions was “Do you own your home?” I invited the planner to meet the child but she declined, saying it wasn’t necessary.

As much as I agree with giving parents options in choosing a carer for their child, the options being presented are often inadequate to the task at hand.

By privatising the disability sector, many people are obtaining an ABN (which is easy to do online) and presenting themselves as a qualified support worker. They do not need background checks and parents who search online for support workers only see promotional material.

I am qualified and have many years of experience, but l am now in competition with an untrained person who is willing to provide “services” at a cheaper rate. They call it business. I call it a dangerous rort.

NDIS has also meant that our work is now casual: we no longer have permanent employment with leave benefits, superannuation and union support.

A few weeks ago a parent asked me to do a buddy shift with a potential new carer as she lives near the client. Having a carer nearby is appealing for parents who may need to call on you at the last minute.

l agreed to do the shadow shift. I found that the inexperienced carer had no idea about the work responsibilities or the safety measures. She had no knowledge about supporting someone who is non-verbal with behavioural difficulties, who needs support in all aspects of daily life. She appeared to be more interested in the times of shifts, rather than the child’s needs.

It is easy to be blinded by the NDIS marketing, but just as the privatisation of the aged care sector has led to cuts in staff, quality meals and wound management, the same is true for the disAbility sector.

There are also many grey areas concerning the care of people with a disability.

Statistics show that as the number of people being diagnosed with autism (done by general practioners) has increased in the past few years. This adds to the NDIS budget.

As a result, NDIS bureaucrats are thinking of using “their people” to make the diagnosis. If this happens, we can expect a decline in the numbers of people being diagnosed with autism and many who need support will not be eligible for funding for appropriate services.

Another grey area concerns supporting people transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and teaching them to become more independent.

It is sometimes possible to teach a person to take public transport to an activity. However, it becomes a crisis situation when the bus/tram/train is late or cancelled and the person has lost all points of reference and they have to navigate replacement measures.

The NDIS planner may have ticked a box for someone to take public transport to an activity when things are going well, but an unexpected or crisis situation which causes the person anxiety is not factored into the plan.

It is imperative that we continue to support vulnerable people in our community. We must not be blinded by the NDIS hype when the reality is vastly different.

www.greenleft.org.au/content/ndis-also-making-life-harder-disability-workers

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06/01/2022

Djokovic Fiasco reflects no credit on Australia

6 January 2022

Most people know that Novak Djokovic is pushing to be the Greatest tennis player Of All Time (GOAT) and needs just one Grand Slam victory to achieve this. Most also know he has been very successful in the Australian Open, which starts next week.  There is little doubt that a lot of people, myself included would be very interested in whether he can win after his failure against Medvedev in the US Open.

Many people are aware that he has been anti-vax and he unwisely attended a tournament last May and he and a number of others got COVID19, presumably by the Delta variant, but this is not recorded.

He has never been a popular as the smooth Roger Federer, or the rougher battler Raphael Nadal who are his great rivals for the GOAT title.  He was seen as not quite as warm a character.  He was praised by the President in his native Serbia for his early victories, but this cooled a bit when he made politically progressive statements.  His anti-vaxx statements have been frankly embarrassing.

Australia has a rule that if you are not vaccinated you cannot have a visa. 

Whether this should be the only criterion for entry should be a moot point.  With most infectious disease, having antibodies at a certain level assumes that you are immune to reinfection with the same disease.  This works for polio, but with ‘flu, where the virus changes, people get infected by a different strain every year.

The CDC (US Centre for Disease Control) guidelines are somewhat equivocal about antibodies. They will not say that having antibodies means either than you cannot be infected or that any infection will be minor.  It seems that COVID is considered more like ‘flu than polio.

It was not clear on what ground Tennis Australia allowed him to come, but now Border Force have excluded him, and the Prime Minister smugly talks about rules being rules.

It is important that we are protected, and many Australians have endured a lot of suffering in lockdown to achieve this, so they have little time for people to be treated differently.  But if Djokovic had COVID 6 months ago, it is hard to believe that he constitutes a high risk when the whole country has decided to abandon masks, distancing, QR codes and venue number restrictions. One might wonder what his antibody status is, or whether this was known.

