Acts of commission – such as an amputation of the wrong leg or a dose of morphine an order of magnitude higher than recommended – generally elicit moral outrage. This anger usually extends to the relatives of the deceased should the victim pass away. Based on figures from the U.S., where medical error is the third leading cause of death, we may infer that five thousands are dying each year occur as a result of medical examination or treatment in Ireland through either commission or omission. The likelihood is that the former outnumbers the latter (see Oops! Why Things Go Wrong: Understanding and Controlling Error by Niall Downey (Liffey Books, 2023))
Over the course of the past century the medical profession has been responsible for horrendous, large scale acts of commission, usually in service of an ideology that made perfect sense at the time. Thus, various documentaries depict old Nazi or Japanese doctors recalling with rheumy eyed nostalgia ‘the good old days’; when everything made sense and boiling, freezing, vivisecting and poisoning human beings was all in a day’s work.
Japanese Unit 731 inflicted unspeakable brutality on the population of China (Manchuria) and Korea. Their experiments were published in prestigious medical journals many of which were aware that the Manchurian monkey-subjects were in fact Chinese peasants (see Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Green and Yuma Totani (Tuttle Classics, 2019). Many died during the experiments – one rarely survives vivisection – and the remainder were murdered before the laboratories were destroyed.
Most will be familiar with accounts of the Nazi doctors – of whom a tiny fraction were put on trial at Nuremberg in 1947 – and from which we derive the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation. 50% of German doctors were members of the Nazi party in the early 1940s by which time the euthanasia programme were in full swing.
Doctors’ trial, Nuremberg, 1946–1947.
For the Greater Good?
The rationale for carrying out much of this barbaric work was apparently ‘for the greater good’, clearly not of the subjects, but for those who held sway over life and death by virtue of their power. The academic brilliance of many of the Nazi doctors led to them being spirited away to the USA to prevent the Soviets accessing their genius. Many of today’s pharmaceutical companies benefitted from their discoveries, e.g. sulfanilamides, methadone, phenol to name but a few (See The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton, Hachette Book Group, 1986).
Of course it wasn’t only the Germans and Japanese who had a penchant for inflicting carnage on the human race; the USA’s own Fort Detrick was a bio-weapons development site, which has had several accidents since the 1960s (See Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick, by J. David McSwane Simon and Schuster, 2022). It was even cited in Professor Jeffry Sachs’ 2022 Lancet report concerning the possible source of Sars-CoV2.
Less often discussed are acts of omission, unless one regards inordinately long waiting times for operations and treatments as omissions. These are not to be dismissed and would include the tragic deaths of children here in Ireland awaiting scoliosis surgery.
The type of omission that we wish to speak about is perhaps more sinister and it doesn’t lend itself to explanations such as ‘scarce resources’ or ‘bureaucratic bumbling.’ Some omissions hint at a systemic evil.
In 2020 at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic (a pandemic generated by fear and hysteria as much as illness), it was widely believed, and stated by the majority of family physicians, that there were no safe and effective treatments for the condition. After all, they had been told as much in a the guidelines that were issued by the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) in April 2020: ‘Care of the Covid-19 presumptive or test positive covid-19 patient at home, including management of the deteriorating patient.’ The document stated that 16% of those over eighty years could die and that 50% of deaths could occur in the community.
Repurposed Drugs
At that time, however, there was a growing number of doctors around the world using repurposed drugs, i.e. medications that were known to have effects outside of what they were designed to do, and that these features might be helpful to fighting this novel yet potentially deadly situation. This is referred to as ‘empirical treatment’ and doctors have been practising it for decades, if not centuries. Examples include the use of blood pressure tablets for headaches, aspirin in the treatment of heart attacks or sildenafil (Viagra). Many are eternally grateful for empiricism!
To the long list of empirical treatments one should add hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin (IVM). However, these once safe, cheap and readily available drugs were transformed by a sustained media campaign into potentially lethal, prohibitively expensive and scarce medicines. Debate around their possible merits bordered on the disavowal of heresy. Indeed, mentioning them on social media platforms resulted in suspension or banning as an army of so-called ‘fact-checkers’ protected the world from empiricism.
Thus, the medical profession, scientists and public health officials abandoned critical faculties and moral courage and joined the mob to bray and bark out any nonsense fed to them by Anthony Fauci, Mike Ryan, Luke O’Neill and other such figures. None of whom had clinical responsibility for patients.
Whilst all of this was unfolding there were people within the Health Service Executive (HSE) here in Ireland, and no doubt in many similar organisations around the world, who knew that repurposed drugs could have had a vital role to play. Indeed, Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India with over 241 million inhabitants, made readily available, take-away packs containing these drugs.
Freedom of Information Request
A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the National Clinical Advisor and Group Lead at the HSE was issuing entirely conflicting instructions to hospital CEO’s around the country in respect of Hydroxychloroquine. A letter to the CEO’s of Irish Hospitals ,dated 24/March/2020 instructs that:
Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) has been identified as having antiviral activity against SARS-CoV2.There is sufficient rationale and pre-clinical evidence of effectiveness to include it as an antiviral treatment option and is included in the guideline.
Its use was not, however permitted in the community or the Nursing Homes. Even more bizarrely in another letter of the same date, issued by Primary Care Reimbursement and Eligibility at the HSE instructed that all pharmacists in Ireland to report any doctor writing prescriptions for this medication.
NPHET and/or the HSE had decided that patients would not be treated in the community despite us having effective medication (chloroquine has been known since 2002/3 to have antiviral properties) and despite it being prescribed, albeit empirically, by family physician (See: ‘Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread’Virology Journal, 2005).
Physicians working within the community – GP’s who cared sufficiently to question the guidelines – looked into using Hydroxychloroquine and found the available evidence instructing that Hydroxychloroquine was most effective if used early in treatment. This is a common theme with most antibiotic or antiviral medications. So, it ought to have been abundantly clear that hospital was not the place where the treatment was needed, nor the setting where the treatment might even work. Of the c. 2000 Covid deaths that occurred in the Irish Nursing Home Sector it is doubtful if any one of them had access to this ‘effective antiviral treatment,’ which might well have saved their lives.
It’s shocking to consider that while politicians, journalists and medics were ridiculing the U.S. President for using Hydroxychloroquine – at a time when Irish GP’s were being disciplined and placed under investigation for trying to use it to treat the sick and the dying – the doctors in charge of policy knew perfectly well that it was a safe and effective treatment.
Even if decisive evidence was lacking, their application might at least have given people hope, which could plausibly have had a placebo effect. It seems as if ‘hope’ is precisely what they wanted to remove. The absence of hope certainly contributed to many lonely deaths.
This seems to have been designed to serve a Pharmaceutical Agenda. You see Covid genetic vaccines were licensed for use under ‘Emergency Use Authorisation’ (EUA). They could only escape the necessity of appropriate trials and be released onto the market on condition that there were no available treatments. So, effective medications were withheld and carnage ensued in the nursing home sector, where victims were deprived of an opportunity to say goodbye to loved ones weeping in car parks. Their deaths facilitated a Pharmaceutical Agenda. They apparently died ‘for the greater good’.
This theme of no treatment, in spite of thousands of case studies from around the world, was perpetuated in a February 2021 HIQA report. It was an approach demonstrating either willful blindness or callous disregard for the need to ‘first do no harm.’
In hindsight, and having climbed in and out of so many rabbit holes, it’s hard not to believe that most people just follow orders – they don’t think, they don’t read, they just pay the mortgage, feed the children, get through the day and find comfort in wearing blinkers. And who could blame them?
The reality is probably more than most could bear. Manchurian Monkeys are everywhere and they need to be controlled. One can’t have liberal democracy upsetting the plans for a greater, if less populated, future. Thus, insidiously unelected and unaccountable bodies – such as the EU Commission, UN, IMF, WHO and WEF slowly dismantle any democratic processes that might thwart their path to political hegemony: suppressing free speech, the right of travel, right of assembly, bodily autonomy, online anonymity, cash transactions and soon perhaps all forms of political dissent.
Feature Image: Building of the Unit 731 bioweapon facility in Harbin
The title of this article may seem somewhat prosaic, but given that it really is about birth after death it seems appropriate. For I really did die on July 25 2022, and that which came back to life was not the same person, and certainly not the same doctor.
