Cassandra Voices

Tag: Hannah Arendt

  • The “Strawman” Conspiracy Theorist

    In two hundred years doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade maybe – but it reigns. And all science must culminate in the science of healing – not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to live… to live.
    Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907), p.263

    This article charts the origins and development of what often appears to be a strawman conspiracy theorist over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through “fact checker” initiatives operating at the behest philanthrocapitalism. This appears to have insulated regulatory agencies long prone to capture from adequate journalistic scrutiny, leading to a groupthink amidst an effective censorship of alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response.

    Losing Our Grip?

    In May, 2020, veteran Guardian journalist John Naughton explored the origins of Plandemic a “documentary” video ‘featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.’ Naughton relates how the video migrated from mainstream social media into the dark recesses of the Internet.

    As he put it: ‘The cognitive pathogen had escaped into the wild and was spreading virally.’ Ultimately, the New York Times ‘traced it back to a Facebook page dedicated to QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory, which has 25,000 members.’ All this Naughton said: ‘confirms something we’ve known since at least 2016, namely that conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around. And when they have a medical conspiracy theory to work with, then they are really in business.’

    In May, 2020 The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldburg announced that conspiracy theorists were winning, and that America was ‘losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.’ Thus a 2014 study estimated that half the American public ‘consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory,’ a proportion that had risen to 61% by 2019, suggesting the Internet was accelerating the trend. Another survey indicated that 60% of Britons were wedded to a ‘false’ narrative.

    Adjudicating on the falseness, or otherwise, of a narrative is not always, however, a straightforward exercise. Indeed, it will be argued that justifiable concerns around recent impugning of expertise have been weaponised to create another layer of disinformation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The “wild-eyed” conspiracy theorist – often referred to as “members of the tin foil hat brigade” – has become a widely derided figure. This appears to be a belated response to so-called “post-truth” accounts, associated with supporters of Donald Trump in the U.S. and proponents of Brexit in the U.K., dismissive of expertise. This challenged a board consensus around such issues as the importance of mitigating climate change. But in confronting genuine disinformation it appears that many on the left, in particular, failed to interrogate vested interests during the pandemic.

    “Totalizing Discourse”

    Charles Eisenstein defines conspiracy myths as ‘a totalizing discourse that casts every event into its terms.’ He traces these overarching explanations – relying on observed phenomena only insofar as these fit with a preordained pattern – to the first century Gnostics, who believed that ‘an evil demiurge created the material world out of a pre-existingdivine essence.’

    The “totalizing” nature of such an approach has previously been dismissed by Karl Popper since ‘nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.’[i] Oliver and Wood (2014) identify three facets to an approach that has traditionally pointed to Freemasonry –an “illuminati” – Jews and Jesuits, and, in more recent times, intelligence agencies such as the CIA, KGB, MI5 or Mossad:

    First, they locate the source of unusual social and political phenomena in unseen, intentional, and malevolent forces. Second, they typically interpret political events in terms of a Manichean struggle between good and evil … Finally, most conspiracy theories suggest that mainstream accounts of political events are a ruse or an attempt to distract the public from a hidden source of power (Fenster 2008)

    In her seminal 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies such a tendency as a precursor to mob rule, describing how a conspiracy theorist ‘is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.’[ii]

    Yet certain conspiracy theories in our time, such as suggestions the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to plunder oil resources rather than decommission weapons of mass destruction, or that the fossil fuel industry deliberately sowed confusion over climate change, remain plausible, even if we lack clear documentary proof.

    A problem lies in how individuals with minimal academic attainment treat conspiracies as objective truths rather than conjectures based on circumstantial evidence. The likelihood of a conspiracy is often portrayed as “beyond reasonable doubt”, as opposed to “on the balance of probabilities.” A formally educated observer may be repelled by an insistent approach that does not allow for reasonable doubt.

    The intuition relied on by confirmed conspiracy theorists thus generally fails to acknowledge uncertainty, and lacks scientific or historical rigour. Yet these accounts may still occasionally yield insights when empirical methods fall short. After all, suspicions raised by conspiracy theories are often vindicated. Rather than dismissing out of hand such ‘magical thinking’, it is useful to consider these as unproven hypotheses, and not necessarily untrue, simply because an individual is overstating a case.

    For example, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly persuasive evidence has emerged of a laboratory leak – perhaps from so-called ‘gain of function’ research – giving rise to the pandemic. But in February, 2020 The Lancet published a letter from a number of prominent scientists who ‘strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.’ This had a chilling effect on the scientific debate during the early stages of the pandemic.

    Notably also, the ‘father of economics’ Adam Smith opined that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’[iii] Smith’s portrayal of commercial calumnies is reflected in a question posed at a medical conference in 2018 by a Goldman Sachs executive: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

    Previously, a succession of pharmaceutical scandals led Ben Goldacre MBE to take a sympathetic view of so-called “anti-vaxxers”, who are now consistently conflated with “conspiracy theorists”: ‘I think it’s fair to say that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are a kind of poetic response to regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.’

    Similarly, Tom Jefferson – editor of the Cochrane Collaboration’s acute respiratory infections – in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2009 in the wake of the Swine Flu pandemic-that-never-was pointed to shadowy pharmaceutical forces: ‘Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.’

    UNESCO’s World Trends Report 2018.

    Journalism Under Threat

    An assumption of malevolent or self-serving – cui bono? – motivations (particularly concerning a Big Pharma industry with a shameful record of distortion and manipulation) is almost a prerequisite for being an investigative reporter. Stories don’t drop out of the air. Unless a journalist assumes wrongdoing – in essence a conspiracy theory – there would be no reason to begin digging.

