Cassandra Voices

Tag: Dr. Marcus de Brun

  • A Coming Plague

    In Ireland and the UK, Anti-vax sentiment, or vaccine hesitancy, along with deteriorating trust in the medical establishment, has set the stage for a coming plague. As a consequence of a recent outbreak of measles in the UK, Irish GP’s are now being encouraged to inform Public Health officials of suspected measles cases. The reasons for this are entirely sensible: records can be kept, cases tracked and the overall situation monitored.

    Unlike COVID-19, measles is a risky disease for children, particularly immuno-suppressed ones. Few, if any, doctors dispute that it kills about one in five thousand children, and that six in a thousand will get life-threatening pneumonia or meningitis.

    I don’t wish to sound alarmist; on an individual level if one of my own kids contracted measles I would not be overly concerned, but that is mainly down to them having all of the HSE-recommended childhood vaccinations (with the exception of those currently recommended for children in in respect of COVID-19).

    As a result of near-universal vaccination coverage, measles presents relatively rarely in General Practice. When it is encountered in a healthy or vaccinated child, it usually causes little apprehension.

    In 2017, after three years without a single recorded case in the UK, the WHO declared with great fanfare that a nation had eliminated measles. Unfortunately, Nature is not bound by WHO policy. The (somewhat deluded) party lasted for about two years, after which, cases began to re-appear; but in small enough numbers so as to be of relatively little concern in terms of public health.

    Even if a single country does manage to eliminate a particular disease the absence of testing for tourists and overseas travellers makes it impossible to stamp it out completely over the long term. Viruses and bacteria don’t need passports.

    Given the paucity of measles cases in Ireland – it had been years since I encountered a case – I was surprised when an email arrived from the authorities reminding me that I should report all cases to the Department of Health, and that, at the weekends, these notifications should be made through the emergency services. I was even more surprised that while working over the February bank holiday weekend to be reporting three suspected cases.

    The current outbreak in the UK has yet to be declared an ‘epidemic’. I imagine there are political reasons for this reluctance; but, given the highly contagious nature of the disease and the current level of cases it is perhaps only a matter of time before that changes.

    Measles is one of the most highly transmissible viruses. It is far more virulent than COVID-19 and has an infectivity rate of almost 100%. Being in the same room as a child with measles for no more than a few minutes is likely to result in transmission. Again, this is not intended as scaremongering, it is merely to point out that what is now happening in the UK is almost certainly happening in Ireland too.

    According to our own HSE, COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of 0.17 deaths per 100,000 cases (roughly one death in a million cases) in children. Measles has an infection fatality rate of 300 per 100,000 cases in children under five-years-old. The reason I trust the medical consensus on this is that measles has been the subject of research and study for decades. The same cannot be said for COVID-19.

    Image Matthias Zomer.

    The short unhappy life of ‘Herd-Immunity’

    When a population is vaccinated against measles to a level of about 95%, the remaining 5% of unvaccinated children remain safe, as a consequence of the much-abused term, ‘herd-immunity’. This simply refers to the fact that those not immunised or vaccinated enjoy immunity by virtue of the majority of other people around them having immunity.

    Immunity can come from vaccination, or from having contracted the disease. With herd immunity, measles (much like COVID-19) can’t spread as easily to those more vulnerable to the disease. This is because, even though naturally immune or vaccinated people will get the virus, their symptoms should be relatively minor. The duration of their infection should be briefer, and thus the potential spread to the vulnerable, or the 5% of unvaccinated, becomes less likely.

    There comes a tipping point when vaccination or immunity levels fall below a threshold of 95%. Then herd-immunity fails and the unvaccinated and vulnerable are no longer protected. Infections become not only more common among the vaccinated, but, importantly, potentially dangerous to the unvaccinated. It is believed that in the UK for 2022-2023 the vaccination uptake (in respect of the MMR) is currently running at less than 85%. There were 1603 suspected cases of measles reported in the UK in 2023.

    The current outbreak in the UK poses a number of questions, in particular: what will the consequences of a measles epidemic be in the UK and Ireland, especially for unvaccinated and immunocompromised children? As measles is presently part of an MMR vaccine, is it not reasonable to expected similar outbreaks of Mumps and Rubella?

    For Measles (unlike COVID-19) there are reliable statistics going back several decades. This is research that has stood the test of time and consistent scientific review. However, after the scaremongering associated with the COVID-19 vaccination program, it is likely that many people are now sceptical about the fatality rate being talked about. Most readers will be familiar with the story of the boy who cried wolf.

    In respect of morbidity and mortality the evidence in relation to measles is relatively incontestable. The risks are real, particularly for immuno-suppressed children such as those undergoing chemotherapy.

    In many ways, vaccinating our own healthy kids against measles is a kind of social duty that almost all parents participate in for the greater good. It is a duty that is entirely contingent on trust in HSE vaccination advice.

    After vaccination, the overwhelming majority of kids will survive a measles epidemic, however a small but significant percentage of children will suffer needlessly, and many will die.

    I don’t question that there is such a thing as a vaccine injury. However, most of us take this risk and make this decision on behalf of our children, not just for their sake but, in particular, for the sake of the vulnerable. Thus, it is a reasonable expectation that all parents should shoulder some of the burden, some of the ‘risk’, and fully engage with the childhood immunisation programme.

    No vaccine is ‘risk free’, sticking an empty syringe into someone’s arm comes with the very real risk of infection, cellulitis, anaphylaxis, shock etc. Indeed, no medical intervention is entirely without risk. We parents tolerate those risks because we trust the medical profession and the HSE. Throughout the pandemic, and particularly in its aftermath – where we are yet to see a formal inquiry into policies and consequences – that trust has been quite seriously eroded.

    Image: Karolina Grabowska.

    A question of trust?

    A recent (2023) IPSOS poll found that with regards to the medical profession, surprisingly, it was the local pharmacist, and not the doctor or nurse, who topped the poll in respect of public trust.

    Although fears persists over a discredited study in the late 1990s linking the MMR vaccine to autism, this was investigated and debunked. Nonetheless, damage has been done and residual hesitancy and mistrust in respect of the MMR vaccine exists to this day.

    Personally and as a physician, I feel that even in the unlikely event of a tiny risk of autism associated with the MMR, I would still reluctantly have my kids vaccinated; if I thought that it would avoid death and suffering in a greater number of kids.

    As stated, all vaccines come with risks that we share as parents and as a society. But that risk is contingent on trust in the medical profession, and mine has certainly been shaken in recent years.

    Simple, deductive reasoning would relate the current fall in vaccine uptake to a decline of confidence in public health guidance. How has this come about?

    In March/April, 2020 elderly nursing home residents were thrown under the bus, as untested hospital patients were dumped into the nursing home sector, and do not resuscitate orders (DNRs) were made. All of this carry on is now common knowledge.

    Even the Zero-Covid fanatics must have raised an eyebrow at policies that linked the transmissibility of a virus to the amount of money spent in a pub. The COVID-19 vaccines were, unequivocally, forced on non-vulnerable people throughout the pandemic. The levels of coercion applied in terms of mandates and passports was absolutely unprecedented. This was reinforced by the public vilification of any individual who dared to decline or expressed fears over taking the vaccine

    There were many stark warnings of censure from the regulator (IMC) for any doctor in Ireland who failed in his or her “duty to follow and promote NPHET policy.”

    Image: Beyzaa Yurtkuran.

    Language Games

    Now that the dust has begun to settle, many people have come to recognise that the use of the word ‘vaccine’ to describe the COVID-19 jab, was (and is) problematic. COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ are, technically speaking, not vaccines in the traditional sense. They are pieces of genetic material (DNA, mRNA) that work in an entirely different manner to traditional vaccines. They are more correctly referred to as ‘gene therapy’ or ‘genetic vaccinations’ and prior to COVID-19 they had never been permitted for use in the general public.

    Calling the injections ‘vaccinations’ from the outset, effectively (but rather deviously) attached this novel technology to all of the antecedent good that traditional sub-unit vaccines have accomplished throughout the centuries. Language is a powerful weapon.

    As more people have had the time to look into the difference between a ‘Covid jab’ and a traditional vaccine, the ‘lie’ or at least the misappropriation of the term ‘vaccine’ has become increasingly apparent.

    Two of the original four genetic vaccines (the two DNA vaccines) were quietly removed from circulation within the first few months of use. Although at the time the government declared (in an Orwellian way) that this was because they were in “short supply”. In truth, it had   become clear that they were associated with significantly higher level of side effects than the mRNA type. This difference was not apparent to a frightened public during the pandemic, but more people are aware of that difference today, and that awareness is growing, in spite of the semantics.

    One of the difficulties in respect of ‘the science’, ‘the facts’ or the ‘data’, during the pandemic, has been over problems with interpretation. For example: the meaning of a ‘Covid death’. Was that unfortunate death caused by COVID-19?  Or was it an expected death in a very elderly person from pneumonia? Or someone who simply had a positive PCR test within the preceding two weeks? We must remember too that emergency COVID-19 funding for the nursing home sector was contingent on the reported number of COVID-19 cases.

    Then there is the cycle threshold of the PCR test itself, detecting the presence of traces of the virus, as opposed to clinically relevant infections; and then plastering these dodgy ‘facts’ before a frightened public, day after day and night after night.

    The overall effect of COVID-19 upon nations has invariably been described in terms of deaths per million. This metric was applied in spite of how COVID-19 mortality being overwhelmingly confined to over sixty-fives. Different countries have vastly different demographic structures, making the famous  ‘deaths per million’ statistic, almost entirely irrelevant.

    Many doctors tried to point these contrary facts out throughout the pandemic; all were silenced with anti-vax and even ‘right wing’ slurs. One GP was suspended and many more (including myself) were put on trial by the regulator and are awaiting sentencing. Therefore, it is important (to myself and my “anti-vax” colleagues) to unpack the accusation before we are also blamed by the regulator for the coming plague.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    A nation of ‘Anti-vaxers’?

    It may surprise people to learn that so far this season, between 18/9/23 and 16/01/2024, 82% of Ireland’s Healthcare Workers (including Doctors and Nurses) have NOT taken the COVID-19 vaccination booster.

    If that is not bad enough, 64% of Healthcare Workers have not taken the influenza vaccine either, which is NOT a genetic vaccine. This is a truly shocking statistic as it would imply that the vast majority of healthcare workers, who are responsible for promoting and administering the COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, have not availed of either themselves.

    Uptake of Autumn Booster & Seasonal Influenza doses by HSE HCWs since 18/09/2023 to 16/01/2024

    In total 109,136 records for HSE HCWs were included in the analysis.

    • Overall Uptake • 19,843 received COVID-19 vaccine, an uptake of 18.2%
    • 39,719 received influenza vaccine, an uptake of 36.4%

    COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Ireland Weekly Report Autumn Campaign 2023 Week ending Sunday 21st January 2024 HSE/HPSC

    The fact that myself and several of my GP colleagues are presently being prosecuted by the regulator for being critical of what purports to be a ‘vaccine’, which is currently being avoided by 82% of our colleagues, tells a story in itself, one that is very political and very Eyrish.

    In the nursing home sector, where those most vulnerable to death from COVID-19 currently reside, 22% of residents have not availed of the COVID-19 vaccine and 16% have not availed of the influenza vaccine. 82% of the workers who care for them have not been vaccinated against either.

    If we were living in a democracy, as opposed to a corporate-ocracy, these figures would represent a resounding vote of ‘no confidence’ in any Minister. Silence in the mainstream media clearly shows (once again) who is actually paying the piper.

    Unbelievable as it may seem, the situation becomes even more bleak (or ridiculous depending on your perspective) when one considers the current public health advice in respect of COVID-19 vaccines for children. The HSE’s website as of 06/02/24 outlines the following guidance:

    Irish children over the age of six months are apparently in need of vaccination: ‘to give them protection against serious Covid-19 illness.’

    Despite the scaremongering, many parents are now aware that this advice is tantamount to a ‘lie’, or at the very least, a gross exaggeration. It is vanishingly rare for COVID-19 to cause “serious illness” in children.

    Most people are surely wondering why this misinformation continues? If the HSE cannot be trusted in respect of the COVID-19 vaccine advice, people may also wonder whether it can be trusted in respect of other vaccines.

    What the above (HSE) table shows is that the uptake of COVID-19 vaccination this season for people between the ages of six months and fifty years of age is 2.8%, i.e., more than 97% of      people in that age category have not availed of a COVID-19 vaccines this winter, in spite of HSE advice to do so.

    The numbers become even more stark when one looks at the uptake in kids between twelve and seventeen: a mere 0.3%. As these figures are derived from 2022 census data the actual      uptake is likely to be even lower, as the population has increased since 2022!

    The salient point is that 82% of health care workers have thus far declined the vaccine, and 97% of those under the age of fifty have also declined it, while 99.7% of the parents of twelve to seventeen year olds. All of these ‘Anti-vaxers’ have declined, despite advice from the HSE. Now what does this say in respect of confidence in the advice from the Minister or the HSE?

    I sincerely hope that most people are capable of distinguishing between advice as it pertains to COVID-19 vaccines, and advice that relates to tried and trusted vaccines included in the childhood immunisation programme. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that this resounding national rejection of HSE guidance by members of the general public, and by an overwhelming majority of healthcare workers, reflects a lack of confidence, which is bound to have an impact on the uptake of vaccines in general.

    As alluded to, in the case of measles it merely takes a fall below 90-95% uptake of vaccines before herd immunity becomes ineffective at preventing outbreaks and even epidemics.

    Excess Mortality

    Another contributor to the current lack of confidence in the government’s health policies has been the recent emergence of OECD mortality analysis. Unlike the equivocation that might surround data points in respect of ‘cause of death’, ‘PCR cases’ and various other data sets, there is almost no equivocation surrounding mortality figures themselves.

    Sadly, when someone dies, they are dead. There is little occasion for debate, confusion or obfuscation in that regard. The number of people who die in Ireland each year is a number that cannot really be interfered with by vested interests. Whilst there might be debate about cause and diagnosis, the date and occurrence of deaths are unequivocal.

    Every year in Ireland c. 55,000 babies are born and approximately 32,000 people die. The numbers fluctuate a little in line with population increases etc., but the ‘death rate’ and the ‘birth rate’ generally remain the same. If the death rate increases unexpectedly, as one would expect following a disaster of some kind, like; an earthquake, a tsunami or a pandemic for example, the increase in deaths are then referred to as ‘excess mortality.’

    For almost two straight years during the COVID-19-era, the Irish people were subjected to a nightly announcement on RTE news – ‘ringing out the dead’– pointing to the catastrophic daily loss of life that was occurring across the nation. To this day the official figure in respect of COVID-19 deaths stands at almost ten thousand.

    One would think that a tragedy that has resulted in so much death will naturally register in respect of our mortality figures? That there will of course be a massive increase in excess mortality during the pandemic? The straight answer here is no! It seems there was no increase in excess mortality for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. A truth that is fully accepted and even embraced by the government!

    In 2023 the OECD analysed mortality figures in Ireland and elsewhere for the duration of the pandemic. They came to the conclusion that for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 there was NO excess mortality in ireland, i.e. during the years of the pandemic there was no increase in the number of expected deaths.

    An immediate reaction might be to assume that the OECD crowd are a bunch of ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy nuts! Perhaps they got something seriously wrong? Truth is that the OECD is one of the most credible sources of data on the planet. And yes, they did make all the appropriate calculations for an increase in the population due to immigration etc.

    Remember, Ireland had a census in 2022, so they had the most up-to-date figures to hand. You can’t get a more accurate assessment than the OECD findings.

    So where did the ten thousand COVID-19 deaths go? All of the reported deaths within the nursing home sector were real. I witnessed this myself as fourteen of my own nursing home patients died in the space of a couple of months.

    Tragic as any death is, the majority in this case were part of the expected mortality in each given year, hastened by several months as a consequence of inept government policy. Most of the COVID-19 deaths that occurred outside the nursing home sector were recorded in people with a positive PCR test, as opposed to having died as a direct consequence of Covid-19.

    The official figure of almost ten thousand deaths from COVID-19 represents about a third of the total deaths one would expect to see in Ireland in a given year. Those deaths must surely have affected our mortality figures in some observable way? They did not because they were part of the (tragic) but entirely ‘normal’ number of deaths that Ireland experiences each year.

    What the OECD figures tell quite clearly is that if the pandemic was not a “hoax” then its effect was systematically exaggerated. A claim that in spite of the figures, remains confined to the realm of conspiracy and far from any danger of a public inquiry.

    So what does the Government have to say in respect of the OECD findings? For three long years we were informed that we were enduring the worst pandemic in living memory. Policies aimed at reducing loss of life cost the exchequer thirty billion euro for the first two years. Yet there was no excess loss of life and the ten thousand ‘COVID-19 deaths’ melt into the normal yearly mortality figures?

    Obviously both positions are mutually exclusive: one cannot have a pandemic with ten thousand deaths and have no increase in excess mortality.

    Unfortunately for the Government there is absolutely no point in trying to deny the OECD findings. So they decided to embrace warmly, gratuitously even, their analysis, asserting that the reason there had been no excess deaths was because of the “success” of government policies throughout the pandemic. Their response is only two pages long and I would urge everyone to read it in its entirety.

    It is truly frightening in terms of the paucity of credit it extends to the intelligence of the Irish people. Minister Donnelly said:

    Ireland asked a lot of its population during this time and the restrictions that were put in place had a profound impact on us all.

    These figures point to the success of Ireland’s public health measures, and to the strong uptake of our COVID-19 vaccination programme.

    Chief Medical Officer Professor Breda Smyth said:

    The OECD Working Paper highlights some of the important caveats associated with previously published estimates on excess mortality during the core pandemic years.

    The population in Ireland demonstrated a strong adherence to public health measures during this time, and Ireland’s COVID-19 vaccination programme has been one of the most successful in the world, with 96% of the adult population receiving their primary vaccinations.

    We know that vaccines save lives, as well as preventing serious illness and hospitalisations.

    COVID is still with us, and immunity wanes over time, so I would like to remind all those who are eligible to top up their protection with a COVID booster this winter, as well as keeping up to date with their flu vaccine.

    The mysterious Cheshire cat-like presence and disappearance of ten thousand COVID-19 deaths is almost magical. It (the cat) appears when the Government wishes to justify lockdowns, vaccine passports and additional billions in expenditure. But in response to the OECD findings its voice is drowned out by a cacophony of self-praise.

    The disappearance of excess mortality is explained by the public’s (96%) enthusiasm for a (effectively mandatory) vaccine. But wait a minute! If there were no excess deaths in 2020, and the vaccine did not arrive in Ireland until 2021, how could the vaccine possibly account for no excess deaths in 2020?

    In fact, by February 2021 at the height of ‘the second wave’ a mere ten per cent of the population had been vaccinated. I doubt whether most people in Ireland are gullible enough to believe in vanishing cats, but I could be wrong. Certainly trust in journalism appears to have plummeted to just 40% according to a recent survey.

    Interestingly, in respect of the OECD findings, there has been a real increase in mortality figures yet this only arrives after the pandemic, in 2023. Myself and many others attribute this ‘spike’ in excess deaths in 2023 to the palpable consequence of missed diagnoses, closed clinics and screening programmes during the lockdowns.

    There is of course a growing school of thought that associates the increase in excess mortality in 2023 with side effects from the ‘vaccine’ itself. I am more sceptical on this account. However, it is a hypothesis that is difficult to dismiss out of hand.

    Determining this issue is not helped by the barriers people face in trying to record a vaccine-related side-effect or death in Ireland. Beyond logging on to an obscure HPRA website and filling out a seven-page form, there is neither the observable means, nor any degree of encouragement, for doctors, or the general public, to report adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. Unlike a ‘COVID-19 death’, deaths that occurs within two weeks of a COVID-19 vaccine are not recorded as a ‘vaccine-related death’. In such cases the vaccine does not even get a mention.

    The HSE are currently running a campaign informing people how to recognise a thrombosis (a recognised potential side effect of mRNA vaccines), yet there is not a single poster in a single medical office in the entire country that might explain how to record or report a side effect related to the vaccine itself.

    I suspect that a growing number of people in Ireland are aware of the official misinformation in relation to COVID-19. Many of us understand that what occurred during the pandemic was based on lies and deception. The most immediate question we must attempt to answer is not whether we were lied to – that much is obvious – the real question is why? Who are the people who have profited from those lies?  If we follow the chem-trails in the wake of the thirty billion euros where will this lead us?

    Blame the regulator

    Four years ago on 15/04/2020, shortly after the arrival of COVID-19 in Ireland I published the above letter in the Irish Medical Times; a paper predominately read by Irish doctors. I tried to debunk the COVID-19 myth before it got off the ground, estimating a total of no more than fifty-five COVID-19 deaths for the first five months of 2020. It was the beginning of the end of my career in General Practice. I was pilloried and vilified[ by a small, but highly influential, clique, some of whom are the Taoiseach’s chums. The attacks were such that colleagues (with a few exceptions) who might have harboured similar suspicions, learned very quickly, to keep very quiet.

    At the time a large payout for General Practice was unfolding before our eyes, beginning with a payment for each time we answered the telephone. In April, 2020, before the full extent of the neglect in the nursing homes had become apparent, I resigned from the Irish Medical Council in an attempt to highlight what was happening. My resignation was ignored by the Medical Council, who then lied to the media, saying that I had resigned for “personal reasons”.

    It might seem petty to complain about the description, “for personal reasons”, but it was targeted to a specific audience of colleagues and journalists. My credibility as a doctor was being undermined. I was “not fit for purpose.” Thus, anything I might have to say on the issue of COVID-19 or nursing home deaths was tainted.

    Shortly after my resignation, I was placed under investigation by the IMC and am presently awaiting a date for my fitness-to-practice hearing. One colleague Dr. Gerry Waters (a braver man than I) has already been suspended for calling the pandemic a ‘hoax’ right from the start. Myself and several others have been compelled to wait on the equivalent of a professional ‘death row’ for several years now.

    I am probably somewhat biased in my conviction that the cause of professional compliance with an at times deadly and at times idiotic array of policies, lies with the regulator: the Irish Medical Council.

    Numerous people complained to them throughout the pandemic about registered doctors (Holohan, Varadkar himself and many more), who were behind the policies. The Irish Medical Council answers directly to the Minister of Health. The word from the top was clearly that rebel doctors should be silenced.

    At one point the head of the Irish College of General Practitioner’s was actively encouraging discrimination against those patients who had been unable or unwilling to take the vaccine. Several doctors and members of the public lodged complaints with the regulator in respect of policies and even overt discrimination, all of it was ignored:

    Without exception, every single whistleblower, every single complaint in respect of medically registered policymakers, tendered to the regulator during the pandemic was completely ignored.

    Should we see an inevitable rise in disease and deaths as a consequence of the current lack of confidence in HSE guidance, it is because we learned absolutely nothing from the Banking Crisis. We have not learned that crises in Ireland stem from the unfettered power of institutions, the friendship ties between those institutions; and the abject failure of regulators who are themselves in bed with those institutions.

    Should there be an increase in mortality amongst our children, those deaths might not disappear quite as easily and as mysteriously as the Cheshire Cat.

    Feature Image

  • The Big House: Censorship of the Medical Profession in Ireland

    ’From my experience of my patients on the front line since March 2020, I estimate that between 1% and 10% of the Irish population have suffered from a serious traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal ideation as a direct result of the government instigated media propaganda and lockdown, which works out at between 48 000 and 480 000 people of this country. This must be seen as a national tragedy, if not a massive crime against the Irish people, perhaps the worst since the great famine..’
    Dr Gerry Waters submission to the High Court, prior to his suspension from the medical register, April 2021 as quoted in the British Medical Journal.

    Looking out upon a ‘snot-green’ sea, I wonder how our ancestors explained the emergence of the craggy rocks and pools. Today we might smile at the idea that the ebb and flow of the tide being the work of ‘spirits’ or gods of sand and stone. Yet perhaps there is a ‘spirit’ of our time? The zeitgeist; a shared belief-system that interprets our world and is the ultimate arbiter of truth itself?  Perhaps it is this ‘spirit’ that future generations might equally recognise as a thing that is drenched in myth and fallacy?

    Lately it seems that truth, like the tide, is constantly shifting. Our mute and collective response to Covid-19 policies suggests we have indeed entered a ‘Post-Truth’ era, where truth has gone the way of video and record stores, to become almost entirely subscription based.

