Many good people will ‘do the right thing’ and spoil their vote this coming Friday. Many will ‘do the right thing’ and vote for one or other of the two candidates that have been shepherded onto the ballot sheet by the powers that be. Many will undoubtedly take the easiest option: blame the weather and not show up at all.
Of the usual fifty-odd percent of eligible voters, who arrive at polling stations as expected, more than likely the majority will vote for Catherine Connolly. In the unlikely event that more Fine Gael stalwarts from South Dublin, Cork and the more affluent suburbs show up, then Heather might rule the day – but that seems very unlikely.
Given the near inevitability of the outcome and the futility of participation in a game that has been rigged from the start, it’s hard to know which of the options is the most ‘right thing to do.’ Personally, if I manage to get the grass cut on polling day I will have done my civic duty.
As far as I can see, there’s about as much difference between the three options as there is any difference between the candidates themselves. In practical or political terms, both Heather and Catherine are on the ballot because neither will use the office of the Presidency to hold the main political parties to account in any practical or substantive way. Of course there will be lip-service to neutrality, wars, digital identities and so on, and perhaps we should be content with a bit of lip service. Either way, neither candidate poses any practical threat to the status quo. Neither candidate will use the office to effectively challenge those who have graciously paved the path to the Áras.
The major issues that face the nation: housing, health, immigration, public services and our neutrality will of course serve as talking points, but the Presidency will function in the usual perfunctory manner, as a kind of mood-music for the political establishment.
Aside from the machinations of ‘far-right extremists’, there appears to be no real appetite for practical change in Ireland. Nothing at least beyond a more trendy set of clothes for the Emperor. Crucially, neither candidate has any intention of raising any questions in respect of the behaviour of the three main parties throughout the Covid years. On that front the government, the opposition and both candidates are united. As Henry Ford said of his Model-T in 1919: “the customer can have any colour he wants, as long as it’s black.”
Seán Gallagher former Irish Presidential candidate.
No Big-Mouth Independents
The whips have ensured that no big-mouthed independents will appear on the ballot paper, independents who might have asked uncomfortable, unscripted questions. An independents who might have given those on the right of the political spectrum a place at the table perhaps?
Yet, it is not only right-wing extremists who are quick to recall the Covid years; the elderly who died, the money trails, the passports, the genetic vaccinations and so on. If not questions, then at least eyebrows are here and there being raised more generally in respect of issues like ‘excess deaths,’ and the increasing incidence of cancers in Ireland.
Even RTÉ is unafraid to admit that cancer was on the decline between 2011 and 2021 but that since 2021 the incidence in Ireland has soared, becoming the second highest in the EU in 2022. Today it is likely to be even higher. Excess deaths are another matter, but they too might step out from behind the shadows one day too.
It is perhaps unsurprising that most Irish voters do see differences between the candidates. To peruse the mainstream media in recent weeks, one would think we had a choice between chalk and cheese. In fairness, Irish voters apparently notice a distinction between Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael, and because Sinn Féin are in opposition and appear to often disagree with FFFG, voters see some differences there too.
I suspect that a growing number of Irish people (young people in particular) are coming to regard the apparent differences between the main political parties as purely superficial. During the Covid years the veil slipped for a time, as the three main parties showed their true colours, behaving in precisely the same manner: pandering to the same fears; promoting the same policies; advocating for the same pharmaceutical products; and pushing the same uncompromising agenda.
In truth, the difference between the main parties, like the difference between Catherine and Heather, is mostly ‘smoke and mirrors,’ entertainment created by the media for the purposes of buttering bread, earning a crust and paying the bills. Unfortunately, figuring out the truth requires intellectual investment, which usually pays poor dividends.
Perhaps we buy into notions of ‘difference’ between parties and between candidates because increasingly we lack that capacity to think deeply; to read a book instead of a tweet.
Despite the ascendancy of the soundbite, Irish voters are undoubtedly wearying of the same old packaging. The presidential Mary-model – featuring the heels, pearl necklace, Louise Kennedy suit and precision haircut – are the unmistakable hallmarks of the two Marys who have gone before. The familiar trappings at the very least have become dull and boring, if for no other reason that we grow tired of repetition.
The only evolution that Heather brings to the ‘Mary-model’ for Presidential success, is the fact that she is not a Mary. Those who will actually make a choice this Friday could not, and will not (in any significant numbers) vote for another Mary. If they do one can surely conclude that all hope is lost, both for Ireland and for the Oysters.
An evolution in our thinking, an intellectual escape from the paradigm of our post-colonial mindset, might be an impossibility, but that does not mean that we are not experiencing an evolution in how we see the world. We evolve cautiously, in small and slow increments. We may be insecure and await precedents to be established elsewhere in the U.K. or the U.S. but it does evolve.
The Mary-boat has sailed. It has had its presidential cruise and is scheduled to be up-cycled into something different, something ‘trending’ and a little bit more environmentally friendly.
Even my dachshund rolls his eyes and looks disappointed when I present him with a bowl of the dried dog-nuts we keep in the pantry. He has come to expect a few leftovers to be mixed in with the mundane.
Catherine Connolly.
‘An Element of Newness’
In respect of how the Presidential ‘rubber-stamp’ will be applied to legislation, Catherine might be no different to Heather, but she will bring a sufficient element of ‘newness’ and ‘difference’ to apply a veneer of ‘change’ lacquered on the planks of the same-old.
Catherine has a certain ruggedness about her, an edge that is ‘earthy’ and ‘progressive’. Her posters are less formal and contain a frequent, if veiled, nod to ‘pride’. Catherine hasn’t been wooed to the mainland to purchase a perfect smile. Unlike her competitor, there is nary a pearl necklace anywhere to be seen, and she is not afraid to wear an anorak, even when it’s not raining. There is something natural and home-grown about Catherine, and that certain-something will be sufficient to carry her all the way to the Áras.
When advanced capitalism sets the agenda for the general production of ‘news’ – costs increase the greater the scrutiny is applied to the issues. It would take a bit of depth and thought to arrive at the truth that there is little if any difference beneath the surface. It’s all about what’s trending, nothing more than that.
Authenticity (whatever that is when it’s at home) took a major hit from that oxymoron of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Deeper issues escape the mainstream media because they require some thought. The more of that commodity required of legacy media the less marketable and consumer-friendly it becomes.
In respect of the ‘vote-spoilers’, few if any media outlets reap a harvest from that small herd of ‘right wing extremists,’ a cohort who are insisting they smell a rat somewhere. That motley crew of racist, flag-wielding loopers, have been smelling plague rats for more than five years now. The left in Dáil Eireann on the other hand are preoccupied with more pressing issues: Ukraine, gender, Palestine and pay gaps for example.
The election naysayers will be ignored by legacy media. The spoilers will scarcely get a mention, and the inevitable low turn-out will most likely be described as ‘only marginally worse than usual’.
Why should we expect anything different? Irish tenants elected their landlords to the English parliament for far longer than we have been freely voting for more of the same. It’s only a pity Jim Gavin bowed out after failing to return money owed to his tenant, as the analogy would require no further reference. We have a long and established tradition of voting for who we’ve been told to vote for. It’s a cultural trait which is quite possibly an integral component of a post-colonial make-up.
Our respect for the authorities who preserve and protect us from each other is predicated on the belief that they care for us – much in the same way as a farmer cares for his herd of milch cows. They have our best interests at heart, and thanks to democracy they remain answerable to ‘we the people.’ All that is necessary to buy into the myth is to show up and vote.
Heather Humphreys.
Our Proud History
Yes, we did have a Revolution and a War of Independence. We have built a mythology around that brief period in our history. We like to forget that only a handful of right and left-wing loopers showed up on Easter Sunday, and those in charge were spat on before being executed. Subsequently, much of our nationalism was self-sabotaged and consumed in the crucible of the Civil War. What little remained expired in the protracted bloodshed of the Northern Troubles.
Ireland is a subservient nation. To suggest otherwise would be to deny the unprecedented scale of our wilful compliance during the Covid years. Lockdowns might have been insane, but we had the longest ones in Europe. In general, we love rules, we love imposing them upon each other, and we respect our masters, just as long as we get to eat some of the long grass in the summer.
That the Presidential election has effectively been rigged; that the party whip was employed openly and unashamedly by Harris and Martin; speaks volumes and roars into some cavernous region of our national psyche.
We elect politicians who act out of a desire to rise through the ranks, and allow themselves to be directed by a whip, rather than being guided by their consciences. Our system of politics has become indistinguishable from the one that it replaced in 1922. Our politics exists primarily as a means for promotion of ambitious individuals within political parties. Harris and Martin are obvious examples.
The system ensures that only ‘yes-men’ or ‘yes-Marys’ rise to the top. One need only look at the mediocrities that reach the top of the pile to confirm that hypothesis. But what if those at the top of the party-political system are presently saying ‘yes’ to other shadowy institutions and individuals?
Today we may be living under a regime that is little more than an elaborate form of puppetry. We call it a ‘liberal democracy’ because we have the right to select the puppets.
Neither Humphreys nor Connolly can see the ‘wizard behind the curtain’. That’s what makes them viable candidates and good politicians. Or perhaps they do see the wizard, but view him as most of the puppets do: as a kind of benign or benevolent entity, who brings ’employment’ and ‘economic growth’ in his big sack.
Either way, the globalist tyrant behind the sheet of ballot paper, the fat man pulling the levers and speaking into the megaphone, remains hidden from view at best. Worse still is when we are entirely grateful to have him pulling the strings.
The voice on the other end of the line was shaky and uncertain. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked. My wife had come upstairs with the phone just as I was getting out of the shower, ‘It’s your father,’ she said, eyebrows to the ceiling.
My father and I have a good relationship now, a better one than when I was a teenager at least. My mind began to race as I sat on the edge of the bed, evaporating in my bathrobe, the bedroom door closed behind her with a polite click of the latch. ‘Yes I’m on my own Dad, is everything alright?’ I was half expecting a diagnosis of some kind: prostate, the big C, or something worse?
‘I couldn’t sleep last night son,’ his voice became a little more relaxed once privacy was assured. ‘I was up pacing the floor after watching that RTE documentary about abuse in the schools.’ As a rule, I don’t watch RTE – haven’t done so since the Covid years – so I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Child abuse has been grist to the media-mill since Angela’s Ashes. Indeed, I suspect people are becoming comfortably numb to the perennial revelations. Perhaps he was having a delayed reaction to the trauma of it all?
‘They mentioned Rosmini and the Carmelites,’ he continued, ‘Jaysus it’s terrible son, terrible!’ he repeated, his voice wringing as though he was going to start crying. The penny finally dropped, and I realised where he was headed. ‘You and your brother went to those schools; Me and your mother sent yous there,’ he added soberly. ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anything happened to either of yis. So I wanted to ask you,’ he spoke slowly, struggling to find words. I sighed, somewhat relieved there was no bad news or terminal diagnosis in the offing. Quietly smiling to myself, I tried to think of a clever answer that might reassure him.
My Dad is a good man, he likes old things and the occasional pint. He worked hard all his life; a bus man, a taxi driver, a father to nine children. He doesn’t need to be unnecessarily upset in his twilight years. Had I been abused as a child I probably wouldn’t have told him. I suspect a lot of victims tell no one, and instead try to keep the hurt buried in a dark place, away from the growth inducing sunlight. I wondered how he was going to phrase the impending question?
‘Did you em, did you have any bother with that sort of thing when you were at boarding school?’ he spluttered, his tone rhetorical as though he expected me to answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he suspected that some of the harmless mischief I had been up to as a boy might have been some kind of ‘a cry for help’? I got into a lot of trouble at the Carmelite Boarding School in Moate. Mostly escaping into the town in the late evenings, to buy chips, drink cider, or try to meet up with my girlfriend Maggie. I restrained a chuckle, ‘what do you mean Dad?’ I pressed him. He sighed deeply, probably assuming I was being stupid and hadn’t got to the gist of the matter.
‘Ah for God’s sake son, I mean did any of them ever?’ His words crackled dryly, and then he blurted it out: ‘Did any of them ever interfere with you?’ The distasteful question hung in the air like a strand of hair pulled slowly out of a sandwich. There it is, I thought, that strange word: ‘interfere’, inextricably bound to the adolescence of Irish males for generations. Joyce’s A Portrait literally climaxes on the notion.
In 1980s Ireland, most boys were sinners, entirely guilty of ‘interfering’ with themselves. The risk of being interfered with by a person of authority, that particular ‘sin’ wasn’t on the horizon. Indeed, given the scale of abuse in Ireland unearthed in recent years, some people might wonder if child abuse was ever considered a ‘sin’ at all?
The RTE programme that had upset my father did not arise out of any investigative journalism on the part of our national broadcaster; rather it was on foot of a ‘scoping inquiry’ that was initiated by the government in 2023, in response to a previous run of ‘new revelations’. This inquiry findings were published in September and contain 2295 allegations of sexual abuse across 300 schools between 1960-1990. In a somewhat nauseating twist, 590 of the allegations were recorded in 17 schools for children with disabilities and these allegations relate to 190 alleged abusers. Of the 884 alleged abusers across 42 religious orders, half are now believed to be deceased.
To describe the report as grim reading would be an understatement. The Carmelites ran my boarding school in Moate, but I knew nothing about the Inquiry until my father’s phone call. Given the difficulties experienced by the few victims who come forward in these types of inquiries, I imagine the number of allegations (shocking as they are) are but the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly,a recent BBC news report on the Inquiry findings was quick to touch on the sacrilegious question of social complicity:
Survivors also had a “strong belief that what was happening was so pervasive that it could not possibly have gone unnoticed by other staff, and the members and leadership of the religious orders”. People who had been abused told the report authors that: “the power of the Catholic Church permeated their lives in every way” and they believed there was no-one they could tell, including their parents.
In Ireland since the early 1990s, religious abuse scandals have become a regular staple on the news. The official response follows the same prescription: establish an expensive tribunal headed up by a retired Judge; dispense a vulgar sort of financial compensation to the victims; and hopefully that’s the end of the matter, at least until the next batch of revelations. It’s an entirely post-colonial response, closely imitating the manner in which his lordship might on occasion have compensated a peasant farmer for the rape of his daughter.
In reality, there is little if any appetite for understanding the conditions that made systemic child abuse possible. One might reasonably argue that there is little appetite to change a culture of abuse that dates back several hundred years. In Ireland, institutions get away with abuse. In a way, it is almost expected of them. The abuse (or at least the acceptance of it) is in our very nature; with time, all that appears to change is the form that the abuse takes.
Consider that most elderly people have a medical cabinet overflowing with prescribed medications. More often than not this is an abuse of the elderly perpetrated by the medical establishment in Ireland. The technical term for the abuse is: ‘polypharmacy’. Despite this being common knowledge, is not yet a ‘scandal’ because of the blind faith that is afforded to the medical establishment in Ireland. Polypharmacy in the elderly will only become a ‘scandal,’ if and when it becomes safe and permissible to criticise the medical profession. This will only happen if and when society comes to realise that it is not in need of much of the medicine it is all-too-frequently prescribed.
To honestly ameliorate child abuse (or any kind of abuse), one must come to understand and accept the conditions that made it possible, or even inevitable. In my opinion to accomplish this, RTE would first have to be dismantled, and the looking glass would have to be repaired. News must not be subject to the censorship of the market. Unpleasant truths are unpopular truths. They just don’t sell. RTE (like all advertisement dependent media) are compelled to tell us what we want to hear, not what we might need to hear. Scandals must therefore wait until they become marketable before they can actually become scandals.
The gullible nature of Irish society; our collective willingness to elevate sacred institutions and afford them the blind faith they demand needs to be explored. As a consequence of this blind faith, the only institution capable of exposing abuse whilst the abuse is unfolding; is the abusing institution itself. Neither paedophile nor neonaticide scandals caused the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Those scandals were common knowledge, they were well known and delicately concealed within the vernacular of the day. They only became scandals because (in the 1980s) the Church had already begun to collapse in the face of increasing capitalism. RTE became free to flog a dying horse; a space in the consumer market had been opened for criticism of the once infallible Church. Those stories could be sold once they had inadvertently received the sanction of the market.
The market and the multinational are the ultimate arbiters of ‘news’ and how it is to be portrayed in the media. For example, look at the invasion of a highly organised and sophisticated Israeli army into a Third World shantytown, deprived of an infrastructure or organised defence forces; this obscenity is invariably referred to as Israel’s ‘war’ against Hamas. Similarly, the low-wage crisis in Ireland and abroad that permits the rich to get richer, is almost invariably referred to as the: ‘cost of living crisis.’ Media sells ‘news’ to the market and sells advertising pages to the corporations. These two institutions are the moderators of language and subsequently of thought itself.
Israeli military during ground operations in the Gaza Strip on 31 October
The Contract
I suspect my own parents’ along with other generations of parents since Irish independence were locked into a kind of unspoken contract with the Church. One wherein they sublimated the signs and symptoms of systemic child abuse in return for a sense of belonging, and a right to participate in our newly won independence. Having been deprived of that for several centuries perhaps the price was considered to be minimal. Children were not as valued then as they are, at least ostensibly, today.
By the 1980s in Ireland, Church and state were practically indistinguishable. Being on the outside can (in many ways) be equated to life in a tent on the Grand Canal as an ‘unwanted immigrant sponger.’ Back then, Catholic identity was a fundamental prerequisite for belonging; for education, social mobility; for salvation and all the trimmings. Perhaps it is only now since we have become less dependent upon the Church that we can read the terms upon which the bargain was concluded. Those sick and vile terms make it difficult to determine whether or not the new landlords are any less unsavoury than the one who had been so recently deposed.
I often wonder who the whistleblowers were over the decades of systemic child abuse in Ireland? I’m sure there were many of them. How were they treated by the authorities? How many were shunned by RTE, and sanctimoniously smeared in the broadsheets like the ‘right-wing loonies’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ of today?
Did a significant number of people know what was happening to children, and simply turn a blind eye? What kind of human beings are they? Who were the doctors and officials who visited the laundries or the mother and baby homes, and saw what was happening with their own eyes? Who treated the women and delivered the 796 babies that were dumped into a cesspit in Tuam over a period of thirty-six years? These types of crimes are not perpetrated by a particular priest, a nun, an order, or even a Church. They require a formal bureaucracy and a veritable army of participants. They are crimes that are not perpetrated on society, but rather by society itself.
I cannot help but wonder if the same silent contract exists today between the mainstream media and our ostensibly more liberal and progressive society? As long as they avoid fixing the cracks in the looking glass, we remain unreservedly committed to buying whatever it’s selling, whether news, vaccines or Renault cars. In a broader sense that same contract defines the type of news we receive, and the type of Ireland we quietly choose to live in.
‘Dad!’ I replied to my father in that firm but ineffectual tone that I sometimes effect to inform my kids that I’m being serious. ‘As I’m sure you remember, I was kicked out of boarding school and labelled a ‘bousy’ and a ‘gurrier,’ I said.
These terms are not in common parlance today, but they are descriptive nouns that were often applied at parent teacher meetings in the seventies and eighties. They are terms that my parents are quite familiar with.
‘I imagine,’ I continued, ‘that being a gurrier or a troublemaker offered some protection from the perverts. It was probably the meek and vulnerable kids who were preyed upon. The ones who did well, and did what they were told.’ He digested this for a moment as I’d hoped he would. ‘There might be something in that son, but it wasn’t always the case, the bousies wouldn’t have been believed if they told anyone,’ he said. It then occurred to me that back then whilst my father sent us up to mass on Sundays he rarely attended himself. ‘You were always getting in trouble with your cheek and your big mouth,’ he continued, ‘maybe in a way it kept you safe,’ he sounded somewhat relieved by my reassurance.
I have never told my Dad, but when I was at boarding school in Moate in the eighties, there was a particular priest or ‘brother’ who acted as a kind of bursar. He would issue small loans to the tune of five pounds (a princely sum in those days), but there was a catch. One had to sit on his knee and have him slip his hand under your shirt and rub your back for five long minutes, before you got the loan. As the end of the month approached, myself and my smoking companions were often reduced to some tobacco dust in the arse of an Old Holborn pouch: lots were drawn and straws were pulled. As far as I can remember I only had to endure one back rub, hardly grounds for complaint when I consider the horrors that so many others have endured.
As kids, my siblings and I were sent to mass, but I think it was more to keep the neighbours happy and let my parents have some peace on Sunday mornings. It was a half hour walk from our house, through the valley of squinting windows, to the church in Lusk village where I grew up.
Recently I asked my Dad if there was much known about paedophilia in the Church when he was a boy? He said: ‘there was plenty known about it!’ That he and his pals knew of the priests to be ‘avoided like the plague’. He went as far as to tell me what one Father used to do in the dark of the confessional box whilst questioning boys about their wet dreams and sexual fantasies.
I write these words not out of a desire to kick at the old bones of Irish Catholicism. Surprisingly perhaps, I feel a kind of sadness at the departure of the Church from Irish society. Just because the Church/State experiment has failed (again), it doesn’t mean that it was entirely devoid of good ideas. For a short time, there were parallels that might be drawn between Plato’s Republic and Catholic Ireland; a society run by saintly philosopher kings disinterested in power, sex and money.
Perhaps a separate Church and state, antagonistic and fearful of each other might be the next variant of that age-old experiment? It is not unreasonable to argue that without some spiritual compass, a society like ours – one that does not even teach philosophy in its schools – is more vulnerable and prone to the extremes of advanced capitalism that are ravaging the Earth and perhaps also, the soul of humanity as well.
I recall being fined for attending Mass in Cavan during the Lockdowns. A defiant priest in Mullahoran continued to say mass and refused to lock the doors of his Church. He was repeatedly fined and vilified in the broadsheets. He persisted defiantly for a time even refusing to pay the fines, (as I initially refused to pay mine); but in the end they broke him, (and me), and many others. That courageous priest reminded me of the ones who said mass in the hedges and the ditches at the time of the Penal Laws. What was it the then Taoiseach said about heroes, during one of his televised fear mongering addresses? ‘Not all of them wear capes!’
Christian philosophy is of course as distinct from priestly messengers, as good health is distinct from doctors. Personally, I enjoy attending mass nowadays; the ceremony, the costumes, the acoustics, the aromas, frankincense and two thousand years of flatulent history. In Joyce’s Ulysses Leopold Bloom expressed a similar kind of reverence for the iconography and the theatre as he sat in a vacant pew in St. Andrew’s Church on Westland Row:
Letters on his back: I. N. R. I? No! I. H. S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.
Ulysses: 5.372-4
I try to go on those Sundays when I’m not working in the out of hours. Mass is much safer now, it’s like flying with an airline that has just endured a terrible crash, in fact it’s even nicer without the bustle and the crowds. Should they return, I will have to travel to the Buddhist temple at Jampa Ling on the border between Leitrim and Cavan; a calm serene setting for healing and meditation. Naturally there’s a different ethos there; vegetarianism, karma, reincarnation and a different type of magic. For me, however, the basic principles are practically the same. If Christ had been a bit fatter and less confrontational, he could just as easily have been the Buddha.
On the Sunday following the documentary that had so rattled my father, the parish priest at the little Church in Annagassan (where I live now), almost cried as he spoke about the ‘new’ revelations. To the small gathering of mostly elderly stalwarts, the anguish and hurt in his voice was palpable as he apologised on behalf of the Church. As one of our living literary legends: John Boyne reminds us in his History of Loneliness: the good priest (and nun) have also become a certain kind of victim; one who’s vocational isolation is compounded and who’s suffering is invariably overlooked.
During the Covid years, at the height of the engineered panic, when my colleagues were being bribed to embrace bizarre draconian policies and an experimental vaccine, several doctors were forced to resign from our posts or be fired. My faith in the medical establishment and much of the enjoyment I once took from my role as a GP, evaporated at that time. Presently I work as a locum, confining myself to immediate medical problems and short-term fixes. Unlike most of my colleagues, I’m no longer contractually engaged by the State to keep people ill. To keep them ‘chronically managed’, maintained, and terminally dependent upon an expensive cocktail ofiatrogenic pharmaceuticals.
Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.
Christian Heroics
Last week the ‘relics’ of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes went on display at St Patrick’s in Dundalk. (I can hear the yawns). The impressive Gothic cathedral contains some of the most beautiful mosaic walls in Ireland, and is hardly in need of saintly bones to big it up. Nonetheless, a crowd of several thousand showed up to view the macabre display of desiccated body parts. Had those bones arrived from Lourdes in the eighties, they would have made national headlines. There might have been a day off work for everyone, and an entirely different type of Taoiseach would have been compelled to be represented; to lick ice-creams and hug someone’s grandmother.
In the late eighties and at the turn of the century many things in Ireland were changing; travel, entertainment, contraception, a shift from varied forms of self-sufficiency to consumption as a national pastime. It was an era of televised heroics; the A-Team, Star Trek, The Dukes of Hazzard, the Incredible Hulk, and a hundred more heroes. As we became wealthier and more overtly American, the old Catholic virtues associated with restraint and frugality were being shed in favour of a new skin. Shopping malls and concert venues were usurping the cathedral in size and scale, and became the new loci for pyrotechnics and Sunday worship.
The present day is very different from how I imagined it would be when I was a teenager. Back then my friends and I had a saying that helped us explain the uncertainties of life: ‘the plan that you don’t plan is the one that always works out!’ Few in the Catholic hierarchy could have foreseen the changes, even fewer could have imagined they would culminate in the collapse of the Church itself.
In his Pulitzer prize-winning book: The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker proposes that one of the main drivers behind human behaviour is our desire to go beyond the painful reality of our mortality. We accomplish this by seeking to do something ‘heroic’ with our lives. By becoming heroes; hero Dads, hero Mums, hero criminals, hero Journalists, empire builders etc., we can (in some small measure) cheat death and be present in the world or in people’s minds, after we are gone. The problem with the Church (Becker argues) is that it no longer affords an opportunity for the heroic. It had failed to compete with Magnum PI or Charlie’s Angels.
The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age is that the youth have sensed – for better or worse – a great social historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany, or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterises whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet. And the crisis of society is the crisis of organised religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. (From The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker: Souvenir Press, 1973 p.197)
Notwithstanding Father P. J. Hughes in Cavan, today’s Catholic ‘heroes’ are invariably presented in the antithetical form of; fundamentalists holding vigils outside abortion clinics, homophobic protestors, or teachers who embrace prison rather than accept that someone has changed or wishes to change their gender. The rather unchristian unwillingness to see the pain behind the woman presenting for an abortion, or the person desperately struggling with their identity, deprives either activist of any possible heroism. The real heroes of Catholicism are hard to find, the media doesn’t look for them anymore. Neither do they tend to seek public recognition. Many (if not most of them) are passing away; alone, demented, childless in the convents and seminaries that have lately been transformed into nursing homes. Another scandal perhaps? If so then like the others, it too must await the sanction of the market.
Former St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack.
ChildProtection?
It is impossible to see into the future and as such many, or most, of the ills that beset our children today, were not anticipated by the most anxious, or even by the best of parents. My own, having come from the ‘lower’ classes, directly (and indirectly) instilled into me an inflated respect for the ‘class system’. When I left home in my late teens, I was determined to become a ‘somebody’ within that same system; as opposed to becoming self-sufficient and capable of thinking beyond it.
My generation’s preoccupation with class may have come at the cost of an appreciation for the arts and for nature; the tools that might help us navigate an ubiquitous sense of inadequacy, an obsession with status and material consumption. We may have compounded the ambivalence towards nature and philosophy with an overemphasis on the importance of a certain kind of education for our own kids. Pushing them into universities, eschewing the arts and the ‘lowly’ trades for the ‘white collar’ of a college degree.
For most young people a university degree (so valued by their parents) amounts to little more than a piece of paper and a pathway to barista work. Many of these young graduates have grown up surrounded by creature comforts. They remain oblivious or disinclined to ascend through the class system their parents have prioritised so much. Today their aspirations are often confined to the digital space; they are beset on all sides by addiction, depression, anxiety, identity, and a precarious social media image. Ills their parents could never have predicted.
It seems as though each generation of parents is condemned to a similar fate of protecting their children from the wrong sorts of evils. Today’s school lunch scheme is a telling example; disempowering children, removing them from an engagement with their food and from the discipline and time needed to prepare and understand what a nutritious meal really is. There is no attention given to disempowerment, environmental impact, or even nutrition itself! Yet most parents seem to love the recently established ‘free lunch’ programme. My own kids get a hot ‘free lunch’ at their primary school in Annagassan, outside of which there is neither a footpath nor a speed bump.
Today, across the country some 455 schools are teaching children in rented prefab accommodation. This comes in at a yearly cost to the state of some 23 million euro. At least this winter, one hopes that the chicken nuggets and pizza slices will be easier to heat than the prefabs.
Had I known then what I know now I would have raised my older children differently. I might have pushed them into carpentry, and would have educated them daily on the twin evils of social media and drug dependence. On top of that I would have taught them how to lift a shovel, turn a sod and plant a seed, as I do now. I did try to teach them to read good literature, and where possible to think independently of the herd.
Image: Daniele Idini
Whistleblowers
Shortly before the economic crash in 2007 economists, most notably David McWilliams and several others were critical of government economic policy and tried to blow the whistle. In 2007 the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern dismissed the naysayers at a speech in Donegal saying:
Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide, because frankly the only thing that motivates me is being able to actively change something.
When I think of a whistleblower, I think of an official who stands on the platform and informs people if and when it’s safe to get off the train. During the pandemic one such whistleblower was Dr Martin Feeley.
