Marc Van Ranst on Twitter

16 comments

  1. Marc just threw the entire official advice document online. I guess he is sick to chew on all the hate the normal folks spew his way, while they (GEMS) advised exactly the opposite of what the politicians decide.

    From now on they will allways immediately make their advice known to the public with the official documents to be fully transparant. Looks like they themselves are sick and tired of the politics and then also swallow the blame and hate from the people while they actually dont deserve it.

  2. >De experten verkiezen dat dit voortaan direct publiek wordt gemaakt. Dit maakt alles volledig transparant, en het maakt lekken nutteloos.

    Sounds logical.

  4. Lovely read. Gives a wonderful overview of what they all have to take into consideration. Such a shame blatant and easily proven facts are ignored, like the worrying increase in fitness centers.

    Look forward to political squirming in an attempt to turn this story.

  5. Fascinating to read just to see how the expert word their advice and the data they use for it.

    Also wonder how many people will get triggered this is written in English.

  9. TRANSPARANCY WOOT! I don’t mind the English (makes sense, as the whole world is watching), it just seems weird to not include Dutch, French & German. Pretty sure it was written by a Dutch speaking person though, thanks to this: “Assessment of de epidemiological situation”

  10. Het publiek moet altijd weten wat het advies van de experten is, en hoe de politiek daar dan van afwijkt.

  11. Anyone know if I was supposed to be able to read the other documents linked in that pdf too ? Am on mobile so was surprised to find out clicking the blue URLs in the text in the first leaked report instantly opened the previous report and the mental health report too. Or is this publicly available anyways ?

  12. Pleasantly surprised to see mental health mentioned so early in the document. But still disappointed that there’s no real attention paid to concrete solutions, although I must admit that might be out of the scope of the GEMS.

  14. It’s perfectly in line with what’s happening.

    Remember MVR saying that during wave 1 you had to find politicians “hiding behind the wallpaper” when they had to make announcements? He pretty much took over and acted, on his own, as a sort of political representative. Until the politicians realised they weren’t getting any screen time.

    Probably because of MVR explaining the rules because politicians hid like little children, we started to say “the experts have decided”. The politicians didn’t correct them because it’s easier to let them take the blame.

    This shifted to being a perverse system of “we can decide what we want and the experts take the blame”, hence why Erika Vlieghe reacted angrily once and asked what her role was if they kept ignoring the advise and leaking things without context 5 seconds after they received a report (which as you can see is not a simple excel file with a list of actions and how it would impact the R).
    This now cumulated in MVR just showing the entire report so politicians can’t hide anymore.

    Politicians hid for a long time, got the narrative changed to “we didn’t decide, the experts did”, and are now being called out because they pick things out of the report without proper motivation: closing culture was a last-line effort, not something to do now. All in the name of saving some dumb public Christmas events (gluhwein over culture).

  15. 23:59:

    > We need to avoid a ‘yo-yo’ effect

    00:00:

    > Daily follow-up of the epidemiological status, and impact of the Omicron variant is
    needed, and may warrant additional measures in due time when cases/incidence would
    start increasing

    Overall I’m unimpressed. Lots of advice but no hard numbers or mention of how much of an impact each measure aims to have in the evolution of the numbers, so basically still the same MO since the beginning – throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope something sticks. The closest thing that came to a clear justification was “because the neighbouring countries are doing it”

    I welcome the transparency but the cynic in me says that this was published more as a way to say ‘Look! The government is ignoring expert advice!!’ and pressuring them to give in to these epidemiologists’ demands instead of in the name of transparency. These aren’t the only people at the table, that’s why there’s a committee, otherwise they might as well just abolish it and have the nation swear fealty to Van Ranst.

    So in response I hope the representatives of the affected sectors, especially of Jambon’s precious culture, will also leak their reports submitted as advice for the committee.

    If anything this erodes even more my trust on everyone involved in making these decisions. I hope they keep going at each other’s throats.

    The journalists will probably have a field day digging into every linked document in this one

  16. >The rapidly emerging Omicron variant brings a lot of uncertainties. The total amount of Omicron cases on 20/12/21 was above 20% and doubles every 3 days. We expect a rise in cases over the next few weeks, as Omicron will gain dominance in our virological landscape. Although information on Omicron’s virulence is still accumulating, experiences from other countries show that a rapid increase in cases will inevitably lead to a new increase in hospitalisations – the net magnitude of which is still difficult to estimate and may be influenced by the level of NPIs applied to slow down transmission and on the coverage of the booster-vaccination among the population to mitigate the impact on severe illness.

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