Cassandra Voices

Tag: Covid-19

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Pandemonium

    Robert Fisk wrote: ‘we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know, no one told us.”[i]

    To be an “impartial witness” is, of course, impossible, as Fisk concedes, but this should not deter journalists from striving for objectivity. Inevitably, reporting on “history as it happens” involves choices as to what information is recorded in the annals of daily newspapers, and decisions over whose account becomes canonical. What is left out is often as important as what is included.

    Since independence Irish journalism has often failed to interrogate the structures of power and privilege. Thus, in his seminal Ireland 1912-1985, J. J. Lee notes ‘the intellectual poverty of Irish journalism … [and] the lack of public demand for serious analysis.’[ii]

    An older generation are sometimes heard to say, “we didn’t know, no one told us”, whether concerning the treatment of children in religious institutions, or corruption in the planning process. We may be revisiting a tendency to sugar-coat our reality in the Irish media’s broadly self-congratulatory response to Covid-19.

    Writing a first draft of history, in Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O’Connell, Irish Times and Irish Independent journalists respectively, offer an insider account of truly unprecedented times. The book recalls how the spectre of a devastating pandemic gives way to a realisation that democracy and the rule of law were undermined amidst extraordinary rules that deliberately orchestrated social atomisation, with unpredictable consequences. But it avoids addressing whether we were duped into an apparently popular commitment to lockdowns.

    Anyone governing Ireland throughout the period of the pandemic would naturally wish for their choices to be vindicated, especially the approach of permitting civil servants and technocrats to make many, if not most, difficult decisions; while riding roughshod over fundamental rights to associate, travel and conduct business freely, seemingly with popular consent, however manufactured.

    As an early assessment, drawing on interviews with many key players, Pandemonium arguably suffers from its proximity to sources. After all, access is only granted to the chosen few. A reputation for being ‘difficult’ is not a recipe for a successful career in mainstream Irish journalism. This perhaps accounts for Pandemonium’s generally muted and conditional criticism.

    Nevertheless, the book brings to light important information, including an unpublished report cataloguing the catastrophe that ensued in many care homes in the early months of 2020.

    To explain the disproportionate – at times self-harming – Irish response to the pandemic a future historian might explore a Catholic inheritance conditioning acceptance of the Original Sin of asymptomatic spread; the Holy Water of hand sanitisers; the Heresy of the unvaccinated; and the Benediction of (repeated) vaccination. Our future historian, or anthropologist, might also note the Obscurantism of a dominant Hierarchy that denied the ‘snake oil’ of antigen testing; the extreme unlikelihood of outdoor transmission, and immunity conferred by natural infection.

    “The big calls”

    The authors maintain that ‘The majority of the big calls were correct.’ This judgment is made, notwithstanding the decision, ‘to clear out hospitals to prepare for a surge in admissions by decanting large numbers of elderly and vulnerable patients into nursing homes’. It should also be noted that CMO Tony Holohan ordered care homes to re-open to visitors in March, 2020. These policies contributed to Ireland suffering the second highest proportion of care home deaths in the world during the first wave.

    To arrive at a broadly positive assessment the main metric the authors use is comparative mortality attributed to Covid-19. However, besides serious questions over how mortality from Covid-19 has been assessed globally – dying ‘from’ or ‘with’ – this ignores how with Europe’s youngest population Ireland ought to have been the least susceptible to mortality from the disease.

    As a Nature article put it in August, 2020: ‘For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die.’ Indeed, from March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to Covid-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years.

    Europe’s youngest population were forced to contend with some of the most draconian laws in the world. An Author’s Note contains analysis of Oxford University’s stringency data which shows among comparator countries in the EU27 and UK that Ireland had the most restrictive regime for 121 out of 685 days, and was joint fourth overall behind Italy, Greece and Germany. Based on other criteria, the regime may have been even harsher.

    Initially, the old were to be sacrificed for the sake of the young, but ultimately it would be the young who would be compelled to put their lives on hold for the sake of the old. Some will never recover. The disgrace is that no serious cost-benefit analyses were conducted during what the authors accurately characterise as enduring pandemonium.

    The decision to empty hospitals in March, 2020 may have been medically justifiable; the real problem lay with the state of the health service, and an incorrect assessment of the danger posed by Covid-19. An ongoing failure to resource emergency medicine, resulted in a perceived dependence of lockdowns that failed to take account of seasonality.

    Rather than attempting to make a virtue out of what was surely possible in outdoor spaces the authorities adopted a no-can-do attitude that ramped up the misery.

    Deep Background

    A ‘Note on Sources’ says:

    The majority of interviews that took place for this book in 2021 and 2022 were conducted under the journalistic ground rule of ‘deep background’. This means that all the information people told us in interviews could be used, but it could not be said who provided it.

    In other words, political and senior civil service sources were at times unwilling to speak on the record, but nonetheless grasped an opportunity to manage the message, and offset any potential for reputational damage.

    We can only guess at who featured most prominently in these “deep background” interviews, but the imprint is unmistakable of core Fine Gael players in the initial, caretaker government; as well as senior civil servants, including the all-powerful Cabinet Secretary Martin Fraser.

    The authors do acknowledge that a very dangerous precedent was set in terms of powers being appropriated for long periods by unelected civil servants – and one man in particular – with only tenuous claims to expertise in infectious disease management.

    Perhaps the most shocking aspect – previously revealed in Richard Chambers’s account – was the exclusion of successive Ministers of Health from NPHET, the all-powerful group for which there was no cabinet approval or even a ministerial order underpinning its establishment.

    Yet we must wait until the Epilogue for the stark admission that ‘Some of the most drastic, expensive and cruel policies ever imposed by the State were arrived at within a system that was ad hoc and could be haphazard.’

    Dictatorial                                                                                                                        

    CMO Tony Holohan became the public face of the state’s response from early on, and this book confirms his dominance over decision-making. The CMO called the shots and assembled a team to carry out his orders.

    His 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 no 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, ‘almost everyone who attended NPHET meetings agreed on one thing above all others: a Tony Holohan production.’ An unnamed source described his style as ‘very dictatorial and autocratic,’ and ‘intolerant of alternative views.’

    One NPHET member, Kevin Kelleher, was prepared to go on the record saying: ‘I felt the debate was controlled to ensure certain outcomes were achieved.’ Thus, he felt frustrated when arguing that testing policy should have look ‘more like how the HSE tests for other infectious diseases.’

    Holohan, the son of a Garda, enjoyed ‘a good relationship’ with Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, who baulked at the former’s early attempts to prevent people from leaving the capital. Harris was apparently unwilling to impose blanket travel restrictions ‘on the basis that it could lead to Ireland becoming a police state.’ Initial reluctance to impede free movement – and become a police state – appears to have receded as the pandemic went by. Police checkpoints became a familiar sight across the country.

    The relationship between Holohan and the Gardaí was put in sharp focus when a tweet by the CMO complained of scenes reminiscent of Jones’s Road on the day of an All-Ireland preceded a Garda baton charge on South William Street in Dublin.

    Young people were grasping a rare opportunity to socialise in bizarre circumstances where pubs were permitted to serve takeaway pints but not allowed to provide outdoor seating. It came after many months of having their lives drastically impacted by restrictions.

    The contempt of one deep source for the hoi polloi is unmistakable: ‘Tony might have phrased the tweet a bit better … Basically South William Street became scumbag central, for want of a better phrase, so that’s where we had to focus the policing effort.’

    Infection Fatality Rate

    As misleading accounts of the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 informed Western governments in spring, 2020 – especially via the famous, non-peer-reviewed Imperial College paper authored by Neil Ferguson which claimed an IFR of 0.9% – a global pandemonium of toilet roll buying proportions ensued. In early March Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s forecast that 85,000 people could die from the coronavirus in Ireland (over three times as many as died during the Spanish influenza pandemic). Having initially downplayed the challenge, his caretaker government were seemingly inclined to induce fear, which generates its own pathologies.

    Based on what we now know were incorrect – duplicitous or otherwise – epidemiological assessment, many in positions of authority appear to have genuinely believed Neil Ferguson’s contention that Covid-19 represented “the next big one” – a re-run of the dreaded Spanish Influenza pandemic that took up to fifty million lives in 1918-19; as opposed to one similar to the Chinese and Hong Kong influenza pandemics episodes of the 1950s and 1960s.

    Excess death is the best measurement of mortality during a pandemic. According to a global analysis of Covid-19 by Professor Lone Simonsen this pandemic has had ‘nowhere near the death toll of the pandemic of 1918.’ In Ireland in just one year of that outbreak 23,000 died, many of them young, whereas the mean age of death in Ireland from Covid-19 was eighty just two years younger than the average age of death,  while the level of excess mortality is considerably lower than the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19.[iii] This has led the Mayo Coroner to object that Covid deaths were being skewed by other illnesses.

    Sadly, as the Swedish epidemiologist John Giesecke pointed out in an interview aired on Sky News Australia in April 2020, governments around the world seemed to be assuming that people were stupid. Giesecke also argued that authorities were failing to consider how they would end their reliance on lockdowns. He pointed to Swedish data showing that between 98 and 99% had either no symptoms or only mild symptoms from Covid-19, and guessed the IFR would turn out to be 0.1%, which now appears a reasonable approximation.

    In contrast, as late as September, 2020 RTÉ’s Fergal Bowers was stating: ‘The World Health Organization says data to date suggests 80% of Covid-19 infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical, requiring ventilation.’ Remarkably, Bowers seems to have copy and pasted this from a seriously out-of-date WHO Situation Report from March 6th, 2020, stating ‘data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation.’

    It’s unlikely Bowers was working alone. Pandemonium reveals an early communications plan involving John Colcannon, indicating there would be ‘close collaboration’ with RTÉ in particular. This would be ‘critical to informing the public and helping in the national effort to respond.’ “Informing the public” did not necessarily mean a truthful account.

    It is also notable that Martin Fraser wrote that ‘RTÉ’s financial issues from the Covid-19 crisis will have to be dealt with.’ The state broadcaster acted as a conduit for government press releases and leaks, faithfully broadcasting case numbers and deaths in almost every bulletin, without questioning their reliance on a highly unreliable PCR test. The main newspapers, receiving tens of millions in government advertising throughout, also faithfully headlined the daily case numbers and death figures.

    The authors argue ‘the scenes from Bergamo were conditioning the State’s early response’, but it appears to have set the tone throughout, as politicians handed power to civil servants who tore up the social contract, amidst hysteria that owed a great deal to the penetration of social media in our lives.

    Although expensively assembled Covid self-isolation facilities and field hospitals went largely unused throughout the pandemic, the authors do not question a dominant narrative that without near-constant lockdown Irish hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed.

    Yet a recent ‘natural experiment’ carried out in the UK casts serious doubt on this orthodoxy. In a Guardian article clinical epidemiologist Raghib Ali outlines how, despite removing all, or most, restrictions in the summer of 2021, England actually had better outcomes than other UK regions:

    England has actually had a similar rate of infection and a lower rate of Covid deaths during the Omicron wave – and since 19 July 2021, England’s “freedom day” – than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, despite having far fewer mandatory restrictions, and none after 24 February. This “natural experiment” shows that having more mandates did not lead to better outcomes.

    It seems that once a generally mild respiratory virus such as Covid-19 becomes endemic restrictions have only a marginal effect.

    Loss of Proportionality

    In Ireland once lockdowns were normalised proportionality went out the window. We learn that an early influencer in this regard was Kevin Cunningham, a Dublin-born, Oxford-educated statistician – with no expertise in infectious diseases – who had previously founded Ireland Thinks with Ed Brophy, then advisor to Paschal Donohoe. Brophy had previously served as Joan Burton’s chief of staff.

    Informed by erroneous early modelling that took no account of distinctive social and environmental conditions, Cunningham wrote a series of emails to Varadkar in February painting a doomsday scenario.

    Cunningham was also able to convince Brophy that ‘Nobody will blame the government for taking too many precautions on coronavirus.’ This led Brophy to text his Taoiseach Varadkar – who was receiving less stark advice from his own public health official – to the effect that ‘We really need to fucking move on this.’

    The calculation, cynical or otherwise, of the governing class in Ireland was that no one would blame them “for taking too many precautions.” This informed one of the most stringent responses of any country in the world. A cowed and misinformed public would accept whatever medicine was applied, with opponents castigated as libertarians or far-right conspiracy nuts.

    Fault also lay with the failure of the opposition to articulate alternatives to lockdowns, especially after the Utopian ideal of ZeroCovid zealots gained traction among smaller left-wing parties, while Sinn Fein seemed unwilling to gamble on an alternative strategy.

    It certainly didn’t help having a bumbling Boris Johnson promoting a herd immunity strategy, or Donald Trump musing on the benefits of bleach. Nor was any argument for moderation helped by a far-right extremist such as Gemma O’Doherty launching foul-mouthed tirades at Garda checkpoints.

    Thus, Ireland was locked down and ordered to await our Saviour: the vaccine. Yet according to Peter Doshi in an article British Medical Journal in October, 2020, trials were not even designed to tell whether it would save lives.

    Pharmaceutical Industry

    As a trained doctor, Varadkar commanded respect during a pandemic that saved his political career. Troublingly, however, Pandemonium reveals his contacts with Pfizer executives, a company which stood to profit enormously from any vaccine – notwithstanding that the benefits could be quite marginal. Notably, despite a widely lauded vaccination roll out, restrictions stretched on, seemingly interminably, from January 2021 until almost the entire population had been infected by the highly transmissible Omicron variety. This seems to have finally dispelled the sense of dread associated with the virus.

    We learn that in September, 2020 Varadkar ‘had been told by Paul Reid (no relation of the HSE’s Paul Reid) that a vaccine would be ready by the end of the year.’ Varadkar appeared to regard the regulatory process as a mere formality. Perhaps he was right.

    In an article for Forbes in September 2020, praising the ‘unusually transparent action’ for a Covid-19 vaccine trials, William A. Heseltine a former professor at the Harvard School of Medicine wrote: ‘close inspection of the protocols raises surprising concerns. These trials seem designed to prove their vaccines work, even if the measured effects are minimal.’

    He went on to point out that ‘prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines.’ In fact, ‘their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.’

    He added that

    Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.

    Furthermore, in October leading health experts in the U.S. sent a public letter to Pfizer warning against a premature application that ‘would severely erode public trust and set back efforts to achieve widespread vaccination. In short, a premature application would prolong the pandemic, with disastrous consequences.’

    Yet Varadkar, like Trump, seemed convinced – based on his contacts with a Pfizer executive as opposed to analysis of trial protocols – that a panacea was on the horizon. What we may have got was a confidence trick, upholding the already tarnished reputation of evidence-based medicine.

    The orthodoxy that the vaccine represented the one and only solution became an article faith among the Irish governing and media class, justifying the stringency of restrictions and erosion of fundamental rights that culminated in vaccine passports and sinister broodings in leading newspapers on the mandating of vaccines.

    The authors maintain the party line that Pfizer’s vaccine was ‘incredibly effective’, yet seem perplexed that by late 2021 ‘Ireland was caught in the bizarre situation of having among the highest vaccination rates in the developed world, but again being imperilled by rising case loads and a health service that was struggling to cope.’

    Micheál Martin

    Taoiseach Micheál Martin played a less prominent role than his predecessor Leo Varadkar. He may be praised for lifting almost all restrictions at the end of January, 2022, when it could have been politically expedient to maintain a few in the face of continued hysteria. He also placed an ‘unrivalled emphasis on keeping schools open,’ which begs the question: how long would closures have continued otherwise?