    I was once of the belief that science served to shape and guide public opinion. I have lately come to feel that when science does not align itself with public opinion, it is dismissed as the ramblings of a madman.

    In recent years the most basic scientific principles, even the simple notion of ‘cause and effect’ have been temporarily suspended. Presently, science is in the service of the zeitgeist. It no longer informs public opinion, instead it is used as a drunk might see a lamp post; more for support than illumination.

    Newton’s Third Law…

    During and prior to Covid, Europe and Ireland, enjoyed several years of what economists call ‘quantitative easing’. In layman’s terms this means printing lots of money in order to keep people content, or at least to keep them spending.

    The world is apparently a better place when we are all spending freely. Economists call this ‘economic growth.’ Strangely the cause and effect of this simple expedient is entirely lost on most people. The countless billions that have been pumped into European economies in recent years, now means that money is worth less, which is generally referred to as inflation.

    At home, in addition to inflation, our Covid-related crises: deaths in nursing homes, suicides, mental health, missed cancer diagnoses, along with enormous political blunders, were all effectively obscured by a bonfire of some fifty billion euro.

    The light of that conflagration was bright enough to relegate our home-grown crises into the shadows of relative obscurity.

    The idea that we are experiencing inflation as a consequence of two years of fiscal dissipation is, either roundly ignored or blamed upon other crises.  One does not hear such a strange assertion on RTÉ, which itself received a significant share of that fiscal dissipation for its ‘public service’ broadcasting.

    We hear nothing about the government’s responsibility for social destruction and economic waste. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must have come as a relief. Now the priority is that ‘Putin must go’, an idea seemingly oblivious to the fact that much of the world might have to go down with him.

    All in this together?

    As Minister for Health for the initial phase of our Covid crisis, Simon Harris stated notoriously: “Remember this is coronavirus Covid-19 – that means there have been 18 other coronaviruses and I don’t think they have actually successfully found a vaccine for any.” Less comically, both he and members of NPHET are still protected from any review into nursing home deaths.

    Nor are the main opposition parties, including Sinn Fein, blameless in respect of the temporary madness. I suspect that when they inevitably get hold of the piggy bank they are unlikely to call for any kind of revision to the narrative. We were ‘all in this together’ after all.

    Nonetheless, as inflation continues and war escalates, the appetite for truth will surely grow, albeit at a remove from the big glasshouse on Nutley Lane.

    When it is safe to speak and ask honest questions, and once the capacity for relating cause and effect returns, calls for a review of the past two years of policy might yet begin in earnest.

    Any colour as long as its black..

    Some truths seem to persist for longer than others. Scientific truths endure not because they are more precious than myth, but simply because they are (or they remain) largely inescapable.

    During the Covid years, scientific truths succumbed to a form of relativism. Thus, one could have any scientific ‘truth’, as long as it was consistent with the fear-frenzy and the dominant narrative that Covid was the only challenge our government ought to address.

    In contrast, unpopular truths became the subject of a formal and informal censorship. Science has become strangely ‘right wing’ in its obedience to pharmaceutical companies and its lack of tolerance for essential questions and contrary facts. Yet Karl Popper once argued; ‘the demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.’

    In the presence of industry-led censorship, neither science nor democracy functions properly. Yet many people still believe that the scientific discourse is free. Sadly, unscientific views on masks, lockdowns and administering genetic vaccinations to children and pregnant women are (for the moment at least) considered to accord perfectly with the scientific evidence.

    Entire national policies were based upon a flawed epidemiology of Covid. That epidemiology was described almost everywhere in the context of ‘deaths per million’, despite Covid being from its inception a disease with a cohort-specific mortality.

    Indeed, mortality itself was defined in the context of deaths ‘with’ Covid-19 as opposed to ‘from’ Covid-19. PCR testing remains the gold standard in determining a ‘Covid case’ as opposed to detecting traces of virus in an asymptomatic individual who has recently been exposed to the virus.

    In response to Covid-19, foundational principles of science and epidemiology were turned on their heads to satiate a politically profitable narrative. Such contortions are unsustainable in the long term.

    The majority desperately feared Covid, and so an aggressive cold virus – dangerous to the elderly and infirm – became a disease almost entirely inflated by a politically inflated fear.

    Science was annexed to supply an array of ‘facts’ to substantiate this fear and pursue the enormous wave of Covid ‘research’ funding from a strange marriage between Big Pharma and the State. Fearmongers were given seemingly unlimited time on TV and radio. In contrast, ‘contrarians’ were issued with legal threats and ongoing investigations.

    Latter Day Inquisition

    It is worth bearing in mind that science has generally co-existed with unscientific ideas. Thus, religion and science have jousted for centuries. However, when governments depend upon science to justify draconian laws and unprecedented spending; to question ‘the science’ becomes a direct challenge to the government itself.

    When governments depended on the Church for legitimacy, for anyone to question its religious tenets was a dangerous heresy, rooted out by Inquisition if necessary.

    In respect of the medical profession the government has a powerful tool to silence doctors, which is the Irish Medical Council (IMC). The Medical Regulator acts as ‘Grand Inquisitor’, answerable only to the Minister for Health.

    During the Covid crisis, anyone in my profession who openly criticised the Science associated with policy, was immediately condemned as a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

    These ‘misinformed medics’ represented, (and in most cases still represent) a ‘clear and present danger’ to public health. They were heretics were to be rooted out; removed from society like a cancerous prostate gland.

    The danger we pose is not towards public health, but rather towards the public’s understanding of the issue. The social operation is ongoing, and the IMC remains its enthusiastic surgeon.

    Enemies of the People

    It is not an easy thing for a doctor who spends the best part of his or her working life trying to solve people’s immediate problems, to be suddenly turned into a kind of pathology, and confined to the world of the anti-vaxxer and right-wing conspiracy theorist.

    Yet that is the fate of any doctor who voiced criticism of Covid-policy. We remain under formal investigations, heading towards the end-game of sanctions and potential strike-offs. The personal struggles behind these investigations are given no public attention.

    The necessity of belonging, to a society, to a fraternity of peers, even continuing to belong to one’s own family, all become tenuous when one is considered a pariah. For some, including myself, the isolation has led to a breakdown of sorts. My own ‘crash’ came in the form of simply running out of gas: facing up to the fact that my ‘gas’ is considered as a form of flatulence by most of my colleagues.

    I have worked hard at keeping my family together, and that has been as much as I can handle, finding solace in bee keeping and a polytunnel. For other colleagues and their families, the consequences have been far more devastating.

    In the mid-nineteenth century the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that surgeons were spreading disease by not washing their hands between operations. He was ostracised for his conspiratorial assertion. Ridiculed and vilified, he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.

    Irish communities draw their strengths from being close knit, but this can lead to a damaging conformity, as our history with the Catholic Church readily demonstrates. Neighbours and friends soon learn who the ‘anti-vax’ doctor is. A whisper at the school gate or a snub in the supermarket may not qualify as an assault, yet it can be just as hurtful to the spouse or daughter of a ‘dangerous’ doctor.

    There are, and were, many Irish doctors who publicly and privately rejected much of our conflicting and often, frankly, comical Covid policies. Too many to list here.

    However, the pressures brought to bear from without, and the enormous financial incentives for the majority of GPs, were sufficient to ensure that serious questions, or even discussion, in respect of policies, was cancelled from the outset. Some GPs have their bicycle clubs sponsored by Pfizer and were most keen not to bite the hand that feeds.

    https://twitter.com/theRiverField/status/1254488307054120960

    Whistleblower

    I occupy a rather unpleasant space as one of the first to speak out against ‘scientific’ polices that led to upwards of a thousand deaths in Irish nursing homes over a period of a few months in early 2020.

    I stood at bedside and watched my patients die, whilst a spouse or loved one sat crying in the car park or staring through the window outside. I struggled to obtain medicines, oxygen and PPE.  Many, if not most, deaths were the consequence of a policy of dumping untested hospital patients into nursing homes to make way for a Covid-19 ‘tsunami’ that ultimately manifested in empty makeshift hospitals and tic-toc videos of dancing medics.

    An enduring myth in respect of those who died in the nursing homes is that that the ‘tragedy’ occurred everywhere equally. Yet throughout Europe, during the first wave, the highest per capita death toll in care homes occurred in Ireland. We hold the dubious record of being second highest in the world after Canada.

    Those who complained about these deaths to the regulator, became the subject of investigation by the regulator, while those responsible are feted as heroes.

    In March of 2020, I attempted to ‘whistle blow’ on the unfolding catastrophe of incompetence, and deprivation within the nursing homes. I resigned my Ministerial appointment in the hope that the Medical Council might investigate what might be considered as criminal manslaughter.

    Yet they chose to ignore the dead and investigated me instead. In the media I found myself being dismissed as a ‘far right’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘anti-vaxxer’.

    Far right is funny, as I am proudly left and liberal in my thinking. Anti-vaxxer is even funnier, as I have given more vaccines than I have had hot dinners. But ‘funny’ is perhaps the wrong word because it conceals some of the hurt endured by own family.

    In one article in the Independent I was described as among those doctors giving ‘horse de-wormer’ to Covid patients.

    Propaganda is a powerful tool. The wild accusations came late in the pandemic and seemed designed to highlight the ‘ridiculous’ things going on outside of the general medical adherence to ‘official guidelines’.

    Dr Gerry Waters

    Other Doctors who went much further than I could have gone have suffered more than insult and isolation. They and their loved ones are more courageous, and deserving of a voice that will be heard as soon as science is liberated from the shackles of dominant interests.

    One such man is Dr Gerry Waters who adamantly refused to administer Covid-19 vaccinations to his non-vulnerable patients, and refused to refer patients for farcical PCR testing. From the start of the pandemic, he fully comprehended, who is, and who is not at risk from Covid-19.

    He recognised that masking and injecting children was ethically and scientifically wrong, and fully understood that the essential impartiality of science had been hijacked by politics and media. In a partial validation of Dr Waters’ fears, the Irish public have smelled a rat, and to date, less than 25% of eligible children have taken the vaccine. Our rather expensive over-stock (some 4 million doses) is presently being donated to Mexico and elsewhere. A mere €25 million to be added to the bonfire.

    Dr Waters stayed true to his conviction that, beyond protecting the elderly, Covid lockdown policy was socially destructive and itself seriously pathogenic.

    Doubtless, he was of the same view as a friend of mine, a former dean of medical studies at RCSI, who told me: ‘we would have been far better off, had we done nothing at all.’ Imagine what could have been done to improve the country with the billions that were wasted?

    Some Doctors in Ireland remain convinced that many people, old and young, could be alive today were it not for the inept response and draconian measures. Effectively, what began as a rallying cry to ‘protect the vulnerable’, culminated in policies that effectively threw them under the bus. Instructively, suicide statistics and missed diagnoses, for the Covid period have yet to be released.

    After speaking the truth as he saw it, Dr Waters was rapidly investigated, tried, and subsequently suspended from the medical register; deprived of a livelihood and compelled (it would seem) to live out the remainder of his days in ignominy.

    https://twitter.com/BillyRalph/status/1458052402372923392

    Resigning from my Practice

    I am somewhat pleased that I managed to avoid administering this genetic vaccine. I contend to this day that many or most GPs in Ireland haven’t the faintest clue as to what a genetic vaccine actually is, never mind how they work and what are the potential risks involved. Unlike Dr Waters I took the less courageous step of simply resigning my post, before vaccinations became part of public policy.

    For a time, I had been able to separate my practice of medicine from my convictions. Indeed, I have been doing that for years. I suspect most doctors operate with this contradiction most days, at least when we write prescriptions for medicines that many people don’t require.

    At the start of the pandemic in 2020 I could work within the guidelines; refer for testing; visit my nursing home; wear a silly mask in the supermarket. As long as I showed that I was formally participating in the farce, I was relatively safe from the regulator.

    However soon after resigning, they placed me under investigation, although they could find nothing to hang me with; except my opinion, contradicting NPHET and Professor Luke O’Neill, and a vocal stance in respect of the nursing home dead.

    A lot of people, including many of my former patients were unhappy to see me closing the practice. Yet, regardless of my practical adherence to policy, my position as an advocate of only vaccinating the vulnerable, became untenable.

    Every week I would hear from nurses, teachers, students and employees who were being threatened with dismissal unless they received the vaccine. I have never witnessed such a blatant assault on human rights. I shudder to this day when I recall how so many people were coerced and intimidated by the government, and by members of my profession.

    Formal resignation from the HSE was my only option, as long as I wished to continue working as a GP. Private GPs are not contractually obligated to vaccinate anyone. I could manage by doing private work for a friend, and out of hours work at an on-call centre.

    Formal Censorship

    To state that the IMC was satisfied with silencing whistle-blowers or making an example of Dr Waters would be a gross understatement. Almost every doctor in Ireland who refuted policy and did not resign from their post, was either fired or placed under investigation.

    Thus, Martin Feely a respected surgeon and clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, was forced to resign; Dr Pat Morrisey a principled and dedicated GP in Adare was both fired from the board of Shannon Doc, and placed under ongoing investigation by the Medical Council.

    Offending doctors received written warnings from the then President of the Council, and others were placed under investigation for failing in their new duty to: ‘promote public health guidelines.’

    One legacy of our colonial administration is a very efficient tax system, another is the efficient censorship of heretical opinions.

    After two years as a member of the IMC I am entirely convinced that it is neither fit for purpose, nor does it have a practical leg to stand on when it comes to regulation. For the most part it makes its own work as it presides over a ‘General Register’ with little or no regulation at all.

    Thus, untrained specialists are invited to come to Ireland from almost anywhere in Europe, and practice wherever and however they see fit, without specialist training; a situation that supplies regional and rural hospitals with ‘affordable’ specialists.

    The public must suck up the consequences and the IMC keeps itself busy with the inevitable mistakes and complaints. For unqualified and untrained specialists, the back door into Ireland is through the front door of the IMC.

    How to burn a heretic..

    The most difficult consequence for a doctor who is placed under investigation by the IMC is without a doubt the process of investigation itself. I recognise this as a ‘gamekeeper who has turned poacher’.  Much of my time at the IMC was spent on the Council’s Preliminary Complaints Committee, tasked with conducting the initial investigation into complaints against doctors.

    Once entangled in the Kafkaesque web of a formal inquiry, there is no escape until the investigation is completed. In many cases this takes several years. Formal letters are sent back and forth, requesting clarifications and further information, which must be formally replied to.

    One cannot leave the country to work or volunteer abroad. One cannot easily change job, as any new or prospective employers must be informed that an investigation is ongoing. One’s professional life is essentially frozen beneath a question-mark.

    Doctors who were openly critical of the Covid response, have been under investigation for over two years now. The IMC has chosen (with the notable exception of Dr Waters) to prolong these dissections for as long as possible.

    It seems that what is important for both the government and the Council is that doctors critical of policy should remain under investigation for as long as possible. Anything he or she might say or do, any comment made whilst under investigation, can readily become part of the investigation itself.

    Moreover, to refuse to engage fully with an investigation, to refuse to reply to the regular formal correspondence, is itself grounds for an immediate suspension.

    The absurd basis of the investigation into me, is that I made an appearance at a public demonstration in 2020 and ‘may not have sanitised my hands between hand-shakes.’

    To my knowledge, all of the GPs under investigation are locked into the process based on equally frivolous grounds. The pretext for investigation is unimportant, the investigations are sufficiently punitive and sufficiently censorious, hence their protracted duration.

    Heads Above the Parapet

    Perhaps the main reason for my now coming out of ‘hiding’, to tap impotently upon my keyboard, has been recent correspondence from the IMC. Some doctors have recently been informed that the investigations will now proceed to the next level of ‘formal hearings.’

    After the IMC has finished its investigation process, it can then decide either to close the case, or proceed to a full Fitness to Practice Hearing. In this instance the doctor in question must appear before the Council’s court room, and plead a case for their continued right to earn a living. As these cases relate to a doctor’s opinion rather than any clinical practice, medical insurers have declined to pay for legal representation, and the doctor must pay for his own legal counsel.

    There is a rich irony here, in that most if not all of the doctors under investigation, have themselves lodged formal complaints with the IMC in respect of registered doctors on NPHET, for ‘unscientific policies’ or financial conflicts of interest.

    For example, several Doctors have lodged complaints against the President of the Irish College of General Practitioners in respect of his openly encouraging medical discrimination against non-vaccinated patients.

    Also, at the height of the pandemic, Leo Varadkar re-registered as a doctor, helping to ‘man the phones’ and visit halting sites to test the Travelling Community. It was all a rather vulgar PR stunt lapped up by the media with a relish normally reserved for freshly baked cake.

    However, when Dr Varadkar re-registered he became open to complaints to the IMC, along with Dr Holohan, and several other key policymakers. Without exception, not one of these complaints have been investigated. Instead, it is the doctors who lodged them who find themselves under ongoing investigations.

    At a point when Leo Varadkar was found to have been leaking sensitive and lucrative contract details to a friend in General Practice, the then President of the Medical Council was busy issuing written warnings to fellow GPs that they had an ethical duty ‘promote government policy’.

    Call for Caution

    Some doctors in Ireland felt a moral and scientific obligation to understand how Covid vaccines work prior to administering them. Many advocated caution, particularly in respect of pregnancy and young healthy children.

    My friend in Wexford is one example. A respected GP, a man of science and integrity, he vaccinated all of his elderly and vulnerable patients in keeping with HSE guidelines, but when it came to pregnant women and healthy young children he called for caution.

    He reminded colleagues of their ethical obligation to ‘first do no harm’, and made no secret of his concerns and fears. In doing so he stepped outside of the public health policy, and into the crosshairs of the IMC.

    Each IMC investigation and each insulting article in the media, along with the invective and scorn that is heaped on contrarians from within the profession itself, comes at a cost. In his case, a deep personal cost.

    The most painful barbs are the ones that are cast into one’s private life. Spouses and children are no less attached to a doctor than they are attached to any husband or wife. Even with the best will in the world no doctor can keep the ramifications of an investigation from creeping into the most intimate spaces.

    Those who objected to Covid policies are treated to daily realities that are small thorns: a neighbour looking at you with scorn; former friends crossing to the other side of the street; wives or children being subjected to insult or abuse simply because they are related to the newly christened ‘right-wing’ or ‘anti-vaxx’ doctor.

    My friend in Wexford tried hard to toe the line whilst preserving his integrity and an uncompromising commitment to the welfare of his patients. He has a family and bills to pay. Full resignation from the HSE is not a financial option for all. He tried to work within the guidelines, whilst at the same time urging caution. He continued to work, for the sake of his patients, his family, to pay his mortgage, and help his daughters get through college.

    Were he on his own and without dependants he (and probably me) might have stood tall and offered the Medical Council the two fingered salute, as Gerry Waters had courageously done.

    He (like me), tried desperately for a time to justify his position to our profession, to our colleagues, with articles, references, papers from the most esteemed of Medical Journals etc. He pointed to the lack of safety data on the vaccine during pregnancy and in children. It was to no avail. His position was akin to a lamb trying to convince a pack of wolves of the virtues of vegetarianism.

    Nonetheless, he defended his position upon an internet forum exclusive to GPs; and despite my words of caution, they tore him to pieces.

    A couple of months ago, my brave friend found himself parked in a lonely spot in Wexford. When the authorities located him, he had taken enough pills to silence the wolves forever.

    After two weeks in intensive care and a return from near death, he returned home to count his blessings, recover from his ordeal, and begin a life-long process of recovery.

    Absolute Power

    As a member of the IMC I was always intrigued at the efficacy and authority that a wealthy quango can wield. There is a sense of limitless power within the inner circle – reminiscent of a well-funded Big House – with a special relationship with the Minister.

    At the IMC there is a department devoted to briefing and monitoring the press for issues that relate to the medical profession. Before each Council meeting a member of this office addresses the Council with a summary of what is happening in the media. It runs a little bit like “…and now what it says in the papers.”

    I mention this to highlight that my friend, the Wexford GP, his near death, and the harrowing experience of his family and many of his patients, was highlighted in the national papers and the local press. Having gone missing for some days, news of his disappearance was reported in the national media.

    There can be no doubt that the Medical Council was well-briefed about his ordeal. Yet within a week or two of his discharge from hospital he (and by proxy his family) received his letter from the IMC, informing him that he has been placed under formal investigation for his failure to promote Covid vaccination policy. He now faces an impending fitness to practice hearing, whereupon it will be decided if he too will be deprived of an ability to earn a living.

    In its role as Grand Inquisitor, the Medical Council has destroyed the professional lives of many doctors, before, during and after Covid.

    In my view, Irish Medicine is as rotten as any pathology it might pretend to address. This is a rot reflecting a wider rot in our political system. Perhaps it extends deep into the zeitgeist itself.

    There is much to address in Irish medicine including inter alia our current mental health crisis, polypharmacy, corruption within the medical schools, defective specialist training schemes, deaths in nursing homes, relationship between pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, tensions between the public and private health sectors, and a general lack of regulation, but none of these seem to be of any concern to the IMC.

    When the dust settled at the end of our last national crisis, the banking regulator was ultimately recognised as being guilty of catastrophic failures in respect of its duties and obligations. I suspect that if science is ever liberated from special interests, and media is free from a particular type of agenda, history will be seen to have repeated itself yet again.

    Our teetering or collapsing system of medical care in Ireland is equally the consequence of an incompetent, and morally bankrupt, regulator.  As usual, there is no one to ‘police the police’, only a fickle public opinion, and a Minister who is as much dependent on the regulator as they are answerable to him.

    As a post-colonial society, and in the ‘spirit’ of our times, we tip the cap, with the same deference as ever to the ‘Big House’.

  • ‘Healthy People Do Not Require Genetic Vaccination’

    Editor’s Note: Having previously published Vaccination: A Matter of Trust with Caveats, we now anticipate objections from some readers to an article that may provoke vaccine hesitancy, at a point when rapid rollout to the entire adult population is widely touted as the only path out of interminable lockdowns. The author of this article, Dr. Marcus de Brun, however, is a medical doctor, and prior to his resignation last year– in protest against the government’s handling of the pandemic – a member of the Irish Medical Council. He also holds a first class degree in microbiology from TCD. Thus, we believe it is incumbent on Cassandra Voices as ‘a home for independent voices to inspire new thinking’ to provide this platform for him to articulate fully a public stance that he would not vaccinate a healthy person with any of the four vaccines currently on offer in Ireland. All the more so in a period of crisis, we maintain it is vital to give space to informed arguments that go against the grain. We invite comment and/or rebuttal, and ask if you appreciate this article that you offer a contribution to this publication, either through signing up with us on Patreon or through a single donation Buy Me A Coffee.

     

    Having recently stated publicly that I would ‘not administer a genetic-vaccine to a healthy animal, never mind a ‘healthy human being,’ I have been asked by friends (and foes) to clarify this statement, and will attempt to do so here.

    At present, vaccines produced by four companies (Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson) are available on the European market. All four are ‘genetic vaccines’ in that they are composed of synthetic DNA or RNA that is contained within a membrane or shell. In construction and appearance the vaccine is very similar to the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the coronavirus disease known as Covid-19. The vaccine gains entry to human cells by a process that is almost identical to the manner by which a virus generally gains access to host cells. This process is called ‘transfection’.

    Each of these vaccines work by introducing either DNA or RNA into host cells. The genetic material then instructs host cells to make a piece of the coronavirus (the spike protein) that is then released into the blood stream or tissues. There, the spike protein will trigger an immune response. Following this immune response, the vaccinated individual will retain some immunity; they will have antibodies and white cells that can now recognise Covid-19 and attack it before it has a chance to cause a serious infection.

    The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are DNA vaccines,[i] which transfect DNA into the Nucleus of host cells. The Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines are RNA vaccines, these transfect their RNA into the cytoplasm of host cells. The difference will be explained later; however, the initial process is the same: human cells take up synthetic viral genes, those genes then direct those cells to begin manufacturing the spike-protein of Covid-19. The cells will then release the nascent spike-protein into the bloodstream or tissues, where it will then function as a ‘traditional vaccine.’