A former Olympian and clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, Martin was part of a small cohort of physicians in Ireland who were critical of Covid policies, including nursing home deaths. He recognised from the outset that only the elderly and the very vulnerable needed protection, and that much of what was going on was not motivated by an interest in public health. Dr Feely was a physician and a gentleman, above and beyond anything the cliche might describe.
We met each other many times and corresponded throughout the years of madness, I feel honoured to have known him. Having been compelled to resign his post as clinical director in 2020, Martin endured a torrid time as a consequence of speaking the truth and adhering to medical and scientific principles. Like the rest of our small group of naysayers, he was stunned and shunned by former ‘friends’ and colleagues. It was reported that Martin ‘died suddenly at his home’ in December 2023. Whilst I would not wish to burden his family with any speculations on his departure from this world, I have no doubt, (and personal experience informs) that the vitriol and invective he endured from within the medical profession, was a contributing factor to his untimely death.
Ironically most of those medics who publicly contradicted Covid policy or questioned the administration of the vaccine to children or pregnant women, were either fired or placed under investigation by the regulator? In some cases, they were both fired and placed under investigation. The ongoing inquiries are now in their fourth year, at this stage they must be some of the longest investigations on record at the Irish Medical Council. One colleague, critical of NPHET policy, received his summons for investigation shortly after being discharged from hospital. Another colleague GP who refused to administer the vaccine, was summarily suspended from the register. In September of this year Dr Neville Wilson, a GP with a busy practice in Kilcock Co Kildare, was brought before a Fitness to Practise Hearing at the Medical Council for allegedly ‘making comments disapproving of the use of Covid Vaccines.’ He is presently awaiting a decision in respect of sanctions against him. Two weeks ago, another colleague (and a good friend), a GP with a busy practice in Adare was ordered (as part of his ongoing investigation) to travel to Dublin to attend an occupational health assessment, which includes an assessment of his mental health! In 2020 this same respected GP who runs a thriving and busy clinic in Adare, was compelled to resign from his role as Chairman of Shannon Doc (the out of hours service for the Midwest); after he publicly criticised Covid policy.
Myself and several other GPs have yet to receive a date for our fitness to practise hearings. The purpose of these interminable prosecutions has an obvious historical precedent. It is a process little different to what those that contradicted the presiding dogma of the day experienced some fifty years ago. Then, as now, the collective injustice endured by Covid policy critics is largely ignored by the media because a majority were complicit in the embrace and execution of those policies. Not one of the doctors presently under investigation have caused harm to a single patient, instead, all are guilty, to a greater or lesser degree, of simply disagreeing with Covid policy, in a manner more benign than the prominent politicians and RTE presenters who publicly flouted the rules with impunity. Of course, there is an element of punishment in all of this, a punishment most acutely felt by the families of those who remain under investigation.
Adverse Events
Had I been inclined to inform someone of the harm that was being done by the bursar at my boarding school; where, or to whom could I have reported these adverse events? How would they have been received?
Today, in order to record or report the adverse consequence or side effects of a Covid vaccine, one’s only recourse is to fill out a seven-page complaint form, obscurely buried on the HPRA website. If you don’t have a Medical Card, it will cost you sixty or seventy euro to bring a suspected side effect to the attention of your GP. If you do manage to get an appointment, he or she will probably dismiss your side effect as: ‘coincidental’ or ‘all in your head’.
I suspect that Irish GPs are as ill-informed about potential side effects from Covid vaccines as they are (and were) ill-informed about the mechanism and mode of action of these novel genetic ‘vaccines.’ There are no posters in the waiting rooms, no mention of side effects anywhere, outside of some inaccessible small print on the back of a leaflet in the bottom of a box. Thus, one must complain about the medicine to the same people who are being handsomely paid to administer it.
It is all easy to fall into the trap of becoming a conspiracy theorist or far-right supporter in Ireland. It is within these circles that criticism of almost all kinds is embraced. The doctors who criticised Covid policy were described as ‘right-wing, anti-vaxxers’, a slur that has not yet lost its resonance. Today the man who was Minister for Health over much of the period of the Covid fiasco – including the period of the nursing home deaths – is presently Taoiseach. That observation alone should be enough to make the most reluctant conspiracy theorist pause and wonder: ‘Who are the king makers?’
Those who objected during Harris’s term as Minister for Health are presently being prosecuted by the Regulator, or are deceased. To impressionable minds it might read like an episode from the HBO series Succession? Or a pulp fiction drama where behind an entertaining puppetry of politics, a few multinational corporations are in control of state and government. In Ireland truth is no stranger to fiction.
My dad was reassured by my denial of being abused by the priests or the unchristian brothers at my boarding school in Moate. My abuse was to come in my adult life in a form I could never have predicted. It came not at the hands of the old priests, but at the hands of the new ones: my ‘colleagues’, and from a hopelessly failed and politically controlled Regulator.
For less than obvious reasons, I fear many people in Ireland don’t want to look back on the Covid period. They would rather move forward towards a hopefully brighter future. Perhaps the lack of a public outcry for a meaningful Covid inquiry reflects a deeper truth about the Irish public; one that suggests a broader culpability, beyond the pharmaceutical companies, the medical establishment and the political puppetry?
I have no doubt, however, that a future generation will look back on the Covid years with the same level of disgust and anger that is readily applied today to those clergy that abused children.
I desperately hope that history does not repeat itself. That fathers will not one day be nervously phone their sons and daughters, apologising for the consequences of decisions that for a time were coerced, mandated and unquestioningly endorsed by the medical hierarchy of today.
In Ireland and the UK, Anti-vax sentiment, or vaccine hesitancy, along with deteriorating trust in the medical establishment, has set the stage for a coming plague. As a consequence of a recent outbreak of measles in the UK, Irish GP’s are now being encouraged to inform Public Health officials of suspected measles cases. The reasons for this are entirely sensible: records can be kept, cases tracked and the overall situation monitored.
Unlike COVID-19, measles is a risky disease for children, particularly immuno-suppressed ones. Few, if any, doctors dispute that it kills about one in five thousand children, and that six in a thousand will get life-threatening pneumonia or meningitis.
I don’t wish to sound alarmist; on an individual level if one of my own kids contracted measles I would not be overly concerned, but that is mainly down to them having all of the HSE-recommended childhood vaccinations (with the exception of those currently recommended for children in in respect of COVID-19).
As a result of near-universal vaccination coverage, measles presents relatively rarely in General Practice. When it is encountered in a healthy or vaccinated child, it usually causes little apprehension.
In 2017, after three years without a single recorded case in the UK, the WHO declared with great fanfare that a nation had eliminated measles. Unfortunately, Nature is not bound by WHO policy. The (somewhat deluded) party lasted for about two years, after which, cases began to re-appear; but in small enough numbers so as to be of relatively little concern in terms of public health.
Even if a single country does manage to eliminate a particular disease the absence of testing for tourists and overseas travellers makes it impossible to stamp it out completely over the long term. Viruses and bacteria don’t need passports.
Given the paucity of measles cases in Ireland – it had been years since I encountered a case – I was surprised when an email arrived from the authorities reminding me that I should report all cases to the Department of Health, and that, at the weekends, these notifications should be made through the emergency services. I was even more surprised that while working over the February bank holiday weekend to be reporting three suspected cases.
The current outbreak in the UK has yet to be declared an ‘epidemic’. I imagine there are political reasons for this reluctance; but, given the highly contagious nature of the disease and the current level of cases it is perhaps only a matter of time before that changes.
Measles is one of the most highly transmissible viruses. It is far more virulent than COVID-19 and has an infectivity rate of almost 100%. Being in the same room as a child with measles for no more than a few minutes is likely to result in transmission. Again, this is not intended as scaremongering, it is merely to point out that what is now happening in the UK is almost certainly happening in Ireland too.
According to our own HSE, COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of 0.17 deaths per 100,000 cases (roughly one death in a million cases) in children. Measles has an infection fatality rate of 300 per 100,000 cases in children under five-years-old. The reason I trust the medical consensus on this is that measles has been the subject of research and study for decades. The same cannot be said for COVID-19.
When a population is vaccinated against measles to a level of about 95%, the remaining 5% of unvaccinated children remain safe, as a consequence of the much-abused term, ‘herd-immunity’. This simply refers to the fact that those not immunised or vaccinated enjoy immunity by virtue of the majority of other people around them having immunity.
Immunity can come from vaccination, or from having contracted the disease. With herd immunity, measles (much like COVID-19) can’t spread as easily to those more vulnerable to the disease. This is because, even though naturally immune or vaccinated people will get the virus, their symptoms should be relatively minor. The duration of their infection should be briefer, and thus the potential spread to the vulnerable, or the 5% of unvaccinated, becomes less likely.
There comes a tipping point when vaccination or immunity levels fall below a threshold of 95%. Then herd-immunity fails and the unvaccinated and vulnerable are no longer protected. Infections become not only more common among the vaccinated, but, importantly, potentially dangerous to the unvaccinated. It is believed that in the UK for 2022-2023 the vaccination uptake (in respect of the MMR) is currently running at less than 85%. There were 1603 suspected cases of measles reported in the UK in 2023.
The current outbreak in the UK poses a number of questions, in particular: what will the consequences of a measles epidemic be in the UK and Ireland, especially for unvaccinated and immunocompromised children? As measles is presently part of an MMR vaccine, is it not reasonable to expected similar outbreaks of Mumps and Rubella?
For Measles (unlike COVID-19) there are reliable statistics going back several decades. This is research that has stood the test of time and consistent scientific review. However, after the scaremongering associated with the COVID-19 vaccination program, it is likely that many people are now sceptical about the fatality rate being talked about. Most readers will be familiar with the story of the boy who cried wolf.
In respect of morbidity and mortality the evidence in relation to measles is relatively incontestable. The risks are real, particularly for immuno-suppressed children such as those undergoing chemotherapy.
In many ways, vaccinating our own healthy kids against measles is a kind of social duty that almost all parents participate in for the greater good. It is a duty that is entirely contingent on trust in HSE vaccination advice.
After vaccination, the overwhelming majority of kids will survive a measles epidemic, however a small but significant percentage of children will suffer needlessly, and many will die.
I don’t question that there is such a thing as a vaccine injury. However, most of us take this risk and make this decision on behalf of our children, not just for their sake but, in particular, for the sake of the vulnerable. Thus, it is a reasonable expectation that all parents should shoulder some of the burden, some of the ‘risk’, and fully engage with the childhood immunisation programme.
No vaccine is ‘risk free’, sticking an empty syringe into someone’s arm comes with the very real risk of infection, cellulitis, anaphylaxis, shock etc. Indeed, no medical intervention is entirely without risk. We parents tolerate those risks because we trust the medical profession and the HSE. Throughout the pandemic, and particularly in its aftermath – where we are yet to see a formal inquiry into policies and consequences – that trust has been quite seriously eroded.
A recent (2023) IPSOS poll found that with regards to the medical profession, surprisingly, it was the local pharmacist, and not the doctor or nurse, who topped the poll in respect of public trust.
Although fears persists over a discredited study in the late 1990s linking the MMR vaccine to autism, this was investigated and debunked. Nonetheless, damage has been done and residual hesitancy and mistrust in respect of the MMR vaccine exists to this day.
Personally and as a physician, I feel that even in the unlikely event of a tiny risk of autism associated with the MMR, I would still reluctantly have my kids vaccinated; if I thought that it would avoid death and suffering in a greater number of kids.
As stated, all vaccines come with risks that we share as parents and as a society. But that risk is contingent on trust in the medical profession, and mine has certainly been shaken in recent years.
Simple, deductive reasoning would relate the current fall in vaccine uptake to a decline of confidence in public health guidance. How has this come about?
In March/April, 2020 elderly nursing home residents were thrown under the bus, as untested hospital patients were dumped into the nursing home sector, and do not resuscitate orders (DNRs) were made. All of this carry on is now common knowledge.
Even the Zero-Covid fanatics must have raised an eyebrow at policies that linked the transmissibility of a virus to the amount of money spent in a pub. The COVID-19 vaccines were, unequivocally, forced on non-vulnerable people throughout the pandemic. The levels of coercion applied in terms of mandates and passports was absolutely unprecedented. This was reinforced by the public vilification of any individual who dared to decline or expressed fears over taking the vaccine
There were many stark warnings of censure from the regulator (IMC) for any doctor in Ireland who failed in his or her “duty to follow and promote NPHET policy.”
Now that the dust has begun to settle, many people have come to recognise that the use of the word ‘vaccine’ to describe the COVID-19 jab, was (and is) problematic. COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ are, technically speaking, not vaccines in the traditional sense. They are pieces of genetic material (DNA, mRNA) that work in an entirely different manner to traditional vaccines. They are more correctly referred to as ‘gene therapy’ or ‘genetic vaccinations’ and prior to COVID-19 they had never been permitted for use in the general public.
Calling the injections ‘vaccinations’ from the outset, effectively (but rather deviously) attached this novel technology to all of the antecedent good that traditional sub-unit vaccines have accomplished throughout the centuries. Language is a powerful weapon.
As more people have had the time to look into the difference between a ‘Covid jab’ and a traditional vaccine, the ‘lie’ or at least the misappropriation of the term ‘vaccine’ has become increasingly apparent.
Two of the original four genetic vaccines (the two DNA vaccines) were quietly removed from circulation within the first few months of use. Although at the time the government declared (in an Orwellian way) that this was because they were in “short supply”. In truth, it had become clear that they were associated with significantly higher level of side effects than the mRNA type. This difference was not apparent to a frightened public during the pandemic, but more people are aware of that difference today, and that awareness is growing, in spite of the semantics.
One of the difficulties in respect of ‘the science’, ‘the facts’ or the ‘data’, during the pandemic, has been over problems with interpretation. For example: the meaning of a ‘Covid death’. Was that unfortunate death caused by COVID-19? Or was it an expected death in a very elderly person from pneumonia? Or someone who simply had a positive PCR test within the preceding two weeks? We must remember too that emergency COVID-19 funding for the nursing home sector was contingent on the reported number of COVID-19 cases.
Then there is the cycle threshold of the PCR test itself, detecting the presence of traces of the virus, as opposed to clinically relevant infections; and then plastering these dodgy ‘facts’ before a frightened public, day after day and night after night.
The overall effect of COVID-19 upon nations has invariably been described in terms of deaths per million. This metric was applied in spite of how COVID-19 mortality being overwhelmingly confined to over sixty-fives. Different countries have vastly different demographic structures, making the famous ‘deaths per million’ statistic, almost entirely irrelevant.
Many doctors tried to point these contrary facts out throughout the pandemic; all were silenced with anti-vax and even ‘right wing’ slurs. One GP was suspended and many more (including myself) were put on trial by the regulator and are awaiting sentencing. Therefore, it is important (to myself and my “anti-vax” colleagues) to unpack the accusation before we are also blamed by the regulator for the coming plague.
It may surprise people to learn that so far this season, between 18/9/23 and 16/01/2024, 82% of Ireland’s Healthcare Workers (including Doctors and Nurses) have NOT taken the COVID-19 vaccination booster.
If that is not bad enough, 64% of Healthcare Workers have not taken the influenza vaccine either, which is NOT a genetic vaccine. This is a truly shocking statistic as it would imply that the vast majority of healthcare workers, who are responsible for promoting and administering the COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, have not availed of either themselves.
Uptake of Autumn Booster & Seasonal Influenza doses by HSE HCWs since 18/09/2023 to 16/01/2024
In total 109,136 records for HSE HCWs were included in the analysis.
Overall Uptake • 19,843 received COVID-19 vaccine, an uptake of 18.2%
39,719 received influenza vaccine, an uptake of 36.4%
The fact that myself and several of my GP colleagues are presently being prosecuted by the regulator for being critical of what purports to be a ‘vaccine’, which is currently being avoided by 82% of our colleagues, tells a story in itself, one that is very political and very Eyrish.
In the nursing home sector, where those most vulnerable to death from COVID-19 currently reside, 22% of residents have not availed of the COVID-19 vaccine and 16% have not availed of the influenza vaccine. 82% of the workers who care for them have not been vaccinated against either.
If we were living in a democracy, as opposed to a corporate-ocracy, these figures would represent a resounding vote of ‘no confidence’ in any Minister. Silence in the mainstream media clearly shows (once again) who is actually paying the piper.
Unbelievable as it may seem, the situation becomes even more bleak (or ridiculous depending on your perspective) when one considers the current public health advice in respect of COVID-19 vaccines for children. The HSE’s website as of 06/02/24 outlines the following guidance:
Irish children over the age of six months are apparently in need of vaccination: ‘to give them protection against serious Covid-19 illness.’
Despite the scaremongering, many parents are now aware that this advice is tantamount to a ‘lie’, or at the very least, a gross exaggeration. It is vanishingly rare for COVID-19 to cause “serious illness” in children.
Most people are surely wondering why this misinformation continues? If the HSE cannot be trusted in respect of the COVID-19 vaccine advice, people may also wonder whether it can be trusted in respect of other vaccines.
What the above (HSE) table shows is that the uptake of COVID-19 vaccination this season for people between the ages of six months and fifty years of age is 2.8%, i.e., more than 97% of people in that age category have not availed of a COVID-19 vaccines this winter, in spite of HSE advice to do so.
The numbers become even more stark when one looks at the uptake in kids between twelve and seventeen: a mere 0.3%. As these figures are derived from 2022 census data the actual uptake is likely to be even lower, as the population has increased since 2022!
The salient point is that 82% of health care workers have thus far declined the vaccine, and 97% of those under the age of fifty have also declined it, while 99.7% of the parents of twelve to seventeen year olds. All of these ‘Anti-vaxers’ have declined, despite advice from the HSE. Now what does this say in respect of confidence in the advice from the Minister or the HSE?
I sincerely hope that most people are capable of distinguishing between advice as it pertains to COVID-19 vaccines, and advice that relates to tried and trusted vaccines included in the childhood immunisation programme. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that this resounding national rejection of HSE guidance by members of the general public, and by an overwhelming majority of healthcare workers, reflects a lack of confidence, which is bound to have an impact on the uptake of vaccines in general.
As alluded to, in the case of measles it merely takes a fall below 90-95% uptake of vaccines before herd immunity becomes ineffective at preventing outbreaks and even epidemics.
Excess Mortality
Another contributor to the current lack of confidence in the government’s health policies has been the recent emergence of OECD mortality analysis. Unlike the equivocation that might surround data points in respect of ‘cause of death’, ‘PCR cases’ and various other data sets, there is almost no equivocation surrounding mortality figures themselves.
Sadly, when someone dies, they are dead. There is little occasion for debate, confusion or obfuscation in that regard. The number of people who die in Ireland each year is a number that cannot really be interfered with by vested interests. Whilst there might be debate about cause and diagnosis, the date and occurrence of deaths are unequivocal.
Every year in Ireland c. 55,000 babies are born and approximately 32,000 people die. The numbers fluctuate a little in line with population increases etc., but the ‘death rate’ and the ‘birth rate’ generally remain the same. If the death rate increases unexpectedly, as one would expect following a disaster of some kind, like; an earthquake, a tsunami or a pandemic for example, the increase in deaths are then referred to as ‘excess mortality.’
For almost two straight years during the COVID-19-era, the Irish people were subjected to a nightly announcement on RTE news – ‘ringing out the dead’– pointing to the catastrophic daily loss of life that was occurring across the nation. To this day the official figure in respect of COVID-19 deaths stands at almost ten thousand.
One would think that a tragedy that has resulted in so much death will naturally register in respect of our mortality figures? That there will of course be a massive increase in excess mortality during the pandemic? The straight answer here is no! It seems there was no increase in excess mortality for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. A truth that is fully accepted and even embraced by the government!
In 2023 the OECD analysed mortality figures in Ireland and elsewhere for the duration of the pandemic. They came to the conclusion that for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 there was NO excess mortality in ireland, i.e. during the years of the pandemic there was no increase in the number of expected deaths.
An immediate reaction might be to assume that the OECD crowd are a bunch of ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy nuts! Perhaps they got something seriously wrong? Truth is that the OECD is one of the most credible sources of data on the planet. And yes, they did make all the appropriate calculations for an increase in the population due to immigration etc.
Remember, Ireland had a census in 2022, so they had the most up-to-date figures to hand. You can’t get a more accurate assessment than the OECD findings.
So where did the ten thousand COVID-19 deaths go? All of the reported deaths within the nursing home sector were real. I witnessed this myself as fourteen of my own nursing home patients died in the space of a couple of months.
Tragic as any death is, the majority in this case were part of the expected mortality in each given year, hastened by several months as a consequence of inept government policy. Most of the COVID-19 deaths that occurred outside the nursing home sector were recorded in people with a positive PCR test, as opposed to having died as a direct consequence of Covid-19.
The official figure of almost ten thousand deaths from COVID-19represents about a third of the total deaths one would expect to see in Ireland in a given year. Those deaths must surely have affected our mortality figures in some observable way? They did not because they were part of the (tragic) but entirely ‘normal’ number of deaths that Ireland experiences each year.
What the OECD figures tell quite clearly is that if the pandemic was not a “hoax” then its effect was systematically exaggerated. A claim that in spite of the figures, remains confined to the realm of conspiracy and far from any danger of a public inquiry.
So what does the Government have to say in respect of the OECD findings? For three long years we were informed that we were enduring the worst pandemic in living memory. Policies aimed at reducing loss of life cost the exchequer thirty billion euro for the first two years. Yet there was no excess loss of life and the ten thousand ‘COVID-19 deaths’ melt into the normal yearly mortality figures?
Obviously both positions are mutually exclusive: one cannot have a pandemic with ten thousand deaths and have no increase in excess mortality.
Unfortunately for the Government there is absolutely no point in trying to deny the OECD findings. So they decided to embrace warmly, gratuitously even, their analysis, asserting that the reason there had been no excess deaths was because of the “success” of government policies throughout the pandemic. Their response is only two pages long and I would urge everyone to read it in its entirety.
It is truly frightening in terms of the paucity of credit it extends to the intelligence of the Irish people. Minister Donnelly said:
Ireland asked a lot of its population during this time and the restrictions that were put in place had a profound impact on us all.
These figures point to the success of Ireland’s public health measures, and to the strong uptake of our COVID-19 vaccination programme.
Chief Medical Officer Professor Breda Smyth said:
The OECD Working Paper highlights some of the important caveats associated with previously published estimates on excess mortality during the core pandemic years.
The population in Ireland demonstrated a strong adherence to public health measures during this time, and Ireland’s COVID-19 vaccination programme has been one of the most successful in the world, with 96% of the adult population receiving their primary vaccinations.
We know that vaccines save lives, as well as preventing serious illness and hospitalisations.
COVID is still with us, and immunity wanes over time, so I would like to remind all those who are eligible to top up their protection with a COVID booster this winter, as well as keeping up to date with their flu vaccine.
The mysterious Cheshire cat-like presence and disappearance of ten thousand COVID-19 deaths is almost magical. It (the cat) appears when the Government wishes to justify lockdowns, vaccine passports and additional billions in expenditure. But in response to the OECD findings its voice is drowned out by a cacophony of self-praise.
The disappearance of excess mortality is explained by the public’s (96%) enthusiasm for a (effectively mandatory) vaccine. But wait a minute! If there were no excess deaths in 2020, and the vaccine did not arrive in Ireland until 2021, how could the vaccine possibly account for no excess deaths in 2020?
In fact, by February 2021 at the height of ‘the second wave’ a mere ten per cent of the population had been vaccinated. I doubt whether most people in Ireland are gullible enough to believe in vanishing cats, but I could be wrong. Certainly trust in journalism appears to have plummeted to just 40% according to a recent survey.
Interestingly, in respect of the OECD findings, there has been a real increase in mortality figures yet this only arrives after the pandemic, in 2023. Myself and many others attribute this ‘spike’ in excess deaths in 2023 to the palpable consequence of missed diagnoses, closed clinics and screening programmes during the lockdowns.
There is of course a growing school of thought that associates the increase in excess mortality in 2023 with side effects from the ‘vaccine’ itself. I am more sceptical on this account. However, it is a hypothesis that is difficult to dismiss out of hand.
Determining this issue is not helped by the barriers people face in trying to record a vaccine-related side-effect or death in Ireland. Beyond logging on to an obscure HPRA website and filling out a seven-page form, there is neither the observable means, nor any degree of encouragement, for doctors, or the general public, to report adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. Unlike a ‘COVID-19 death’, deaths that occurs within two weeks of a COVID-19 vaccine are not recorded as a ‘vaccine-related death’. In such cases the vaccine does not even get a mention.
The HSE are currently running a campaign informing people how to recognise a thrombosis (a recognised potential side effect of mRNA vaccines), yet there is not a single poster in a single medical office in the entire country that might explain how to record or report a side effect related to the vaccine itself.
I suspect that a growing number of people in Ireland are aware of the official misinformation in relation to COVID-19. Many of us understand that what occurred during the pandemic was based on lies and deception. The most immediate question we must attempt to answer is not whether we were lied to – that much is obvious – the real question is why? Who are the people who have profited from those lies? If we follow the chem-trails in the wake of the thirty billion euros where will this lead us?
Blame the regulator
Four years ago on 15/04/2020, shortly after the arrival of COVID-19 in Ireland I published the above letter in the Irish Medical Times; a paper predominately read by Irish doctors. I tried to debunk the COVID-19 myth before it got off the ground, estimating a total of no more than fifty-five COVID-19 deaths for the first five months of 2020. It was the beginning of the end of my career in General Practice. I was pilloried and vilified[ by a small, but highly influential, clique, some of whom are the Taoiseach’s chums. The attacks were such that colleagues (with a few exceptions) who might have harboured similar suspicions, learned very quickly, to keep very quiet.
At the time a large payout for General Practice was unfolding before our eyes, beginning with a payment for each time we answered the telephone. In April, 2020, before the full extent of the neglect in the nursing homes had become apparent, I resigned from the Irish Medical Council in an attempt to highlight what was happening. My resignation was ignored by the Medical Council, who then lied to the media, saying that I had resigned for “personal reasons”.
It might seem petty to complain about the description, “for personal reasons”, but it was targeted to a specific audience of colleagues and journalists. My credibility as a doctor was being undermined. I was “not fit for purpose.” Thus, anything I might have to say on the issue of COVID-19 or nursing home deaths was tainted.
Shortly after my resignation, I was placed under investigation by the IMC and am presently awaiting a date for my fitness-to-practice hearing. One colleague Dr. Gerry Waters (a braver man than I) has already been suspended for calling the pandemic a ‘hoax’ right from the start. Myself and several others have been compelled to wait on the equivalent of a professional ‘death row’ for several years now.
I am probably somewhat biased in my conviction that the cause of professional compliance with an at times deadly and at times idiotic array of policies, lies with the regulator: the Irish Medical Council.
Numerous people complained to them throughout the pandemic about registered doctors (Holohan, Varadkar himself and many more), who were behind the policies. The Irish Medical Council answers directly to the Minister of Health. The word from the top was clearly that rebel doctors should be silenced.
At one point the head of the Irish College of General Practitioner’s was actively encouraging discrimination against those patients who had been unable or unwilling to take the vaccine. Several doctors and members of the public lodged complaints with the regulator in respect of policies and even overt discrimination, all of it was ignored:
Without exception, every single whistleblower, every single complaint in respect of medically registered policymakers, tendered to the regulator during the pandemic was completely ignored.
Should we see an inevitable rise in disease and deaths as a consequence of the current lack of confidence in HSE guidance, it is because we learned absolutely nothing from the Banking Crisis. We have not learned that crises in Ireland stem from the unfettered power of institutions, the friendship ties between those institutions; and the abject failure of regulators who are themselves in bed with those institutions.
Should there be an increase in mortality amongst our children, those deaths might not disappear quite as easily and as mysteriously as the Cheshire Cat.
When the day becomes the night and the sky becomes the sea, when the clock strikes heavy and there’s no time for tea; and in our darkest hour, before my final rhyme, she will come back home to Wonderland and turn back the hands of time. The Cheshire Cat.
There are very good reasons why bathrooms are located at a remove from the dinner table: one should never defecate in the place where one eats. A barrister reminded me of this old adage one evening at dinner after I had bemoaned Ireland’s corrupt medico-legal system wherein plaintiffs (or more often their solicitors) pay their GPs handsomely to write medical reports for insurance claims. I’m sure my barrister friend would agree, however, that when the dining room has depreciated into the vandalised shell of an old tenement; it will inevitably become prone to unhygienic and antisocial usage.
No doubt it will surprise some to read of a GP complaining about General Practice and biting the proverbial hand that feeds. However, my position within the establishment is ‘as safe as houses’ after my criticism of Covid policy and the role many of my colleagues played during the pandemic. This led to me closing my practice in North Dublin, having resigned my appointment to the Medical Council in 2020.
I was subsequently placed under investigation for attending a public rally against lockdowns, and soon (three years later) the Medical Council is to decide upon my punishment, and that of the other doctors who failed in their duty to promote, unquestioningly, Government policy. Apparently, we were more influential and more of a danger to people than the Taoiseach or the TDs and judges in attendance at ‘Golf Gate’, ‘Party Gate’ and ‘Concert Gate’ etc.
