Cassandra Voices

Tag: efficacy of masks

  • COVID-19: Torches of Freedom

    ‘Harold Evans used to say that an investigation only really began to count once the readers – and even the journalists – were bored with it’
    Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?

    In New York city on Easter Sunday 1929, in a premeditated move, a group of women brought the annual parade to a halt and proceeded to light up cigarettes. In a choreographed response, the tobacco industry, guided by the legendary Edward Bernays, re-branded cigarettes ‘Torches of Freedom’.

    This manipulated scandal had the desired effect of connecting smoking cigarettes with female empowerment. Within a few years, a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke had largely been conceded. Effectively doubling its market, the tobacco industry laughed all the way to the bank.

    Such an apparently spontaneous public spectacle is arguably the gold standard in advertising, wherein an avant-garde movement is associated with a product or service – all while the consumer is blissfully unaware. Importantly, radical or even rebellious social groups often inform mainstream taste, as with the popularity of so-called ‘ghetto styles’.

    This article explores how the pharmaceutical industry, in league with technology corporations and so-called stakeholder capitalism – which entails giving corporations more power over society and democratic institutions less – successfully associated global support for universal vaccine uptake against COVID-19 with a ‘left-wing’ political outlook, infused with youthful idealism.

    In particular, global Black Lives Matter demonstrations appear to have been harnessed – without the consent of organisers – to popularise the use of face masks, which became the enduring global symbol of the pandemic. The fretful atmosphere these inculcated offered a chilling reminder that COVID-19 was constantly in our midst.

    This arrived despite an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2020 dismissing calls for widespread masking as ‘a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic’. That same month the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine referred to 14 trials on the use of masks vs. no masks, saying these ‘showed no effect in either healthcare workers or in community settings’. Thereafter, even experts who questioned their efficacy were censored on social media.

    Masks were supposed to play an equivalent role to the assumed purpose of vaccines: protecting others. They were made – and in some cases remain – compulsory in many settings in numerous states, foreshadowing similar laws enforcing vaccine compliance. In essence, the vaccine would set us free from an obligation to wear masks.

    Summer, 2020

    By the summer of 2020, with case numbers plummeting, many were wondering whether COVID-19 had become an endemic, seasonal respiratory infection. We learnt that France’s first known case was in December, 2019. Later, it was discovered to have been circulating in Italy from September, 2019 and in Spain from as far back as March, 2019, apparently without overwhelming medical systems.

    But a whole industry had been waiting for a pandemic to occur, with the incentive of producing a vaccine for global use and, seemingly, an architecture of surveillance that had been publicly discussed from the outset. In contrast to the Swine Flu debacle, this opportunity would not be lost.

    Moreover, it was being reported that PCR testing was inflating case counts (and thus mortality statistics) through false positive results. Publicity stunts that generated a wave of global hysteria were by then appearing increasingly absurd. Meanwhile, extraordinary predictions for mortality, suggesting we were contending with a challenge equivalent to the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1919 were proving seriously wide of the mark.

    Spanish Influenza caused approximately 75 million deaths, whereas COVID-19 may have been responsible for a global death toll of 6 million, the vast majority of whom were beyond average life expectancy, at a time when the global population was about five times that of 1919.

    Indeed, the early spike in deaths from (or with) COVID-19 in some countries can be attributed to hospitals transferring sick older patients into care homes, where outbreaks followed and only basic medical care was available.

    The ‘Scientific’ Advice Changes…

    After a period of social isolation brought about by unprecedented stay-at-home orders and lockdowns, there were no significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in the wake of large and often disorderly Black Lives Matters demonstrations triggered by the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25.

    In response, some outlets claimed protestors’ use of face masks had prevented outbreaks. However, most of those in evidence were cotton fabric, which health agencies now acknowledge to be next to useless. Furthermore, masks had been worn as a defence against tear gas, or in order to preserve anonymity prior to COVID-19, as the feature image for this article from 2014 demonstrates.