    In essence, the distinction between genetic-vaccines and ‘traditional vaccines’ is that the latter would involve a person being injected with killed or inactive virus or spike-protein, which would then cause our immune systems to mount a response. Each of these novel genetic-vaccines however, insert genetic material into human cells. These synthetic genes then ‘hijack’ those cells or ‘convert’ them to manufacture and release the spike-protein. With a genetic vaccine, pharma does not make the vaccine, our own cells are programmed to do the work instead, a process entirely different from that of a ‘traditional vaccine’.

    Out with the Old…

    For the first time in my medical career of some twenty years, I am presented with the apparent necessity of vaccinating young healthy people with experimental vaccines, against a disease for which they have little or no risk of suffering life-threatening,[ii] or even serious long-term[iii] illness. The vast majority of  ‘vulnerable’ people to whom they might pass Covid-19 have already been either vaccinated or been exposed to the virus.[iv]

    In Ireland according to our Central Statistics Office, during the past 12 months up to the end of January 2021; amongst the entire population of 1-24yr olds, there have been 55,565 PCR confirmed cases of Covid-19. Out of those cases, there has not been a single death recorded; from, by, or associated with Covid-19.[v] It has been reported that a single Covid-related death in this cohort (1-24yrs) did occur in February of this year. However, this has yet to appear in the figures published by the CSO.

    Young nurses, medical staff, care workers, are being pressured into taking a vaccine they probably don’t need themselves, despite residents under their care having been almost all vaccinated already. Now Covid-19 genetic-vaccines are being tested upon children as young as six months old.[vi]

    A Scarcity of Serious Questions? Or a Scarcity of Serious Media?

    The justification for many, if not most, policies during this crisis has largely been based on ‘mortality data’. In contrast, Swedish authorities have enforced relatively few restrictions, nor made masks mandatory. In Ireland, the CSO indicate that 92% of all Covid-related deaths have occurred in those over 65 years of age.[vii]

    In Sweden that cohort of their population is 3.17 times greater Ireland’s. Thus, if we roughly compare the Swedish mortality total (at the time of writing) of 13,262,  to the Irish total of 4588, and if we then multiply the Irish mortality total by 3.17, we arrive at a figure of 14,544, which is significantly higher than the comparable Swedish total.

    We are crudely, but reasonably, comparing ‘like with like’ to reveal glaring potential problems with our own relatively draconian Covid policies. When compared with Sweden, our own version of lockdown seems to have had no benefit in terms of preventing mortality. It might not be unreasonable to assert that our stricter policies may have contributed to a relatively higher mortality. Yet, perhaps the biggest question here is: why are there so few questions being posed in the media in respect of the efficacy of masks, lockdowns or vaccination policies?

    On the rare occasion questions are raised in our national media, it as if an ‘anti-vaxxer’, ‘right-wing loon’, or political extremist is trying to gate crash what might otherwise be a rather sedate and respectable party.

    Pro-Vaxxer

    In the good old days before Covid, in Ireland, and around the world, we only vaccinated those who were vulnerable to, or at risk from a specific disease. We still vaccinate children against an array of illnesses that adults have not been, and are not routinely vaccinated against; Rotavirus and Meningitis B are but two obvious examples. Adults are equally susceptible to infection by either, but they are not as vulnerable to serious illness, and so are not vaccinated. Previously, we only ever vaccinated the vulnerable and those at risk; recently, however, that good science and common sense has been turned on its head.

    It is suggested that we should vaccinate young healthy people who have little if anything to fear from Covid-19. A paediatric genetic-vaccine is expected to be available later this year. It is argued that even though children are generally not susceptible to serious disease, they should be vaccinated in order to protect the vulnerable and achieve ‘herd-immunity.’ In the meantime, the vulnerable have in large part already been either been vaccinated already, exposed or sadly passed away.

    In a recent post on Twitter Michael Levitt, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Biophysics at Stanford University said:

    If getting the disease does not give immunity, how do you think that a vaccine that makes the same spike protein as the virus makes will give immunity?

    It beggars belief that with over a quarter of a million cases of Covid-19 already confirmed in Ireland, [viii] those who have already contracted the virus, are not at least being offered antibody testing prior to being offered (or pressured into taking) a new type of vaccine; novel vaccine that have recognised associated risks, and have not completed all safety trials.

    Between March and June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years [ix] We have clearly lost sight of whom we are trying to protect, and what we are trying to protect them from. Presently we have a national obsession with conformity, and an ostensible adherence to guidelines. Despite empirical truths, and substantial contrary evidence, we are being corralled into what increasingly appears to be a specific belief-system surrounding Covid-19, and its threat to the entire population.

    Those who have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) will be familiar with the threats issued to the hapless animals: ‘Jones the farmer will return, and destroy all of your good work!’ In contemporary parlance, he will return with ‘Long Covid,’[x] and frightening ‘New Variants’ with him.

    https://twitter.com/bergerbell/status/1379143927542947841

    Politicians have applied policies that are in keeping with this notion of ‘universal severity’ in response to a virus where 86% of those infected did not have virus symptoms, such as cough, fever, and loss of taste or smell., according to a UK study from October.[xi] Many of our Covid policies arrive with the benefit of preserving established governments from demonstrations and assemblies calling for policy revisions and or enquiries.

    My own calls for a public enquiry into nursing home deaths, or my pleas on behalf of common sense and natural science, are at best ignored by media. As are those of colleagues who feel and believe as I do, including Limerick GP Dr. Pat Morrissey, and Wexford GP Dr Gerry Waters, who was recently suspended by the Medical Council for refusing to adhere to and promote current public health guidance. Others who have openly spoken out against current policies have been subjected to investigation by the Medical Council, and ongoing vilification by many of our peers. Speaking out returns precious few short term dividends.

    Throughout much of Europe since the outset of the crisis, governments, like our own, are presently controlled by proxy scientific-panels or unelected expert committees. Governments claim to be simply ‘following their scientists advice,’ whilst the scientists insist that they are merely informing the government and not directing government policy. In this apparently blameless political ‘no man’s land’, the stage is perfectly set for blameless political atrocities.

    War of the Words: ‘Genetic vs ‘Traditional’

    Many scientists and physicians prefer to describe most Covid-19 vaccines as ‘gene therapy’. It is a phrase that no doubt serves as much to antagonise proponents, as it does to inform them. However, it is as good a place as anywhere to start.

    Genetic vaccines are certainly not ‘traditional’ vaccines. The licence for their use against Covid-19 throughout Europe was granted under emergency legislation that permits manufacturers to skip phase 4 safety trials that would have otherwise delayed their distribution. Advocates insist that skipping this final phase was absolutely necessary to resolve the current crisis.

    There is much to this argument, and we will not dive into it here. However, one point should be made. There are at least two off-patent (cheap and safe) drugs, Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, that may be effective in treating Covid-19. These drugs are not, however, licensed for use in treating Covid in many Western countries, (particularly the wealthier ones who can afford the novel vaccines).

    https://twitter.com/EvidenceLimited/status/1379400534000594945

    If either, or both, drugs had been licensed, this might have proved an obstacle to the granting of emergency use licences for Covid-19 vaccines. The reason for this is that grounds for emergency licensing of genetic-vaccines are substantially reinforced, as long as there are no other pharmacological treatments available at the time.

    Edward Jenner (1749-1823)

    A Traditional ‘Vaccine’

    In China the practice of inoculation against diseases such as smallpox was established as far back as 200 BC.[xii] It is likely that traditional medicine, tribesmen and ancient civilisations used, or at least inadvertently ‘knew’ something of the benefits of limited exposure to a disease, in order to establish some degree of immunity.

    Our own modern era of the ‘traditional’ vaccine begins when Edward Jenner (1749-1823) noticed that milkmaids appeared to be relatively immune to smallpox, a viral illness that was, in Jenner’s day, responsible for widespread suffering and death.

    Jenner observed that something was being transmitted from the cows to the milkmaids, effectively protecting them against smallpox. Cows contract cowpox. It’s not the same disease as smallpox, but as the respective viruses are so similar, whenever the hands of a milkmaid came into contact with a blister or pox on the udder of a cow infected with cow-pox; the milkmaid would be exposed to this very similar virus.

    In these instances the cowpox virus or ‘pieces’ of it, would enter the milkmaid’s blood stream through a cut or minor abrasion on her hands. The virus would be identified by her immune system as a ‘pathogen’ or disease-causing agent. White cells would attack the cowpox virus, causing it to break apart. Those same white cells would manufacture antibodies; little Y-shaped proteins that will stick to surface-proteins on the virus, and cause it to be directly destroyed, or recognised by other white cells that will mobilise to destroy it.

    All of this complex immunology would of course be occurring within the milkmaid’s blood, whilst she happily milked her cows. She might notice a slight blister, a little pus, or minor swelling around one of the abrasions on her overworked hands. The slight redness might be ignored, and would inevitably fade away. However this localised reaction would have heralded exposure to cowpox. The cowpox antibodies would then persist in her blood, remaining attached to the surface of many of her circulating white blood cells; protecting her or “vaccinating” her against small-pox.

    If the milkmaid should later come into contact with smallpox, those newly formed cowpox antibodies would be ready to mount an early and more efficient immune response. Her antibodies to the cowpox virus could attach to the smallpox virus, recruit other white cells – killer t-cells etc – onto the scene, and mount a pre-emptive response. This would be fast enough to eradicate the smallpox infection before it had an opportunity to spread and cause severe illness or death. It was Jenner’s genius that ultimately brought this reality to light.

    Jenner collected some of the pus that oozed from the udders of cows infected with cowpox. He swirled it about in a drop of water, placed it in a glass vial and then offered it to the world as the prevention for small-pox. Half a century later Louis Pasteur coined the phrase ‘vaccination’ after vacca, the Latin for cow. The paradigm in respect of human medicine and public health had shifted forever.

    Louis Pasteur.

    Perhaps the real hero of the vaccination story was an eight-year-old boy by the name of James Phipps, the son of Jenner’s gardener. On May 14th 1796, Jenner made a small incision into James’s arm, and rubbed in a drop of his magical ‘pus-paste’, making little James the first to be given a vaccine in the modern sense.

    Thankfully, little James proved immune to the various small-pox ‘exposures’ and challenges that Jenner then came up with. At the time small-pox was responsible for almost 10% of annual deaths in England. Jenner sent his results in a paper to the Royal Society for publication, but his paper was ignored.

    Having had the audacity to suggest pus from an infected cow’s udder, as a cure for smallpox, Jenner was at first dismissed as an eccentric by his peers. Yet, rather than disappearing into obscurity, he persisted. He vaccinated a further twenty-three people, and having seen little James survive, he even included his own eleven-month old son Robert, in this first ever vaccine trial.

    At that stage the medical establishment found it impossible to ignore his findings, which soon attracted widespread interest amongst the medical fraternity. However, it was not until 1840, some forty-four-years after his first attempt to publish his results, that the British Government began offering Jenner’s vaccination, free of charge, to the general public.

    The same but different

    Since Jenner’s day, ‘traditional vaccines’ have functioned in precisely the same way. Pharmaceutical companies take a virus or bacterium, they break it up, kill it, or leave it intact but render it weaker or ineffective ‘the same but different.’ They then take the bug (or pieces of the bug), swish them around in a little drop of water, add in a few elements that act as preservatives and immune-stimulants; then we doctors inject those pieces into people, thereby preventing many from succumbing to various infective diseases. The vaccination exposes us to a bug or pieces of a bug causing our immune system to generate antibodies and white blood cells that will persist in our circulation and be ready to launch a pre-emptive strike against the bug or a similar bug if it is encountered again: we have, in essence, become immune.

    So what is different about genetic-vaccines? Well here’s where the story becomes a little nuanced. Let’s try to put it in terms we might relate to.

    To begin with we must remind ourselves that: all living things are composed of cells, which is perhaps the most basic tenet of biology.

    Image of a recreated 1918 influenza virus.

    Viruses are not considered ‘living things’, because they are not ‘cells’ and neither are they made up of cells. They are formally referred to as ‘obligate intracellular parasites.’ They only become ‘alive;’ and can only replicate, after entering host cells, at which point they replicate or multiply within host cells. Once inside a cell the virus hijacks the cell’s own processes for making things that the cell needs for itself. The infected cell then becomes a virus factory, it swells with new virus particles, until it bursts, dies, and releases its payload of new virions into the bloodstream, or fluid outside of the cell membrane.

    It is only when a virus is outside the cell, within the blood stream or tissues, that it might be recognised by white cells or antibodies, and become the subject of an immune response. When a virus is inside one of our cells, there are some discrete ways this cell can let other cells know that it has become infected; there are means by which the immune system detects that one of our own cells has a virus inside it. However, these are comparatively slow, indefinite and uncertain processes and will not be discussed here. The major and most important way the immune system clears viruses is by getting at them before they get inside our cells.

    Once a virus is inside a cell, for the most part, it is hidden from the immune system. This point will be crucial to understanding the distinction between a genetic vaccine, and a traditional vaccine.

    All Cells Look a Little, or a Lot, Like a Fried Egg:

    Under a microscope, all cells appear a little like fried eggs. Almost all of them have the same basic plan, the yellow yolk being the nucleus; the white of the egg, the ‘cytoplasm;’ and the outer margin of the fried egg (the crispy brown edge) being the ‘cell membrane’ or wall surrounding the cell. To learn the basics of how genetic vaccines work, we need only refer to this analogy, but we must understand our ‘egg’ a little better before we put the toast on.

    The yellow yolk, or nucleus, contains all of our DNA. To understand what DNA looks like, imagine your fly, not the one buzzing at the window, but the zip on your trousers. It is composed of two sides or strands that are linked together when your zipper is up, and separated when your zipper is down.

    DNA is like an extremely long length of closed zip. Imagine this super long ‘zip’ coiled into individual space-saving packages, like neat balls of wool. Each of these little packages is called a chromosome and (with the exception of sperm cells and egg cells) the nucleus of each of our cells contains forty-six of these little balls of wool; twenty-three from mum, and twenty-three from dad.

    All forty-six are packed into the nucleus, the yellow yolk of our analogous egg. When we, or one of our cells, needs something; a protein, a hormone, a replacement part etc., the information to make what the cell needs (the recipe for all of life’s necessities) is coded for in that length of closed zip, our DNA.

    Each of the ‘teeth’ along the length of the zip strands, represent a single letter of the genetic code. An entire message may contain many letters, or teeth, along a specific length or piece of the zip. The lengths of zip that contain messages (or recipes) are called our ‘genes.’

    The ‘message’ within a gene is like a recipe in a cookbook. It contains a coded instruction for how to make the protein, enzyme etc., or whatever it is that the cell wants or needs. The DNA code is in the nucleus, and the basic ingredients are located in the cytoplasm, and it is in the cytoplasm (the egg-white) where the item required is assembled and manufactured. The raw materials for manufacture get into the cytoplasm, when they are absorbed across the cell membrane (the crispy brown bit at the edge of our fried egg). These raw materials are the amino-acids, sugars and vitamins etc., that we receive in our diet.

    To kick off the process, when a cell needs to make something, a signal is sent from the white of the egg (the cytoplasm) into the nucleus. That signal makes its way to the ball of wool or chromosome that contains the particular recipe, or code for the ingredients that will make up whatever is needed by the cell. When the signal reaches the chromosome containing the particular recipe or gene, the ball of wool is loosened slightly, and a relatively small length of closed zip (or DNA containing that recipe), is unzipped. One side of the opened zip is then copied into a piece of mRNA.

    That copy of one side of the unzipped zip is called messenger RNA. In most textbooks it (the mRNA) looks exactly as I have described it: a single side of a zip. This messenger RNA then exits through pores in the nucleus.  It enters the white of the egg, where this mRNA ‘recipe’ is then read or translated, and whatever it is the cell needs can now be manufactured within the cytoplasm or the white of the egg.

    The Ribosome

    When the strand of messenger RNA leaves the nucleus and enters the cytoplasm it is immediately found by a fascinating little cytoplasmic protein called a ‘ribosome’. The ribosome attaches to the mRNA. It then slides along this single strand of zip, and as it does so, ‘reads’ the code, and then makes a little strand, like a bead of pearls (a polypeptide). That strand of polypeptide then curls and folds itself into a little ball or blob; and this little blob of protein, is the very thing that the cell was looking for in the first place.

    It might be a structural protein, an enzyme, a building block, a replacement part, or whatever. When the ribosome slides along the piece of mRNA it makes this new little string that will ultimately fold upon itself to become the required product. This wonderful orchestral process is as ancient as life itself and is called ‘translation.’

    It is one of the rare occasions when jargon makes sense, for the little piece of mRNA, has indeed been ‘translated’ into a protein or ‘final product’ by the ribosome. The cell has now manufactured the thing that it needs, and after a few translations, the mRNA then degrades. No more ribosomes can attach to it, and no further product can be manufactured from it. If the cell wants another product it must send another message into the nucleus and call for another mRNA copy to be made in the nucleus and sent into the cytoplasm. It is a beautifully organised process, integral not simply to human life but to all life on the planet.

    How Does a Genetic-Vaccine Work?

    If you got all of that, you have grasped some of the fundamentals of cell biology and we are now able to ask: how does a genetic vaccine work?

    Most of us have seen an image or an artist’s impression of what a coronavirus looks like. A little ball, covered in spikes, like a medieval weapon swung from the end of a chain. Inside this little ball are the virus’s own genes. These genes are in the form of strands of RNA; the same type of RNA that is made in the nucleus of our cells, and sent into the cytoplasm for the manufacture of all ‘things’ that the cell needs.

    SARS-CoV-2

    The main difference between the RNA strands within a coronavirus, and those that naturally emerge from the nucleus of our own cells, is that coronavirus RNA does not code for ‘things’ that our cells might need. On the contrary, it codes for pieces that make up the coronavirus itself.

    When a coronavirus binds to the outside of one of the cells in our respiratory tract, it releases its RNA into those cells – into the white of the egg – and there, instead of making proteins that are needed by our cells, our ribosomes attach to their viral RNA and begin to manufacture (or translate) proteins that make up the physical structure of the virus. The host cell has now becomes a virus-making factory; the cytoplasm swells with viral particles; the cell bursts, and thousands of new viruses (virions) are released into the bloodstream, or the fluid that lies outside of the cell membrane.

    A genetic vaccine looks like, and functions, in almost exactly the same manner as the coronavirus itself. If a genetic vaccine could be visualised, it would look like a little sphere that encapsulates a piece of viral RNA or DNA (depending on which of the four vaccines we are considering). The role of the sphere is to protect the RNA or DNA inside the vaccine, and, most importantly, to bind it to human cells in a manner that will allow the piece of RNA or DNA to enter host cells at the site where the ‘vaccine’ is injected.

    For an RNA containing vaccine (Pfizer & Moderna) once the vaccine RNA gets inside our cells, our ribosomes attach and translate the RNA into a piece of the virus (one of the spike proteins). The host cell will then swell with spike proteins, and release them into the blood stream or body fluids outside the cell. There, the spike-protein will trigger the same immune response that Jenner and the traditional vaccines make use of.

    For DNA vaccines (Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca) the vaccine-DNA makes its way into the nucleus of our cells where it begins working (and is treated the same as our own DNA). It is copied into a piece of mRNA that will then travel into the cytoplasm and be translated by ribosomes into spike-proteins. Because genetic vaccines cannot infect cells, the process whereby a genetic-vaccine enters host cells is referred to as ‘transfection’.

    It is only after the transfected host cell releases spike-protein into the blood stream that our genetic-vaccine begins working in the ‘traditional’ way. In reality, it is the cellular process for the manufacture of things which has been hijacked, and the ‘traditional vaccine’ is being made inside one’s own cells. The ‘vaccine’ is released into our blood stream in the same way that a cell infected with a virus releases new virus into the blood stream or tissues.

    The final result might be the same, however, where a genetic-vaccine is different is in its mechanism it operates inside cells at a level of intimacy that Jenner could never have imagined. Because DNA vaccines enter the nucleus of our cells, and are treated as our own DNA, they come with a risk of damaging our own DNA, causing mutations, including, potentially, cancer. The potential is indeed an established fact. It is no less established than the fact that there is a link between smoking and cancer.

    Consider when a piece of synthetic DNA comes within intimate proximity of a relatively enormous coiled ball of DNA that is dynamically unwinding and unravelling in response to the daily activities of the cell. Is there a chance that this relatively small piece of synthetic DNA might become incorporated into or interfere with the normal function of our own DNA? Before Covid, the answer was an emphatic yes. However of late, the mere suggestion will undoubtedly be treated as something of a ‘conspiracy theory’.

    It is for this and other reasons that genetic-vaccines have not been previously licensed for use in humans prior to the current crisis. Thus, a 2013 paper[xiii] published in Germs, the respected Journal of Infectious Diseases lists the established disadvantages of DNA vaccines.

    Crossing the Rubicon

    At this point the reason critics refer to current Covid-19 vaccines as ‘gene therapy’ should not be too difficult to understand. It is important to bear in mind that as the cellular process of translation can be hijacked to produce a ‘vaccine’, it can also be hijacked to produce a myriad of other potential pharmaceutical therapies.

    Very limited forms of gene therapy are available in the treatment of terminal cancers. However, pharmaceutical companies have not been able to market this form of medicine, outside of the laboratory, on human populations.[xiv] A cynic might reasonably argue that companies are exploiting the current crisis in order to expedite safety trials and open the market for ‘gene-therapy’.

    There is nothing new here, this type of therapy, whereby patients are administered the gene for a missing or desired product, has been in development for several decades. The major difficulty for pharmaceutical companies has been how to get it out of the laboratory and past the paralysis of safety trials. It is certainly easy to see that if our cells are programmed to make and release spike-proteins, they can also be programmed to release other kinds of proteins, drugs and potential therapies directly into the human blood stream or tissues.[xv] Getting this type of therapy past regulators, and avoiding meaningful debate, has, (for better or worse), clearly been accomplished within the context of the current crisis.

    From a simple economic perspective, if human cells can be programmed to take on the role of manufacturing the ‘drug’, numerous difficulties in respect of production, costs, delivery, and even safety trials, are relatively easily overcome. The paradigm shift that resulted from Jenner’s development of vaccination could pale into insignificance compared to the potential game changer of genetic-vaccine.

    Ah go on. You’ll be grand!

    If, indeed, these vaccines are going to protect people from Covid-19, and they come with the added benefit of paving the way for novel therapies, why are people like me getting our proverbial knickers in a twist?

    Again the answer is not that complicated. The cellular process of ‘translation’ that is being ‘hijacked’ by the relevant pharmaceutical companies, does not belong to them, to our respiratory cells, or even human cells. As mentioned already, it is a process that belongs to ALL cells, in ALL species. In essence it ‘belongs’ to all living things in Nature.

    If anything happens to go wrong, the consequences are not limited to human beings, as the process being ‘hijacked’ is not exclusive to us. It ‘belongs’ to all life on Earth. The consequence of error, may extend further than a little nausea or swelling at the injection site.[xvi] Potential consequences extend to all cells that utilize the same process, and come in contact with the manufactured DNA or RNA.

    DNA or RNA? Red or White?

    Whilst the potential for either of the two available DNA vaccines to integrate into, or damage, human DNA is well established; there is an argument being made that this cannot possibly occur with the two available RNA vaccines.

    Generally speaking within our cells once RNA is copied or made in the nucleus it moves into the cytoplasm. It does not travel backwards. RNA does not move back inside the nucleus and incorporate into our DNA. However, the key words here are: ‘generally speaking.’

    Nature (generally speaking) blocks this possibility because the copied RNA that exits the nucleus, is different to DNA. It is an RNA copy of the DNA, the RNA cannot bind or interact with DNA. In the first instance RNA is a single stranded copy of one side of the zip. In the second instance the ‘teeth’ on the newly copied RNA are slightly different. They are tweaked with a sugar molecule called ribose, they are ‘ribosylated’ and therefore cannot readily recombine with DNA. (The ‘R’ in RNA simply means Ribosylated Nucleic Acid.)

    The RNA does indeed code for the same message that is contained within the DNA, but the teeth, or the letters of the RNA code, are slightly different. RNA does not travel backwards and interfere with DNA. Generally speaking they are incompatible, and cannot interfere with each other. Therefore, when the vaccine makers insist that the pieces of RNA that they have transfected into our cells do not interact with our DNA; well, they aren’t spoofing. It doesn’t normally happen that RNA interferes with DNA.

    So that’s what it says on the tin. However, there are two points that must be considered before we take this claim at face value. The first is a question of ‘precedence’ and the second is a question of scale.