    The key distinction between genuine journalism and conspiracy theorising is that proponents of the latter tend to blurt out their “findings” without marshalling supporting evidence, with the Internet providing anonymity as required. This, however, makes such accounts easy to ridicule to the detriment of journalism with an evidential basis.

    Journalists have long been deflected from investigating large corporations. In a recent memoir the great American journalist Seymour Hersh fumes at how in the late 1970s The New York Times shut down his attempt to investigate corporate America ’when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.’[iv]

    This challenge has increased significantly in the wake of the Internet. After the “Original Sin” of free online publication, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009, a pattern seen across the world. As revenues diminished, workloads increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories, discovering the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. To put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time to do the same job.[v]”

    “Fact Checkers”

    Over the course of the pandemic a strawman conspiracy theorist appears to have been consciously developed to deter valid journalistic interrogation, in particular, through so-called “fact checking” initiatives. It has reached a point where, as Charles Eisenstein observes: ‘“Conspiracy theory” has become ‘a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory’

    In the absence of adequate journalistic scrutiny during the pandemic corruption has been rife. The executive director of The British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi described ‘state corruption on a grand scale’ that is ‘harmful to public health’ Abbasi observes how the pandemic ‘has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.’

    This also occurred in the context of unregulated social media, where companies set their own rules. In March, 2020, having previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’, Twitter moved to address concerns around conspiracy theories. In future it would be: ‘Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.’

    Nonetheless, free reign was given to “click-bait” alarmists such as Eric Feigle-Ding on Twitter, who saw his following mushroom from just two thousand to almost a quarter of a million. Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, identified a pattern: ‘He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.’

    Twitter did not act alone in upholding an apparent orthodoxy that often lapsed into an extremism that deterred legitimate questioning. Google took unprecedented steps to erase material violating ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’

    Initially at least, Facebook adopted a more laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website. In November, 2021, however, the editors of the British Medical Journal sent an open letter to Facebook in response to “fact checkers” undermining their investigative report into ‘a host of poor clinical trial research practices’ at Pfizer’s original vaccine trial.

    Thus, the approach of the social media giants was bolstered by an unprecedented journalistic effort to “factually” repudiate conspiracy theories during the pandemic; notwithstanding how ‘uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable—tend to be elusive.’

    Preparations for the “fact-checking” initiative began in January, 2020 when a global #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, comprising more than one hundred “factcheckers” around the world, described as ‘the largest collaborative factchecking project ever,’ was launched by the Poynter Institute, ‘when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally.’ It said that the WHO had classified the issue as ‘an infodemic — and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.’

    From March 2020, with the support of these “fact checkers”, outlets such as Reuters responded to an anticipated wave of conspiracy theories, taking particular care to address allegations against Bill Gates. He has been described as ‘the world’s most powerful doctor’ despite not having earned a medical degree due to the Gates Foundations being the second largest funder of the WHO, after China. This included allegations that he had apparently planned the pandemic, and wanted to commit genocide through vaccines.

    For example, on May 30, 2020 a BBC article purported to defuse claims the pandemic was ‘a cover for a plan to implant trackable microchips and that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind it’; although it acknowledged Gates had said that ‘eventually “we will have some digital certificates” which would be used to show who’d recovered, been tested and ultimately who received a vaccine,’ and also referenced ‘a study, funded by the Gates Foundation, into a technology that could store someone’s vaccine records in a special ink administered at the same time as an injection.’

    Front building of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.

    Gates Foundation

    When it came to outlandish conspiracy theories around COVID-19 all roads led to Bill Gates and his $47 billion philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – besides a personal fortune of $115 billion, and growing, as of October 2020.

    For many of world’s population under stay-at-home orders the pandemic was viewed through a digital prism – often at a remove from morbidity or mortality itself. At that stage, Gates’s 2014 Ted Talk ‘The Next Outbreak. We’re not ready’ seemed almost prophetic.

    He opined: ‘If anything kills over ten million people in the next few decades it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.’ The failure of Western governments to prepare for such an eventuality seemed to have been laid bare – in particular the Presidential administration of Donald Trump, who according to a Cornell University study ‘was likely th\\e largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic.”’

    Gates’s Ted Talk, however, failed to discuss the false alarm of the Swine Flu Pandemic, when the WHO estimated that between 2.0 and 7.4 million could die, assuming the outbreak was relatively mild. This proved a wild exaggeration as less than 300,000 were estimated to have died globally, with Western governments stockpiling millions of dollars’ worth of GlaxoSmithKlein’s Pandemrix vaccine, which  brought an elevated risk of narcolepsy.

    Gates’s main reference point appears to have been the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 – the Ur-pandemic of modern times  – that led to up to fifty million deaths, many of them young men in their prime, at a point when the global population was approximately two billion. In contrast, the infectivity and severity of SARS-CoV-2 ‘are well within the range described by respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries (where the 1918–20 influenza is the clear outlier).’

    Neil Ferguson

    “Scientific Groupthink”

    In March, 2020, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson told the New York Times the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario, a projection that has proved wildly inaccurate. Yet, alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response to the challenge were virtually ignored in legacy media at the time. Thus, an Oxford University paper, which included Sunetra Gupta as an author, countered what the New York Times described as the ‘gold standard’ Imperial modelling underestimated immunity from prior coronavirus infections and posited a far lower infection fatality rate.