Prior to 2020 I hadn’t asked the question: ‘what is a doctor?’ I entered medical school to escape working class powerlessness, and successfully developed unhealthy delusions of grandeur reveling in a body of knowledge that I now know to be about as substantial as clouds. I did have some moments of sober reflection during my undergraduate days, but they were not in Dublin. Rather, the people and doctors of Moscow taught me to see the world from a different perspective. I have no love of Soviet-style Communism, and no wish to eulogize it, given the millions of lives lost or destroyed, but the sense of classlessness I experienced in the Russia of 1990 was liberating. It was a feeling that soon evaporated on returning to the ‘land of the free.’
Reflecting now on how I practiced medicine, I think that it was fortunate that for much of that time I worked in low-risk environments. This was fortunate for the patients who encountered me at that time. Despite my paucity of knowledge and practical skills I succeeded in doing some good by listening and tried to understand complex human relationships, and the societal forces shaping these. With that perceived limited skill set – perhaps created by impostor syndrome and the pressure of the short duration of time per consultation – one invariably becomes a conduit for the distribution of pharmaceutical products. The quick pattern recognition followed by the reflexive use of the prescription pad. I was getting well paid. I was doing the same as my colleagues, or at least that’s what we told each other in practice meetings, and all was right in the world.
Of course, I never really questioned what world I was actually referring to, my own or my patients. On reflection I chose willful blindness over open scepticism, a strange position to take for a young man brought up in Ireland since the 1960s. This was a country that showed clearly – at least to anyone who chose to look – that those in power and positions of authority had feet of clay. That period revealed clerical abuse, government corruption and waste, medical malfeasance in the form of vaccine experiments and the selling of children to wealthy Americans in collusion with the Church. Then we had the banking and economic collapse leading to the selling off of the country and its sovereignty, and more recently the Covid-19 scandal. Why did I think that the biomedical model served anyone other than those corporations and professions earning vast profits from illness?
Image Daniele Idini.
Awakening
A growing cynicism and scepticism coalesced into an awakening on St Patrick’s day March 17, 2020 when then Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar paraphrased Winston’s Churchill’s World War II speech: ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ It was then, to quote Emily Dickenson, that I felt “a cleaving in my mind”. The juxtaposition of such incongruent images as the much loved and revered patron saint of Ireland with his herpetology skills, and the current barely re-elected and much reviled Taoiseach conjuring up images of the London Blitz when speaking about an impending wave of beta-corona virus infections recalled a Monty Python sketch.
The more I listened to mainstream media in Ireland that mainly consisted of the state-funded Raidio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ), the more the absurdities flowed and the cleft grew. Eventually, this dislocated myself and a few like-minded colleagues from the rest of our colleague’s apparent embrace of what to us seemed a clearly fabricated, dystopian reality. Doctors shut their practices, refused to see or treat patients because the Irish College of General Practitioners told them that there was no treatment available. Yet, the HSE had been claiming that hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating Sars-CoV1, from 2003, sending a circular to pharmacists suggesting they stock up on the drug and reserved it for treating patients in hospital with Sars-CoV2.
Who thought that this was ethically and morally appropriate? The rest of society followed suit accepting with slack-jawed-gormlessness curious phrases such as ‘apart together’,’social distancing’,’flatten the curve,’ along with the ultra-dystopian ‘build back better’ and the ‘new normal’. What did any of these inane statements even mean?
Societal strategies such as mandatory mask-wearing were inflicted with the emphatic certainty only fools can generate and even bigger fools gorge themselves on. Masks of any material, worn walking through restaurants, but not seated, even masks for solo journeys in cars. Then we had the perspex screens over which, apparently, viruses couldn’t jump, the safe purchasing practice of beer and crisps, but not socks and shoes, within the same department stores, and the viral-repellent Nine Euro Meal, along with the destructive removal of children from school for months.
The sacred was not spared the ravages of this banal evil. Burials were in closed caskets, while no wakes were allowed, and only a ‘safe’ few mourners were permitted; weddings were cancelled, and masses went uncelebrated.
The medical profession adopted its own dystopian practices such as artificially ventilating cases initially, at least until they realised they were actively killing people. Within general practice the main concern expressed on a well known GP support website was the potential loss of income if we couldn’t see patients. Any attempt to discuss the ramifications of drastically altering the daily rhythms of society was met with ridicule, and dismissed as irrelevant. After all, this was a pandemic and we could lose a substantial amount of our income! Later, when the topic of vaccine adverse events were raised, many of the same people urged us to shut up and vaccinate.
Nursing Homes
Meanwhile, in the nursing homes around Ireland, the elderly were left alone, unloved, unvisited and untreated unless it was end of life care. How ironic and criminally sad that these people should be treated this way for ‘their own good’.
A personal story about a patient of mine may bring home the human tragedy. Jim and Mary were married for close to sixty years. Mary was moved to a nursing home after her dementia worsened to a point where she could no longer be cared for at home. Once that happened Jim visited her every day. Speaking to him after several of these visits he expressed his frustration at her memory loss. Then one day after a visit he came out and told me that he discovered that Mary had excellent recall of the events of their early life together, so he would just talk about those memories. For a while he had the woman he married back.
Then the nursing homes prevented people visiting on account of Covid. Neither the residents nor their families were asked for their permission to be separated. Jim still visited everyday but he would come away frustrated. Mary would be placed in the window, like a mannequin, and Jim would stand outside. On a sunny day he would stand there looking at his own reflection, unable to see his wife.
Jim was finally allowed in to see Mary, but by then she was on her death bed and was unable to share any memories or even say goodbye. This was for the greater good of course.
What wasn’t used for anyone’s ‘ good’ were treatments such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine despite emerging evidence of efficacy from around the world from reputable clinicians. Curiously these ‘reputable’ clinicians rapidly became disreputable, despite decades of blemish-free clinical service to their patients. Some had very respectable research and academic careers. Yet, they became outcasts, renegades, not to be trusted according to the ‘fact-checkers.’ This latter group of reprobates turned out to be captured academics with vested interests in protecting certain ideologies or social media companies, pressurised by the U.S. state department and FBI to suppress all ‘thought crime’.
Image: Daniele Idini.
But One Hope
Fear was thus weaponised as the great and the good climbed aboard the gravy train and stoked fear until a mental paralysis gripped the nation. Any dissenting voice was dismissed as selfish and lacking a social conscience. We had but one hope: the vaccine, which was arriving at ‘warp speed,’ while Ursula von der Leyden was exhausting her texting thumb making sure that we in Europe would be saved.
Everybody would be rescued, whether they wanted it or not, and sure who wouldn’t want a novel pharmaceutical product that was still in phase 3 of clinical trials. Trials that were confounded by giving the placebo arm the product, a product never before used successfully as a vaccine. This was a product for whom the English language had to be subverted in order to accommodate it. Only the insane or the selfish would not want to be rescued, and we don’t want those type of people in our ‘new normal’ world was the message that came from politicians, celebrities and doctors via a complicit media. They pleaded for all our sake to get vaccinated. These were people who at any other time would not give a moments reflection to inordinately long waiting times in our public hospitals, the overcrowding in our prisons, the record levels of homeless children, or the plight of the working class suddenly wanted to embrace collectivism, and ideas about humanity sharing the burden of this ‘pandemic.’ And it worked. Beaten down by fearmongering propaganda and the mind-numbing effects of Netflix, beer and pizza most people walked towards the light, or rather what they were told was the light.
As of 2025 homelessness in Ireland is at a record high, along with immigration and the cost of living. Excess deaths, which remained steady until 2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) rising to 33,055 in 2021, 35,477 in 2022, 35,459 in 2023 and 35,173 in 2024. Cancer is also on the rise. We have the second highest rate in Europe as of 2022 (our Minister for Health’s office informed me that this was because we are so much better at recording than other nations). International events have further revealed the powerless of many nations and that the rule of law isn’t universal. There is no rules based order. There is only power and money and the golden rule is that those who have the gold rule!
Amongst the flotsam and jetsam post-Covid are the inadequately accounted injured by these vaccines. They are deemed to be invisible, however, even inconvenient and regularly have their realities denied by the very people who created the problem. The medical profession is still clinging to the idea that they saved the world from the plague and are indignant that more gratitude hasn’t been shown.
The medical profession according to JAMA(Journal of the American Medical Association) has seen a 30% drop in public trust. This will have complex reasons behind it, but the combination of snout in trough and downright dishonesty will have contributed. Gaslighting those who were previously well and now cannot function after receiving Covid vaccines has only added to this.