    Does it happen in humans and in Nature that RNA can travel backwards into the nucleus and interfere with or incorporate into DNA? The simple answer to this question is a definite yes! RNA can and does travel backwards to incorporate itself into our DNA. This retrograde move, (where RNA sequences become incorporated into DNA) is called reverse-transcription. The reason for the use of ‘retro’ in the word retrovirus, is because retroviruses, and many other viruses, make use of reverse-transcription, converting RNA into DNA that will then integrate into our own DNA.

    HIV and HTLV (a human virus that causes t-cell leukaemia) are examples of viral infections, where RNA is converted backwards into DNA which then ‘interferes’ with our own DNA inside the nucleus of our cells. These viruses contain RNA, and they also carry an enzyme called ‘reverse transcriptase’. This enzyme converts RNA backwards into DNA. Retroviruses and other viruses (such as Hepatitis B) introduce the reverse-transcriptase enzyme into our cells when they infect them.[xvii] Furthermore, our own cells normally produce and use this enzyme (reverse transcriptase) inside the nucleus, where it has some ‘house-keeping’ roles in maintaining our own DNA.[xviii]

    Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that within the human genome some 8% of our DNA is composed of DNA that was originally viral RNA. Infections with RNA viruses whose genes have since become permanently incorporated into our own DNA. These sequences are called ‘Human Endogenous Retroviral Sequences’ or HERVS.[xix] Many of them persist within our genome because they may code for proteins or things that are likely to be of some benefit to us; genes brought into our genome from outside the cell, via the natural, dynamic interaction between viruses, retroviruses and human DNA.

    Many more of these endogenous retroviral (originally RNA) sequences are mysteriously redundant, and science is yet to learn of their function in sickness or in health. The fact remains that they are present; been present for countless millennia; may be integral to our evolution as a species; and are certainly with us ‘until death do us part.’ They should serve to remind us that there is a long established history of communication between viral and human genetics; an interaction that we should attempt to understand before it is blindly manipulated.

    Interconnectedness

    Too often viruses are portrayed as static structures, distinct from our own genetic material and distinct from one another. This is quite simply a rather primitive concept, the same kind of thinking that removes human beings and the consequence of our actions from Nature. It is part of the reason we remain largely incapable of seeing and appreciating the vast web of interconnectedness that dependently joins us to whales, rain forests, and even viruses.

    We depend upon viruses for our genetics, as we depend upon yeast for our beer. Often viruses depend upon each other to cause infection. In certain instances, if a particular virus is missing something, a part or component (without which it is defective or deficient), the missing part is supplied by another helper-virus. There are helper-viruses, and there is an entire family of viruses (dependoviruses) that are entirely dependent upon assistance from helper-viruses. For example, in Humans, Hepatitis D virus is activated, only in the presence of Hepatitis B virus. Essentially, in order to function, the D-virus ‘borrows’ some missing parts from the B virus.

    In short, viruses are not ‘monogamous recluses’: interacting with each other; helping each other; interacting with our genetic material within the cytoplasm and within the nucleus. It does not matters if that genetic material has come from the nucleus of our own cells, or been synthesized in the labs at Johnson and Johnson.[xx]

    A Question of Scale

    There is no such thing as a ‘perfect process’. Do something for the first time and you might do it right,  do it right enough times, and you will eventually do it wrong. 

    When vaccine RNA or DNA hijacks a natural cellular processes and transforms the cell to vaccine or spike-protein production; how many times does this ‘event’ occur in the tissue of the person who has thus been vaccinated? Thousands, or several thousands of times? How many times has it occurred when several billion people are vaccinated? I don’t know the answer to this question. However, when a process is repeated billions of times, mistakes are no longer ‘possible’, they are inevitable. Such mistakes or mutations are not only inevitable but are essential, lying at the heart of evolution itself.

    The End is Nigh?

    There is certainly a mountain of spin and delusion on either side of the ‘genetic-vaccine’ or ‘gene-therapy’ debate, and we must keep matters in perspective. Genetic modification is here to stay, for better or for worse. The argument in respect of unforeseen genetic consequence to ourselves and/or other species is an old one. It began with ‘Dolly’ the sheep, and has raged for some time around the desirability of genetically modified foods.

    Ironically, the introduction of synthetic genes into vegetables, created something of an international furore, yet the transfection of synthetic genes into millions of regular human beings has created far less controversy. Debate or discussion on the subject of genetic modification or therapy, its necessity, utility, or potential harm, is long overdue; although perhaps it might be a case of too little, too late.

    Today, many of the foods we eat have been genetically modified to some degree. Genetically modified food is, however, met with and processed by the acid and digestive enzymes in our guts. The synthetic genes in GM products do not (as far as we know) enter our cells, they do not attempt to manipulate our own cellular or genetic processes.

    There is clearly an urgent need to revisit this debate in light of these new vaccines. The battle may have been lost in respect of GM crops, but there is a reasonable argument to be advanced this time round as ‘human genetic processes’ are being tampered with, rather than sheep, beetroot or soya beans.

    The Right Hashtag?

    In recent years discourse and protest have become strangely predictable, organised around or stimulated by whatever happens to be trending on social media. It seems the right hashtag hasn’t been developed for ‘debate’ in respect of current pandemic policy, even as that policy extends into the function of our own cells.

    How many people in Ireland, or around the world, know how a Covid vaccine work? How many clinicians are aware for that matter? When debate does erupt in relatively small pockets around the country it is hijacked by extremists or dismissed as being organised and attended by extremists. Social media appears to be moderating our behaviour to a greater degree than even genetics.

    The health of our society depends far more on constructing a more honest and happier version of ourselves. We need to re-evaluate materialism, define happiness, reduce consumption, eat less (or no) meat, take plastics out of our food chain and ecosystems, restore and preserve habitats, protect and understand a biodiversity upon which we are entirely dependent. All of this, and more, is not contingent on genetic modification, no more than it is dependent on us getting to Mars.

    Therefore, for the reasons I have outlined, I would not inject a healthy animal with an experimental genetic-vaccine, never mind a healthy human being.

    [i] Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer, ‘How the Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Works,’ New York Times, March 22nd, 2020,  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine.html

    [ii] Smriti Mallapaty, ‘The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks’ August 28th, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2

    [iii] Adam W. Gaffney, ‘We need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about long Covid’ Statnews, March 22nd, 2021, https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinking-more-critically-speaking-cautiously-long-covid/

    [iv] Conor Pope, Vivienne Clarke, ‘Vaccination rollout in nursing homes almost complete, HSE says,’ February 12th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/vaccination-rollout-in-nursing-homes-almost-complete-hse-says-1.4483250

    [v] CSO. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-covid19/covid-                                                19informationhub/health/covid-19deathsandcasesstatistics/

    [vi] Moderna Announces First Participants Dosed in Phase 2/3 Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate in Pediatric Population https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-first-participants-dosed-phase-23-study-0

    [vii] CSO. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-covid19/covid-                                                19informationhub/health/covid-19deathsandcasesstatistics/

    [viii] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=covid+deaths+ireland

    [ix] ‘Immune evasion means we need a new COVID-19 social contract’, The Lancet, February 18th, 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00036-0/fulltext

    [x] Jeremy Divine, ‘The Dubious Origins of Long Covid’, Wall Street Journal, March 22nd, 2021,  https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dubious-origins-of-long-covid-11616452583

    [xi] Angela Betsaida B. Laguipo, ‘86 percent of the UK’s COVID-19 patients have no symptoms,’ News Medical Life Sciences, October 9th, 2020, https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201009/86-percent-of-the-UKs-COVID-19-patients-have-no-symptoms.aspx

    [xii] The History of Vaccines, Chinese Smallpox Inoculation, https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/early-chinese-inoculation

    [xiii] Germs. 2013 Mar; 3(1): 26–35. Published online 2013 Mar 1. doi: 10.11599/germs.2013.1034/

    [xiv] Kristina Fiore, ‘Want to Know More About mRNA Before Your COVID Jab?’ Medpage Today, December 3rd, 2020, https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89998

    [xv] Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 17, pages261–279(2018)

    [xvi] Nicola Davis, ‘Covid vaccine side-effects: what are they, who gets them and why?’ The Guardian, March 18th, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/18/covid-vaccine-side-effects-what-are-they-who-gets-them-and-why

    [xvii] Medical Microbiology. 4th edition (Chapter 62).Galveston (TX): University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston; 1996.

    [xviii] Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1986 Apr; 83(8): 2531–2535.
    doi: 10.1073/pnas.83.8.2531, https://www.nature.com/articles/1205081

    [xix] PMCID: PMC7139688 PMID: 32155827 Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs): Shaping the Innate Immune Response in Cancers.

    [xx] Knipe, David M.; Howley, Peter M. (2007). Fields Virology (5th ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 126–7.

     

     

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Landfall

    In August of last year I wrote an article pointing to the impending consequence of the Irish government’s rolling lockdown policy, ‘The Perfect Storm’[i] gathering on the horizon over the country. By that I meant a significant second wave of Covid-19 – to hit this winter. I made that prediction based on the following factors:

    An elevated number of potential viral hosts, which is a consequence of suppression of natural-immunity.

    Increased life of the virus in the external environment due to decreased daylight

    Raised levels of social anxiety and subsequent susceptibility to illness/infection

    Continued persistence of the virus at low levels within Irish society

    The ‘storm’ made landfall at the start of January, leading to the imposition of an extreme lockdown for the third time – with children denied their constitutional right to an education –  amid renewed fears the hospital system would be overwhelmed, as many elderly in care homes passed away once again.

    Sadly, this ‘third’ wave actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.[ii]

    Could additional deaths have been averted if the Taoiseach had not sought ‘a meaningful Christmas’; or if NEPHT’s advice had been followed to the letter – permitting house visits rather than opening restaurants and gastropubs[iii] at the start of December? Based on the HSPC report that seems doubtful. And I would question whether most Irish people would have willingly foregone sociability throughout the depths of winter – there was certainly no political clamour to cancel Christmas – having endured near-constant lockdown since March. But you never know.

    Furthermore, without a Christmas spending spree many indigenous retailers and restaurateurs might have been forced out of business – to the unrestrained joy of Jeff Bezos, Tescos and the rest.

    But in Ireland, as ever, we desperately need someone to blame third time round; anyone other than NPHET that has managed to preserve a reputation for scientific insight despite the damage it is doing to the country. So, instead of questioning the government’s response, youngsters – who may have availed of a brief chink of light to socialize – are scapegoated.

    Other than that we find talk of selfish immigrants returning home over Christmas to see loved ones. And now attacks on those who escaped the overwhelming doom and gloom for a post-Christmas break. Yet, whatever one’s thoughts on the sustainability of flying, it is notable that just 1% of cases since the pandemic began have been traced to travel abroad.

    Lockdown Policy

    In the midst of any crisis scientific arguments compete to establish the best way forward. In the case of Covid-19 in Ireland ‘the argument’ has been remarkably one-sided. Discussions in the media are generally over the severity of lockdowns to be employed – this hitherto unheard of public health intervention with enormous collateral damage, which has somehow been normalised.

    From the outset I have been convinced that the Irish government at the prompting of the WHO – along with most other Western governments – adopted an erroneous approach, based on a flawed epidemiological assessment, which led Leo Varadkar to suggest there could be a staggering 85,000 deaths[iv] in Ireland.

    Virtually alone in Europe, the Swedish health authorities (relatively free of political interference) stood apart, refusing to lockdown in March, 2020. I would argue that this softer approach has been to the benefit of the vast majority of people living there – and may even lead to a lower death toll in the end – compared to the trauma of lockdowns experienced by citizens in most other European countries.

    Notably, during the first wave almost 92% of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in Ireland were among over sixty-five-year-olds,[v] and when this Irish cohort is compared to Sweden’s considerably older population a very different picture emerges; in contrast to the usual truck of ‘deaths per capita’ and ‘deaths per million.’

    Hats off to the impressively organised states of Norway and Finland, where Covid-19 mortality has remained very low indeed, but vigorous track and trace strategy operating in these countries have proved ineffective elsewhere; even Germany is floundering this winter, having been locked down for months.

    Revealingly, in March 2020 the Director-General of the Norwegian Institute for Public Health Camilla Stoltenberg[vi] recommended that her government should keep schools open – as in Sweden – and was advocating last June for a softer approach in the likely event of a second wave.

    Now, as the death toll from Covid-19 in Ireland steadily converges with Sweden’s – especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population – it remains to be seen whether much-vaunted, but still experimental, vaccines will significantly alter the respective death tolls.

    I maintain that a policy of keeping the Irish population under rolling lockdowns until the whole population is vaccinated will have a worse impact on the nation’s long-term health than any mortality or morbidity that may be avoided.

    Zero Covid Utopianism

    The frankly bizarre ‘option’ of Zero Covid-19 that has been grasped by some on the left, and the right, in Ireland is a form of Utopianism. It ignores the virtual impossibility of eradicating an aerosol, sub-microscopic pathogen such as Covid-19 from Ireland. Moreover, we remain one of the most globalized societies in the world with over half-a-million foreign born resident in the country[vii] and an Irish-born diaspora of three million;[viii] rely on international trade for most commodities; besides having a porous border to the North.

    Moreover, New Zealand and Australia are currently enjoying summer, when respiratory viruses retreat. This seasonal effect is enhanced by a depleted ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere – causing the world’s highest rate of skin cancers[ix] – which elevates the level of UV light that destroys viruses. Both countries are also insulated from the rest of the world by vast oceans and an uninhabited landmass. Even still, outbreaks occurred in New Zealand and Melbourne last winter, prompting draconian responses.

    Notably, however, the maximum number of cases that Melbourne – with a population almost the size of Ireland’s – experienced in a single day was just seven hundred, and it required an extreme 112-day lockdown[x] – and/or the arrival of spring before an apparent elimination. In contrast, case numbers in Ireland have exceeded eight thousand in a single day.

    Covid-19: Southern Dreaming

    A Zero-Covid approach assumes the island of Ireland is sealed hermetically. Good luck with telling the DUP that they have to follow the rules of the South! And ‘success’ would presumably give way to a permanent state of siege against the viral dangers posed by the outside world.

    At this point even New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has had enough, acknowledging the long-term impossibility of pursuing Zero Covid she recently said: ‘Our goal has to be though, to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally, with the flu. It won’t be a disease that we will see simply disappear after one round of vaccine.’[xi]

    Comparing Ireland to East Asian countries may also be inappropriate as, Wuhan apart, no single country in that region has experienced a significant outbreak. Notably, Japan, which has avoided locking down throughout the crisis experienced forty times as many flu and pneumonia deaths during that period. This suggests other factors – East Asia has been the geographic origin of several modern coronavirus epidemics – may be inhibiting the spread of Covid-19 there.[xii]

    Yet this message has not trickled either left or downwards into popular opinion as the Irish Times continues to print articles in support of ‘the plan’.[xiii]

    ‘Zero Covid’ is as much a vote-winner, as a zero tolerance for crime or any other virtuous objective, but it’s political claptrap from an taxidermized left and a neoconservative right, furnished by scientists that seemingly have no conception of biological realities.

    Reality Bites

    The success of any institution might be summed up by the notion that it is only as good as its ability to predict the future. Throughout human history we have had two powerful methods of prediction: science and religion. If not religion, we might define this in terms of ‘faith,’ or an ‘unscientific’ belief system of some kind or other.

    If the Romans, the Egyptians, the Spartans, or the Native Americans, had done a ‘better’ job predicting the future, the world would be a different place. Thus, the success or persistence of any individual, nation, or civilisation, is based on an ability to reliably predict the future. Our faith in science is strengthened solely by this condition, and undermined when predictions go awry.

    Galileo Galilei, 1636 portrait by Justus Sustermans.

    Galileo’s prognostications in respect of the Earth and the Sun led him into conflict with the dominant powers of his day. The accuracy of his predictions disturbed the established cosmic order, as any heresy does. The predictions of Einstein had a similar effect on Newtonian Physics, and now Quantum Mechanics has become the sacred cow. Final judgements on the success or otherwise of policies are, of course, made through the prism of hindsight.

    Two Schools of Thought

    At present around the world there are two broad scientific schools[xiv] of thought in respect of how to respond to Covid-19. On one side there is a dominant view: that we are in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, where humanity is dealing with a virus that will kill, and perhaps permanently incapacitate, many millions more than it has already done; and that the correct response for any government should be to impose a lockdown and mandate masks until the ‘scientific cavalry’ arrive, carrying their novel genetic vaccinations as shields to save the day.

    On the other side there are the conspiracy theorists, Covid-deniers, and a minority of scientists who consider most most masks in use to be ineffective, and who argue that restrictions and lockdowns cause more harm than good. These scientists have advocated protecting the vulnerable and permitting an equilibrium of natural immunity to emerge within the non-vulnerable majority as the least harmful way forward.

    The question for ordinary people and politicians, then, is where does the truth lie? Or, more accurately, who is correctly predicting the future?

    When the dust settles in a few years, perhaps we’ll see that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. An appreciation of a middle way, or synthesis, is evident in Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell’s acknowledgement in June that mistakes were made in the first wave.[xv]  Such concessions to human fallibility seem to be the preserve of Scandinavian leaders. This may explain why increased restrictions have been introduced in Sweden during their second wave, though its government has refrained from imposing a lockdown, and the emphasis is still on personal responsibility.

    By the start of February, without a lockdown, Sweden appears to be sitting pretty with the death toll falling precipitously during the month of January, suggesting a herd immunity threshold may have been reached.

    [An earlier version of this article read: “surveys indicate that at least forty percent of the [Swedish] population now have antibodies to the virus,[xvi]” We have sought corroboration from Sebastian Rushworth MD @sebrushworth, having been advised that this claim is unreliable]

    Likewise, there are positive signs that India has now reached a herd immunity threshold,[xviii] without recourse to vaccines.

    Benefit of Hindsight

    Last April I resigned my position on the Irish Medical Council to the shock of family, friends and former colleagues. I did so because I believed a catastrophe was immanent, and that hundreds of nursing home residents would die as a consequence of political ineptitude and mass hysteria. As it transpired, 62% of deaths in Ireland occurred in this setting during the first wave of the pandemic, the second highest proportion in the world.[xix]

    I take no comfort that my fears were realised, and have since also resigned as a contracted employee of the HSE. I could no longer, in good conscience, enforce guidelines upon staff and patients I do not consider either efficacious or ethical.

    I would argue that a failure to conduct a proper inquiry into the decision-making that led to this carnage has led to avoidable mortality in this second wave in the care home setting. Any enquiry would surely have highlighted the inadequacy of safety protocols in these settings, and the absence of real expertise on NPHET.

    Before my small Covid-19 rebellion, in March 2020, I circulated a paper on the response to Covid called The Mismanagement of Covid-19 in Ireland. Its premise was (and remains) quite simple: that Covid-19 is a viral illness with a mortality confined to a relatively small and manageable subset of our population.[xx]

    I argued that Ireland’s gross demographic – the youngest population in Europe – is (and was) the key to navigating a safe path through the crisis. With a relatively low population of over sixty-fives – approximately 650,000 – this amounted to a manageable population of those truly vulnerable.

    I also noted how, unlike during influenza pandemics of the past, children and young adults were not dying of this disease, and that the vast majority of adults without serious underlying conditions were also relatively (if not entirely) immune to significant consequence.

    Long Covid

    A current cause for concern with Covid-19, which may be deterring our governments from permitting younger people from resuming their lives is so-called ‘Long Covid,’ or Covid ‘Long Haulers’ as this is referred to in the U.S..

    This is a condition that appears to fit within the category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue;[xxi] which is ‘a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’

    In October one of the leading advocates for Long Covid patients, and a firm advocate of draconian policies, Oxford University’s Professor Trish Greenhalgh clarified that Long Covid is only very rarely a long-term affliction:

    The reviews we’ve done seem to suggest that whilst a tiny minority of people, perhaps one per cent of everyone who gets Covid-19, are still ill six months later, and whilst about a third of people aren’t better at three weeks, most people whose condition drags on are going to get better, slowly but steadily, between three weeks and three months.[xxii]

    But a paper from 2017 gives an idea of the pre-existing scale of chronic and post-viral fatigue syndrome in the U.K.:

    Fatigue is a symptom of a number of diseases—anaemia, depression, chronic infection, cancer, autoimmune disorders and thyroid disorders among them. But no apparent cause can be found for a state of extreme and disabling exhaustion that has acquired a number of names, the most generally accepted worldwide being chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). In the UK, where it is (often incorrectly) known as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), 150 000 people are said to be affected. Other terms used for the condition are postviral fatigue syndrome (PVFS) and chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS).[xxiii]

    So, we can conclude that Long Covid is hardly a new phenomenon, and while the pandemic is likely to create an additional burden on health services, the extent of the problem needs to be put in context: perhaps one percent of sufferers are still ill after six months.

    Moreover, the impact of Covid-19 is significant heightened by environmental factors such as air quality[xxiv] and poor nutrition. I would argue, therefore, that the threat of Long Covid is insufficient grounds for closing universities and denying young people the chance of a social life beyond walking the block.

    Indeed, the obesity pandemic that leads to a wide range of morbidities is a far greater challenge to this nation’s health, and a crucial indicator of an individual’s risk of severe case of Covid-19 .[xxv] Yet there has been no serious attempt since the Covid-19 pandemic began to address how Ireland fails to adopt international best practice for addressing obesity.[xxvi]

    Seasonality

    In my March paper I also observed that Covid-19 is a member of the coronavirus family responsible for many common colds,[xxvii] and that such viruses are seasonal, in that they are eliminated especially by increasing UV light (and the population’s tendency to retreat indoors). These were hardly earth-shattering revelations, and have been noted by many other doctors and scientists around the globe.

    I also compared the population of over sixty-five-year-olds in Ireland, to the equivalent cohort in the U.K., noting there are roughly twenty-times the number of over sixty-five in the UK (while the overall population is less than ten times that number); so I assumed U.K. mortality would be in the region of twenty times that of Ireland’s.

    In this respect, Ireland has performed significantly better than the U.K., but other factors such as population density and an elevated risk of severe disease among BAME groups[xxviii], may account for the  higher relative death toll there. It should also be emphasised that the U.K. has almost the highest rate of mortality in the world.

    ICU Capacity at the beginning of the pandemic.

    Like many other doctors and scientists, I argued that in the absence of a proven cure or vaccine at that time for Covid-19, humanity is (or was) very much operating at the whim of nature. Thus, without a cure we were (and to a certain extent still are) subjected to natural forces, as I assumed this virus would spread widely through the population. All we could do, then, was ‘flatten the curve,’ protect the vulnerable, and await a safe vaccine.

    At the outset of the crisis that was the mantra behind which the public united. Flattening the curve would reduce the rate at which the vulnerable would present for treatments in hospitals. This would protect the system form being overwhelmed, bringing an increased chance of survival for those badly afflicted.

    ‘Protect the NHS’ from collapse was a similar cry across the water. That made sense at the outset of the crisis. The reiteration of these ‘priorities’ might now illicit a yawn, as our national health authorities did not use the flattened time and space to increase ICU capacity substantially, which brings the ‘necessity’ of recurring lockdowns.

    Hysteria

    Since March of last year events have taken a strange turn. With fear and hysteria at the helm politicians lost their nerves. The mantra shifted from ‘flatten the curve’, to ‘protect everyone from this deadly disease,’ despite it becoming clear that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is considerably lower than the 0.9% assumed initially. Now a paper on the WHO website states that the infection fatality rate for the disease is less than 0.2% ‘in most locations.’[xxix]

    Perversely, children have become the focus of inordinate efforts; locked indoors, locked out of school and forced into wearing masks. We have insisted upon protecting them from a disease that has not caused a single child death in Ireland throughout the entire crisis.[xxx]

    Troublingly, when Covid-19 panic gripped the nation, politicians and mainstream media listened only to the scientific ‘authorities’ that fed the hysteria and justified everything from political incompetence to profligate expenditure. Hospitals were emptied in preparation for an approaching ‘tsunami’ of illness, as tens of thousands of deaths were incorrectly predicted by politicians and esteemed professors, all of whom continue to profess, and have even grown in esteem.

    Covid patients were dumped from hospitals into Nursing Homes, and tests were withheld from residents lest they run short for the healthy-hysterical. The vulnerable were not only abandoned, but too many of them were crushed in the stampede.