    Less commendable, was Martin’s tendency to take refuge in sacred public health advice supplied by Bishop Tony. He also played a curious role in the introduction of face mask mandates. We learn that Martin’s phone had been ‘buzzing with texts from his sister-in-law in Singapore. ‘Masks, masks, masks,’ she told him.’

    Earlier, Martin Cormican informed NPHET that, ‘if there is a benefit, it is very small’, and that ‘widespread mask use also rapidly degenerates with poor practice, which could increase the risk of Covid-19 transmission.’

    Yet, desptie a broad scientific consensus as to their irrelevance prior to 2020, reiterated by the expert advice of Professor Carl Heneghan at the Dáil Inquiry in the summer of 2020, Ireland followed many countries in introducing mandates that summer. Here again, it is notable that the Swedish authorities adopted an alternative approach. Decisive evidence for the efficacy of face masks remains elusive. An analysis of six studies found a risk of bias ranging from moderate to serious or critical. Perhaps the public health rational was simply to induce fear of social interaction.

    We also learn of Angela Merkel ringing up the Taoiseach to air her concerns about the Irish case trajectory in the Christmas of 2020, and Martin recalling her bringing this up again ‘at the bloody EU Council meeting.’ Merkel appeared to be demanding a level of stringency in other European states that ignored wider impacts. Just as during the era of austerity, the Irish government would endeavour to be the best boy in the European class and disregard the consequences.

    Non-Sterilising Vaccines

    Non-sterilising Covid-19 vaccines, which do not prevent onward transmission of the virus, may have only made a marginal difference to the global mortality toll. Evidence to the effect that the main (Pfizer) vaccine saves lives, or even prevents hospitalisations, also remains equivocal.

    In January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    A Lancet article distinguishes an absolute risk reduction of approximately 1% from the relative risk reduction of c. 95%. Yet mainstream media outlets invariably quote relative risk reduction, while conspicuously ignoring reports of trial irregularities that emerged in the medical literature.

    Mainstream Irish media failed to interrogate the efficacy of these pharmaceutical products. In the Irish Times on October 28, 2020, Kathy Sheridan – before regulatory approval had been granted – went so far as to write: ‘One thing is clear, even when a vaccine emerges the mother of all marketing and reassurance jobs will be required.’

    That a member of the fourth estate considered marketing a medication to be her role is quite disturbing, especially given the adverse reactions that previously occurred in the wake of a vaccine being rushed to market in response to the Swine Flu Pandemic-that-never-was. Unsurprisingly, no attention was given in the Irish media to early reports of serious adverse reactions among elderly patients.

    Against the Grain

    The authors of a book such Pandemonium were unlikely to go against the grain, and question foundational assumptions that still underpin most Irish people’s understanding of the nightmarish years – at least for some – of 2020-2021. Nonetheless this is an important source explaining how Ireland was governed during the period.

    It should be acknowledged that the complexity of scientific debates underpinning the response to Covid-19 are challenging for over-worked journalists tasked with filing daily stories. Inevitably journalists rely on expert accounts. But this should be accompanied by an awareness that scientific discourses are never entirely objective, and that expertise is subject to regulatory capture and other forms of corruption, especially where the legendarily corrupt pharmaceutical industry is involved.

    A major problem, particularly during the crucial early stages of the pandemic, was a global scientific groupthink that came about through passive and active censorship of viewpoints that questioned the WHO’s global response of promoting lockdowns. Instructively in April, 2020 Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, wrote a letter about the potential harms of lockdowns which was rejected from more than ten scientific journals (and six newspapers). Baral recalls, ‘it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.’

    He also recalled that, ‘highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.’ Accordingly, the ‘net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences.’

    The big lie was that we were all in this together. Notably the world’s top ten richest men doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while the incomes of 99% of humanity fell. It was a particularly lucrative period for pharmaceutical companies, including one partly owned by Professor Luke O’Neill, a go-to figure for the Irish media, who emerged as a latter day Father Brian Trendy complete with guitar band.

    To date there has been an inadequate global reckoning over what happened in response to Covid-19. As in the wake of the last Financial Crisis, it seems that certain institutions and reputations are ‘too big to fail.’

    In Ireland, meanwhile, we appear to have “moved on” from the pandemic without any serious interrogation of what has occurred. It seems astonishing that the state could have spent close to €1 billion on PPE in 2020 alone without there being a serious inquiry into the procurement process.

    A proper national conversation might explore distinctive cultural tendencies that reasserted themselves in a period of crisis. That evaluation is left to future historians. Then we may well hear the cry once more: “We didn’t know, no one told us.”

    Feature Image: (c) Daniele Idini

    [i] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation, (Fourth Estate, London, 2005) p.XXV

    [ii] Joe Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: politics and society (Cambridge, 1989) pp.605-607

    [iii] Worldometre attributes 1,736 deaths to COVID-19 by December 31st, 2020. But the level of mortality through the years 2018-2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) show little difference.

  • Operation Mass Formation

    We need to sing again.
    We need to be Irish.
    We need to socialise.
    We need to be ourselves.

    So said Sarah, professional singer and mother from Ballina, County Tipperary, on the Late Late Show, only a few hours after Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin’s address to the nation and his surprise announcement that most of the Irish State’s Covid-19 restrictions were to be lifted with almost immediate effect.

    The Late Late Show, for the uninitiated, is one of the world’s longest-running talk shows, gracing Irish television screens, courtesy of state broadcaster RTE, every Friday evening since the 1960s.

    Sarah’s comments, coming just after she’d performed a rousing showband style rendition of Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, seemed to capture the official (i.e. state-sanctioned) mood of the nation and prompted host Ryan Tubridy to gush “That is good stuff! Congratulations Sarah!”

    Operation Transformation’s Sarah on the Late Late Show.

    So why was Sarah from Tipperary opening the Late Late Show on this particularly momentous occasion? Sarah, as it turns out, is one of the ‘leaders’ of this year’s iteration of RTE’s diet and fitness show Operation Transformation (or OT as it is known to cult members). A staple of Irish TV since 2008, OT has become, much like the Late Late Show itself, something of a national institution.

    Each year, the programme features five contestants. These are ordinary Irish people who want to lose weight, kick unhealthy habits and get fit. The show refers to these participants as ‘leaders’; the idea being that, through inspirational example, the contestants will ‘lead’ the diet-and-exercise-hesitant Irish public into the promised land of health and fitness.

    The leaders are assisted in their endeavours by a panel of four ‘experts’: a dietician, a personal trainer, a clinical psychologist and a GP, who, between them, design individually tailored diet and fitness plans for each leader. The leaders’ homes and fridges are then kitted out with webcams so that we, the audience, gain an intimate view of their struggles.

    Even better, every Wednesday evening we see how much progress our leaders have made – if any – or to enjoy the veritable bollocking they will receive from the panel of experts. We can also download the OT app  and follow the diet and fitness plans of whichever leader we choose to follow. There are national OT fitness event extravaganzas and ‘partnerships’ with most Irish supermarkets.

    2022 Operation Transformation Contestants.

    As I said, an institution. Supported by another institution: the Irish State. The Department of Health has spent €230,000 sponsoring Operation Transformation, and its logo is prominently displayed throughout the show.

    Sarah is also the first leader whose progress we get to see the following Wednesday. As OT host Kathryn Thomas remarks of Sarah’s performance on The Late Late Show, “You just captured that moment that everybody was feeling! It was a moment of celebration!”

    But while four of our leaders are feeling celebratory and enjoying their state-sanctioned return to freedom, things aren’t looking quite so  rosy for the fifth, salon-owner Kathleen, who, along with her farmer husband Tony, lives on a farm in Carrignavar, County Cork. Terrifyingly, Kathleen and Tony had both tested positive for covid the previous week.

    As Kathleen explains, “One of my main symptoms of covid is that I’ve been completely bored”, while Tony is more philosophical about their predicament, remarking that “Well, I’ve kind of been isolating for the past 40 years anyway.”

    Kathleen and Tony are regulars at their local cattle mart but, because of covid restrictions and lockdowns, they have had to make do with virtual visits on their tablets. This is not an entirely satisfactory alternative, however. As Kathleen notes to Tony of one animal they are considering buying, “She’s a much poorer looking cow on your screen than on mine.” The couple also lament that, in the age of virtual cattle-trading, “The human interaction isn’t there.”

    Cattle Mart.

    OT host Kathryn Thomas uses this as a cue to joke, “But at least one thing wasn’t in short supply in the house….” She’s referring to antigen tests. We are then treated to a montage of Kathleen and Tony shoving nylon-tipped plastic swabs up their nostrils while making squirming faces, all to an R&B soundtrack. This seems to be particularly traumatic for poor Tony, who needs to sit down and have his wife perform the procedure for him each time. And who can blame him?  After all, this is no man flu. This is Covid-19.

    Later, Kathleen has a video call with OT fitness expert Karl Henry, who wants to find out how she’s doing. “I feel great. I feel fine,” she says, “the only thing is the boredom of it all and the isolation of it all. The feeling is (as) if I nearly have leprosy for some reason!” Karl has a good chuckle at Kathleen’s analogy (even though she doesn’t seem to be joking) and assures her she is not the only one feeling this way, stating that, “What you’re going through, people around the county are going through. It’s a really normal thing!”

    Nevertheless, Karl and the other OT experts are taking no chances. When it’s Kathleen’s turn to have her weekly check-in, she has to do it remotely, despite having come out of her required isolation period. “Just to be extra cautious”, she is told.

    Remarking again that “This isolation from the outside world hasn’t sat with me very well”, Kathleen is once more reassured by the experts that her feelings of unease and boredom are nothing to be concerned about, with the show’s GP, Sumi Dunne, telling her “that flat effect…is just a reaction to the circumstances.”

    Kathleen and Tony looking at cows.

    This episode of Operation Transformation is a microcosm of what has been going on, regarding Covid-19, in the rest of the country and indeed the world as a whole: the constant and repetitious normalising of behaviour which only two years ago would have been considered at best neurotic and at worst deeply psychologically problematic.

    Remember when we used to joke about somebody having man flu? That curiously culturally acceptable form of sexism which, according to the Harvard Health Blog, describes “a constitutional character flaw of men who, when felled by a cold or flu, embellish the severity of their symptoms.”

    Nowadays, the whole world seems to be suffering from man flu. The only difference is that, with a case of Covid-19, you don’t even need any symptoms to embellish; all you need is a positive antigen or lateral flow test, items which have become as much a staple of our weekly supermarket trips as a sliced pan, two litres of milk and a six-pack of cheese and onion crisps.

    As Kathleen herself said, “I had absolutely none of the symptoms of covid, but at the same time I was aware that I had it because obviously I tested positive. So I was even watching my heart rate increasing, and saying ‘ok, I won’t go too far or even push my body at all’.”

    A man embellishing flu symptoms.

    There are several more occasions in the episode when Kathleen refers to the abnormality of the situation she finds herself in and how uncomfortable she feels being isolated from other people. Yet, every time her concerns are brushed off by the experts (including, as mentioned, a clinical psychologist and a doctor) who tell her that this is “normal” or that the majority of people in the country are also experiencing something very similar.

    When people like me (and by that I simply mean anyone who questions the status quo on covid) talk of the mainstream media, for the most part we are referring to the news media. But of course the flagrant bias and  propaganda doesn’t stop there. It has infiltrated all forms of media: it’s there in the soap operas we follow, the chat shows, televised sporting events, health and lifestyle programmes, children’s television, social media platforms, social media influencers, and so on ad nauseum.

    As others have pointed out, television programmes and social media do not simply provide entertainment, they also greatly influence our ideas about the world and provide a model for our attitudes and behaviour: certain individuals and their actions are presented approvingly and in a positive light, while others are presented negatively, with disapproval. Some behaviours and opinions are shown to be typical, normal and to be emulated, while others are shown to be strange, problematic and to be avoided. As such, TV shows and social media provide a powerful example of what is acceptable in a society and what is not. And far from simply reflecting reality, these forms of media are instrumental in the building and shaping of it.

    If you are somebody who has questioned the mainstream narrative about covid, you’ll no doubt be aware of Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet and his theory of mass formation. This compelling theory is a useful tool for analysing our current situation. If you are  unfamiliar with it, I recommend looking at this video in which Professor Desmet explains the idea himself.

    In a nutshell, mass formation describes the process whereby a large part of the population subconsciously disengages its rational and critical faculties in order to participate in a form of groupthink, the focus of which is usually one small point or issue. Mass formation is a phenomenon that typically occurs in the emergence of totalitarianism. It can occur spontaneously, as in Nazi Germany, or be intentionally created by the state, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Mass formation can only take place when four very specific conditions are met.

    These are as follows: a substantial number of people in the population have to feel socially isolated; a substantial number of people have to feel an essential lack of meaning in their lives; a substantial number of people have to experience what he calls “free-floating anxiety” (in other words, anxiety or stress which is not connected to a mental representation – feeling anxious but not knowing why) and finally, a large percentage of the population has to experience free-floating frustration and aggression.

    Professor Mattias Desmet.

    The four conditions were already in place, in Desmet’s opinion, when the pandemic was first announced by the WHO back in March 2020. According to one study published before the pandemic in The American Sociological Review, 25% of Americans reported they didn’t have a single close friend. A Gallup poll, which included participants from a number of industrialised countries, found that nearly 50% of those questioned stated they didn’t have a single meaningful relationship and that they only connected to other people through the internet or through technology. As Desmet asserts, “A connection through the internet doesn’t make you resonate in the same way with other people.”

    This isolation or lack of social bond leads into the second condition: a feeling that life is generally meaningless or senseless. In his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber states that 50% of people reported that their job was ’not at all meaningful’.” A Gallup poll from 2012, which included people from 142 countries, shows that 63% of respondents, in Desmet’s words, “admitted to being so disengaged at work that they were sleepwalking through their day, putting time but not passion into their work.”

    This combination of social isolation and the impression that life has no  meaning produces a kind of anxiety which is “free floating.” Unlike a phobia, which pinpoints a specific object of fear (for example spiders or confined spaces), free floating anxiety is not connected to anything tangible. Feeling anxiety without understanding its cause produces profound “psychological discontent.” Desmet notes that each year in Belgium 300 million doses of antidepressants are administered to a population of only 11 million people. This doesn’t even take into account antipsychotics, sleeping tablets or anxiety medication. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has reported that one in five people have an actual anxiety disorder.

    The fourth condition, what Desmet calls “free-floating frustration and aggression”, is a result of the isolation, lack of meaning and consequent anxiety. Furthemore, it is extremely problematic because people simply don’t understand what is causing them to feel aggression or frustration.

    When these four conditions are in place, all that is needed for mass formation to occur is for the mainstream media to produce a narrative which highlights “an object of anxiety” (in this case, a virus) and to simultaneously provide a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety (lockdowns, masks, vaccination, etc.).

    For Desmet, identifying the object of anxiety and participating in a strategy to deal with it gives people both a sense of control and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of connection. And it is this feeling of strong solidarity and connection which enables, “an extraordinary willingness…to participate in the strategy…no matter how absurd the measures or the narrative becomes.”