People will reflect on the misuse of the Covid vaccines, the profits made and the lies told about its efficacy and safety, and wonder how many times these same scenarios played out in a greater or lesser form in the past.
After thirty years of practice, I simply can no longer engage with a profession that has been captured by an industry whose sole aim is profit. Most postgraduate medical training is paid for or delivered by the pharmaceutical industry. One has to question what are the priorities of an industry that spends $19 dollars on advertising and marketing for every dollar spent on research.
This results is a disease modelrather than one that examines the root cause. The former results in conditions that coincidentally have pharmaceutical products as alleged solutions. This chronic disease approach rarely if ever returns a person to a state of health. With such an interventionist approach one can understand why around a quarter of a million people may die each year at the hands of the medical profession in the USA, and perhaps 5,000 per annum in Ireland. An emphasis on sleep, diet, breath and movement is unlikely to result in such carnage or in such vast profits.
The shifting of a paradigm is rarely easy to achieve, but it is doubly troublesome when the concepts are unfamiliar to the people one is seeing on a daily basis in practice. Not only have the medical profession been trained to view health through the lens of chronic disease but the population at large connect health this with pharmaceutical products. They receive this message from most hucksters who want you to buy their products/procedures/cleanses etc. So when it comes to the person taking control of their lives there is a gargantuan effort needed to shift many people’s locus of control from the external to the internal. And it can be financially risky to give a person agency over their own health.
Fortunately, there is a growing awareness that lifestyle is more than a sidebar to achieving health. Instead it is health. One aspect in particular has gained a wide interest recently, the issue of insulin resistance.
This is this concept that I now spend most of my consultations discussing with amenable patients. The subject can be as complex or as straight-forward as one wants to make it. Fundamentally, we do not need carbohydrates, another large industry – the misnamed ‘food industry’ – would disagree, but physiology says we don’t.
Up to 70% of the Western diet is composed of carbohydrates. Most of the items in our supermarket trollies are in packets with barcodes and usually contain a lot of carbohydrate, and worse still refined carbohydrates. These products are broken down into the main fuel of the body and in particular the brain, i.e. glucose. However many of these products contain fructose, or more precisely high fructose corn syrup, a substance that causes a great deal of problems for our mitochondria and subsequently our cells and energy levels. Most of the health problems that we develop are ‘energy’ problems. Using this term runs the risk of wandering into the land of ‘woo,’ but slowly the concept of energy deficits as a cause of many inflammatory conditions, such as diabetes, cancers and dementia is gaining traction.
Returning to insulin resistance. This is a phenomenon that occurs when we consume and create more glucose. Then our body habitus changes, i.e. we get more fat than muscle and we move less. We then need more insulin to regulate our glucose levels. And this is where current medical thinking creates the problem that it then goes on to profit from.
We measure glucose not insulin. Glucose stays within the normal range for decades before it rises above some arbitrary threshold to be called Type 2 diabetes mellitus. But insulin has been raised for decades resulting in high blood pressure, altered lipids, migraines, anxiety, depression, IBS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, dementia, cancer and insomnia to list but a few. All of these conditions are seen as separate problems when in fact they have a common treatable root cause.
Let me just clarify something at this stage. I am not saying that these complex conditions are solely caused by insulin resistance (IR), but IR is a fundamental feature and if more effort went into reducing IR through actual lifestyle changes then people could actually return to and maintain a state of good health.
At the beginning of this article I alluded to how I died in 2022 and that was the death of this doctor. From that suicide attempt, an attempt precipitated by increasing dismay at the state of the world and my profession in particular, I have rejected many of the beliefs and gods of the past. I have found hope in taking an approach to both my lifestyle and that of my patients which actually has tangible results, and is not based on probabalistic forecasts. My own state of health is fundamental to how I practice medicine and is reflected in my consultation style and physical presence with my patients, and whether they ‘believe’ what I tell them until they see that it is or isn’t working for themselves. Then we rethink and try again. This is unlike the medical model that expects the patient to believe regardless of the almost inevitable side effects.
The physician needs to be and live in the state of health that they want the patient to obtain. Patients are driven by emotion and to some extent by optics not by rational argument. An overweight, flatulent and out-of-breath doctor is not going to promote anything healthy in his or her patients. They can, however, empathize with the pill for every ill model because they have clearly embraced that wholeheartedly.
The role of the doctor has declined in significance over time and will continue to do so with the evolution of more advanced AI models if doctors continue down the same road using the same disease model paradigms that are conveniently linked to pharmaceutical products. Instead, doctors need to revert to the model of the physicians of old, and perhaps once again let ‘food be thy medicine’ and be role models for their patients. Optics in today’s age of forever-on-screens is a useful adjunct, but the doctor-patient relationship untainted by influence from the pharmaceutical industry should still be the bedrock of the practice of medicine.
Northern Ireland has already conducted a statutory inquiryinto how Covid was managed. In contrast, the Republic is set to have a ‘review’ without statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend. This despite the Republic having had both a relatively high fatality rate and punitive restrictions that don’t appear to have worked. Maybe there is something to be learned from the Orangemen?
In a seminal 1913 article entitled ‘The North Began’, the renowned scholar Eoin MacNeill opined that the rest of the island of Ireland could learn from the approach then adopted by Ulster Unionists in setting up the Ulster Volunteer Force. Ultimately, this led to the creation of the Irish Volunteers, ostensibly to protect Home Rule, then supposedly imminent, but which also contributed to the emergence of the Irish Republican Army after the Easter Rising of 1916.
MacNeill’s argument comes to mind with the recent announcement of a limited ‘Review’ into how Covid-19 was managed in the Southern Irish state – and also regarding how the experience of life during Covid differed from the North, especially for Dubliners, who were significantly disadvantaged.
Who can forget – amid frenzied reports of hospitals being overrun in Italy and China by a new infection – this state going into lockdown as a ‘temporary’ precaution? A mantra quickly adopted was to ‘flatten the curve’ referring to the Rate of Infection, with every citizen encouraged to adhere to ‘social distancing’ rules until the health system was ready to absorb the expected surge.
Having cut ICU beds after the Crash, the twenty-six county state was poorly placed by comparison with most of its E.U. counterparts to deal with expected surges.
The Irish ‘Plan’
Yet, for once, the Irish state did have a properly planned response (‘Ireland’s National Action Plan in response to COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Update 16th March 2020’) – having previously modelled responses to pandemic scenarios. Essentially, it was envisaged that third level institutes would be closed – as occurred – with field hospitals opened in these large, idle facilities. It was, on paper at least, a great plan.
With any ‘Irish Plan’, there were two distinct pathways to follow. The first involved attempting to follow the ‘Zero Covid’ approach adopted by New Zealand, which sought to keep Covid off their islands altogether by requiring international passengers to remains for a specified period in quarantine facilities prior to any stay in the country. Then there was the so-called ‘Swedish Model’, which emphasized protection of the vulnerable, while minimising restrictions on personal liberties.
Instructively the Irish plan was based on an assumption that ‘6% of people may become more seriously infected and will require hospital care.’
It is now clear that this figure was much exaggerated, based on flawed Chinese data, and generated undue fear. Moreover, early statistics on Covid hospital admissions seem to have included patients who tested positive for the virus, but were admitted for something else, as well as those who caught the virus while in hospital being treated for another condition.
Many of those hospitalised ‘with Covid’ may have been asymptomatic, due to the sensitivity of the PCR test. As an important article in the New York Times from August 2020 put it: ‘Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.’
Sweden
In these circumstances, the Swedish Model was harshly criticized as uncaring, and it was said that the disease would spread like wildfire. Yet, in hindsight, it seems to have been the lesser of evils.
Alas, there is still no consensus as to the cumulative total of fatalities that occurred in the different European states. Nonetheless, even sources that seem less favourable to the Swedish approach, such as the ‘Worldometer’ table on Wikipedia, rate their death toll as lower than Ireland’s per capita, despite a significantly older population. There were 1,860 Reported Deaths per million happening there, as opposed to the 1,980 here. (Original source: https://www.worldometers.info/ coronavirus/?utm_campaign= homeAdvegas1. See Wikipedia table, ‘Statistics by country and territory’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ COVID-19_pandemic_in_Europe).