    Thus, there is the shocking case of a resident in a Meath care home discovered to have had a maggot-infested a wound.[xxxi] What began as a campaign to protect the vulnerable, had turned into nothing short of a manslaughter machine.

    At the End of the Day

    The natural endpoint for viral infection in respect of many viral pathogens is of course ‘herd immunity.’ This is the point where a sufficient proportion of a population have been exposed to and develop full or partial immunity to a particular pathogen, such that its rate of reproduction is below 1 most of the time.

    With insufficient hosts, a virus can no longer spread easily. This is not full elimination but an endemic equilibrium within the population, with a certain annual death toll tolerated – such as is the case with influenza, which kills up to a thousand people a year in Ireland, despite the availability of a vaccine.

    This natural evolution, or pathogenesis, is also helped along by the seasonal shift from spring to summer. Increasing daylight reduces the level of viral particles, and people spend more time out of doors, or ventilate their living spaces in warmer conditions. This is how nature brings an end to seasonal colds and flus. Yet curiously this basic piece of natural science was largely ignored in March. Talk of UV light became highly politicised and thence poisoned.

    The Swedes

    Sweden provided a template for a country acting within the bounds of common sense and science. From the outset health authorities there endeavoured to protect a vulnerable aged cohort, leading to a natural-immunity developing within the population. In permitting this to occur they also took the precaution of doubling ICU capacity[xxxii] which, like Ireland’s, had been among the lowest in Europe when the pandemic began.

    Comparison between Sweden and Ireland cannot be made on a like-for-like basis, any more than the Irish can be compared to any other national group; however, some relevant comparisons can be drawn in respect of population demographics.

    Sweden has twice Ireland’s population, but 3.2 times the number of over sixty-five-years-olds. Ireland has not quite experienced just over a third of Sweden’s mortality (11,815 v 3,418); but while Ireland’s death rate from Covid-19 has been steadily increasing over the month of January, Sweden’s has flattened to point where, according to the WHO, Sweden’s death toll has been in single figures since the start of February, while Ireland has been experiencing daily deaths over one hundred.

    Source: WHO

    There may be a further uptick in Covid deaths in Sweden once schools reopen – and even a third wave – but the hopeful signs are that the country is now reaching a herd immunity threshold – one that has brought less suffering overall when compared to other jurisdictions.

    A similar comparison can be drawn between Sweden and most other European states, implying, in most situations, that mortality is not significantly reduced by lockdown policies. Yet invariably whenever one reads about Sweden in mainstream Irish media[xxxiii] comparisons are only drawn with best-in-class Scandinavian neighbours, where lockdowns have also been, for the most part, avoided.

    Lockdowns are likely to increase mortality through missed cancer screenings, dysfunctional health services, serious mental health impacts, besides the ‘shadow-pandemic’ of domestic violence that has occurred under lockdown.

    The writing on the wall?

    What of the good people on the opposite side of the Swedish argument? It is fair to say that lockdowns can flatten the curve. This is apparent if we compare mortality graphs on the Euromomo website that tracks excess deaths across Europe. It shows that Sweden did not see the same kind of spike on their graph of mortality during the first wave as in other countries that locked down, but experienced a steady decline, which in July led the New York Times to state prematurely that ‘Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale’[xxxiv]

    Source: Euromomo.

    The question is whether the short-term benefits of lockdowns in terms of averted-deaths are worth the cost? Or, were lockdowns necessary, and will they ultimately translate into lives being saved rather than simply deferring deaths? Perhaps the truth lies in the middle of these arguments but I know which side I lean.

    Lockdowns do not prevent deaths, but slow the rate of infection and mortality. They can only ease the burden on hospital or tertiary care services. The purpose of lockdown should be to insure that the sick can access the best treatment available, and should not be ‘a primary means of controlling the virus’[xxxv] according to leading authorities in the WHO, as we are experiencing in Ireland.

    Although the mortality figures in Ireland still lag behind Sweden’s I suspect this is deferred mortality and does not represent patients who have been cured or saved. The curve has been flattened. Thus far, lockdown policies have had the beneficial effect of decreasing mortality by less than 20% compared to Sweden’s when adjusted for our respective age profiles. In my view, however, what may simply be deferred mortality, cannot justify the burden of lockdowns on the wider population.

    Only when the crisis has passed, and with the benefit of hindsight, will it be possible to determine if the Swedes broadly got things right. Although, it is more appropriate in the context of a disease that has killed thousands of people – and caused suffering to most of the rest of the population – to state that some countries will have managed it better than others. For sure, no one will have got everything ‘right’.

    Assuming vaccines do not represent a panacea, if it transpires that most Irish mortality is confined to the nursing home sector, and that all lockdowns accomplish is to preserve a larger number of potential hosts for successive seasonal resurgences then the pandemic will have been a more painful and long-running saga in Ireland than it might otherwise have been.

    [i] Marcus de Brun, ‘The Perfect Storm’, Cassandra Voices, August 19th, 2020, https://cassandravoices.com/science-environment/covid-19-the-perfect-storm/

    [ii] Epidemiology of COVID-19Outbreaks/Clustersin IrelandWeekly Report Prepared by HPSC on25thJanuary 2021, https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/respiratory/coronavirus/novelcoronavirus/surveillance/covid-19outbreaksclustersinireland/COVID-19%20Weekly%20Outbreak%20Report_Week032021_25012021_WebVersion_final.pdf

    [iii] Digital Desk Staff, ‘Opening hospitality will mean limiting Christmas gatherings, Nphet warns’, November 26th, 2020, Extra.ie, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/nphet-strongly-opposed-to-parts-of-governments-lockdown-exit-plan-1042387.html

    [iv] ‘Up to 85,000 Irish people could die from coronavirus in worst-case scenario, Taoiseach indicates, as three more diagnosed’ John Downing, Eilish O’Regan and Gabija Gataveckaite, Irish Independent, March 9th, 2020, https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/up-to-85000-irish-people-could-die-from-coronavirus-in-worst-case-scenario-taoiseach-indicates-as-three-more-diagnosed-39029363.html

    [v] COVID-19 Deaths and Cases, Central Statistics Office, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/br/b-cdc/covid-19deathsandcases/

    [vi] ‘Norwegian health chief: we advised against closing schools’, 10 June, 2020, Unherd, https://unherd.com/thepost/norwegian-health-chief-we-advised-against-closing-schools/

    [vii] ‘Census of Population 2016 – Profile 7 Migration and Diversity’, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp7md/p7md/p7anii/

    [viii] Ciara Kenny, ‘ The global Irish: Where do they live?’, February 4th, 2015, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/the-global-irish-where-do-they-live-1.2089347?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Flife-and-style%2Fgeneration-emigration%2Fthe-global-irish-where-do-they-live-1.2089347

    [ix] American Institute of Cancer Research, Skin cancer statistics, https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/skin-cancer-statistics

    [x] Phil Mercer, ‘Covid: Melbourne’s hard-won success after a marathon lockdown’, 26th of October, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54654646

    [xi] Luke Malpass, ‘Jacinda Ardern declares 2021 ‘the year of the vaccine’’, January 21st, 2021, Stuff, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/124012148/jacinda-ardern-declares-2021-the-year-of-the-vaccine

    [xii] Ramesh Thakur, ‘The West should envy Japan’s COVID-19 response’ January 10th, 2021, Japan Times,  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/01/10/commentary/japan-commentary/west-japan-coronavirus-response/

    [xiii] Gabriel Scally: It is essential Ireland tightens borders in fight against Covid-19, January 30th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/gabriel-scally-it-is-essential-ireland-tightens-borders-in-fight-against-covid-19-1.4471283

    [xiv] Sarah Bosley, ‘Covid UK: scientists at loggerheads over approach to new restrictions’, September 22nd, 2020, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/22/scientists-disagree-over-targeted-versus-nationwide-measures-to-tackle-covid

    [xv] Rafaela Lindeberg, ‘Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes’, Bloomberg, June 3rd, 2020,  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/man-behind-sweden-s-virus-strategy-says-he-got-some-things-wrong

    [xvi] Sebastian Rushworth M.D., ‘Here’s a graph they don’t want you to see’, 25th of January, 2021, https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/01/25/heres-a-graph-they-dont-want-you-to-see/

    [xvii] Sheena Cruickshank  ‘A new study suggests coronavirus antibodies fade over time – but how concerned should we be?’ October 27th, 2020, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-suggests-coronavirus-antibodies-fade-over-time-but-how-concerned-should-we-be-148957

    [xviii] Amy Kazmin, ‘India’s tumbling Covid cases raises question: Is the pandemic burning itself out?’ February 1st, 2021, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/india-s-tumbling-covid-cases-raises-question-is-the-pandemic-burning-itself-out-1.4472406?mode=amp

    [xix] Fergal Bowers, ‘High percentage of virus deaths in Ireland’s care homes highlighted in comparison report

    [xx] Mismanagement of Covid in Ireland’ May 27th, RTE, https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0527/1143036-covid-deaths-ireland/

    [xxi] ‘What to know about post-viral syndrome’ Medical News Today, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326619

    [xxii] Jennifer Rigby, ‘Why long Covid can be really grim, but is rarer than you think’, October 3rd, 2020 The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/long-covid-can-really-grim-rarer-think/

    [xxiii] Postviral Fatigue Syndrome, Science Direct, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/postviral-fatigue-syndrome

    [xxiv] Matt Cole et al, ‘Air pollution exposure linked to higher COVID-19 cases and deaths – new study’, July 13th, 2020, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-exposure-linked-to-higher-covid-19-cases-and-deaths-new-study-141620

    [xxv] Meredith Wadman, ‘Why COVID-19 is more deadly in people with obesity—even if they’re young’, September 8th, 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young

    [xxvi] Shauna Bowers, ‘Irish policies to tackle obesity ‘fall behind international best practice’ – report’, November 9th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/irish-policies-to-tackle-obesity-fall-behind-international-best-practice-report-1.4403921?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Firish-policies-to-tackle-obesity-fall-behind-international-best-practice-report-1.4403921

    [xxvii] Anthony King, ‘Coronavirus family now a prime suspect in previous pandemics,’ February 4th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/coronavirus-family-now-a-prime-suspect-in-previous-pandemics-1.4463053

    [xxviii] Tom Kirby, ‘Evidence mounts on the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on ethnic minorities’, The Lancet, May 8th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30228-9/fulltext

    [xxix] Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data

    John P A Ioannidis, WHO, September 13th, 2020, https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/99/1/20-265892/en/

    [xxx] (According to the CSO there have been 20,402 confirmed cases of Covid amongst the age group 0-24yrs, during the period from Feb 2020 to December 2020 and not a single recorded death in Ireland. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/br/b-cdc/covid-19deathsandcasesseries18/

    [xxxi] Simon Carswell, ‘Widow ‘outraged’ by footage of husband’s facial wound’, August 26th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/widow-outraged-by-footage-of-husband-s-facial-wound-1.4338831?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Fwidow-outraged-by-footage-of-husband-s-facial-wound-1.4338831

    [xxxii] Emma Lofgren, ‘’The biggest challenge of our time’: How Sweden doubled intensive care capacity amid Covid-19 pandemic’, June 23rd, 2020, The Local, https://www.thelocal.com/20200623/how-sweden-doubled-intensive-care-capacity-to-treat-coronavirus-patients

    [xxxiii] Suzanne Cahill, ‘Coronavirus lockdowns are still a step too far for Sweden’, February 3rd, 2021, Irish Times,  https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/coronavirus-lockdowns-are-still-a-step-too-far-for-sweden-1.4473119?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fcoronavirus-lockdowns-are-still-a-step-too-far-for-sweden-1.4473119

    [xxxiv] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html

    [xxxv] Michelle Doyle, ‘WHO doctor says lockdowns should not be main coronavirus defence’, October 12th, 2020, ABC, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688

  • Unforgettable Year: July 2020

    As the pandemic subsided during the summer months in Europe, the southern states of the United States experienced a surge in cases.

    We brought a first hand account from Linda Barnard in a New Orleans care home:

    It’s getting real in here. Newly established, the isolation ward has been set up too close for comfort. From my room, I’m able to hear most comings and goings, and I know the current number of patients is exactly nine. In the last twenty-four hours, out of two patients who went to hospital, one died, though not of Covid-19. Then they moved two more into the ward. What I’m not sure of is how many, in total, have gone to the hospital or been identified as having Covid-19, because they move them around during the night. They say about five or six staff tested positive. But a couple of them were out sick before testing was even available. Me, I hydrate. I take daily doses of vitamins and apple cider vinegar. I’m good.

    Ferguson, Missouri, (c) Barry Delaney.

    The pandemic formed the backdrop to the U.S. Presidential election later this year. Photographer Barry Delaney brought us back to the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

    I left a depressed New York city following the surprise election of Donald Trump in November 2016; a city reeling in disbelief at what occurred – but I had captured history unfold in Time Square – now I was heading into the heartland of how this had actually happened – the Rust Belt – then the bus broke down at night in rural Pennsylvania and I missed my connection to Kentucky. I overnighted in a cheap motel and caught an early bus to Kingsport, as we pulled into Bristol, Virginia we alighted for a cigarette break and this anonymous traveller waved his American flag, in defiance or support? To understand this election, one had to be in the rural American heartland, to see what was actually going on – coal-mining towns decimated by unemployment, despair and opiates.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Meanwhile, Dr. Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay explored the economic impact of the pandemic on SMEs, and the insecurity of work in the gig economy.

    He wants to work Monday nights but not Tuesday afternoons; she is available on Saturday evenings but not on Sunday mornings… Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises often find it challenging to recruit part-time workers, with abundant choices available to gig workers in different sectors, but the pandemic has vividly demonstrated the nature and depth of insecurity of this form of employment.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Similarly, David Langwallner identified a new corporate colonialism in the form of austerity:

    Franz Fanon

    Frantz Fanon’s provided a profound insight into how colonised peoples – The Wretched of the Earth – are required to pay the debts of the occupying powers. This has been reproduced in our own societies in the form of austerity. The occupying powers are now the corporatocracy, or those with inherited wealth. The only difference from the colonial period is they are no longer all from the same ethnic group. In fact a veneer of diversity is achieved with the promotion of a few specimens with varied pigmentation, and an embrace of safe, politically correct policies that ignores structural racism.

    While Dr Marcus de Brun posed the question: ‘Where have all the Lefties Gone?’:

    So where have they all gone, those Beatniks and the latter-day Chés? Today, distinguishing ideological differences between ruling and opposition parties in most Western democracies requires superhuman vision, or no vision at all. Existentialist dialogue about literature or philosophy is rarely found in mainstream media, instead relegated to academia, or that strange cabal, referred to disparagingly as ‘intellectuals’.

    What we are left with is an exaggerated respect for the titans of big business, the market, and venerate unlimited economic growth.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    On the theme of social exclusion, Nicole Miller was drawing attention to the drug epidemic that has been afflicting Ireland since the 1980’s:

    The Republic of Ireland has a long history of opioid drug-related deaths. Since 1998, mortalities due to opioids have increased yearly. Indeed, there is now, on average, one drug-related death every day. The majority of these involve users combining two-to-four drugs mainly, heroin, benzodiazepines, methadone and pregabalin.

    Further afield, Keith Bolender was drawing attention to corporate media bias against the Cuban Revolution:

    Criticizing Cuba’s many shortcomings throughout the decades has been an easy endeavour for corporate media. Yet the press has studiously ignored positive aspects of the Revolution. This was seen recently in negative coverage of Havana’s decision to send medical teams to some of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19. Indeed, Cuba was the only nation to provide medical assistance to Italy at the height of the crisis there.

    (c) Hectic Fish

    As in Vietnam the Hectic Fish was finding:

    Storytelling is a shield against loneliness and the unbearable weight of boredom. Truth does not exist, and if it does, then all storytellers are liars. And all storytellers are liars, though Rousseau might have argued that when you are loyal to yourself you are telling nothing but the truth.

    At home in Dublin, meanwhile, statues were on the move from outside the Shelbourne Hotel, an occurrence that drew the critical opprobrium Billy O Hanluain:

    If we are to go back four thousand years and posthumously ‘correct’ the sins of that past, I would fear for many heritage sites around the world tainted by practices and beliefs very much at odds with current ‘enlightened’ standards. In any therapeutic practice, acknowledgment of the past is critical but the difficult work in healing is always how we manage the present, the now, which is after all, the only thing we have.

    And Andrea Reynell caught up with renowned documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle to discuss his new film ‘James Joyce – Reluctant Groom‘ in which poet Niall McDevitt guides us through a London landscape with unknown Joycean associations. The film went back to a period in 1931 when Joyce and his long-term partner Nora Barnacle moved to London for a year to secure a legal marriage.

    Damien Lennon by Brian Culligan Photography.

    July’s musician of the month Damien Lennon reflected on the uncertainty of the pandemic era:

    Grammar expresses a human desire to control time. Regimented in terms of right and wrong, grammar draws lines by which people can express themselves as concurring or not with their own era. Breaking with grammar rules has often been seen as a form of resistance against the dominant forces of a time: take le verlan in disaffected French suburbs for example. But in corona times this paradigm has been inverted: the notion that humanity is at the heart of time has been annihilated. And now, our era has rejected us. Suddenly our grammar is exposed as fantasy. But wasn’t there always an implicit arrogance in the phrase “next week I will be sitting in Tulum drinking tequila”? It seems hubristic that humans are grammatically equipped to script their own future when anything can happen. Such reflections have been on my mind since our latest release flukishly coincided with the pandemic.

    Anakronos (left to right): Caitríona O’Leary, Deirdre O’Leary, Nick Roth, and Francesco Turrisi (photograph by Tara Slye).

    Also in music coverage, Catríona O’Leary finally found an opportunity to work with some of her favourite musicians: Nick Roth, Francesco Turrisi and my sister Deirdre O’Leary, and was inspired by the the witch hunts of medieval Kilkenny:

    But why sing the words of a witch-burner? Because they’re beautiful and I find it interesting to contemplate the contradictions that exist within people. As Stanley Kubrick said when asked if his characters were good or evil, “They are good AND evil!”.

    Kari Cahill

    Artist of the Month Kari Cahill work is grounded in an exploration of landscape:

    The word ‘landscape’ not only refers to the topography of an environment, but also to its existence within society, consciousness and experiences. As we move through our existence we traverse thousands of constantly shifting landscapes – geographic and experiential- moulding them around us. Boundaries shape how we think, move and express ourselves. Our ability to understand ourselves, and our place in this world, rests on our collective responsibility to protect and celebrate our surroundings.

    Finally, Nick Feery ‘the boy from Tore’ brought us back to his eighteenth birthday when he worked for his local builder Whimpy Dunne.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    Unforgettable Year: May 2020

    Unforgettable Year: June 2020

  • The Algorithm of Evil

    The story of subliminal messaging follows an interesting evolution, one infrequently told about a technique that may have created a monster.  Considering this technique in the context of advertising, we can trace its roots back to the post-war 1940’s and 50’s United States. In so doing we must set the stage and, as Voltaire insists, ‘define our terms’.

    Post-war America was undergoing an unprecedented economic boom. Manufacturing was in the ascendancy and incomes rising as never before. Modern capitalism was struggling through the birth canal of history and media-advertising was to be its midwife. The somnolent frugality and penury that defined the war years, and especially the pre-war Depression, was steadily usurped by a ‘terrible beauty’; the  ‘American dream’ was assuming a material reality in cars, clothes, movies, music, diners and jukeboxes , enterprise, technology and invention; so much and more was coming out of America, and much of the world looked on with envy.

    Post-war America thus experienced an explosion in new media; of television, radio, magazines connecting capitalist aspirations, with revenues increasingly derived from advertising.

    Those behind the advertising fuelling American economic growth were fondly known as the ‘ad-men’. It was their job to motivate particular behaviours within a newly financially empowered individual, increasingly referred to as the ‘consumer’. Citizens had evolved into civic and economic units, with civic and economic or consumptive obligations. Consumption, despite being a euphemism at the time for the ravages of tuberculosis, was to become the bedrock of democratic capitalism.

    By the late 1950’s and early 60’s, however, these consumers had begun to satisfy many of their material wants with products that initially endured, leading to new and more targeted influences. Rather than satisfy real and prescient needs, it became the job of the advertiser to ‘get inside’ the consumers’ minds and encourage them to think and feel differently, about each other, about the world, and about products.

    America at the time was rich in oil, steel, lumber, agricultural lands and innovation. Resources were not unlimited, but they appeared so. Notions of conservation, environmental protection, biodiversity or climate change, were barely on the table, at least until Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring was published in 1962.

    During those halcyon days the Republican mantra of ‘trickle down economics’ had some substance, as there appeared to be an overabundance flowing down the social ladder. Even ‘socialism’ in respect of constructing roads, schools and other infrastructure enjoyed a share.

    Planned Obsolescence

    By the early 1950’s, however, it appeared to the captains of industry that the consumer market was becoming saturated. After large sections of the white middle classes had purchased a fridge, a car, a TV, a washing machine and other consumer durables, insiders feared the economy might be headed for a crash. Consumers might purchase enough material conveniences, but would soon begin to purchase less! Limitless economic growth might eventually come to an abortive and premature end.

    The widespread prevalence of this fear cannot be overstated. One researcher writes:

    There were disturbing indicators: for instance, between 1940 and 1950, the proportion of American families with mechanical refrigerators increased from 44 to 80 percent. Indeed, such ravenous consumption of homes, cars, and other goods meant that by the mid-1950s, marketers and businessmen feared, the saturation point was at hand. This fear led to two important marketing innovations. Planned obsolescence, the intentional design of goods to be short-lived, provided consumers with a reason to buy replacement items and created trends that promoted “keeping up with the Joneses.”[i]

    Market segmentation arose from the theory that consumers had different preferences, rational and irrational, influencing their purchases. Advertisers began to target consumers on an individual level in order to market goods. These innovations helped advertisers to differentiate products and more successfully market them.

    In The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith condemned advertising for creating ‘wants that previously did not exist,’ but recognized its importance in stimulating the consumption that had generated post-war prosperity. Thus, between 1946 and 1955, the amount of money spent annually on advertising in the United States nearly tripled, from $3.4 billion to $9 billion. Consequently, throughout the post-war period, the ad man’s ‘real and perceived abilities to influence politics, culture, and the economy steadily grew.’[ii]

    This makes sense: people don’t need to purchase products they already own. Fuelling the fears of a crash, was the reality that products were initially being made to last. Everlasting nylons, everlasting light bulbs, cars and machines with serviceable or repairable parts; permanence and durability were great ideas in the early days, but these ideas soon became dangerous with unfettered economic growth in mind.

    The legacy of this revision is now all around us in terms of the environmental costs, and the ‘Growth Delusion’ has been extensively written about. (See Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1992) An irony emanating from this era is the permanent shift into our present reality of ‘planned obsolescence’. If products refused to wear out they would need an inbuilt expiry date. One might say with reasonable confidence that from the 1950’s the most enduring material artifact of manufacturing, has not been products, but landfill and human waste.

    The task of the ad-man thus evolved from satisfying existing practical needs into creating new ones. Ideally, the ‘need’ for products that would gracefully expire and require replacement. If the products themselves refused to wear-out they would be portrayed as ‘outdated’, ‘outmoded’, or even an embarrassment to the owner.

    The enduring, and egregious reasoning for dumping millions of tons of functional material products, in place of more ‘fashionable’ and  ‘modern’ alternatives, slowly and effectively became normalised.

    To all but the old-school farmer, this modern notion of ‘fashion’ as an important feature of function, persists to this day. The techniques for sustaining this ideology are taught in most universities. Of itself ‘fashion’ is perhaps a strange ideology and so-called ‘fast’ fashion is of course one of the largest contributors to the mass production of human waste. Thus an environmentally inimical notion of style emerged ascendant, and is now practically unassailable. Any questions of the cost or necessity of ‘fashionable’ apparel can readily be dismissed as outmoded.

    Freud’s Nephew

    This juncture in the history of advertising is best illustrated by the career of Edward Bernays – the nephew of Sigmund Freud – perhaps the most famous ad-man in the history of media. His influence as one of the founders of the ‘science of advertising’ is detailed in a BBC documentary: ‘The Century of the Self.’ He made use of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis throughout his career to develop marketing strategies that have come to define the industry to this day.