It is important that various agencies in a country remain independent. We do not want Border Force deciding medical issues, nor Tennis Australia deciding immigration policy.  But Australia looks pretty silly, when one group allows him and another does not.  As a tennis watcher, I would like to see him play, and it does seem that the politics are overcoming the science. 

Now we bring in the lawyers, another idiot factor?

www.smh.com.au/sport/tennis/novak-djokovic-launches-court-bid-to-fight-deportation-20220106-p59mdp.html

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06/01/2022

Fake Science now an Industry

6 January 2022

Many years ago (?1977), I applied for the job as editor of the Medical Journal of Australia.  I had done two years as a surgical trainee and took a year off from the somewhat disillusioning hierarchical system.  I had done 3 and a half years of university English, but in terms of my experience editing, it was perhaps a long shot.

The salary was roughly the same as a second year resident, though more than half that salary had been overtime.  The job seemed a bit of dangerous niche, but it was worth thinking about.  I didn’t get the job (Dr Alan Blum from the US did), but was invited to apply for Deputy Editor.  The salary here was $20,000 less, which was more than a third. But the key reason I declined is that I hate having someone else waste my time. 

There is such an incentive to publish in order to climb academic ladders that most writing is done for the writer, not the reader.  As many papers are written as possible, so the idea of spending a lifetime sorting through thousands of papers to find ones of merit seemed a hazardous occupation with a great danger of drudgery.

When I thought about the issue I devised the Chesterfield-Evans theory of knowledge acquisition. It is an exponential graph with time on the horizontal axis and knowledge in the vertical.  With a little time you can get quite a lot of knowledge, but to get a little more or to get the forefront takes an immense amount of time, for the last bit of knowledge. This extra bit of knowledge may be well rewarded financially in medicine if you get it ‘approved’ as a specialty, but in many scientific endeavours there is no reward at all.  Getting to the forefront is made harder by the lack of incentive to write concise papers for the benefit of the reader.

In practices as a medical professional the explosion of information of indifferent quality has made reliance on key journals the easiest way to go, but even here the increased specialisation makes even being a reasonable generalist more difficult. The monetisation of knowledge makes the specialties not want to share all their information, the college and universities act like businesses and the drug companies want to sponsor a certain view.

When I wrote both my Masters theses, getting a good supervisor was a problem. No one really wanted to go through the writings of yet another postgrad.  My supervisor, Dr Chris Winder said that he would simply prefer students write concise papers and send the lot to a publisher, giving degrees to the ones considered worthy of publishing. 

But there has been a profusion of journals, initially driven by the profitability of these.  Now the pressure from students has been joined by a rogue element, the dodgy rip-off factories.  Plagiarism and now straight out fraud are now industries.

Those who seek knowledge now have to be more discerning. There is delight amongst the non-scientific who can, like Pontius Pilate ask, ‘What is truth’ and then also like Pilate not want to know the answer.

Sadly, politicians and managers who have agenda other than optimal knowledge are flourishing  in this environment.

I am glad that I did not become a medical editor; it is hard enough getting a broad-based knowledge of reasonably indisputable facts.

I am quite unsure how the confluence of factors favouring ignorance can be countered.  Making everyone learn some science and maths at school might be a start.

How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals

Harriet Alexander

January 5, 2022

In 2015, molecular oncologist Jennifer Byrne was surprised to discover during a scan of the academic literature that five papers had been written about a gene she had originally identified, but did not find particularly interesting.

“Looking at these papers, I thought they were really similar, they had some mistakes in them and they had some stuff that didn’t make sense at all,” she said. As she dug deeper, it dawned on her that the papers might have been produced by a third-party working for profit.

“Part of me still feels awful thinking about it because it’s such an unpleasant thing when you’ve spent years in a laboratory and taking two to 10 years to publish stuff, and making stuff up is so easy,” Professor Byrne said. “That’s what scares the life out of me.”

The more she investigated, the more clear it became that a cottage industry in academic fraud was infecting the literature. In 2017, she uncovered 48 similarly suspicious papers and brought them to the attention of the journals, resulting in several retractions, but the response from the publishing industry was varied, she said.