    But in March, 2020, the Financial Times warned that Gupta’s group’s modelling was ‘controversial and its assumptions have been contested by other scientists.’ Implicitly, the Financial Times was accepting the “gold standard” Imperial paper.

    Moreover, in November, 2020 an article in the Scientific American describes how 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) in April, 2020. Baral recalls, ‘it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.’

    The article also recalled that, ‘highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.’ The authors concluded that 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.’

    In the absence of access to authoritative, diverging scientific accounts, opposition to lockdowns could easily be dismissed as being the preserve of conspiracy theorist cranks associated with “anti-vaxxers” and even a “far-right” fringe.

    “Screen New Deal”

    Apart from offering pharmaceutical companies the huge financial incentive – grasped within open arms – of developing a vaccine for universal application, lockdowns and social distancing measures also brought soaring profits for major technology corporations. Moreover, restrictions provided a testing ground for the Gates Foundation’s long advocacy of technological approaches in education.

    In May, 2020 Naomi Klein identified collusion between state and Big Tech interests in what she described as ‘A Screen New Deal.’ She referred to New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s courting of Google and the Gates Foundation: ‘Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.’

    Remote learning technology permitted extended school closures around the world, despite the chance of death from COVID-19 being ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Research now suggests many students made little or no progress while learning from home, and that learning loss was most pronounced among disadvantaged students. As a consequence, up to 20,000 children in the U.K. went missing from school rolls during the pandemic. Nor is it apparent that teachers faced any greater risk compared to the wider population in fulfilling classroom teaching.

    Media Funding

    Popular consent on a global scale for lockdowns, particularly from those identifying on the left, seems to have been manufactured through vast ‘philanthropic’ funding of journalism, in particular of publications associated with progressive outlooks.

    By June 2020, the Gates Foundation contributed $250 million to journalism, which according to Tim Schwab in The Columbia Journalism Review, ‘appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.’

    A theme of ‘we are in this together’ inhibited criticism and enquiry. This quiescence has been criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris who wrote: ‘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.’

    Tim Schwab calculates that $250 million had been devoted to journalism by the Gates Foundation for the six months up to June, 2020,. Recipients included BBC, NBC, Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as the BBC’s Media Action and The New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund.

    Schwab adds: ‘In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.’

    As a result, he says:

    During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.

    ‘Undermining Scientific Creativity’

    The Gates Foundation’s pivotal role in funding global health has long raised concerns. In 2008, Dr. Arata Kochi, the former head of WHO’s malaria programme argued the Gates Foundation was undermining scientific creativity in a way that ‘could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policymaking process in world health.’ He worried that Gates-funded institutions – including Imperial College London (MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis) – were adopting ‘a uniform framework approved by the Foundation,’ leading to homogeneity of thinking: ‘Gates has created a ‘cartel,’ with research leaders linked so closely that each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of others. The result is that obtaining an independent review of scientific evidence (…) is becoming increasingly difficult.’

    GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, is the most obvious example of the Gates Foundation’s engagement. GAVI has successfully immunized large numbers of children, but been criticized by other NGOs for inadequate funding of health system strengthening.

    One of GAVI’s senior representatives reported that Bill Gates often told him in private conversations ‘that he is vehemently ‘against’ health systems (…) he basically said it is a complete waste of money, that there is no evidence that it works, so I will not see a dollar or cent of my money go to the strengthening of health systems.’

    As of 2017 only 10.6 percent (US$862.5 million) of GAVI’s total commitments between 2000 and 2013 had been dedicated to health system strengthening, whereas more than 78.6 percent (US$6,405.4 million) have been used for vaccine support. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) states that, while GAVI has helped to lower prices of new and underused vaccines for eligible countries, the cost to fully immunize a child was 68-times more expensive in 2014 than it was in 2001.

    According to long-time Gates critic James Love, Gates ‘uses his philanthropy to advance a pro-patent agenda on pharmaceutical drugs, even in countries that are really poor.’

    Safe Treatment?

    This article makes no bold claims regarding the efficacy of any treatments, but the overwhelmingly negative reaction of legacy media to research pointing to the efficacy of the off-patent drug Ivermectin suggests that vested pharmaceutical interests wished to undermine public confidence in any scientific arguments regarding its efficacy.

    In June, 2020, a laboratory study demonstrated it was ‘an inhibitor of the causative virus’ (Caly, 2020). Later, a Systematic Review, Meta-analysis that included twenty-four randomized controlled trials said: ‘Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.’

    In a predictable example of “fact-checking” where an outlandish claim is used to discredit a compelling hypothesis, the Poynter Institute quoted a social media post ‘rating’ the claim that Ivermectin basically ‘basically obliterates’ as ‘false.’

    The Guardian’s dedication to discrediting the meta-analysis also suggested vested interests were at work, and contrasts with a failure to report on the British Medical Journal’s account of a whistle blower alleging serious data integrity issues during Pfizer’s vaccine trial.

    It should hardly be controversial – let alone dismissed as a conspiracy theory – to argue that the weight of evidence points to a ‘Gates-Approach’ lying behind ongoing adoption by most Western governments of unprecedented suppression measures in support of universal vaccination – notwithstanding potential treatment alternatives – leading to the introduction of vaccine passports, as Gates “predicted” in April, 2020. This also occurred alongside a familiar ‘rhetoric supportive of ‘holistic’ health systems.’

    It is now clear that consent for lockdowns, especially in the Anglophone world, was manufactured through wildly inaccurate epidemiological assessments of an infection fatality rate of 0.9% in the notorious Imperial College paper. This estimate has since been adjusted to 0.2% (available on the WHO website), a figure which Joffe argues is likely ‘a large over-estimate.’