    Whatever the purpose, an impression was created of ‘caring’ mask-clad protestors demanding racial justice around the world. Subsequently, Joe Biden’s own lawyers helped Whole Food workers mount a legal challenge to allow them to wear Black Lives Matters-branded facemasks while on the job. More revolutionary aspirations – including to disband the police – were conveniently ignored by lockdown-enthusiasts who craved enforcement.

    Circumstantial evidence suggests that demonstrations were seized on by an alliance of vested interests that exert control over a swathe of media, new and old.

    The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appears pivotal. The Foundation is the second-largest contributor to the WHO budget, and put over $10 billion into universities in 2020 as well as at least $250 million into journalism in the first half of 2020 alone.

    Unprompted by the publication of any scientific study, the WHO changed its advice on wearing masks on June 5, 2020 shortly after the Black Lives Matters demonstrations. Most national health agencies – long subject to regulatory capture – followed suit, although a few countries declined to alter long-standing advice.

    In the U.S., NIAID director Dr Anthony Fauci claimed he had previously told a white lie to the effect that wearing a mask offered no protection in order to prevent a run on stocks. But emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal he was giving the same advice in private — against mask use.

    Manipulation of mortality statistics can also be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. This set out strict new rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths that differed fundamentally from registration for other causes.

    The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’

    The achievement of universal vaccine uptake – no matter how limited its usefulness – offered dizzying possibilities to the super-rich intent on engineering a new world order, which was openly being referred to as the Great Reset.

    Political Identification

    There was also a direct political purpose for stoking fears around COVID-19, which goes some way towards explaining the involvement of actors beyond the pharmaceutical sector. Application of ‘the science’ against COVID-19 would undermine right-wing Populist movements around the world, which had been to the fore in challenging globalisation – alongside chauvinistically asserting national and religious identities.

    The political quiescence of the radical left in a period of authoritarian lockdowns led by rapacious global corporations arrived following the defeats of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and a concomitant decline in investigative journalism. Fresh from seriously undermining Corbyn with bogus charges of antisemitism, the once-progressive Guardian became a leading conduit for fearmongering coverage of COVID-19. It now provides fawning interviews with Bill Gates, whose Foundation subsidises the newspaper.

    Nonetheless, in the era of the internet political allegiances retain a tribal dimension that can be exploited. Thus, at the outset of the pandemic when lockdowns were first mooted many identifying as left-wing assumed that in ‘following the science’ and/or ‘listening to the experts’ they would be preventing the medical system from collapsing.

    But as the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris put it: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    In fact, from the outset there were huge divisions, and arguments, in the scientific community over the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports. But these debates were largely concealed from public view through online censorship of authoritative academic sources.

    2020 was also the year of the U.S. Presidential election during which the Democrats used the pandemic as a weapon against incumbent Populist President Donald Trump, who actively antagonised those identifying as left-wing.

    In order to defeat Trump, the Democrat establishment seems to have entered a Faustian Pact with Big Tech, ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and Big Pharma.

    One still hears partisan support for vaccines against COVID-19 being expressed by those identifying as left-wing. Most seem oblivious to the world’s ten richest men doubling their fortunes during the period, while the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fell; besides the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies.

    It is axiomatic that young people are drawn to idealistic ‘left-wing’ ideas – any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head. This was also the cohort that would be most difficult to persuade to take a vaccine.

    Therefore, apart from allaying individual health concerns, taking a COVID-19 vaccine was sold as an exercise in civic virtue. Hold outs were decried as selfish and put other people’s lives at risk, even unAmerican, while ‘anti-vaxxers’ were portrayed by a prominent (however hypocritical) left-wing ideologue Fintan O’Toole as a motley crew of ‘egoists, paranoiacs and fascists.’

    Generally ignored in this coverage is in that in the U.S. vaccination rates lagged among people of colour, and that leaders of the Black Lives Matters movement were steadfastly opposed to vaccine passports.