    We now live in a world of absurd contradictions: governments and media assert repeatedly that Covid-19 vaccines are effective, yet many more people have contracted and spread the virus since getting the jab than before the vaccine rollout. We were told that masks and social distancing would curb the spread of Covid-19 but have never been offered unequivocal evidence to that effect. And, of course, the biggest fraud of all: the idea of asymptomatic spread. It is now a commonly held belief that a perfectly healthy individual who feels well and has no symptoms of any illness is a danger to others. Consequently, they must be cordoned off and isolated from the rest of society in order to be approved of or accepted by that same society.

    For me, one of the most fascinating elements of Desmet’s theory is how he describes the nature of the social bond that emerges during mass formation. As he says, “this is never a social bond between individuals. It is always a social bond between an individual and the collective.” Furthermore, the longer the mass formation continues, the more “a radically paranoid atmosphere” is established which “destroys the connection between individuals.”

    So when Kathleen from Operation Transformation talks about being bored and missing social contact with other people, she is talking about the personal relationships she has with other individuals, whether that be family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances. However, a positive antigen test demands that she must sacrifice these personal connections in order to maintain and participate in the much larger (and faceless) relationship she now has with society as a whole. And the thing that most defines that relationship is to virtue signal, in the most public way possible, that you are keeping others safe by adhering to government guidelines, no matter how absurd or illogical those guidelines may be.

    Imagine if, only two years ago, someone you knew told you they had just got a flu shot in order to protect, not just themselves, but you and everyone else from influenza. Or that they were spending 50 to 60 euro a week to test themselves and their family on a daily basis for colds or flu, despite feeling perfectly healthy. Or that, if one of those tests gave a positive result, they would not go into work for 5-10 days and isolate themselves in their home, completely avoiding contact with the outside world. You would have thought your hypochondriac friend had finally lost the plot, and maybe even suggested they get some psychiatric help for that Howard Hughes-style obsessive compulsive disorder.

    Antigen testing.

    In fact, Desmet suggests that many of the Covid-19 measures put in place by governments around the world “are without pragmatic meaning” and function in a ritualistic way, demanding “a sacrifice from the individual; a sacrifice through which the individual shows that the collective is more important” than his or her own interests. Moreover, “people, without knowing it, will continue to buy into the narrative just because, as a social being, there is nothing more painful than to be profoundly and thoroughly socially isolated.”

    And what would the point of a sacrifice be if it were not acknowledged or rewarded in some way? Kathleen’s isolation because of a positive antigen test result is applauded by the experts on the show. Her reward is the public acknowledgment of that sacrifice: she has willingly done everything within her power to keep others safe, despite having absolutely no symptoms of any illness.

    Operation Transformation has a huge following in Ireland and it is very clear from watching only a few episodes that one of its main attractions is the sense of belonging and acceptance that both participants and the audience gain from taking part in or following the show. One woman, who planned to get involved in the Operation Transformation 5k run in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, went as far as to remark, “I don’t feel like Mrs Nobody anymore, and I’d encourage anybody not to feel like that.”

    Unsurprisingly, considering it is sponsored by the Department of Health and broadcast on RTE, there is an implicit acceptance by Operation Transformation that the State’s removal of our fundamental rights was absolutely necessary, that in doing so the State kept us all safe, and that the reestablishment of some of these rights is something for which we should be grateful. Another talking head on the show, Frank Greally of Athletics Ireland, says, of the recent OT 5k (the first OT event of this nature in nearly two years), that “when you join in something (like this) and participate, it’s an outpouring of gratitude” and that “we’re back on freedom road again!”

    So what does being “back on freedom road again” look like in the weeks since Michael Martin’s surprise announcement? When you use public transport or go into a supermarket, most people are still wearing a mask. Many school children continue to be masked up, sitting in freezing classrooms with open windows in the middle of winter. Mentally handicapped adults are still wearing facemasks in their day centres. The elderly in care homes, despite being triple-jabbed, can be locked down at a moment’s notice as soon as any resident or member of staff tests positive for covid. Tens of thousands of people just like Kathleen continue to test themselves on a daily basis.

    More worryingly, the State has doubled down on its campaign to vaccinate children despite acknowledged dangers. Other parents, just like this man, will suffer the horror of their child having a heart attack, and then be told by so-called medical experts that it had nothing to do with the experimental gene therapy that was administered shortly beforehand. Furthermore, unconstitutional and draconian legislation that was put in place back in March 2020 remains on the statute book. Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, could decide (using statutory instruments that do not require legislative oversight) to reinstate all restrictions, or add a few more, just as quickly as he removed them.

    In recent weeks, there’s also been a state and media pivot. The object of anxiety has shifted with breathtaking rapidity from Covid-19 to war in the Ukraine. And the strategy to deal with this new anxiety is to virtue signal your unconditional support for Ukraine and unquestioningly condemn everything Russian.

    The shift in narrative has been seamless. Just as the world’s media, in lockstep, uncritically presented Covid-19 as a simple morality tale, they now do the same with the Ukraine crisis. And the public appears, once more, to be lapping it up.

    The yellow and blue of Covid-19 public health advertising has given way to the yellow and blue of Ukraine’s national colours. Significant buildings in most European cities are now lit up yellow and blue, and you see the Ukrainian flag everywhere. In Dublin, a member of the public, to much applause, deliberately drove his lorry through the gate of the Russian embassy; soon afterwards, local councillors announced their intention to change the name of the street in which the embassy is located from Orwell Road to Free Ukraine Road.

    Protestors outside the Russian embassy in Dubln.

    At the centre of this new object of anxiety is evil incarnate Vladimir Putin and his dastardly plan to destroy Ukraine, and democracy more generally. In less than a week the number of Irish households offering accommodation to Ukrainian refugees has leapt from 5,000 to 14,500, with the State pledging that Ireland will offer sanctuary to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their country. That’s nearly a 2% increase in population for a country already facing a housing crisis and spiralling homelessness.

    But if you dare question any of this, then just like those that dared to question the covid narrative, you will be roundly condemned and ridiculed. Any form of critical thinking will have you branded, once again, as some kind of far-right, bigoted, conspiracy nutjob.

    All of Ukraine’s well-documented human rights abuses in the Donbas, and the distubing presence of neo-Nazi militia groups in that country’s armed forces, have not just been forgiven, but have, in fact, been whitewashed by the new media narrative. And despite his severely limited political experience, former comedian and current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been hailed as the new Churchill.

    Operation Transformation has become Operation Mass Formation, and this most recent manipulation of public opinion over the Ukraine crisis shows that we are still in the thick of a very problematic and unyielding kind of groupthink.

    So yes, Sarah from Operation Transformation, it may well be the case that Irish people need to sing and dance again, socialise and be themselves, but it was never the business or prerogative of the State to tell us that we couldn’t, and no matter what nonsense the government has come out with about ‘covid bonuses’ and ‘dividends’ for our obedience, it is certainly not their business to tell us that we can now.

    Until all the legislation that underpins the mandates is repealed, and until we make sure that such measures can never be inflicted on the population again, we are deluding ourselves if we think we are free. The current mono-narrative being presented to the public about war in Ukraine should be a red flag to us all that we no longer live in functioning democracies.

  • Covid-19: The View from Turkey

    On March 11th, 2020 the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in Turkey, followed by the first mortality on March 15th. Then on April 1st Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced that cases had spread all over Turkey. So how has the pandemic been managed since? And how have measures affected people.

    A total of 5.34 million cases have been diagnosed by May 2021, with 48,795 people losing their lives. Various measures have been implemented in Turkey, with opinions divided on whether they have been too harsh or too lenient.

    The first restriction was placed on air travel, with the installation of thermal cameras on airlines. As of March 11th, 2020 flights from China to Turkey were put on hold. Also, an attempts were made to allow Turkish citizens to return to Turkey from Iran, but with an obligatory 14-day quarantine period in a government facility.

    Afterwards, passengers returning from Umrah for religious purposes were allowed to quarantine at home. This brought opposition amidst fears the disease would spread. In response student dormitories were used for those returning from Umrah. There was, however, a reaction to this from both students and those placed in quarantine, especially as the students were suddenly removed from their dormitories.

    Restrictions were also imposed on overland travel. The borders with neighbouring Iran were closed. After the initial period, restrictions continued to be imposed on various flights and areas within a framework of broader rules. In addition to the use of masks and similar precautions, the Ministry of Health in Turkey launched a mobile health app that was supposed to be used by everyone, called HES (Hayat EveSığar – Life Fits Into Home). This made access to airlines and similar places easier. However, question marks lingered around how well the system worked.

    Specific precautions were also taken in public areas as well. Schools, sports competitions and cultural and artistic events were suspended. Online education modules were offered to students. Restaurants, cafes and bars were also forced to close, and asked to switch to takeaway.

    Offices were recommended to work remotely. However, many workplaces unable to do so at that time attempted to protect themselves through their own initiatives.

    Restrictions were also imposed on working hours as a precautions for employees, although, measures were not followed strictly by many employers. The situation caused financial difficulties for many companies, especially restaurants and cafes. Many claimed that that the government support packages were insufficient.

    Alongside this, citizens aged sixty-five and over were asked to ‘cocoon’ from March 22nd, 2020. Those under the age of twenty were also subsequently required to quarantine. Later, a 48-hour lockdown was declared in thirty-one provinces. This was announced by the Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu just two hours before it applied, which caused a certain degree of panic.

    People rushed to markets and shops in surprise, and the crowds of people were unable to maintain social distance as crowding ensued in many markets and bazaars, which led to the resignation of the Minister. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan refused to accept his resignment however. So the Minister kept his job.

    On May 10th, 2020, the transition period to a controlled social life began. However, in reality for many the transition period had already been happening, as many, old and young had refused to obey the prohibitions in the first place. Retail stores in most shopping malls across Turkey were allowed to open from May 11th.

    On July 1st, 2020, venues such as cinemas, theatres, and cultural and artistic centres opened in accordance with various rules. Later, on July 21, 2020, restrictions on the hours of businesses such as cafes and restaurants were also lifted.

    By mid-July, however, case numbers has doubled, but this did not translate into an increase in the number of patients in hospitals. For this reason, the public began to question the authenticity of the number of cases.

    At the same time, the Minister of Health’s statement that only those who show symptoms should be considered sick created a question mark in people’s minds.

    On January 1st, 2021, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca stated that fifteen people had been detected with the so-called U.K. variant. As a result, the Minister of Health temporarily halted all arrivals from the U.K. By January 2nd, 2021, variants of the Covid-19 virus first detected in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil were discovered for the first time in Turkey. This has heightened anxiety in many people.

    From the beginning of 2020 vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, SinoVac, Moderna, Sputnik V and AstraZeneca became available around the world. Two vaccines were offered in Turkey, first SinoVac and then Pfizer/BioNTech.

    This led to questioning as to which one was more effective, and what were the side effects. Especially on social media, many articles and appeared about the side effects. Many worried about being vaccinated, while others wanted to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

    The government set up a priority list for who should be vaccinated. President Erdoğan himself received a first dose when the social vaccination process began on January 14th.

    Then, more than 250,000 health workers received their first dose. The vaccination process continued in line with the groups determined after health workers: people aged 65 and over started to be vaccinated according to their wishes.

    With the vaccination process being carried out through family doctors, some complained about over-crowding and disorder. Many just wanted to get their vaccinations and return home as soon as possible.

    Over time, teachers, soldiers and policemen were offered the jab. Afterwards, the vaccination process continued with the determined priority groups.

    A total of over 34.8 million doses of vaccine have been administered in Turkey. The number of fully vaccinated people stands at 13.8 million out of a population of over eighty million.

    However, the public has been worried about this vaccination process, and continues to be, amid rumours the vaccines don’t work, and worries around side effects.

    As in many countries, the pandemic has witnessed a shift towards online work in Turkey. Businesses and individuals have developed remote working methods. Transactions such as online meeting, e-commerce, onlinebanking and digital payment have increased.

    In short, we can say that Turkish people have moved more and more online. Also, in this period, with longer periods spent at home, many have also developed an increased interest in cookery, sharing recipes online for bread, yogurt and other dishes.

    Moreover, various hobbies such as sports moved online, as people got used to innovating. Despite social distancing and the use of masks, people have continued to live their lives. But normal activities are still missed. Everyone is certainly looking forward to the end of this process and full normalization!

  • Covid-19: Unanswered Questions

    Confusion and fear are to be expected in novel situations where experience is limited; this should fade as understanding grows. Such is the natural cycle. When governments employ behavioural psychologists to induce fears in order to control and coerce the population, however, we have to question their motives and methods.

    Initially we were advised that a zoonotic virus crossed species: horseshoe bat to pangolin and then to humans, via the food chain. Ghastly images were shown nightly of a range of exotic creatures that Chinese people – portrayed in somewhat xenophobic terms because of their, to us, foreign tastes – supposedly enjoy consuming. This outbreak witnessed sagacious, and wealthy, heads knowingly saying ‘I told you so.’

    And apparently we can expect much more, and worse, in the future because of the ways in which we live and eat. Last year any question of whether it could have come from any other source was shot down as absurd by dubious fact checkers, and freighted with conspiracy theory fairy dust.

    This despite Wuhan containing a level 4 BSL laboratory, and three members of its staff being hospitalised in November 2019 with coronavirus-like respiratory symptoms. Furthermore, this same laboratory was conducting gain of function research into coronaviruses, through a grant form EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation funded by U.S. National Institutes for Health. This type of research using viruses was banned by the Obama administration as being too risky.

    Weaponising

    This same research is not far removed from the process of weaponising a pathogenic organism. So why did NIH fund this laboratory to carry out this type of research, and who else knew of the potential risks, and incentives, for finding a novel infective agent and researching possible treatments and vaccines?

    The first we in the West learnt about any of this came from the videos on TV and social media of people dropping dead in the street – in hindsight clearly not coronavirus cases – and the Chinese locking down it citizens. Next there was Italy, with coffins being carted away by military trucks.

    These were all carefully orchestrated publicity stunts, but who was responsible? Who decided to broadcast uncritically these sensational images? The world took note, a pandemic was declared and governments around the world, almost uniformly, imposed harsh and unprecedented restrictive measures on their citizens.

    In Britain the initial plan was to protect the vulnerable, through cocooning, whilst awaiting herd immunity in the young. But there followed a swift turnaround in the face of public outcry. In Europe only Sweden resisted the clamour to lockdown and was pilloried in the international media. ‘Sweden has become the World’s Cautionary Tale’ declared The New York Times in July, 2020.

    The British government’s approach was strongly influenced by the epidemiological modelling of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, of previous forecasting fiascos. For example, he predicted three to four million deaths from Swine Flu in 2009, which ultimately resulted in less than 300,000 global fatalities.

    Ferguson’s Imperial paper predicted 500,000 deaths in the U.K. in an unmitigated scenario, and on March 20th, told the New York Times that the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario. As of June, the U.S. has seen just over 600,000 deaths, and the U.K. 127,945, in circumstances where the attribution of death to Covid-19 is often deceptive.

    Further doom and gloom laden scenarios was provided by Professor Christian Drosten, head of the institute of virology, Charite university hospital, Berlin, while alternate modelling provided by Professor Michael Levitt, Stanford University and Nobel laureate was ignored.

    PCR Testing

    Dorsten’s main contribution to this story is his paper ‘Detection of 2019 novel corona virus by real time RT-PCR’ outlining the basis for the widely used Drosten-PCR test that has been criticised for multiple errors, and the haste with which it was published. This test is now the most widely used diagnostic test for Sars-CoV2.