Today I have little invested in General Practice. In truth I have come to see it as a social ill rather than an overall benefit to society. I knew it was unwell prior to Covid, I had taken up my Ministerial appointment to the Council in 2018 in the vain hope of changing it. My experience and the silence of so many colleagues during the Covid years, suggests to me that the illness may be terminal. Its pathology is genetic and runs much deeper than the financial incentive brought to bear on General Practice throughout the pandemic.
Myself and other Covid policy critics, have little left to lose, other than our licences, and a shared sense of disappointment in our profession. Realistically, I feel that disappointment could only be lifted by an unlikely paradigm shift; as such it will probably stay with us until the end. Having adhered to the Covid guidelines, yet being entirely guilty of the ‘crimes’, hopefully we will hold onto our licences and continue to be able to make a living. There are no guarantees. The establishment remains angered by dissent, and can be brutally vindictive when it wishes.
Medicine is sometimes described as something of an ego trip. I have to admit that on occasion it has become one for me, but not in the manner you might think. What I mean by ego trip is that lately, should I glance at headlines on the shelves, or overhear the radio as I push my trolley down the supermarket aisles, I find myself nodding and even chuckling quietly to myself.
The truth in respect of the Covid years remains as politically toxic as any virus. Occasionally however, it leaks into the air in flatulent forms of ‘I told you so’. I’m not alone in this mad little trip, the few doctors who spoke up against; nursing home deaths, masks, lockdowns and compulsory vaccines, also share in this little Pyrrhic victory.
We continue to be gagged, pursued by a certain cabal who pull the strings from within the medical establishment. Excess deaths, missed cancers, suicides and vaccine related injuries cannot remain concealed indefinitely. To coin a hopeful phrase from the current ascendancy ‘tiocfaidh ár lá’. Given the hitherto impossibility of their day ever coming (as it might at the next General Election); so too might we hope that ‘our day will come’.
In the Rare Auld Times
I have been practising as a GP for more than twenty years, and regardless of current trends in a more progressive parlance, I don’t mind expressing a fondness for things like community, traditions, or even the old-fashioned notion of ‘the Family Doctor’. Some things are not ‘old fashioned’ at all. That’s just a term that is applied in the pejorative, for particular motives.
In the olden-days (whenever they were), a reference to ‘years as a Doctor’, might have scooped some credibility from the idea that the longer one has practised at something, the better one performs in the role. Like poker or potty-training, practice means you are more likely to win, and less likely to ruin the carpet.
Today, with the exception of less technologically dependent skills, like piano or pottery, the longer one has practised, the more likely one is to be outdated; married to ‘old fashioned’ or ‘primitive’ methods.
Technology has become synonymous with progress towards the good. For many people, it has made the GP as redundant as the old notion of growing your own vegetables. In today’s world of instant food and information, people rarely visit the GP to dig up an ‘expert opinion’. Everybody’s got one of those – either in their head or at their fingertips. Many patients have already self-diagnosed, long before they’ve reached the waiting room. What they need is a signature, a scan, a test, a vaccine, or the usual panacea of the antibiotic. Augmentin has become a household brand-name, all too often (I am told) it is ‘the only one that works’.
It is an important and relatively recent development in medicine that there is no longer a distinction between what we ‘want’ and what we ‘need’. The distinction remains a valid one, but there are few people we can trust to make it for us. Most antibiotics prescribed in General Practice are prescribed inappropriately, and more often, solely on the basis of demand.
The internet has turned medicine into something of an amateur sport, one that everyone has a duty to participate in. I often hear people in the shops or passers-by on the pavement, applying diagnoses and medical terminology as though they were talking about cooking. Most people, with a rudimentary education, presume to know as much about a particular disease as the average GP. Often (but not always) the presumption is not too far off the mark.
The General Practitioner, despite his oxymoronic designation as a ‘specialist’, has become a somewhat self-conscious ‘jack of all trades’; anxious to avoid complaints and keep his dwindling supply of private customers happy as Larry. Being an expert on nothing, he can be challenged on almost everything, except maybe golf or football?
He does, however, remain slightly relevant to the average family as a sort of ‘medical handyman’; useful in the confirmation of a diagnosis, the issuing of prescriptions, or stamping forms. He’s not a real plumber or electrician, of course, but he can usually put you in touch with one and ‘get the ball rolling’ so to speak.
The erosion of his standing within society may have added to his insecurity. Lately he must increasingly rely upon the government to validate his existence and to mandate the attendance and the dependence of his flock.
By Trade I was a Cooper
Present company excluded, GPs are (generally speaking) not stupid people, we are at least educated, and some (among the old-fashioned ones at least) might even supplement their phone usage with an occasional book.
Many in the profession are not oblivious to the technological annexation of the lands that once belonged to the General Practitioner. Video and phone consultations are a cheaper and more accessible alternative to a waiting-room full of germs and viral pathogens. These types of consultations were becoming the ‘new-norm’, long before the current ‘new-norm’ replaced the older one.
Impending social irrelevance is a bitter pill for any professional, but we humans are a resilient lot. When plastics and Tupperware made the tinkering of the travelling community redundant, they wisely moved into tarmacadam and power tools.
Equally, General Practice must evolve as it struggles with its own increasing redundancy. During the pandemic, when the government invited GPs to an orgy of self-validation; saving the nation with a dirty cloth-mask and a syringe full of experimental vaccine; few of my colleagues asked any questions at all.
Few resisted the temptation of becoming a ‘hero without a cape’. Fewer still were impervious to the largess and financial incentive, associated with logic-defying Covid Policies. Even the then Taoiseach Dr Varadkar, cashed in on the kudos. He rejoined the Medical Register, and flew to Halting Sites to test the travelling community. What a tragedy it took a pandemic for a Taoiseach to fly to a halting site.
On the Corruption of the Youth
Lately, when I work at the out-of-hours service in Dublin, I do so in the company of a junior Doctor; a GP registrar whom I am supposed to supervise and teach for the duration of my shift. They are fortunate enough when assigned to me, as I hardly know enough to practise medicine, never mind teach it to anyone.
When I chat with these ‘newbies’ I am always surprised at the level of uncertainty they express in respect of their approaching identity as a fully qualified GP. In real terms what does that actually mean anymore? Most of them tell me they are seeking a ‘work life balance’, something very much at odds with the stubbornly persistent notion of what a family Doctor actually is, or perhaps was. A doctor who knows his patients and their families by name? Someone with a small efficient surgery in the heart of a community; a clinic where wounds are sutured, and lumps and bumps are removed or biopsied? Someone who does house calls, and stays for a cup of tea after the final palliative visit to the mum or dad who has just passed away?
Or is the modern GP a youthful, tech-savvy doctor in a hospital scrub top? Someone who works three days per week at a large office block with a shiny glass frontage? A reticent and cautious professional type, who refers the dying to the palliative care team, house calls to the out of hours service, and anything requiring intervention to the relevant ‘specialist’ at the hospital?
The former is an endangered species, confined to the fringes of rural Ireland.
The latter, the GP who works on contract at the busy clinic with the impenetrable waiting list, and the unfriendly receptionist, he or she has become the aspiration and practical or empirical reality.
Woke up one morning, looked out the window and I struggled for something to say, but you, you left me, just when I needed you most. Randy VanWarmer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u06A-77TN4
Not so long ago, my daughter interrupted some sage medical advice I was attempting to cast at her feet, by cooly stating: ‘Dad, who needs a GP when you have a smartphone?’ Her generation is an increasingly rare occurrence in the waiting room. Young adults have replaced most of what’s on offer at the GP, with a faster and cheaper consultation with Siri, Google, or Chat GPT.
Pharmacists issue medical advice, along with; contraceptives, skin care, and a host of over the counter remedies for common ills. Alcohol, Red Bull, illicit drugs, and street-Xanax are self-applied to a real epidemic, currently plaguing a generation. That hidden disease of mental illness and drug dependence is managed by parents and barely registers on the busy radar of Irish General Practice.
Young adults and teenagers have voted with their feet, unless they need a cert for school or for social welfare payments. The disengagement of young people (if they were ever engaged in the first place) is perhaps one of the sadder realities of General Practice. Arguably they are the cohort most in need of help in coping with; the porn, the drugs, the pressure, and the paradox of choice they must navigate alone, with a smartphone.
At one extreme we have the absence (or abstention) of young people, at the other extreme we have the professional neglect of elderly people within the Nursing Homes. The space between these two demographics, contains some of the abysmal failures of General Practice as it exists today and that is to say nothing of the unique needs of a diverse immigrant population, one that GP’s are neither trained nor even encouraged to understand.
What if the pharmacist could stamp forms or if patients could vouch for their own sick leave? Or if they could simply refer themselves for a routine blood test, or an appointment to see a consultant (as private patients often do); General Practice would be about as socially relevant as tits on a bull. If a couple of antibiotics were available over the counter (as they are in many countries), the meteor would impact and the dinosaurs would shuffle on towards oblivion.
Arguably there is precious little that an average GP can or will do in the community that a competent Nurse could not accomplish quickly and efficiently. Today, almost all minor surgical procedures are referred into queues at the major hospitals. In north Dublin the Out of Hours Service will neither suture a wound nor syringe an ear, which seem to be risky interventions in these litigious times. Almost everything nowadays is referred to a ‘real doctor’ at the hospital.
Ironically, the burgeoning bureaucracy of forms is not the bane of General Practice, it has become the umbilicus. A newly qualified GP can be as competent as he likes in respect of medicine yet, if he does not know how to use the practice software, to tick boxes and lodge claims for a myriad of HSE chronic-care payments, he or she is essentially unemployable.
The traditional mythology surrounding General Practice, the institution’s relationship with the HSE, all mean that like the banks, it is ‘too big to fail’. For example, the training body responsible for the production of new GPs (the ICGP) has complex ties with, and is paid by the HSE.
Like a recruiting agency, it supplies them with Doctors, who fill unattractive hospital posts around the country, as part of their ‘training’. These trainee GPs are also farmed out to provide free labour for select GPs around the country, whilst both the trainee and the ICGP are paid by the HSE. The ICGP is one of those illustrious quangos we Irish are in love with; a ‘registered charity’ with freebies for friends and financial investments as far afield as Saudi Arabia. Colleges and ‘non-profit’ medical organisations like the ICGP and the RCSI., pay no taxes, they share the spoils out in the form of benevolence, salaries and expense accounts.
The entire system of medical training in Ireland is defined by deeply embedded and legitimate forms of nepotism and corruption. Beaumont Hospital freely provides almost everything from patients and teachers to the toilet paper, for the Royal College of Surgeons. The College is a private medical school and it charges students up to €58 thousand per year in tuition for the six year course, three years of which are conducted at Beaumont Hospital. Bizarrely (or perhaps not) this private medical college is sustained by the largest ‘public’ hospital in the country.
Consultant Professors of this and that, can hardly find time to attend to surgeries or public clinics. They are often busy down the hall, at another theatre, lecturing to Saudi Princes and Emirs from Kuwait.
The RCSI (another registered charity), owns and operates a second Private Medical School in Bahrain, where it offers private medical training to Canadian and American Medical Students, for around €44 thousand per annum for the six year degree.
The Taoiseach’s leaking of contractual negotiations between the HSE and one of the rival GP organisations, is merely the tip of just one iceberg that has recently floated by. Off to melt away in warmer waters; like the long-forgotten intrigues and scandals at the IMO another quango who’s last CEO retired amid a teacup of controversy with a pension of ten million euro.
Medicine in Ireland, particularly medical training might well be described as a fermenting vat of rot. We have no swamp; the water is too putrid for any genuine forms of life, reptilian or otherwise.
The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse… Richard Ashcroft
The vast majority of medicines consumed in Ireland are prescriptions issued by General Practitioners. The Pharmaceutical industry from the local Pharmacist to Pfizer itself, depends on GPs for those scripts. A need that is more prescient and influential than those of any particular patient cohort.
This year, circa two billion euro in Exchequer funding was paid to a few pharma companies in return for drugs covered by the medical card scheme. That sum could be more than halved if a National Formulary of prescription drugs was put up for tender each year, as is the case in other countries like New Zealand for example.
Pharmaceutical lobbying, however, discreetly maintains the status quo. In Ireland corporate lobbying will hardly be investigated by a mainstream media, dependent upon corporate payments for advertising revenues and the salaries of A-list celebrities. The general acceptance of corporate influence over the state broadcaster suggests that most Irish people think ‘lobbying’ is something that might pertain to Wimbledon or tennis.
A prescription is often the most efficient way to end a consultation, it does not cost the Doctor a thought because they do not cost him a penny. In Irish Nursing Homes most residents have an extended shopping list of pointless medications, the phenomenon is referred to as ‘polypharmacy’. Many of the frail and emaciated are taking statins, in order to keep their cholesterol down; it’s a little bit like putting famine victims on diet pills. Sleeping pills, sedatives and expensive food supplements to compensate for an unpalatable diet of gruel are the norm for many.
As a consequence of being interlaced with a political and pharmaceutical agenda, and in abeyance to a certain type of mythology associated with the family doctor; Government underwrites General Practice to the extent that it consumes as much, if not more exchequer funding, than the entire Public Hospital system. Last year it cost four billion Euro to pay for GPs and Medical Card Prescriptions, an increase of 49% since 2016.
General Practice is a little bit like a religion in that it is sustained by some established patriarchal ideals. The notion of ‘doctor knows best’ or ‘just what the doctor ordered’ etc., is possibly more embedded in post-colonial or post Catholic societies.
Following the collapse of the Church in Ireland, the GP has become something of alocum tenens, for the parish priest. His is an ‘evidenced based’ religion, one that promises a healthy life; in place of the immodest and unsubstantiated offer of an everlasting one.
Despite a paucity of practical reasons for its preservation, General Practice is nonetheless sustained by popular demand, as a kind of impractical luxury. Like paying rent for a Lamborghini when a bicycle would be overkill. It is difficult to know whether the costly underwriting is motivated by the mythology; or whether it is mandated by the institution or the many others who gorge themselves upon a Health budget that knows no limits.
Church & State
The political preservation of General Practice is accomplished in several ways. You can be as sick as you like, but you will only get paid once the GP signs the IB1 form. Ironically if you are in hospital, a hospital Doctor will give you an IB1 form that you must then bring to your GP and pay for the pleasure of his or her signature.
GPs are responsible for the care of every elderly resident within the depressing environs of the Nursing Home Sector. In Ireland a Nursing Home can neither open nor operate without the supervision of a registered GP, a supervision that is at best light-touch, but is heavily paid for.
Illness benefit, driving licences, passports, nursing homes, access to the public hospital system, to the Emergency Department etc etc., are all stamped and signed by General Practice. These are the lands that belong to a post-colonial landlord, one who operates behind the general facade of a liberated Ireland.
Pharmaceutical companies have an ever increasing need for community GPs to push an agenda of pharmaceutical dependence upon the entire population. Arguably this agenda has gone unchecked for over half a century. Pharma companies provide jobs in Ireland and advertising revenues for the mainstream media, they should never be questioned; and so the executive board of the HPRA is dominated by ex-pharma employees.
Opiate dependence is barely a scratch on the surface; antidepressants, benzodiazepines, Lyrica, statins, antibiotics and polypharmacy in the elderly are more disturbing realities. Each of them are lucrative social tragedies, rarely spoken of in public. Like excess mortality or vaccine-related injuries they are confined to the realm of ‘conspiracy’.
Learned and encouraged helplessness within Irish society in respect of basic health, fear mongering by pharma and state agencies in the guise of various ‘health promotion’ campaigns, means that there will always be the need for a Doctor in the community; one who is almost as skilled as a Nurse, but has all the power and influence of a mafia boss.
I just checked in to see what condition my condition was in. Kenny Rogers
Thirty years ago when I began to study medicine there was this crazy notion that Doctors would ‘cure’ or ‘fight’ disease, whenever possible. That same general expectation of ‘cure’ has all but disappeared from the everyday language of modern medicine. It is no longer expected of the GP to cure, or even to attempt to do so. Long-term illness and ‘chronic management schemes’ have become the ‘ne plus ultra’.
Ironically, apart from cancer, the biggest killers in Ireland are indeed curable diseases; heart disease, type 2 Diabetes, vascular disease, obesity, depression etc. In recent years all of these conditions have evolved to be considered solely in the context of ‘chronic disease management’, associated with chronically diseased payments.
The gaping irony hardly registers. When I mention it to the trainees they return a blank confused expression, as though I were suggesting something possible and impossible at the same time. There is no space within the establishment to discuss the question as to how or why GPs have become facilitators instead of healers? This is another conversation generally confined to the realm of conspiracy.
In Ireland today illness is managed, no differently to a business, wherein profit is the bottom line. Tellingly, amid the mind-boggling array of payment types issued from the HSE to GPs, there is not a single payment or financial incentive in respect of ‘curing’ anything at all, never mind any of the curable diseases that actually kill most people.
In New Zealand, where I completed my GP training some years ago, GPs were actually paid a bonus if their prescribing of antibiotics remained below the national average. Most disease was treated (and often cured) within the community setting. In Irish General Practice ‘cure’ has become an anathema and disease has become our raison d’être.
Image Daniele Idini.
Halcyon Days
Any real or practical value that the GP brings to public health is (or was once) contingent upon the fading reality of the somewhat old-fashioned ‘Family Doctor’. That GP was (and occasionally is) part of a community of people living in close physical (as opposed to digital) proximity. People who are mutually dependent upon each other and the community, in small but positive ways. In the modern world of sprawling high-density estates, the notion of collective, integrative and supportive communities, is becoming little more than a sound-bite that estate agents use to sell houses.
There was once a time when the GP knew all or most of his patients very well. That knowledge was an essential and fundamental clinical tool, as important as the stethoscope, and impossible to replicate through any amount of technology. It was that intimate knowledge that would often determine an intervention, and whether a referral to the specialist was immediately necessary, or necessary at all.
Outside of the paperwork, most presentations in General Practice are motivated by some form of anxiety or worry. Intimate knowledge in respect of the family and the individual often allows the GP to distinguish between anxiety and pathophysiology.
Sometimes he might have got it wrong, but more often, he or she was in the right place. This lack of distinction or inability to distinguish between anxiety and physical pathology, is one of the things that annually overwhelms the health service. It is almost never discussed and is expressed regularly in the unintelligent language of a: ‘shortage of hospital beds’ and a ‘shortage of doctors’. We may not have a shortage of Doctors, rather than a genuine shortage of doctors who know their patients well, or know their patients at all.
The Doctor’s sometimes sage advice was an imperfect thing, derived from his unique knowledge of the person, from a love of learning and an understanding of science. He was also the victim and the enforcer of a particular zeitgeist and strict social paradigm; that aspect of medicine has never changed.
Although it remains a rather lucrative enterprise to have one’s HSE-income, and share it with no one; single handed practice is taxed with an unhealthy level of responsibility. No newly qualified GP would dream of setting up alone in today’s Ireland. Few, if any, single-handed practitioners could provide the type of service that people now expect. Sole practice was the first limb of the cat to vanish. The once ubiquitous ‘walk-in’ surgery once had a financial incentive, supposedly socialist medicine however is strictly by an appointment, generally for sometime next week.
Working for the Man
Presently in Ireland a couple of large corporate entities are hoovering up what remains of the small suburban practices or those rural practices with profitable lists of Medical Card holders. These companies will buy a practice and keep the principal GP on as a paid employee in order to control his Medical Card list.
For the most part, newly emerging GPs know nothing of the ‘halcyon days’, and are generally happy to start working for ‘the man’. They cannot be accused of selling their souls to the devil. In contemporary General Practice there is no place for old-fashioned things like souls, despite the overabundance of devils.
Such corporations pay 12.5% in corporation tax; yet when I had my own practice I paid 52%; the profit margins are a no-brainer. They will then harvest the greatest possible return from the various Medical Card payments, and chronic disease schemes. They can afford to pay GPs good salaries, and hire a minimum number to do the husbandry. This type of corporate General Practice is entirely unregulated in respect of the service it provides (or doesn’t provide) for patients.
These profit driven behemoths are presumed to function in the same way as the traditional Family Doctor. For the most part they are left to their own devices, sucking up a maximum amount of HSE payments and returning a token level of care. They conceal the inadequate service behind a rigid appointment system that keeps patients waiting, the workload at sustainable level, and profit margins as high as possible.
For all their faults these centres are the inevitable future for General Practice, they are what people think they want, and what politicians are eager to give them.
To interface with this industrial model, patients must increasingly learn to translate all of their pain into the unaccommodating language of medical pathology; human beings and their emotional realities become invisible and entirely medicalised. Deeper truths behind the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that are an increasing part of everyday life for all of us, evade this more sophisticated model of Primary Care. The emergent mystery becomes just another number on another waiting list.
Of Human Bondage
In my early twenties after reading Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, I thought about becoming a Doctor. I didn’t especially want to help people, but I wanted to be in a position whereby I could help them if I wished.
I might have wanted to ‘help people’ in some vague way, but I wanted to help myself first. For a time I probably translated this notion into the more noble expression that many of my colleagues prefer to cling to. It is refreshing to hear honest medical motives expressed in the more acceptable language of a ‘work life balance’.
Maugham’s novel is about all kinds of bondage, the one I wished to liberate myself from was poverty. Medicine has at least afforded me that compensation for the small price of my soul and at times my sanity. I never imagined that I would come to see the career itself as a kind of bondage; a darkening cave wherein we can no longer see the chains or the flickering shadows on the wall.
Many Doctors know there is no need for the antibiotic, no need for the hospital referral, the scope or the scan, and yet we increasingly act according to our own benefit, or that of our employers. Convenience and fear of complaint are the other silent incentives.
In Ireland and abroad, private obstetric care is more likely to result in a caesarean section, and a child with private health insurance is more likely to end up with grommets or a tonsillectomy. Medicine has always been an uncomfortable marriage between profit and compassion. Lately it seems that profit has separated, and is suing for divorce as well as damages.
Image Daniele Idini.
Hope Deferred?
Perhaps the only thing worth saving in General Practice – the most beautiful and essential thing – is the thing that has almost disappeared; the unique nature of the relationship between the family Doctor and the families who attend him or her.
That ‘thing’ is something many people may have once enjoyed and may still enjoy with some ‘old-fashioned’ GPs. It is the thing that saved many lives during the Pandemic, more so than; masks, vaccines or spending ten euro on a pint and a sandwich.
Any future validity for General Practice would be contingent upon training GPs properly, educating them (and patients) to participate in that old partnership in an honest and meaningful way. For the moment however, the relationship is broken. The modern GP is not trusted in the manner that the family doctor once was, and he is wary of his patients or views them solely as a means to a private end. The problem is a million light years away from medical schools, training bodies or public health campaigns, all of whom have their heads in the trough.
Before former Health Minister Mary Harney reformed the Medical Council in 2007, into a weapon for the indignant and a cosy club for political appointments; the family doctor might have been a man or woman with an honest opinion in respect of your health.
An opinion that you could take or leave as you saw fit. Presently, Doctors are not trained to be honest or even candid with patients, quite the contrary in fact. Candidness was something that was permitted years ago. Often (but not always), it was a good and a welcome kind of honesty. The GP had the ‘power’ to tell you that you were ‘too fat’, ‘overly anxious’ or that you didn’t need to be immediately referred for a battery of tests or scans on demand. The GP was frank, candid and honest, and was even expected to be so. Some Doctors and GPs were lazy in their old-fashioned power, and things were sometimes missed, like cancers and physical disease. People were sometimes abused with insensitive words or beaten with the religious paradigm of the day.
Today it is increasingly rare (if not impossible) to encounter a GP who would be willing to run the gauntlet of refusing a test or having a frank conversation with the newly emancipated patient turned consumer. Training bodies and the Medical Council indirectly insist upon an obsequious dishonesty as the gold standard. They advise Doctors to give ‘back pocket’ prescriptions, a euphemism for the unnecessary antibiotic on demand. Happy customers are presumed to equate with healthy patients. The universal goal is a consumer, pleased with the product they have purchased, or recently become entitled to.
A GP might be sanctioned for using the word ‘fat’ inappropriately, and yet he or she will be rewarded in various ways should he provide an inappropriate prescription for a trendy weight loss injection; a diabetic drug currently in short supply as it is being over prescribed in the community for cosmetic purposes.
As an institution, General Practice thrives upon; ignorance, compliance and government subsidy. Most consultations in primary care amount to a waste of time in respect of public health or genuine pathology. An increasing majority attend the GP simply because they have to, or because they have been encouraged or allowed themselves to become prescription drug addicts.
Sometimes, disease becomes an identity; a form of socially sanctioned escape from an unpleasant and painful life. Illness is very often the veil that is worn to conceal a deeper unhappiness. Often, chronic illness becomes a persona with a social and financial incentive, one that can be as alluring and addictive as any drug.
In my own experience far too many ‘sick’ people are simply very unhappy. General Practice in its current form is utterly ill-equipped to deal with, or even to recognise the unhappiness or anxiety that is its principal presentation.
Increasingly, during my years in clinical practice, I found that telling a patient that they are ‘normal’ or that they have ‘normal results’ can cause a kind of disappointment. For some people, telling them they are normal is like denying their pain, barring them from Kafka’s Castle, refusing them a diagnosis and an entry into the legitimate world of the sick.
Image: Daniele Idini
To Italy
“Are you the farmer? We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”
‘Withnail and I’
In many countries the expensive appendage of General Practice has already disappeared. Outside of the catchment area of ‘old victorian ways’, one attends an accident-clinic in the event of an accident, and almost everything else is self-referred to a specialist; a hospital consultant with rooms in the nearby town or city.
In places like Northern Italy, the Middle East, the U.S. and many more, people do not need a magic letter from a GP to get to see a ‘real doctor’. One simply makes an appointment at the consultant clinic, the receptionist will assign the headache to the neurologist, or the gastritis to the gastroenterologist and so on. Sick children are brought to see paediatricians, those wishing to become more beautiful attend the plastic/cosmetic surgeon, and old people are brought to see a geriatrician before being dropped off at the nursing home. Friendly secretaries will triage and normally arrange a bed over the phone. The first consultation usually occurs with the patient in a bed on the hospital ward. The bill is sent to the state or the insurer.
I am not suggesting for a moment that this is a better system, it is a system that was the principal cause of the horrific scenes in Lombardy during the Pandemic. Covid killed too many elderly people, that much is true, but it was the condition and organisation of the Italian health service in Northern Italy that allowed Covid to become the catastrophe that dominated the television networks.
If we think about it, cholera and a few other diseases (rather than starvation) were responsible for half of all the deaths during the Irish Famine (1847-1851). Now, imagine the hue and cry that would emerge if some renowned British Epidemiologist tried to suggest that half of the total number of Famine victims did not die of the Famine, but died instead from a coincidental ‘pandemic’ of Asiatic Cholera? What remains of the IRA would undoubtedly issue a fatwa.
Apparently when it comes to the Great Famine, we are quite capable of recognising that social conditions (poverty/famine) created the environment where disease festered and then killed exponentially. We don’t blame Cholera for the Famine, we blame the famine for Cholera. It was the Famine that created the conditions for Cholera to thrive, and it was English policy that created the conditions for the Famine itself.
Equally, the Covid virus was not the principal cause of the terrible scenes in Northern Italy. It was the absence of community medicine that created the conditions necessary for the tragedy to unfold in the horrific manner that it did.
There is, and was, no system of community medicine throughout much of Northern Italy when Covid arrived. In Lombardy; frail, elderly people with Covid, had no one to call, other than consultants and specialists, who then flooded their hospitals with Covid and transformed them into the geriatric hotbeds of disease and mortality that provided the horror show, and fuelled the fear-frenzy. That same frenzy soon transformed Covid from a cohort specific disease, into a pandemic that requires universal vaccination, lockdowns and allegedly kills almost everyone it touches.
At home the Italian mistakes were coarsely imitated by the Irish Government as they cleared the public hospitals and transferred a mass of untested, convalescing hospital patients, into all available beds in the Nursing Homes. They introduced Covid into the sector en masse, firmly and strictly locked it in, and thereby caused (or at least facilitated) a wave of death that has yet to be investigated.
In 2016, Lombardy — home to more than 10 million people — saw only 90 medical school graduates go on to pursue specialised studies toward becoming general practitioners. They received annual scholarships of 11,000 euros (nearly $13,000), less than half those secured by people preparing for specialties like cardiology. The numbers have grown in recent years, but not enough to replace retiring general practitioners, medical associations say.
The point I am making here, is that despite the fact that General Practice might well be an overall pathology in Ireland; that is not to say that the institution does not accomplish some purely accidental good. A broken clock will tell the right time twice a day.
Many Irish lives were inadvertently saved by the fact that patients had a relationship with a Doctor (their Family Doctor). One whom they could call and who would tell them what they should or should not do.
Despite the fact that medical advice from the oracle of General Practice amounted to little more than: ‘stay at home and suffer on’; it was the simple fact of having a relationship with a contactable GP that reassured and ultimately saved lives.
Needless to say, (proportionally at least) far more lives were saved by GPs like Dr Pat Morrissey in Adare, and several others – some of whom who became part of a covert network who insisted (despite threats from the IMC president) upon doing more for very sick patients – than simply telling them to ‘stay at home until they turned blue’.
Public health officials were quick to see the value of this old-relationship and offered GPs an unvouched blank cheque, to the tune of €30 per reassuring phone call. However, beyond a phone consultation, Irish GPs by and large did not provide any interventional ‘care’ for those whom they advised to ‘stay at home’.