“A lot of journals don’t really want to know,” she said. “They don’t really want to go and rifle through hundreds of papers in their archives that are generated by paper mills.”

More recently, she and a French collaborator developed a software tool that identified 712 papers from a total of more than 11,700 which contain wrongly identified sequences that suggest they were produced in a paper mill. Her research is due to be published in Life Science Alliance.

Even if the research was published in low-impact journals, it still had the potential to derail legitimate cancer research, and anybody who tried to build on it would be wasting time and grant money, she said. She has also suggested that journals could flag errors while articles were under investigation, so people did not continue to rely on their findings during that time.

Publishers and researchers have reported an extraordinary proliferation in junk science over the last decade, which has infiltrated even the most esteemed journals. Many bear the hallmarks of having been produced in a paper mill: submitted by authors at Chinese hospitals with similar templates or structures. Paper mills operate several models, including selling data (which may be fake), supplying entire manuscripts or selling authorship slots on manuscripts that have been accepted for publication.

The Sydney Morning Herald has learned of suicides among graduate students in China when they heard that their research might be questioned by authorities. Many universities have made publication a condition of students earning their masters or doctorates, and it is an open secret that the students fudge the data. The universities reap money from the research grants they earn. The teachers get their names on the papers as contributing authors, which helps them to seek promotions.

International biotechnology consultant Glenn Begley, who has been campaigning for more meaningful links between academia and industry, said research fraud was a story of perverse incentives. He wants researchers to be banned from producing more than two or three papers per year, to ensure the focus remained on quality rather than quantity.

“The real incentive is for researchers to get their papers published and it doesn’t have to be right so long as it’s published,” Dr Begley said. He recently told the vice-chancellor of a leading Australian university of his frustration with the narrative that Australia was “punching above its weight” in terms of research outcomes. “It’s outrageous,” Mr Begley told the vice-chancellor. “It’s not true.”

“Yes,” the vice-chancellor replied. “I use that phrase with politicians all the time. They love it.”

According to one publishing industry insider, editors are operating with an element of wishful thinking. This major publishing house employee, whose contract prevented him from speaking publicly, said when his journal started receiving a torrent of applications from Chinese researchers around 2014, the staff assumed that their efforts to tap into the Chinese market had borne fruit. They later realised that many of the papers were fraudulent and acted, but he was aware of other editors who turned a blind eye.

“Obviously there’s so much money in China and the journals have their shareholders to answer to, and they are very careful not to tread on Chinese toes because of the political sensitivity,” he said. “There’s a lot more they could do to sort the good from the bad because there is good science going on in China, but it’s all getting a bad name because of what some Chinese people have worked out — that there’s a market here for a business.”

Last month, SAGE journals retracted 212 articles that had clear evidence of peer review or submission manipulation, and subjected a further 318 papers to expressions of concern notices. The Royal Society of Chemistry announced last year that 68 papers had been retracted from its journal RSC Advances because of “systematic production of falsified research”.

To indicate the upswing in cases, German clinical researchers reported last week that in their analysis of osteosarcoma papers, just five were retracted before the millennium and 95 thereafter, with 83 of them from a single, unnamed country in Asia. University of Munster Professor Stefan Bielack, who published the study in Cancer Horizons, said some open access journals charged academics US$1500 to $2000 to publish their work, so they were more interested in publishing lots of papers than their scientific validity.

“There is a systematic problem and in some countries people might have the wrong incentives,” Professor Bielack said. “I think the journals have a major role. They all need to be more rigorous.”

The problem is not confined to China, but it has accompanied a dramatic growth in research output from that country, with the number of papers more than tripling over the last decade.

In 2017, responding to a fake peer review scandal that resulted in the retraction of 107 papers from a Springer Nature journal, the Chinese government cracked down and created penalties for research fraud. Universities stopped making research output a condition of graduation or the number of articles a condition of promotion.

But those familiar with the industry say the publication culture has prevailed because universities still compete for research funding and rankings. The number of research papers produced in China has more than tripled over the last decade, with dramatic growth over the past two years. The Chinese government’s investigation of the 107 papers found only 11 per cent were produced by paper mills, with the remainder produced in universities.