    This is despite its invenor Kary Mullis’s – Nobel laureate for chemistry for his work with PCR – stating unequivocally ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick’.

    https://twitter.com/zaidzamanhamid/status/1384873889591873536

    There are a number of criticisms of the Drosten method in that he reportedly developed it using partial genetic sequences provided by the Chinese, in conjunction with sequences from other corona viruses. Furthermore, the test which according to Kary Mullis is a quantitative test, is not reported to clinicians this way.

    Instead a qualitative result ‘detected’ or ’not detected’ is reported without giving the cycle threshold, even after the WHO suggested physicians should be given this figure. The significance of the cycle threshold harks back to Kary Mullis’s ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick.’ Even Dr Anthony Fauci of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has stated that at ct values of greater than 35 it is unlikely that any live virus is present in the patient.

    https://twitter.com/jimgris/status/1326518250386063361?lang=en

    Why then did Irish laboratories use ct values as high as 45? And why did we go from testing inpatients with PCR, knowing the false positive rate, to the community setting and especially the asymptomatic, given asymptomatics are often ‘false positives’, leading to an inflated ‘case’ count.

    One has to wonder if the state’s spending of an estimated €400 million on PCR testing has been a case of noses in the trough not wanting to avoid the public smelling the coffee. Who were the people with vested or conflicted interests in this issue?

    Churchillian Speeches

    Most Western governments, including Australia and New Zealand, paraded their respective Prime Ministers before the cameras to make speeches of Churchillian gravity, implicitly likening the threat of Sars-CoV2 to World War II. Leo Varadkar even paraphrased Churchill in his first speech to the nation -’never will so many ask so much of so few,’ before imposing unprecedented draconian lockdown measures, based on fear.

    Along the way we have heard words of caution from notable academics including Stanford Professors John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, as well as Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. But these voices were hardly ever heard on Irish mainstream media.

    These authorities cautioned that measures would disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable; that severe illness was mainly confined to a recognisable cohort, and that there was no evidence for the efficacy of lockdown measures.

    Nobody listened. Instead the government closed schools, prevented people from earning a living, stopped all cultural and sporting activity, prohibited religious worship and confined travel to within five kilometres of home.

    For months elderly people languished alone in nursing homes and hospitals, some dying alone; women gave birth without their partners; funeral rites were severely curtailed, as basic civil rights were completely ignored in response to an illness with an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.05% for anyone under the age of seventy years.

    Every night the state broadcaster became the government’s harbinger of doom with the recitation of nightly death tolls. What purpose other than ratcheting up of fear did this serve?

    Through the diligent questioning of Michael McNamara TD, however, we know that the reported mortality figures included anyone testing positive in the previous twenty-eight days with a PCR test, no matter what their underlying condition. Deaths unassociated with Sars-CoV2 were obviously irrelevant.

    They turned out to be very relevant as the CSO annual death figures of 6.4 per 1000, which were little different to previous years, and even less than 2013. Why then, when death figures dropped, did reporting switch to the spurious concept of ‘cases’, defined by a positive PCR test? Why did the Irish government shamefully enlist the services of RTE in terrifying the nation, and why did the state broadcaster acquiesce? Answers on the back of a postcard…

    Disproportionately Affected

    The message ‘we are all in this together’ was a big lie. The disease disproportionately killed people over the age of eighty, especially those in nursing homes, many of whom were needlessly infected after being transferred to hospitals with testing withdrawn at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020. The obese, those with diabetes, chronic heart and lung diseases are also disproportionately affected.

    These pre-existing morbidities are more prevalent among lower socioeconomic groups in society. So we were clearly never all in this together.

    Civil servants, including politicians and the medical profession, those working in IT and for media corporations, could easily work from home, but nearly half a million people had to stop work for the duration, especially those in the tourism and hospitality sectors. These are mainly young people, and like children, most would only have been mildly effected by the virus. So why were they forced to suffer unnecessarily?

    Moreover, why did small retail outlets have to close for months on end, while off licenses and fast food chains were deemed essential services?!

    States of Fear

    The kind of Propaganda devised by Sigmund Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays who infamously made it fashionable for women to smoke, was evident in the government’s manipulation of the figures, and the media’s delivery. Bernays wrote in Propaganda (1928) ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’

    A host of celebrity scientists appeared, many with Conor McGregor levels of empathy, only better elocution, a gentler demeanour and less tattoos. Trite experiments were undertaken on popular TV shows, where we found dour funereal forecasts from infectious disease experts, who were invariably wrong in their predictions, and inane squeaking from a misplaced neuroscience.

    All of these ‘experts’ sang in unison. Dissenting voices were heard briefly and infrequently. Some lost their jobs merely for disagreeing with the bull-in-a-china shop approach taken by the HSE/NPHET/government.

    In her new book States of Fear Laura Dodsworth outlines how the UK government used behavioural psychologists, probably via their Nudge unit, to control the population through the deployment of carefully selected ‘experts’ and repetitive messaging on news broadcasting.

    This was substantiated in the recent testimonies by Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson. ISAG were also familiar with scaremongering techniques, as intercepted emails highlight their tactic of targeting and discrediting individuals, and keeping fear ramped up as a tool in their ZeroCovid campaign.

    To quote Bernays again ‘there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realised to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scene.’

    Using this sinister playbook, between them NPHET, ISAG and the government managed to sow a level of fear, suspicion and division in society that may take years to unravel.

    Flatten the Curve?

    Despite all the hype around flattening the curve to save the health service at the beginning of the pandemic, and the use of draconian measures to do so, alas nothing was done to treat patients at home.

    Several readily available, cheap and relatively safe products, were hypothesised to have positive benefits in the early stages of a Sars-CoV2 infection, but there were systematic efforts to steer physicians away from these.

    The ICGP guidelines for GPs on the treatment of early Sars-CoV2 amounts to do nothing, and wait for patients to get better, or if they fall really ill send them into hospital. Some doctors in the USA lost their licenses for prescribing these medications, and others in Ireland faced censure by the Medical Council.

    According to physicians like Peter McCullough, Professor of Medicine at Baylor University, Texas in conjunction with AAPS (The association of American Physicians and Surgeons), and separately Dr Pierre Kory of FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance) Sars-CoV2 was empirically treatable, especially in that first week before the patient became very unwell.

    https://vimeo.com/560523610

    So, despite a concerted effort to vilify them, they treated their patients. Why did Irish GPs, save for a few, fail to do so?

    In doing nothing did many patients needlessly died? With our widespread application of lockdowns and our disregard for focused protection measures, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration (which has garnered 850,000 signatures, including 43,000 from medical practitioners) coupled with our refusal to at least try and treat patients, have we done a great disservice to our patients?

    Silencing of Dissent

    Sweden did not adopt anything like the same draconian measures, and their economy and society has not been disrupted to anything like the same extent as Ireland’s. Yet their mortality figures compare favourably, especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population.

    Perhaps one of the main reasons for the concerted campaign to ensure that no other treatments were deemed suitable for the early treatment or prevention of the disease was the FDA criterion for an EUA (emergency use exemption).  No such exemption would have been granted to a product in such an early stage of development, without animal or human study data, except in what are deemed to be extraordinary circumstances.

    €26 billion – the amount Pfizer expects to earn this year after producing the first Covid-19 vaccine – might buy a lot of scientific validation, and political influence.

    The undue haste with which these vaccines have been rolled out demands sceptical enquiry, especially in relation to two particular cohorts: pregnant women and children. As clinicians we generally exercise extreme caution in these groups.

    So why is it that for a condition with an overall IFR of 0.15% have we discarded this caution? Linking vaccination status to the right to work, travel, attend cultural and sporting events is divisive, coercing those who wish to exercise a degree of caution and/or exercise autonomy over their health.

    Without the questionable concept that is asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for vaccinating anyone in low risk groups, and certainly no justification for using bully tactics.

    Despite all these glaring questions, there has been a deafening silence from the medical profession in Ireland, and those that have spoken out have been quickly silenced. Is this how we are going to deal with complex issues in future? Adopting binary, categorical approaches without nuance leaves no room for debate.

    RTE have paid lip service to the notion of an informed debate, hosting Martin Feeley and then later pitching Professors John Lee and Sunetra Gupta into debate with hand-picked stalwarts.

    Moneybags

    In Ireland today scepticism is viewed as a contagion to be eradicated, with compliance seen as the perfect state of health. As a nation we must ask: why have so many been so quiet; why has fear replaced reason, and groupthink taken over once again?

    One must question the role of doctors ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ as Aneurin Bevan put it in relation to British doctors at the inception of the NHS. A quick look at the 2019 PCRS payments to GPs shows a healthy €85 million in government expenditure. This, however, mushroomed to over €200 million for the same period in 2020.

    Some were clearly making a killing during the pandemic. And whose idea was it to advise doctors not to see patients face-to-face during the pandemic? If a doctor won’t see you who will?

    Further to this windfall will be vaccination payments at a cool €60 per patient. Is it any wonder GPs want everyone vaccinated?

    There may even be boosters for variants required for everyone on the planet! The media should be asking the question: who is benefitting from this Monty-Pythonesque situation?

    Certainly any government with the slightest authoritarian bent, which it transpires appears to be most Western ‘democracies’. It really is worrying how little opposition there has been to Chinese-inspired lockdowns, with opponents dismissed as a far right fringe – even by the apparently left-wing opposition – despite the obvious damage these policies have done to the poorest, who were also least protected by the measures.

    Why did so many European governments fall into line so quickly, when even a passing familiarity with EU politics would indicate that it can take years for Member States to agree on the number of legs that the average cow possesses?

    If you intuit that something is just not right, and baulk at jingoistic phrases like ‘the new normal’ and ‘build back better’ ask yourself cui bono or ‘who benefits’, and don’t let the fear of being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ dissuade you from asking reasonable questions.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Covid-19: A New Irish Social Contract?

    Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of three indicators: Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens.

    These features of a healthy republic, he wrote, diverge from a narrow form of republicanism associated with Rousseau ‘which argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will: ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy.’ Up to that point in Ireland, O’Toole argued, this latter, narrow version had predominated, which he associated ‘in vulgar terms’ with appeals being made to ‘pull on the green jersey’’; and where ‘an idea of accountability implicit in mixed government is ditched.’

    ‘For most of the history of the state’, O’Toole concluded that the state ‘failed miserably in the basic task of ensuring citizens were free from subjection to the arbitrary will of others.’[i]

    Now, as Ireland slowly unwinds from an interminable lockdown that tendency of Irish governments to pull on the green jersey, avoid accountability, reject obstreperousness and a conspicuous failure to ensure that citizens are free from the subjection to the arbitrary will of others, is evident once again. This regression has arrived especially through what O’Toole himself described on April 28th, 2020 as the ‘top-down, command-and-control approach’ of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), which the elected government has deferred to throughout most of the pandemic.

    Times of War

    The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to reshape the Irish political landscape, eroding foundational certainties of left and right. When the dust settles new formations may crawl from the debris, with democracy itself in peril, as the coalition government chooses to extend emergency powers until November, while other countries such as Denmark aim for a swift return to normality.

    In terms of the pandemic’s wide-ranging impact, there are parallels with the outbreak of a global war. As Hannah Arendt put it: ‘The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of the an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.’[ii]

    Placing billions under lockdown around the world had a shuddering effect on daily routines, altering intimate exchanges and gestures, besides radically reducing the ambit of daily peregrinations. It’s a very modern form of trench warfare that confined most of us to within 5km of barracks – spilling out invective on (anti-)social media.

    In Ireland, with the advent of bigger government, there is a confidence among some on the left that their time has arrived, and that a relatively youthful population will vanquish age-old privileges of wealth and caste through a permanently enlarged state.

    However, as Eric Hobsbawm records, one reason Engels (and even the late Marx) ‘began to turn away from calculations that the international war might be an instrument of revolution was the discovery that it would lead to ‘the recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries’ which would serve the ruling classes.’[iii]

    Similarly, nationalism chauvinism – ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex’ – has been witnessed throughout the pandemic in Ireland. This is perhaps unsurprising as, historically, infectious diseases have given rise to, and fed, plagues of prejudice and outright racism; the diseased ‘other’ at the gates of the city is a recurring theme. Ruling classes have often put forward strongman rulers to harness this xenophobic sentiment.

    Since March 2020 we have poured over spreadsheets of daily deaths, infections, testing rates and vaccine roll outs to determine how ‘we’ are doing relative to ‘them.’ In Ireland we tend to measure achievements and failures against the noisy neighbour next door, whose boorish leader has somehow managed to transform one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from Covid-19 into a great British victory pageant, through a rapid vaccine rollout. Boris now looks unassailable, notwithstanding Brexit storm clouds, Dominic’s revenge, Indian variants; and just the suspicion that the vaccine may not prove quite the panacea it seems now in winter 2022. Time will tell.

    Indeed, the narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic should serve as a warning to the Irish left that ruling classes can easily steal their best clothes. In this respect, Johnson operated with far greater flexibility than Donald Trump, shifting from a ‘take on the chin’ herd immunity approach in March, 2020 to championing what he would have previously decried as a ‘nanny state’ lockdown. He and his chumocracy used the pandemic as a pretext for introducing draconian legislation against protest and civil disobedience, apparently aimed at movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

    Recovery Position

    Similarly, though less dramatically, Leo Varadkar resuscitated his political career after Fine Gael’s disastrous performance in General Election 2020, donning proverbial scrubs for the initial phase of the pandemic. Having identified himself with “early-rising” middle class voters Varadkar was smart enough to realise that his preferred Thatcherite policy of reliance on an Invisible Hand of market forces could lead to a public health disaster during a pandemic.

    Since entering the coalition, Fine Gael Ministers have emphasised a law and order approach – Simon ‘TikTok’ Harris was quick off the blocks denouncing as ‘disgusting, grotesque and obscene’ a comparatively unobstreperous anti-lockdown protest in Dublin by European standards. Fine Gael have also allowed Fianna Fail to act as a mudguard for a failing system of public health: Ireland’s health expenditure is the third highest in the EU, yet we have only 5 ICU beds per 100,000, compared to 35 in Germany and 28 in Austria.

    Fine Gael represents itself as a centrist party, placing emphasis on its belated support for marriage equality and abortion referendums, which obscures from a failure in government to address structural inequalities and ongoing environmental damage. Replacing James Reilly as Minister for Health in 2015 Leo Varadkar promptly abandoned universal health insurance (UHI).

    After becoming leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar claimed he would represent thrusting early risers – tantamount to saying he would not alter structural inequalities that are most apparent in access to housing. In combination with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael has represented the dominant interest of large property owners, indifferent to whether their wealth is maintained via independent corporate entities, the state, or as in Ireland’s case increasingly, a corporate-state nexus.

    Simple distinctions of left and right are often misleading. Thus, when considering the virtues, or otherwise, of big government it should be clear that administrative levers and patronage may drive inequality; most obviously through mind-boggling salaries, such as the €420k paid to the Director General of a dysfunctional HSE, Paul Reid – ironically a former Workers’ Party activist. Reid has no medical or scientific qualifications, and previously acted as chief executive of Fingal County Council.

    Moreover, left-wing politicians and their supporters are often drawn from higher income groups; a tendency that within Fine Gael circles used to be referred to as noblesse oblige – accompanied by the obligatory glass of fine Cognac – of which the Just Society was the apotheosis. But a left-wing identity may be superficial, as the distribution of state largesse, or patronage, apart from being expressed in high public sector salaries, often benefits established professional elites of lawyers, academics and indeed doctors.