    For the advertiser or student of media ‘getting inside the mind of the consumer’ is perhaps an entirely reasonable objective. And yet, when we pause to think for a moment, how many of us would be wary of someone proposing to ‘get inside our mind’?

    Bernays most famous use of these ‘new’ psychological techniques, was during his professional  association with the tobacco industry. At the time in America, and indeed in many Western countries, most women did not smoke. The practice was socially frowned upon. If they could be encouraged to start smoking, profits would potentially double.

    Ingeniously, Bernays effectively enlisted the women’s suffrage movement, by fostering a notion that not smoking was a sign of women’s oppression. His campaign implied that social stereotyping was preventing women from smoking, and that it could become an expression of their equal rights.

    This perhaps intimates a familiar failure within feminism, which is the pursuit of equality rather than creating a practical respect for difference. A persistent desire to achieve equality with men, raises women no higher than equality. It sets the bar at the level of ‘man the trousered-ape’. Feminism rarely permits itself to go beyond men, into the realm of an overdue respect for female distinction, especially motherhood.

    If men can smoke, then women should be free to do so also. The idea is simple, it contains a simple truth, but is hardly reflective of anything truly ‘feminist’ or ‘feminine’. Here we encounter the original ‘evil’ of the Sophist; the attempt to prove a facile argument by using true facts.

    Whatever one’s views on the link between women smoking and their oppression, Bernays’s conversion of smoking into an assertion of equality, was unquestionably marketing genius. It should also be recalled that the harmful effects of heavy smoking were not then as widely accepted as they are today.

    A decisive moment in Bernays’ campaign was when he enlisted a group of women to march in the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929. At a pre-ordained moment the women halted the parade, lit up cigarettes and puffed away.

    Bernays and the tobacco industry temporarily re-branded cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’ The artfully manipulated ‘scandal’ had the desired effect, connecting smoking with female empowerment, and within a few years, a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke had been largely conceded. The tobacco companies were laughing all the way to the bank.

    The successful marketing of cigarettes as progressive statements of liberty, female emancipation or a sign of Western sophistication, continues to this day in Africa and in the Middle East.[iii]

    1890s satirical cartoon from Germany illustrates the notion that smoking was considered unfeminine by some in that period.

    Old Socrates and the ad-man/Sophist

    Of course ‘sublimation’ has a longer history than Bernays and the Manhattan ad-men. One might ask, what exactly does it mean to be a ‘victim’ of subliminal messaging? And when or if the victims deny they have been wronged then the delusion is complete.

    Sublimation might be defined as some kind of ‘subversive mind control.’ Yet, perhaps the process is not a dark or subversive tool? Perhaps it is intrinsic to the functioning of group psychology. It may be  integral to how our shared beliefs are transmitted, become established and are continually reinforced through a collective and instinctual need for belonging?

    When misappropriated this ‘process’ of sublimation, becomes what Freud referred to as ‘mass psychogenic delusion’[iv] or what is sometimes described in Psychiatry as a ‘conversion disorder’. Certainly, when particular ideas are introduced into the sublime – the subconscious mind – there is often no limit to the evils they might engender there.

    The ‘message’ is about getting us to behave in a certain way, to convince us to move in a particular direction, despite, or even in contradiction to external evidence, or our own better judgement. Yet this type of definition is equally unsatisfactory. It simply transfers the objective criteria for these newly fostered ‘needs’ to an external place; to someone else, to an ‘outside-of-self’ analysis of what one’s needs really are. This outside or objective ‘other’ must then decide what one’s thinking would normally be, if one’s mind had not been manipulated in the first place.

    If I am aware that I am being deceived, I am hardly being deceived. And if someone tries to tell me that I am being deceived, (as with Plato’s cave dwellers), I might prefer to continue with the deception, before having my gullibility exposed.

    If someone is apparently thinking or acting against their own better judgement, he or she will require an ‘other’ to identify this for them. It’s a classic Catch-22. If I am to realise that I am mad, someone else must tell me, or I must figure it out myself. If I’m sane enough to figure out I’m mad, I cannot have been that mad in the first place.

    Whilst we are ostensibly guided by our own reasoning, we cannot know that our reasoning is being manipulated. Once we become aware of the manipulation; once we have recourse to our own ‘better judgement’ the spell has been broken. But it takes a brave soul to declare to the world: ‘I am being manipulated; I am being controlled or motivated by the ad-man.’

    The essential deception contained within all forms of sublimation, therefore, is the requirement to make the subject believe that his newly fostered belief or desire, has not been caused by the advertisement itself. The advertisement has not caused us to desire a product, but has simply reminded us of an endogenous internal need, one that is entirely one’s own. The ad-man like the sophist has proven a false need by using true facts. The need in this case is only true by virtue of the unspoken fact that we have come to believe its ‘truth’.

    The fostered desire must be hitched to our own desires, our inescapable instinctual imperatives; our desire to be happy; to live in accordance with reason; to be moral and just; or to be loved, accepted or respected by others. The ad-man must encourage us to ‘realise’ autonomously that life will be better, once we go ahead with the purchase.

    There is of course a strong internal bias here. If I admit that my needs are not my own – that they are not genuine but have been hijacked by another – I must then admit to a sort of mental weakness; a failing on the part of my brain or intelligence. It is far easier, and safer, to assume and even insist that my beliefs are my own. That I am too intelligent to be ‘brainwashed.’

    The Sophists

    Sublimation is as old as civilisation. Socrates was convinced that we never really ‘learn’ anything at all. He believed that all important knowledge is within our minds at birth. That it is merely brought into being or delivered into the world. The midwife in this process is the philosopher. Socrates believed the challenge does not lie in the introduction of novel thoughts or ideas, but rather in altering how we go about our thinking. His solution is a Socratic methodology of thought.

    Learning how to count presupposes (in the Socratic sense) an innate knowledge of relative numbers, this knowledge is something that we are born with, and do not acquire. We simply learn how to express and use that knowledge, to apply it in the pursuit of mathematics.

    The structure of language might equally be considered an innate tool, as Noam Chomsky argues with the idea of a universal grammar. It is useful in helping us describe our thoughts, but we do not require language in order to have thoughts. We do not need to formally learn how to engage the process of thinking. Language might help us express our thinking, but we are born with an ability to think, and merely learn to express our thinking through the tool of language.

    For Socrates, learning how to think is a relatively simple matter. There is a good and bad way of thinking. The benchmark for success being its independent approximation with truth; an absolute truth, a priori, unique, unassailable and independent of man. In the Socratic sense, truth is attainable through reasoned independent thinking: in other words, through philosophy. Independence in thinking was, however, an anathema to Socrates antagonists the Sophists. It remains an anathema to the ad-man, independent thinkers are rarely fashionable.

    The main point here is that Socrates is of the belief that there is a distinction between acquiring information or skills, and understanding or correct thinking. What we should ‘do’ with information as it is acquired or learned through our senses, is already known to us innately. The truth is already within us, it is the ‘good as such;’ the ‘good’ in all of us. It is not acquired or purchased from another. It need only be brought into the world by learning how to think correctly, independent of any motive other than truth.

    So here’s the rub, the crucial distinction between Socrates and the Sophists is that the Sophists were uninterested in an internal, a priori truth or the ‘good as such’. They defined ‘good’ as being in the realm of the external, material world. In simple terms, they correlated ‘good’ with success and power. ‘Justice is what is good for the stronger’ is the first Sophistic argument that Socrates refutes in the opening chapter of Plato’s Republic.

    For the Sophist, understanding or philosophy is not to be confused with an inner or a priori ‘good.’ Instead it connotes success in the world. There is a very important distinction between the type of thinking advocated by Socrates and that of the Sophists: the former encourages an evaluation of one’s thoughts from the perspective of an internal uncompromising ‘good as such’; the latter identifies truth on the basis of its success or value in the material or external world.

    Social Media

    Whilst Socrates would have little interest in a ‘like’ button on social media, a Sophist might feel that the number of likes ascribed to a particular thought or idea is a good reflection of its inherent value, and even truth.

    Socrates had little concern for the external world, which he likened to mere shadows upon the wall of a cave. He cared only that he might reconcile his existence in the world with his inner good or an internal a priori notion of truth. If that is accomplished, or at least pursued in an unbiased and philosophical manner, the affairs of society and the world will largely take care of themselves. Socrates’s ideals coincide with Confucius’s wise words:

    To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

    What distinguishes Socrates from the Sophists is that the latter were practical teachers. They charged a fee, and considered knowledge a commodity. Socrates on the other hand always insisted that he had nothing to teach anyone. The wisest man is the fool, or at least he who knows the true extent of his own ignorance.

    The Death of Socrates

    For the Sophist, winning an argument is not simply a question of truth or falsity, but rather devolves  to how the argument is presented. Using true facts to win false arguments is the criticism that is levelled against the Sophist, and indeed it is the essential meaning of the word Sophistry.

    In this ancient contest we find the unacknowledged origins of advertising, and the ‘art’ of persuasion itself. Winning a false argument by using true facts, often entails convincing another of an untruth through recourse to simple self-evident facts. The other’s mind might then be hijacked into thinking and acting upon an idea that he might otherwise find repugnant. Subliminal advertising has its roots in this essential contest.

    If you have been convinced by an external agency to desire popcorn or Coca-Cola at the cinema, then it is not unreasonable to assert that you have fallen prey to a certain type of invidious sophistry.

    The Popcorn Experiment

    By all accounts James McDonald Vicary – a late contemporary of Bernays and graduate of the University of Michigan – was an interesting ad-man. He presents a very interesting contrast to Bernays. He began his marketing career as a boy while in the employment of a company conducting a political poll for the election of a city mayor.

    Sent about town in a cab, he interviewed passers-by to determine how they were going to vote. Vicary came from a humble background, having lost his father at a young age, and his family had struggled to make ends meet. A biographer informs us that his trip about the town was his ‘first time in a cab,’ and the success of his polling data in the prediction of the election outcome, confirmed his career in marketing research.

    In 1957 Vicary issued a press release in which he described the results of an experiment he had conducted on the good people of Fort Lee New Jersey. The experiment is famously known as the ‘Popcorn Experiment’ and it is often referred to as the first documented use of subliminal messaging in advertising products.

    Vicary claimed to have conducted his experiment on 46,599 movie goers, who, whilst watching a movie at a theatre in New Jersey, were exposed to screen images telling them to ‘eat popcorn,’ and ‘buy Coca-Cola.’ During the movie the ‘messages’ flashed on the movie screen in 1/3000th of a second, and as such were too brief to be consciously recognised by the viewers. Nevertheless, Vicary reported that these ‘subliminal messages’ resulted in a 57.5% increase in popcorn sales and an 18.1% increase in Coca-Cola sales during the movie.

    Now you see it…

    What is perhaps most interesting about Vicary’s story is that the experiment generated a public outcry, and was soon dismissed as a hoax or at worst a fraud. Either way, Vicary himself later declared that the results were fabricated and that the experiment never even happened.

    It is important to contextualise Vicary’s renunciation. Amid the hue and cry, he was asked in an interview whether he had obtained people’s consent to have their minds ‘altered’ in the manner in which he claimed? It is quite possible, given the level of opprobrium he faced, and fearing potential claims for compensation, that he chose to distance himself from his work and quietly disappear into historical obscurity.

    The irony here is that Vicary is still considered the father of subliminal messaging in advertising, and the result of the experiment was believed (or at least feared) by many to be substantially true. Indeed, there have been subsequent experiments proving the effectiveness of subliminal messaging in influencing our behaviours. The technique was quickly banned in America, and elsewhere. It seems unlikely that it would be banned if there was no possibility of effectiveness.

    Although the experiment was dismissed as fraud, the unreal or ‘faked’ results convinced more people of the effectiveness of the technique than might have been convinced if Vicary’s results had been deemed truthful. Thus, ironically the faked results had an apparently greater impact in convincing people than the truth might have done. This recalls Nietzsche’s assertion that mankind is too often inclined to hold untruth in greater esteem than its inverse.

    For our purposes the question is a simple one: what is the difference between the sublimation described and conducted by Vicary, and that same sublimation that was described and conducted by Bernays?

    Vicary’s experiment resulted in an immediate backlash, and intervention by the U.S. Congress prohibiting such techniques. In contrast, Bernays continued to enjoy a favourable reputation and career. In the wake of his success with the ‘torches of freedom,’ he achieved legendary status within the marketing world. His books are still widely read and his techniques continue to be taught and applied.

    Why is that Bernays enjoyed fame and fortune, whilst Vicary was compelled to vanish into obscurity, probably relieved that he had not ended up behind bars?

    Perhaps the distinction between Bernays and Vicary’s approach, might be summarised as follows: as long as the individual subject can be preserved from the truth that they have ‘given up’ control of their mental faculties; as long as they remain convinced that the sublimated idea is compatible with their own thinking, the sublimated message will be readily accepted as an endogenous idea – one that has merely been reinforced or brought to light by the ad-man.

    The Algorithm

    In the wake of the 2016 American Presidential election evidenceof Cambridge Analytica meddling first came to light. It became apparent that algorithms had been applied to personal data, gathered from social media, which had then been used to manipulate voting patterns. The Western world (for a brief time) was horrified that minds had been tampered with, unbeknownst to those minds. Subliminal messaging had reared its ugly head once again.

    It is highly likely, however, that the outrage was neither felt nor voiced by the true ‘victims’ of the algorithms. Rather, the anger emerged from the ‘other side.’ It was articulated, often by journalists, who felt that ‘other’ minds had been controlled, and the election of a President had been secured by devious means. This is an important distinction, and it reminds us that the victims of mind control tactics or subliminal messaging are very unlikely to admit to its effect, let alone develop an awareness of the tactics deployed on them.

    Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica (2017).

    And so it might follow that, if we, (the big ‘we’) are victims of subliminal mind control, how would we know? Who will tell us? In political parlance: only the left will inform on the right, and only the right will inform on the left. For each side of the political divide to label its antagonist as ‘brainwashed’ is nothing new. But what happens if each side is not in the habit of listening to one another, and if both sides are indeed correct?

    Today we don’t have to look too far to find the evolution of sublimation: Bernay’s techniques are everywhere. Closer to home, sublimation is nowhere more obvious than in the practice of ‘predictive text,’ and the algorithms employed on social media.

    When I begin to reply to an e-mail, my e-mail account offers to finish my sentences, and even offers complete sentences on my behalf. What is happening here? Why am I not insulted by a computer presuming to know my innermost thoughts, before I have taken the trouble to think them myself?

    How is this process any different from what Vicary attempted in his Popcorn Experiment? Who controls this algorithm that presumes to think on my behalf?  How deep into my psyche do these algorithms and advertisements reach? These are questions that we ‘victims’ rarely care about sufficiently to ask. The process appears benign and refined. Frighteningly, I cannot deny that those words the algorithm suggests do appear to coincide with what I might write, were I presumptuous enough to persist in thinking for myself!

    Shouldn’t I steadfastly preserve my right to think autonomously? Perhaps I should respond like an inebriated rock star, and throw my computer screen out a hotel window in disgust at this presumptuous hijacking of my thoughts.

    Tucker & the Gadfly.

    I have a very close friend who does not read much. I love him dearly because he is straight and honest with me. I value his opinion because he is often more honest with me than I sometimes care to be with myself.

    This friend recently introduced me to a Fox presenter whom I had never heard of called Tucker Carlson. One evening he insisted that I watch one of Carlson’s shows. Initially, I was surprised and somewhat amazed at what he had exposed me to. I forget what Carlson was talking about, but I remember being struck that he seemed quite sincere, and that much of what he was saying appeared to make sense, despite the way he was contradicting many of my core beliefs.

    Tucker Carlson (2018).

    Some days after watching, I decided to return to Carlson in order to better understand him, to recognise what he was trying to convince me of, and how he was going about it.

    I watched two more episodes and the techniques he was employing gradually became obvious. It was not entirely clear at first, hence my perplexity and compulsion to watch him again. His techniques are no different to those used by Bernays or the sophistry of using true facts to prove false unspoken arguments. The facts were obvious, but the arguments, particularly in the arena of race, or race relations, were subtle: concealing dark convictions that align with primitive fears and aggressions.

    There is a certain type of mind that is drawn to people like Carlson; a mind like my own that engages with the world with a set of hard-wired preconceptions, fears and desires. Yet Carlson was not music to my ears because I don’t harbour a fear-based love for guns or a suspicion of black people. Some of my fears I am conscious of, others less so.

    If, for example, I were fearful of Black America, of its claims in respect of racism, slavery, inequality; if I were subconsciously fearful that equality or reconciliation was a threat to me; to my wealth; my morality, or my entitled share of wealth, then Carlson would be my man. It is not simply because he is racist or that he does not believe in ‘equality’. Carlson is interested in attracting an audience, and what he offers in return is a sublimated validation of one’s prejudice and fear.

    One need only watch him at work to see this. The language he uses is openly about freedom and democratic values, and yet, there is a subtext that is difficult to identify immediately, or pick out with direct quotation marks. There is an artful use of words, not quotable sentences but words, interjected into sentences, which serve precisely the same purpose as ‘Eat Popcorn’ or ‘Drink Coca-Cola.’ or ‘torches of freedom’.

    One quickly gains the measure of Carlson’s deeper opinion, or at least of what would likely be his opinion upon issues like gun control, or socialist initiatives such as universal health care, race relations, capitalist wealth, or global warming.

    His unspoken ‘opinions’ or sublimations in respect of race are particularly invidious. The young black American is more often portrayed as a criminal thug, a gangster, a cop-killer. Yet this criticism of Carlson cannot be sustained easily, as there are protective ‘pro-black’ images interspersed in his monologues – ordinary black folk occasionally behaving like decent white folk.

    I imagine the deception is so complete that Carlson has many black subscribers. It is almost as though he is reiterating the traditional racist slur that ‘not all blacks are bad people.’ Subtle slurs like this, provide the racist with a moral foothold.

    It is once again a truth that is used to prove a false argument. Undoubtedly, it is a slur that some Black Americans reiterate and perhaps unwittingly inflict upon themselves. In essence the same sentence may be seen as a subtle evolution of outright racist contempt.

    The former traditional slur has a sublimated racism, whilst the latter outright form is openly vile. The former in its disguise is perhaps more invidious, the latter whilst more grotesque, is at least openly so. Carlson’s racism is in the realm of the former: the sophisticated truism that has its racism concealed beneath the surface.

    But the point here is not a critique of Carlson’s techniques. Instead it is a warning to avoid the same mistake as I made. After watching two final episodes of Carlson in an attempt to gain the full sublimated picture, I then tried to get rid of him out of my life: to cleanse myself of the poison.

    Unfortunately, however, my YouTube feed now regularly spits Carlson onto my screen. I only ever watched two of his shows, yet he finds me at almost every login. I often watch shows about vintage cars, van-lifers and philosophers, yet regardless of my previous choices the algorithm has decided that I am – or should become – a fan of one: Tucker Carlson, an anathema.

    The algorithm has made me one of his countless millions of viewers. Perhaps I would have done less harm to the ‘greater good’ had I watched two episodes of a different kind of porn.

    The modern advertisement might have been defined by Bernays, but the algorithm that finishes my sentences, sends me ‘likes’, and has wedded me to Carlson, was engineered by a small group of techies in Silicon Valley. They apply the most up to date science and research in their engineering. They reach into our minds every time we interface with social media platforms, with the Internet and the ubiquitous smartphone. The purpose of the Internet we are informed is simply to turn a profit. But what is the product they are selling, when most of these platforms appear to be ‘free’?

    I have often heard it said of social media: ‘when you cannot see the product being advertised, it’s because you are the product.’

    Our preferences and opinions become part of the programme, encouraging certain types of thoughts and behaviours in others. The ‘like’ button is integral to the function of social platforms and yet what purpose does it serve in respect of the data or information that is being liked or disliked? Behind the like button lies one of the core values of the algorithm itself; the Sophistic assertion that truth is dependent upon likes. That ‘truth’ becomes truer when enough people ‘like’ it.

    Human behaviour is predicated upon thought: what we do and when we choose to do it; how we portray ourselves; how we are perceived by others; all of these facts become lines of code within the algorithm.

    If we can assert that the history of sublimation reaches as far back as the Greek mind; what can we say of the philosophy of the algorithm? When enough thought becomes manipulated, we may well move into a world where the dominant mode of thinking becomes that of the algorithm itself.

    What if the algorithm has already become our new master, the predominant mechanism for thought and the architect of empirical reality? Does it contain a few lines of code that might define or preserve a moral truth of some kind? How would we know if the algorithm is out of control, if it has ‘gone viral’?

    The Sophists may have had a counterbalance, a devil’s advocate in the form of Socrates the ‘old gadfly.’ Man has always had a counterbalance, a morality of some kind. If the advertisement and the algorithm have managed to move beyond morality, beyond good and evil, ‘it’ rather than we, has become what Nietzsche referred to as the ubermensch.

    Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

    What role does the Algorithm play in the election of a President? In taking to the streets in Dublin because a black man is murdered in America? What role does it play in hatred? In being afraid of a virus, or in wearing a face mask? In taking a vaccine, or in taking one’s own life? The darkness in our world may not be the workings of conspiracy – nor the consequence of irrational political allegiance – it might just be a consequence of sublimation: of a gullible embrace of the thoughts of others.

    What has become of old Socrates, that he cannot and will not come to our rescue? Perhaps he is dead, and perhaps as Nietzsche said of God, ‘we have killed him’?

    Feature Image: Alan Curtis & Patricia Morison in ‘Hitler’s Madman’ (1943).

    [i] ‘Invisible Commercials and Hidden Persuaders: James M. Vicary and the Subliminal Advertising Controversy of 1957’ Kelly B. Crandall HIS 4970: Undergraduate Honors Thesis University of Florida Department of History, http://plaza.ufl.edu/cyllek/docs/KCrandall_Thesis2006.pdf

    [ii] Kelly B. Crandall, Invisible Commercials and Hidden Persuaders: James M. Vicary and the Subliminal Advertising Controversy of 1957. HIS 4970: University of Florida, Department of History, April 12, 2006

    [iii] Amos, Amanda, and Margaretha Haglund. “From Social Taboo to “Torch of Freedom”: the Marketing of Cigarettes to Women .” Tobacco Control 9.1 (2000). Web. 28 Apr 2010.

    [iv] Bartholomew, Robert; Wessely, Simon (2002). ‘Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness’ (PDF). The British Journal of Psychiatry. 180 (4): 300–306. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2BDC2262E104B8A33F3DD49773DA0D8B/S0007125000268578a.pdf/protean_nature_of_mass_sociogenic_illness.pdf

  • Covid-19: The Perfect Storm

    Paying the piper?

    When a researcher publishes a research paper he or she is obliged to state clearly any funding source. The reasons for this are entirely obvious. Most ‘bad’, ‘faulty’, or ‘unreliable’ research is tainted by the interests of those who have provided financial support.

    There is nothing new in any of this, and scientific literature is replete with examples – from the use of Thalidimode for morning sickness to Andrew Wakefield linking the MMR vaccine to autism etc. – of bad or biased science. That is not to say necessarily that a scientist or expert offering scientific guidance has been influenced by the overt or covert desires of his sponsors; however, to preserve impartiality he must declare any sponsors before ‘expert’ or ‘scientific’ conclusions are tendered.

    Unfortunately, the same rigorous insistence on transparency in respect of funding does not extend to appearances on TV or Radio. Thus, if an ‘expert’ appears to promote a particular therapy, vaccination, or social behaviour, he is not obliged to declare a vested interests or private sponsorship.

    It falls to the media source itself – the newspaper or interviewer – to ascertain the affiliations or funding of a particular ‘expert,’ either prior to or during the delivery of scientific conclusions or guidance. This process is integral to maintaining ethical standards within journalism. It is particularly incumbent upon-state funded media, whose income is derived from mandatory licence fees that such standards are not compromised. Without this the general populace could find itself following faulty advice or guidelines to the advantage of ‘he who pays the piper.’

    This is precisely the dark territory we have entered in respect of public health guidelines on masks, lockdowns and vaccinations in response to Covid-19.

    Obligatory Mask-Wearing

    The Irish government has recently made it compulsory to wear surgical face masks on all public transport and inside shops.[i] If a person refuses to comply, without providing a ‘valid’ medical reason, he or she faces a fine of €2500, or a prison sentence of up to six months. The Gardai are to police the validity of such medical reasons. The ethics of a law requiring a Garda to question a member of the public on his or her medical condition in a public places has yet to be discussed in a meaningful manner, despite the clear infringement on an individual’s constitutional right to privacy.