Nonetheless they saved lives and avoided an Italian-type tragedy simply because those lives had access to a Doctor within their own community. During Covid, it did not matter if GPs were wilfully useless; it only mattered that people had access by phone, by video-link or smoke signal. They were not entirely alone.
The miracle of science was with them, and they stayed in the safest place, far away from established medicine. Whilst Covid patients were in contact with their GP, they were cared for at home by their families. This was not the case in Northern Italy where even a token degree of Community Medicine was non-existent. A passage from the NYT article states the following:
When the first wave hit, Milan — a city of more than 1.3 million — had only five doctors expert in public health and hygiene, said Roberto Carlo Rossi, president of Milan’s Doctors’ and Dentists’ Guild. They were responsible for setting up a testing and contact tracing regimen.
Where most Irish GPs did in fact care for patients in practical terms, was in the Nursing Home. We were the responsible physicians and were the only ones allowed in.
As a consequence of our careless ‘care’, combined with political ineptitude; over a thousand died alone, and in truly horrible conditions, all within a matter of months. During that time Covid payments in respect of their care were doubled, trebled and quadrupled, in spite of the death rate and the abject failure to deliver what might be described (in third world terminology) as ‘the very basics’.
The survival of honest medicine may depend upon an old-fashioned relationship with a different type of Doctor. One who is often found to be ‘non-compliant’ at Medical Council Hearings. Yet, to paraphrase an old philosopher: ‘there may be a different court, one that is higher than the Courts of men; one where a great many of the judgements of this world, will doubtlessly be overturned.’
I would imagine I am no different to many people in that I suffer from a degree of anxiety. Prior to 2019, this usually manifested in a mild degree of agoraphobia. I could manage a packed train or a bus whenever necessary, but concerts, bustling streets, or shopping malls were always places to be avoided.
In recent years I have found that my tendency to avoid crowds, has become a more acute need, extending to the company of people whom I don’t know very well. On a ‘one to one’ basis I don’t mind engaging – my misanthropic default is often proven wrong – as I encounter people whose ideas emanate from outside the RTÉ news bubble.
As such, attending for my car’s NCT test last week was not an impossible task, but something I was not looking forward to.
I moved from Dublin to county Leitrim some months ago, and as a consequence my agoraphobia is almost entirely under wraps. There are very few people where I live, down a little laneway off a quiet road, just outside the small town of Ballinamore, in the shadow of the Iron Mountains.
Leitrim is relatively unmolested by the excesses of modernity. The population of the county would only half fill Croke Park. Forestry, fracking, semi-abandoned villages with neglected vernacular architecture, garbage in the hedgerows and ugly one-off houses, are among the few assaults a sensitive soul must endure.
I am very fortunate to live across the road from an entire family of agoraphobics; an IRA veteran and his wife and family. They home-school their kids and similarly hide from the world; wary of its narrow materialistic ideals, the ongoing romance with consumption and superfluous technology.
The two eldest sons of this family spend their days tinkering about with old cars: painting, sanding, welding bits of metal and fixing engines. Unemployed but gainfully so. Like me, they hide from a world they are somewhat apprehensive and mistrustful of.
The evenings in my garden are quiet enough to hear an owl hoot in the twilight. The old Gods still reside here. Sometimes I join my neighbours across the lane for a smoke and a cup of tea, free of judgements. I gaze in wonder at the mechanical heaps of rust and rot they are about to resuscitate.
The ‘lads’ did a service on my Yaris to get her ready for the NCT, changing the oil and brake pads. My wife hoovered it out, and I was ordered to give it a power-wash and click the rear seatbelts in place, as they are supposed to be visible – all in preparation for the big day.
Since resigning my Dublin medical practicein protest at the mad Covid Policies, and as a means of avoiding injecting children with the stuff that was called a ‘vaccine’, I have had a lot more time to myself.
Time to devote to bees, a polytunnel, NCT’s and other hitherto trivial things. Indeed, my wife was most concerned that the car should pass, as our son needs to use it for his driving test next month.
The test centre in Carrick-on-Shannon is about a forty minute drive from our cottage. As you have probably guessed, despite the attention of the two lads and all the hoovering and power-washing, the car failed. A front coil-spring wasn’t up to scratch, and one brake bulb was brighter than the other.
I wasn’t surprised given the car is ten years old. When I told the lads the news they laughed and told me to get the parts and they would address the ‘problems.’ This I did, and after finishing the work they showed me the old coil-spring. Apparently (they informed me) a coil spring is one of the suspension springs for the car.
They put the the old one before me and said that it was perfect, save for a bit of rust at the tip of one end. They insisted that this would cause no problem to the car, saying that the spring was tested under the heading of ‘suspension’; that it passed the physical test and that this was printed on the fault sheet that had been returned to me.
I then asked: “if it passed the actual test of its integrity and function, how did it fail the test?” They informed me that the chap who was looking underneath the car, saw rust on the spring and that it was a ‘visual failure’.
The lads aren’t highly educated by any means, so what would they know? They insist that for the most part the NCT is just “a multi-million money making racket”, an enormous source of revenue for a few people, and a way for government and car dealers to get perfectly decent cars off the road and replaced by new ones.
Buying new cars is, of course, really good for the environment, particularly if they have big lithium batteries. Across Dublin suburbia, dizzying heights of environmental virtue can be scaled at the bottle bank if one can pull up in a battery powered car.
Nonetheless, I find it hard to get too worked up about the nefarious powers behind the NCT network. The ideals of capitalism are pretty much universal at this stage. I was happy enough that the bulb and spring had been replaced and the car was ready for her retest. I had already devoted an afternoon to the first one.
The following week I returned for the re-test at my scheduled time of 4.30pm. The little waiting room was packed. The tests were running behind time. They didn’t get to my car until well after 5pm. I had plenty of time to listen to the people around me come and go, sharing their stories of success and failure.
Some years ago I read The Wayward Bus, a little known work by John Steinbeck. It’s one of my favourite stories, concerning a group of people travelling on a bus, all from different social and cultural backgrounds.
The bus breaks down on a lonely road, and when it does the barriers that normally separate people also break down.
As a consequence of either boredom or necessity, when these barriers come down we may be compelled to get to know one another. I suspect that most people have had the subliminal experience of finding themselves stuck somewhere in the company of strangers, united by unforeseen circumstance.
The experience was also recently masterfully explored and brought to a beautiful conclusion in the film ‘Triangle of Sadness’. In that passengers and crew of a luxury yacht find themselves stranded on a beach and are compelled to get to know each other after the boat sinks.
Stripped of the relevance of their wealth and station, all must rely on actual abilities to survive. It’s a wonderful film with some great twists. Perhaps when the ship of humanity flounders, if we have time, we might pause and get to know each other a little better?
With Irish media placing unprecedented focus on climate change during #COP26 we recall an unhealthy dependence on advertising revenue from the car industry that appears to influence transport coverage in particular.https://t.co/wXx0LOgPVB@think_or_swim@WilliamsJon@ian_lumley
As we sat in the waiting room of the NCT office I dealt with my agoraphobia by going outside for a smoke, at the point when people were getting to know each other, and social interaction seemed imminent.
There was no public toilet in the centre and no coffee machine, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was cold outside and a cigarette doesn’t last as long as an NCT test.
There were about ten of us seated in the plastic chairs around the wall of the waiting room. Occasionally the NCT man would magically appear at the empty hatch and call out a name for one of us. The chit-chat and various horror stories associated with tests and re-tests had brought us together, to the point where success or failure of one’s test became a shared experience.
Soon, a round of applause was being awarded to each successful testee (no pun intended). Commiserations and a few empathetic sighs were offered to the failures.
At last my name was called and I went to the Perspex hatch to receive the news. The man taped on his computer, and I caught a glimpse of the green and yellow of a new NCT cert emerge from the printer. The few who remained in the waiting room were anxious to know if I was deserving of applause or commiserations.
Not wishing to be a sour-hole, I turned to the row of seats and gave my comrades two-thumbs up, informing all that I had joined the ranks of the victorious. A round of applause was tendered, and a middle-aged lady seated with her daughter offered me a handshake – which seemed a little over the top!
Her daughter should have been heartily confused but seemed rather amused, the rules that applied to strangers were out the window.
As I took the certificate, however, I noticed that the date on the new cert was only valid until May 2023. So, I had passed the test, but my car was deemed roadworthy for less than four months, at which time it would have to be retested. I felt certain this was a mistake, and brought it to the attention of the attendant.
“This cert is only valid for four months,” I said. “I thought the test would be valid for at least a year?”
He took the forms back from me and looked them over. “Your last test is out of date for over six months,” he replied, by way of explanation.
By then I was a bit irked, having paid for a test, and then having paid for a re-test, and now being expected to test the car again in four months’ time.
There was a three month wait for my first test, so, effectively, I would have to book the car in next week in order to be on time for the next test!
Despite being conscious of the fact that he was only the messenger, I still wished to shoot him (metaphorically speaking of course).
I replied: “but you are not testing the forms, you are testing the car, and the car has passed the test.”
Unfortunately, the starter motor was jammed, the spark plug failed to ignite and the attendant hadn’t a clue what I was banging on about. He smiled and then disappeared from behind the screen like the cat from Alice in Wonderland.
My questioning and dissatisfaction did not go unnoticed by the small crowd in the waiting room. I looked about their faces as I departed with my Pyrrhic ‘victory’ in hand. One or two of the faces appeared sympathetic to my plight, others seemed mildly indignant that despite having passed the test, I still seemed unhappy – making a fuss and potentially causing a delay.
I felt the breath quicken in my chest. It was as though, for a moment I had been plunged back into the near forgotten Covid days of ‘put up and shut up’, because we are ‘all in this together’.
As I departed a large poster on the pane of the waiting room door said ‘goodbye.’ The poster was covered with smiley emojis encouraging people to buy an NCT disc-pocket that sticks in the window and holds ones new cert. ‘Hooray! I passed my NCT’. I wonder do people actually buy these gimmicks on top of paying for their test?
The poster reminded me of the smiley buttons that the HSE were dispensing to the vaccinated during Covid. I also recalled the free iodine tablets that were dispensed by the Government when they worried about the Sellafield nuclear reactor exploding, and that then reminded me of the Millennium Candle that came in the post at the turn of the century.
I’m not sure how or why I should feel that these little tokens are related in some indistinct manner – all buttons and smiley faces to stick in the window or upon one’s chest. I recalled where I had wanted to stick the candle when it arrived in the post.
The phrase ‘all in this together’ still makes me nauseous. As an old farmer in Rush where I once had my surgery used to say: “Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.”
I suspect that for many people it’s always raining in Ireland, a golden shower that moves from Leinster House, and then on to Mizen Head and Malin Head, each day of the year. Yet I am perhaps cynical enough to believe that we get our just political deserts.
One need only watch the recent rebranding of Bertie Ahern as the population is groomed into accepting him being provided with an armchair in the Áras. Or that recent RTÉ documentary that had Sean Quinn weeping, and staring wistfully out upon the lakes of Cavan, from the third story of his palace, like Ozymandias King of Kings.
One of the impossibilities of democracy – perhaps its greatest limitation – is a tendency to elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear. Nowadays our cast of chosen doctors – like the bishops of old – tell us what we want to hear, and give us the pills we have been groomed to demand. Should they venture outside of this brief and tell us what we need to hear, the ice generally thins beneath their feet.
Perhaps the greatest evil in the world is in the realms of paedophilia, and when this was exposed within the Church, it ended many people’s belief in and respect for Catholicism.
There is of course a sinister underbelly to our scandals, and that is the strangely complicit nature of “we the people”, whether it’s in the pew, or in the waiting room at the NCT centre.
I recall, as I made my confirmation at the National School in Swords County Dublin, how my classmates and I innocently queued down the church aisle to partake in the ritual honour of kneeling and kissing the Bishop’s ring.
We did it because we were sent up to do it by our parents. I also remember answering proudly in the affirmative when my grandmother asked me if I had I kissed the ring.
I was also an alter boy for a time, a role that was foisted on me by my grandmother, with the full and enthusiastic backing of my parents. Had I perhaps returned home and informed them that something ‘bad’ had happened, that I had been ‘interfered’ with, I probably would have been given a clip on the ear, or simply told to shut up.
Most kids who were victims of abuse, said nothing to their parents, and the reasons for this are rarely ever spoken about in Ireland. You can perhaps find traces of this in the NCT centre, or see it on the face of a teenager who is sent home from school because he has had his ear pierced.
My parents were not bad parents, they were just typical of their time. My point here is that in Ireland we like to think that paedophilia within the Church was entirely the fault of the Church and the priests. I tend to disagree. Parents, the state and society at large were as much a part of the problem, perhaps the bigger part. ‘We the people’ were invested in the scandal as much as the perpetrators. It seems that all too often we are ‘all in this together’.
Ireland will never be capable of really face up to the abuse scandals because we will never accept the blame for our own part. We will never question our gullibility, but our children might, as they are less likely to suffer from our co-dependence upon RTÉ.
In all likelihood, we will never explain the scandal of Covid policies, the waste and the suicides, because we the people were so invested in the narrative; a tsunami of indignant virtue in the midst of a state sanctioned pogrom in the nursing home sector.
What has this to do with my NCT? Perhaps nothing. But the lads were right, it is indeed just a racket for making money and taking perfectly decent cars off the road – another racket that we are all complicit in.
It’s no different to the Covid racket where billions in potential hospitals, schools and footpaths, were foolishly handed over to Big Pharma and men in yachts. In Ireland being ‘all in this together’ comes with an unspoken historical warning : you are either with us or against us.
Against us, and you run the gauntlet of vilification or exclusion, at best being depicted as a weirdo, at worst a bad apple. If you are with us, ‘there is one for everyone in the audience’, and any ‘minor inconveniences’ one might be compelled to endure becomes just another shower of golden rain.
’From my experience of my patients on the front line since March 2020, I estimate that between 1% and 10% of the Irish population have suffered from a serious traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal ideation as a direct result of the government instigated media propaganda and lockdown, which works out at between 48 000 and 480 000 people of this country. This must be seen as a national tragedy, if not a massive crime against the Irish people, perhaps the worst since the great famine..’ Dr Gerry Waters submission to the High Court, prior to his suspension from the medical register, April 2021 as quoted in the British Medical Journal.
Looking out upon a ‘snot-green’ sea, I wonder how our ancestors explained the emergence of the craggy rocks and pools. Today we might smile at the idea that the ebb and flow of the tide being the work of ‘spirits’ or gods of sand and stone. Yet perhaps there is a ‘spirit’ of our time? The zeitgeist; a shared belief-system that interprets our world and is the ultimate arbiter of truth itself? Perhaps it is this ‘spirit’ that future generations might equally recognise as a thing that is drenched in myth and fallacy?
Lately it seems that truth, like the tide, is constantly shifting. Our mute and collective response to Covid-19 policies suggests we have indeed entered a ‘Post-Truth’ era, where truth has gone the way of video and record stores, to become almost entirely subscription based.
I was once of the belief that science served to shape and guide public opinion. I have lately come to feel that when science does not align itself with public opinion, it is dismissed as the ramblings of a madman.
In recent years the most basic scientific principles, even the simple notion of ‘cause and effect’ have been temporarily suspended. Presently, science is in the service of the zeitgeist. It no longer informs public opinion, instead it is used as a drunk might see a lamp post; more for support than illumination.
Frank Armstrong reviews a new book on the Irish government's response Covid-19 and wonders whether it will be said once again: “We didn’t know, no one told us”https://t.co/vikPQsuFMa@broadsheet_ie@danieleidiniph1
During and prior to Covid, Europe and Ireland, enjoyed several years of what economists call ‘quantitative easing’. In layman’s terms this means printing lots of money in order to keep people content, or at least to keep them spending.
The world is apparently a better place when we are all spending freely. Economists call this ‘economic growth.’ Strangely the cause and effect of this simple expedient is entirely lost on most people. The countless billions that have been pumped into European economies in recent years, now means that money is worth less, which is generally referred to as inflation.
At home, in addition to inflation, our Covid-related crises: deaths in nursing homes, suicides, mental health, missed cancer diagnoses, along with enormous political blunders, were all effectively obscured by a bonfire of some fifty billion euro.
The light of that conflagration was bright enough to relegate our home-grown crises into the shadows of relative obscurity.
The idea that we are experiencing inflation as a consequence of two years of fiscal dissipation is, either roundly ignored or blamed upon other crises. One does not hear such a strange assertion on RTÉ, which itself received a significant share of that fiscal dissipation for its ‘public service’ broadcasting.
We hear nothing about the government’s responsibility for social destruction and economic waste. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must have come as a relief. Now the priority is that ‘Putin must go’, an idea seemingly oblivious to the fact that much of the world might have to go down with him.
As Minister for Health for the initial phase of our Covid crisis, Simon Harris stated notoriously: “Remember this is coronavirus Covid-19 – that means there have been 18 other coronaviruses and I don’t think they have actually successfully found a vaccine for any.” Less comically, both he and members of NPHET are still protected from any review into nursing home deaths.
Nor are the main opposition parties, including Sinn Fein, blameless in respect of the temporary madness. I suspect that when they inevitably get hold of the piggy bank they are unlikely to call for any kind of revision to the narrative. We were ‘all in this together’ after all.
Nonetheless, as inflation continues and war escalates, the appetite for truth will surely grow, albeit at a remove from the big glasshouse on Nutley Lane.
When it is safe to speak and ask honest questions, and once the capacity for relating cause and effect returns, calls for a review of the past two years of policy might yet begin in earnest.
The state broadcaster descended into wild scaremongering throughout the pandemic, and failed to cover anything else. We cannot be expected to make informed political choices as long the nonsense continues, and it is clear that the rot starts at the top.https://t.co/R326gIfNz8
Some truths seem to persist for longer than others. Scientific truths endure not because they are more precious than myth, but simply because they are (or they remain) largely inescapable.
During the Covid years, scientific truths succumbed to a form of relativism. Thus, one could have any scientific ‘truth’, as long as it was consistent with the fear-frenzy and the dominant narrative that Covid was the only challenge our government ought to address.
In contrast, unpopular truths became the subject of a formal and informal censorship. Science has become strangely ‘right wing’ in its obedience to pharmaceutical companies and its lack of tolerance for essential questions and contrary facts. Yet Karl Popper once argued; ‘the demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.’
In the presence of industry-led censorship, neither science nor democracy functions properly. Yet many people still believe that the scientific discourse is free. Sadly, unscientific views on masks, lockdowns and administering genetic vaccinations to children and pregnant women are (for the moment at least) considered to accord perfectly with the scientific evidence.
Entire national policies were based upon a flawed epidemiology of Covid. That epidemiology was described almost everywhere in the context of ‘deaths per million’, despite Covid being from its inception a disease with a cohort-specific mortality.
Indeed, mortality itself was defined in the context of deaths ‘with’ Covid-19 as opposed to ‘from’ Covid-19. PCR testing remains the gold standard in determining a ‘Covid case’ as opposed to detecting traces of virus in an asymptomatic individual who has recently been exposed to the virus.
In response to Covid-19, foundational principles of science and epidemiology were turned on their heads to satiate a politically profitable narrative. Such contortions are unsustainable in the long term.
The majority desperately feared Covid, and so an aggressive cold virus – dangerous to the elderly and infirm – became a disease almost entirely inflated by a politically inflated fear.
Science was annexed to supply an array of ‘facts’ to substantiate this fear and pursue the enormous wave of Covid ‘research’ funding from a strange marriage between Big Pharma and the State. Fearmongers were given seemingly unlimited time on TV and radio. In contrast, ‘contrarians’ were issued with legal threats and ongoing investigations.
It is worth bearing in mind that science has generally co-existed with unscientific ideas. Thus, religion and science have jousted for centuries. However, when governments depend upon science to justify draconian laws and unprecedented spending; to question ‘the science’ becomes a direct challenge to the government itself.
When governments depended on the Church for legitimacy, for anyone to question its religious tenets was a dangerous heresy, rooted out by Inquisition if necessary.
In respect of the medical profession the government has a powerful tool to silence doctors, which is the Irish Medical Council (IMC). The Medical Regulator acts as ‘Grand Inquisitor’, answerable only to the Minister for Health.
During the Covid crisis, anyone in my profession who openly criticised the Science associated with policy, was immediately condemned as a ‘conspiracy theorist’.
These ‘misinformed medics’ represented, (and in most cases still represent) a ‘clear and present danger’ to public health. They were heretics were to be rooted out; removed from society like a cancerous prostate gland.
The danger we pose is not towards public health, but rather towards the public’s understanding of the issue. The social operation is ongoing, and the IMC remains its enthusiastic surgeon.
We are where we are today because of the GREATEST Political and Scientific Blunders in History!
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It is not an easy thing for a doctor who spends the best part of his or her working life trying to solve people’s immediate problems, to be suddenly turned into a kind of pathology, and confined to the world of the anti-vaxxer and right-wing conspiracy theorist.
Yet that is the fate of any doctor who voiced criticism of Covid-policy. We remain under formal investigations, heading towards the end-game of sanctions and potential strike-offs. The personal struggles behind these investigations are given no public attention.
The necessity of belonging, to a society, to a fraternity of peers, even continuing to belong to one’s own family, all become tenuous when one is considered a pariah. For some, including myself, the isolation has led to a breakdown of sorts. My own ‘crash’ came in the form of simply running out of gas: facing up to the fact that my ‘gas’ is considered as a form of flatulence by most of my colleagues.
I have worked hard at keeping my family together, and that has been as much as I can handle, finding solace in bee keeping and a polytunnel. For other colleagues and their families, the consequences have been far more devastating.
In the mid-nineteenth century the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that surgeons were spreading disease by not washing their hands between operations. He was ostracised for his conspiratorial assertion. Ridiculed and vilified, he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.
Irish communities draw their strengths from being close knit, but this can lead to a damaging conformity, as our history with the Catholic Church readily demonstrates. Neighbours and friends soon learn who the ‘anti-vax’ doctor is. A whisper at the school gate or a snub in the supermarket may not qualify as an assault, yet it can be just as hurtful to the spouse or daughter of a ‘dangerous’ doctor.
There are, and were, many Irish doctors who publicly and privately rejected much of our conflicting and often, frankly, comical Covid policies. Too many to list here.
However, the pressures brought to bear from without, and the enormous financial incentives for the majority of GPs, were sufficient to ensure that serious questions, or even discussion, in respect of policies, was cancelled from the outset. Some GPs have their bicycle clubs sponsored by Pfizer and were most keen not to bite the hand that feeds.
I occupy a rather unpleasant space as one of the first to speak out against ‘scientific’ polices that led to upwards of a thousand deaths in Irish nursing homes over a period of a few months in early 2020.
I stood at bedside and watched my patients die, whilst a spouse or loved one sat crying in the car park or staring through the window outside. I struggled to obtain medicines, oxygen and PPE. Many, if not most, deaths were the consequence of a policy of dumping untested hospital patients into nursing homes to make way for a Covid-19 ‘tsunami’ that ultimately manifested in empty makeshift hospitals and tic-toc videos of dancing medics.
An enduring myth in respect of those who died in the nursing homes is that that the ‘tragedy’ occurred everywhere equally. Yet throughout Europe, during the first wave, the highest per capita death toll in care homes occurred in Ireland. We hold the dubious record of being second highest in the world after Canada.
Those who complained about these deaths to the regulator, became the subject of investigation by the regulator, while those responsible are feted as heroes.
In March of 2020, I attempted to ‘whistle blow’ on the unfolding catastrophe of incompetence, and deprivation within the nursing homes. I resigned my Ministerial appointment in the hope that the Medical Council might investigate what might be considered as criminal manslaughter.
Yet they chose to ignore the dead and investigated me instead. In the media I found myself being dismissed as a ‘far right’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘anti-vaxxer’.
Far right is funny, as I am proudly left and liberal in my thinking. Anti-vaxxer is even funnier, as I have given more vaccines than I have had hot dinners. But ‘funny’ is perhaps the wrong word because it conceals some of the hurt endured by own family.
In one article in the Independent I was described as among those doctors giving ‘horse de-wormer’ to Covid patients.
Propaganda is a powerful tool. The wild accusations came late in the pandemic and seemed designed to highlight the ‘ridiculous’ things going on outside of the general medical adherence to ‘official guidelines’.
Other Doctors who went much further than I could have gone have suffered more than insult and isolation. They and their loved ones are more courageous, and deserving of a voice that will be heard as soon as science is liberated from the shackles of dominant interests.
One such man is Dr Gerry Waters who adamantly refused to administer Covid-19 vaccinations to his non-vulnerable patients, and refused to refer patients for farcical PCR testing. From the start of the pandemic, he fully comprehended, who is, and who is not at risk from Covid-19.
He recognised that masking and injecting children was ethically and scientifically wrong, and fully understood that the essential impartiality of science had been hijacked by politics and media. In a partial validation of Dr Waters’ fears, the Irish public have smelled a rat, and to date, less than 25% of eligible children have taken the vaccine. Our rather expensive over-stock (some 4 million doses) is presently being donated to Mexico and elsewhere. A mere €25 million to be added to the bonfire.
Dr Waters stayed true to his conviction that, beyond protecting the elderly, Covid lockdown policy was socially destructive and itself seriously pathogenic.
Doubtless, he was of the same view as a friend of mine, a former dean of medical studies at RCSI, who told me: ‘we would have been far better off, had we done nothing at all.’ Imagine what could have been done to improve the country with the billions that were wasted?
Some Doctors in Ireland remain convinced that many people, old and young, could be alive today were it not for the inept response and draconian measures. Effectively, what began as a rallying cry to ‘protect the vulnerable’, culminated in policies that effectively threw them under the bus. Instructively, suicide statistics and missed diagnoses, for the Covid period have yet to be released.
After speaking the truth as he saw it, Dr Waters was rapidly investigated, tried, and subsequently suspended from the medical register; deprived of a livelihood and compelled (it would seem) to live out the remainder of his days in ignominy.
I am somewhat pleased that I managed to avoid administering this genetic vaccine. I contend to this day that many or most GPs in Ireland haven’t the faintest clue as to what a genetic vaccine actually is, never mind how they work and what are the potential risks involved. Unlike Dr Waters I took the less courageous step of simply resigning my post, before vaccinations became part of public policy.
For a time, I had been able to separate my practice of medicine from my convictions. Indeed, I have been doing that for years. I suspect most doctors operate with this contradiction most days, at least when we write prescriptions for medicines that many people don’t require.
At the start of the pandemic in 2020 I could work within the guidelines; refer for testing; visit my nursing home; wear a silly mask in the supermarket. As long as I showed that I was formally participating in the farce, I was relatively safe from the regulator.
However soon after resigning, they placed me under investigation, although they could find nothing to hang me with; except my opinion, contradicting NPHET and Professor Luke O’Neill, and a vocal stance in respect of the nursing home dead.
A lot of people, including many of my former patients were unhappy to see me closing the practice. Yet, regardless of my practical adherence to policy, my position as an advocate of only vaccinating the vulnerable, became untenable.
Every week I would hear from nurses, teachers, students and employees who were being threatened with dismissal unless they received the vaccine. I have never witnessed such a blatant assault on human rights. I shudder to this day when I recall how so many people were coerced and intimidated by the government, and by members of my profession.
Formal resignation from the HSE was my only option, as long as I wished to continue working as a GP. Private GPs are not contractually obligated to vaccinate anyone. I could manage by doing private work for a friend, and out of hours work at an on-call centre.
I am somewhat alarmed by the fact that this article of mine was published several months ago.. it's been fact checked by friends and enemies alike and as yet I have not received a single contradiction or criticism.https://t.co/qaNltNw45M
To state that the IMC was satisfied with silencing whistle-blowers or making an example of Dr Waters would be a gross understatement. Almost every doctor in Ireland who refuted policy and did not resign from their post, was either fired or placed under investigation.
Thus, Martin Feely a respected surgeon and clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, was forced to resign; Dr Pat Morrisey a principled and dedicated GP in Adare was both fired from the board of Shannon Doc, and placed under ongoing investigation by the Medical Council.
Offending doctors received written warnings from the then President of the Council, and others were placed under investigation for failing in their new duty to: ‘promote public health guidelines.’
One legacy of our colonial administration is a very efficient tax system, another is the efficient censorship of heretical opinions.
After two years as a member of the IMC I am entirely convinced that it is neither fit for purpose, nor does it have a practical leg to stand on when it comes to regulation. For the most part it makes its own work as it presides over a ‘General Register’ with little or no regulation at all.
Thus, untrained specialists are invited to come to Ireland from almost anywhere in Europe, and practice wherever and however they see fit, without specialist training; a situation that supplies regional and rural hospitals with ‘affordable’ specialists.
The public must suck up the consequences and the IMC keeps itself busy with the inevitable mistakes and complaints. For unqualified and untrained specialists, the back door into Ireland is through the front door of the IMC.
The most difficult consequence for a doctor who is placed under investigation by the IMC is without a doubt the process of investigation itself. I recognise this as a ‘gamekeeper who has turned poacher’. Much of my time at the IMC was spent on the Council’s Preliminary Complaints Committee, tasked with conducting the initial investigation into complaints against doctors.
Once entangled in the Kafkaesque web of a formal inquiry, there is no escape until the investigation is completed. In many cases this takes several years. Formal letters are sent back and forth, requesting clarifications and further information, which must be formally replied to.
One cannot leave the country to work or volunteer abroad. One cannot easily change job, as any new or prospective employers must be informed that an investigation is ongoing. One’s professional life is essentially frozen beneath a question-mark.