    Leprechaun Economics

    Big government patronage motors along fine in Ireland for all concerned as long as the tech and pharma sectors do the heavy economic lifting. This is the ‘Leprechaun Economics’ that Paul Krugman referred to dismissively. But now the Biden administration’s taxation proposed changes to the global tax system may make the current Irish model unworkable. The ECB is also likely to desist eventually from quantitative easing, with inflation looming.

    Renewed fiscal rectitude and the prospect of multinationals leaving a perpetually unaffordable capital city for workers, will place increasing reliance on those indigenous SMEs that have endured the Crash of 2008, and the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. Yet whole sectors have been furloughed for over a year, with some such as events and tourism wondering whether they have a future at all. The Central Bank has warned that one in four firms could fail when pandemic payments cease.

    It should be unsurprising, therefore, for a small businessperson living from transaction to transaction to be wary of parties promising higher taxation on the left, and instead be attracted to politicians on the right, or even far-right, that are acquainted with the language of commerce, however superficial this may be, in the case of Leo Varadkar at least, whose concern for SMEs has disappeared after his supportive comments proved unpopular last October.

    An objective for a progressive left should be to attract support from an increasingly marginalised mercantile class, emphasising that a favourable environment for entrepreneurship, as in Scandinavia, is enabled by efficient public service, including a one-tier, functioning health system. The left can argue that leaving healthcare to market forces – as in the U.S. – is not only deeply unfair, but also, crucially, leads to greater costs than a functioning one tier public system which also – as in most European countries – delivers better outcomes overall.

    The inherent danger of Ireland’s two-tier model, where health care provision is subject to market forces is epitomised by a question recently posed by a Goldman Sachs executive: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” In an age of profound health insecurities – which are amplified through subtle advertising cues – market forces will continue to distort public health priorities.

    It was the father of economics Adam Smith who warned: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ However, while resisting a buccaneering tendency in the delivery of a vital government service such as healthcare, the left cannot afford to dismiss the dynamism of entrepreneurship in society at large. Just imagine the food you would be served if the government was running all the restaurants.

    Following Public Health Guidance

    While there are a range of financial supports available to SMEs, the world-beating length of Ireland’s lockdown has made trade impossible for many businesses, some of which may never recover. The failure of the two centre-right parties in government to represent their concerns arguably, lies at the heart of Ireland’s deeply flawed response to the pandemic.

    From March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years. Yet, despite having the youngest population in the Union, according to a Reuters by February Ireland had endured 163 days of workday closures. This was the highest, by some measure, of all the European countries surveyed at that point. By contrast, Denmark had lost just fifteen days, having experienced a death toll almost half that of Ireland’s per capita.

    The uncritical attitude of mainstream Irish left wing parties towards public health officials should also be reconsidered. Recall the major mistakes in particular by Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan, who saw nothing wrong with fans going to Cheltenham in early March, 2020, ordered care homes to re-open to visitors that same month, and then transferred 4,500 untested patients back into care homes – surely contributing to the second highest level of care home mortality in the world during the first wave. Yet Irish left wing politicians have consistently complained about the government failing ‘to follow public health advice,’ despite Holohan’s long history of cock-ups and cover-ups.

    Even before Christmas NPHET – a body composed primarily of career civil servants and notably short on scientific expertise – seemed to have been all on board for the ’meaningful Christmas’ of Micheal Martin’s imagination. The only significant deviation between the government’s approach and NPHET’s advice was that the latter preferred to permit household gatherings rather than opening the hospitality sector. Cue raucous Christmas house parties, as opposed to what were mainly orderly affairs in pubs and restaurants.

    In fact, Ireland’s ‘third’ wave, which coincided with the more transmissible B.119 variant (although apparently not more lethal as was widely reported) actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.

    Sadly, public health obscurantism has also brought denial of their own data, which said outdoor transmission of Covid-19 is about as frequent as curlew sightings.

    The latest embarrassment over NPHET refusing to acknowledge the benefits of antigen testing, underlines that if left-wing politicians are slavishly going ‘to follow the public health advice,’ and whatever Yes Minister civil servant advises then we won’t see radical reforms in Ireland any time soon.

    Frank O’Connor

    Guests of the Nation

    Over the course of the pandemic Irish attitudes have hardened against the free movement of people in and out of the country, culminating in the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantines for some foreign, including EU, arrivals at the end of February.

    Contemporary Irish attitudes to hardworking foreigners resident in Ireland recall Frank O’Connor’s classic 1931 short story ‘Guests of the Nation.’ Set during the War of Independence 1919-21 it portrays a bond of friendship that grows up between two IRA men, Bonaparte (the narrator), and Noble, who are detailed to guard two captured English soldiers Belcher and ‘Awkins who have a natural affinity with the country:

    I couldn’t at the time see the point of me and Noble being with Belcher and ‘Awkins at all, for it was  and is my fixed belief you could have planted that pair in any untended spot from this to Claregalway and they’d have stayed put and flourished like a native weed.

    Ultimately ‘Awkins and Belcher are sacrificed at the altar of of a narrow nationalism, just as a today the Populist appeal to ‘protect our own people’ has ordained that the rights of immigrants in Ireland, and abroad, to see their families was disregarded.

    This appears to stem from a widespread notion that ‘we,’ like faraway New Zealand and Australia, can eliminate the disease from ‘our’ shores altogether – devolving into the juvenile #wecanbezeros hashtag adopted by some politicians on the left. The problem is that ‘we’ are a society with lots of ‘them’ immigrants living here, and an enormous diaspora of ‘us’ beyond the shores of an island divided into two jurisdictions, highly dependent on international trade in goods arriving on trucks (with drivers).

    Moreover, apart from the extreme geographic isolation and sparse populations of Australia and New Zealand, ‘we’ in Ireland have legal obligations to preserve freedom of movement under European treaties and the Good Friday Agreement, enshrining a porous open land border. Apart from committing economic hari-kari, pursuit of ZeroCovid appears legally impossible, unless of course we want to pursue an Irexit and build a wall along the Northern border.

    Nonetheless, egged on by febrile – ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – coverage in a national media increasingly reliant on government advertising, a prevailing view is that all deaths from Covid are essentially preventable; emanating from the failing of the state, or the reviled Covidiot, rather than being the tragic consequence of a pandemic, the death toll from which has been systematically exaggerated.

    Moreover, intercepted correspondence within the ZeroCovid ISAG group of independent scientists – who have taken on the Opus Dei role to the Catholic hierarchy of NPHET – reveals, among other disturbing insights, that they were looking ‘for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.’ As these revelations first appeared in right-wing Gript, however, the left-wing echo chamber refuses to acknowledge it is being played.

    Are you right there Michael?

    Nonetheless, a number of politicians have come forward representing an anti-authoritarian left, concerned by the harms of lockdown and favouring a targeted approach – protecting the elderly – and building up ICU capacity. In a recent blistering Twitter attack the independent (and former Labour) TD for Clare, barrister Michael McNamara – who as chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Covid-19 Response became as well acquainted as any Irish politician with diverging epidemiological assessments of the pandemic – identified a recurring Irish deference to vested authority.

    In response to a Fintan O’Toole article critiquing the DUP McNamara wrote: ‘Instead of criticising unionism, let’s look at the complete mess we’ve made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We’re ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same.’

    He continued: ‘If it wasn’t for Unionism, we’d be like Hoxha’s Albania now. There’d be no way off this island. But there is a beacon. Belfast Airport and Larne are beyond the reach of NPHET, just as surely as the rule of the Archbishop’s palace in Drumcondra didn’t pass the bridge in Portadown.’

    He added more controversially:

    ‘We can’t blame the medics for their experimental therapy, any more than we could blame the clergy for their zeal.  Successive governments have abdicated their democratic responsibility throughout this State’s short history. So why would Unionists want to be “governed” by Dublin?’

    It was a fair question, when one considers the North is reopening far sooner than the Republic. Although this has arrived after a rapid vaccine rollout, the experimental nature of which McNamara raises problems with.

    Facing Up to Errors

    Here we come to the crux of an unhelpful cultural division between left and right that the ruling parties will use to divide and conquer. This is the new identity politics arising out of the pandemic, epitomised by attitudes towards face masks.

    For too many on the left the science on this issue is proven as opposed to followed. Wearing a face mask now appears to have become an article of faith. Yet a recent report by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention entitled ‘Using face masks in the community: first update – Effectiveness in reducing transmission of COVID-19’ stated:

    The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect, but there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect. Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty.

    Additional high-quality studies are needed to assess the relevance of the use of medical face masks in the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Moreover, the Irish left should consider our dependence on pharmaceutical behemoths that jealously guard intellectual properties, notwithstanding huge state aid grants, and indemnification against adverse reactions. It is akin to the dependence of small farmers in developing countries on genetically modified seed, under a model of Philanthrocapitalism overseen by Bill Gates, who according to a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik has shown “a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies,” and devotes hundreds of millions of dollars each year to whitewashing his reputation through “charitable” media grants.

    Moreover, all too often, media debates around Covid-19 fail to acknowledge the link between pre-existing morbidities – ‘underlying conditions’ – and morbidity and mortality from Covid-19. Thus, US Studies have shown that having a BMI over 30—the threshold that defines obesity—increases the risk of being admitted to hospital with covid-19 by 113%, of being admitted to intensive care by 74%, and of dying by 48%, making it almost as relevant a consideration as having been vaccinated.

    In Ireland, moreover, Mayo coroner Patrick O’Connor recently questioned the attribution of deaths to Covid-19, saying: ‘In reality, a lot of people have terminal cancer or multiple other serious co-morbidities. People can die from Covid and or with Covid. I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis.’

    https://twitter.com/SunTimesIreland/status/1383791062846562307

    Furthermore, by embracing ZeroCovid Utopianism many on the Irish left failed to focus on the failings of a decrepit Irish health system. This epitomises a tendency among politicians to dance to the tune of a corporate media that has placed relentless focus on the disease itself, regularly interviewing mendacious ISAG figures, while generally ignoring underlying social and environmental factors that drive morbidity and mortality.

    The canard that Ireland could simply shut its borders and reach ZeroCovid perhaps points to the need for reform of an Irish secondary educational system, which according to the a rather unkind assessment from the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher is designed to produce ‘second-class robots.’ Perhaps too many of us are lacking the requisite critical faculties to look beyond news headlines.

    In fact a radically different, defiantly left-wing approach to the pandemic been put forward by, among others, Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kuldorff in The Jacobin. They pointed out:

    Elites have seen their stock portfolios balloon in value, and many professionals have been able to keep their jobs by working from home. It is the country’s poor and working-class households, particularly those with children, who have borne a disproportionate share of the burden. Lower-income Americans were much more likely to be forced to work in unsafe conditions, to have lost their livelihoods due to business and school shutdowns, or to be unable to learn remotely.

    Beyond ZeroCovid, the Irish left should emphasis the harms of Ireland’s reliance on lockdowns, and harness the malcontents of the poorest, including small business owners. Otherwise they court irrelevance as the traditional ruling parties have already taken on the role of ‘caring’ for the people, while retaining the power to ease restrictions in the face of opposition from the left.

    Science and Technology are not Neutral

    Also, as opposed to running in fear from being labelled anti-vaxxers by a cheerleading corporate media, the left might at least consider the wisdom of foisting vaccines that have been granted under emergency use conditions on all age groups. Indeed, many on the left in Ireland seem unwilling to question dominant institutional narratives, a tendency recently criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris in The Jacobin, who said: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    It remains unclear whether universal immunization will bring about long-term ‘herd’ immunity; while in the absence of long-term safety data the benefits to young, healthy subjects of vaccination may not outweigh the cost in terms of adverse events from treatments granted under emergency use licences. Sober assessment seems to have given way to an ideological and, at times, a coercive approach.

    In terms of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, writing in the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, pointed to how in the media ‘a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%’ for severe disease.’ Ollario et al in The Lancet referred to absolute risk reductions of ‘1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.’ The authors also pointed to how ‘considerations on efficacy and effectiveness are based on studies measuring prevention of mild to moderate COVID-19 infection; they were not designed to conclude on prevention of hospitalisation, severe disease, or death, or on prevention of infection and transmission potential.’

    Doshi has also objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’  This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer those who received a placebo the opportunity to receive its vaccine.

    Doshi argued that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    An alternative policy would be to reserve vaccines for those most susceptible to severe symptoms – the old and the obese – along with healthcare workers and others unavoidably working around the world in congested environments. Devoting scarce resources to increasing ICU provision to bring us into line with European averages might be a better approach than relying exclusively on the quick fix of the vaccine.

    The Irish left should now desist from identity politics around vaccine uptake that the centre-right is relishing. ‘Tiktok’ Harris previously stoked tensions with talk of mandatory vaccines and promoting vaccine passports. The left should resist vaccine apartheid, nationally and globally, while demanding the release of patents earned through state supports.

    On the Horizon

    Ireland can expect significant social problems to emerge out of our world-beating lockdown strategy that recalls a prior devotion to austerity; a mental health pandemic and mass youth unemployment are upon us already. Moreover, the young are currently denied the safety valve of an easy hop to another English-speaking country for work. This may be a recipe for radicalism, but unfortunately genuinely dark forces on the far-right are ready to pounce on malcontents.

    It is surely vital that we maintain our European connections, thereby scrapping Mandatory Health Quarantine that is an insult to immigrant groups in Ireland, as well as the diaspora. 90% of scientists believe that Covid-19 will be with us forever, so it seems there will always be ‘variants of concern’ to contend with, just as there are with influenza.

    As a country Ireland has serious work to get on with in terms of addressing a housing crisis and improving our environment. A narrow focus on the pandemic should not be allowed to derail these efforts. This may be like a war but it is not a war. Even prior to vaccines, this is a virus with an infection fatality rate of less than 0.2% in most locations. Moreover, up to 86% of those infected may not have symptoms, such as cough, fever, or loss of taste or smell, according to a UK study from October. We require better provision of public health and an adequate plan to address the ongoing obesity pandemic.

    We also need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about Long Covid, considering ‘at least some people who identify themselves as having Long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.’

    We need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about long Covid

    A New Social Contract?

    The pandemic calls for a new social contract to be negotiated in Ireland that acknowledges republican values of Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens. The French COVID-19 Scientific Council led the way in a paper for The Lancet:

    it is time to abandon fear-based approaches based on seemingly haphazard stop-start generalised confinement as the main response to the pandemic; approaches which expect citizens to wait patiently until intensive care units are re-enforced, full vaccination is achieved, and herd immunity is reached.

    They continue:

    Crucially, the new approach should be based on a social contract that is clear and transparent, rooted in available data, and applied with precision to its range of generational targets. Under this social contract, younger generations could accept the constraint of prevention measures (eg, masks, physical distancing) on the condition that the older and more vulnerable groups adopt not only these measures, but also more specific steps (eg, voluntary self-isolation according to vulnerability criteria) to reduce their risk of infection. Measures to encourage adherence of vulnerable groups to specific measures must be promoted consistently and enforced fairly. Implementation of such an approach must be done sensitively and in conjunction with the deployment of vaccination across the various population targets, including all generations of society.

    They argue against reliance on lockdowns:

    Using stop-start general confinement as the main response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer feasible. Though attractive to many scientists, and a default measure for political leaders fearing legal liability for slow or indecisive national responses, its use must be revisited, only to be used as a last resort.