    In respect of masks, there are indeed many strong counterarguments, drawn from respectable scientific literature,[ii] against the anti-viral efficacy of masks, the safety of prolonged mask use; besides the social division they create, pitting advocates on both sides against one another.

    Indeed, the near pointless nature of mask-wearing has been pointed out to the Oireachtas by its own commissioned expert witness: Professor Carl Heneghan director of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.

    Cloth masks are likely to do more harm than good, as it has been stated in many sources that viral particles are so small that the protection offered by most masks is analogous to ‘keeping flies off ones property with a chain-link fence.’ The plastic welder type face shield, in vogue among hotel staff, can reasonably be described as ridiculous in terms of its potential to protect against this virus, or anything at all for that matter. They are, like most masks, little more than a placebo.

    Masks afford wearers the delusion of protection. If one wishes to become aware of the appropriate attire to wear to effectively limit transmission of an aerosol or airborne virus from one person to another, there are plenty of images available online showing what ‘medical-grade’ protective attire and masks looks like.

    Hazmat suit.

    The serious question then arises; ‘when will the population be released from an obligation to wear masks?’

    There is no disputing that Covid-19 remains in circulation in Ireland: cases are detected daily and a small number of deaths continue to be reported. There are reasonable concerns that there will be an uptick in cases during the winter months. Historically, coronaviruses cause 30-40% of the common cold which peaks in winter and ‘dies off’ in the summer months. The natural history of coronaviruses is extensively described in the literature.

    I suspect the mandatory wearing of masks among the general public is motivated by two quasi-political aims. The first is to distract from what is best described as the ‘incompetent manslaughter’ of several hundred elderly care home residents at the height of the crisis.[iii] Secondly, to pave the way for mandatory vaccinations, the legal case for which has already been set out by Sarah Fulham-McQuillan, Assistant Professor in UCD’s Sutherland School of Law,[iv] despite such an intervention not even existing. Such an unprecedented law would obviously be to the direct financial benefit of select pharmaceutical companies.

    Therefore, the end game for public mask wearing, the ‘get out of jail card’, or release from the ’duty to mask’ has little to do with the mask itself, which in practical terms is little more than more symbolic; informing or even indoctrinating  an awareness of the ‘danger’ of the virus. The public can only stop wearing masks once the virus is no longer circulating in society. The only mechanism by which it can disappear is through the development of immunity within most of the population.

    Mandatory masks imply ‘mandatory’ protection for elderly vulnerable people and for young, healthy, non-vulnerable alike. Yet young healthy people have practically nothing to fear from Covid-19, again this is repeatedly cited in almost all available literature. Therefore, when the majority of healthy people within society are ‘protected’ from exposure by masks they are compelled to be protected from developing a natural-immunity through an otherwise natural exposure to the virus. This crucial point has been missing from the non-existent debate in the Irish media on the issue of mask wearing.

    When the state makes mask-wearing mandatory, the state has formally rejected natural-immunity among the non-vulnerable.

    When the State rejects ‘natural-immunity,’ indeed when it wilfully or legislatively deprives the non-vulnerable individual of opportunities to acquire natural immunity, the State is then compelled to adopt the only alternative to natural-immunity, and that ‘only alternative’ is a vaccine.

    We can assume that the lockdown and ongoing prohibitions on large social gatherings and social distancing have worked to an extent – albeit perversely not for the most vulnerable – and that those measures have ‘protected’ healthy young people. This means that only a low number of people have been exposed to the virus across society. This point is apparently confirmed by antibody surveys, showing that less than 5% of the population had antibodies,[v] although this survey was not extensive, and antibodies appear to fade rapidly in persons with mild Covid-19,[vi] which gives way to other forms of immunity.[vii]

    Thus, if the only means of eradicating the virus is reaching a herd immunity threshold – assuming we do not reach zero Covid and hermetically seal our borders indefinitely in a new Tír na nÓg – it follows then that the majority of society must eventually be vaccinated in order to achieve immunity. Given that masks have been mandated, it is entirely consistent with government policy that the ‘eagerly’ awaited vaccine must also be mandated.

    Warp Speed

    Perhaps the foremost expert who has been advocating compulsory mask-wearing in the general public has been Professor Luke O’Neill, a Trinity College biochemist, and head of its immunology department. Professor O’Neill is not a Medical Doctor, nor has he a qualification in public health or epidemiology. Most recently he has been to the fore in insisting mandatory masks should be extended to secondary school students.

    As an advocate of compulsory mask wearing, it follows that Professor O’Neill should be a proponent of a universally administered Covid-19 vaccine. Notably, Professor O’Neill’s Twitter feed has included enthusiastic countdowns for the vaccine being rushed through clinical trials at ‘warp speed.’[viii]

    There is nothing new here, and nothing is being uncovered or exposed. Professor O’Neill’s position is neither unusual nor indeed unreasonable. It is entirely expected. Any proponent of universal mask-wearing cannot avoid being a proponent of vaccination as the means of escaping the imposition of the mask – universal vaccination is the only escape from the universal mask.

    The relevant question may be whether Professor O’Neill is a proponent of compulsory masks because compulsory masks may only be escaped via compulsory vaccination?

    The subtle shift, lost on many, is that the current measures have transformed the positive anticipation of a vaccination for those at risk, into a formal obligation for universal vaccination.

    Mask wearers (in theory at least) remain ‘potential hosts’ for Covid-19; natural internal immunity having been officially avoided; immunity can only come from the pharmaceutical industry. Failing to make this connection is a failure of simple logic.

    If universal vaccination is the logical conclusion of mask-wearing, and if indeed members of the public are threatened with jail if they fail to comply; it would seem entirely reasonable to establish any potential conflicts of interest that might exist between any scientific proponents of masks, and the manufacturers of a vaccine, very likely to be compulsory for all; a proposal also mooted in other jurisdictions.

    One does not wish to focus upon Professor O’Neill unduly; however, as he has been perhaps the most publicly visible scientist to promote masks for all it is not unreasonable to examine his relationship with vaccine manufacturers, and operation ‘warp-speed’.

    Sitryx

    In 2018 Professor O’Neill, along with five others[ix], founded a private biotech firm called Sitryx. The company develops therapeutic agents that modulate the immune system. Agents that modulate the immune system or immune response, are essential ingredients to many if not most vaccines available on the market today.[x] It is therefore unsurprising to learn that the largest investors in Prof O’Neill’s firm are indeed vaccine manufacturers.

    GlaxoSmithKline[xi] and Lilly Pharmeceuticals[xii] Sitryx’s biggest sponsors, are currently developing potential vaccines for Covid-19. GSK has invested some $30 million into Sitryx[xiii], and also provided Professor O’Neill with a laboratory and assistants to facilitate his research. All of this information is in the public domain, and indeed is published on Sitryx’s own website:

    Sitryx was founded in 2018 with seed funding from SV Health Investors and raised $30 million Series A funding from an international syndicate of specialist investors including SV Health Investors, Sofinnova Partners, Longwood Fund and GSK. In 2020 Sitryx formed an exclusive global licensing and research collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company. Lilly also became an investor in the company.[xiv]

    What we can at least say is that a cautionary approach to vaccination would be antagonistic to Sitryx’s primary funders. Whilst mandatory vaccination could result in a transfer of enormous tax revenues into the coffers of those companies fortunate enough to win the ‘race’ for the vaccine.

    It is interesting to note that at the outset of the crisis, Professor O’Neill was interviewed on the Late Late Show. At that time he declared that masks were ‘pointless’, if not ‘dangerous’. He described the new coronavirus as an “evil virus” that could get into people’s bodies “through their eyes.” When asked why he thought people were wearing them he replied good humouredly they had watched “too many horror movies”.

    Strangely, however, within a matter of weeks the good professor had entirely changed his mind on the issue and continues to assert that masks are indeed entirely essential and should be mandated for almost everyone.

    Through no fault of his own, Professor O’Neill’s potential conflict of interest has been wilfully ignored in the national and mainstream media. To my knowledge, he has not once been asked about the relationship between his biotech company, and his sponsors at GSK or Lilly pharmaceuticals, having appeared on almost every talk show on radio and television in the land.

    An Alternative?

    Partiality towards the bio-tech agenda and public health guidance, might be in the public interest, if masks and subsequent vaccine were in fact the only option available. The general public have been led to believe that mask wearing regulations are ‘for the greater good’, and that those who object are reckless, anarchic, or simply ignorant.

    https://twitter.com/DonnellyStephen/status/1293973649683288070

    They are not. Mask-wearing policies differ across Europe, mandatory in some countries optional in others. Most Scandinavian countries have resisted the compulsion to the extent that is seen elsewhere. Norway only recommended their use on August 14th whilst using public transport in and around the capital Oslo.[xv]

    Throughout the pandemic the Swedish approach has been far less draconian than in most European countries, permitting (without encouraging) it’s healthy non-vulnerable citizens to be exposed to the virus within the community setting, and thereby developing natural immunity, a policy that is somewhat in keeping with the natural cycle of viral colds and flues. This takes advantage of natural processes to encourage its natural extinction or diminished severity.

    This reduces the potential hosts within society and the attendant risk of the virus spreading to vulnerable or elderly communities. In the face of widespread international criticism[xvi] the country has persisted with the closest model to the much maligned notion of ‘herd immunity.’ Recently the UK press, including the Financial Times[xvii] and Daily Telegraph[xviii], have awoken to the relative success of the Swedish approach, media sources are increasingly joining the ranks of the ‘converted’.

    The same model that the UK initially opted for, but later dismissed based on defective modelling from Imperial College, which suggested that a ‘herd immunity’ approach would lead to half a million deaths in the UK,[xix] a model that has since been shown to have been deeply flawed, and based on flawed epidemiology.[xx]

    The Swedish approach by avoiding compulsory mask-wearing is not entirely dependent upon universal vaccination as their only ‘end game’. That is not to say that the Swedes will avoid or decline a vaccine when or if it arrives on the market; it is merely that their approach is not locked-into a vaccine as the principal source of immunity for the population. The Swedes have maintained the right to ‘opt’ for a mask and, as such, and have preserved the right to ‘opt’ for a vaccine too.

    Regardless of what a country may choose in respect of vaccination, the Swedes will certainly have more of a ‘choice’ relative to those countries that continue to more actively avoid exposure among their healthy non-vulnerable citizens.

    Social Division

    The recent transformation of many aspects of the external environment, into something of a hospital ward, through the wearing of masks by many, and avoidance by many more, is certainly a new departure in the social habits for most people in Ireland and beyond.

    Many are under the impression that mask wearing either in public, in shops or on public transport, is not simply ‘a good idea’ but integral to saving lives. Battle lines have been drawn between the ‘sensible’, and the ‘reckless’.

    The state and national media are on the side of the ostensibly sensible, and mainstream media is presently flooded with a positive insistence upon masks. Regardless of the government’s insistence, and the concurrence of mainstream media, large numbers of people refuse to comply, and social division is apparent on the streets, among neighbours and even within families.

    This division is a consequence of government policy, and that policy is not based upon any agreed international standard. Interestingly, however, there is little evidence of debate on the subject. This lack of dialogue, and indeed the active suppression of views contradicting the official line, is a very worrying development within a supposedly democratic society, where a diverse range of opinions should be heard.

    The present social policy of mandating compliance is a difficult road to navigate without infringing human rights, as members of the public who choose not to wear a mask must disclose their most intimate and private medical details to members of An Garda Síochana in public places, if they are to avoid arrest, fines or imprisonment.

    In the recent past an individual’s personal medical details were entirely private and a doctor might be struck off the medical register or sued for sharing this information, without informed consent. Under the current emergency legislation a member of the Gardaí must elicit a quasi-medical history from a non-mask wearer and be satisfied as to its reliability if the non-mask wearer is to avoid arrest. Inalienable human rights to privacy, have been entirely brushed aside.

    Unfortunately the consequence of current policy is leading to what might be described as the most divisive situation in Ireland since the civil war. There are those who believe that they are ‘saving lives’; their own, their countrymen and the vulnerable. Opponents believe that wearing a mask is harmful to one’s health, will do nothing to save lives and that there are sinister, political and even corporate motives behind the directives.

    Each side of the divide is ostensibly concerned about public welfare. However, those conforming to the narrative are generally presumed correct, whilst nonconformists are readily dismissed as wearing ‘tinfoil-hats’, or being conspiracy theorists, or even ‘anti-vaxxers.’

    Presently, the division within society is only simmering. There have been occasional incidences of angry exchanges between both sides, yet these are mostly confined to the zones where mask wearing and other guidelines are compulsory; public transport, and social settings where other guidelines such as social distancing within pubs, restaurants or social venues also apply.

    https://twitter.com/IrishInquiry/status/1294238059949678592

    For most of us, wearing a mask on the bus, in the shops, or having the local publican issue a dodgy food receipt so that we can have a pint without fear of being arrested, may not be insurmountable limitations. If we are compliant we are unlikely to be questioning the guidelines, and will be looking forward to a return to normality. Fortunately, for the government it is difficult to look forwards and backwards at the same time. Sure enough, dialogue pertaining to mistakes, missed screenings, deaths in nursing homes etc. are all rather conveniently eclipsed by the current political mask wearing debate. It might be argued that there is indeed a malevolent purpose to this.

    If a division erupts into violence or aggression, the parties involved are generally on the extremist fringes of either side of the divide. This is unlikely to remain the case.

    I believe we have been led here by motives that are not in the interests of the greater public. The social division that is being fostered, may (for the present time) be manifest only at the level of ‘wearing the jersey’ and shouting up for one’s team. Yet this relatively benign manifestation is likely to evolve into a more sinister version of itself. This is perhaps inevitable as the associated stresses upon either side will undoubtedly increase in the coming months.

    Second Wave?

    At the time of writing deaths from Covid-19 have declined to almost nothing in Ireland and throughout most of Europe. The question that is in most people’s mind is whether or not this decline will continue throughout the autumn and winter months?

    Covid-19 is member of the coronavirus family, responsible for some 30-40% of the yearly or seasonal ‘colds’ that affect almost all nations.[xxi] With it still circulating, we can expect a seasonal increase in cases in the coming months. Our normal or historical experience with the cold and flu viruses each year sees their arrival some time in Autumn, peaking around March or April, and then waning before generally expiring in late Spring or early Summer.

    There are two significant factors influencing this process. The first being the natural immunity that develops within society as most people are exposed to and recover from the cold virus. The second factor being the increase in the length of daylight and the effects of daylight (UV-light) upon aerosols, droplets or viral particles on external surfaces. There is nothing new in any of these assertions, which are basic tenets of microbiological science.

    Therefore, we can conclude, that as the virus is still here, and as the measures to date have been moderately effective in preventing a build-up in natural-immunity within the population, as the days shorten, a resurgence seems inevitable.

    Stress and Disease

    In my twenty years of experience as a physician I have noted what many doctors have observed since the dawn of medicine itself. This is the simple empirical truth that psychological stress is a major factor in the subjective evolution or pathogenesis of ALL disease. This truism applies more for some diseases, less in others, but is indeed true for all disease. In many cases psychological stress is the sole factor that pushes the generally tolerable symptoms of minor illness, firmly and definitively into the realm of significant pathology. Indeed, the NHS advise that loneliness can make the symptoms of a cold virus feel worse.[xxii]

    Today, the language of psychological and emotional pain has been almost entirely medicalised. Now when one is talking about one’s ‘medical’ illness or one’s ‘diagnosis’, it takes the skill of a competent psychoanalyst to uncover the subjective psychological truths that invariably unite one’s medical ‘pain’ to a deeper insecurity – its emotional or psychological fountainhead. The process is an introspective one, and nowadays most of us are cut off from making these connections.

    For some it may be a simple lack of emotional-intelligence, for many more it is simply easier to run with the medical diagnosis, and just take the pill.

    I am not asserting that pain is ‘caused’ by emotion or psychology. It is not; it is caused by disease. However, emotion or psychology will determine the tolerability of pain and can push the sub-clinical pain into the realm of clinical manifestation. It will and does make almost all disease worse.

    An Honest Version of the Self

    Likewise too, when people become angry, on either side of the mask wearing-divide, there is a history to that anger, one that connects it to deeper and more profound frustrations. This is an important factor, rarely considered by a medical establishment that is in thrall to the idea of the human subject as a ‘biological machine’. One where symptoms are mechanical faults, requiring mechanical or physical remedies. Almost all of these remedies must then be purchased. Modern cures are rarely derived from nature, from introspection or the pursuit of an honest version of the self.

    This is entirely relevant to the subjective ‘deeper’ angers, insecurities and frustrations that are easily brought to the surface in many people, when the scapegoat of an inferior or non-compliant ‘other’ is provided or even offered up by the powers-that-be. History is our teacher here, and as usual she is wilfully ignored.

    I mention the influence of psychological stress to highlight the observation that it is a major determinant in one’s experience with Covid-19 as with any dis-ease. Psychological stress is (medically speaking) a self-fulling prophecy. People who are most anxious about becoming ill are most likely to become ill. If you ask yourself often enough whether or not you have a headache, you will eventually experience one.

    The same applies to Covid-19. Most people who are exposed to the virus do not even know they have been exposed. Many experience little more than a common cold or flu like illness, many more experience nothing at all. As is the case with the common cold, the crucial factor that determines where one is likely to fall upon the spectrum of suffering, is not simply the cold-virus itself, but rather the physical and importantly the mental health of the ‘victim’. There is no individual more acutely aware of his symptoms, than someone who is most anxious about his health.

    Back to School

    Psychological stress for some members of our society has an equally seasonal component. Each September when Irish children return to school, the stress levels within many Irish families, (particularly those with young children) begin to rise.

    There are immediate demands for uniforms, books, lists, shoes, sportswear, transport etc, all of which place a significant burden on parents, especially mothers. Returning to school this year for most families will be fraught with many additional anxieties.

    Children may have to wear masks, visors, social distance in the classroom and the playground, be prevented from bringing lunch boxes, and perhaps have their uniforms washed daily. Schools may not be able to accommodate required classroom sizes and schedules for attendance may have to be altered. The familiar routine is to be a ‘thing of the past’ – the implications for increased stress upon parents and children are incalculable. Let us organize all of this into a list of observations

    An elevated number of potential viral hosts, which is a consequence of suppression of natural-immunity.

    Increased life of the virus in the external environment due to decreased daylight

    Raised levels of social anxiety and subsequent susceptibility to illness/infection

    Continued persistence of the virus at low levels within Irish society

    These factors suggest a resurgence of the virus this winter, and taken in context with the existing level of social stress, and the inevitable increase in those stresses next month; it is not unreasonable to suggest a ‘perfect storm’ is gathering.

    It is highly likely that the present level of bitterness or anger between both sides of the mask wearing divide willl be where that stress and pain becomes publicly manifest. The deeper tragedy at play, is the fact that each side of the division will be seen as the aggresor. Yet those who have fostered the division remain immune to any degree of scrutiny for past mistakes, while dark clouds are on the horizon.

    [i] Orla Dwyer, ‘Explainer: Everything to know about new face covering regulations’, thejournal.ie, August 10th, 2020, https://www.thejournal.ie/when-and-how-to-wear-a-face-covering-ireland-5171841-Aug2020/

    [ii] David Isaacs et al, ‘Do facemasks protect against COVID‐19?’, Journal of Paediatric Child Health, June 16th, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7323223/?fbclid=IwAR15wQ0gOySIs8c7I4m9qsCiPJT6E66pM9Hiwr82AKeAPfcmfmKctK9qG1Y#__ffn_sectitle

    [iii] Catherine Fegan, ‘’Many in nursing homes died deaths that certainly could have been prevented’’, Irish Independent, June 13th, 2020, https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/many-in-nursing-homes-died-deaths-that-certainly-could-have-been-prevented-39282569.html

    [iv] Sarah Fulham-McQuillan, ‘Strong legal basis for making Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory’, Irish Times, June 27th, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/strong-legal-basis-for-making-covid-19-vaccinations-mandatory-1.4313941?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fstrong-legal-basis-for-making-covid-19-vaccinations-mandatory-1.4313941

    [v] Simon Carswell, ‘Coronavirus: Ireland has ‘no significant’ herd immunity, study shows’, July 20th, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/coronavirus-ireland-has-no-significant-herd-immunity-study-shows-1.4308216

    [vi]F. Javier Ibarrondo, Ph.D. et al, ‘Rapid Decay of Anti–SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in Persons with Mild Covid-19’, July 27th, 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2025179

    [vii] Katherine J. Wu, ‘Scientists See Signs of Lasting Immunity to Covid-19, Even After Mild Infections’, New York Times, August 16th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-immunity-antibodies.html

    [viii] https://twitter.com/laoneill111/status/1276424356869046279

    [ix] Sitryx, ‘Founders’ http://www.sitryx.com/about-us/founders/

    [x] ‘Adjuvants help vaccines work better’ https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/adjuvants.html

    [xi] https://www.pmlive.com/pharma_news/gsk_signs_deal_with_medicargo_for_covid-19_vaccine_1344532

    [xii] ‘Lilly Initiates Phase 3 Trial of LY-CoV555 for Prevention of COVID-19 at Long-Term Care Facilities in Partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)’ https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lilly-initiates-phase-3-trial-ly-cov555-prevention-covid-19-long

    [xiii] ‘New biopharmaceutical company Sitryx launches with $30 million fundraising to develop disease modifying therapeutics in immunometabolism’, October 8th, 2018, https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/10/08/1617744/0/en/New-biopharmaceutical-company-Sitryx-launches-with-30-million-fundraising-to-develop-disease-modifying-therapeutics-in-immunometabolism.html

    [xiv] Sitryx ‘Founders’ http://www.sitryx.com/about-us/founders/

    [xv] VOA News, ‘Norway Makes First Face Mask Recommendation Since Pandemic Began’, VOA, August 14th, 2020, https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/norway-makes-first-face-mask-recommendation-pandemic-began

    [xvi] Peter S. Gordon, ‘Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale’, New York Times, July 7th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html

    [xvii] Richard Milne ‘Sweden’s pandemic no longer stands out’, Financial Times, August 9th, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/7acfc5b8-d96f-455b-9f36-b70dc850428f

    [xviii] Allister Herd, ‘Sweden’s success shows the true cost of our arrogant, failed establishment’, The Telegraph, August 10th, 2020   https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/12/swedens-success-shows-true-cost-arrogant-failed-establishment/

    [xix] Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, ‘Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action’, New York Times, March 17th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-imperial-college-johnson.html

    [xx] See: David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik, ‘Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time’, The Telegraph, May 16th, 2020,
    And: Freddie Sayers, ‘Nobel prize-winning scientist: the Covid-19 epidemic was never exponential’, Unherd, May 2nd, 2020, https://unherd.com/thepost/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-the-covid-19-epidemic-was-never-exponential/

    [xxi] J. Black, Micriobiology Principles & Applications, (1993) p.580

    [xxii] ‘Loneliness may make cold symptoms feel worse’, NHS, March, 2017, https://www.nhs.uk/news/mental-health/loneliness-may-make-cold-symptoms-feel-worse/

  • Where have all the Lefties Gone?

    Revolution? Really!

    Lately there seems to be something very right-wing about being on the ‘Left’. I’m not really sure what the ‘Left’ actually stands for anymore. Until the 1990’s it was the place where you would find a broad array of Marxists, Trotskyites, Labour Party members, Socialists, and even Shinners. All partook of an identity easily distinguished from the ‘Right’, where there was a corresponding mix of Thatcherites, Reaganites, ‘trickle-down’ economists, and extreme libertarians.

    Oh boy! Things were easy then. Even if you didn’t sympathize with the Left, agreement with the near-ubiquitous Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) made you one by proxy. The Left was a vast political and psychological landscape, and it was almost impossible to reach another political standpoint without crossing its borders.

    In essence, the Left was once defined by its distinction from the Right; the big Other of Nuclear Power, the Corporation and ‘profits before people’. It was real, accessible, unavoidable, and an essential alternative to the establishment; a crucial political counterbalance to the dominant side of politics. It was, ostensibly, about ‘ordinary-people’, higher taxes for the rich and social investment.