Another metric provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ranks the Scandinavian nation lowest for overall cumulative excess deaths among a number of countries studied from 2020-22, at 6.8 per cent. By comparison Australia had 18 per cent, the U.K. 24.5 per cent, and the U.S.A. a rate of 54.1 per cent.
In retrospect, it is plausible that the ‘Irish Plan’ might have co-existed with either the Zero or Swedish approaches. Based on what was known at the time, it may have been worth trying a Zero approach initially. It probably would not have worked – not just because of a porous border with the North or membership of the European Union – but also because it seems that Covid-19 was already circulating in Europe as early as March, 2019.
Normalisation of House-Arrest
Intelligent leadership adapts to changing circumstance, and so, with the likely failure of the Zero-Covid approach, the Swedish model could – and should – have been adopted by the autumn of 2020. Had the Irish authorities adhered to their own plan, by that time, the universities would have been functioning as field hospitals. Yet that’s not what happened.
Instead, ‘temporary’ lockdowns, introduced in March 2020, were gradually normalised into a weird form of house arrest. Rather than lasting a few weeks, these ‘temporary’ measures would dominate our lives for almost two years. It was an unprecedented, draconian suppression of civil liberties, which became more tyrannical and absurd as time passed by.
The ‘new normal’ was to live within two kilometres of home, later extended to some five kilometres. All social activities were banned, bar a clap in one’s garden to thank ‘front-line’ staff. Meanwhile, Irish care homes – where air is often stuffy and poor quality – were left to fester with full occupancy, as sick elderly patients were released from hospitals. Consequently, the level of mortality that occurred in these institutions was second only to that of Canada during the first wave.
That the Taoiseach at the time of outbreak, Leo Varadkar, had previously been a medical doctor, was an initial source of hope that we would be guided by competent leadership.
Empty hospitals, however, such as Baggot Street and St. Bricin’s in Dublin, continued to lie idle. Elected representatives, including Varadkar, effectively devolved leadership to NPHET (the National Public Health Emergency Team for Covid-19). which was composed almost entirely of career civil servants – arguably with little ‘skin in the game’ if businesses were shut down – but whose pronouncements came to be treated with the same reverence as was once accorded to the Catholic hierarchy. Throughout that period their evaluations decided our destinies in ways that often seemed ridiculous.
Image: Daniele Idini
Science becomes religion
Holohan’s decision to appoint Professor Philip Nolan – ‘The pair had known each other for years’ – to oversee disease modelling ought to have prompted concern. Nolan was then President of Maynooth University, his ‘research was in physiology – specifically the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.’
With limited apparent research background or expertise in infectious diseases, Nolan’s wayward models – and bizarre commentary on antigen testing – informed Irish government decisions throughout the pandemic.
According to the authors of Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic (2022), ‘almost everyone who attended NPHET meetings agreed on one thing above all others: this was a Tony Holohan production.’ An unnamed source in that publication described his style as ‘very dictatorial and autocratic,’ and ‘intolerant of alternative views.’
Science became the new religion. Yet the measures often seemed scientifically questionable. Thus, in line with WHO guidance a positive PCR test within twenty-eight days of someone dying was listed as a Covid fatality – even if that poor individual had died in a car crash!
Meanwhile, ‘stay safe’ became ‘stay sane’ for many of us who watched scarce resources dwindle, as the normal conduct of business was prevented. Sadly, little adaption to challenging circumstance occurred in line with ‘the science’.
Who can forget the moral panic that ensued in the summer of 2020? Thus, tabloid photographers cunningly used long range lenses to foreshorten the view of people at beaches. Despite people sitting apart, it looked as if they were on top of one another. Subsequently, in January 2021 it emerged that not one case of transmission could be traced to the beach ‘outrages’ when assessed by the U.K. authorities.
‘The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty’?
The Irish state was set-up a century ago to prevent the coercion of Irish citizens. Notably, the fourth paragraph of the 1916 Proclamation asserts:
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Ergo the social contract on which this Republic is based ought to protect personal freedoms, within bounds. Yet, instead we had unprecedented and clearly disproportionate restrictions imposed on us by our own government. It seems that being ‘the best in the class’ mattered most of all to Irish politicians in terms of accepting dictates from European masters.
EU leadership?
Meanwhile, disastrously, leadership at the European level was sorely lacking: Rather than providing positive guidance to adapt to the reality that Covid was effectively endemic by the winter of 2020, the European Union supported lockdowns, a milder model of that first trialled in that great bastion of liberal democracy: the People’s Republic of China.
Hence the Germans banned outdoor markets – even though outdoor trade should have been encouraged. Meanwhile, only at the last minute did the Austrian government abandon the idea of forcing injections on recalcitrant civilians. Thus, it seems logical that there should be a proper inquiry into how Covid was handled at the E.U. level, as well as in each member state.
The unwillingness of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to release communications with vaccine manufacturers, including text messages with Pfizer boss Albert Bourla, also raises serious questions regarding transparency.
In Ireland, the utter incompetence of Boris Johnson in the U.K. provided lasting cover. He was memorably, if somewhat bizarrely, compared to a rogue shopping trolley creating chaos about the place.
A regular refrain on Irish media, and in private conversations, was that ‘at least we’re not as bad as the Brits’. Thus, instead of finding ways to enable the maximum amount of people to live their lives as normally as possible, officialdom largely adopted a ‘no can do’ approach. At times, it almost seemed as if the state broadcaster was intent on terrorising the population into submission.
Irish Constitution
In such a challenging period, thoughts of God might may have come to mind. In line with the sentiments expressed in the 1916 Proclamation, Article 44of the Irish Constitution of 1937 protects practice of faith from obstruction.
Unlike care homes, churches and temples are typically tall spacious venues with plenty of fresh air. There was little scientific basis for banning people from attending such places, provided certain measures were adopted – including ensuring adequate ventilation, personal space, and adapting rituals pertaining to communion and hand shaking.
In my view, the state was obliged to vindicate these rights. After all, what is the point of a constitutional right if serious efforts are not made to adhere to it in challenging circumstances?
Instead, essential freedoms were extinguished at the stroke of a pen. Thus, by early 2021, twelve months into the pandemic, what were effectively inmates of the twenty-six counties were being subjected to the most stringent restrictions on personal freedoms in Europe.
Lockdown gains?
It may be recalled that during Covid, there was talk about ‘building back better’; that society would become more compassionate; that we would have a notably better health system afterwards Today, little of that seems evident.
The impact of shutting down the construction trade for long periods should also not be overlooked. Homeless figures are now at an all-time high – amid huge levels of emigration, much of this in response to the state’s desultory attitude towards housing. All of this despite Ireland being the least densely populated state in the E.U., and supposedly among the richest.
Nonetheless, in both Cork city and Dún Laoghaire, earnest efforts were made during Covid to adapt and advance neighbourhoods by way of enhancing their public domains – thus facilitating local trade and improving amenities.
What then was the experience of Dublin City? As the main place of work for the country’s civil servants, the city centre was all the more quiet for their absence. While the country was undergoing the most severe of lockdowns in Europe, Dubliners were, to all intents and purposes, singled out for the most repressive regime of all.
Along with ‘front-line workers’, anyone involved in agriculture or food production during Covid was effectively exempt from restrictions on movement. Hence, it was the urban populations who were particularly hampered in the course of their normal lives – while many of their rural counterparts experienced much less difference, apart, obviously, from children being kept at home from school.
Despite it being well-established by 2021 that it was safe for people to socialise outside, March that year saw ordinary decent Dubliners being harassed by police for drinking outside in parks by the River Dodder – instead of gathering inside, where infection would more likely occur.
A few stretches of cycleways were added along Werburgh and Nassau Streets – with unsightly plastic bollards inserted there and elsewhere. Public toilets were provided in an ugly kiosk outside the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre – despite purpose-built public toilets being sited only sixty metres away inside Stephen’s Green, that the Office of Public Works keeps locked-up.
The only serious civic gain during that time was the pedestrianisation of Capel Street, and a small amount of pedestrian pavement being widened elsewhere.
Decline of Dublin
Otherwise, Dublin’s city centre clearly stagnated. A small vignette: throughout the entirety of Dublin 1, there is only one public glass recycling bank sited at Shamrock Street in Ballybough. That is obviously disastrous in terms of under-provision for such a densely populated area.
