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September 1, 2020 - 7:55am
Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke’s interview with UnHerd made waves around the world when, at the height of the Covid-19 crisis in April, he made the case for why lockdowns were not the answer.
He has now been promoted to a more senior advisory role within the World Health Organisation, as Vice-Chair of the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards, which advises the Director-General on the response to pandemics.
“It’s a group of thirteen scientists from all around the world. Usually we meet twice a year in Geneva but since Covid-19 we’ve been meeting once a week by telephone,” he tells me down the line from Stockholm.
The London-based Chair, David Heymann, who Dr Giesecke describes as “one of the world’s best known infectious disease fighters”, has other commitments across the WHO and Dr Giesecke will lead the group in his absence.
He was voted in as the new Vice-Chair by the other members.
I asked him if he regards his election as a sign that epidemiologists around the world were looking more towards the Swedish response to Covid-19 as a model.
“I don’t think it’s a political statement, no,” he said. “I think they like my experience.”
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SubscribeOne can but hope this will move things along a more positive direction.
A small example of decency and common sense in the public realm. And much needed when we have just learned that only 6% of Covid deaths in the US were purely Covid deaths. (This is from the CDC – look it up).
Good luck Fraser. You are never going to die according to those CDC stats. Unless you are one of the vanishingly small number of people who die of a single cause with no comorbidities.
Please please please never quote a statistic again, if you don’t know what it means. Let’s leave mathematical illiteracy to the Marxists eh?
I believe I coined the word ‘scamdemic’ and I stand by it. Fewer than 10,000 people in the US died from Covid alone, and many or most of those deaths could probably have been prevented had Democrat-run states like New York acted sensibly.
The same applies to many or most of the other 150,000 deaths, which happened to people with an average of 2.6 co-morbidities.
And the fact is that flu is more likely to kill people below the age of 60 or so than C19.
Do you have a link out of interest. The CDC site is terrible.
https://disrn.com/news/new-…
It’s hard to believe this news after all the bashing of the Swedes. I assume it’s good news, although I remain skeptical when an organization reinstates their biggest criticaster. Is it to silence him or to listen to him? Time will tell and let’s hope for the best.
Yes, I’m a bit suspicious about this too…
I heart Sweden, it’s scientists, it’s PM & it’s people. Bravo.
Interestingly native Swedes have no excess mortality in 2020. Immigrant population from MESA and Africa has a huge excess mortality unfortunately. My swedish doctor friends tell me that they have very low levels of vitamin D and this G6PD enzyme deficiency. They have a Gene that the nordics don’t have. This makes them very sick from covid. 400 million people have this deficiency and if you look at mortality issues in NYC and london etc much can be explained by this.
Prof Wolgang Wodarg said back in March that certain ethnic groups react badly to hydroxychloroquine because they have an inherited G6PD enzyme deficiency which can lead to anaemia if given this drug and therefore poor outcomes. I haven’t seen it mentioned since then, although I thought it might have been an important factor which should have been taken into consideration in treatment regimes.
Very good Aris. That will take some digesting but he seemed to have predicted the rise of populism and the increasing importance of cultural values that go beyond the liberty, equality and fraternity of liberalism.
Perhaps he was anticipating the increased competition that arises from a race to the top in terms of expectations and therefore the increased competition that arises from seeking ever better standards of living.
However, as it happens, competition has increased due to secular stagnation within the Western World which has seen the return of Race as a signifier of social justice as well as the Climate as a signifier of environmental justice. Similarly, but more contentiously, the Human has become a signifier of ecological justice especially in terms of unrestrained human growth.
Overall, Fukuyama seems to be contemplating the re-emergence of social competition in the face of the complacency facilitated by liberal cooperation. The former perhaps more associated with the human animal and the latter more associated with the perceived apex of human evolutionary development, homo liberalus.
“By all metrics, living standards have declined across the liberal West, leading to the rapid proletarianisation of the middle class in the United States and much of Europe.” Could we see at least one of those metrics?
