Eugenics is at the centre of why a some significant people are arguing against public health interventions, and for the so-called "Sweden model" of uncontrolled spread of the virus leading to herd immunity. This thread is about what this means and why it needs to be opposed: 1/

Eugenics is essentially the idea that society improves by people with good genes, who have good traits, passing them on. But traditionally the idea has been used negatively: it has been about stopping people who supposedly have bad traits passing them on, either by killing 2/

them off or stopping them having kids. Sometimes this has led to genocides. In others it's led to mass forced sterilisations of poorer, oppressed, and immigrant populations. This sounds old fashioned, but the popularity of eugenics is increasing in Britain's ruling classes. 3/

Toby Young, columnist for The Spectator and editor of the "Lockdown Skeptics" website, is know to have attended the London Conference on Intelligence in 2017 and 2018. This secretive conference that discusses the idea that intelligence is racially determined and eugenics. 4/

Another attendee was Andrew Sabisky, advisor to Boris Johnson, who was ultimately sacked in February this year for his remarks about black Americans having lower IQs, and for arguing for forced contraception to stop unplanned pregnancies, which, he claimed, create 5/

a permanent underclass. ( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/16/tory-aide-wants-enforced-contraception-to-curb-pregnancies) Similar ideas about intelligence, and the relationship between genes, heritability, and IQ - and how genetic prediction should be used to decide who gets access to higher education - have been defended by Dominic Cummings for 6/

years. Meanwhile, Cummings' wife is Mary Wakefield, who is the executive editor of The Spectator. You can hear how her father has to say about the inheritability of intelligence here, and how geniuses apparently arise from good old aristocratic families here (although I we 7/

can't blame Wakefield for the cranky views of her father, this is to give a taste of the intellectual climate.)

So what does this all have to do with COVID? In short the idea is that herd immunity gained through mass infection matters less because the victims will either be 8/

people who are "going to die anyway", or because they are not economically productive parts of the population (the old and the sick), or because the dangers of this disease are most concentrated among poorer people and among people of black and ethnic minority backgrounds. 9/

Often the argument is not made explicitly in these terms, and again it is often made negatively. These lockdown skeptics types see the real enemy as the concept of universal health promoted by the NHS (which Karol Sikora has called "the last bastion of communism") because 10/

it guarantees the health, welfare, and wellbeing of everyone regardless of wealth, background, or class. This is considered to be the greatest threat to the eugenicist project.

Sometimes the argument is made with more scientific flair. Professor Sunetra Gupta, who for 11/

has claimed we already have herd immunity, and has decried public health interventions, pitches the eugenicist project more abstractly as a matter of viral ecology. You can watch a lecture from her here, from many years before this pandemic, in which she describes how during 12/

pandemics the weak succumb and the strong survive. - and apparently as a results humans become genetically richer. To mess with that is to mess with nature it seems. Except the problem is that the types of divisions that are killing people during this 13/

pandemic aren't natural. The fact that BAME people are more likely to be poor, live in cramped conditions, live in multiple generation homes, have bad working conditions etc. have nothing to do with nature. The fact that Boris went to Eton is not natural. Nor is the fact 14/

that his cleaner didn't. And so the argument for microbial ecology - with its very old fashioned red in tooth and claw vision of nature (and thus of society) - becomes an alibi for what are essentially exterminationist projects. The pandemic becomes, for these people, an 15/

opportunity to split the strong from the weak, and all the better if the weak die. All the more so if they were a drain on the economy because they were old enough to be claiming a pension, or disabled enough that they were unable to work. This is the grim vision that 16/

underlies so much of the chatter about how Sweden got it right. It is a weaponisation of the pandemic against the weak for the sake of a social programme that believes society is better without them. If they can't be forcibly sterilised then they can at least have the life 17/

support switched off. Perhaps all of this is uttered more quietly in public: Boris and Gove don't like to talk about eugenics, but they will happily talk about "natural talent". And all the plans now are for a society in which only the young, fit, and healthy are able to go 18/

back to normal, while the old, the sick, the immunosuppressed are told to stay at home forever and ever. The media colludes with it too: no interviews of old people, none of disabled people, none of people with chronic illnesses for whom the Swedish model of eugenics means 19/

either death or permanent exclusion from society through imprisonment in their own homes.

The entire basis of this eugenic thinking needs to be robustly opposed. True freedom can be found only in a society in which we are all free. And public health ought to be about making 20/

collective lives together, instead of deciding that some people's lives do not matter.

Lots of people have been taken in by these eugenicist arguments, because they are given to people with the promise of not having to undertake strenuous and difficult health interventions. 21/

The trouble is that few people are talking about the real social consequences - and those whose plan this is will never be open about it, because their views are so disgusting and repugnant. 22/22

Ooops missed out the Humphrey Wakefield video - it is here https://twitter.com/samjknights/status/1266006126526631936?s=20