    ‘We Realised We Could’

    In a revealing interview with The Times Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, whose unpeer-reviewed paper in March, 2020 proved pivotal – ‘due to the professor’s WHO ties’ – to the introduction of lockdowns in the U.K. and elsewhere, revealed amazement at the influence he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    “Getting away” with imposing lockdowns – that appear to be causing ongoing excess deaths – was predicated on the assumption that a vaccine, or vaccines, against COVID-19 would be invented within eighteen months or longer.

    A subsidised vaccine against COVID-19 would be all the more lucrative if it was not simply a one-off treatment, and as long as states were offering a captive market, through coercion if necessary.

    It also represented a unique opportunity to trial new technologies. Unsurprising, the industry, and their supporters, were highly resistant to any suggestion of a safe, off-patent treatment being used instead.

    Since the nineteenth century, the pharmaceutical industry has been implicated in a host of scandals, including the recent opioid epidemic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, dean of Harvard Medical School concluded in 1860 that ‘if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the seas, it would be all the better for mankind – and the worse for the fishes.’

    Moreover, in a history charting advances in longevity, The Changing Body (2012), Floud et al argue that ‘it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it.’

    Of course medications such as antibiotics continue to save many lives, but as David Healy put it ‘we are living off scientific capital accumulated in an earlier age.’

    Peter C. Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre has argued that the industry’s conduct today closely resembles organized crime syndicates. He wrote perceptively: ‘Drugs always cause harm. If they didn’t, they would be inert and therefore unable to give any benefit.’

    A recently published work entitled The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research (2020) by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry argues:

    Pharmaceutical spin doctors are the contemporary counterparts of the sophists of fifth century Greece. The essence of sophistry is to shape public opinion by skilful mastery of persuasive speaking without regard for any considerations of truth. Pharmaceutical marketing is a form of sophistry, whereby the serious attempt to discover efficacy or safety in medicine is subjugated to the goal of promotion. Medical rhetoric has usurped medical science – an embarrassment in an age allegedly devoted to evidence-based medicine (p.126).

    Qualitatively Different

    Attitudes to the COVID-19 vaccines were also scaffolded on tried and tested paediatric vaccines against common infectious diseases such as measles. Parents are encouraged to vaccinate their kids not just for their own sake, but for the sake of all children.

    The COVID-19 vaccines were, however, from the outset qualitatively different to most traditional vaccines, which generally produce a herd immunity that diminishes childhood morbidity – and even mortality – from infectious diseases, notwithstanding at times spurious claims of adverse reactions.

    All COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ produced so far are qualitatively different to most – with rare exceptions – traditional vaccines that are designed to prevent an infection from occurring.

    At the very least, one would have expected the trials to determine whether a COVID-19 vaccine would seriously diminish illness; yet as British Medical Journal associate editor Peter Doshi observed in October, 2020: ‘The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.’

    He continued:

    None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

    Moreover, the companies were busy covering their tracks, meaning efficacy, and long-term safety data, would be difficult to determine. In January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. Yet Doshi and Light argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    The information in the public domain was easily manipulated by servile media. In April, 2021 a Lancet article by Ollario et al referred to the ‘elephant (not) in the room’, wherein vaccine efficacy was being reported overwhelmingly in terms of a relative risk reduction. This gives percentages of around 95% efficacy, whereas the absolute risk reduction of developing a serious illness was in the region of just 1%.

    Importantly, relative risk reduction only considers ‘participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population.’

    Peter Doshi has since publicly argued these ‘products which everyone calls MRNA vaccines are qualitatively different from standard vaccines.’

    Whistleblower

    In November, 2021, Paul D. Thacker in the British Medical Journal brought to light a whistleblower’s account of poor practices at a contract research company carrying out Pfizer’s trials. Brook Jackson raised questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight which, once again, gained little or no traction in mainstream ‘progressive’ media.

    The real scandal is that often coercive attempts to persuade the entire adult – and in many cases child – population was not based on a cost-benefit analysis.