The writer didn’t mention the financial crash of 2008
Mr Sayers,
Given you had the opportunity, it would also have been interesting for you to ask Giesecke whether he stands by his assertion in your April interview that the IFR for Covid is the same as the seasonal flu, around 0.1%? Or his opinion that 50% of the Swedish and UK populations had already been infected in April?
We don’t have to wait a year or five to have some pretty informed discussion of the IFR and seroprevalence data. To my mind, this goes to Giesecke’s credibility as a policy advisor who is required to give advice in real time based on the best available evidence; he’s not being employed as a historian of pandemics.
I should add for the avoidance of doubt that I’m making a very specific point about the accuracy of Giesecke’s opinion on IFR and seroprevalence expressed to UnHerd in April.
I’m not seeking to make a point about where Giesecke fits in the ongoing discourse on whether lockdown/masks/school-closures/whatever are the “right” or “wrong” policy, or the basis for his belief that the rest of the world will “catch up” with Sweden’s death toll per capita notwithstanding improved treatment/sheltering/vaccine etc.
It would also be interesting to get your views on the release of emails between Giesecke and Tegnell from the start of the pandemic, which rather suggest they did not understand what was going on and mistakenly treated SARS-Cov-2 as being like the flu. There’s some discussion here in English-language Swedish news:
https://www.thelocal.se/202…
Interesting that Scotland & Nicola Sturgeon have been largely following Prof Devi Sridhar’s “ZeroCovid” strategy and were praised in the early days for efforts they had made to contain the virus. Fast forward and we find that cases have surged and Glasgow and surrounding areas have gone back into lockdown affecting 15% of the population. On 28 August it was found that “In England 7.7 per million of the population are occupying a hospital bed [with Covid]. However, in Scotland 46.8 per million are in a hospital bed with Covid ““ a rate that is nearly nine times higher” (Centre for Evidence Based Medicine 02 September 2020). Little wonder WHO now thinks Johan Giesecke may have something to contribute.
Interesting that Scotland & Nicola Sturgeon have been largely following Prof Devi Sridhar’s “ZeroCovid” strategy and were praised in the early days for efforts they had made to contain the virus. Fast forward and we find that cases have surged and Glasgow and surrounding areas have gone back into lockdown affecting 15% of the population. On 28 August it was found that “In England 7.7 per million of the population are occupying a hospital bed [with Covid]. However, in Scotland 46.8 per million are in a hospital bed with Covid ““ a rate that is nearly nine times higher” (Centre for Evidence Based Medicine 02 September 2020). Little wonder WHO now thinks Johan Giesecke may have something to contribute.
UnHerd: why is the comment I wrote three days ago still pending?
Same for me, a long comment I left on the Michael Levitt interview went off to ‘moderation’ and is now stuck in pending. Is this a technical glitch, or something more sinister, ironically, on UnHerd? It seems designed to put people off spending time preparing thoughtful comments, because they’re likely to get ‘disappeared’…
Indeed. I asked some factual questions about the accuracy of predictions Giesecke made back in April, providing links to my sources. Shame that it appears to have been censored.
I saw Fukuyama when he was a guest on the Hoover Institution’s Goodfellows episode “The Politics of a Pandemic”. He is just a typical Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer, more delusional than most. This wasn’t just my impression, but seemed to be the general consensus of people who commented on the episode. As for Fukuyama’s book, “The End of History and the Last Man”, its predictions are vague and delphic, are they not? A whole range of very different negative outcomes can be claimed to be consistent with it. If Fukyama had predicted in 1992 that before thirty years had passed a Marxist outfit that claimed to protect black Americans would be destroying historical monuments and burning down cities, I would be really impressed, but he didn’t do so.
In his UnHerd interview in April, Giesecke said that he thought Covid’s IFR was the same as seasonal ‘flu, about 0.1%, and that half the population had already been infected at that time?
Those opinions have already been proven to be completely wrong, no?
the man is half a joke.
He constantly (including Unherd video) predicted a “boom” in herd-immunity. When the tests were done across Sweden (may or June) he was completely wrong. When asked by Expressen (a Swedish tabloid) how did he come up with the numbers his response was “let’s drop this”.
I think you’ll find the antibody tests strongly suggested he was wrong.