Until last year, University of NSW offered its academics a $500 bonus if they were the lead author in a prestige publication and $10,000 if they were the corresponding author of a paper published in Nature or Science. The system, which was designed to reward quality over quantity, was discontinued due to financial constraints.

But others have questioned whether the quality of a paper can be measured by the journal in which it is published, and an open access movement has sprung up in opposition to the scientific publishing industry, arguing that research paid for by taxpayers should be freely available to all.

Alecia Carter, an Australian biological anthropologist at University College London, said the emphasis on getting published in a high-impact journal rewarded sensational results over integrity, positive results over negative results and novel findings over building the evidence base. Researchers might inflate effect sizes or omit conflicting evidence because it muddied the overall story they were trying to tell.

“We as scientists know all these things that are wrong with the way the system is set up, but we still play the game,” Dr Carter said. “We’re all chasing the same thing.”

Dr Carter boycotts luxury journals, publishes as much as possible in open access journals and reports negative results, though this has come at a cost to her career. She was once asked at a job interview why she would bother reporting results that were not interesting.

“I said, ‘If it’s interesting enough to do the research then we should publish the results’.”

She did not get the job.

Here is an SMH article which stimulated my post:

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05/01/2022

COVID Day 4- a non-PCR Day

5 January 2022

I did nothing today- it just took longer than usual.

I felt much the same, a sore throat, not much energy, a bit of a headache and bouts of a dry cough. I did not feel like exercise and I thought that I had better try to get a PCR test and some Rapid Antigen tests in case we needed to prove we were not infectious, or had other people who were concerned contacts.

I researched online where the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests were being done. The site I used 2 weeks ago, a 4Cyte drive through test that had taken an hour to do and 3 days and 16 hours to get results from was closed Wed-Friday. It was not clear why this was but the Laverty Pathology group at 60 Waterloo Rd near Macquarie Centre was open till 4pm. I took a novel in case of a long wait and drove there.

As I approached from the google direction cars in the left lane were not moving from the major intersection as far as one could see to the next hill. Many of them had their tail lights on, so I reflected that they were sitting in a line with the engines on. Bad for the environment, but it at least told me that his was the queue. I turned off the engine and started to read. After a while I was wondering why no progress at all was being made, and I thought I might ask if I was under some misapprehension. As I looked up, a pleasant looking woman in her mid-30s got out of the small car ahead, and went to her boot.

I called to her out the window, ‘Is this the PCR test queue?

‘Reckon so’, she said, ‘I’ve brought some snacks to get through it’. She took some biscuits, grapes and a drink and got back in.

We advanced glacially slowly, and I noticed that there was a side road a little way down the queue. Space had been left so cars could go in and out of this side road, but cars had also started to queue there, and of course the two queues merged at the intersection. I had not thought of this until I was nearly at the corner, and I suppose the woman in the car hadn’t either. Some on the side road were shouting abuse or tooting as if we were somehow pushing in to their queue. There were no signs, no guides and nothing online, so it seemed that the only fair thing to do was to take alternate cars. My young friend had recognised this before I had and moved her car across the middle of the side road, so that cars exiting or entering could go in front or behind her, but she could be sure that the side road queued cards did not just push in. There was a cacophony of abuse from the side street.

The queue moved forward a few cars, so I followed her closely, letting one car in as seemed fair. A large 4WD with a man screaming obscenities at me tried to push in, but I kept him out. I wondered if he would get out and make trouble but he did not. The passenger in the car I had let ahead of me had got out and was remonstrating with the woman who had been in front of me. It was tense. I was very glad we were not in America with some people having guns.

We continued our glacial advance, then a car coming in the other direction stopped. The driver stuck his head our and was shouting something to those in the queue ahead of me. I could not hear him, but he did not seem abusive, so as he passed I called to him to ask what he had said. He said, ‘They have closed early; I was second in the queue and they told me to go away’. It seemed likely that he was right, but most people had waited so long that they were not willing to drive off, so we moved quite slowly till everyone had driven past the ‘Closed’ sign that had appeared in the driveway. It was 2pm. The testing site was advertised to be open till 4.