Doctors who were openly critical of the Covid response, have been under investigation for over two years now. The IMC has chosen (with the notable exception of Dr Waters) to prolong these dissections for as long as possible.
It seems that what is important for both the government and the Council is that doctors critical of policy should remain under investigation for as long as possible. Anything he or she might say or do, any comment made whilst under investigation, can readily become part of the investigation itself.
Moreover, to refuse to engage fully with an investigation, to refuse to reply to the regular formal correspondence, is itself grounds for an immediate suspension.
The absurd basis of the investigation into me, is that I made an appearance at a public demonstration in 2020 and ‘may not have sanitised my hands between hand-shakes.’
To my knowledge, all of the GPs under investigation are locked into the process based on equally frivolous grounds. The pretext for investigation is unimportant, the investigations are sufficiently punitive and sufficiently censorious, hence their protracted duration.
Perhaps the main reason for my now coming out of ‘hiding’, to tap impotently upon my keyboard, has been recent correspondence from the IMC. Some doctors have recently been informed that the investigations will now proceed to the next level of ‘formal hearings.’
After the IMC has finished its investigation process, it can then decide either to close the case, or proceed to a full Fitness to Practice Hearing. In this instance the doctor in question must appear before the Council’s court room, and plead a case for their continued right to earn a living. As these cases relate to a doctor’s opinion rather than any clinical practice, medical insurers have declined to pay for legal representation, and the doctor must pay for his own legal counsel.
There is a rich irony here, in that most if not all of the doctors under investigation, have themselves lodged formal complaints with the IMC in respect of registered doctors on NPHET, for ‘unscientific policies’ or financial conflicts of interest.
For example, several Doctors have lodged complaints against the President of the Irish College of General Practitioners in respect of his openly encouraging medical discrimination against non-vaccinated patients.
Also, at the height of the pandemic, Leo Varadkar re-registered as a doctor, helping to ‘man the phones’ and visit halting sites to test the Travelling Community. It was all a rather vulgar PR stunt lapped up by the media with a relish normally reserved for freshly baked cake.
However, when Dr Varadkar re-registered he became open to complaints to the IMC, along with Dr Holohan, and several other key policymakers. Without exception, not one of these complaints have been investigated. Instead, it is the doctors who lodged them who find themselves under ongoing investigations.
At a point when Leo Varadkar was found to have been leaking sensitive and lucrative contract details to a friend in General Practice, the then President of the Medical Council was busy issuing written warnings to fellow GPs that they had an ethical duty ‘promote government policy’.
Some doctors in Ireland felt a moral and scientific obligation to understand how Covid vaccines work prior to administering them. Many advocated caution, particularly in respect of pregnancy and young healthy children.
My friend in Wexford is one example. A respected GP, a man of science and integrity, he vaccinated all of his elderly and vulnerable patients in keeping with HSE guidelines, but when it came to pregnant women and healthy young children he called for caution.
He reminded colleagues of their ethical obligation to ‘first do no harm’, and made no secret of his concerns and fears. In doing so he stepped outside of the public health policy, and into the crosshairs of the IMC.
Each IMC investigation and each insulting article in the media, along with the invective and scorn that is heaped on contrarians from within the profession itself, comes at a cost. In his case, a deep personal cost.
The most painful barbs are the ones that are cast into one’s private life. Spouses and children are no less attached to a doctor than they are attached to any husband or wife. Even with the best will in the world no doctor can keep the ramifications of an investigation from creeping into the most intimate spaces.
Those who objected to Covid policies are treated to daily realities that are small thorns: a neighbour looking at you with scorn; former friends crossing to the other side of the street; wives or children being subjected to insult or abuse simply because they are related to the newly christened ‘right-wing’ or ‘anti-vaxx’ doctor.
My friend in Wexford tried hard to toe the line whilst preserving his integrity and an uncompromising commitment to the welfare of his patients. He has a family and bills to pay. Full resignation from the HSE is not a financial option for all. He tried to work within the guidelines, whilst at the same time urging caution. He continued to work, for the sake of his patients, his family, to pay his mortgage, and help his daughters get through college.
Were he on his own and without dependants he (and probably me) might have stood tall and offered the Medical Council the two fingered salute, as Gerry Waters had courageously done.
He (like me), tried desperately for a time to justify his position to our profession, to our colleagues, with articles, references, papers from the most esteemed of Medical Journals etc. He pointed to the lack of safety data on the vaccine during pregnancy and in children. It was to no avail. His position was akin to a lamb trying to convince a pack of wolves of the virtues of vegetarianism.
Nonetheless, he defended his position upon an internet forum exclusive to GPs; and despite my words of caution, they tore him to pieces.
A couple of months ago, my brave friend found himself parked in a lonely spot in Wexford. When the authorities located him, he had taken enough pills to silence the wolves forever.
After two weeks in intensive care and a return from near death, he returned home to count his blessings, recover from his ordeal, and begin a life-long process of recovery.
As a member of the IMC I was always intrigued at the efficacy and authority that a wealthy quango can wield. There is a sense of limitless power within the inner circle – reminiscent of a well-funded Big House – with a special relationship with the Minister.
At the IMC there is a department devoted to briefing and monitoring the press for issues that relate to the medical profession. Before each Council meeting a member of this office addresses the Council with a summary of what is happening in the media. It runs a little bit like “…and now what it says in the papers.”
I mention this to highlight that my friend, the Wexford GP, his near death, and the harrowing experience of his family and many of his patients, was highlighted in the national papers and the local press. Having gone missing for some days, news of his disappearance was reported in the national media.
There can be no doubt that the Medical Council was well-briefed about his ordeal. Yet within a week or two of his discharge from hospital he (and by proxy his family) received his letter from the IMC, informing him that he has been placed under formal investigation for his failure to promote Covid vaccination policy. He now faces an impending fitness to practice hearing, whereupon it will be decided if he too will be deprived of an ability to earn a living.
In its role as Grand Inquisitor, the Medical Council has destroyed the professional lives of many doctors, before, during and after Covid.
In my view, Irish Medicine is as rotten as any pathology it might pretend to address. This is a rot reflecting a wider rot in our political system. Perhaps it extends deep into the zeitgeist itself.
There is much to address in Irish medicine including inter alia our current mental health crisis, polypharmacy, corruption within the medical schools, defective specialist training schemes, deaths in nursing homes, relationship between pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, tensions between the public and private health sectors, and a general lack of regulation, but none of these seem to be of any concern to the IMC.
When the dust settled at the end of our last national crisis, the banking regulator was ultimately recognised as being guilty of catastrophic failures in respect of its duties and obligations. I suspect that if science is ever liberated from special interests, and media is free from a particular type of agenda, history will be seen to have repeated itself yet again.
Our teetering or collapsing system of medical care in Ireland is equally the consequence of an incompetent, and morally bankrupt, regulator. As usual, there is no one to ‘police the police’, only a fickle public opinion, and a Minister who is as much dependent on the regulator as they are answerable to him.
As a post-colonial society, and in the ‘spirit’ of our times, we tip the cap, with the same deference as ever to the ‘Big House’.
Editor’s Note: Having previously published Vaccination: A Matter of Trust with Caveats, we now anticipate objections from some readers to an article that may provoke vaccine hesitancy, at a point when rapid rollout to the entire adult population is widely touted as the only path out of interminable lockdowns. The author of this article, Dr. Marcus de Brun, however, is a medical doctor, and prior to his resignation last year– in protest against the government’s handling of the pandemic – a member of the Irish Medical Council. He also holds a first class degree in microbiology from TCD. Thus, we believe it is incumbent on Cassandra Voices as ‘a home for independent voices to inspire new thinking’ to provide this platform for him to articulate fully a public stance that he would not vaccinate a healthy person with any of the four vaccines currently on offer in Ireland. All the more so in a period of crisis, we maintain it is vital to give space to informed arguments that go against the grain. We invite comment and/or rebuttal, and ask if you appreciate this article that you offer a contribution to this publication, either through signing up with us on Patreon or through a single donation Buy Me A Coffee.
Having recently stated publicly that I would ‘not administer a genetic-vaccine to a healthy animal, never mind a ‘healthy human being,’ I have been asked by friends (and foes) to clarify this statement, and will attempt to do so here.
Speaking as a qualified Microbiologist, l would NOT administer an mRNA vaccine to a healthy animal, never mind a healthy human being.
At present, vaccines produced by four companies (Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson) are available on the European market. All four are ‘genetic vaccines’ in that they are composed of synthetic DNA or RNA that is contained within a membrane or shell. In construction and appearance the vaccine is very similar to the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the coronavirus disease known as Covid-19. The vaccine gains entry to human cells by a process that is almost identical to the manner by which a virus generally gains access to host cells. This process is called ‘transfection’.
Each of these vaccines work by introducing either DNA or RNA into host cells. The genetic material then instructs host cells to make a piece of the coronavirus (the spike protein) that is then released into the blood stream or tissues. There, the spike protein will trigger an immune response. Following this immune response, the vaccinated individual will retain some immunity; they will have antibodies and white cells that can now recognise Covid-19 and attack it before it has a chance to cause a serious infection.
The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are DNA vaccines,[i] which transfect DNA into the Nucleus of host cells. The Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines are RNA vaccines, these transfect their RNA into the cytoplasm of host cells. The difference will be explained later; however, the initial process is the same: human cells take up synthetic viral genes, those genes then direct those cells to begin manufacturing the spike-protein of Covid-19. The cells will then release the nascent spike-protein into the bloodstream or tissues, where it will then function as a ‘traditional vaccine.’
In essence, the distinction between genetic-vaccines and ‘traditional vaccines’ is that the latter would involve a person being injected with killed or inactive virus or spike-protein, which would then cause our immune systems to mount a response. Each of these novel genetic-vaccines however, insert genetic material into human cells. These synthetic genes then ‘hijack’ those cells or ‘convert’ them to manufacture and release the spike-protein. With a genetic vaccine, pharma does not make the vaccine, our own cells are programmed to do the work instead, a process entirely different from that of a ‘traditional vaccine’.
Out with the Old…
For the first time in my medical career of some twenty years, I am presented with the apparent necessity of vaccinating young healthy people with experimental vaccines, against a disease for which they have little or no risk of suffering life-threatening,[ii] or even serious long-term[iii] illness. The vast majority of ‘vulnerable’ people to whom they might pass Covid-19 have already been either vaccinated or been exposed to the virus.[iv]
I have an article today in @statnews making the case that we need to start thinking more critically, and speaking more cautiously, about “Long COVID.” https://t.co/WCGxyxKe37
In Ireland according to our Central Statistics Office, during the past 12 months up to the end of January 2021; amongst the entire population of 1-24yr olds, there have been 55,565 PCR confirmed cases of Covid-19. Out of those cases, there has not been a single death recorded; from, by, or associated with Covid-19.[v] It has been reported that a single Covid-related death in this cohort (1-24yrs) did occur in February of this year. However, this has yet to appear in the figures published by the CSO.
Young nurses, medical staff, care workers, are being pressured into taking a vaccine they probably don’t need themselves, despite residents under their care having been almost all vaccinated already. Now Covid-19 genetic-vaccines are being tested upon children as young as six months old.[vi]
We are where we are today because of the GREATEST Political and Scientific Blunders in History!
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A Scarcity of Serious Questions? Or a Scarcity of Serious Media?
The justification for many, if not most, policies during this crisis has largely been based on ‘mortality data’. In contrast, Swedish authorities have enforced relatively few restrictions, nor made masks mandatory. In Ireland, the CSO indicate that 92% of all Covid-related deaths have occurred in those over 65 years of age.[vii]
In Sweden that cohort of their population is 3.17 times greater Ireland’s. Thus, if we roughly compare the Swedish mortality total (at the time of writing) of 13,262, to the Irish total of 4588, and if we then multiply the Irish mortality total by 3.17, we arrive at a figure of 14,544, which is significantly higher than the comparable Swedish total.
We are crudely, but reasonably, comparing ‘like with like’ to reveal glaring potential problems with our own relatively draconian Covid policies. When compared with Sweden, our own version of lockdown seems to have had no benefit in terms of preventing mortality. It might not be unreasonable to assert that our stricter policies may have contributed to a relatively higher mortality. Yet, perhaps the biggest question here is: why are there so few questions being posed in the media in respect of the efficacy of masks, lockdowns or vaccination policies?
On the rare occasion questions are raised in our national media, it as if an ‘anti-vaxxer’, ‘right-wing loon’, or political extremist is trying to gate crash what might otherwise be a rather sedate and respectable party.
Pro-Vaxxer
In the good old days before Covid, in Ireland, and around the world, we only vaccinated those who were vulnerable to, or at risk from a specific disease. We still vaccinate children against an array of illnesses that adults have not been, and are not routinely vaccinated against; Rotavirus and Meningitis B are but two obvious examples. Adults are equally susceptible to infection by either, but they are not as vulnerable to serious illness, and so are not vaccinated. Previously, we only ever vaccinated the vulnerable and those at risk; recently, however, that good science and common sense has been turned on its head.
It is suggested that we should vaccinate young healthy people who have little if anything to fear from Covid-19. A paediatric genetic-vaccine is expected to be available later this year. It is argued that even though children are generally not susceptible to serious disease, they should be vaccinated in order to protect the vulnerable and achieve ‘herd-immunity.’ In the meantime, the vulnerable have in large part already been either been vaccinated already, exposed or sadly passed away.
If getting the disease does not give immunity, how do you think that a vaccine that makes the same spike protein as the virus makes will give immunity?
If getting the disease does not give immunity, how do you think that a vaccine that makes the same spike protein as the virus makes will give immunity? https://t.co/UGlSeE8LhW
Between March and June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years[ix] We have clearly lost sight of whom we are trying to protect, and what we are trying to protect them from. Presently we have a national obsession with conformity, and an ostensible adherence to guidelines. Despite empirical truths, and substantial contrary evidence, we are being corralled into what increasingly appears to be a specific belief-system surrounding Covid-19, and its threat to the entire population.
Those who have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) will be familiar with the threats issued to the hapless animals: ‘Jones the farmer will return, and destroy all of your good work!’ In contemporary parlance, he will return with ‘Long Covid,’[x] and frightening ‘New Variants’ with him.
Politicians have applied policies that are in keeping with this notion of ‘universal severity’ in response to a virus where 86% of those infected did not have virus symptoms, such as cough, fever, and loss of taste or smell., according to a UK study from October.[xi] Many of our Covid policies arrive with the benefit of preserving established governments from demonstrations and assemblies calling for policy revisions and or enquiries.
My own calls for a public enquiry into nursing home deaths, or my pleas on behalf of common sense and natural science, are at best ignored by media. As are those of colleagues who feel and believe as I do, including Limerick GP Dr. Pat Morrissey, and Wexford GP Dr Gerry Waters, who was recently suspended by the Medical Council for refusing to adhere to and promote current public health guidance. Others who have openly spoken out against current policies have been subjected to investigation by the Medical Council, and ongoing vilification by many of our peers. Speaking out returns precious few short term dividends.
Throughout much of Europe since the outset of the crisis, governments, like our own, are presently controlled by proxy scientific-panels or unelected expert committees. Governments claim to be simply ‘following their scientists advice,’ whilst the scientists insist that they are merely informing the government and not directing government policy. In this apparently blameless political ‘no man’s land’, the stage is perfectly set for blameless political atrocities.
War of the Words: ‘Genetic vs ‘Traditional’
Many scientists and physicians prefer to describe most Covid-19 vaccines as ‘gene therapy’. It is a phrase that no doubt serves as much to antagonise proponents, as it does to inform them. However, it is as good a place as anywhere to start.
Genetic vaccines are certainly not ‘traditional’ vaccines. The licence for their use against Covid-19 throughout Europe was granted under emergency legislation that permits manufacturers to skip phase 4 safety trials that would have otherwise delayed their distribution. Advocates insist that skipping this final phase was absolutely necessary to resolve the current crisis.
There is much to this argument, and we will not dive into it here. However, one point should be made. There are at least two off-patent (cheap and safe) drugs, Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, that may be effective in treating Covid-19. These drugs are not, however, licensed for use in treating Covid in many Western countries, (particularly the wealthier ones who can afford the novel vaccines).
If either, or both, drugs had been licensed, this might have proved an obstacle to the granting of emergency use licences for Covid-19 vaccines. The reason for this is that grounds for emergency licensing of genetic-vaccines are substantially reinforced, as long as there are no other pharmacological treatments available at the time.
Edward Jenner (1749-1823)
A Traditional ‘Vaccine’
In China the practice of inoculation against diseases such as smallpox was established as far back as 200 BC.[xii] It is likely that traditional medicine, tribesmen and ancient civilisations used, or at least inadvertently ‘knew’ something of the benefits of limited exposure to a disease, in order to establish some degree of immunity.
Our own modern era of the ‘traditional’ vaccine begins when Edward Jenner (1749-1823) noticed that milkmaids appeared to be relatively immune to smallpox, a viral illness that was, in Jenner’s day, responsible for widespread suffering and death.
Jenner observed that something was being transmitted from the cows to the milkmaids, effectively protecting them against smallpox. Cows contract cowpox. It’s not the same disease as smallpox, but as the respective viruses are so similar, whenever the hands of a milkmaid came into contact with a blister or pox on the udder of a cow infected with cow-pox; the milkmaid would be exposed to this very similar virus.
In these instances the cowpox virus or ‘pieces’ of it, would enter the milkmaid’s blood stream through a cut or minor abrasion on her hands. The virus would be identified by her immune system as a ‘pathogen’ or disease-causing agent. White cells would attack the cowpox virus, causing it to break apart. Those same white cells would manufacture antibodies; little Y-shaped proteins that will stick to surface-proteins on the virus, and cause it to be directly destroyed, or recognised by other white cells that will mobilise to destroy it.
All of this complex immunology would of course be occurring within the milkmaid’s blood, whilst she happily milked her cows. She might notice a slight blister, a little pus, or minor swelling around one of the abrasions on her overworked hands. The slight redness might be ignored, and would inevitably fade away. However this localised reaction would have heralded exposure to cowpox. The cowpox antibodies would then persist in her blood, remaining attached to the surface of many of her circulating white blood cells; protecting her or “vaccinating” her against small-pox.
If the milkmaid should later come into contact with smallpox, those newly formed cowpox antibodies would be ready to mount an early and more efficient immune response. Her antibodies to the cowpox virus could attach to the smallpox virus, recruit other white cells – killer t-cells etc – onto the scene, and mount a pre-emptive response. This would be fast enough to eradicate the smallpox infection before it had an opportunity to spread and cause severe illness or death. It was Jenner’s genius that ultimately brought this reality to light.
Jenner collected some of the pus that oozed from the udders of cows infected with cowpox. He swirled it about in a drop of water, placed it in a glass vial and then offered it to the world as the prevention for small-pox. Half a century later Louis Pasteur coined the phrase ‘vaccination’ after vacca, the Latin for cow. The paradigm in respect of human medicine and public health had shifted forever.
Louis Pasteur.
Perhaps the real hero of the vaccination story was an eight-year-old boy by the name of James Phipps, the son of Jenner’s gardener. On May 14th 1796, Jenner made a small incision into James’s arm, and rubbed in a drop of his magical ‘pus-paste’, making little James the first to be given a vaccine in the modern sense.
Thankfully, little James proved immune to the various small-pox ‘exposures’ and challenges that Jenner then came up with. At the time small-pox was responsible for almost 10% of annual deaths in England. Jenner sent his results in a paper to the Royal Society for publication, but his paper was ignored.
Having had the audacity to suggest pus from an infected cow’s udder, as a cure for smallpox, Jenner was at first dismissed as an eccentric by his peers. Yet, rather than disappearing into obscurity, he persisted. He vaccinated a further twenty-three people, and having seen little James survive, he even included his own eleven-month old son Robert, in this first ever vaccine trial.
At that stage the medical establishment found it impossible to ignore his findings, which soon attracted widespread interest amongst the medical fraternity. However, it was not until 1840, some forty-four-years after his first attempt to publish his results, that the British Government began offering Jenner’s vaccination, free of charge, to the general public.
The same but different
Since Jenner’s day, ‘traditional vaccines’ have functioned in precisely the same way. Pharmaceutical companies take a virus or bacterium, they break it up, kill it, or leave it intact but render it weaker or ineffective ‘the same but different.’ They then take the bug (or pieces of the bug), swish them around in a little drop of water, add in a few elements that act as preservatives and immune-stimulants; then we doctors inject those pieces into people, thereby preventing many from succumbing to various infective diseases. The vaccination exposes us to a bug or pieces of a bug causing our immune system to generate antibodies and white blood cells that will persist in our circulation and be ready to launch a pre-emptive strike against the bug or a similar bug if it is encountered again: we have, in essence, become immune.
So what is different about genetic-vaccines? Well here’s where the story becomes a little nuanced. Let’s try to put it in terms we might relate to.
To begin with we must remind ourselves that: all living things are composed of cells, which is perhaps the most basic tenet of biology.
Image of a recreated 1918 influenza virus.
Viruses are not considered ‘living things’, because they are not ‘cells’ and neither are they made up of cells. They are formally referred to as ‘obligate intracellular parasites.’ They only become ‘alive;’ and can only replicate, after entering host cells, at which point they replicate or multiply within host cells. Once inside a cell the virus hijacks the cell’s own processes for making things that the cell needs for itself. The infected cell then becomes a virus factory, it swells with new virus particles, until it bursts, dies, and releases its payload of new virions into the bloodstream, or fluid outside of the cell membrane.
It is only when a virus is outside the cell, within the blood stream or tissues, that it might be recognised by white cells or antibodies, and become the subject of an immune response. When a virus is inside one of our cells, there are some discrete ways this cell can let other cells know that it has become infected; there are means by which the immune system detects that one of our own cells has a virus inside it. However, these are comparatively slow, indefinite and uncertain processes and will not be discussed here. The major and most important way the immune system clears viruses is by getting at them before they get inside our cells.
Once a virus is inside a cell, for the most part, it is hidden from the immune system. This point will be crucial to understanding the distinction between a genetic vaccine, and a traditional vaccine.
All Cells Look a Little, or a Lot, Like a Fried Egg:
Under a microscope, all cells appear a little like fried eggs. Almost all of them have the same basic plan, the yellow yolk being the nucleus; the white of the egg, the ‘cytoplasm;’ and the outer margin of the fried egg (the crispy brown edge) being the ‘cell membrane’ or wall surrounding the cell. To learn the basics of how genetic vaccines work, we need only refer to this analogy, but we must understand our ‘egg’ a little better before we put the toast on.
The yellow yolk, or nucleus, contains all of our DNA. To understand what DNA looks like, imagine your fly, not the one buzzing at the window, but the zip on your trousers. It is composed of two sides or strands that are linked together when your zipper is up, and separated when your zipper is down.
DNA is like an extremely long length of closed zip. Imagine this super long ‘zip’ coiled into individual space-saving packages, like neat balls of wool. Each of these little packages is called a chromosome and (with the exception of sperm cells and egg cells) the nucleus of each of our cells contains forty-six of these little balls of wool; twenty-three from mum, and twenty-three from dad.
All forty-six are packed into the nucleus, the yellow yolk of our analogous egg. When we, or one of our cells, needs something; a protein, a hormone, a replacement part etc., the information to make what the cell needs (the recipe for all of life’s necessities) is coded for in that length of closed zip, our DNA.
Each of the ‘teeth’ along the length of the zip strands, represent a single letter of the genetic code. An entire message may contain many letters, or teeth, along a specific length or piece of the zip. The lengths of zip that contain messages (or recipes) are called our ‘genes.’
The ‘message’ within a gene is like a recipe in a cookbook. It contains a coded instruction for how to make the protein, enzyme etc., or whatever it is that the cell wants or needs. The DNA code is in the nucleus, and the basic ingredients are located in the cytoplasm, and it is in the cytoplasm (the egg-white) where the item required is assembled and manufactured. The raw materials for manufacture get into the cytoplasm, when they are absorbed across the cell membrane (the crispy brown bit at the edge of our fried egg). These raw materials are the amino-acids, sugars and vitamins etc., that we receive in our diet.
To kick off the process, when a cell needs to make something, a signal is sent from the white of the egg (the cytoplasm) into the nucleus. That signal makes its way to the ball of wool or chromosome that contains the particular recipe, or code for the ingredients that will make up whatever is needed by the cell. When the signal reaches the chromosome containing the particular recipe or gene, the ball of wool is loosened slightly, and a relatively small length of closed zip (or DNA containing that recipe), is unzipped. One side of the opened zip is then copied into a piece of mRNA.
That copy of one side of the unzipped zip is called messenger RNA. In most textbooks it (the mRNA) looks exactly as I have described it: a single side of a zip. This messenger RNA then exits through pores in the nucleus. It enters the white of the egg, where this mRNA ‘recipe’ is then read or translated, and whatever it is the cell needs can now be manufactured within the cytoplasm or the white of the egg.
The Ribosome
When the strand of messenger RNA leaves the nucleus and enters the cytoplasm it is immediately found by a fascinating little cytoplasmic protein called a ‘ribosome’. The ribosome attaches to the mRNA. It then slides along this single strand of zip, and as it does so, ‘reads’ the code, and then makes a little strand, like a bead of pearls (a polypeptide). That strand of polypeptide then curls and folds itself into a little ball or blob; and this little blob of protein, is the very thing that the cell was looking for in the first place.
It might be a structural protein, an enzyme, a building block, a replacement part, or whatever. When the ribosome slides along the piece of mRNA it makes this new little string that will ultimately fold upon itself to become the required product. This wonderful orchestral process is as ancient as life itself and is called ‘translation.’
It is one of the rare occasions when jargon makes sense, for the little piece of mRNA, has indeed been ‘translated’ into a protein or ‘final product’ by the ribosome. The cell has now manufactured the thing that it needs, and after a few translations, the mRNA then degrades. No more ribosomes can attach to it, and no further product can be manufactured from it. If the cell wants another product it must send another message into the nucleus and call for another mRNA copy to be made in the nucleus and sent into the cytoplasm. It is a beautifully organised process, integral not simply to human life but to all life on the planet.
How Does a Genetic-Vaccine Work?
If you got all of that, you have grasped some of the fundamentals of cell biology and we are now able to ask: how does a genetic vaccine work?
Most of us have seen an image or an artist’s impression of what a coronavirus looks like. A little ball, covered in spikes, like a medieval weapon swung from the end of a chain. Inside this little ball are the virus’s own genes. These genes are in the form of strands of RNA; the same type of RNA that is made in the nucleus of our cells, and sent into the cytoplasm for the manufacture of all ‘things’ that the cell needs.
SARS-CoV-2
The main difference between the RNA strands within a coronavirus, and those that naturally emerge from the nucleus of our own cells, is that coronavirus RNA does not code for ‘things’ that our cells might need. On the contrary, it codes for pieces that make up the coronavirus itself.
When a coronavirus binds to the outside of one of the cells in our respiratory tract, it releases its RNA into those cells – into the white of the egg – and there, instead of making proteins that are needed by our cells, our ribosomes attach to their viral RNA and begin to manufacture (or translate) proteins that make up the physical structure of the virus. The host cell has now becomes a virus-making factory; the cytoplasm swells with viral particles; the cell bursts, and thousands of new viruses (virions) are released into the bloodstream, or the fluid that lies outside of the cell membrane.
A genetic vaccine looks like, and functions, in almost exactly the same manner as the coronavirus itself. If a genetic vaccine could be visualised, it would look like a little sphere that encapsulates a piece of viral RNA or DNA (depending on which of the four vaccines we are considering). The role of the sphere is to protect the RNA or DNA inside the vaccine, and, most importantly, to bind it to human cells in a manner that will allow the piece of RNA or DNA to enter host cells at the site where the ‘vaccine’ is injected.
For an RNA containing vaccine (Pfizer & Moderna) once the vaccine RNA gets inside our cells, our ribosomes attach and translate the RNA into a piece of the virus (one of the spike proteins). The host cell will then swell with spike proteins, and release them into the blood stream or body fluids outside the cell. There, the spike-protein will trigger the same immune response that Jenner and the traditional vaccines make use of.
For DNA vaccines (Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca) the vaccine-DNA makes its way into the nucleus of our cells where it begins working (and is treated the same as our own DNA). It is copied into a piece of mRNA that will then travel into the cytoplasm and be translated by ribosomes into spike-proteins. Because genetic vaccines cannot infect cells, the process whereby a genetic-vaccine enters host cells is referred to as ‘transfection’.
It is only after the transfected host cell releases spike-protein into the blood stream that our genetic-vaccine begins working in the ‘traditional’ way. In reality, it is the cellular process for the manufacture of things which has been hijacked, and the ‘traditional vaccine’ is being made inside one’s own cells. The ‘vaccine’ is released into our blood stream in the same way that a cell infected with a virus releases new virus into the blood stream or tissues.
The final result might be the same, however, where a genetic-vaccine is different is in its mechanism it operates inside cells at a level of intimacy that Jenner could never have imagined. Because DNA vaccines enter the nucleus of our cells, and are treated as our own DNA, they come with a risk of damaging our own DNA, causing mutations, including, potentially, cancer. The potential is indeed an established fact. It is no less established than the fact that there is a link between smoking and cancer.
Consider when a piece of synthetic DNA comes within intimate proximity of a relatively enormous coiled ball of DNA that is dynamically unwinding and unravelling in response to the daily activities of the cell. Is there a chance that this relatively small piece of synthetic DNA might become incorporated into or interfere with the normal function of our own DNA? Before Covid, the answer was an emphatic yes. However of late, the mere suggestion will undoubtedly be treated as something of a ‘conspiracy theory’.