    It is also clear that globally mortality statistics for COVID-19 have been systematically exaggerated. This manipulation can be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. It set out strict rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths, which differ 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).’

    It is revealingly that in a country such as Ireland since the pandemic began the mean age of death from COVID-19 has been eighty years of age (eight-two being the median age), just two years younger than the average age of death, and that level of mortality through the years 2018-2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) show little difference.[vi]

    For most people COVID-19 is a virus that poses little danger. Prior to the arrival of a vaccine, a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms, and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19. Moreover, an article from Peter Doshi in the British Medical Journal in September, 2020, stated: ‘At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus’; apparently vindicating Sunetra Gupta’s “controversial” paper, over which the Financial Times cast doubt.

    It should not be controversial to argue that morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 ought to have been weighed against the global impact of lockdowns. On that score, a new paper jointly by authored by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the US, Lund University, in Sweden and the Centre for Political Studies, in Denmark concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the US decreased COVID-19 mortality by a measly 0.2% on average.

    Conclusions

    A “totalizing” discourse of a COVID-19 conspiracy theory identifies a preordained plan being set in motion by malicious actors, wherein the pandemic culminates in a dangerous vaccine being foisted on a brainwashed population. This might lead to an assumption that such vaccines invariably give rise to severe adverse reactions that are systematically covered up. Such an account does not demand evidence as events are simply unfolding “as planned.”

    In reality, however, events rarely follow a preordained pattern, and even in circumstances of regulatory capture state agencies are never entirely bereft of integrity. Moreover, such accounts divert attention from probing interrogation of the efficacy of vaccines and the desirability of universal uptake of a medication that does not block transmission, especially one rushed to the market, and which may cause unforeseen adverse reactions.

    It is also apparent that public perception of the efficacy of vaccines has been distorted by the media’s reporting of relative risk reduction, as opposed to absolute risk reduction, which is just 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

    Moreover, importantly, 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. The authors 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.’

    In terms of any actual conspiracy or contrivance to raise prices along the lines of tendencies that Adam Smith pointed to among gentlemen of commerce, the role played by Bill Gates has been, doubtless, more complex than many conspiracy theorists allow for. However, in circumstances where a billionaire with a history of monopolistic aspirations promotes an agenda aligning with his financial interests it should come as no surprise that colourful theories abound; especially with many journalists seemingly inhibited from enquiring into his Foundation’s activities.

    Indeed, ironically, the aforementioned Guardian journalist John Naughton recently described Gates while Microsoft CEO as having acted like ‘a mogul who is incredulous that the government would dare to obstruct his route to world domination.’ Does such a leopard ever change his spots?

    Sadly, the amplification of the outlandish claims of conspiracy theorists by so-called “fact checkers” could be causing reputational damage to genuine expertise, and allow demagogues reliant on angry mobs to say: “I told you so.” The propagandist role of “fact checkers” has undermined genuine investigative reporting, much of which already occurs on the margins.

    In the early stages of the pandemic especially, difficulties in reporting were compounded by deficits in scientific understanding among overworked journalists in precarious employment, who were encouraged to justify unprecedented lockdowns as a form of social solidarity. The assumption that by “following the science” a journalist is adequately performing his or her role is a dangerous fallacy, which does not take account of how diverging scientific arguments may be concealed.

    In the absence of sufficient independent journalism, and amidst censorship of alternative scientific opinion, troubling questions remain unanswered as the pandemic draws to a close. Perhaps we will never know the full story. Nonetheless, it is vital that adequate cost-benefit analyses (including with access to full trial data) are conducted on all pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions in future.

    Feature Image (c) Daniele Idini: The Burning of “the Witch of Winter” in Cardano al Campo, Lombardy, Italy.

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    [i][i] Karl Popper (1972). Conjectures and Refutations, 4th ed. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. pp. 123–125.

    [ii] Hannah Arendt (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, p.140

    [iii] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter 10, par. 2).

    [iv] Seymour Hersh, Reporter, 2018, p.247.

    [v] Rusbridger, Alan, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters, 2018, p.163-181

    [vi] Worldometre attributes 1,736 deaths to COVID-19 by December 31st, 2020.

  • Shakespeare’s Wisdom in Troubled Times

    As a barrister I am given to quoting from Shakespeare’s plays in closing speeches. This may seem pretentious, but I find his acute observations on the human condition continue to speak to juries, and judges. He remains highly relevant to legal education, and indeed the practice of law. I would go so far as to say that a good knowledge of his work provides a real advantage to any practitioner.

    William Shakespeare’s Birthplace.

    Stratford-upon-Avon

    Recently, I was delighted to have the opportunity to appear in a rare in-person trial in Royal Leamington Spa, which is in Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire. I recalled John Betjeman’s poem about dying in the town, whose name conjures images of Bertie Wooster on a bucolic retreat:

    oh, you know that the stucco is peeling.
    Do you know that the heart will stop?
    From those yellow Italianate arches
    Do you hear the plaster drop?

    Times have changed. To my chagrin, Leamington Spa is not actually a spa town – any longer at least – but is just a short hop from Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, where I stayed for the duration of proceedings.

    The house where Shakespeare was born was previously an ale house and is now a museum. Nearby, in The Holy Trinity Church, lies his grave, which contains a stern warning that his bones should remain in situ.

    Unfortunately, the well-preserved Anne Hathaway House was closed for the duration of my stay, but the exterior and gardens were at least visible. Likewise, the complex of theatres – home to the Royal Shakespeare Company – were also no go in this bleak period for the performing arts.