    To date, many on the Irish left appear to have had their heads in the sand promoting a Utopian ZeroCovid solution. This should give way to a more balanced appraisal that considers the interests of all of Irish society. With the youngest population in Europe, and as one of the richest countries, the Irish government could have preserved a far higher standard of living for the population during the pandemic. We now need to draw up a social contract that takes a more balanced approach.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] O’Toole, Fintan (editor), Up The Republic: Towards a New Ireland. Faber and Faber, London, 2012, p.1-52.

    [ii] Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.22

    [iii] Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, Tales of Marx and Marxism, Little, Brown, London, 2011, p.79

  • Covid-19: A Deadly Deception

    4,915. And rising. This number can only increase or, at best, stay the same. It can never go down. Of all the innovations that governments and media around the world have come up with, seemingly independently of each other, during the ongoing Covid period perhaps the most insidious is the daily running total of deaths.

    I have often wondered what purpose this number serves. At a time when we are frequently told by the media and government to ‘follow the science’, what could be more unscientific than a figure which, even when nobody is dying, looms above us as a warning that danger is ever present and nothing has improved.

    But take the number of people who are unemployed, a figure that has reached terrifying proportions without any sophistry or assistance from behavioural scientists. In fact, a lot of effort is expended on massaging this number downwards from the actual amount to levels more palatable for public consumption.

    But imagine that we calculated the number of unemployed by concocting a total of all those who have been laid off – jobs that have died – at any time and for any duration, during the past thirteen months? Or since unemployment began, a running total of all the people who have been unemployed ever?

    What function would that number serve? Might it help prevent future unemployment? Might it better inform us of the skills and training required for our workforce? Might it be useful for analysis and reporting? As Frankie Howerd used to say, “Nay, nay, and thrice nay.” I wager any civil servant who proposed such an idea would soon be on their way to early retirement, and be about as popular with politicians as a Garda on breathalyzer duty outside Leinster House.

    Yet that’s exactly what we do with the running death total (and its near twin the running case total) for Covid. If the purpose of this number is to show where we currently stand amidst the ebbs and flows of the pandemic, then surely a monthly or a weekly total would do the job better. We could then, as we do with the unemployment figure, compare this month to last (or this week to last) and judge which way we’re going. Are we moving steadily forwards? Are we tumbling hopelessly backwards? You get the idea.

    Why haven’t we ever had a running total of deaths from cancer, heart attacks or diabetes? If we’d started even a year ago, these numbers would be at impressive levels now. Cancer and diseases of the circulatory and respiratory systems certainly dwarf the Covid tally.

    Surprisingly, Worldometer hasn’t tried to do something like this. To many of us, Worldometer is the central hub of running Covid death totals. Currently, it trumpets a formidable 593,148 deaths for the United States, a daunting 127,570 for the United Kingdom and, as mentioned at the start, a not inconsiderable 4,915 for Ireland.

    But what do these frightening numbers refer to? Well, they refer to the number of Covid-19 deaths. So what’s all the fuss about? The fuss is over what constitutes a Covid-19 death. So what is meant, exactly, by a Covid-19 death? Here is where it starts to get a bit complicated.

    WHO Guidance

    On April 16th 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a document entitled “International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of Covid-19 as Cause of Death”. This provided strict rules for registration of Covid-19 deaths, rules which were fundamentally different to those which were in place for the registration of deaths from other causes.

    Some doctors expressed concern about what they felt would give a misleading picture of causes of mortality. These rules, they said, were unprecedented and would lead to the over-reporting of deaths from Covid-19 and the under-reporting of deaths from other causes. Their warnings went unheeded and, for the most part, unreported. There was no place for prudence and common sense amid the frenzy and hysteria of the early days of the pandemic.

    Even CMO Tony Holohan acknowledged in April last year: ‘Clinically, the “index of suspicion” for the disease would be “a good deal higher” than would normally be the case for flu.’

    Since then numerous medical professionals have added their voices to this dissenting chorus. The latest Patrick O’ Connor is coroner for Mayo and public information officer of the Coroners Society of Ireland. O’Connor has expressed his discomfort at official reporting of Covid-19 deaths in this country: “I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis”, he said earlier this month.

    Let’s take a look at the International Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (MCCD). For this section I am indebted to Dr. No, the author of the ‘Bad Medicine’ blog, for his succinct explanation of how the MCCD works and how, in practice, the WHO guidelines affect this process. I recommend his article about this if you want a more detailed understanding of the topic.

    The MCCD was introduced by the WHO in 1948. Its purpose was to create an international standard for the recording of deaths and to describe the sequence of events which led to a death, rather than just the immediate cause (as was common in many countries at that time).

    Frame A (above) is the most important part of the MCCD. It is here that all significant information about a death is recorded. As you can see, Frame A has 2 boxes. Box 1 is for recording the cause of death, Box 2 is for recording contributing conditions. Box 1, the cause of death box, has four lines: the first line records the immediate cause of death, the remaining lines record any conditions which led to the immediate cause of death, with the last line containing the underlying cause of death. The idea is to record the sequence of events which led to the death.

    To give an example. A person with diabetes dies from a heart attack, which was caused by heart disease.

    So the first line in Box 1 contains ‘Myocardial Infarction’ (the clinical name for a heart attack) because a heart attack was the immediate cause of death. The second line contains ‘Ischaemic Heart Disease’ (the clinical name for heart disease) because this is the underlying cause of death. This is the condition which initiated the sequence of events which culminated in the person’s death: the heart disease led to a heart attack. The remaining lines in Box 1 are left blank because this person had no other conditions which contributed to the sequence of events leading to their death. Diabetes is recorded in Box 2 because this is a contributing condition, rather than being a part of the sequence of events which led to death. This death will be registered as ischaemic heart disease (or simply heart disease) because this is the underlying cause of death.

    Another example. A person dies from internal bleeding due to a ruptured artery as the result of a road traffic accident.

    The first line in Box 1 contains ‘Internal Bleeding’ because this is the immediate cause of death.

    The second line contains ‘Ruptured Artery’ because this is what led to the internal bleeding.

    The third line contains ‘Road Traffic Accident’, as this was the underlying cause of death: it was a road traffic accident which initiated the sequence of events that led to the death. In this instance, Box 2 is left blank as there were no contributing conditions. So, the road traffic accident led to the ruptured artery which led to the internal bleeding. This death will be registered as a road traffic accident.

    “clinically compatible illness”

    The WHO’s guidelines define a Covid-19 death as “a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).” This is an extremely vague definition and one which allows for a rather broad interpretation of what can be considered a Covid-19 death.

    As can be seen from the HSE’s website or that of the UK’s NHS, there is a large overlap between the symptoms of Covid-19 and those of any number of other respiratory conditions or Influenza Like Illnesses (ILIs). Any of these other conditions can be considered a “clinically compatible illness”. You will note that Covid does not have to be confirmed: a “probable” case is sufficient for inclusion as a death. As Dr. No puts it, “If it looks like Covid-19, it is Covid-19.”

    The guidance goes on: “A death due to COVID-19 may not be attributed to another disease (e.g. cancer) and should be counted independently of preexisting conditions that are suspected of triggering a severe course of COVID-19.” This is very important. What physicians are being told here is that, when they have identified a Covid-19 death (using the loose “if it looks like Covid” definition), then regardless of any pre-existing conditions which may have triggered severe Covid-19, the death must be registered and counted as a Covid-19 death. This goes against all conventions for identifying the cause of death.

    So how does this relate to our MCCD form? Well, in our earlier examples of somebody dying from a heart attack and somebody dying in a road traffic accident, there should be no difference in the way the deaths are recorded. In fairness to the WHO, they are quite clear in their guidance that these two types of death should not be recorded as Covid-19. (Unfortunately, this has not stopped overzealous authorities around the world from registering heart failure, motor accidents, suicides and murders as Covid deaths).

    However, when it comes to most other types of death, we start getting into murky waters. Take the example of a person who dies from pneumonia, caused by immobilisation, which itself was caused by multiple sclerosis.

    In this case, the underlying cause of death is multiple sclerosis. Why? Because multiple sclerosis led to immobilisation which led to pneumonia. So this death will be registered as multiple sclerosis.

    Now, let’s imagine this person had tested positive for Covid-19.

    Notice anything strange? Because of the WHO guidelines, the underlying cause of death is no longer multiple sclerosis, but is instead Covid-19. Multiple sclerosis (and immobilisation) gets moved to Box 2, it’s now been relegated to a contributing condition. This death will be registered as Covid-19. Remember the WHO said in their guidelines “A death due to Covid-19 may not be attributed to another disease and should be counted independently of pre-existing conditions.”

    Testing Flaws

    A further issue with the above example is that the presence of Covid-19 is determined solely on the basis of a positive PCR test result. According to the WHO’s clinical coding instructions, a death must be registered as Covid-19 if the patient received a positive test result, even if they never displayed any symptoms. But PCR tests are notoriously unreliable, with even the WHO themselves warning of their tendency to produce false positive results.

    So here we have the case of an unfortunate individual whose multiple sclerosis, over many years, caused them to become immobile. Immobility, sadly, can lead to pneumonia which, especially for the aged and/or immunocompromised, often results in death. However, because of the WHO guidance, the presence of a positive PCR result alone means that all of their medical history, the entire chain of events which led up to the person’s death, is cast aside and replaced by the misleading explanation of Covid-19.

    But the issue goes even deeper. You’ll recall that the WHO’s definition of a Covid-19 death includes “probable” cases as well as “confirmed” ones. Our final example describes an individual who dies from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), caused by pneumonia, which itself was caused by chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).

    As you can see, the underlying cause of death is COPD, which led to pneumonia, which led to ARDS. This death will, of course, be registered as COPD.

    But what if this person had had contact with someone known to have Covid-19 or even with a person suspected of having it? Here’s what would happen to the MCCD:

    The underlying cause of death is now ‘suspected Covid-19’, which, in the figures we see on the nightly news and in the vast majority of statistics made available by governments, is treated in exactly the same way as a confirmed Covid-19 death. The WHO’s clinical coding instructions insist that it is, so long as the deceased had “contact with (a) confirmed or probable case.” The COPD which caused this person’s pneumonia is cast aside, no longer considered to have played a part in the sequence of events that led to their death.

    This is absurd. Yet this is how deaths around the world are now being recorded and registered. If somebody is dying of heart disease, liver disease, respiratory disease, cancer, dementia or any other terminal illness, and they have a positive PCR test or have simply been in contact with somebody suspected of having Covid, their death is now registered and counted as a Covid-19 death. Any pre-existing condition, no matter how serious and no matter what part it played in their ultimate demise, is moved to Box 2 of the MCCD and not recorded as the underlying cause of death. The WHO guidelines state, in the section entitled “Comorbidities”, that “if the decedent had existing chronic conditions…they should be reported in Part 2 of the medical certificate of cause of death.” Conditions which for more than seventy years, since the introduction of the MCCD form, have been understood as underlying causes of death, are now rebranded as contributing factors. All to make way for the mighty Covid.

    Massive Inflation

    The result is a massive inflation of the numbers of Covid-19 deaths. As Patrick O’Connor, the Mayo coroner, says, when speaking about terminally ill patients, “If they prove to be Covid positive in a test, it is that (Covid) which is recorded as the principal cause of death — even though that person may have been terminally ill with a short life-expectancy prior to such testing.” And, as we have seen, a test is not even necessary, as the WHO’s guidelines instruct physicians to include “probable” with “clinically compatible” illnesses in the tallies.

    Even before the WHO issued their guidelines on 16th April last year, Italian authorities had been using a similar method to register Covid deaths, with 88% of patients there (up to March 20th, 2020) having at least one comorbidity and many having two or three. In addition to hugely inflating the number of deaths from Covid-19, this bizarre way of counting also distorts the mortality rate of the disease, making it seem far more deadly than it actually is.

    In 2020, a total of 73,444 people died in England and Wales with Covid-19 recorded as their underlying cause of death. In response to a freedom of information request, on 29th March 2021, the UK’s Office for National Statistics revealed that only 9,400 (12.8%) of that number were recorded without pre-existing conditions.

    On July 3rd last, Ireland’s then acting Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, tweeted, “In Ireland we counted all deaths in all settings, suspected cases even when no lab test was done, and included people with underlying terminal illnesses who died with Covid but not of it”, revealing that the numbers of Covid-19 deaths in Ireland were vastly exaggerated and in no way reflected the lethality of the disease in this country.

    Although the complete death statistics for 2020 have not yet been made available for Ireland, in April, 2021 Kildare coroner Professor Denis Cusack published a report analysing deaths in that county during the pandemic. Of 230 deaths recorded with Covid-19 as the underlying cause, 228 (99.13%) had pre-existing conditions.

    Fewer than 1% Died Without a Comorbidity

    I would have thought that this was a significant finding, that fewer than 1% of the people who died from Covid-19 in County Kildare did not have comorbidities. But, like anything else that doesn’t fit in with their campaign of terror against the Irish people, the Irish media was having none of it. While both RTE and The Irish Times gave coverage to Professor Cusack’s report, neither had anything to say about the 99.13% of Kildare’s Covid dead who had pre-existing medical conditions. Nor was there a mention of the average age of death in this cohort being 82.2 years of age. Both news services instead chose to focus on selected aspects of the report which they used to support the ‘lethal virus’ narrative they have long pushed. Is this censorship? Maybe it’s just extremely poor journalism.

    The running total of deaths is one of the pillars that supports this whole charade. The narrative of a deadly pandemic would never have worked without the impression of huge numbers of fatalities, countless lives ‘lost to Covid’. The unprecedented changes in the way deaths are counted allowed this to happen. You would imagine such a fundamental change, one which has had such a colossal impact on every man, woman and child on the planet, would be widely reported and discussed. Yet it is almost impossible to find a mention of it anywhere in the mainstream media.

    Although most of us have suffered under the heel of draconian Covid regulations, and will continue to suffer, some have profited greatly from this fiasco. We have seen how health scares have been manipulated for gain in the past, none more so than the Swine Flu pandemic that never was, in 2009, when governments, the WHO and pharmaceutical corporations colluded to profit at our expense.

    There needs to be an urgent investigation, on a global scale, to find out how the Covid pantomime was allowed to happen. And we need one in Ireland, to determine who knew what and when, and exactly who has benefitted.

    Walk-in Testing Centres

    The current narrative being spun in Ireland is that we are close to ‘finding a way out’ of lockdown and that, if we behave ourselves, we might be permitted some limited freedoms during the summer. This is hardly surprising. We’re coming to the end of coronavirus season, which means it’s so much harder to inflate ‘cases’. And because mortality rates in the Northern Hemisphere are typically at their lowest during the summer months, it’s not as easy to attribute huge numbers of deaths to Covid-19. It was the same last summer.

    But the government has been preparing for this. Already, there are 5 walk-in testing centres in operation in Ireland, with many more planned – a perfect way to boost the numbers and keep us on our toes for the summer months. And, of course, the government reserves the right, at any moment, to slap us all back into lockdown.

    At the same time, it has been made abundantly clear that whatever limited freedoms we might be permitted will be contingent on mass vaccination and, before long, vaccine passports and digital identity. And don’t forget, coronavirus season comes around again in September. But, as we have seen, the lethality of this disease, for which we’ve radically changed the way we live and have forsworn so much of our freedom, has been blown out of all proportion by the fraudulent way in which deaths are registered.

