While several European countries pause their vaccine rollout to look into blood clots, this would seem an ideal time to clear up once and for all whether the vaccine is causing pregnancies, sunburn, and taking up smoking! https://t.co/sXoY4li9MS
— stuart mcdonald (@ActuaryByDay) March 16, 2021
It is rare for the Covid actuaries to drop their guard, but this exchange shows how they can articulate the frustration that most of us are feeling about the vaccine hesitancy of some close neighbors. The humour may be dry but I found a tear in my eye reading this exchange!
Inexplicable clots
I had four pulmonary embolisms (blood clots) in November 2019; because they were “unprovoked”, they have been linked to Covid, which hadn’t officially arrived in England till three months after my embolisms were found. The embolisms were taken up by one doctor as a sign that Covid was in the UK in Q4 2019 , I was even asked for an interview.
I imagine the Danes found to have similarly unprovoked embolisms are the cause of , and subject of , much public scrutiny. “It was the Oxford jab wot dunnit” – goes out the cry, just as Pfizer’s vaccine was responsible for one person giving up smoking and another taking smoking up.
But there are many things in medical science and life that go unexplained. I had a period when I felt I needed to know the cause of my embolisms and was calmed down by my doctor (who could see the harm in my fretting) by plainly telling me “you’re a clotter”. I guess this is better than being a “clot” , which I would have been if I’d gone on worrying.
The unexplained
John Kay gave a great lecture to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, which ended with him talking of Switzerland, a country that had avoided any sense of adventure, any attempt to reach beyond the borders of the known. “What had 400 years of prudence produced” asked Kay
The cuckoo clock
And so ends entrepreneurship, so ends ambition.
So Europe will not get jabbed, and may try to stop us getting jabbed. So financial economists will persist in de-risking our financial structures and so Switzerland will continue to be boring. Everyone looking for the certainty of the perfectly known.
It is the unexplained that makes us brave, “intimations of immortality” – Wordsworth called them. Tell this to the Swiss as they lock themselves down in their cocoon of certainty.
Association to come!
You can look into blood clots as much as you like, but you’ll still be in lockdown at Christmas! I’ll finish this morning knowing that we at least – have an expectation of normality – for all the fearsome risks we’re taking! For which happy sentiment, I have the Covid actuaries to thank – again!
Update on hospital admissions and deaths in England from @COVID19actuary
Deaths halving in around two weeks. Admissions falling slightly slower than that. Regionally the fastest falls recently were in London and the South East. https://t.co/Cl99R78AUl
— stuart mcdonald (@ActuaryByDay) March 16, 2021
Big vaccine week in the UK. https://t.co/KUrKYNcpsr
— stuart mcdonald (@ActuaryByDay) March 16, 2021
Feel free to associate those tweets!
Cuckoo clocks were traditionally made in the Black Forest, not Switzerland. I believe that Orson Wells in The Third Man originated that much-quoted and incorrect saying.
Switzerland actually has two large pharmaceutical companies, two leading scientific universities (with several Nobel Prizes), and plenty of other hi-tech industry. Plus mountains and chocolate. Not boring at all.