    Shakespeare himself often confronted the closure of puppet shows for sowing subversive ideas as Puritanism gained ground, as documented in James Shapiro’s, 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (2015).

    Shakespeare’s era was marked by recurring plague, tyranny and civil strife, themes according to Stephen Greenbelt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) the Bard approached obliquely, for fear of persecution. Under conditions of tyranny, public art may still be an outlet for mockery of the powerful. Thus we find in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’

    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

    In what follows I recite some of Shakespeare’s lines that inform my understanding of our present world.

    Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (Polonius, Hamlet)

    In the light of the bailing out of toxic banks – socialism for the mega rich – and the infliction of austerity, being indebted now brings serious dangers. With so much crime linked to social exclusion and poverty, it is as if we are returning to an era of Debtors’ Prisons, ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s day.

    The late David Graeber’s excellent book Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011) precisely illustrates how debt, and now student debt in particular, is creating a permanent rentier class with no educational outlet for upward mobility, and low prospects of home ownership, at least for those who don’t have access to the bank of Mum and Dad.

    The power of bankers in contemporary society should lead to consideration of The Merchant of Venice, which, apart from dreadful antisemitism – Shakespeare often expressed the prejudices of his day – provides a searing attack on the sin of usury, the existence of which is conveniently ignored by far right Christians today.

    In the play, Portia (Bassano’s betrothed who finds himself in a spot of bother after taking on a debt on unfavourable terms from Shylock) presents herself in court, disguised as a male lawyer, and pleads for mercy against the enforcement of the bond, which is the extraction of a pound of flesh.

    Shylock and Portia (1835) by Thomas Sully

    In a famous passage she argues:

    The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed, it blessed him that gives, and him that takes, tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown, His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings: But mercy is above this sceptred sway, it is enthroned in the heart of kings, it is an attribute to God himself; and earthly power doth then show likes god’s, when mercy seasons justice…

    Shylock responds with a narrow vision of justice that sadly is all too familiar in our time of dispossessions:

    I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.

    Portia then shifts ground and cleverly argues that the bond should be enforced but:

    The bond gives thee there no jot of blood – The words expressly are a pound of flesh … Then take they bond, take thou thy pound of flesh, but in the cutting it, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate … For as thou urge justice, be assured, thou shalt have justice more than thou deserts.

    In this morality tale, therefore, Shylock – unlike our contemporary bankers in most cases – is forestalled in his extraction of the pound of flesh. If only such arguments against the extraction of financial flesh were available to barristers defending the disposed today.

    Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope

    The True Criminals

    So who are the true criminals today? Shakespeare offered an answer through the medium of the wise Fool in Kind Lear:

    What art mad. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear, change places, and handy dandy, what is the justice which is the thief.

    Governments bail out Goldman Sachs and other banks. There are no repercussions for their reckless lending, save in Nordic countries like Iceland. But If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread, they pursue him to the ends of the Earth to extract the pound of flesh.

    Similarly, if you become a whistle-blower and reveal the machinations of the powerful such as Julian Assange, then you are turned into a criminal, while Messrs Blair, Kissinger, and indeed Varadkar, are never forced to face the music.

    Amanda Knox

    The lady doth protest too much, methinks, (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2).

    Stacey Schiff’s Witches: Salem 1692 (2015) observes how the hysteria of witch hunts appear to represent a sublimation of pre-existing grievances, and envy. This remains the case for modern day witch hunts such as that directed against Amanda Knox, which have been highlighted by the Innocence Project.

    The book makes clear that children can be manipulated into holding false belief, even to the extent that they incriminate themselves. False allegations are also linked to hysterical parents or authority figures. As occurred in Amanda Knox’s case, young minds are easily turned to mush by persistent questioning, fear of authority, and interaction with nefarious police officers and social workers.

    This is what is referred to as falsely implanted memory syndrome, on which subject Elizabeth Loftus and Maggie Bruck are experts.

    Categorising someone as a witch or a warlock also reflects jealousy if that person holds a gift you do not possess. Seen in Freudian terms, it is a form of transference of perceived inadequacies.

    All that glisters is not gold. (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7)

    This zeitgeist is one of post-truth amorality, a phenomenon with long antecedents. In King Lear we hear that ‘a scurvy politician seems to see the thing thou does not’; while Henry VI speaks of: ‘Stuffing the ears of men with false reports’, which seems curiously relevant to Covid Times.

    Purveyors of nonsense and incomprehensible prose – the structuralists and post-modernists who took over the universities – represent a movement, or grouping, united in their rejection of universal values. Relativism leads to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision and all the integrative forces that tie society together, as Noam Chomsky has observed: ‘if I am missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand.’

    The first point to note about the post modernists nonsense is that it has encouraged a distrust of the truth and an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, wherein any old argument, or moral position, is accorded equal weight.

    In 2005 the late David Foster Wallace observed that this created an epistemic free-for-all in which any truth is seen from the vantage of perspective and agenda.

    Relativistic and structuralist ideas such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language fed into Trump and his aides saying that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida could contradict itself, similarly Trump can jump from one inconsistency to the next.

    The work of The Innocence Project is littered with examples of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts or pseudo experts, which have led to wrongful convictions. All too many innocent people are incarcerated on the basis of lies. With the embrace of subjectivity, we are celebrating opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts.

    Confirmation bias applies where people rush to judgment, and give into their prejudices, rather than evaluating evidence.