But, two or three months later, the numbers strongly suggest he was right.
You are right to judge the man (he’s in the political sphere after all) but on matters of science you have to keep reassessing the evidence. Look at the numbers.
I did some modelling over the weekend to compare a simulation with Karl Friston’s latest (June) results. I am persuaded that full immunity doesn’t last long, and that a country which has had a first wave is likely to experience far less deadly second waves, as well as experiencing the long tails we’ve been seeing. Countries with effective lockdowns don’t experience long tails.
You should give mathematical modelling a go yourself. Walk a few yards in his shoes.
I used to build (Excel and VB+) CMBS modelling – so I know something about structured financial modelling – not herd immunity.
He predicted c.50% immunity rate, last time the test were done (may) it was c.7%.
What is the rate now – do you have the numbers?
Way more better than modelling is the data itself.
You should get familiar with the scientific literature, otherwise models are useless.
There are several papers, old and new, that strongly suggests immunity via T cells against coronaviruses, instead of antibody (B cells) immunity.
Months ago, neither Giesecke nor anyone else picked this up.
But he was right to predict immunity (by any means) and the swedish data on cases and deaths backs him up.
Yep, and when will Ioannidis be reinstated?
The case and death numbers were falling too fast for a 7% immunity rate to make sense. As you are probably aware antibody immunity is not the ne all and end all.
I can’t do numbers (yet), I’m going on the shape of the graphs from simulations to take a guess at the dynamics. (Yes I said modelling, I was actually running randomised simulations – minor fib). A bit like seeing a Bessel function and saying “thats a drum”, or a sine wave and saying “thats a tuning fork”.
Until this weekend I couldn’t reproduce anything that looked like the actual shapes we are seeing in country after country.
In short, if you put a lockdown into an infection simualtion, you get a standard SIR curve, with a kink in it. it looks like two standard SIR curves pasted together. I tried relaxing lockdown to get the long tails but nothing.
Only adding reinfection after temporary immunity gets you a long tail, and depending on the length of temporary immunity you either get (a) a bigger initial spike, of a different shape to SIR, or (b) a long tail with a later spike. The size and distance of that second spike depends on the date lockdown is introduced, and the time to resusceptibility.
The graphs roughly concur with Karl Friston’s latest paper (June, arxiv 2006.09429.pdf), numbers which have been modelled, and have had their parameters fitted to the data. The paper does have numbers in it (death rates at specific dates in specific countries), so we’ll eb able to evaluate the usefulness of the model in due course.
The paper doesn’t say so, but the implication is that in some countries the first wave has passed, with the majority of susceptible people having been infected. I.e. initial herd immunity. I would suspect that second waves in these instances would cause markedly less deaths than the initial wave. In countries that did manage to effctively suppress the virus, we’d expect essentially, a continuation of the first wave, and higher death tolls.
I’d love to post my code, graphs or even gifs of the simulations here but I don’t think I can. Especially as the gifs suggest that second waves are generated from the last places to get infected, like a wave reaching the end of a tank and being reflected.
It’s been over 20 years since I used Excel and VB to model/simulate anything, but it was good fun. If you are a pythonista, I’ll try and get you my code – it’s not large, but not tidy either. It’s good for a giggle.
Again, you’re wrong on 7% seroprevalence means 7% infected.
Also, preimmunity from T-cells min 30% means 15-25% infection gets to HIT.
I agree with you but I didn’t mean to imply that
7% seroprevalence means 7% infected. If the specificity of the antibody tests and has been allowed for it should mean that 7% is the absolute minimum number of people who have been infected. I think too much store was based on the seroprevalance tests, and initial modelling, rather than the more solid figures that were coming out of e.g. ONS.
From another recent study in Luxembourg the antibodies were found in 10% of the population rather than 2% as in the case of blood test antibody studies. These were nasal test I understand, so maybe a lot of people stop the virus early on. I do not believe in full immunity but I think with a little bit of care the most of us should move on with their lives. If i did not know about this virus probably the life for most would have been better.
You’re making an amateurs error of assuming only those with antibodies have been infected,
When it’s perhaps 1/3 of the infected population