It is for this and other reasons that genetic-vaccines have not been previously licensed for use in humans prior to the current crisis. Thus, a 2013 paper[xiii]published in Germs, the respected Journal of Infectious Diseases lists the established disadvantages of DNA vaccines.
Of the 4 Genetic Vaccines currently available, 2 are RNA based (Pfizer/Moderna), & 2 are DNA based (AstraZen/J&J). Here's what non-bias (pre-covid) Science, states about the disadvantages of DNA Vaccines:
Very limited forms of gene therapy are available in the treatment of terminal cancers. However, pharmaceutical companies have not been able to market this form of medicine, outside of the laboratory, on human populations.[xiv] A cynic might reasonably argue that companies are exploiting the current crisis in order to expedite safety trials and open the market for ‘gene-therapy’.
There is nothing new here, this type of therapy, whereby patients are administered the gene for a missing or desired product, has been in development for several decades. The major difficulty for pharmaceutical companies has been how to get it out of the laboratory and past the paralysis of safety trials. It is certainly easy to see that if our cells are programmed to make and release spike-proteins, they can also be programmed to release other kinds of proteins, drugs and potential therapies directly into the human blood stream or tissues.[xv] Getting this type of therapy past regulators, and avoiding meaningful debate, has, (for better or worse), clearly been accomplished within the context of the current crisis.
From a simple economic perspective, if human cells can be programmed to take on the role of manufacturing the ‘drug’, numerous difficulties in respect of production, costs, delivery, and even safety trials, are relatively easily overcome. The paradigm shift that resulted from Jenner’s development of vaccination could pale into insignificance compared to the potential game changer of genetic-vaccine.
If, indeed, these vaccines are going to protect people from Covid-19, and they come with the added benefit of paving the way for novel therapies, why are people like me getting our proverbial knickers in a twist?
Again the answer is not that complicated. The cellular process of ‘translation’ that is being ‘hijacked’ by the relevant pharmaceutical companies, does not belong to them, to our respiratory cells, or even human cells. As mentioned already, it is a process that belongs to ALL cells, in ALL species. In essence it ‘belongs’ to all living things in Nature.
If anything happens to go wrong, the consequences are not limited to human beings, as the process being ‘hijacked’ is not exclusive to us. It ‘belongs’ to all life on Earth. The consequence of error, may extend further than a little nausea or swelling at the injection site.[xvi] Potential consequences extend to all cells that utilize the same process, and come in contact with the manufactured DNA or RNA.
DNA or RNA? Red or White?
Whilst the potential for either of the two available DNA vaccines to integrate into, or damage, human DNA is well established; there is an argument being made that this cannot possibly occur with the two available RNA vaccines.
Generally speaking within our cells once RNA is copied or made in the nucleus it moves into the cytoplasm. It does not travel backwards. RNA does not move back inside the nucleus and incorporate into our DNA. However, the key words here are: ‘generally speaking.’
Nature (generally speaking) blocks this possibility because the copied RNA that exits the nucleus, is different to DNA. It is an RNA copy of the DNA, the RNA cannot bind or interact with DNA. In the first instance RNA is a single stranded copy of one side of the zip. In the second instance the ‘teeth’ on the newly copied RNA are slightly different. They are tweaked with a sugar molecule called ribose, they are ‘ribosylated’ and therefore cannot readily recombine with DNA. (The ‘R’ in RNA simply means Ribosylated Nucleic Acid.)
The RNA does indeed code for the same message that is contained within the DNA, but the teeth, or the letters of the RNA code, are slightly different. RNA does not travel backwards and interfere with DNA. Generally speaking they are incompatible, and cannot interfere with each other. Therefore, when the vaccine makers insist that the pieces of RNA that they have transfected into our cells do not interact with our DNA; well, they aren’t spoofing. It doesn’t normally happen that RNA interferes with DNA.
So that’s what it says on the tin. However, there are two points that must be considered before we take this claim at face value. The first is a question of ‘precedence’ and the second is a question of scale.
Does it happen in humans and in Nature that RNA can travel backwards into the nucleus and interfere with or incorporate into DNA? The simple answer to this question is a definite yes! RNA can and does travel backwards to incorporate itself into our DNA. This retrograde move, (where RNA sequences become incorporated into DNA) is called reverse-transcription. The reason for the use of ‘retro’ in the word retrovirus, is because retroviruses, and many other viruses, make use of reverse-transcription, converting RNA into DNA that will then integrate into our own DNA.
HIV and HTLV (a human virus that causes t-cell leukaemia) are examples of viral infections, where RNA is converted backwards into DNA which then ‘interferes’ with our own DNA inside the nucleus of our cells. These viruses contain RNA, and they also carry an enzyme called ‘reverse transcriptase’. This enzyme converts RNA backwards into DNA. Retroviruses and other viruses (such as Hepatitis B) introduce the reverse-transcriptase enzyme into our cells when they infect them.[xvii] Furthermore, our own cells normally produce and use this enzyme (reverse transcriptase) inside the nucleus, where it has some ‘house-keeping’ roles in maintaining our own DNA.[xviii]
Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that within the human genome some 8% of our DNA is composed of DNA that was originally viral RNA. Infections with RNA viruses whose genes have since become permanently incorporated into our own DNA. These sequences are called ‘Human Endogenous Retroviral Sequences’ or HERVS.[xix] Many of them persist within our genome because they may code for proteins or things that are likely to be of some benefit to us; genes brought into our genome from outside the cell, via the natural, dynamic interaction between viruses, retroviruses and human DNA.
Many more of these endogenous retroviral (originally RNA) sequences are mysteriously redundant, and science is yet to learn of their function in sickness or in health. The fact remains that they are present; been present for countless millennia; may be integral to our evolution as a species; and are certainly with us ‘until death do us part.’ They should serve to remind us that there is a long established history of communication between viral and human genetics; an interaction that we should attempt to understand before it is blindly manipulated.
Interconnectedness
Too often viruses are portrayed as static structures, distinct from our own genetic material and distinct from one another. This is quite simply a rather primitive concept, the same kind of thinking that removes human beings and the consequence of our actions from Nature. It is part of the reason we remain largely incapable of seeing and appreciating the vast web of interconnectedness that dependently joins us to whales, rain forests, and even viruses.
We depend upon viruses for our genetics, as we depend upon yeast for our beer. Often viruses depend upon each other to cause infection. In certain instances, if a particular virus is missing something, a part or component (without which it is defective or deficient), the missing part is supplied by another helper-virus. There are helper-viruses, and there is an entire family of viruses (dependoviruses) that are entirely dependent upon assistance from helper-viruses. For example, in Humans, Hepatitis D virus is activated, only in the presence of Hepatitis B virus. Essentially, in order to function, the D-virus ‘borrows’ some missing parts from the B virus.
In short, viruses are not ‘monogamous recluses’: interacting with each other; helping each other; interacting with our genetic material within the cytoplasm and within the nucleus. It does not matters if that genetic material has come from the nucleus of our own cells, or been synthesized in the labs at Johnson and Johnson.[xx]
A Question of Scale
There is no such thing as a ‘perfect process’. Do something for the first time and you might do it right, do it right enough times, and you will eventually do it wrong.
When vaccine RNA or DNA hijacks a natural cellular processes and transforms the cell to vaccine or spike-protein production; how many times does this ‘event’ occur in the tissue of the person who has thus been vaccinated? Thousands, or several thousands of times? How many times has it occurred when several billion people are vaccinated? I don’t know the answer to this question. However, when a process is repeated billions of times, mistakes are no longer ‘possible’, they are inevitable. Such mistakes or mutations are not only inevitable but are essential, lying at the heart of evolution itself.
The End is Nigh?
There is certainly a mountain of spin and delusion on either side of the ‘genetic-vaccine’ or ‘gene-therapy’ debate, and we must keep matters in perspective. Genetic modification is here to stay, for better or for worse. The argument in respect of unforeseen genetic consequence to ourselves and/or other species is an old one. It began with ‘Dolly’ the sheep, and has raged for some time around the desirability of genetically modified foods.
Ironically, the introduction of synthetic genes into vegetables, created something of an international furore, yet the transfection of synthetic genes into millions of regular human beings has created far less controversy. Debate or discussion on the subject of genetic modification or therapy, its necessity, utility, or potential harm, is long overdue; although perhaps it might be a case of too little, too late.
Today, many of the foods we eat have been genetically modified to some degree. Genetically modified food is, however, met with and processed by the acid and digestive enzymes in our guts. The synthetic genes in GM products do not (as far as we know) enter our cells, they do not attempt to manipulate our own cellular or genetic processes.
There is clearly an urgent need to revisit this debate in light of these new vaccines. The battle may have been lost in respect of GM crops, but there is a reasonable argument to be advanced this time round as ‘human genetic processes’ are being tampered with, rather than sheep, beetroot or soya beans.
The Right Hashtag?
In recent years discourse and protest have become strangely predictable, organised around or stimulated by whatever happens to be trending on social media. It seems the right hashtag hasn’t been developed for ‘debate’ in respect of current pandemic policy, even as that policy extends into the function of our own cells.
How many people in Ireland, or around the world, know how a Covid vaccine work? How many clinicians are aware for that matter? When debate does erupt in relatively small pockets around the country it is hijacked by extremists or dismissed as being organised and attended by extremists. Social media appears to be moderating our behaviour to a greater degree than even genetics.
The health of our society depends far more on constructing a more honest and happier version of ourselves. We need to re-evaluate materialism, define happiness, reduce consumption, eat less (or no) meat, take plastics out of our food chain and ecosystems, restore and preserve habitats, protect and understand a biodiversity upon which we are entirely dependent. All of this, and more, is not contingent on genetic modification, no more than it is dependent on us getting to Mars.
Therefore, for the reasons I have outlined, I would not inject a healthy animal with an experimental genetic-vaccine, never mind a healthy human being.
[i] Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer, ‘How the Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Works,’ New York Times, March 22nd, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine.html
[ii] Smriti Mallapaty, ‘The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks’ August 28th, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2
[iii] Adam W. Gaffney, ‘We need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about long Covid’ Statnews, March 22nd, 2021, https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinking-more-critically-speaking-cautiously-long-covid/
[iv] Conor Pope, Vivienne Clarke, ‘Vaccination rollout in nursing homes almost complete, HSE says,’ February 12th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/vaccination-rollout-in-nursing-homes-almost-complete-hse-says-1.4483250
[vi] Moderna Announces First Participants Dosed in Phase 2/3 Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate in Pediatric Population https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-first-participants-dosed-phase-23-study-0
[ix] ‘Immune evasion means we need a new COVID-19 social contract’, The Lancet, February 18th, 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00036-0/fulltext
[x] Jeremy Divine, ‘The Dubious Origins of Long Covid’, Wall Street Journal, March 22nd, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dubious-origins-of-long-covid-11616452583
[xi] Angela Betsaida B. Laguipo, ‘86 percent of the UK’s COVID-19 patients have no symptoms,’ News Medical Life Sciences, October 9th, 2020, https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201009/86-percent-of-the-UKs-COVID-19-patients-have-no-symptoms.aspx
[xii] The History of Vaccines, Chinese Smallpox Inoculation, https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/early-chinese-inoculation
[xiv] Kristina Fiore, ‘Want to Know More About mRNA Before Your COVID Jab?’ Medpage Today, December 3rd, 2020, https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89998
[xv] Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 17, pages261–279(2018)
[xvi] Nicola Davis, ‘Covid vaccine side-effects: what are they, who gets them and why?’ The Guardian, March 18th, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/18/covid-vaccine-side-effects-what-are-they-who-gets-them-and-why
[xvii] Medical Microbiology. 4th edition (Chapter 62).Galveston (TX): University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston; 1996.
[xviii] Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1986 Apr; 83(8): 2531–2535.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.83.8.2531, https://www.nature.com/articles/1205081
[xix] PMCID: PMC7139688 PMID: 32155827 Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs): Shaping the Innate Immune Response in Cancers.
[xx] Knipe, David M.; Howley, Peter M. (2007). Fields Virology (5th ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 126–7.
In August of last year I wrote an article pointing to the impending consequence of the Irish government’s rolling lockdown policy, ‘The Perfect Storm’[i] gathering on the horizon over the country. By that I meant a significant second wave of Covid-19 – to hit this winter. I made that prediction based on the following factors:
An elevated number of potential viral hosts, which is a consequence of suppression of natural-immunity.
Increased life of the virus in the external environment due to decreased daylight
Raised levels of social anxiety and subsequent susceptibility to illness/infection
Continued persistence of the virus at low levels within Irish society
The ‘storm’ made landfall at the start of January, leading to the imposition of an extreme lockdown for the third time – with children denied their constitutional right to an education – amid renewed fears the hospital system would be overwhelmed, as many elderly in care homes passed away once again.
Sadly, this ‘third’ wave actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.[ii]
Could additional deaths have been averted if the Taoiseach had not sought ‘a meaningful Christmas’; or if NEPHT’s advice had been followed to the letter – permitting house visits rather than opening restaurants and gastropubs[iii] at the start of December? Based on the HSPC report that seems doubtful. And I would question whether most Irish people would have willingly foregone sociability throughout the depths of winter – there was certainly no political clamour to cancel Christmas – having endured near-constant lockdown since March. But you never know.
Furthermore, without a Christmas spending spree many indigenous retailers and restaurateurs might have been forced out of business – to the unrestrained joy of Jeff Bezos, Tescos and the rest.
But in Ireland, as ever, we desperately need someone to blame third time round; anyone other than NPHET that has managed to preserve a reputation for scientific insight despite the damage it is doing to the country. So, instead of questioning the government’s response, youngsters – who may have availed of a brief chink of light to socialize – are scapegoated.
Other than that we find talk of selfish immigrants returning home over Christmas to see loved ones. And now attacks on those who escaped the overwhelming doom and gloom for a post-Christmas break. Yet, whatever one’s thoughts on the sustainability of flying, it is notable that just 1% of cases since the pandemic began have been traced to travel abroad.
Lockdown Policy
In the midst of any crisis scientific arguments compete to establish the best way forward. In the case of Covid-19 in Ireland ‘the argument’ has been remarkably one-sided. Discussions in the media are generally over the severity of lockdowns to be employed – this hitherto unheard of public health intervention with enormous collateral damage, which has somehow been normalised.
From the outset I have been convinced that the Irish government at the prompting of the WHO – along with most other Western governments – adopted an erroneous approach, based on a flawed epidemiological assessment, which led Leo Varadkar to suggest there could be a staggering 85,000 deaths[iv] in Ireland.
Virtually alone in Europe, the Swedish health authorities (relatively free of political interference) stood apart, refusing to lockdown in March, 2020. I would argue that this softer approach has been to the benefit of the vast majority of people living there – and may even lead to a lower death toll in the end – compared to the trauma of lockdowns experienced by citizens in most other European countries.
Notably, during the first wave almost 92% of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in Ireland were among over sixty-five-year-olds,[v] and when this Irish cohort is compared to Sweden’s considerably older population a very different picture emerges; in contrast to the usual truck of ‘deaths per capita’ and ‘deaths per million.’
Hats off to the impressively organised states of Norway and Finland, where Covid-19 mortality has remained very low indeed, but vigorous track and trace strategy operating in these countries have proved ineffective elsewhere; even Germany is floundering this winter, having been locked down for months.
Revealingly, in March 2020 the Director-General of the Norwegian Institute for Public Health Camilla Stoltenberg[vi] recommended that her government should keep schools open – as in Sweden – and was advocating last June for a softer approach in the likely event of a second wave.
Now, as the death toll from Covid-19 in Ireland steadily converges with Sweden’s – especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population – it remains to be seen whether much-vaunted, but still experimental, vaccines will significantly alter the respective death tolls.
I maintain that a policy of keeping the Irish population under rolling lockdowns until the whole population is vaccinated will have a worse impact on the nation’s long-term health than any mortality or morbidity that may be avoided.
Zero Covid Utopianism
The frankly bizarre ‘option’ of Zero Covid-19 that has been grasped by some on the left, and the right, in Ireland is a form of Utopianism. It ignores the virtual impossibility of eradicating an aerosol, sub-microscopic pathogen such as Covid-19 from Ireland. Moreover, we remain one of the most globalized societies in the world with over half-a-million foreign born resident in the country[vii] and an Irish-born diaspora of three million;[viii] rely on international trade for most commodities; besides having a porous border to the North.
Moreover, New Zealand and Australia are currently enjoying summer, when respiratory viruses retreat. This seasonal effect is enhanced by a depleted ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere – causing the world’s highest rate of skin cancers[ix] – which elevates the level of UV light that destroys viruses. Both countries are also insulated from the rest of the world by vast oceans and an uninhabited landmass. Even still, outbreaks occurred in New Zealand and Melbourne last winter, prompting draconian responses.
Notably, however, the maximum number of cases that Melbourne – with a population almost the size of Ireland’s – experienced in a single day was just seven hundred, and it required an extreme 112-day lockdown[x] – and/or the arrival of spring before an apparent elimination. In contrast, case numbers in Ireland have exceeded eight thousand in a single day.
Covid-19: Southern Dreaming
A Zero-Covid approach assumes the island of Ireland is sealed hermetically. Good luck with telling the DUP that they have to follow the rules of the South! And ‘success’ would presumably give way to a permanent state of siege against the viral dangers posed by the outside world.
At this point even New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has had enough, acknowledging the long-term impossibility of pursuing Zero Covid she recently said: ‘Our goal has to be though, to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally, with the flu. It won’t be a disease that we will see simply disappear after one round of vaccine.’[xi]
Comparing Ireland to East Asian countries may also be inappropriate as, Wuhan apart, no single country in that region has experienced a significant outbreak. Notably, Japan, which has avoided locking down throughout the crisis experienced forty times as many flu and pneumonia deaths during that period. This suggests other factors – East Asia has been the geographic origin of several modern coronavirus epidemics – may be inhibiting the spread of Covid-19 there.[xii]
‘Zero Covid’ is as much a vote-winner, as a zero tolerance for crime or any other virtuous objective, but it’s political claptrap from an taxidermized left and a neoconservative right, furnished by scientists that seemingly have no conception of biological realities.
“The only thing that brings this deadly virus to our shores is human bodies.“
It is sobering what dark emotions the pandemic unleashed. I can only hope that in a year, to most, this statement will sound the way it would have sounded a year ago. https://t.co/GVRYtlVw1P
The success of any institution might be summed up by the notion that it is only as good as its ability to predict the future. Throughout human history we have had two powerful methods of prediction: science and religion. If not religion, we might define this in terms of ‘faith,’ or an ‘unscientific’ belief system of some kind or other.
If the Romans, the Egyptians, the Spartans, or the Native Americans, had done a ‘better’ job predicting the future, the world would be a different place. Thus, the success or persistence of any individual, nation, or civilisation, is based on an ability to reliably predict the future. Our faith in science is strengthened solely by this condition, and undermined when predictions go awry.
Galileo Galilei, 1636 portrait by Justus Sustermans.
Galileo’s prognostications in respect of the Earth and the Sun led him into conflict with the dominant powers of his day. The accuracy of his predictions disturbed the established cosmic order, as any heresy does. The predictions of Einstein had a similar effect on Newtonian Physics, and now Quantum Mechanics has become the sacred cow. Final judgements on the success or otherwise of policies are, of course, made through the prism of hindsight.
Two Schools of Thought
At present around the world there are two broad scientific schools[xiv] of thought in respect of how to respond to Covid-19. On one side there is a dominant view: that we are in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, where humanity is dealing with a virus that will kill, and perhaps permanently incapacitate, many millions more than it has already done; and that the correct response for any government should be to impose a lockdown and mandate masks until the ‘scientific cavalry’ arrive, carrying their novel genetic vaccinations as shields to save the day.
On the other side there are the conspiracy theorists, Covid-deniers, and a minority of scientists who consider most most masks in use to be ineffective, and who argue that restrictions and lockdowns cause more harm than good. These scientists have advocated protecting the vulnerable and permitting an equilibrium of natural immunity to emerge within the non-vulnerable majority as the least harmful way forward.
The question for ordinary people and politicians, then, is where does the truth lie? Or, more accurately, who is correctly predicting the future?
When the dust settles in a few years, perhaps we’ll see that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. An appreciation of a middle way, or synthesis, is evident in Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell’s acknowledgement in June that mistakes were made in the first wave.[xv] Such concessions to human fallibility seem to be the preserve of Scandinavian leaders. This may explain why increased restrictions have been introduced in Sweden during their second wave, though its government has refrained from imposing a lockdown, and the emphasis is still on personal responsibility.
Last April I resigned my position on the Irish Medical Council to the shock of family, friends and former colleagues. I did so because I believed a catastrophe was immanent, and that hundreds of nursing home residents would die as a consequence of political ineptitude and mass hysteria. As it transpired, 62% of deaths in Ireland occurred in this setting during the first wave of the pandemic, the second highest proportion in the world.[xix]
A prominent doctor has resigned from the Medical Council over the government's handling of #COVID19 in nursing homes.
Dr Marcus de Brun said residents have been treated as "an afterthough".
I take no comfort that my fears were realised, and have since also resigned as a contracted employee of the HSE. I could no longer, in good conscience, enforce guidelines upon staff and patients I do not consider either efficacious or ethical.
I would argue that a failure to conduct a proper inquiry into the decision-making that led to this carnage has led to avoidable mortality in this second wave in the care home setting. Any enquiry would surely have highlighted the inadequacy of safety protocols in these settings, and the absence of real expertise on NPHET.
Before my small Covid-19 rebellion, in March 2020, I circulated a paper on the response to Covid called The Mismanagement of Covid-19 in Ireland. Its premise was (and remains) quite simple: that Covid-19 is a viral illness with a mortality confined to a relatively small and manageable subset of our population.[xx]
I argued that Ireland’s gross demographic – the youngest population in Europe – is (and was) the key to navigating a safe path through the crisis. With a relatively low population of over sixty-fives – approximately 650,000 – this amounted to a manageable population of those truly vulnerable.
I also noted how, unlike during influenza pandemics of the past, children and young adults were not dying of this disease, and that the vast majority of adults without serious underlying conditions were also relatively (if not entirely) immune to significant consequence.
Long Covid
A current cause for concern with Covid-19, which may be deterring our governments from permitting younger people from resuming their lives is so-called ‘Long Covid,’ or Covid ‘Long Haulers’ as this is referred to in the U.S..
This is a condition that appears to fit within the category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue;[xxi] which is ‘a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’
In October one of the leading advocates for Long Covid patients, and a firm advocate of draconian policies, Oxford University’s Professor Trish Greenhalgh clarified that Long Covid is only very rarely a long-term affliction:
The reviews we’ve done seem to suggest that whilst a tiny minority of people, perhaps one per cent of everyone who gets Covid-19, are still ill six months later, and whilst about a third of people aren’t better at three weeks, most people whose condition drags on are going to get better, slowly but steadily, between three weeks and three months.[xxii]
Fatigue is a symptom of a number of diseases—anaemia, depression, chronic infection, cancer, autoimmune disorders and thyroid disorders among them. But no apparent cause can be found for a state of extreme and disabling exhaustion that has acquired a number of names, the most generally accepted worldwide being chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). In the UK, where it is (often incorrectly) known as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), 150 000 people are said to be affected. Other terms used for the condition are postviral fatigue syndrome (PVFS) and chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS).[xxiii]
So, we can conclude that Long Covid is hardly a new phenomenon, and while the pandemic is likely to create an additional burden on health services, the extent of the problem needs to be put in context: perhapsone percent of sufferers are still ill after six months.
Moreover, the impact of Covid-19 is significant heightened by environmental factors such as air quality[xxiv] and poor nutrition. I would argue, therefore, that the threat of Long Covid is insufficient grounds for closing universities and denying young people the chance of a social life beyond walking the block.
In my March paper I also observed that Covid-19 is a member of the coronavirus family responsible for many common colds,[xxvii] and that such viruses are seasonal, in that they are eliminated especially by increasing UV light (and the population’s tendency to retreat indoors). These were hardly earth-shattering revelations, and have been noted by many other doctors and scientists around the globe.
Globally, Covid cases peaked on Jan 7th and have declined 28% in three weeks.
This also appears to be a global decline, with cases falling from recent peaks on all continents: pic.twitter.com/c7vNfYZPlU
I also compared the population of over sixty-five-year-olds in Ireland, to the equivalent cohort in the U.K., noting there are roughly twenty-times the number of over sixty-five in the UK (while the overall population is less than ten times that number); so I assumed U.K. mortality would be in the region of twenty times that of Ireland’s.
In this respect, Ireland has performed significantly better than the U.K., but other factors such as population density and an elevated risk of severe disease among BAME groups[xxviii], may account for the higher relative death toll there. It should also be emphasised that the U.K. has almost the highest rate of mortality in the world.
Like many other doctors and scientists, I argued that in the absence of a proven cure or vaccine at that time for Covid-19, humanity is (or was) very much operating at the whim of nature. Thus, without a cure we were (and to a certain extent still are) subjected to natural forces, as I assumed this virus would spread widely through the population. All we could do, then, was ‘flatten the curve,’ protect the vulnerable, and await a safe vaccine.
At the outset of the crisis that was the mantra behind which the public united. Flattening the curve would reduce the rate at which the vulnerable would present for treatments in hospitals. This would protect the system form being overwhelmed, bringing an increased chance of survival for those badly afflicted.
‘Protect the NHS’ from collapse was a similar cry across the water. That made sense at the outset of the crisis. The reiteration of these ‘priorities’ might now illicit a yawn, as our national health authorities did not use the flattened time and space to increase ICU capacity substantially, which brings the ‘necessity’ of recurring lockdowns.
Hysteria
Since March of last year events have taken a strange turn. With fear and hysteria at the helm politicians lost their nerves. The mantra shifted from ‘flatten the curve’, to ‘protect everyone from this deadly disease,’ despite it becoming clear that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is considerably lower than the 0.9% assumed initially. Now a paper on the WHO website states that the infection fatality rate for the disease is less than 0.2% ‘in most locations.’[xxix]
Perversely, children have become the focus of inordinate efforts; locked indoors, locked out of school and forced into wearing masks. We have insisted upon protecting them from a disease that has not caused a single child death in Ireland throughout the entire crisis.[xxx]
Troublingly, when Covid-19 panic gripped the nation, politicians and mainstream media listened only to the scientific ‘authorities’ that fed the hysteria and justified everything from political incompetence to profligate expenditure. Hospitals were emptied in preparation for an approaching ‘tsunami’ of illness, as tens of thousands of deaths were incorrectly predicted by politicians and esteemed professors, all of whom continue to profess, and have even grown in esteem.
Covid patients were dumped from hospitals into Nursing Homes, and tests were withheld from residents lest they run short for the healthy-hysterical. The vulnerable were not only abandoned, but too many of them were crushed in the stampede.
Thus, there is the shocking case of a resident in a Meath care home discovered to have had a maggot-infested a wound.[xxxi] What began as a campaign to protect the vulnerable, had turned into nothing short of a manslaughter machine.
At the End of the Day
The natural endpoint for viral infection in respect of many viral pathogens is of course ‘herd immunity.’ This is the point where a sufficient proportion of a population have been exposed to and develop full or partial immunity to a particular pathogen, such that its rate of reproduction is below 1 most of the time.
With insufficient hosts, a virus can no longer spread easily. This is not full elimination but an endemic equilibrium within the population, with a certain annual death toll tolerated – such as is the case with influenza, which kills up to a thousand people a year in Ireland, despite the availability of a vaccine.
This natural evolution, or pathogenesis, is also helped along by the seasonal shift from spring to summer. Increasing daylight reduces the level of viral particles, and people spend more time out of doors, or ventilate their living spaces in warmer conditions. This is how nature brings an end to seasonal colds and flus. Yet curiously this basic piece of natural science was largely ignored in March. Talk of UV light became highly politicised and thence poisoned.
The Swedes
Sweden provided a template for a country acting within the bounds of common sense and science. From the outset health authorities there endeavoured to protect a vulnerable aged cohort, leading to a natural-immunity developing within the population. In permitting this to occur they also took the precaution of doubling ICU capacity[xxxii] which, like Ireland’s, had been among the lowest in Europe when the pandemic began.
Comparison between Sweden and Ireland cannot be made on a like-for-like basis, any more than the Irish can be compared to any other national group; however, some relevant comparisons can be drawn in respect of population demographics.
Sweden has twice Ireland’s population, but 3.2 times the number of over sixty-five-years-olds. Ireland has not quite experienced just over a third of Sweden’s mortality (11,815 v 3,418); but while Ireland’s death rate from Covid-19 has been steadily increasing over the month of January, Sweden’s has flattened to point where, according to the WHO, Sweden’s death toll has been in single figures since the start of February, while Ireland has been experiencing daily deaths over one hundred.
There may be a further uptick in Covid deaths in Sweden once schools reopen – and even a third wave – but the hopeful signs are that the country is now reaching a herd immunity threshold – one that has brought less suffering overall when compared to other jurisdictions.
A similar comparison can be drawn between Sweden and most other European states, implying, in most situations, that mortality is not significantly reduced by lockdown policies. Yet invariably whenever one reads about Sweden in mainstream Irish media[xxxiii] comparisons are only drawn with best-in-class Scandinavian neighbours, where lockdowns have also been, for the most part, avoided.