    According to Evan Davies in his recent book Post Truth, one aspect of all this bullshit is a desire to believe something unreasonable to be true. Pope Francis sagely remarked that ‘There is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’

    To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3)

    In general, social media is weaving a web of deceit and destroying the social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears, and character assassination. Pierre Omidyar a founder of eBay argued that the monetization and manipulation of information is rapidly tearing us apart.

    Trolls and bots were unleased by Trump, Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica to spread disinformation in the U.S presidential election, undermining democratic institutions and fact-driven debates.

    Now the social media platforms have moved on to shilling for Big Pharma – laying the ground for a Screen New Deal – while shutting down alternative assessments of the pandemic, and unprofitable treatments.

    It leads me to an unhappy conclusion that we increasingly developing a generation of technocratic fascist, selfish, materialistic ultra-conformists receptive to post-truth deception. The silos they occupy reinforce their prejudices. It is less important now to establish the truth than to ask whose side you are on.

    As Cicero, a minor character in Julius Caesar remarks:

    Indeed, it is as strange, disposed time but men may construe things after their fashion clean from the purpose of things themselves.

    Lies in fact have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction. In The People of the Lie (1983) Scott Peck contends that Evil is untruth, undermining life and liveliness. Such people operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others, and cover up their misdeeds. They prevent the rest of us from making informed choices. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by authority figures. Evil is also surprisingly obedient to authority.

    In contrast, in times of stress those who genuinely good people, even in times of acute stress, do not desert principles.

    Hannah Arendt presaged our Brave New World.

    The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.

    Cry “havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, (Mark Antony, Julius Caesar)

    The film, Wag the Dog witnesses the beginning of a fake war. Today, apart from military engagements that are generally played out on our television screens – such as Iraq and Afghanistan – there are new types of fake wars. The War on Drugs is a smokescreen that obscures failure to deal with the root causes in poverty and austerity. Now the war on the virus – a disproportionate reaction to a significant but not overwhelming public health crisis – has generated unprecedented panic.

    People are told to comply or face gruesome death. But how safe are we really in these circumstances? We will not be safe in authoritarian police states with restrictions on liberty, freedom of movement, privacy and associational or community ties. Nor will we be necessarily safe from a plethora of hastily tested pharmaceutical products, enforced by so-called vaccine passports.

    How to subjugate the world population? Create a hyper real sense of emergency. Engender panic, leading to compliance and deference

    Should we disassociate ourselves from the unvaccinated? Even putting it in these terms shows how admen dominate the discourse.

    The disproportionate response to the pandemic represents a fascist creep. People are desensitized to loss of liberty once they are in fear of their lives, and increasingly dependent on the state for the pile of gruel it so generously provides, having removed any prospect of employment for hundreds of thousands in precarious work.

    Meanwhile, the corporate law firms and mega rich have won big in our new version of disaster capitalism using Modern Money Theory to oil the chains of patronage.

    Thus, whether centrally orchestrated, or more likely arising out a coalition of vested interests, and made possible through an increasingly uneducated, desperate and compliant population, COVID-19 has brought us the Shock Doctrine par excellence.

    Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays. Artist unkown.

    The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. (Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar)

    The problem of evil in our times is embodied in extremism, fundamentalism, draconian laws, high consumerism, and the negation of the rule of law. Today, unselfish communal behaviour go unrewarded, while the innocent are framed.

    What is left of compassion, sincerity, truth, community, and optimism? Well at least we can still find it in the poetry of Shakespeare.

    Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
    Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
    And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
    Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
    And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
    And every fair from fair sometime declines,
    By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
    But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
    Nor lose possession of that fair thou owls.
    Nor shall death brag thou wander in his shade,
    When in eternal lines to time thou grow’s:
    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

    Put simply, love conquers all. Or should. The Bard of Avon has much to say in these troubled times.

    Featured Image: Lear and Cordelia by William Blake.

  • Covid-19: A New Irish Social Contract?

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

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

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

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

    Times of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Recovery Position

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Leprechaun Economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Following Public Health Guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Frank O’Connor

    Guests of the Nation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Are you right there Michael?

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

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

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

    He added more controversially:

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

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

    Facing Up to Errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Science and Technology are not Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    On the Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

    A New Social Contract?

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

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

    They continue:

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

    They argue against reliance on lockdowns:

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

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

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

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

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

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

  • Public Intellectuals: Hannah Arendt

    A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    It is, perhaps, notable that as a young student Hannah Arendt was the Nazi-sympathising philosopher Martin Hedeigger’s lover. His little Jewess trophy, perhaps redolent in his mind of Weimar Republic decadency. Surprisingly, she never really developed a hated for him, intellectually at least, despite his stunning failure in selling his soul to the Nazis.

    In contrast to Heidegger, the ultra-conservative German burgher Thomas Mann chose exile. His rather clunky prose is excused on that point alone, and, suitably, his best work arrived after decamping to Switzerland. This includes especially Doctor Faustus (1947) an oblique portrayal of an actor and academic visited by a Mephistophelian figure, who sells his soul to the Nazis – a Heideggerean type in fact.

    Arendt’s background, steeped in the great German philosophical tradition, but rejected as a Jewess – and even subjected to a period under Gestapo confinement – gave her an unparalleled vantage on the great evils of the twentieth century, and the perils of ideological conformity that corrupted even the most elevated intellects. A failure to exercise a moral conscience in performing actions is a recurring failure, even where we do not see the extremes of totalitarian rule.

    Arendt and Albert Camus

    Arendt is among the most important public intellectual of our age for a variety of reasons.

