Delta Variant
I honestly don&#x27;t know how to feel about Tomas Pueyo.<p>He&#x27;s very opinionated about what he writes, and has gained good readership and influencer status on this topic.
It&#x27;s clear in his writings that he fancies himself as an &quot;amateur of expert insight&quot;.
He may be 100% correct. He may also be 100% wrong. It&#x27;s hard to tell (let alone without invoking the conditional fallacy).<p>However, the most lasting impression I have of him is when he was invited in one of those &quot;both sides&quot; TV programmes in the UK on the basis that his &quot;Hammer and the Dance&quot; blogpost at the time became very popular. He was invited to debate with a renowned epidemiologist, who was part of the COVID-19 team advising the UK government at the time, and who was there to discuss the rationale for the policy after copious simulations by his research team. The epidemiologist was considered an expert and leading figure in his field. Meanwhile, Pueyo&#x27;s self-described title on his blogpage at the time was &quot;data visualisation expert&quot; or something along those lines.<p>Now, like I said, he may be 100% correct (or not). This is not about making an &quot;ad verecundium&#x2F;hominem&quot; argument. But all I remember from that TV debate is that his main argument tactic on TV was effectively interrupting all the time by saying &quot;wtf&quot;, &quot;people will die because of you&quot; and visibly eyerolling and audibly sighing an awful lot, without offering much counterargument except by referring to his blogpost and the &quot;obviousness of his claims&quot;. All this to the dismay and visible frustration of the epidemiologist who was trying to remain civil, objective, and doing his best to remain calm, relay the science as clearly as he could, while trying to avoid unnecessary panic and drama. Honestly watching it made me feel like you had just pitched the dalai lama in a debate against trump.<p>Pueyo has now changed his blogpage&#x27;s tagline from &quot;data visulisation expert&quot; (or whatever it used to be) to &quot;Understand the biggest problems and how to solve them&quot;. Forgive me if that doesn&#x27;t sound as vague and grandiose to you as it does to me, but at best it doesn&#x27;t come across to me as very humble from someone who, at the very least, is not particularly qualified for that description (then again, who is).<p>So, good on him for writing these blogposts and taking a stand, but while he may (or may not) be 100% correct (if there is such a thing), after that TV performance I witnessed, I&#x27;m taking his (otherwise professionally edited) blogposts with a large pinch of salt.