An Open Letter To Every In-Person Invitation
--
Want my attendance? Read this.
Hello, (person or organization) that would like to see me personally appear at (insert event). Since a variety of officials have repeatedly said that it’s up to each of us to assess our own Covid risks, I’ve invested some time in doing exactly that. I’m going to briefly walk you through my findings and my thinking, providing links to 22 relevant peer reviewed studies published in accredited medical journals as well as a range of efforts by medical professionals to explain those findings to non experts. I welcome you to follow along this brief journey to see whether your conclusions are similar to my own, and encourage you to follow the links to learn more.
Risk assessment basics
Human beings really like things to be simple, and risk assessment is a complex beast. As a result, we’re usually not very good at it. During my time as a member of the Working Group for the environmental agreement on the Giant Mine Remediation Project — the largest toxic cleanup in Canadian history, which involves more than enough arsenic trioxide waste to kill every human being on the planet — I’ve had a chance to learn a little more about how professional risk assessment is undertaken. We cannot simply consider the theoretical likelihood that one specific outcome may or may not occur in a vacuum. Sometimes you have to weigh a smaller likelihood of a severe outcome against a less severe outcome which is, however, likely to manifest with significantly greater frequency. Complex matters involve a convoluted tapestry of associated risks which may interact with one another in surprising ways. It gets messy.
This becomes even harder when the subject matter is technically detailed, unless you are personally trained in that specialty. The assessment of risks associated with Covid is complicated yet further by the fact that governments let ideology and optics shape the way they present data and reduced or eliminated testing so that we’re largely flying blind. Conveniently, I don’t have to be an expert epidemiologist myself to be able to point to what leading experts in medicine learn and publish.