No test and a couple of hours wasted. I have COVID. It is not recorded in the system. It seems that I will recover. Will I waste another few hours tomorrow? And if I do will I have PCR results anyway? I am scheduled to see my patients again 9 days after the onset of symptoms- presumably I will be non-infectious. Luckily I got some RAT kits.

It is not hard to see where anger and frustration comes in all of this.

‘Personal responsibility’ has a very Darwinian edge.

Thank God I am not very sick.

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01/01/2022

It is Hard to get COVID tests and likely to get Harder

1 January 2022

The numbers of COVID cases are rising dramatically, many of the clinics have closed for Christmas, and Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) have sold out from most chemists. You might wonder why this wasn’t anticipated, but it seems that the strategy of ‘Let ‘er Rip’ was meant to stimulate the economy as everyone assumed that either COVID was over, or that the Omicron variant did not matter, (not that Delta had actually gone away).

In fact the people have been mostly quite sensible and are not going out and are wearing masks and isolating, which of course means two things.

1. The ‘Let ‘er Rip’ strategy is not getting the economy back to normal and

2. The government can say that it is not their fault if people choose not to go out and spend, so they don’t need to support business or anyone else.

Here is an explanation of the PCR test unavailability from Kim Hatton:

‘Some people today have been wondering why the Feds are pushing so strongly to reduce PCR testing for COVID and shift to RAT. Yes of course the path labs are overloaded but there’s more to the story than that. Currently Medicare pays $110 for a PCR test, split between the path lab and whoever is collecting the sample. With tests reaching 270,000 a day that’s basically $30million per day out of fed budget.

The plan is to reduce PCR tests down to around 50,000 a day saving $24 million a day.To fill the gap the plan is to use Rapid Antigen Tests which cost around $10 in bulk. The Feds will fund 50% of whatever the states buy. In theory the states would buy enough to bridge the gap ie 220,000 per day costing them $1.1 million and the Feds the same. Meaning fed expenditure drops from $30m per day to $7million.

However that assumes the states buy enough which they haven’t. NSW has placed an order for 2 million which won’t even last 2 weeks assuming infection rates don’t increase – which of course they will.In practice what is more likely to happen is the the public will fund the majority of RATests themselves saving the Govt at least another million a day.

That million a day then becomes part of the economy which comes out as economic growth the federal government has achieved and will use to argue how good a job they’ve done.’ End Quote

This seems quite plausible to me- I will chase the source.

The other aspect is that if you do not have a PCR test and do not go to hospital, you are not recorded as a COVID case, so the statistics look better.

I personally had a contact and did a PCR at about midday on Friday 24th and got a text with a negative result at 4am on Tuesday 27th- 3 days and 16 hours later. If this blows out much more the test is virtually useless, as you would have had to isolate anyway.

It seems if we do not have a PCR test, and/or everyone does their own Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) and then monitors their own health with or without a $20 oximeter to make sure that their oxygen saturation is normal and over 95%, the whole epidemic can be ignored except for the ones so sick as to go to hospital.

This seems to be the effect of the new guidelines as in the SMH. Here is the ‘Do It Yourself’ article from the SMH:

More COVID cases told to manage themselves at home as tests hit ‘bottleneck’

By Mary WardSydney Morning Herald December 28, 2021 — 6.38pm

Private pathology companies have warned that NSW’s rising coronavirus cases are creating a “bottleneck” in the testing system as more people who catch COVID-19 are being directed to manage their infections from home.

On Tuesday, NSW Health updated its advice for people who are COVID-positive, directing that most people aged 65 and under are considered able to recover from the virus without medical involvement.

Under the new rules, people in this age group who have had two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, do not suffer from any chronic conditions and are not pregnant are considered able to safely manage an infection at home.

Previously, this was only the case for people aged under 50.Of the 42,600 COVID-19 cases reported in the state over the past seven days, fewer than 7 per cent of infections were in people aged 60 and older. About 3400 were aged in their 50s.