    First,  she witnessed at first hand the rise of antisemitism in Germany, before migrating to the Americas, along with others from a golden generation of great mitteleuropean thinkers – many of them also Jewish – such as Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin. She was young and resilient enough to avoid the despair that led many to suicide, or to expire prematurely like Louis Althusser, whose structuralist influence has had a less than positive influence.

    A migratory professor with lifestyle “issues” including a nicotine habit that has become increasingly unacceptable in America, Arendt’s cosmopolitan “Europeanness” was tolerated in her time. In a bygone age the Frankfurt School colonised American academia, and a person such as Vladimir Nabokov – a different beast altogether – could became a professor in Columbia. Imagine the uproar if his Lolita was published today?

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    In some respects her Gallic twin – and the other indispensable public intellectual for our time – Albert Camus also disavowed extremism, strict ideological conformity and what may be described as scientism. Both firmly rejected a positivism identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions according to Camus ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’

    According to Camus, Comte conceived of a society whose:

    [S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priest who reign over everything.[i]

    As today we hang on the pronouncement of anointed scientists who decide our intimate social lives, it would appear Comte’s vision has come to fruition. Thus, one of the latter-day hierarchy, Professor Niall Ferguson in an interview with The Times revealed his amazement at the power 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.’

    Likewise, Arendt equated Comte’s hope for ‘a united, regenerated humanity under the leadership – présidence – of France’[ii] with the idea of a ‘national mission’ used by English imperialists to justify global expansion during the late nineteenth century. Arendt also pointed to the danger of the positivists’ assumption – evident in totalitarian Soviet propaganda – ‘that the future is eventually scientifically predictable’.[iii]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem

    Eichmann on trial in 1961.

    Arendt’s fame rests especially on the proverbial shitstorm caused by her coverage of the former SS officer Alfred Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She coined the immortal phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe how under Nazism ambitious functionaries and bean counters – such as Eichmann – climbed career ladders without regard for the supreme brutality of their regime. This was not apparent to them in their day-to-day lives; so out of sight was out of mind. In any age, including this, we should be wary of a cost-benefit analysis of life where board room decisions decide the fate of human beings and the natural world.

    Indicatively, in Ireland between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112.[iv] It is now clear that bean counters and bureaucrats dominate our lives. Although many may not seem like villanous characters, any buffoonery on display should not be a source of reassurance. As Arendt describes Eichmann:

    Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.[v]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem highlights how an obsession with compliance and promotion blunts moral sensibility; and how a cognitive dissonance takes hold where slavish obedience leads to a failure to question one’s actions. This is the moral corrosion generated by a lack of consequentialist or moral thinking.

    The Human Condition

    I would argue that The Human Condition (1958) is central to understanding our age, in that it emphasizes the good life, and a need for Aristotelian measure and moderation in pursuit of eudaimonia. As the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics puts it: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good.’

    The Human Condition emphasizes a moral conscience that should ideally inform all our actions, especially politics. And she warns of a detachment from human realities that may occur once the “pensionopolis” of an entitled state class have no concern for trade or manufacturing:

    No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufacture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the “pensionopolis” with a “proletariat of consumers”[vi]

    It is insufficient to perform a deed in isolation; you have to understand what you are doing and for whom and why. Or at the least investigate and interrogate your motivations, while avoiding the pitfalls of perfectionism. As Voltaire put it: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, a point seemingly lost on certain scientific authorities in their utopian pursuit of ZeroCovid.

    Arendt also warns against the scientism in our public discourse, or more crucially the triumph of a form of mathematical intelligence, which is often divorced from moral decision-making, with Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ after the launch of the atomic bomb an obvious statement of this pitfall.

    It is a point the philosopher Mary Midgley (above) has also made in response to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to the wife of a deceased physicist that ‘people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’[vii]

    In response Midgley wrote:

    if reality was indeed something that only physicists could reach – if everybody else was wandering clueless through a hopeless maze of illusions – there would be a crucial difference between these scientists and the rest of us. We are being told that we are mere peasants, helpless “folk-psychologists”, and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult “you are nothing.”[viii]

    Thus Arendt, along with Midgley, warns against placing too great a premium on mathematical intelligence – and those who may consider lesser mortals as mere nothings. Arguably, this can be seen in the all-too-ready acceptance of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday mathematical modelling for Covid-19 mortality last year, which proved to be wrong by a significant margin. According to Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times, Ferguson’s interpretation was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    More widely, the contemporary veneration of science has spilled into worship of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, and the triumph of homo economicus. This represents a negation of critical human identity through a hyper-inflated economic reality of survival. That any critical intelligence endures, divorced from corporate ‘influencers’, is almost a minor miracle.

    The Human Condition also ably demonstrates that when the sphere of political engagement and the public sphere become redundant and private interests control democracy, then it has given way to something else

    Technocracy

    Arendt warns of the dangers of technocracy, pointing to the blunted moral conscience of an Eichmann, who reasoned that he was only putting people on trains, and did not have the intellectual curiosity to consider their destination and the likely outcome, or was casually indifferent. Arendt understood that he was more concerned with consorting with powerful people, and networking in a moral oblivion. One might add that being exclusively within one’s own silo bubble, or online echo chamber – as all too many are today – is recipe for serious trouble.

    Likewise, Jurgen Habermas has warned of the danger of technocratic solutions devoid of a moral compass, coining the phrase the public sphere.

    Juergen Habermas

    To offset growing consumerism Arendt advocates the Vita Activa of civic engagement. She remains even-handed, recognising that scientists should of course be listened to – providing crucial specialisation – but it should be understood that many lack a moral or philosophical education, and without ethical training ultimately hold no allegiance to the truth.