    We suffered under austerity for a decade. It’s hard to believe that the same politicians who decimated our health service, causing untold hardship and death, now want to protect us. Do we trust they are spending our money honestly and wisely? How much is being spent on mass vaccination, testing, tracing, the vaccine passport infrastructure? And what is the cost of the Covid period to our economy? The whole circus makes a mockery of the years of austerity and of every person who suffered because of them.

    Cost to our Health

    Then there is the cost to our health. Many have lost their lives because of this deception, but you don’t see a running total of their deaths on the news every night. How many have died due to a lack of primary health care, which has been sidelined and neglected, sacrificed at the altar of Covid? How many cancelled surgeries and missed screenings? What about those in urgent need of treatment who were too frightened to attend a hospital? And those who were turned away before they even reached a hospital, because Gardai at a checkpoint deemed their need not sufficiently urgent?

    The mental health of our nation has taken a nosedive, not due to Covid but because of lockdowns and other unwarranted sanctions against our people. Loneliness, depression and despair have all taken their toll. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hardly a radical anti-lockdown stronghold, has estimated that one third of all excess mortality in the United States during 2020 was due to reasons other than Covid-19.

    We’ve been deceived. When important facts are left out of a narrative in order to foster a misconception, we call it lying by omission. We have been lied to by politicians, public health officials, wealthy media barons and the stooges who write for them. And we have paid a terrible price. In the twilight of our freedom, it’s time for us to stand up for the truth.

  • COVID-19: Virtual Work a Bridge Too Far?

    For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
    Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

    “That’s how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you’ll eventually get it. And then you’ll make new mistakes.”
    Louis Sachar, The Card Turner (2010)

    Managing and Nurturing the New Workplace Culture

    A recent report from the International Labour Organization provides evidence that employees are more productive when they work outside a conventional office.[i] They are, however, more vulnerable to longer working hours, a more intense pace of work, work-home interference, and elevated stress.

    Mark Twain

    Other research indicates that common problem for remote workers[ii] include: ‘unplugging after work’ (38%); as well as loneliness (19%); lack of collaboration (17%); distractions at home (10%); managing and coping with time zones (8%); and last but not the least, Staying motivated (8%).

    Mark Twain once said: ‘If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worse things that is going to happen to you all day long. Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.’

    So, I list two recommendations for managing expectations while we survive the #workfromhome phase.

    1. Focus on a few things, and do them well. The ‘Eisenhower matrix’ is often used to avoid unnecessary time-wasting tasks and know which tasks to do next. Ideally plan to do just one big thing, three medium things, and five small things per day,[iii] the 1-3-5 rule.
    2. Managing energy is more important than managing time: Keep track of how much you’ll be able to focus at different points of the day. You improve by pushing your practice, not yourself during periods of low energy.

    ‘Given the lack of face-to-face interaction and heavy reliance on technology, the intent of what someone wants to communicate might be misconstrued.’

    Communication (a lack of it or too much of it) generally improves when a collaborative work management platform is used to centralise all communication and collaboration. Suggestions would include using Trello or Asana to Basecamp or Wrike – they are inclusive in keeping managers in the loop and on top of what is happening.[iv]

    An MIT Sloan study shows that employees were twice as likely to discuss the quality of communication by top leaders in positive terms during the months of the pandemic than they were a year earlier. In fact, they were 88% more likely to write positively about leaders’ honesty and transparency (46%). Employees also expressed more positive sentiment about transparency (42%) and communication (35%) in general.[v]

    One of the most important themes that stand out in the months of the pandemic is the degree and quality of communication by leaders. A recent study shows that employees of Culture 500 companies gave their corporate leaders much higher marks in terms of honest communication and transparency, during the first six months of the pandemic compared to the preceding year.[vi]

    On the other side of the coin, when you work from home, you no longer have a clear geographic division between workspace and personal space. It is for this very same reason, once again, difficult to switch off when both personal and professional worlds operate under the same roof. With constant remote work in action, the boundaries between working and not-working start to fade rapidly.

    Home-based workers do not tend to receive signals about when to switch off. Therefore, leaders need to communicate clearly on the ‘time for work’ and ‘time for play’ model, which would help smooth everybody’s work model and conduct.

    No Place Like Home

    Fundamentally, one’s home is a place of relaxation, safety, and security. It’s a place where you subconsciously slip into a calm, easy-going state of mind, putting the stresses of the workday behind. However, working from home punches a hole right through that neat division. Many telecommuters complain they feel like they’re never off the job. They always feel a compulsion to check email or get “just one last thing done.”

    So how to set the rules of engagement and boundaries?

    Remote work becomes more efficient and satisfying once managers set expectations for the frequency, means, and ideal timing of communication for their teams. For example using videoconferencing for daily check-in meetings, but using IM when something is urgent.

    Also, if leaders can allow employees to specify their hours to be contacted and equally importantly, when not to be. Finally, it is important for leaders to keep an eye on communication among team members to ensure that they are sharing information as needed.

    Additionally, leaders need to do more frequent check-ins to see how they can support their people in moving forward. Since, above all, leaders need to build trust. During this period managers in certain industries have enjoyed a bit more autonomy within companies to take ownership of projects and complete these how they see fit. A responsible degree of empowerment and delegation is what came out of the process when done with purpose.

    Consequently, there’s also been a huge shift in flexibility in this period, with firms having to acknowledge – often for the first time – that their employees have complex lives, which sometimes incorporate children, ageing parents, health concerns, and poor housing, to name but a few of the challenges the pandemic has brought to the fore.

    The Art of Learning (by doing)

    According to Erin Driver-Linn of Harvard University: ‘Experiential learning is participative—for example, either making or doing … What do we need to understand, as a learner, which is conceptual? And what do we need to understand by experiencing things in a different way?’[vii]

    Managing talents and the right selection followed by allocation of relevant resources are attributes that a good institution requires. The core skills any individuals who wants to thrive in an innovative business environment or organisation come down to the following: creativity, problem-solving and continuous improvement skills, developing attitudes and behaviours that are needed to frame and solve problems, and generate new ideas on a continual basis.

    Additionally there is risk-assessment and risk-taking skills; the mindset to manage these has to be solidified over time. Upgrading these skills depends heavily on effective planning and implementation.

    Managing the ‘New Normal’ Workplace Culture

    ‘People find meaning in their daily rituals of getting ready to leave home, commuting, grabbing their cup of coffee, and filling their water bottle before sitting at their desk.’[viii]

    Broadly, organisational culture is defined by the collective norms of behaviour exhibited by the individuals within an organisation. Since the first, almost global, lockdown of early 2020, there was a shared buzz, online and otherwise, that #wfh would be a recipe for disaster when it comes to maintaining stable company culture.

    Among the questions that leaders and managers pondered were:

    Will the company culture take a hit because people can’t meet in person, making it harder to solidify their shared beliefs?

    Will they be less able to use the company culture as a roadmap for making sensible decisions during tumultuous times?

    How can companies continue to build and leverage their culture while all operations are functioning remotely?

    At least we seem to be wasting less time now. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research claims that even though we’re attending more meetings in the Zoom era, the average meeting length is shorter and we’re collectively spending less time in them.[ix] Most firms claim to have increased communication, meaning that employees might be feeling more connected.

    Besides communication and trust exercise, leaders also need to establish and maintain discipline and boundaries. People working alone tend to become less productive over time, even if they work longer hours than they did in the office. This has less to do with productivity than losing their frame of reference and task orientation. As is often the case, it comes down to mindset. While some of this is innate, other aspects are derived from situational and environmental conditions.

    Social media giant Twitter was one of the first companies that decided that their workers could work from home when COVID-19 cases began rising in March 2020.[x] With foresight, Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter and Square) also stated that employees will potentially have the option to work remotely indefinitely.

    In addition to being ahead of the game, Twitter also provided employees with day-care reimbursements, continued to pay contract workers[xi] whether they’re able to work or not, and banned all in-person events for the rest of 2020. This is the situation to this day.

    American graphic artist Harvey Ball.

    Put a Human Face on your Organisation

    Especially in the context of an abrupt shift to remote work, it is important for leaders to acknowledge stress, listen to employees’ anxieties and concerns, and empathize with their struggles. If a newly remote employee is clearly struggling, but failing to communicate stress or anxiety, ask them how they’re doing.

    Even a general question such as: “How is this remote work situation working out for you so far?” can elicit important information that you might not otherwise hear.

    Once you ask the question, be sure to listen carefully to the response, and briefly restate it back to the employee to ensure that you understood their answer correctly. Let the employee’s stress or concerns (rather than your own) be the focus of this conversation.

    Cut to Credits!

    Successful organizations need effective leaders. With the aging of the workforce and imminent retirement of the Baby Boomers, U.S. organizations are experiencing a shortage of skilled leaders and a significant need for leadership training. Skilled leadership affects the entire workforce; numerous studies indicate that one of the key reasons for employees leaving their jobs is because they are uncomfortable with the working environment created by a direct supervisor. Successful organizations need effective, parental, and democratic leaders at this juncture.

    Leadership training could reduce turnover at all levels in an organization, the focus remains on learning and managing adaptability, interpersonal people skills, self-awareness, developing and maintaining a sense of purpose, timely and effective decisiveness, as well as collaborative skills. The basic aim of training and development programmes is to help the organization to achieve its mission and goals by improving individual and, ultimately, organizational performance.

    In light of the initiatives of prominent global businesses as well as small businesses at a domestic and local level, the concept of a virtual workplace has been redefined in the past twelve months. This is a useful time to document the process as at a later stage we will need to look back and take lessons from this period.

    Virtual bonding is helping many to come emotionally closer to their colleagues. Some have seen a marked reduction in the communication gap between themselves and their senior. This insight may not seem like rocket science, but a key lesson for companies is to work out ways of avoiding toxicity and recognise the supreme importance of fairness and kindness.

    Research into emotional intelligence and emotional contagion tells us that employees look to their leaders for cues about how to react to sudden changes or crisis situations. If a manager communicates stress and helplessness, this will have what Daniel Goleman calls a ‘trickle-down’ effect on employees.

    Effective leaders[xii] generally take a two-pronged approach, both acknowledging the stress and anxiety that employees may be feeling in difficult circumstances, but also providing affirmation of confidence in their teams. We are all in this together, and we will get through it – perhaps we should see it as a time to get to know ourselves a bit better.

    [i] ‘Working anytime, anywhere: The effects on the world of work’, Eurofound, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—publ/documents/publication/wcms_544138.pdf

    [ii] Business Coach: Vanessa Moore, May 30th, 2019 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/eat-frog-vanessa-moore-1c/

    [iii] Deen Dayal Yadav, ‘How to cope up with the challenges of remote working?’ Thrive Global, May 6th, 2020, https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-to-cope-up-with-the-challenges-of-remote-working/

    [iv]  Trello vs Asana vs Basecamp, Grasshopper Resources, https://grasshopper.com/resources/tools/project-management-tools-trello-asana-basecamp/

    [v] ‘STUDY: Organizations Rising to the Challenge of COVID-19 Communications, but Needs Persist; Leaders Must Address Concerns and Demonstrate Transparency, Clarity and Openness’ BusinessWire, April 3rd, 2020. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200403005278/en/STUDY-Organizations-Rising-to-the-Challenge-of-COVID-19-Communications-but-Needs-Persist-Leaders-Must-Address-Concerns-and-Demonstrate-Transparency-Clarity-and-Openness

    [vi] Donald Sull and Charles Sull, ‘How Companies Are Winning on Culture During COVID-19’ October 28th, 2020, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-companies-are-winning-on-culture-during-covid-19/

    [vii] ‘Innovation & discovery skills for ‘innovention’ managers’ The Sentinel, February 14th, 2021, https://www.sentinelassam.com/editorial/innovation-discovery-skills-for-innovention-managers-524593

    [viii] James Thomas, ‘How the pandemic can change workplace culture for the better’ Strategy&, https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/m1/en/articles/2020/how-the-pandemic-can-change-workplace-culture-for-the-better.html

    [ix] Daniel Kost, ‘You’re Right! You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings,’ Harvard Business School, September 14th, 2020, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/you-re-right-you-are-working-longer-and-attending-more-meetings

    [x] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Twitter tells staff to work from home,’ BBC, March 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51700937

    [xi] Jack Kelly, ‘Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Tells Employees They Can Work From Home ‘Forever’—Before You Celebrate, There’s A Catch’, May 13th, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/05/13/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-tells-employees-they-can-work-from-home-forever-before-you-celebrate-theres-a-catch/?sh=32caf77a2e91

    [xii] ‘Daniel Goleman, ‘An EI-Based Theory of Performance’ Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organisations, 2000, http://www.eiconsortium.org/reprints/ei_theory_performance.html

  • The New Abnormal

    The pandemic has changed life as we know it. We are dealing with the ‘New Abnormal’ where certain aspects of life, such as our café and pub culture are no longer viable. Alas, many places have closed down permanently due to reduced customer footfall and loss of incomes.

    So, what does this mean for our social lives?  As social animals we need a certain level of sociability for our mental wellbeing. This teaches us valuable life lessons for survival in different situations. We socialize to meet new people for friendship or to meet partners. Socialising differs from age group to age group. Cafés and pubs are the most common areas across generations in most countries.

    In Ireland, cafés and coffee shops now operate on a socially distanced basis. Many have developed outdoor seating, which is a fantastic addition on those rare occasions of sunny weather in Ireland.

    For the younger generation in pre-Covid times, socialising on weekends meant pre-drinks in someone’s house and then piling into a taxi or bus to get into town. The bars and clubs would be heaving, and you’d brush by strangers on the way to buy a drink. When it got warm, you’d nip outside to the smoking area to cool down and have a chat with friends even if you didn’t smoke.

    The nights out were great. But waking up the following day at least €40 down and a pounding headache, you would have to wonder, was it really worth it? Could there be a better way to socialize?

    In today’s pandemic circumstances we have an opportunity to find other ways of remaining sociable, yet safe from contagion. Phase Four of the lockdown easing measures involving the reopening of pubs has been put on hold until the 18th of September. So for now we still have to book a table to have a meal if we want a drink for the allotted time, give or take.

    It is easy for some premises that already served food. But it is a bit of a pain knowing that you’re spending more than you want, all for the sake of a socially-distanced drink.

    Temple Bar, Dublin. 27 March 2020. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices

    Chance encounters with new people will be unlikely as we’re not meeting in big groups anymore. This goes for house parties, pubs, and venues as a result of the current regulations. Indoor gatherings and events are limited to six people from no more than three households. Private outdoor gatherings are limited to fifteen people. The exception is for weddings which are allowed a maximum of fifty people.

    German Approaches

    It seems as if Germany is in two minds over how to move forward with a social experiment that went ahead in Leipzig on the 22nd of August and an anti-restriction protest being witnessed in Berlin at the start of the month.

    The experiment equipped 4,000 pop music fans with tracking gadgets and bottles of fluorescent disinfectant. This is designed to allow scientists gain a clearer picture of how the spread of Covid-19 can be prevented at large indoor concerts. We’ll find out from this how easy it will be to return to a level of pre-Covid normalcy when the results are known.

    Meanwhile, in Berlin on August 29th a protest against Covid-19 measures went ahead that brought out an undisclosed number of people of varying opinions on the restrictions. Many chose to avoid wearing face masks or social distance, despite the urgings of police over megaphones. A similar protest also went ahead in Dublin and also featured a lack of masks and social distancing.