    Recently, a peer reviewed article in Vaccine – the premier journal for vaccine research – found the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with a 16% higher risk of serious adverse events.

    The study was limited to an analysis of trial data the companies had submitted to the FDA and did not evaluate the vaccines’ overall harm-benefit. The authors argue that

    The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.

    A young, healthy person faces a vanishing risk of hospitalisation from COVID-19.

    However, throughout the pandemic industry-aligned ‘fact checking’ initiatives served to undermine scientific integrity. The tactic of so-called fact checkers is to highlight absurd claims from random sources that serve to undermine informed criticism of the lockdown-mask-vaccine policy.

    Apart from its political ramification, the vaccine was, and is, a cash cow. It is instructive that the AstraZeneca vaccine, which in an apparent appeal to left wing sentiment was to be sold ‘at cost’, never received U.S. authorisation, and the manufacturers have since announced that it will be sold for a profit.

    The failure to interrogate vested interests reflects a serious decline in contemporary journalism, especially from publications previously associated with progressive viewpoints, many of which now depend on philanthro-capitalist handouts. We have reached an absurd juncture where a centibillionaire such as Bill Gates is attacked for being ‘left-wing’.

    Sell to Anyone

    The COVID-19 pandemic realised former Merck CEO’s Henry Gadsden dream of making drugs for healthy people, which Merck would be able to ‘sell to anyone’, as he candidly revealed to Fortune magazine in the 1970s.

    This could not have been achieved without the active collaboration of technology corporations and stakeholder capitalism in an era of surveillance capitalism. The censorship and disinformation used to bring the world to a halt in 2020, and beyond, represents a unique attack on democracy and worked to the benefit of a global financial elite.

    As Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry anticipated ‘the ideal of an open, democratic society is threatened by an oligarchy of corporations’ (p.23).

    However, at least much of the evidence that was used to permit coercion is slowly being decoded by investigative journalists such as Paul D. Thacker and research scientists of the calibre of Peter Doshi. We can remain optimistic that the truth will eventually out, at least on the margins, despite continued social media censorship.

    Nonetheless, the willing dissemination of disinformation in once-reputable publications has been increasingly normalised. Thus, the first and enduring casualty of the war in Ukraine has been the truth.

    On September 10, 2022 the Guardian reported that ‘the much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive was a disinformation campaign to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s special forces have said.’ Strikingly, the authors do not refer to the Guardian previously publicising that disinformation.

    COVID-19 generated a conveyor belt of disinformation that has cast doubt over the reliability of contemporary journalism, and revealed how medico-scientific discourse can be captured by vested interests. It is vital for the future of humanity, as we confront environmental challenges, warfare and crushing poverty that scientific rigour, coupled with values that can be traced to Aristotle, are reasserted.

    Feature Image: Black Lives Matter demonstration in Oakland, California, December 2014.

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Pandemonium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “The big calls”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Deep Background

    A ‘Note on Sources’ says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Dictatorial                                                                                                                        

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

    His decision to appoint Professor Philip Nolan – ‘The pair had known each other for years’– to oversee disease modelling ought to have prompted concern. Nolan was then President of Maynooth University, his ‘research was in physiology – specifically the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.’ With no research background or expertise in infectious diseases Nolan’s wayward models – and bizarre commentary on antigen testing – informed Irish government decisions throughout the pandemic.

    According to the authors, ‘almost everyone who attended NPHET meetings agreed on one thing above all others: a Tony Holohan production.’ An unnamed source described his style as ‘very dictatorial and autocratic,’ and ‘intolerant of alternative views.’

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

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

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

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

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

    Infection Fatality Rate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Loss of Proportionality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Pharmaceutical Industry

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

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

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

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

    He added that

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

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

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

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

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

    Micheál Martin

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

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

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

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

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

    Non-Sterilising Vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

    Against the Grain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Feature Image: (c) Daniele Idini

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

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

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