Lockdowns are likely to increase mortality through missed cancer screenings, dysfunctional health services, serious mental health impacts, besides the ‘shadow-pandemic’ of domestic violence that has occurred under lockdown.
The writing on the wall?
What of the good people on the opposite side of the Swedish argument? It is fair to say that lockdowns can flatten the curve. This is apparent if we compare mortality graphs on the Euromomo website that tracks excess deaths across Europe. It shows that Sweden did not see the same kind of spike on their graph of mortality during the first wave as in other countries that locked down, but experienced a steady decline, which in July led the New York Times to state prematurely that ‘Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale’[xxxiv]
The question is whether the short-term benefits of lockdowns in terms of averted-deaths are worth the cost? Or, were lockdowns necessary, and will they ultimately translate into lives being saved rather than simply deferring deaths? Perhaps the truth lies in the middle of these arguments but I know which side I lean.
Lockdowns do not prevent deaths, but slow the rate of infection and mortality. They can only ease the burden on hospital or tertiary care services. The purpose of lockdown should be to insure that the sick can access the best treatment available, and should not be ‘a primary means of controlling the virus’[xxxv] according to leading authorities in the WHO, as we are experiencing in Ireland.
Although the mortality figures in Ireland still lag behind Sweden’s I suspect this is deferred mortality and does not represent patients who have been cured or saved. The curve has been flattened. Thus far, lockdown policies have had the beneficial effect of decreasing mortality by less than 20% compared to Sweden’s when adjusted for our respective age profiles. In my view, however, what may simply be deferred mortality, cannot justify the burden of lockdowns on the wider population.
Only when the crisis has passed, and with the benefit of hindsight, will it be possible to determine if the Swedes broadly got things right. Although, it is more appropriate in the context of a disease that has killed thousands of people – and caused suffering to most of the rest of the population – to state that some countries will have managed it better than others. For sure, no one will have got everything ‘right’.
Assuming vaccines do not represent a panacea, if it transpires that most Irish mortality is confined to the nursing home sector, and that all lockdowns accomplish is to preserve a larger number of potential hosts for successive seasonal resurgences then the pandemic will have been a more painful and long-running saga in Ireland than it might otherwise have been.
[i] Marcus de Brun, ‘The Perfect Storm’, Cassandra Voices, August 19th, 2020, https://cassandravoices.com/science-environment/covid-19-the-perfect-storm/
[ii] Epidemiology of COVID-19Outbreaks/Clustersin IrelandWeekly Report Prepared by HPSC on25thJanuary 2021, https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/respiratory/coronavirus/novelcoronavirus/surveillance/covid-19outbreaksclustersinireland/COVID-19%20Weekly%20Outbreak%20Report_Week032021_25012021_WebVersion_final.pdf
[iii] Digital Desk Staff, ‘Opening hospitality will mean limiting Christmas gatherings, Nphet warns’, November 26th, 2020, Extra.ie, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/nphet-strongly-opposed-to-parts-of-governments-lockdown-exit-plan-1042387.html
[iv] ‘Up to 85,000 Irish people could die from coronavirus in worst-case scenario, Taoiseach indicates, as three more diagnosed’ John Downing, Eilish O’Regan and Gabija Gataveckaite, Irish Independent, March 9th, 2020, https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/up-to-85000-irish-people-could-die-from-coronavirus-in-worst-case-scenario-taoiseach-indicates-as-three-more-diagnosed-39029363.html
[v] COVID-19 Deaths and Cases, Central Statistics Office, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/br/b-cdc/covid-19deathsandcases/
[vi] ‘Norwegian health chief: we advised against closing schools’, 10 June, 2020, Unherd, https://unherd.com/thepost/norwegian-health-chief-we-advised-against-closing-schools/
[vii] ‘Census of Population 2016 – Profile 7 Migration and Diversity’, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp7md/p7md/p7anii/
[viii] Ciara Kenny, ‘ The global Irish: Where do they live?’, February 4th, 2015, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/the-global-irish-where-do-they-live-1.2089347?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Flife-and-style%2Fgeneration-emigration%2Fthe-global-irish-where-do-they-live-1.2089347
[ix] American Institute of Cancer Research, Skin cancer statistics, https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/skin-cancer-statistics
[x] Phil Mercer, ‘Covid: Melbourne’s hard-won success after a marathon lockdown’, 26th of October, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54654646
[xi] Luke Malpass, ‘Jacinda Ardern declares 2021 ‘the year of the vaccine’’, January 21st, 2021, Stuff, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/124012148/jacinda-ardern-declares-2021-the-year-of-the-vaccine
[xii] Ramesh Thakur, ‘The West should envy Japan’s COVID-19 response’ January 10th, 2021, Japan Times, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/01/10/commentary/japan-commentary/west-japan-coronavirus-response/
[xiii] Gabriel Scally: It is essential Ireland tightens borders in fight against Covid-19, January 30th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/gabriel-scally-it-is-essential-ireland-tightens-borders-in-fight-against-covid-19-1.4471283
[xiv] Sarah Bosley, ‘Covid UK: scientists at loggerheads over approach to new restrictions’, September 22nd, 2020, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/22/scientists-disagree-over-targeted-versus-nationwide-measures-to-tackle-covid
[xvi] Sebastian Rushworth M.D., ‘Here’s a graph they don’t want you to see’, 25th of January, 2021, https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/01/25/heres-a-graph-they-dont-want-you-to-see/
[xvii] Sheena Cruickshank ‘A new study suggests coronavirus antibodies fade over time – but how concerned should we be?’ October 27th, 2020, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-suggests-coronavirus-antibodies-fade-over-time-but-how-concerned-should-we-be-148957
[xviii] Amy Kazmin, ‘India’s tumbling Covid cases raises question: Is the pandemic burning itself out?’ February 1st, 2021, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/india-s-tumbling-covid-cases-raises-question-is-the-pandemic-burning-itself-out-1.4472406?mode=amp
[xix] Fergal Bowers, ‘High percentage of virus deaths in Ireland’s care homes highlighted in comparison report
[xx] Mismanagement of Covid in Ireland’ May 27th, RTE, https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0527/1143036-covid-deaths-ireland/
[xxi] ‘What to know about post-viral syndrome’ Medical News Today, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326619
[xxii] Jennifer Rigby, ‘Why long Covid can be really grim, but is rarer than you think’, October 3rd, 2020 The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/long-covid-can-really-grim-rarer-think/
[xxiv] Matt Cole et al, ‘Air pollution exposure linked to higher COVID-19 cases and deaths – new study’, July 13th, 2020, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-exposure-linked-to-higher-covid-19-cases-and-deaths-new-study-141620
[xxv] Meredith Wadman, ‘Why COVID-19 is more deadly in people with obesity—even if they’re young’, September 8th, 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young
[xxvi] Shauna Bowers, ‘Irish policies to tackle obesity ‘fall behind international best practice’ – report’, November 9th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/irish-policies-to-tackle-obesity-fall-behind-international-best-practice-report-1.4403921?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Firish-policies-to-tackle-obesity-fall-behind-international-best-practice-report-1.4403921
[xxvii] Anthony King, ‘Coronavirus family now a prime suspect in previous pandemics,’ February 4th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/coronavirus-family-now-a-prime-suspect-in-previous-pandemics-1.4463053
[xxviii] Tom Kirby, ‘Evidence mounts on the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on ethnic minorities’, The Lancet, May 8th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30228-9/fulltext
[xxix] Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data
John P A Ioannidis, WHO, September 13th, 2020, https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/99/1/20-265892/en/
[xxx] (According to the CSO there have been 20,402 confirmed cases of Covid amongst the age group 0-24yrs, during the period from Feb 2020 to December 2020 and not a single recorded death in Ireland. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/br/b-cdc/covid-19deathsandcasesseries18/
[xxxi] Simon Carswell, ‘Widow ‘outraged’ by footage of husband’s facial wound’, August 26th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/widow-outraged-by-footage-of-husband-s-facial-wound-1.4338831?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Fwidow-outraged-by-footage-of-husband-s-facial-wound-1.4338831
[xxxii] Emma Lofgren, ‘’The biggest challenge of our time’: How Sweden doubled intensive care capacity amid Covid-19 pandemic’, June 23rd, 2020, The Local, https://www.thelocal.com/20200623/how-sweden-doubled-intensive-care-capacity-to-treat-coronavirus-patients
[xxxiii] Suzanne Cahill, ‘Coronavirus lockdowns are still a step too far for Sweden’, February 3rd, 2021, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/coronavirus-lockdowns-are-still-a-step-too-far-for-sweden-1.4473119?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fcoronavirus-lockdowns-are-still-a-step-too-far-for-sweden-1.4473119
[xxxv] Michelle Doyle, ‘WHO doctor says lockdowns should not be main coronavirus defence’, October 12th, 2020, ABC, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688
The story of subliminal messaging follows an interesting evolution, one infrequently told about a technique that may have created a monster. Considering this technique in the context of advertising, we can trace its roots back to the post-war 1940’s and 50’s United States. In so doing we must set the stage and, as Voltaire insists, ‘define our terms’.
Post-war America was undergoing an unprecedented economic boom. Manufacturing was in the ascendancy and incomes rising as never before. Modern capitalism was struggling through the birth canal of history and media-advertising was to be its midwife. The somnolent frugality and penury that defined the war years, and especially the pre-war Depression, was steadily usurped by a ‘terrible beauty’; the ‘American dream’ was assuming a material reality in cars, clothes, movies, music, diners and jukeboxes , enterprise, technology and invention; so much and more was coming out of America, and much of the world looked on with envy.
Post-war America thus experienced an explosion in new media; of television, radio, magazines connecting capitalist aspirations, with revenues increasingly derived from advertising.
Those behind the advertising fuelling American economic growth were fondly known as the ‘ad-men’. It was their job to motivate particular behaviours within a newly financially empowered individual, increasingly referred to as the ‘consumer’. Citizens had evolved into civic and economic units, with civic and economic or consumptive obligations. Consumption, despite being a euphemism at the time for the ravages of tuberculosis, was to become the bedrock of democratic capitalism.
By the late 1950’s and early 60’s, however, these consumers had begun to satisfy many of their material wants with products that initially endured, leading to new and more targeted influences. Rather than satisfy real and prescient needs, it became the job of the advertiser to ‘get inside’ the consumers’ minds and encourage them to think and feel differently, about each other, about the world, and about products.
America at the time was rich in oil, steel, lumber, agricultural lands and innovation. Resources were not unlimited, but they appeared so. Notions of conservation, environmental protection, biodiversity or climate change, were barely on the table, at least until Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring was published in 1962.
During those halcyon days the Republican mantra of ‘trickle down economics’ had some substance, as there appeared to be an overabundance flowing down the social ladder. Even ‘socialism’ in respect of constructing roads, schools and other infrastructure enjoyed a share.
Planned Obsolescence
By the early 1950’s, however, it appeared to the captains of industry that the consumer market was becoming saturated. After large sections of the white middle classes had purchased a fridge, a car, a TV, a washing machine and other consumer durables, insiders feared the economy might be headed for a crash. Consumers might purchase enough material conveniences, but would soon begin to purchase less! Limitless economic growth might eventually come to an abortive and premature end.
There were disturbing indicators: for instance, between 1940 and 1950, the proportion of American families with mechanical refrigerators increased from 44 to 80 percent. Indeed, such ravenous consumption of homes, cars, and other goods meant that by the mid-1950s, marketers and businessmen feared, the saturation point was at hand. This fear led to two important marketing innovations. Planned obsolescence, the intentional design of goods to be short-lived, provided consumers with a reason to buy replacement items and created trends that promoted “keeping up with the Joneses.”[i]
Market segmentation arose from the theory that consumers had different preferences, rational and irrational, influencing their purchases. Advertisers began to target consumers on an individual level in order to market goods. These innovations helped advertisers to differentiate products and more successfully market them.
In The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith condemned advertising for creating ‘wants that previously did not exist,’ but recognized its importance in stimulating the consumption that had generated post-war prosperity. Thus, between 1946 and 1955, the amount of money spent annually on advertising in the United States nearly tripled, from $3.4 billion to $9 billion. Consequently, throughout the post-war period, the ad man’s ‘real and perceived abilities to influence politics, culture, and the economy steadily grew.’[ii]
This makes sense: people don’t need to purchase products they already own. Fuelling the fears of a crash, was the reality that products were initially being made to last. Everlasting nylons, everlasting light bulbs, cars and machines with serviceable or repairable parts; permanence and durability were great ideas in the early days, but these ideas soon became dangerous with unfettered economic growth in mind.
The legacy of this revision is now all around us in terms of the environmental costs, and the ‘Growth Delusion’ has been extensively written about. (See Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1992) An irony emanating from this era is the permanent shift into our present reality of ‘planned obsolescence’. If products refused to wear out they would need an inbuilt expiry date. One might say with reasonable confidence that from the 1950’s the most enduring material artifact of manufacturing, has not been products, but landfill and human waste.
The task of the ad-man thus evolved from satisfying existing practical needs into creating new ones. Ideally, the ‘need’ for products that would gracefully expire and require replacement. If the products themselves refused to wear-out they would be portrayed as ‘outdated’, ‘outmoded’, or even an embarrassment to the owner.
The enduring, and egregious reasoning for dumping millions of tons of functional material products, in place of more ‘fashionable’ and ‘modern’ alternatives, slowly and effectively became normalised.
To all but the old-school farmer, this modern notion of ‘fashion’ as an important feature of function, persists to this day. The techniques for sustaining this ideology are taught in most universities. Of itself ‘fashion’ is perhaps a strange ideology and so-called ‘fast’ fashion is of course one of the largest contributors to the mass production of human waste. Thus an environmentally inimical notion of style emerged ascendant, and is now practically unassailable. Any questions of the cost or necessity of ‘fashionable’ apparel can readily be dismissed as outmoded.
Freud’s Nephew
This juncture in the history of advertising is best illustrated by the career of Edward Bernays – the nephew of Sigmund Freud – perhaps the most famous ad-man in the history of media. His influence as one of the founders of the ‘science of advertising’ is detailed in a BBC documentary: ‘The Century of the Self.’ He made use of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis throughout his career to develop marketing strategies that have come to define the industry to this day.
For the advertiser or student of media ‘getting inside the mind of the consumer’ is perhaps an entirely reasonable objective. And yet, when we pause to think for a moment, how many of us would be wary of someone proposing to ‘get inside our mind’?
Bernays most famous use of these ‘new’ psychological techniques, was during his professional association with the tobacco industry. At the time in America, and indeed in many Western countries, most women did not smoke. The practice was socially frowned upon. If they could be encouraged to start smoking, profits would potentially double.
Ingeniously, Bernays effectively enlisted the women’s suffrage movement, by fostering a notion that not smoking was a sign of women’s oppression. His campaign implied that social stereotyping was preventing women from smoking, and that it could become an expression of their equal rights.
This perhaps intimates a familiar failure within feminism, which is the pursuit of equality rather than creating a practical respect for difference. A persistent desire to achieve equality with men, raises women no higher than equality. It sets the bar at the level of ‘man the trousered-ape’. Feminism rarely permits itself to go beyond men, into the realm of an overdue respect for female distinction, especially motherhood.
If men can smoke, then women should be free to do so also. The idea is simple, it contains a simple truth, but is hardly reflective of anything truly ‘feminist’ or ‘feminine’. Here we encounter the original ‘evil’ of the Sophist; the attempt to prove a facile argument by using true facts.
Whatever one’s views on the link between women smoking and their oppression, Bernays’s conversion of smoking into an assertion of equality, was unquestionably marketing genius. It should also be recalled that the harmful effects of heavy smoking were not then as widely accepted as they are today.
A decisive moment in Bernays’ campaign was when he enlisted a group of women to march in the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929. At a pre-ordained moment the women halted the parade, lit up cigarettes and puffed away.
Bernays and the tobacco industry temporarily re-branded cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’ The artfully manipulated ‘scandal’ had the desired effect, connecting smoking with female empowerment, and within a few years, a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke had been largely conceded. The tobacco companies were laughing all the way to the bank.
The successful marketing of cigarettes as progressive statements of liberty, female emancipation or a sign of Western sophistication, continues to this day in Africa and in the Middle East.[iii]
1890s satirical cartoon from Germany illustrates the notion that smoking was considered unfeminine by some in that period.
Old Socrates and the ad-man/Sophist
Of course ‘sublimation’ has a longer history than Bernays and the Manhattan ad-men. One might ask, what exactly does it mean to be a ‘victim’ of subliminal messaging? And when or if the victims deny they have been wronged then the delusion is complete.
Sublimation might be defined as some kind of ‘subversive mind control.’ Yet, perhaps the process is not a dark or subversive tool? Perhaps it is intrinsic to the functioning of group psychology. It may be integral to how our shared beliefs are transmitted, become established and are continually reinforced through a collective and instinctual need for belonging?
When misappropriated this ‘process’ of sublimation, becomes what Freud referred to as ‘mass psychogenic delusion’[iv] or what is sometimes described in Psychiatry as a ‘conversion disorder’. Certainly, when particular ideas are introduced into the sublime – the subconscious mind – there is often no limit to the evils they might engender there.
The ‘message’ is about getting us to behave in a certain way, to convince us to move in a particular direction, despite, or even in contradiction to external evidence, or our own better judgement. Yet this type of definition is equally unsatisfactory. It simply transfers the objective criteria for these newly fostered ‘needs’ to an external place; to someone else, to an ‘outside-of-self’ analysis of what one’s needs really are. This outside or objective ‘other’ must then decide what one’s thinking would normally be, if one’s mind had not been manipulated in the first place.
If I am aware that I am being deceived, I am hardly being deceived. And if someone tries to tell me that I am being deceived, (as with Plato’s cave dwellers), I might prefer to continue with the deception, before having my gullibility exposed.
If someone is apparently thinking or acting against their own better judgement, he or she will require an ‘other’ to identify this for them. It’s a classic Catch-22. If I am to realise that I am mad, someone else must tell me, or I must figure it out myself. If I’m sane enough to figure out I’m mad, I cannot have been that mad in the first place.
Whilst we are ostensibly guided by our own reasoning, we cannot know that our reasoning is being manipulated. Once we become aware of the manipulation; once we have recourse to our own ‘better judgement’ the spell has been broken. But it takes a brave soul to declare to the world: ‘I am being manipulated; I am being controlled or motivated by the ad-man.’
The essential deception contained within all forms of sublimation, therefore, is the requirement to make the subject believe that his newly fostered belief or desire, has not been caused by the advertisement itself. The advertisement has not caused us to desire a product, but has simply reminded us of an endogenous internal need, one that is entirely one’s own. The ad-man like the sophist has proven a false need by using true facts. The need in this case is only true by virtue of the unspoken fact that we have come to believe its ‘truth’.
The fostered desire must be hitched to our own desires, our inescapable instinctual imperatives; our desire to be happy; to live in accordance with reason; to be moral and just; or to be loved, accepted or respected by others. The ad-man must encourage us to ‘realise’ autonomously that life will be better, once we go ahead with the purchase.
There is of course a strong internal bias here. If I admit that my needs are not my own – that they are not genuine but have been hijacked by another – I must then admit to a sort of mental weakness; a failing on the part of my brain or intelligence. It is far easier, and safer, to assume and even insist that my beliefs are my own. That I am too intelligent to be ‘brainwashed.’
The Sophists
Sublimation is as old as civilisation. Socrates was convinced that we never really ‘learn’ anything at all. He believed that all important knowledge is within our minds at birth. That it is merely brought into being or delivered into the world. The midwife in this process is the philosopher. Socrates believed the challenge does not lie in the introduction of novel thoughts or ideas, but rather in altering how we go about our thinking. His solution is a Socratic methodology of thought.
Learning how to count presupposes (in the Socratic sense) an innate knowledge of relative numbers, this knowledge is something that we are born with, and do not acquire. We simply learn how to express and use that knowledge, to apply it in the pursuit of mathematics.
The structure of language might equally be considered an innate tool, as Noam Chomsky argues with the idea of a universal grammar. It is useful in helping us describe our thoughts, but we do not require language in order to have thoughts. We do not need to formally learn how to engage the process of thinking. Language might help us express our thinking, but we are born with an ability to think, and merely learn to express our thinking through the tool of language.
For Socrates, learning how to think is a relatively simple matter. There is a good and bad way of thinking. The benchmark for success being its independent approximation with truth; an absolute truth, a priori, unique, unassailable and independent of man. In the Socratic sense, truth is attainable through reasoned independent thinking: in other words, through philosophy. Independence in thinking was, however, an anathema to Socrates antagonists the Sophists. It remains an anathema to the ad-man, independent thinkers are rarely fashionable.
The main point here is that Socrates is of the belief that there is a distinction between acquiring information or skills, and understanding or correct thinking. What we should ‘do’ with information as it is acquired or learned through our senses, is already known to us innately. The truth is already within us, it is the ‘good as such;’ the ‘good’ in all of us. It is not acquired or purchased from another. It need only be brought into the world by learning how to think correctly, independent of any motive other than truth.
So here’s the rub, the crucial distinction between Socrates and the Sophists is that the Sophists were uninterested in an internal, a priori truth or the ‘good as such’. They defined ‘good’ as being in the realm of the external, material world. In simple terms, they correlated ‘good’ with success and power. ‘Justice is what is good for the stronger’ is the first Sophistic argument that Socrates refutes in the opening chapter of Plato’s Republic.
For the Sophist, understanding or philosophy is not to be confused with an inner or a priori ‘good.’ Instead it connotes success in the world. There is a very important distinction between the type of thinking advocated by Socrates and that of the Sophists: the former encourages an evaluation of one’s thoughts from the perspective of an internal uncompromising ‘good as such’; the latter identifies truth on the basis of its success or value in the material or external world.
Social Media
Whilst Socrates would have little interest in a ‘like’ button on social media, a Sophist might feel that the number of likes ascribed to a particular thought or idea is a good reflection of its inherent value, and even truth.
Socrates had little concern for the external world, which he likened to mere shadows upon the wall of a cave. He cared only that he might reconcile his existence in the world with his inner good or an internal a priori notion of truth. If that is accomplished, or at least pursued in an unbiased and philosophical manner, the affairs of society and the world will largely take care of themselves. Socrates’s ideals coincide with Confucius’s wise words:
To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
What distinguishes Socrates from the Sophists is that the latter were practical teachers. They charged a fee, and considered knowledge a commodity. Socrates on the other hand always insisted that he had nothing to teach anyone. The wisest man is the fool, or at least he who knows the true extent of his own ignorance.
The Death of Socrates
For the Sophist, winning an argument is not simply a question of truth or falsity, but rather devolves to how the argument is presented. Using true facts to win false arguments is the criticism that is levelled against the Sophist, and indeed it is the essential meaning of the word Sophistry.
In this ancient contest we find the unacknowledged origins of advertising, and the ‘art’ of persuasion itself. Winning a false argument by using true facts, often entails convincing another of an untruth through recourse to simple self-evident facts. The other’s mind might then be hijacked into thinking and acting upon an idea that he might otherwise find repugnant. Subliminal advertising has its roots in this essential contest.
If you have been convinced by an external agency to desire popcorn or Coca-Cola at the cinema, then it is not unreasonable to assert that you have fallen prey to a certain type of invidious sophistry.
The Popcorn Experiment
By all accounts James McDonald Vicary – a late contemporary of Bernays and graduate of the University of Michigan – was an interesting ad-man. He presents a very interesting contrast to Bernays. He began his marketing career as a boy while in the employment of a company conducting a political poll for the election of a city mayor.
Sent about town in a cab, he interviewed passers-by to determine how they were going to vote. Vicary came from a humble background, having lost his father at a young age, and his family had struggled to make ends meet. A biographer informs us that his trip about the town was his ‘first time in a cab,’ and the success of his polling data in the prediction of the election outcome, confirmed his career in marketing research.
In 1957 Vicary issued a press release in which he described the results of an experiment he had conducted on the good people of Fort Lee New Jersey. The experiment is famously known as the ‘Popcorn Experiment’ and it is often referred to as the first documented use of subliminal messaging in advertising products.
Vicary claimed to have conducted his experiment on 46,599 movie goers, who, whilst watching a movie at a theatre in New Jersey, were exposed to screen images telling them to ‘eat popcorn,’ and ‘buy Coca-Cola.’ During the movie the ‘messages’ flashed on the movie screen in 1/3000th of a second, and as such were too brief to be consciously recognised by the viewers. Nevertheless, Vicary reported that these ‘subliminal messages’ resulted in a 57.5% increase in popcorn sales and an 18.1% increase in Coca-Cola sales during the movie.
Now you see it…
What is perhaps most interesting about Vicary’s story is that the experiment generated a public outcry, and was soon dismissed as a hoax or at worst a fraud. Either way, Vicary himself later declared that the results were fabricated and that the experiment never even happened.
It is important to contextualise Vicary’s renunciation. Amid the hue and cry, he was asked in an interview whether he had obtained people’s consent to have their minds ‘altered’ in the manner in which he claimed? It is quite possible, given the level of opprobrium he faced, and fearing potential claims for compensation, that he chose to distance himself from his work and quietly disappear into historical obscurity.
The irony here is that Vicary is still considered the father of subliminal messaging in advertising, and the result of the experiment was believed (or at least feared) by many to be substantially true. Indeed, there have been subsequent experiments proving the effectiveness of subliminal messaging in influencing our behaviours. The technique was quickly banned in America, and elsewhere. It seems unlikely that it would be banned if there was no possibility of effectiveness.
Although the experiment was dismissed as fraud, the unreal or ‘faked’ results convinced more people of the effectiveness of the technique than might have been convinced if Vicary’s results had been deemed truthful. Thus, ironically the faked results had an apparently greater impact in convincing people than the truth might have done. This recalls Nietzsche’s assertion that mankind is too often inclined to hold untruth in greater esteem than its inverse.
For our purposes the question is a simple one: what is the difference between the sublimation described and conducted by Vicary, and that same sublimation that was described and conducted by Bernays?
Vicary’s experiment resulted in an immediate backlash, and intervention by the U.S. Congress prohibiting such techniques. In contrast, Bernays continued to enjoy a favourable reputation and career. In the wake of his success with the ‘torches of freedom,’ he achieved legendary status within the marketing world. His books are still widely read and his techniques continue to be taught and applied.
Why is that Bernays enjoyed fame and fortune, whilst Vicary was compelled to vanish into obscurity, probably relieved that he had not ended up behind bars?
Perhaps the distinction between Bernays and Vicary’s approach, might be summarised as follows: as long as the individual subject can be preserved from the truth that they have ‘given up’ control of their mental faculties; as long as they remain convinced that the sublimated idea is compatible with their own thinking, the sublimated message will be readily accepted as an endogenous idea – one that has merely been reinforced or brought to light by the ad-man.
The Algorithm
In the wake of the 2016 American Presidential election evidenceof Cambridge Analytica meddling first came to light. It became apparent that algorithms had been applied to personal data, gathered from social media, which had then been used to manipulate voting patterns. The Western world (for a brief time) was horrified that minds had been tampered with, unbeknownst to those minds. Subliminal messaging had reared its ugly head once again.
It is highly likely, however, that the outrage was neither felt nor voiced by the true ‘victims’ of the algorithms. Rather, the anger emerged from the ‘other side.’ It was articulated, often by journalists, who felt that ‘other’ minds had been controlled, and the election of a President had been secured by devious means. This is an important distinction, and it reminds us that the victims of mind control tactics or subliminal messaging are very unlikely to admit to its effect, let alone develop an awareness of the tactics deployed on them.
Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica (2017).
And so it might follow that, if we, (the big ‘we’) are victims of subliminal mind control, how would we know? Who will tell us? In political parlance: only the left will inform on the right, and only the right will inform on the left. For each side of the political divide to label its antagonist as ‘brainwashed’ is nothing new. But what happens if each side is not in the habit of listening to one another, and if both sides are indeed correct?
Today we don’t have to look too far to find the evolution of sublimation: Bernay’s techniques are everywhere. Closer to home, sublimation is nowhere more obvious than in the practice of ‘predictive text,’ and the algorithms employed on social media.
When I begin to reply to an e-mail, my e-mail account offers to finish my sentences, and even offers complete sentences on my behalf. What is happening here? Why am I not insulted by a computer presuming to know my innermost thoughts, before I have taken the trouble to think them myself?
How is this process any different from what Vicary attempted in his Popcorn Experiment? Who controls this algorithm that presumes to think on my behalf? How deep into my psyche do these algorithms and advertisements reach? These are questions that we ‘victims’ rarely care about sufficiently to ask. The process appears benign and refined. Frighteningly, I cannot deny that those words the algorithm suggests do appear to coincide with what I might write, were I presumptuous enough to persist in thinking for myself!
Shouldn’t I steadfastly preserve my right to think autonomously? Perhaps I should respond like an inebriated rock star, and throw my computer screen out a hotel window in disgust at this presumptuous hijacking of my thoughts.
Tucker & the Gadfly.
I have a very close friend who does not read much. I love him dearly because he is straight and honest with me. I value his opinion because he is often more honest with me than I sometimes care to be with myself.
This friend recently introduced me to a Fox presenter whom I had never heard of called Tucker Carlson. One evening he insisted that I watch one of Carlson’s shows. Initially, I was surprised and somewhat amazed at what he had exposed me to. I forget what Carlson was talking about, but I remember being struck that he seemed quite sincere, and that much of what he was saying appeared to make sense, despite the way he was contradicting many of my core beliefs.