Coincidentally, every year, the Irish Times reports on the IBAL Litter Survey which repeatedly finds Dublin’s north inner city to be the worst in the state. Yet, during the ‘Covid Years’, City Council management actually moved to close down this one glass recycling facility! Fortunately it was saved in September 2022 – but only after intervention by councillors, (Alas, no reports in the Irish Times about any of that.)
Meanwhile, cops on the beat became far less visible around the inner city. There were regular reports of gang fights occurring around the quays as a thuggish culture festered, culminating in the notorious Dublin Riots of October 2023.
A lasting perception of inadequate personal safety has eroded public confidence, which has resulted in people avoiding town – further undermining the commercial viability of many of the businesses based therein.
Thus, the city centre is clearly now in crisis; once bedrock establishments of the city’s premier core around Stephen’s Green, such as Shanahan’s on the Green and Café en Seine, have either closed down or have seen profits halved.
The commissioning of a report last year by the government regarding O’Connell Street – while doing little else obvious otherwise – does not inspire confidence.
The prospect of an accountable elected City Mayor with powers has long been held out by central government as a logical solution for the city’s management. Yet just like the airport railway that has been repeatedly promised since the early 1970s, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Failure to adapt
Ultimately, the initial response by responsible citizens to adhere to extraordinary state rules in a time of crisis was abused beyond belief. On this, the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman was proven right: nothing becomes so permanent as a ‘temporary’ government programme.
Any hopes of the state responding to Covid in a progressive manner gradually evaporated. Official guidance regarding mandatory facemasks was never properly updated – despite clear evidence that the effectiveness of basic blue ‘surgical’ masks was minimal, at best. Had people been made aware of the efficacy of different mask types – albeit a secondary consideration to good ventilation – it would have enabled citizens to better manage their risk exposure.
Meanwhile, the arrival of low-cost, antigen Covid tests for home use offered an obvious way forward. People would have a quick way of identifying whether they would pass on the virus – and could act accordingly. Remarkably, however, NPHET’s Philip Nolan pronounced on Twitter that these were being offered by ‘snake-oil salesmen’!
Fortunately, outside eyes were watching. Harvard epidemiologist, Professor Michael Mina, brought some sense to proceedings by tweeting back at Nolan ‘For an advisor to your government – you don’t appear to know what you are talking about’, adding, ‘The comment adds nothing of benefit and further sows confusion. You should be ashamed of your demeanour here.’
Regime Media
So much media space was bought by the state by way of advertisements, it was Herculean. Unsurprisingly, counter-arguments were not encouraged, as few outlets were prepared to question the official line.
When Astra Zenica was taken off the marketentirely early last year, arising from ‘rare but serious’ side-effects, media coverage was muted. Meanwhile, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine has also been withdrawn from the market in the United States – but yet again, there seems to have been little reportage here on the magic shot being discontinued.
So, where were the brave journalists questioning what was happening at the time, or now for that matter? Aside from photos of naughty social occasions that leaked onto the internet, commercial media organs essentially competed with one other to be the first to publicize official edicts. There is little reason to suspect any difference in future. Other than a few honourable exceptions, it seems what we have in this country is a propaganda apparatus, as opposed to a free media.
The pronouncements of NPHET were all that mattered. Nine euros was sanctioned as the minimal spend when eating out – presumably because Covid was waiting for an eight euro offer?
All the time, people delayed necessary health checks and procedures – initially ‘to flatten the curve’ – and so critical conditions may have gone untreated. Others put on weight through inactivity.
There was also the undoubted impact on many people’s mental health, as after a few months, the grim reality of forced isolation, without-end-in-sight, pushed many towards the edge. At least in part, such factors may explain Ireland’s highly elevated mortality in the wake of Covid. All this underlines the need for a robust inquiry into the state’s management of that period.
Any Accountability?
It seems to me that the cumulative effects of Ireland’s Covid response surely did more harm than good. Now, if this state is to do its job properly in future – if we are to learn anything from that dystopian time – it is essential to conduct a transparent and rigorous assessment of the response.
The effects of that period were pronounced and are, to some extent, ongoing. For example, it is notable that the number of recipients of sick benefit in England and Wales has increased by 38% since Covid. How does that tally with the experience here? Lacking powers to compel witnesses and documents, how can the state’s Covid ‘Review’ properly assess impacts of its response during that time?
I fear nothing will be learned from this Review, as it lacks the necessary powers. Yet where are the elected representatives who should be demanding the proper statutory inquiry that is necessary?
Without such a process, if we ever encounter a similar challenge, it is worrying that the state’s agents – ‘the permanent government’ of civil servants – may fail to have due regard to fundamental constitutional rights.
Game On (for some)
Memorably, with restrictions on sports, almost all facilities were shut down – despite most activities being held outdoor. Notably, golf and hill-walking were prohibited – even though these presented the least threat of exposure to an airborne virus.
As time went on, some allowances were made for certain sporting bodies – such as the GAA. Again, Dublin benefited least, as that body’s membership is disproportionately rural.
By year two, the emergence of a two-tier state seemed fairly clear, with the GAA allowed to have over 40,000 spectators from Mayo and Tyrone attend the All-Ireland Football final in Croke Park on September 11, 2021 – at a time when many businesses in that part of Dublin were closed down.
The decision-making process that allowed the match to take place was notable, as the ‘new’ freedoms were only announced retrospectively – with a press statement issued on September 9th stating: ‘From 6 September, indoor events can take place with 60% of the venue’s maximum capacity, provided all the people attending are fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 in the past 6 months’. Did the GAA know something that the rest of us didn’t when arranging the fixture?
Meanwhile, a retirement gathering in RTE featuring some of the best known presenters on the station, was found to have involved five breaches in relation to Covid 19 advice, protocols and regulations.
Memorably, an apparent sense of entitlement also extended to then E.U. Commissioner Phil Hogan, who was forced to resign in August 2020 after being caught breaking the rules by playing golf and having supper afterwards. And with that, went the best opportunity Ireland had to influence E.U. affairs at its most senior level.
Even a year later, little seemed to have been learned, when it emerged that the former Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, had held a party on July 21 for around fifty attendees in the garden of the Merrion Hotel. But that was all happily resolved when the Government Press Office released a statement a fortnight later stating that the Attorney General was of the view that it was permissible for outdoor gatherings of up to 200 people.
How can such carry-on occur in a proper democracy? It seems that rules could be retrospectively interpreted differently if required.
Justice for the Plebs
Yet the leniency shown to ‘the few’ sharply contrasts with the dogged pursuit of ‘the many’. For the outrageous crime of spreading the Lord’s Word, in December 2022 three Evangelical Christian street preachers were prosecuted for holding an outdoor event beyond five kilometres of their homes the previous year. Consequently, those three men each now have criminal records – having never had them before.
Only this week, in February 2025, the trial date has been set in April for the prosecution of the so-called‘Dubai Two’ who allegedly broke quarantine rules during that period. Thus. two young mothers face the prospect of a month in jail and a €2,000 fine.
Where is the Republic that ‘guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’ as per the 1916 Proclamation?
Vaccine vs Liberty?
Based on that experience, it is impossible to ever again trust the state to ‘suspend’ civil liberties. What reward was there for compliance?
So then, if the vaccines were so effective, why then were we again subjected to lockdowns after much of the population had been vaccinated? Either the vaccines worked, and subsequent lockdowns should not have occurred – or else the vaccines were not so effective, and the emphasis put on mass inoculation was incorrect. This argument needs to be addressed.
Even with the high rates of vaccination and diminished threat, as late as January 2022, members of NPHET were contemplating force injecting the small minority outstanding.
All of this points to the need for public confidence to be restored – by way of a robust evaluation as to how matters were managed. It is now five years since Covid began, and three since it ended; people’s memories will be getting hazy.
RTÉ: Rewarding Failure?
And what of the media apparatus that helped ensure compliance in the population? The year after Covid ended, the wheels came off the wagon of RTÉ, when it emerged that there had been serious problems with the finances and management at the state-owned company.
Memorably the then Director General Dee Forbes resigned in June, 2023. Around the same time, Ryan Tubridy’s ‘secret’ payments subsequently came to light.
Nonetheless, it appears that the Covid period provided cover for questionable practices, both within that organisation and in other state agencies.