    For a long time the Left held the intellectual high ground. Existentialists, artists, poets; Kafka, Camus, Beckett, Joyce, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and many more, were all on-side, raging in their own way ‘against the machine’; against religion, blind conformity, and the inhumanity of a comfortably-numb establishment.

    You just had to grab a copy of Kafka’s The Castle, slip into a pair of Birkenstock’s, order a latte, or smoke on a clove cigarette, to declare yourself a Leftie. Today those same cafes are populated with ‘techies’, hurriedly devouring avocado toast, perusing the Economist, fiddling with a ‘fit-bit’, and asking Siri if Tesla shares are on the rise.

    So where have they all gone, those Beatniks and the latter-day Chés? Today, distinguishing ideological differences between ruling and opposition parties in most Western democracies requires superhuman vision, or no vision at all. Existentialist dialogue about literature or philosophy is rarely found in mainstream media, instead relegated to academia, or that strange cabal, referred to disparagingly as ‘intellectuals’.

    What we are left with is an exaggerated respect for the titans of big business, the market, and venerate unlimited economic growth.

    What Colour are Irish Apples?

    Perhaps the Left simply grew old and frail? The fruit of the early labours brought sufficient liberty and licence to sire a more politically effete ‘snowflake generation’. Perhaps their offspring have simply ‘sold out’, or been wooed into the corporate fold, via a co-dependence on social media and semi-legal sedatives?

    Yet today in Ireland our government is not simply failing to tax corporations progressively, but actively trying to return tax revenues to its corporate ‘benefactors.’

    Allegiance of the national media to the Government’s ongoing legal battle to return tax revenue to Apple has been crucial. Thus, in one article published on the RTE News website in September 2019 entitled ‘The Apple tax case: All you need to know,’ RTE’s Business editor Will Goodbody concludes his analysis with the following summation:

    But wouldn’t we like to get our hands on the cash?

    That would seem like a great idea on the face of it, and one advocated by quite a few politicians.

    At a time when we are facing significant economic uncertainty with Brexit, a global economic downturn, trade wars and more, €14.3bn would go a long way towards resolving many problems.

    However, that would only be a short term gain and may only go to reinforce claims that Ireland is a tax haven – something the Government strongly denies.

    In the long-run the argument made by other politicians and experts is that Ireland would be far better off if it and Apple won their appeals.

    This would protect Ireland’s reputation and send a strong message out to the international investment community that Ireland is a safe place to invest, they claim.

    Of course, there is much change afoot in the international corporate tax environment anyway, particularly through the OECD. Within the country too, the Government has taken steps to clamp down on corporation tax loopholes.

    So while a €14.3bn windfall might seem very attractive, for a small open economy like ours that is so dependent on inward investment and a reputation for doing clean business, it actually could prove massively damaging.

    The stakes are very high for all concerned and the next hand will be played on Tuesday morning in Luxembourg.

    Note that the argument for accepting the tax arises from “quite a few politicians”, whilst the case to return the tax is made “by other politicians and experts”. Apple must be permitted to  avoid paying taxes, otherwise they might take their sugar elsewhere. At least that’s the “expert” view.

    Goodbody’s supposedly impartial analysis is really “all you need to know”.

    Notably, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic whilst in opposition Green Party leader Eamon Ryan repeatedly stated he hoped the government would drop its legal challenge to the E.U. judgment, and accept the unpaid tax (2). Yet whilst negotiating the Programme for Government this enormous issue, slipped down the Green agenda.

    It’s reached the stage where we should not be asking where are the Left, but rather where have our collective morals disappeared altogether with regard to a company paying its dues.

    Revealingly, in 1968 the rate of corporation tax in the U.S. stood at 52.8%. Since then it has dropped steadily to the present rate of 21%. Socialism is an expensive business which requires taxation revenue.

    Halcyon days.

    Socialism is the political expression of Leftist ideology. In calling for a Renewed Deal, David Langwallner argued recently that Socialism may have been undermined by Socialism itself:

    In Late 1970’s Britain in particular, the excess of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the Unions. In circumstance where initiative was stifled Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan championed the old doctrine of unregulated markets.

    What Langwallner’s critique hints at is that when the unions became strong, workers in many industries became lazier and devoid of initiative. There is also the U.S. Republican assumption that socialism has the same effect upon the poor. The welfare or unionised notion of paying people to work less, or not at all, may indeed be the ‘terrible’ underbelly of socialism, but this notion needs to be unpacked, with impartiality.

    When the poor are given sugar in the context of a political philosophy that values sugar (or material wealth), as the measure of success, it is not unreasonable to expect that teeth will rot and guts bulge. This is, however, true of the poor and of the not-so-poor. The problem with sugar is that it dampens hunger for more demanding or nutritional alternatives.

    What do people generally do with the essential supports from a socialist system, once the absolute essentials are paid for? If there is something remaining, do they buy; beer, smokes, take-aways, or books to read? Some might choose the latter, but let’s face it, they are hardly in a majority.

    The ‘poor’, are encouraged to become more ‘educated’ and ‘literate’. Yet, all too often, getting homework done, or having academic interests is only really possible as one ascends through the class structure of Western society. Education is impeded at an early stage by classrooms that are overcrowded. Literacy or literature has little social currency, if you don’t believe me ask a poet.

    The poor live within a society that values wealth above most other qualities. The education system hardly teaches children to become autonomous individuals, insisting on conformity to a particular curriculum. Children are primarily educated to become ‘workers’ or ‘professionals.’

    The poor respond to their marginalization through recourse to booze, smokes, sugar, football, or pot. Or someone can vent frustrations or social impotence upon those vulnerable who are closer to home.

    James Joyce described this process in Dubliners in the stories of ‘Counterparts,’ where the ‘hero’ Farrington is lauded in a pub after work, for a witty retort to his hectoring superior’s question: ‘Do you take me for an utter fool?’ His response ‘I don’t think, sir, that that’s a fair question to ask me’.

    He has his drinking buddies in stitches, but ends the day realising the joke may have cost him his job, which shines an unforgiving light on his failings. Returning home:

    He cursed everything he had done for himself in the office, pawned his watch, and he had not even got drunk.”  At home his son becomes the scapegoat: Farrington severely beats him with a stick, for failing to keep the fire alight.

    Joyce subtly illustrates the inferiority and anger we inflict on others because of our own socially reinforced notions of success; and what it means to be a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’. Human psychology changes very little.

    A Deeper Analysis

    What of the assertion that the socialist transaction cannot avoid reminding both beneficiaries and benefactors, of who the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ really are? Now we are upon the fringes of a different kind of question. This is not to doubt the requirement for social supports, but to interrogate more deeply the psychology of the participants, the ideological context, and the material nature of the transaction itself.

    We have been playing different versions of the same capitalist game since the advent of civilization, in amassing personal wealth. Yet, the irony is that human-mortality resolutely confirms ownership as a delusion. Every ‘thing’ we think we own, is in fact, merely borrowed for a time. The plastic bags within which we carry home our groceries, may well be around for longer than ourselves.

    Science, technology, government and mass production have freed us from a necessity to hoard, but it continues in different forms, as we make it our life’s work. Perhaps we are simply stupid or perhaps instead we have been conditioned to fear instead of trust? Wealth provides security and assuages certain fears. Indeed, if we could only trust our politicians to deliver on their promises, we might be less inclined to hoard, and even happily pay our taxes.

    In the decline of the Left, Democracy succumbs to a capitalism that sustains corporations, the market and a state bureaucracy. Arguably Democracy has foundered, and an evolution, or a new kind of ‘social experiment’ is long overdue. Impending environmental collapse means the window for change is fading fast.

    In the present version of ‘the game’, there are plenty of ‘losers’. Social welfare is the essential mechanism whereby those ‘losers’ are protected from falling too far from the field. The game is indeed an expensive one. As such, Socialism is a kind of charity that is derived from the taxes of those who are not losing badly, or (in theory at least) from the taxes of those who are not losing at all.

    Yet, what becomes of Socialism when it is trapped within the wealth-game and dependent on the charity of the winners? What is the nature of the relationship between giver and receiver? The latter ought to be grateful, whilst the former cannot escape feeling self-righteous, magnanimous, or even ‘Christian’. Much of this ‘sentiment’ is superficial, but what if we dig a little deeper?

    What if the recipient of socialist charity feels resentment towards his benefactor?  Or what if his outlook is merely ambiguous, or he could not care less about a state that has generously endowed him with entitlements like a home, a medical card and welfare payments? If he lacks gratitude, he is apparently not fulfilling his part of the transaction. But if he experiences gratitude, he is demoralized.

    What if the poor are not as thoughtful as some presume? Perhaps they see the relative wealth of the State, and resent that they are dining on crumbs, however hearty? We in the middle classes expect recipients of our social charity to be grateful, at least to the extent that they refrain from breaking into our homes and disturbing the islands in our kitchens.

    But what if the poor man is an angry man, and not a grateful demoralized slave? What if he is uncertain as to why he is angry? What if he defines his material wealth, his status, through the same relativist lens as his benefactor? He has clearly ventured outside the contract; he is not playing by the rules. He may even become a criminal.

    Mainstream media displays an obsession with ‘obvious’ criminals. Yet the hidden criminality of tax avoidance is immune from daily scrutiny or moral indignation.

    https://twitter.com/roisiningle/status/1141006400421806082

    But what if our ‘obvious criminal’ is merely demonstrating his anger by pissing on the street, or through petty crime, littering,  graffiti or larceny? What if his addiction or self-destruction is a symptom of losing the game? What if much criminality is instead, the sublimation of something deeper? The criminal participates in a different game, where he doesn’t depend on charity and has an equal if not a significantly improved chance of becoming a winner?

    We are want to believe that they are indeed grateful for our socialist charity, and immune to the material-relativism that has generated the very excesses that makes such largesse possible. Within this narrative criminals are simply ‘bad-eggs’ requiring incarceratation, re-education, rehabilitation, punishment or perhaps simply entertainment with a little bit of sugar.

    Alain de Botton described a ‘Status Anxiety’ where the relatively poor are just as unhappy as the relatively rich. How unhappiness manifests in either ‘class’ is different of course: rich and poor display peculiar versions of the same dis-ease. Neither are immune from feeling like a ‘loser’, and indeed, becoming a ‘winner’ is often far less rewarding, than assumed.

    It is only when we have the courage to reject the wealth-game that permits and demands us to be charitable, that ‘we’ begin to reject both cause and effect. At best however, we wallow in the intellectual mire, of continually trying to change the rules; to make society more inclusive, accessible and accommodating for all the players. We never tire of trying to preserve the game and construct what Slavoj Zizek describes as ‘Capitalism with a human face.’

    Counter Argument

    The counter argument is often that without wealth, charity becomes impossible. Perhaps we are all now ‘trickle-down’ economists.

    There is, however, in this modern era, a reasonable reply, requiring a modicum of thought. It states with philosophical confidence, that without wealth, charity itself becomes largely unnecessary. This ‘radical’ assertion is based on a progressive assessment of our social progress, of our technology, our science, our medicine and our ability to provide for honest human needs.

    There is today, more than enough for everyone, but only when we begin to define ‘enough’ outside of the context of relativism. Yet it’s a truth that has yet to find a political home, and be lived up to by ‘we the people’. We should not despair, however, the Scandinavian nations, at least, seem to have secured a few lifeboats and embarked on a voyage of political discovery.

    On a practical level, the question then arises: how might we elect politicians who will lead by the contrary example of rejecting the wealth-game, instead of the usual perfunctory review of the rule-book?

    I believe we must listen to the hidden articulations of our ‘obvious’ criminals, sanction the un-obvious criminals, and honestly reject our material superfluity.

    If we should ever embark upon a different game, politicians will have to tell us what many do not wish to hear. That too much money is not good for us. They will have to insist that the game itself is the cause of our dis-eases.

    It is simply inhuman to live in a society that does not hold socialist values; and yet we cannot avoid Oscar Wilde’s astute observation in The Soul of Man Under Socialism that: ‘charity degrades and demoralizes. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.’

    We must move our political philosophy beyond the Victorian ideal of a charitable socialism, into a realm of thinking that renders charity itself unnecessary. To do so we must consider human beings as being far more than consumers. We must recognise that the poor don’t require a decent and philosophically grounded education, we all do.

    To think philosophically or even intelligently, we must re-evaluate our collective love of sugar. We must dispense with excessive material possession, status anxiety, eternal youth, and fast fashion. The measures of success and the benchmarks for respect within a shared society must be turned on their fat ugly heads.

    Such a society would be one where each human being is recognised as being born with something successful already contained within. It need not be consumed or purchased or attained, it is already hard-wired, and needs only to be introduced to the world by the midwife of old Philosophy. If the Left is to become viable again, it must stand as an antagonism to the irrational consumptive ideals that have come to define the individual, society and state. In order to do so, the Left must own a pure philosophy, and lead by example.

    The Extinction of the Left

    It is interesting to note that many, if not most of the big Corporate entities we might consider to be on the Right, emerged from ostensibly Leftie origins.

    Steve Jobs, ‘Leftie’ origins.

    Steve Jobs who founded Apple, was an orphan of mixed race parentage. The start-up began in a garage with a few pals, followed by a rise to fame and fortune with a ‘vision’ to bring an ‘alternative’ to the market, a computer for ordinary people.  Likewise all the main players from Starbucks coffee, Facebook, Google etc., began their lives with the lefty dream-tropes, of grass-roots change.

    In Ireland, we had something of the same transformation of U2 the band, into U2 the industry. We see this evolution in erstwhile Lefty publications like the Guardian, who begin on the Left, and then drift inexorably right-ward, becoming increasingly dependent upon the market, or the ‘clickbait’ of social media.

    Arguably the same process has ultimately transformed  RTE. It’s income from mandatory TV licences was supposed to insulate it from market forces. Yet it is now caught in a bind between dependent on licence fees and the market revenues it derives from advertisements. The present salaries of its top presenters are as publicised as they are ignored. Early on, the transformation was objected to by one of its most accomplished and renowned directors, Bob Quinn, who resigned as an RTE producer in 1969, objecting to the increasing influence of market imperatives.

    Today, stuck between the pay-masters of Government and the Market; ideas uncomfortable to either, are rarely countenanced. RTE’s financial dependence define its intellectual boundaries. What has evolved, might be described as something of a national ‘metronome’, ticking hypnotically between two defined limits; a fidelity to the ruling regime (whomever they may be) and a strict conformity to market ideology. Until RTE is liberated from itself, (and we from it), Ireland’s intellectual paralysis seems likely to remain.

    Too often, the Left is contaminated by the same wealth that it seeks on behalf of the proletariat. Thus as Lefties become rich, we evolve slightly different values. The process of the son growing up and murdering his father, is as old as Greek mythology. A cynic might even suggest that the purpose of the Left is simply to nurse the children of the Right, until they are mature enough to leave the den and hunt for themselves.

    The Meek shall Inherit the Earth

    It appears that you have to be poor to be on the Left. The further one moves from poverty into the middle classes, the more of a material ‘success’ one makes of oneself, the more difficult it becomes to declare oneself a Lefty.  As most society get wealthier the Leftist demand for ‘more money’ for the relatively poor is increasingly difficult to sustain. Terms like ‘looney left’ are increasingly grounded in empirical truths.

    During the Lefty campaign against water charges in 2014, then Tánaiste and leader of the Labour Party Joan Burton answered a questions in the Dáil with words that may have led to the demise of her career:

    “All the protesters I have seen seem to have extremely expensive phones, tablets and video cameras.”  [They]… “put Hollywood in the ha’penny place.

    It serves to remind us that only ‘genuine,’ ‘deserving’ poor should lay claim to being on the Left. The brutal irony is that the statement was made by the leader of the Labour Party, then in receipt of a salary in the region of €200k per annum, which just goes to confirm the absurdity of Irish politics.

    Yet we cannot insist that all Lefties are equally bereft of integrity. Socialist TDs Joe Higgins and Clare Daly, were jailed for protesting against bin charges in 2003. Higgins subsisted on half his salary, donating the remainder to his party. TD’s under the banner of ‘People before Profit’ can claim a similar ideological legitimacy.

    Perhaps there is some cut off point at the lower middle class, where the legitimacy of being a Lefty starts to break down? Lefties (real ones) apparently don’t drive Range Rovers, or have islands in their kitchens, and they don’t live in the leafy burbs.

    Yet I, along with many family members and a few friends who are relatively wealthy, consider ourselves ‘legitimate’ Lefties. The real test arrives when we are called upon to give some of it back, to pay more taxes, or take pay cuts. I like to think that we would gladly rise to the occasion. However, I am yet to experience a political regime that is willing to lead by example, and until then, my own superfluous wealth is safe from them, and perhaps safe from a more honest version of myself.

    Protective Rationalization

    The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins.
    “The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by the discovery. It was miraculous.
    “It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue, slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honour, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
    Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

    In many respects a new market space has opened up where Lefties can now outsource our morality, in order to reconcile private wealth with the realities of global, ecological and home-grown privations.

    In pursuit of this ‘protective rationalization’ the easiest thing may simply be to deny everything, from climate change to the Holocaust. To blame the poor for poverty and the addict for his addiction – de-legitimizing the left by pointing to their expensive phones.

    Having lived in California for many years and been educated there, I wonder at how I reconciled my own life; going to college, driving a pick-up, living in a comfortable apartment in Sacramento, and attending University. How was I able to reconcile my hard-earned comforts with the privations I witnessed while walking through the Mission District? There one encounters a kind of ‘zombie apocalypse’ – an army of homeless, social outcasts, mentally ill, war-veterans, alcoholics, drug addicts, down and outs, panhandling to get by, engaging in petty crime, sleeping on the streets, and being a veritable ‘nuisance’ to all and sundry.

    At the time, I bought into a particular narrative that may have held an element of truth back in the naughties. I had emigrated to America with nothing, I had some help from a girlfriend. I lived with her until I could get on my own two feet; obtained a student visa to make myself legitimate; attended college; found a job and secured a credit card.

    Encountering the homeless, I too saw them as ‘bums’ and ‘wasters’:too fucked up on drugs; or too lazy to take advantage of the opportunities that California had afforded me. They may not have had expensive phones but they had the same ‘opportunities’ as I enjoyed.

    Since then I have grown up, and become a little wiser in respect of what ‘causes’ another human being to sleep on the streets. Yet, what I now know remains alien to many Americans who cling to the belief that their nation is a ‘frontier’ society, where fortune and success await anyone willing to get out of bed early in the morning and get to work.

    Henry David Thoreau

    Henry David Thoreau

    I imagine that when Henry David Thoreau began his life experiment on Walden Pond, his ideas conformed with those of a contemporary Republican in the U.S., Indeed, his assertion that ‘government is best which governs least’ remains a Republican or Right-wing ideal, in respect of taxes and social investment.

    If, however, that assertion is amended slightly to: ‘government is best which has to govern least’, we may gain a clearer understanding of what Thoreau stood for. There is an obligation upon government to govern, and there is an equal obligation upon individuals members of society to avoid needing an excess of governance.

    Society requires a government to keep us safe from criminals; to protect borders from invasion, (armed as opposed to invasions of the hungry or displaced); to treat its water and sewage; to tend to the sick and to educate children.

    Government on all these levels is essential. Yet there is a vital counterbalance to the need for government. This arises from the autonomy of the individual, his freedom to determine his own destiny. If we convince ourselves that the bum has chosen his destiny and that his choice is his ‘right’, his ‘freedom’; we find it easier to exclude the horror of his existence from the relative comforts of our own lives.

    But it isn’t easy to convince oneself that another human being deserves a squalid life, simply because of a ‘choice’ he has made as an expression of his liberty. Yet this is an approach that seems to work for a lot of people.

    So what can we do? We can’t simply raise enough in taxation to provide every homeless person in the Western world with a slice of middle class living.

    Perhaps we can stay on track, with the Republican notion of ‘opportunities’, so that the poor have less of an ‘excuse’ to be poor? Wherever that argument lead us, it cannot escape the hard reality that fellow human beings should not be allowed to sleep, live and die on the streets. Nor can it escape the reality that the existence of winners gives rise to losers. Clean, hygienic shelters/homes, access to adequate nutrition, to mental health services, to education; all are eminently realisable in a state that can send aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf.

    A rejection of personal material wealth raises a different type of  intellectual ‘poverty’ and affords us a different type of environmental solution. In respect of the environment, and our own personal ‘enlightenment’, it might well be the only approach that will permit the global human enterprise to continue.

    Love thy Neighbour?

    So the Lefty question remains: Is it wrong for me to live out a life of comfort, whilst many within my society and billions outside of  it, live in squalor or at least as ‘losers’ beyond the prevailing notions of success? I fear the answer is yes. But at what distance does my relative abundance, my moral indignation, my personal wealth, become relatively immoral? Perhaps I owe more of an obligation to my immediate neighbour, if indeed I am aware that he or she is hungry or suffering or is abusing his dependents. But what if he lives two doors down, or a block away, just across the border, or on another continent?

    Sadly, as we become wealthier, we become less overtly Lefty. We subtly change our morals to accommodate our ‘success’ in the world. As the process evolves we become overburdened by our possessions, our connections with corporations, or our smartphones.  The weight often grows to the extent that we feel a need to outsource those same morals, to a ‘safer’ place than Leftist activism.

    We achieve this through comedy, through the arts, or perhaps through supporting the Green Party. Art allows us to feel the pain of the poor without getting our hands dirty. Comedy provides us with a safety valve to laugh at the pointless nature of our own materialism, our insatiable desire for more of the same.

    The Green Party are of course not the enemy. Yet the notion that we can ameliorate the collapse of global ecology, through a new type of ‘Green consumption’, through recycling, or by driving an electric car is a palpable manifestation of our capacity for delusions that are at once essential and ineffectual.

    The Growth Illusion

    The poverty that is chiefly described in the West, is rarely the real poverty that sleeps on the streets and numbs itself with heroin. It is instead, the self-absorbed horror show of ‘relative poverty’; doctors, teachers, nurses, state employees, train drivers, taxi men, all of us feeling that relative to others, we don’t earn enough and don’t possess enough.

    The desires of the ‘many’ are the voices that politicians listen to. Putting more money in the pockets of ‘ordinary people’ or ‘the squeezed middle’, is the mantra of almost all political parties. It is the basic economic imperative of the state. It grounds what Richard Douthwaite and others have referred to as the ‘The Growth iIlussion.’ Growth maintains the irony that a cure for our social and environmental ills, can only arise from more of the same cancer.

    In Walden Pond, Thoreau made an honest evaluation of our real needs by his little experiment in the woods. He added the corollary of an extended list of things that are honestly beautiful, and of value. Unsurprisingly most of these things cost nothing at all.

    I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited  farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more  easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them  serfs of the soil?
    Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and  smothered under its load.

    The Left is Dead, Long Live the Left

    We have murdered the Left by failing to recognize that we ourselves, our individualism and materialism, remain the absolute source of our social ills, and petty dissatisfactions.

    The revolution cannot begin until we reject materialism in ourselves, the devil at home as opposed to elsewhere. We must become proud to be materially poorer than our neighbours, so that we might be richer; in spirit, in mind, in temporal freedoms, in Nature and in soul. What a truly paradoxical concept! The only thing such an idea has going for it, is the fact that today more than ever before, this is as realizable as it appears impossible.

    Plato in his idealised Republic insisted that the political elite of his ideal state, its ‘Guardians’ should not be paid, and should treat gold as if it caused a disease. They would be trained to recognize that their gold lay in their souls and cultivated minds.

    James Joyce described his art in A Portrait of Artist of a Young Man as follows: ‘I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the un-created conscience of my race.’  That aspiration should become the banner of an honest version of the Left.

    When Ireland or indeed any wealthy country begins to see politicians rejecting their current salaries in favour of a minimum wage, once more copies of Ulysses instead of Argos or Ikea catalogues adorn coffee tables; when we we begin cultivating our gardens, baking bread, and leading by example; only then will the Left be a living honest thing. Then a revolution will have begun; not out the streets at the behest of social media, but rather within, the ‘smithy of the soul.’

    Perhaps there is something in the phrase that; ‘there is good in everyone’. Alas, I have my doubts. But it is this ‘good’ that demands practical and honest expression from the top down. It is then that the environment will have a hope, and the plutocrats will have something to fear. Then and only then will the cause and need for socialist charity begin to end. Governments will need to govern less. The Left will be ‘woke’, and the tired old game will have been irrevocably changed.