Tucker Carlson (2018).
Some days after watching, I decided to return to Carlson in order to better understand him, to recognise what he was trying to convince me of, and how he was going about it.
I watched two more episodes and the techniques he was employing gradually became obvious. It was not entirely clear at first, hence my perplexity and compulsion to watch him again. His techniques are no different to those used by Bernays or the sophistry of using true facts to prove false unspoken arguments. The facts were obvious, but the arguments, particularly in the arena of race, or race relations, were subtle: concealing dark convictions that align with primitive fears and aggressions.
There is a certain type of mind that is drawn to people like Carlson; a mind like my own that engages with the world with a set of hard-wired preconceptions, fears and desires. Yet Carlson was not music to my ears because I don’t harbour a fear-based love for guns or a suspicion of black people. Some of my fears I am conscious of, others less so.
If, for example, I were fearful of Black America, of its claims in respect of racism, slavery, inequality; if I were subconsciously fearful that equality or reconciliation was a threat to me; to my wealth; my morality, or my entitled share of wealth, then Carlson would be my man. It is not simply because he is racist or that he does not believe in ‘equality’. Carlson is interested in attracting an audience, and what he offers in return is a sublimated validation of one’s prejudice and fear.
One need only watch him at work to see this. The language he uses is openly about freedom and democratic values, and yet, there is a subtext that is difficult to identify immediately, or pick out with direct quotation marks. There is an artful use of words, not quotable sentences but words, interjected into sentences, which serve precisely the same purpose as ‘Eat Popcorn’ or ‘Drink Coca-Cola.’ or ‘torches of freedom’.
One quickly gains the measure of Carlson’s deeper opinion, or at least of what would likely be his opinion upon issues like gun control, or socialist initiatives such as universal health care, race relations, capitalist wealth, or global warming.
His unspoken ‘opinions’ or sublimations in respect of race are particularly invidious. The young black American is more often portrayed as a criminal thug, a gangster, a cop-killer. Yet this criticism of Carlson cannot be sustained easily, as there are protective ‘pro-black’ images interspersed in his monologues – ordinary black folk occasionally behaving like decent white folk.
I imagine the deception is so complete that Carlson has many black subscribers. It is almost as though he is reiterating the traditional racist slur that ‘not all blacks are bad people.’ Subtle slurs like this, provide the racist with a moral foothold.
It is once again a truth that is used to prove a false argument. Undoubtedly, it is a slur that some Black Americans reiterate and perhaps unwittingly inflict upon themselves. In essence the same sentence may be seen as a subtle evolution of outright racist contempt.
The former traditional slur has a sublimated racism, whilst the latter outright form is openly vile. The former in its disguise is perhaps more invidious, the latter whilst more grotesque, is at least openly so. Carlson’s racism is in the realm of the former: the sophisticated truism that has its racism concealed beneath the surface.
But the point here is not a critique of Carlson’s techniques. Instead it is a warning to avoid the same mistake as I made. After watching two final episodes of Carlson in an attempt to gain the full sublimated picture, I then tried to get rid of him out of my life: to cleanse myself of the poison.
Unfortunately, however, my YouTube feed now regularly spits Carlson onto my screen. I only ever watched two of his shows, yet he finds me at almost every login. I often watch shows about vintage cars, van-lifers and philosophers, yet regardless of my previous choices the algorithm has decided that I am – or should become – a fan of one: Tucker Carlson, an anathema.
The algorithm has made me one of his countless millions of viewers. Perhaps I would have done less harm to the ‘greater good’ had I watched two episodes of a different kind of porn.
The modern advertisement might have been defined by Bernays, but the algorithm that finishes my sentences, sends me ‘likes’, and has wedded me to Carlson, was engineered by a small group of techies in Silicon Valley. They apply the most up to date science and research in their engineering. They reach into our minds every time we interface with social media platforms, with the Internet and the ubiquitous smartphone. The purpose of the Internet we are informed is simply to turn a profit. But what is the product they are selling, when most of these platforms appear to be ‘free’?
I have often heard it said of social media: ‘when you cannot see the product being advertised, it’s because you are the product.’
Our preferences and opinions become part of the programme, encouraging certain types of thoughts and behaviours in others. The ‘like’ button is integral to the function of social platforms and yet what purpose does it serve in respect of the data or information that is being liked or disliked? Behind the like button lies one of the core values of the algorithm itself; the Sophistic assertion that truth is dependent upon likes. That ‘truth’ becomes truer when enough people ‘like’ it.
Human behaviour is predicated upon thought: what we do and when we choose to do it; how we portray ourselves; how we are perceived by others; all of these facts become lines of code within the algorithm.
If we can assert that the history of sublimation reaches as far back as the Greek mind; what can we say of the philosophy of the algorithm? When enough thought becomes manipulated, we may well move into a world where the dominant mode of thinking becomes that of the algorithm itself.
What if the algorithm has already become our new master, the predominant mechanism for thought and the architect of empirical reality? Does it contain a few lines of code that might define or preserve a moral truth of some kind? How would we know if the algorithm is out of control, if it has ‘gone viral’?
The Sophists may have had a counterbalance, a devil’s advocate in the form of Socrates the ‘old gadfly.’ Man has always had a counterbalance, a morality of some kind. If the advertisement and the algorithm have managed to move beyond morality, beyond good and evil, ‘it’ rather than we, has become what Nietzsche referred to as the ubermensch.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
What role does the Algorithm play in the election of a President? In taking to the streets in Dublin because a black man is murdered in America? What role does it play in hatred? In being afraid of a virus, or in wearing a face mask? In taking a vaccine, or in taking one’s own life? The darkness in our world may not be the workings of conspiracy – nor the consequence of irrational political allegiance – it might just be a consequence of sublimation: of a gullible embrace of the thoughts of others.
What has become of old Socrates, that he cannot and will not come to our rescue? Perhaps he is dead, and perhaps as Nietzsche said of God, ‘we have killed him’?
Feature Image: Alan Curtis & Patricia Morison in ‘Hitler’s Madman’ (1943).
[i] ‘Invisible Commercials and Hidden Persuaders: James M. Vicary and the Subliminal Advertising Controversy of 1957’ Kelly B. Crandall HIS 4970: Undergraduate Honors Thesis University of Florida Department of History, http://plaza.ufl.edu/cyllek/docs/KCrandall_Thesis2006.pdf
[ii] Kelly B. Crandall, Invisible Commercials and Hidden Persuaders: James M. Vicary and the Subliminal Advertising Controversy of 1957. HIS 4970: University of Florida, Department of History, April 12, 2006
[iii] Amos, Amanda, and Margaretha Haglund. “From Social Taboo to “Torch of Freedom”: the Marketing of Cigarettes to Women .” Tobacco Control 9.1 (2000). Web. 28 Apr 2010.
[iv] Bartholomew, Robert; Wessely, Simon (2002). ‘Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness’ (PDF). The British Journal of Psychiatry. 180 (4): 300–306. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2BDC2262E104B8A33F3DD49773DA0D8B/S0007125000268578a.pdf/protean_nature_of_mass_sociogenic_illness.pdf
When a researcher publishes a research paper he or she is obliged to state clearly any funding source. The reasons for this are entirely obvious. Most ‘bad’, ‘faulty’, or ‘unreliable’ research is tainted by the interests of those who have provided financial support.
There is nothing new in any of this, and scientific literature is replete with examples – from the use of Thalidimode for morning sickness to Andrew Wakefield linking the MMR vaccine to autism etc. – of bad or biased science. That is not to say necessarily that a scientist or expert offering scientific guidance has been influenced by the overt or covert desires of his sponsors; however, to preserve impartiality he must declare any sponsors before ‘expert’ or ‘scientific’ conclusions are tendered.
Unfortunately, the same rigorous insistence on transparency in respect of funding does not extend to appearances on TV or Radio. Thus, if an ‘expert’ appears to promote a particular therapy, vaccination, or social behaviour, he is not obliged to declare a vested interests or private sponsorship.
It falls to the media source itself – the newspaper or interviewer – to ascertain the affiliations or funding of a particular ‘expert,’ either prior to or during the delivery of scientific conclusions or guidance. This process is integral to maintaining ethical standards within journalism. It is particularly incumbent upon-state funded media, whose income is derived from mandatory licence fees that such standards are not compromised. Without this the general populace could find itself following faulty advice or guidelines to the advantage of ‘he who pays the piper.’
This is precisely the dark territory we have entered in respect of public health guidelines on masks, lockdowns and vaccinations in response to Covid-19.
Obligatory Mask-Wearing
The Irish government has recently made it compulsory to wear surgical face masks on all public transport and inside shops.[i] If a person refuses to comply, without providing a ‘valid’ medical reason, he or she faces a fine of €2500, or a prison sentence of up to six months. The Gardai are to police the validity of such medical reasons. The ethics of a law requiring a Garda to question a member of the public on his or her medical condition in a public places has yet to be discussed in a meaningful manner, despite the clear infringement on an individual’s constitutional right to privacy.
In respect of masks, there are indeed many strong counterarguments, drawn from respectable scientific literature,[ii]against the anti-viral efficacy of masks, the safety of prolonged mask use; besides the social division they create, pitting advocates on both sides against one another.
Indeed, the near pointless nature of mask-wearing has been pointed out to the Oireachtas by its own commissioned expert witness: Professor Carl Heneghan director of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.
Cloth masks are likely to do more harm than good, as it has been stated in many sources that viral particles are so small that the protection offered by most masks is analogous to ‘keeping flies off ones property with a chain-link fence.’ The plastic welder type face shield, in vogue among hotel staff, can reasonably be described as ridiculous in terms of its potential to protect against this virus, or anything at all for that matter. They are, like most masks, little more than a placebo.
Masks afford wearers the delusion of protection. If one wishes to become aware of the appropriate attire to wear to effectively limit transmission of an aerosol or airborne virus from one person to another, there are plenty of images available online showing what ‘medical-grade’ protective attire and masks looks like.
Hazmat suit.
The serious question then arises; ‘when will the population be released from an obligation to wear masks?’
There is no disputing that Covid-19 remains in circulation in Ireland: cases are detected daily and a small number of deaths continue to be reported. There are reasonable concerns that there will be an uptick in cases during the winter months. Historically, coronaviruses cause 30-40% of the common cold which peaks in winter and ‘dies off’ in the summer months. The natural history of coronaviruses is extensively described in the literature.
Therefore, the end game for public mask wearing, the ‘get out of jail card’, or release from the ’duty to mask’ has little to do with the mask itself, which in practical terms is little more than more symbolic; informing or even indoctrinating an awareness of the ‘danger’ of the virus. The public can only stop wearing masks once the virus is no longer circulating in society. The only mechanism by which it can disappear is through the development of immunity within most of the population.
Mandatory masks imply ‘mandatory’ protection for elderly vulnerable people and for young, healthy, non-vulnerable alike. Yet young healthy people have practically nothing to fear from Covid-19, again this is repeatedly cited in almost all available literature. Therefore, when the majority of healthy people within society are ‘protected’ from exposure by masks they are compelled to be protected from developing a natural-immunity through an otherwise natural exposure to the virus. This crucial point has been missing from the non-existent debate in the Irish media on the issue of mask wearing.
When the state makes mask-wearing mandatory, the state has formally rejected natural-immunity among the non-vulnerable.
When the State rejects ‘natural-immunity,’ indeed when it wilfully or legislatively deprives the non-vulnerable individual of opportunities to acquire natural immunity, the State is then compelled to adopt the only alternative to natural-immunity, and that ‘only alternative’ is a vaccine.
Thus, if the only means of eradicating the virus is reaching a herd immunity threshold – assuming we do not reach zero Covid and hermetically seal our borders indefinitely in a new Tír na nÓg – it follows then that the majority of society must eventually be vaccinated in order to achieve immunity. Given that masks have been mandated, it is entirely consistent with government policy that the ‘eagerly’ awaited vaccine must also be mandated.
Warp Speed
Perhaps the foremost expert who has been advocating compulsory mask-wearing in the general public has been Professor Luke O’Neill, a Trinity College biochemist, and head of its immunology department. Professor O’Neill is not a Medical Doctor, nor has he a qualification in public health or epidemiology. Most recently he has been to the fore in insisting mandatory masks should be extended to secondary school students.
As an advocate of compulsory mask wearing, it follows that Professor O’Neill should be a proponent of a universally administered Covid-19 vaccine. Notably, Professor O’Neill’s Twitter feed has included enthusiastic countdowns for the vaccine being rushed through clinical trials at ‘warp speed.’[viii]
Warp speed continues for vaccine- 3 enter final phase of testing (having successfully passed the previous 2) with 18 close behind and 125 more at earlier stages. pic.twitter.com/MMS1FxFLUS
There is nothing new here, and nothing is being uncovered or exposed. Professor O’Neill’s position is neither unusual nor indeed unreasonable. It is entirely expected. Any proponent of universal mask-wearing cannot avoid being a proponent of vaccination as the means of escaping the imposition of the mask – universal vaccination is the only escape from the universal mask.
The relevant question may be whether Professor O’Neill is a proponent of compulsory masks because compulsory masks may only be escaped via compulsory vaccination?
The subtle shift, lost on many, is that the current measures have transformed the positive anticipation of a vaccination for those at risk, into a formal obligation for universal vaccination.
Mask wearers (in theory at least) remain ‘potential hosts’ for Covid-19; natural internal immunity having been officially avoided; immunity can only come from the pharmaceutical industry. Failing to make this connection is a failure of simple logic.
If universal vaccination is the logical conclusion of mask-wearing, and if indeed members of the public are threatened with jail if they fail to comply; it would seem entirely reasonable to establish any potential conflicts of interest that might exist between any scientific proponents of masks, and the manufacturers of a vaccine, very likely to be compulsory for all; a proposal also mooted in other jurisdictions.
#BREAKING Scott Morrison says he expects to make vaccination against coronavirus 'as mandatory as you can possibly make it' once it becomes available https://t.co/03LINcxjmf
One does not wish to focus upon Professor O’Neill unduly; however, as he has been perhaps the most publicly visible scientist to promote masks for all it is not unreasonable to examine his relationship with vaccine manufacturers, and operation ‘warp-speed’.
Sitryx was founded in 2018 with seed funding from SV Health Investors and raised $30 million Series A funding from an international syndicate of specialist investors including SV Health Investors, Sofinnova Partners, Longwood Fund and GSK. In 2020 Sitryx formed an exclusive global licensing and research collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company. Lilly also became an investor in the company.[xiv]
What we can at least say is that a cautionary approach to vaccination would be antagonistic to Sitryx’s primary funders. Whilst mandatory vaccination could result in a transfer of enormous tax revenues into the coffers of those companies fortunate enough to win the ‘race’ for the vaccine.
It is interesting to note that at the outset of the crisis, Professor O’Neill was interviewed on the Late Late Show. At that time he declared that masks were ‘pointless’, if not ‘dangerous’. He described the new coronavirus as an “evil virus” that could get into people’s bodies “through their eyes.” When asked why he thought people were wearing them he replied good humouredly they had watched “too many horror movies”.
Strangely, however, within a matter of weeks the good professor had entirely changed his mind on the issue and continues to assert that masks are indeed entirely essential and should be mandated for almost everyone.
Through no fault of his own, Professor O’Neill’s potential conflict of interest has been wilfully ignored in the national and mainstream media. To my knowledge, he has not once been asked about the relationship between his biotech company, and his sponsors at GSK or Lilly pharmaceuticals, having appeared on almost every talk show on radio and television in the land.
An Alternative?
Partiality towards the bio-tech agenda and public health guidance, might be in the public interest, if masks and subsequent vaccine were in fact the only option available. The general public have been led to believe that mask wearing regulations are ‘for the greater good’, and that those who object are reckless, anarchic, or simply ignorant.
Throughout the pandemic the Swedish approach has been far less draconian than in most European countries, permitting (without encouraging) it’s healthy non-vulnerable citizens to be exposed to the virus within the community setting, and thereby developing natural immunity, a policy that is somewhat in keeping with the natural cycle of viral colds and flues. This takes advantage of natural processes to encourage its natural extinction or diminished severity.
This reduces the potential hosts within society and the attendant risk of the virus spreading to vulnerable or elderly communities. In the face of widespread international criticism[xvi] the country has persisted with the closest model to the much maligned notion of ‘herd immunity.’ Recently the UK press, including the Financial Times[xvii] and Daily Telegraph[xviii], have awoken to the relative success of the Swedish approach, media sources are increasingly joining the ranks of the ‘converted’.
The same model that the UK initially opted for, but later dismissed based on defective modelling from Imperial College, which suggested that a ‘herd immunity’ approach would lead to half a million deaths in the UK,[xix] a model that has since been shown to have been deeply flawed, and based on flawed epidemiology.[xx]
The Swedish approach by avoiding compulsory mask-wearing is not entirely dependent upon universal vaccination as their only ‘end game’. That is not to say that the Swedes will avoid or decline a vaccine when or if it arrives on the market; it is merely that their approach is not locked-into a vaccine as the principal source of immunity for the population. The Swedes have maintained the right to ‘opt’ for a mask and, as such, and have preserved the right to ‘opt’ for a vaccine too.
Regardless of what a country may choose in respect of vaccination, the Swedes will certainly have more of a ‘choice’ relative to those countries that continue to more actively avoid exposure among their healthy non-vulnerable citizens.
Social Division
The recent transformation of many aspects of the external environment, into something of a hospital ward, through the wearing of masks by many, and avoidance by many more, is certainly a new departure in the social habits for most people in Ireland and beyond.
Many are under the impression that mask wearing either in public, in shops or on public transport, is not simply ‘a good idea’ but integral to saving lives. Battle lines have been drawn between the ‘sensible’, and the ‘reckless’.
The state and national media are on the side of the ostensibly sensible, and mainstream media is presently flooded with a positive insistence upon masks. Regardless of the government’s insistence, and the concurrence of mainstream media, large numbers of people refuse to comply, and social division is apparent on the streets, among neighbours and even within families.
This division is a consequence of government policy, and that policy is not based upon any agreed international standard. Interestingly, however, there is little evidence of debate on the subject. This lack of dialogue, and indeed the active suppression of views contradicting the official line, is a very worrying development within a supposedly democratic society, where a diverse range of opinions should be heard.
The present social policy of mandating compliance is a difficult road to navigate without infringing human rights, as members of the public who choose not to wear a mask must disclose their most intimate and private medical details to members of An Garda Síochana in public places, if they are to avoid arrest, fines or imprisonment.
In the recent past an individual’s personal medical details were entirely private and a doctor might be struck off the medical register or sued for sharing this information, without informed consent. Under the current emergency legislation a member of the Gardaí must elicit a quasi-medical history from a non-mask wearer and be satisfied as to its reliability if the non-mask wearer is to avoid arrest. Inalienable human rights to privacy, have been entirely brushed aside.
Unfortunately the consequence of current policy is leading to what might be described as the most divisive situation in Ireland since the civil war. There are those who believe that they are ‘saving lives’; their own, their countrymen and the vulnerable. Opponents believe that wearing a mask is harmful to one’s health, will do nothing to save lives and that there are sinister, political and even corporate motives behind the directives.
Each side of the divide is ostensibly concerned about public welfare. However, those conforming to the narrative are generally presumed correct, whilst nonconformists are readily dismissed as wearing ‘tinfoil-hats’, or being conspiracy theorists, or even ‘anti-vaxxers.’
Presently, the division within society is only simmering. There have been occasional incidences of angry exchanges between both sides, yet these are mostly confined to the zones where mask wearing and other guidelines are compulsory; public transport, and social settings where other guidelines such as social distancing within pubs, restaurants or social venues also apply.
For most of us, wearing a mask on the bus, in the shops, or having the local publican issue a dodgy food receipt so that we can have a pint without fear of being arrested, may not be insurmountable limitations. If we are compliant we are unlikely to be questioning the guidelines, and will be looking forward to a return to normality. Fortunately, for the government it is difficult to look forwards and backwards at the same time. Sure enough, dialogue pertaining to mistakes, missed screenings, deaths in nursing homes etc. are all rather conveniently eclipsed by the current political mask wearing debate. It might be argued that there is indeed a malevolent purpose to this.
If a division erupts into violence or aggression, the parties involved are generally on the extremist fringes of either side of the divide. This is unlikely to remain the case.
I believe we have been led here by motives that are not in the interests of the greater public. The social division that is being fostered, may (for the present time) be manifest only at the level of ‘wearing the jersey’ and shouting up for one’s team. Yet this relatively benign manifestation is likely to evolve into a more sinister version of itself. This is perhaps inevitable as the associated stresses upon either side will undoubtedly increase in the coming months.
Second Wave?
At the time of writing deaths from Covid-19 have declined to almost nothing in Ireland and throughout most of Europe. The question that is in most people’s mind is whether or not this decline will continue throughout the autumn and winter months?
Covid-19 is member of the coronavirus family, responsible for some 30-40% of the yearly or seasonal ‘colds’ that affect almost all nations.[xxi] With it still circulating, we can expect a seasonal increase in cases in the coming months. Our normal or historical experience with the cold and flu viruses each year sees their arrival some time in Autumn, peaking around March or April, and then waning before generally expiring in late Spring or early Summer.
There are two significant factors influencing this process. The first being the natural immunity that develops within society as most people are exposed to and recover from the cold virus. The second factor being the increase in the length of daylight and the effects of daylight (UV-light) upon aerosols, droplets or viral particles on external surfaces. There is nothing new in any of these assertions, which are basic tenets of microbiological science.
Therefore, we can conclude, that as the virus is still here, and as the measures to date have been moderately effective in preventing a build-up in natural-immunity within the population, as the days shorten, a resurgence seems inevitable.
Stress and Disease
In my twenty years of experience as a physician I have noted what many doctors have observed since the dawn of medicine itself. This is the simple empirical truth that psychological stress is a major factor in the subjective evolution or pathogenesis of ALL disease. This truism applies more for some diseases, less in others, but is indeed true for all disease. In many cases psychological stress is the sole factor that pushes the generally tolerable symptoms of minor illness, firmly and definitively into the realm of significant pathology. Indeed, the NHS advise that loneliness can make the symptoms of a cold virus feel worse.[xxii]
Today, the language of psychological and emotional pain has been almost entirely medicalised. Now when one is talking about one’s ‘medical’ illness or one’s ‘diagnosis’, it takes the skill of a competent psychoanalyst to uncover the subjective psychological truths that invariably unite one’s medical ‘pain’ to a deeper insecurity – its emotional or psychological fountainhead. The process is an introspective one, and nowadays most of us are cut off from making these connections.
For some it may be a simple lack of emotional-intelligence, for many more it is simply easier to run with the medical diagnosis, and just take the pill.
I am not asserting that pain is ‘caused’ by emotion or psychology. It is not; it is caused by disease. However, emotion or psychology will determine the tolerability of pain and can push the sub-clinical pain into the realm of clinical manifestation. It will and does make almost all disease worse.
An Honest Version of the Self
Likewise too, when people become angry, on either side of the mask wearing-divide, there is a history to that anger, one that connects it to deeper and more profound frustrations. This is an important factor, rarely considered by a medical establishment that is in thrall to the idea of the human subject as a ‘biological machine’. One where symptoms are mechanical faults, requiring mechanical or physical remedies. Almost all of these remedies must then be purchased. Modern cures are rarely derived from nature, from introspection or the pursuit of an honest version of the self.
This is entirely relevant to the subjective ‘deeper’ angers, insecurities and frustrations that are easily brought to the surface in many people, when the scapegoat of an inferior or non-compliant ‘other’ is provided or even offered up by the powers-that-be. History is our teacher here, and as usual she is wilfully ignored.
I mention the influence of psychological stress to highlight the observation that it is a major determinant in one’s experience with Covid-19 as with any dis-ease. Psychological stress is (medically speaking) a self-fulling prophecy. People who are most anxious about becoming ill are most likely to become ill. If you ask yourself often enough whether or not you have a headache, you will eventually experience one.
The same applies to Covid-19. Most people who are exposed to the virus do not even know they have been exposed. Many experience little more than a common cold or flu like illness, many more experience nothing at all. As is the case with the common cold, the crucial factor that determines where one is likely to fall upon the spectrum of suffering, is not simply the cold-virus itself, but rather the physical and importantly the mental health of the ‘victim’. There is no individual more acutely aware of his symptoms, than someone who is most anxious about his health.
Back to School
Psychological stress for some members of our society has an equally seasonal component. Each September when Irish children return to school, the stress levels within many Irish families, (particularly those with young children) begin to rise.
There are immediate demands for uniforms, books, lists, shoes, sportswear, transport etc, all of which place a significant burden on parents, especially mothers. Returning to school this year for most families will be fraught with many additional anxieties.
Children may have to wear masks, visors, social distance in the classroom and the playground, be prevented from bringing lunch boxes, and perhaps have their uniforms washed daily. Schools may not be able to accommodate required classroom sizes and schedules for attendance may have to be altered. The familiar routine is to be a ‘thing of the past’ – the implications for increased stress upon parents and children are incalculable. Let us organize all of this into a list of observations
An elevated number of potential viral hosts, which is a consequence of suppression of natural-immunity.
Increased life of the virus in the external environment due to decreased daylight
Raised levels of social anxiety and subsequent susceptibility to illness/infection
Continued persistence of the virus at low levels within Irish society
These factors suggest a resurgence of the virus this winter, and taken in context with the existing level of social stress, and the inevitable increase in those stresses next month; it is not unreasonable to suggest a ‘perfect storm’ is gathering.
It is highly likely that the present level of bitterness or anger between both sides of the mask wearing divide willl be where that stress and pain becomes publicly manifest. The deeper tragedy at play, is the fact that each side of the division will be seen as the aggresor. Yet those who have fostered the division remain immune to any degree of scrutiny for past mistakes, while dark clouds are on the horizon.
[i] Orla Dwyer, ‘Explainer: Everything to know about new face covering regulations’, thejournal.ie, August 10th, 2020, https://www.thejournal.ie/when-and-how-to-wear-a-face-covering-ireland-5171841-Aug2020/
[ii] David Isaacs et al, ‘Do facemasks protect against COVID‐19?’, Journal of Paediatric Child Health, June 16th, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7323223/?fbclid=IwAR15wQ0gOySIs8c7I4m9qsCiPJT6E66pM9Hiwr82AKeAPfcmfmKctK9qG1Y#__ffn_sectitle
[iii] Catherine Fegan, ‘’Many in nursing homes died deaths that certainly could have been prevented’’, Irish Independent, June 13th, 2020, https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/many-in-nursing-homes-died-deaths-that-certainly-could-have-been-prevented-39282569.html
[iv] Sarah Fulham-McQuillan, ‘Strong legal basis for making Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory’, Irish Times, June 27th, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/strong-legal-basis-for-making-covid-19-vaccinations-mandatory-1.4313941?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fstrong-legal-basis-for-making-covid-19-vaccinations-mandatory-1.4313941
[v] Simon Carswell, ‘Coronavirus: Ireland has ‘no significant’ herd immunity, study shows’, July 20th, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/coronavirus-ireland-has-no-significant-herd-immunity-study-shows-1.4308216
[vi]F. Javier Ibarrondo, Ph.D. et al, ‘Rapid Decay of Anti–SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in Persons with Mild Covid-19’, July 27th, 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2025179
[vii] Katherine J. Wu, ‘Scientists See Signs of Lasting Immunity to Covid-19, Even After Mild Infections’, New York Times, August 16th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-immunity-antibodies.html
[xii] ‘Lilly Initiates Phase 3 Trial of LY-CoV555 for Prevention of COVID-19 at Long-Term Care Facilities in Partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)’ https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lilly-initiates-phase-3-trial-ly-cov555-prevention-covid-19-long
[xiii] ‘New biopharmaceutical company Sitryx launches with $30 million fundraising to develop disease modifying therapeutics in immunometabolism’, October 8th, 2018, https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/10/08/1617744/0/en/New-biopharmaceutical-company-Sitryx-launches-with-30-million-fundraising-to-develop-disease-modifying-therapeutics-in-immunometabolism.html
[xv] VOA News, ‘Norway Makes First Face Mask Recommendation Since Pandemic Began’, VOA, August 14th, 2020, https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/norway-makes-first-face-mask-recommendation-pandemic-began
[xvi] Peter S. Gordon, ‘Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale’, New York Times, July 7th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html
[xvii] Richard Milne ‘Sweden’s pandemic no longer stands out’, Financial Times, August 9th, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/7acfc5b8-d96f-455b-9f36-b70dc850428f
[xviii] Allister Herd, ‘Sweden’s success shows the true cost of our arrogant, failed establishment’, The Telegraph, August 10th, 2020 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/12/swedens-success-shows-true-cost-arrogant-failed-establishment/
[xix] Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, ‘Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action’, New York Times, March 17th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-imperial-college-johnson.html
[xx] See: David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik, ‘Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time’, The Telegraph, May 16th, 2020,
And: Freddie Sayers, ‘Nobel prize-winning scientist: the Covid-19 epidemic was never exponential’, Unherd, May 2nd, 2020, https://unherd.com/thepost/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-the-covid-19-epidemic-was-never-exponential/
[xxi] J. Black, Micriobiology Principles & Applications, (1993) p.580
[xxii] ‘Loneliness may make cold symptoms feel worse’, NHS, March, 2017, https://www.nhs.uk/news/mental-health/loneliness-may-make-cold-symptoms-feel-worse/