But this was small beer compared to the €725 million fixed upon the Exchequer only last year by the government to ensure RTÉ’s continued operation until 2028. That cash could be used to build up to 1,500 houses, potentially reducing the state’s homeless population by almost a third. Instead, it is being shovelled into an economic albatross that loyally served the government, when the people required rigorous journalism.
How can we expect accountability at the state broadcaster when cash is shoveled in so easily?
So then, whatever happened to the assertion in the 1916 Proclamation about ‘cherishing all of the children of the nation equally’?
Looking North
Thus, it is interesting to look North, as they took a somewhat different approach. It’s a different jurisdiction, but with a broadly similar social make-up.
In the main, similar restrictions were adopted, with schools and pubs closed for much of the period. It was far from perfect in terms of coping with the crisis, with criticisms at the time, and since, as stated in evidence. Restrictions on social assemblies were clearly detested in some quarters, most memorably by a vocalVan Morrison.
Yet, over time, a different approach gradually emerged. For example, in the first year, as occurred with crowd events in the south, the Orangemen called off their summer marches to prevent contagion. This was a sensible approach, given the knowledge at that time – and arguably more notable given that body has not always been associated with responsible approaches.
But by the second summer, however, the Orangemen allowed outdoor, localised events to go on. Again, this was consistent with an evidence-based response. Simply put, the Orangemen got it right in terms of their Covid response!
Last summer a suitably robust Inquiry was conducted in the North into how the state there had responded – with the BBC reportingthat it had heard ‘devastating evidence with multiple failings across several departments.’ Hardly a ringing endorsement for that state’s response, which made for uncomfortable listening for many of those involved. Yet, the process may prove cathartic if mistakes are not to be repeated.
As part of that inquiry, elected representatives were asked to turn over all text and WhatsApp messages from the period. Unfortunately, Sinn Féin politicians had apparently deleted the most relevant ones. In contrast, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) disclosed their texts. One member, Edwin Poots, appeared to have regarded Covid as a ‘Catholic’ disease – but, in fairness, he seems to have been an outlier.
Obvious need for a statutory Covid Inquiry in the ‘Republic’
What could be learned from a comparable Covid inquiry in the South? Certainly, it would be very useful to gauge how the state implemented its emergency plan; how it adapted to new data; and how it will respond should a similar scenario ever again arise. MacNeill’s 1913 article resonates yet again; much can be learned from the approach adopted in Ulster.
Instead, a culture of non-transparency that developed during Covid seems to have been normalised throughout the Southern government. Rather than a statutory Covid inquiry with accountability prioritised, it appears the so-called Republic are now to be governed according to secret pacts made with elected independent representatives.
To borrow a description from Theobald Wolfe Tone, the last regime was ‘execrable’; and yet, there is every reason to fear the new administration may be even worse.
Alas, it is hard to see how a non-statutory ‘review’ without powers to compel witnesses or documents will find much that is not already part of the establishment’s narrative.
Without adequate explanations, as an inquiry could allow, my faith in this state has been shattered. Simply put, once entrusted with special powers, the government made a bad situation bloody awful.
God forbid, if a proper inquiry was to occur, perhaps we might learn that at most crucial junctures, this state and at least some of its agents see themselves as beyond accountability – and are happy to force citizens to carry the cost of demented policies.
Should this state ever again try to enforce measures such as those during Covid, I for one will be looking North to see how the Orange brethren respond. In the absence of accountable government here, I have learned to respect those who at least seem to prize their own civil liberties.
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.’
Covid is a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. But whether the unprecedented response represents a singularity, or the beginning of an era of authoritarian capitalism, is unclear.
Many of us remain incapable of distinguishing a reliable version of reality from lonely projections. Thankfully, telling insights arrive in a new publication: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left. Authors Toby Green (a professor of African history and culture) and Thomas Fazi (a writer and journalist) navigate a path through the scientific thickets, to reveal the socio-economic and cultural factors that shaped the pandemic response.
The temporary elevation of public health officials in many countries to positions of almost unfettered power led the Mozambique writer Pedrito Cambrao to observe that ‘the secular West has essentially turned science into a religion and scientists and healthcare workers into a priestly caste that cannot be challenged. (p.346)’
Media, new and old, brought unrelenting focus to a single challenge, while only rarely surveying accumulating evidence of collateral damage. As in Albert Camus’s great novel, The Plague: ‘Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.’[i]
Additionally, as I propose in this review, a “left-brained” positivism appears to have informed the Covid Consensus that Green and Fazi define.
Positivism is a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified, or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, but this can lead to a narrowing of perspective. Thus, long-standing challenges yielded to a singular metric, the waxing and waning of “the virus” – as defined by the PCR test, a dubious diagnostic tool that accounts for exaggerated mortality statistics.
Positivism is identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions, according to Albert Camus, ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’
Comte conceived of a hierarchical society that looks similar to what we witnessed over the course of the Covid Consensus:
[S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priests who reign over everything.[ii]
In our time, technocratic rule relied on an underlying hysteria founded on a generally irrational fear of premature death, whipped up by social media in particular.
Only once this dissipated – arguably when wide availability of rapid antigen tests revealed the widespread prevalence of basically harmless infections – was normality restored. As in Camus’s novel The Plague: ‘Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.’[iii]
Questioning Authority
The paucity of left-wing lockdown critiques, ignoring the plight of Global South, where more than one hundred million people fell below the poverty line (p.286), despite the minimal impact of the virus itself, demonstrates an intellectual impoverishment in a broad-based movement that achieved extraordinary progress during the twentieth century, by questioning established authority in terms or wealth, gender and race.
In contrast, the veteran Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris observed that what went missing during the pandemic was an understanding that ‘science and technology are not neutral’.
All too many who identify as left-wing, Green and Fazi argue failed to recognise, ‘something much more profound than a straightforward conflict between left and right’, but instead,
a struggle at the heart of capitalism between the traditional press and business interests it has always represented (hotels, restaurants, high street shops) and the new corporate giants which did not require such promotion. (p.19)
A sympathetic explanation might trace broad left-wing approval for what were ineffectual lockdowns to the accompanying state largesse. Below the surface, however, a huge transfer of wealth occurred to billionaire owners of giant corporations. Thus, the ten richest men in the world doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while supports to workers proved transient, and were based on unsustainable quantitative easing, which has, predictably, given way to inflation.
Through effective control over online content, including outright censorship, and regulatory capture – including of the WHO – the corporate giants successfully narrowed the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Dissenters from a dominant narrative were stigmatised as far-right, libertarian or conspiracy theorists.
Importantly, statements of President Donald Trump were weaponised by architects of the Consensus. Green and Fazi contend that it was ‘no longer possible for left-leaning progressives to question ‘the science’ since that is what Trump had done. (p.78)’
Various conspiracy theories purport to explain the decisions of governments to quarantine almost half of humanity for almost two years to inhibit (rather than eliminate) a virus with a median infection fatality rate of c. 0.27% (the figure for Spanish Influenza in 1918-19 was > 2.5%) that posed a vanishingly low risk of death to anyone under the age of seventy, prior to the arrival of vaccines that were not designed to save lives.
The Covid Consensus addresses a more interesting question however, namely: why did Western populations overwhelmingly consent to unprecedented infringements on civil liberties, culminating in the population-wide, medical coercion of vaccine mandates and passports?
Indeed, leading experts seem to have been surprised at the power they wielded. Thus, after the British government adopted Chinese lockdown policy, Professer Neil Ferguson observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
It should also be noted that any idea of locking down healthy people was contrary to best practice in global health prior to 2020. An article from 2014 on the history of quarantine, ‘Gold, fire and gallows: quarantine in history’ by Médecins Sans Frontières’s Duncan Mclean found:
There is limited and far from definitive research on quarantine effectiveness and far too many other factors at play that are difficult to ascertain from the historical record. Yet while present understanding about the pathology and transmission of hostile pathogens is far advanced on centuries past, there are some basic conclusions that can be made. For example, it is fairly certain that isolating a healthy population alongside an unhealthy population risks causing more harm than good, especially when access to food, water and medical care is taken into account. For quarantine to be successful, it requires perfect compliance and transmission without symptoms.
Moreover, notwithstanding the dubious achievement of temporarily excluding Covid-19 from certain countries through a Zero Covid policy, the idea that a highly infectious respiratory pathogen causing a low level of morbidity (a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19) could have been eliminated was never a serious proposition.