Those managing an infection at home should also not expect to be “cleared” from isolation by NSW Health. Instead, they may leave after day 10 of their isolation, even if they do not hear from NSW Health in a text message on this date, provided they have not experienced symptoms in the previous 72 hours.

NSW Health advice for managing common COVID-19 symptoms at home

• Cough: Breathe in steam and sip on fluids. Avoid lying on your back. If you are coughing up mucous, it is important to continue to do this as it reduces risk of a chest infection.

• Nausea, vomiting and diarrhea: Eat plain, low fibre foods. Have six smaller meals instead of three. Do not drink alcohol or caffeine. Stay hydrated.

• Fever: Take paracetemol. Put a cool, damp washcloth on your forehead. Wipe your arms and body with a cool cloth.

Source: NSW Health

“It is important that this information is provided to people who are at lower risk of severe illness to allow NSW Health to focus on those who have the greatest risk of poor outcomes, this includes people over the age of 65,” a NSW Health spokesperson said.

“Regardless of age, people are also provided clear advice about what to do if they start to feel worse or in the case of a medical emergency.

”People who have a chronic condition – such as obesity, a severe, chronic or complex medical condition, diabetes – are immunocompromised, have severe mental illness or are pregnant are urged to contact the COVID-19 Care at Home Support Line on 1800 960 933 if they return a positive PCR test to receive further medical assistance.

Last week, Australian Medical Association NSW president Danielle McMullen warned that doctors would struggle to cope with thousands of patients needing virtual care as health authorities flagged they would increasingly rely on the GP network to manage COVID-19.

Tuesday’s public holiday again meant some testing clinics were forced to shut within hours of opening, as wait times for PCR results blew out to more than four days despite the system processing fewer tests than it had previously.

There were 93,581 COVID-19 tests processed in the 24 hours to 8pm on Monday, down from the previous day’s total of 97,241 and nowhere near upwards of 150,000 tests done in September. NSW Health’s Christine Selvey said testing in the state was “under enormous pressure”, urging people to only have a PCR test if they had symptoms, were a household contact of a case or had been advised by NSW Health about attending a high transmission venue.

Premier Dominic Perrottet said he believed up to 30 per cent of tests were for interstate travel, as he and Health Minister Brad Hazzard urged the Queensland government to ease requirements for people to return a negative PCR test before crossing the border, after it scrapped a day five test for people who had already travelled to the state due to pressure on its own system.

“If we can move that PCR requirement to a rapid antigen test requirement that will significantly alleviate some of the pressure on the testing over summer,” Mr Perrottet said.Mr Hazzard said he had asked NSW Health and the federal government to reconsider whether two tests completed by returned international travellers who come through Sydney Airport needed to be PCRs, in light of the delays.

He also asked the ministry to look into recommending rapid antigen tests were used to screen pregnant women ahead of birth after the Herald revealed women had been queueing for tests every 72 hours on the advice of some hospitals.

But while private pathology labs said so-called “tourism testing” did account for some of delay, a higher volume of positive tests was also to blame. More than 6 per cent of tests reported on Tuesday were positive, up from about 2 per cent the previous week.

Greg Granger, director of strategic operations at Histopath, said the proportion of tests which were positive had created “one of the biggest bottlenecks” in the system.

Mr Granger said the method of PCR testing large volumes of samples – where samples are pooled and tested in groups – worked well when fewer than 1 per cent of tests were positive and most “pools” of tests could be cleared as negative.

“When there’s a positive in the pool every single time, you essentially have to double or triple test the samples,” he said, noting laboratories were now needing to figure out, with their available instruments, what a more efficient method would be.

“Obviously in an ideal world, you don’t pool at all. But with these sheer numbers you just can’t … it’s about finding where the balance is.

”A spokesperson for St Vincent’s Hospital, which operates the SydPath clinics, agreed positive tests took longer to confirm in its laboratory than negative ones.

They said the process of reporting a positive case to NSW Health was also “more significant” than the administration needed for a negative test.Despite the high demand, SydPath clinics will operate at reduced hours “in order to maintain the quality of [its] testing”, after more than 800 people were incorrectly sent negative test results over the weekend due to human error. The provider asked people to not attend its clinics, including the Bondi Beach drive-through, seeking a test for interstate travel.