    Open-air Concerts

    On the 11th of August an open-air concert took place at the Virgin Money Unity Arena in Gosforth Park, Newcastle, at which people were fenced off into private pens at a six feet distance with a maximum of five people for each one. This could be the short-term future of concerts and would certainly allow events to proceed and may even improve on certain aspects of the experience!

    However, in Ireland, we have not been as lucky with the weather as in Britain, which experienced a summer heatwave. Clearly it is more viable to put on outdoor concerts in warmer countries than Ireland. We do, however, have the space for outdoor concerts with the likes of Phoenix Park and other large green areas such as the Punchestown racecourse, where the Oxygen festival was held, close to Dublin city. But without a large marquee for concerts, which maintains open-air ventilation, it’s unlikely that many concerts will be able to proceed outdoors, as we enter the cooler part of the year.

    In Switzerland, clubs reopened in June without physical distancing and at a reduced capacity. The creation of the Swiss Night Pass, a digital ticket, ensures that clubs, bars, and events have a list of attendees with their contact information for tracing. This became mandatory after revellers failed to provide correct information. Six people contracted the virus after a man tested positive after attending the Flamingo Club in Zurich in June, but otherwise, surprisingly, these venues have not been the occasion for super-spreader events.

    Many countries plan to reopen nightclubs from September 1st. South Korea reopened nightclubs back in May, but this led to a spike in Covid-19 cases resulting in indefinite closure of all bars and clubs. New Zealand had been doing well, maintaining zero Covid-19 for a hundred days, but a recent outbreak led to another set of Level Three restrictions in Auckland, which has just recently ended. There appears to be no signs of clubs reopening there for a while yet.

    Better Ways To Socialise?

    So, what will these restrictions entail for sociability? And, can we find a better way to socialise?

    One novel approach that could bring about a change in the way we socialise would be to revive The Muse Conversations proposed by Theodore Zeldin. Zeldin is a renowned Oxford University philosopher, historian, and author. He has been a pioneer in revealing how relationships, and emotions such as love, fear, loneliness, friendship, and ambition have evolved in different civilisations over the centuries.

    The Muse Conversations brings together total strangers in pairs, for a conversation that transcends small talk. Both are given a Menu of Conversation with specific questions that guide and structure their discussion. These questions enable the pair to reflect on the details of their lives, speculate on their personal experiences, and gain a deeper understanding of one another. The idea is that this encounter will change their world for a short period of time.

    Perhaps this idea of a new way of relating to one another could take place in short periods of time in a controlled environment. Indeed libraries have reopened along with the likes of community halls where this would certainly be a viable option. Another alternative could be to have The Muse Conversations in an app, in the style of dating apps. Socialising in person is still the best way to make connections as non-verbal communication such as body language and inflections or tone of voice remain important to forming lasting bonds.

    Marking indicating social distancing in a cafe in Dublin. August 2020

    Getting Around the Regulations

    For the moment it seems that we will have to continue to reserve tables in bars and restaurants. One option is to make a second reservation to extend a social gathering, as ninety minutes is really insufficient to catch up properly with people. If others don’t live close by the chosen destination then it often just isn’t worth it, given the cost of travel and the mandatory nine euro surcharge for food, on top of the money that will be spent on drinks. This will probably lead to more indoor gatherings at houses where the social norm is to provide guests with snacks and some drinks. It’s also a lot cheaper for guests to bring their own beverage and there’s less of a time limit.

    For coffee shops, it’s possible to take away beverages which doesn’t change that aspect at all. The chance to sit and work on a laptop at a café appears to still be part of the new normal, as long as they are following the same rules as restaurants.

    For clubs, it remains to be seen what will happen when they officially reopen. It’s difficult to see how social distancing will work on dance floors, along with ordering drinks. If clubs increase the size of their smoking areas, it may be possible to achieve the required ventilation. And unless there’s the possibility of a club having an app to order drinks that allows distancing from patrons, it would be difficult to remove entirely the chance of contracting Covid.

    The only way we can socialise with a degree of normalcy is to have more open-air events. This may have to come with a limit on numbers or even a ban on alcohol consumption. But this could work if bookings for private seating arrangements were possible as with the outdoor concert in Newcastle. Ireland should certainly look at what has been happening in the UK, and elsewhere, for inspiration of what can work for future events.

    The pandemic will certainly bring huge changes to social life around the globe that will hopefully not last as long as people expect. All we can do is wait and see what happens. For now, we have to accept the new abnormal.

  • COVID-19 and SMEs: Survival, Resilience and Renewal

    In a recent survey of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) by Ernst and Young [i], 79% of board members stated that their organisations were not well-prepared to deal with a crisis such as today’s pandemic. Several other analyses also indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic will push down the full-year gross domestic product (GDP) globally from the 2.5% that was forecasted in January 2020 to 0%.[ii]

    In this climate, corporations are urgently attempting to satisfy the dual key targets of meeting strategic goals and also customer demands (which tend to be bespoke in several sectors). However, a closer look at these two goals reveals that strategic goals also includes employee wellbeing (a particular problem during this period), maintaining brand image and overall reputation, supply chain and procurement essentials, while staying clear of legal challenges that the current situation might inadvertently throw up.

    So, while sending out a responsible business image that needs to be maintained, at the same time longer term stakeholder management and internal coherency in management decisions are equally important. All of this while keeping healthy financial charts, tables and projections in today’s remote board room meetings.

    An OECD analyses show that new business registrations in the U.S. fell by more than 75% relative to the prior year from 15-16 March onwards [iii] – the day when lockdowns started. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the number of start-ups dropped by 34% in April 2020 compared to April 2019 [iv], in particular in business services and construction.

    Also, in China venture capital investment in new companies declined by 60% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the first quarter of 2019. In Canada, a survey suggests that 59% of Canadians are considerably less likely to start a business after COVID-19 than before.[v] While these numbers indicate how deeply the aspiring start-ups and entrepreneurial initiatives have been hit in several leading countries, it also demands an exploratory look into how existing and relatively new businesses (especially, smaller ones) are coping under the circumstances.

    The Competitive Engine

    Over 50% of SMEs have already experienced strong decline in revenues and more than half of them do not have reserves to survive more than 3 months without help.[vi] Yet SMEs account for 60% of employment and 50-60% in value added across OECD countries.

    They remain the competitive engine of many regions and cities while contributing to the fabric of local communities. Policy makers in several countries, including most BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India, China] have responded by deferring payments and assisting with temporary layoffs, enhancing access to credit, providing grants and wage subsidies – amongst many other short-term measures. However, these quick fixes cannot continue indefinitely. Therefore, strategic action is required to enhance SME resilience by opening new markets and by helping them to adopt new technologies and work practices.

    The vigour, agility and the general wellbeing of employees should be a priority for small and large businesses alike. Despite the image portrayed on social media, throughout the lockdown limited working hours, work from home, virtual leadership and new strategies for remote engagement have brought considerable difficulties in all major sectors.

    For progressive organisations, small and large, the challenges are on several fronts, beginning with identifying the current bottlenecks, before listing challenges and potential (and implementable) solutions.

    The primary concern of any business should be the wellbeing of employees and their families. This should look beyond the ‘duty of care’ component of management and take a more humane and ‘affiliative’ leadership approach.

    Secondly, perhaps the most important consideration should be communication. Not only how clear and concise a message should be, but also how well-coordinated and standardised the communication systems is to ensure clarity when engaging with key stakeholders.

    A third consideration is the challenge of ensuring sustainable financing and stable cash reserves in the period following lockdown.

    A fourth component is to assess what kind of models and constructs are in place for companies to assess risk and crisis management.

    Fifthly, despite talks of a ‘new’ normal etc., the empirical demand patterns in some markets will not witness a sea change immediately after the crisis lifts. The challenge is to address the impact of demand disruptions, which businesses will need to recover from. This will hit the supply chain and entail procurement risks that businesses need to mitigate both in the medium and long term. The practical foresight of resilience and prudence will play a colossal role.

    Staffing Limitations

    The emphasis on driving production efficiency, strong yield, and high first pass quality is even more urgent now as many companies have reduced capacity utilization due to staffing limitations. Data shows that even after the reopening of factories, most sites are still struggling to achieve 50% of their previous capacity.

    Most companies are likely to experience significant disruption to their operations and will underperform for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Companies that are operating in, or exposed, to countries that are significantly affected by COVID-19 will experience disruption to their supply chain and production commitments.

    A greater emphasis on employee wellbeing should be as a priority since employees are the one true asset, even more so if they are motivated as much as their line managers towards a common larger goal.

    For SMEs, staffing and recruitment should remain key components during times such as today. At least the market has provided a brief window to rethink the acquisition, management and retention of talent. This has as much to do with change management as with determining the culture of the company as it will be in the future. One tip that might prove worthwhile is to be empathetic in reducing employee hours.

    Particularly in the case of businesses that have not been in complete lockdown, or those that have been partially open with restricted hours every day, or those slowly expanding their opening hours as lockdowns are lifted in phases: it is often best to speak directly with employees about their financial situations.

    Most zero-hour contract workers in retail outlets, food and beverage, fast-fashion and also the hospitality industry are self-selecting towards reduced hours, thereby, saving the time and energy of line manager cutting the hours of those who may be more dependent on the income from that employment.

    Provide Reassurance

    An equally prudent approach towards customers is to provide reassurance during this period. That is easier said than done for companies that are widely visible on social media. The question is how personalised, accurate and contextual that message should be.

    Clearly, there is a temptation to post often on social media, but this also carries challenges and long-term risks. A lack of clarity, and meaningless assurances to customers could do far more damage than not posting at all. A recent survey showed that 34% of customers,[vii] especially concentrated in the Gen-Z cohort use social media platforms channels as an information source.

    To keep a business’s head above water, this may also be a good time to reach out to lenders to negotiate short-term reliefs. This could come either in the form of deferred payments or extended credit lines. As mentioned earlier, the focus on supply chain and procurement in this period is essential.

    This is also important because there may be significant changes in stakeholder relationships arising out of current decisions. Equally timely and important is reaching out to business vendors to confirm supply continuity. Some of these businesses may be facing their own hardships. This is a good time to work closely with them and explore opportunities for mutual benefits. Some of these businesses could offer deferred payment terms as well.

    Going forward, survival, resilience, and renewal strategies need to be independently developed if the pandemic is to teach businesses a crucial lesson or two.

    [i] Ernst and Young (2020). Is your organization prepared to respond?, EY Global Risk Survey (accessible at https://www.ey.com/en_ie/covid-19/is-your-organization-prepared-to-respond-)

    [ii] World Bank (2020). Pandemic, Recession: The Global Economy in Crisis, World Bank (accessible at https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-global-economic-outlook-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-changed-world)

    [iii] OECD (2020). Coronavirus (COVID-19): SME policy responses, OECD Policy Responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19) (accessible at http://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/coronavirus-covid-19-sme-policy-responses-04440101/)

    [iv] OECD (2019), OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook 2019, OECD Publishing, Paris (accessible at http://www.oecd.org/industry/smes/SME-Outlook-Highlights-FINAL.pdf)

    [v] McKinsey & Company (2020). COVID-19: Briefing note: June, 2020, COVID-19: Implications for business (accessible at https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business)

    [vi] Yoshino, N. And Taghizadeh-Hesary, F. (2016) Major Challenges Facing Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Asia and Solutions for Mitigating Them, ADBI Working Paper Series, Asian Development bank (accessible at https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/182532/adbi-wp564.pdf)

    [vii] The Asean Post (2020). Gen Z’s use of social media has evolved, The Phillipines (accessible at https://theaseanpost.com/article/gen-zs-use-social-media-has-evolved)

  • ‘This is science which should go on trial’

    A zoom panel discussion organised by Lindau, which included two other Nobel-prize winning scientists, provided Stanford biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt with a platform to vent his fury over the global scientific community’s flawed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as he saw it.

    In particular, he condemned Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson for failing to respond to his emails at the height of the crisis. He said that a flawed response had caused hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of suffering and damage, that had disproportionately affected a younger generation, and which would not substantially alter the ultimate death toll.

    Levitt began by saying (at 11.41 in the video below):

    One thing that strikes me is that once the virus moved from the China-Korea phase is how totally inadequate science structure is for real time science. People are insisting on refereed reports. No one wants to share anything. The scientists are more panicked and scared by reality than anybody else. The august organisations like Lindau, The Royal Society, The National Academy of Science, have been totally silent … As a group, scientists have failed the younger generation.

    ‘There should have been a committee formed’, he said, ‘either by the Nobel Foundation, by Lindau, by the Royal Society, or the National Academy of Science in the middle of February.’

    He continued:

    The worst opposition I got was from very, very prominent scientists, who were so scared that the non-scientists would break quarantine and infect them. There was total panic, and the fact is that almost all the science we were hearing from organisations like the World Health Organisation, was wrong. We had Facebook censoring WHO-contrary views. This has been a disgraceful situation for science … We should have been talking to one another ..

    Over the course of the pandemic, he said he was releasing reports openly, but all he go back was abuse. Nonetheless, he argued, everything he said in the first six weeks was true, but that ‘for political reasons, we as scientists, let our views be corrupted.’

    He argued that ‘the data had very clear things to say. Nobody said to me: ‘let me check your numbers’. They all just said: ‘stop talking like that’.’

    Levitt reserved particularly harsh comments for epidemiologists who he said:

    see their job, not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore if they say it is 100-times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s ok. Their mistake was that we listened to them. They said the same thing for Ebola, they said the same thing for Bird Flu, no one shut down for them. We should never have listened to the epidemiologists. They have caused hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of suffering and damage, mainly on the younger generation. This is going to be a tragedy. It’s going to make 9/11 look like a baby story. This is much, much worse. I am not against lockdown, I am against stupid lockdown, without considering the full picture, i.e. not just combating a virus, that is exactly as dangerous as flu, but also avoiding the economic damage, that every country has caused itself except Sweden. We have really, really failed as a group. There have been smart people in Sweden, and that’s about it. Germany is getting reinfected because they cut down too strongly. You know the level of stupidity that has been going on here has been amazing, and it just required a little bit of discussion of smart people. I am not saying I am right, but I would like people to contra me on the details.

    He says that ‘simple logical assumptions’ such as the infection fatality rate ‘got discussed so slowly and so late,’ while, ‘we circled the wagons against this, and it really, really hurt us.’

    Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson.

    Neil Ferguson, he said, ignored his emails, and that the problem did not simply lie with a lack of communication with the public, but that scientists refused to listen to people not in their fields.

    Now he said:

    Scientists are getting away scot-free for causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage and this is something that cannot be allowed to happen. It’s not just the World Health Organisation. Ferguson wanted Sweden to lockdown, got Britain to lockdown, and when the numbers become normal, exactly what you would expect without lockdown. He then says, ah it’s because of lockdown. This is terrible science. This is science which should go on trial. Scientists cannot cause damage like this and refuse to listen. I really, really tried hard to get them to at least discuss this with me. In the end I said something I never say: whatever. Just leave me alone, go ahead and die. And the fact is that epidemiology and modelling has been a disgrace. They have not looked at the data. They have been wrong at every turn. We are going to see that although coronavirus is a different disease, the net impact of death is going to be very similar to severe flu and it’s going to be that way without lockdown.

    Levitt reserved praise for Sweden:

    Sweden is the only country that has done the right thing by heading for what they consider to be herd immunity. It occurs at 15%, not at 80%, another error that the epidemiologists made. Sweden is going to end up with about 600 deaths per million.

    https://vimeo.com/433350887/33bbbe4090