The lockdown-to-vaccine strategy was also predicated on a misplaced article of faith, which is that vaccines – what Boris Johnson referred to as “the scientific cavalry” – would essentially eliminate Covid-19, or at least the transmission of the virus. The progressive – or “left-wing” – argument to take vaccines for the sake of others never stood up to serious scrutiny from the outset; but mainstream media had suspended critical assessment as part of what was immediately likened to a war-time effort.
Despite failing to achieve what most people assumed it would, i.e. block transmission, which its inventor claimed it could achieve, seemingly pre-planned measures were rolled out, while serious harms largely went unreported in a mainstream media dangerously reliant on ‘philanthro-capitalism’.
According to the authors of the Covid Consensus the pandemic ‘provided a radical continuity of many trends which had been latent in global society.’ They point to a steady growth over many years in social inequality, ‘the power of computing, information wars, and the shift towards increasingly authoritarian forms of capitalism across the world had all been growing.(p.2)’ Arguing:
we should perhaps consider the troubling hypothesis that the Chinese and Western regimes, far from representing two opposites may actually have come to embody two different types of authoritarianism, conflictual but symbiotic at the same time – as the striking convergent responses to the pandemic would seem to suggest. (p.398)
Notwithstanding the similarities Green and Fazi point to, the approaches of East and West did diverge in one significant respect: China’s early adoption of a highly authoritarian Zero Covid policy ensured life continued for most of the time “as normal”, whereas Western governments promoted a more consensual social distancing approach that relied on an unprecedented propaganda campaign.
The disturbing effects of social distancing might be viewed as the apotheosis of neo-liberalism. The virus seems to have provided a welcome pretext for the wealthy to remove themselves from the hoi polloi.
Covid-19 also laid bare the widespread out-sourcing of manufacturing to lower wage economies (such as China). Lockdowns demonstrated that many workers in the West were no longer in productive employment, and instead engaged in what the late David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’, often as part of swollen bureaucracies.
Thus, Green and Fazi identify the lockdown response as ‘a symptom of the ever-increasing removal of people in wealthier societies from economic production. (p.2)’ For many Western consumers concern for ‘the implications of lost harvests, ruptured supply chains, and abandoned industrial plant machines was not as real as the threat of a new virus to this group of disproportionately influential people. (p.3)’
An important cultural facet the authors refer to is a crippling fear of death. Over many decades Western governments have cleansed ‘the dead from daily life’ (p.11). This contrasts with the far more obvious folk rituals and religious practices attending a person passing away in the Global South.
A collective inability to reconcile ourselves to death best explains the panic generated by coverage of events in Lombardy, Italy in February, 2020: as ‘the shadow loomed of death re-entering the normal spaces of society people sought to seal themselves away from something which terrified them. (p.11)’
Ferguson’s candid testimony suggests it is highly unlikely that anyone in power anticipated the propaganda value of “the scenes in Italy”. Indeed, many governments displayed little appetite for lockdowns initially. Most quickly rolled over, however in the face of an enduring hysteria; even after initial mortality projections of 0.9% (used by Ferguson in his infamous paper) had been show to be seriously inflated.
A fear of premature death is most obvious explanation for why peopled consented to unprecedented infringements on their civil liberties.
Left-brained?
Another cultural factor the authors point to is ‘the undermining of social science and humanities degrees by governments … in favour of STEM subjects’. They contend that ‘these subjects were routinely ignored in the shaping of major policy decisions by both government and the media. (p.14)’
This educational trend, I would argue, reflects a longer term tendency in advanced industrialised societies (now including China) to perceive the world disproportionately through the left hemisphere of the brain, which has yielded a distinctive version of reality.
McGilchrist argues that since antiquity we find an ‘increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness.’[iv] This sounds suspiciously like the prevailing state of mind under lockdown.
McGilchrist also averts to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, arguing the real horror of the Concentration Camps lay in ‘the detachment with which the detailed plans of the extermination camps were developed, often relying on expertise of engineers, physicians and psychiatrists that makes the Holocaust so chilling.’[v]
It is inappropriate to compare those who promoted lockdowns to the architects of the Final Solution, or the Gulags for that matter. Indeed, many lockdown agitators were probably motivated by a misplaced altruism. The architecture of lockdowns, however, also required a detachment from the far-reaching consequences of shuttering societies and undermining community life.
Lockdowns and vaccine roll-outs depended on (“left-brained”) technical approaches – relying on engineers, physicians and psychiatrists for disease modelling, track and trace and “psy-ops”. In an era of positivism, the role of governments essentially narrowed to curbing the spread of Covid-19. This obscured “big picture” determinants of health and well-being such as social connection, as well as causing almost incalculable educational loss by closing schools for up to two years in some countries.
An acknowledged tendency to mislead the public over the course of the pandemic may also be traced to the left hemisphere; as McGilchrist puts it: ‘The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admitting to not knowing the way.’
Thus, more proportionate policies, such as those followed in Sweden, were sadly lacking in the response. The consequences of a detachment from other determinants of health and well-being seem to be reflected in the troubling excess death statistics we are now witnessing.
The belated repeal of emergency powers in most countries indicates that we have not entered a prolonged period of government led by public health officials. Indeed, conversely, there are strong arguments for greater emphasis on health initiatives to contend with other, more profound, challenges such as the obesity pandemic.
However, the overnight shift from blanket coverage of the virus to the War in Ukraine suggests we may have entered an era of ‘permanent crisis.’ This, according to Green and Fazi, ‘means being stuck in a perpetual present where all energies are focused on the fight against the enemy of the moment. (p.397)’
As with the response to Covid-19, the populations of Europe and America are presented with a single prescription – here a total victory for Ukraine – seemingly at all cost. This is, arguably, indicative of an ascendant “left-brained” positivism, which narrows or simplifies the range of possibilities to the “enemy of the moment”.
Moreover, our dependence on compromised technology accelerated under lockdown. This increases a susceptibility to propaganda, although freedom of association blunts the insidious power of the smart phone device.
Also, fear of Putin and Russia has not awakened a similar hysteria to that generated by Covid-19, although the plight of Ukrainians has certainly been used to garner sympathy for the war effort. A major difference, is that many, though certainly not all, on the left in Europe are questioning a dominant narrative; alert to the fingerprints of the military industrial complex; in contrast to the Covid response – where the role of Big Pharma was generally overlooked.
My concern is not simply that the billionaire class is enriching itself through proximity to power. It is also with the dominance of a “left-brained” caste of mind reigning ascendant in both the West and the East.
Perhaps Bobby Kennedy Jr’s bid for the Democratic nomination will bring greater attention to the influence of the corporate money men in power. An outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the military industrial complex over many years, Kennedy might previously have been easily dismissed as an “anti-vaxxer”, but that term may have lost its valency in the wake of Covid.
Unless, or until, there is a thorough evaluation of what has occurred during Covid-19, the possibility of a renewed assault on basic liberties at the behest of the billionaire class remains. Green and Fazi’s Covid Consensus represents an important first draft of history, which should inform that inquiry.
Feature Image: A classroom with socially distanced desks.
Foremost among Utopian absurdities, we had the false promise of ZeroCovid. This continues to inflict untold damage on millions of lives and livelihoods that have been lost along the mystical path to salvation.
Although the ZeroCovid leaders identified themselves with logic and rationality, the fanciful idea of every country excluding an influenza-like virus appears to have been a hangover from Judeo-Christian eschatology, which purports to save human beings from themselves.
Other Utopian modern ideologies including Communism, Nazism and even neoconservatism, adopt a similar schema, wherein a vanguard elite guides the flock to safety.
The nonsense started before the ZeroCovid concept grew legs, as China, the source of our slave-produced consumer goods, provided carefully choreographed footage demonstrating how instantaneous death ensued after infection with the deadly pox. All dutifully conveyed by compromised media.
That China also runs concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslim minority, and harvests organs for transplantation from healthy executed prisoners was ignored. The West adopted a lockdown policy that represented the onset of another, dystopian Cultural Revolution.
The WHO advised the West that lockdowns were essential. This advice arrived despite the 2019 WHO pandemic preparedness document containing no such recommendation. China then supplied genetic sequences they happened to have lying around to dodgy German academics to create the PCR test, which is a research tool not a diagnostic test.
Weren’t we so lucky that the Wuhan Institute of virology is located near the alleged ground zero? It just so happened to be doing gain of function research on bat corona viruses in conjunction with the Americans.