Australian National University infectious diseases expert Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake said the state’s high positivity rate meant it was likely more infections were being missed by testing. However, he said, an upside of this was that the hospitalisation rate of Sydney’s Omicron wave was likely even lower than reported.

“At this stage, it does seem like the current infections are resulting in significantly fewer hospitalisations than we saw with Delta,” he said.

There were 557 COVID-19 patients in NSW hospitals on Tuesday, including 60 in intensive care, compared to 168 in hospital a fortnight ago. NSW’s COVID-19 hospitalisations reached a peak of 1266 in mid-September, including 244 in intensive care.

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29/12/2021

Scientific Fraud

29 December 2021

I have friends who campaign for various things, sometimes quite alone for many years.

One of my friends is Polish.  He was part of the dissident movement when Solidarity was trying to end the Communist system.  While the Government was forced to negotiate with Lech Walesa, the Secret Police were busy and the second tier of activists and sympathisers simply disappeared overnight, so he spent quite a lot of time moving around.  He learned English and studied industrial hygiene, the safe use of chemicals in industry, so that he would have a qualification that was useful and recognised when he escaped to the West, which he eventually did. 

But he retained an interest in Poland and noted that some of the researchers there simply translated English papers, changed them very marginally, passed off the plagiarism as their original work, and became professors based on their great advances.  When the various academies were informed, they did not really want to know, as it disturbed their internal structures and was also something of an insult to national pride.

So he has spent years campaigning against scientific fraud, both there and here. 

There are other problems that grossly distort research.  No one really wants to publish negative findings; new discoveries are much more exciting than finding that stuff was wrong.  Also private research is much more interested in funding work that will produce a marketable product, and research that shows a drug works or is better than another.  The government has got into this mode also, wanting ‘partnerships with the private sector’ that will allow them to defray the research costs. This has arguably meant that the private sector tends to have a lot of say in what is studied, gets the government to pay for areas that it might not have bothered with, and can also grab lucrative patents early.  In this competitive environment, researchers have to find funding, and there is not much money in repeating experiments to disprove them.

Some research needs thousands of subjects to see which investigations or drugs are the most useful so that treatment protocols can be developed. Naturally these require huge coordination between many hospitals, health authorities and clinicians.  They require huge budgets. They offer big rewards if a certain investigation or treatment is shown to be beneficial and is included in the final recommendation of a huge trial.  The lead authors will travel the world for years as the definitive experts in that field with all the prestige that that entails.  Yet, as clinicians tied up with clinical work and often departments to administer, they cannot personally manage the logistics or the data and usually rely on ghost writers to put the drafts together.  Who funds that you might ask?  And what are the consequences if the funding company’s products do not work so well?  Will the professor who said it did not work get funding next time?

There is even a whole scam industry of dodgy or even non-existent  journals where you pay to be published or to be a supposed reviewer of papers.

So the pure idea that scientists are only interested in the truth and have no personal or financial interest was never true and has been under even more stress of late. 

Just as self-regulation in banking, aged care, casinos, building, advertising and many other industries has been shown to be inadequate, now scientific publishing is coming under the public spotlight.

The world of academia is more poorly set up than most industries to act as policeman. Evidence is evaluated in good faith.  Universities are expected to fund their courses from fees and donations so they are less in a position to take action that may be expensive and may damage their reputations.

Now, at last, the Australian Academy of Sciences has asked for a research integrity watchdog. This will help with deliberate individual fraud.

How much it can affect the other biasing factors in research remains to be seen.  The political and economic factors are likely to remain in the ‘too hard basket’.  It is still hard to know what the truth is.  Gut feelings about plausibility are of course ‘unscientific’ and what you ‘believe’ at a point of time is supposed to relate to what the ‘facts’ are.  And all this without social media even considered.

On the bright side, my Polish friend will see a significant step for his campaign, and if regulatory oversight replaces one lot of self-regulation there is hope that it will spread to other industries.

www.smh.com.au/national/macquarie-university-considers-investigating-suspected-research-fraud-20211214-p59hfr.html

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