A reminder of an anonymous account from April, 2020 by an Irishman living in China who described a society on the brink of another, dystopian Cultural Revolution.https://t.co/oRbwdEShoz
Initially there were sensible discussions – including from the U.K.’s chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance – around herd immunity, the limited lethality of corona viruses in general, and the potentially disastrous effects of shutting down entire societies.
Sweden, then a bastion of social democracy, held on to its rational faculties. Sadly, the government of no other major Western democracy seriously weighed up the effects on society of its public health policy. In an atmosphere of acute hysteria some governments acted against the advice of their health authorities.
Resistance to drastic measures broke down once the Italians began singing to the world from their balconies, and army trucks were filmed removing dozens of bodies from hospital morgues. Strange how film crews always seem to know when to turn up to capture such footage.
In what was the final twist of the thumb screw, our old friend Professor Reliable Data from Imperial College pulled scary figures from a dark orifice and waved it in the face of sceptics. Bear in mind, the same guy hadpredicted in 2005 that up to one hundred and fifty million people could die from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
Despite the reasoned arguments of Nobel laureate Professor Michael Levitt, which few were able to read or hear, the British and others opted for the doom-laden scenario.
Meanwhile, on our own benighted little island of Ireland, beloved of Big Pharma and Big Tech, T-Shock Varadkar took to the podium to address the nation in our solemn hour, as the spectre of a common cold virus loomed on the horizon. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s World War II speech, he told the nation ‘this is the calm before the storm…’ before opining that there could be up to 85,000 deaths.
Severe limits were placed on our freedom to roam freely and meet one another, as if we faced the impending Blitzkreig. He asked us to perform the unlikely feat of ‘coming together as a nation by staying apart.’
Ironically, the wellbeing of the nation had become the central focus for a right-wing government, as individual needs and desires were cast aside, apparently for the common good. A country that had racked up vast personal and household debt worshipping at the altar of Mammon was expected to do a U-turn and become altruistic. But beneath the surface snouts were in the trough.
For the first time in the history of infectious diseases the entire global population, healthy and infirm, would now be forced to quarantine, as apparently we could be asymptomatically-ill, or healthy-sick.
Staying apart from each other meant no visits to elderly relatives, because grandchildren might kill their grannies. Children might even infect one another with a disease less likely to kill than being struck by a fork of lightning.
Naturally outdoor sports and music events would have to be prohibited too. After all, they wouldn’t want people to be discussing the bullshit over a few pints. And finally, most small and medium sized businesses were to be closed down, regardless of the long-term effects.
Well not all small businesses. Off licences, fast food outlets and supermarkets would still be open. These however are usually staffed by low skilled, low-wage earners. Young and expendable in other words.
The propertied middle class would stay at home, protected from the menace of infection behind computer screens, home deliveries and A-rated houses. These were the civil servants, tech workers, teachers, and professional classes.
This ‘Zoomocracy’ would ‘stay safe’, while boosting the profits of Messrs Bezos, Gates, Dorsey, Zuckerberg et al. Somehow the top ten wealthiest men in the world managed to double their wealth in the midst of the biggest international crisis since World War II. It would make you wonder who was really in control.
A reminder of previous restrictions that included NPHET's attempt to rebrand "The Electric Picnic" "The Acoustic Brunch" … #fictionoreality https://t.co/xb1BrZVQmL
We were treated to the daily sight of embarrassed members of the Gardai stopping ordinary citizens on their way to shops enquiring as to the purpose of their journeys.
Other brave fellows formed road blocks at entry points to beaches or mountain trails. A particularly bizarre incident took place one Sunday near the tiny Cavan village of Mullahoran, when the only four roads leading to the Catholic church were blocked by garda cars preventing parishioners accessing their place of worship.
The terror was augmented by the obscene nightly roll call of death and pestilence, which had the desired effect on the majority. Those who didn’t succumb to the fear were subjected to ridicule, or simply starved of the oxygen of publicity. Dissenters were forced to resign from their jobs.
Throughout, we were repeatedly assured as to its deadliness, yet the median age of death was eighty-two years of age. The true figures for the numbers who died of (not with!) this virus will never be known.
Paradoxically, despite the elevated risk of those over eighty years of age dying from COVID-19, their family doctors were advised that they didn’t need to see their patients.
There were simply no treatments available. This despite Professor Didier Raoult from Marseille, Professor Paul Marek from Virginia and Professor Peter McCullough from Texas successfully repurposing drugs. The advice for the Irish patient was to take two paracetamol and at the first tinge of blue call an ambulance. Primum non nocere, my arse.
Fear, like any stimulus exhausts itself, so using the support and advice from various purveyors of psychological tortures, such as Susan Michie, governments introduced curveballs to confuse the population even further. We couldn’t have people waking up and smelling the bullshit when they reflected on how many in their social circles had actually died of this deadly virus, relative to an average influenza season.
‘The New Normal’ was a term coined by very shady unelected people and repeated ad nauseum by some equally shady elected individuals.
Once measures designed to ‘open up’ society were introduced we were treated to the infamous €9-45 minute meal and a pint. No meal, no pint. Then we had the restricted purchasing within supermarkets – crisps and condoms, but no socks or Nerf guns.
Then came the masks, for almost every setting, including eventually, primary schools. Lone occupants of cars and swimmers at the Forty Foot and even people out picking blackberries in the remotest parts of Ireland weren’t excused.
All of this imported from totalitarian China! And woe betide anyone not wearing their badge of allegiance. These untermensch were jostled by shopping centre security guards, refused access to medical care and even arrested, regardless of their age. And in the final entry in this sorry list, jailed.
Having endured the relentless propaganda, lockdowns, masks, social isolation, endless hours of Netflix, nourished on the finest delicacies from Dominoes and McDonalds, the vast majority of the country’s wage slaves were simply dying to become commuters and patrons of the country’s pubs, cafes and restaurants once again.
So, when the experimental mRNA gene therapy, also known as the Covid vaccine, became available the population had been primed. Primed by the most successful advertising campaign in history, a global conformity Edward Bernays and his admirer Joseph Goebbels could have only dreamed of achieving.
That ‘vaccine’ is the gift that keeps on giving – to its manufacturers. If Bill Gates’s wish comes true all seven billion humans on the planet will receive it.
It is so safe that one manufacturer persuaded a court that its supporting data should be hidden away from prying eyes for seventy-five years. Nonetheless, the post-mortem in the peer reviewed literature is revealing serious adverse reactions.
We heard from many sources including our own resident expert Professor Luke O’Neill that the vaccine was a game changer, while potential conflicts of interest were never disclosed or discussed during the extended time he spent on air.
Other worthies such as dear old Joe Biden advised that you would not catch the virus, it would stop the transmission of the virus, and even stop hospitalisations and deaths.
Fast forward a few months and you can catch the virus, you can transmit it, you can end up in hospital and die despite two, three or even four shots of this miracle medicine.
Worst of all, we now can’t have an open scientific debate because the truth might get in the way of the vast profit potential for the manufacturers how inept our so-called experts really are, and how venal politicians in so-called democracies became as they made light of civil liberties.
Today in Ireland, most of the medical profession are reluctant to acknowledge the damage inflicted on societies by their gullible and myopic approach of shutting down society, and they most certainly do not want to kill the golden goose, especially in general practice.
No heed is taken of the CDC-VAERS data, Eudravigilance, WHO’s own reporting, the Yellow Card system in the UK, the up to 40% rise in life insurance pay outs in some European countries; resistance to exposing drug trial data to public scrutiny.
No heed is taken of the meteoric rise in the careers of so-called celebrity scientists and doctors whose integrity and ethics were dispensed with at the first whiff of the profits on show.
Contrast this with some real academics and scientists whose careers have been badly damaged by retaining their integrity; for example Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, Professor Martin Kuldorff of Harvard, Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford, and Professor Peter McCullough of Texas A&M.
This latter group called for the availability of early treatments, focused protection of the vulnerable, but for society to function as normal to limit unintended damage. They also advocated for judicious not widespread use of an experimental product, avoiding children and pregnant women in particular, and most importantly preserving scientific debate.
Instead, we got lockdowns and restrictions on civil liberties, no early treatments, and a coercive vaccination campaign straight form the CCP playbook.
Feature Image is a still from RTE’s Claire Byrne Live of Professor Luke O’Neil trying ‘Zorbing’.