    In our time, all too often, political debates reach a point of paralysis in endless arguments over statistics; we are to quote Peter Greenaway ‘Drowning By Numbers’. Arendt’s analysis demonstrates how number can give rise to anti-humanism, perfectionism including an obsessions with tidiness, and other forms of anal retentiveness that inhibit our development as human beings.

    Science detached from philosophy is divorced from ethical considerations, and thus can be deployed for great evil. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which ‘science’ [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.’[ix]

    Banner of Stalin in Budapest.

    The Origins of Totalitarianism

    The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951) is the seminal account of twentieth century totalitarianism – as distinct from the ‘mere’ fascism of figure such as Mussolini – of both the Nazis under Hitler and Communism under Stalin. It offers a series of reflections that should serve as a warning in our time – when we cannot be said to live under totalitarianism – but where, nonetheless, an unmistakable shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the individual. Thus measures that no government would previously have contemplated – from lockdowns to curfews – have been normalised in many countries, and controls have even been tightened in Ireland at precisely the point when a declining number are dying from the disease. Coincidentally, ‘terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition.’[x]

    We cannot overlook the damage of enforced social isolation, as Arendt put it:

    What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the nontotalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of ever-growing masses of our century.[xi]

    Arendt also well understood the fictions that underpin our understanding of the world, and a tendency to embrace conspiratorial ideas in the absence of reasonable explanations:

    Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. Man, who has not been granted the gifts of undoing, who is always an unconsulted heir of other men’s deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequences of an unending chain of events rather than unconscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future seems to be concealed. Legends were the spiritual foundation of every ancient city, empire, people, promising safe guidance through the limitless space of the future. Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.[xii]

    Thus, it is essential that in responding to the damage of contemporary social atomisation that we do not succumb to ideologies that sow further division.

    Arendt observed how allegiances break down when Populist mobs gain traction. Initially the targets are those of no influence or assets, but essentially anyone is guilty under the arbitrary laws of totalitarianism in power. Thus she recalls:

    It is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible – not in order to prevent discovery of one’s secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain sense of future trouble, all persons who might not only who might have an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

    Sadly, this agitation seems reminiscent of the states of mind actually cultivated by government scientists, who have deployed ‘fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China,’ according to Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist. Nowadays, instead of being imprisoned, we contend with social shame and even loss of a job for heinous crimes such as meeting a friend for a pint or taking a hill walk.

    Radical Evil

    Arendt observes a failure ‘inherent in our entire philosophical tradition’ to conceive of a radical evil.[xiii] Such a blind spot she argues means, ‘Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’[xiv]

    Moreover, it is important to note in our present state of enforced isolation:

    [I]t has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical governments is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror, it certainly is its most fertile ground, it always is its result.[xv]

    So let us be wary of the strongman leaders who have emerged to ‘guide’ us to the promised land during a pandemic, which shows up the damage of their own making; and who now argue that solutions lie in asserting the very neoliberal values that brought us to this impasse in in the first place.

    Sadly Burkean and Habermasean moderation has been lost in an age of tribal nationalism. The handmaiden’s of the strongman leaders are in fact a grasping “pensionopolis” that are removed from the dramatically worsening poverty in countries such as Ireland caused by the pandemic.

    This sadly is the digital generation of what are, in effect, fabricated human identities – a kind of unreal Blade Runner replicant. Homo faber has given way to homo economicus, as the law and economics ideologues put it. Craftsmanship and intellectualism are despised, and the public space denuded of significance.

    Finally, and perhaps more optimistically, Arendt clearly distinguishes between loneliness, and solitude: ‘Solitude requires being alone, where loneliness only shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ Let us thus endeavour to accept solitude as a temporary gift and resist the loneliness which is fertile ground for the infliction of terror.

    [i] Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin, London, 2013, p.145

    [ii] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.237

    [iii] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.454

    [iv] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12

    [v] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, New York, 1963, p.55

    [vi] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p.37

    [vii] Mary Midgley, Are You an Illusion, p.136

    [viii] Beard, Ibid, p.138

    [ix] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.453

    [x] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.514

    [xi] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.627

    [xii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.271

    [xiii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.602

    [xiv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.603

    [xv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.623

  • Covid-19: A Simple Moral Calculus

    Introduction

    There are still many unresolved questions regarding the pathogenesis of this disease and especially the reasons underlying the extremely different clinical course, ranging from asymptomatic forms to severe manifestations, including the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). SARS-CoV-2 showed phylogenetic similarities to both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV viruses, and some of the clinical features are shared between COVID-19 and previously identified beta-coronavirus infections. Available evidence indicate[s] that the so called “cytokine storm” an uncontrolled over-production of soluble markers of inflammation which, in turn, sustain an aberrant systemic inflammatory response, is a major [factor] responsible for the occurrence of ARDS.
    Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: ‘An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)[i]

    For the first time in the post-war history of epidemics, there is a reversal of which countries are most heavily affected by a disease pandemic. By early May, 2020, more than 90% of all reported deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been in the world’s richest countries; if China, Brazil, and Iran are included in this group, then that number rises to 96%.
    Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ (2020)[ii]

    The evidence of Hitler’s as well as Stalin’s dictatorship points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the top of the whole structure.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

    All this hate and violence [in the world] is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.[iii]
    Sacha Baron Cohen, speech, (2019)

    Comment is free, but facts are sacred.[iv]
    John Scott, editor of The Guardian, (1921)

    In March, 2020 a simple moral calculus seized Western consciousness. Prompted by grim epidemiological assessments, and distressing accounts from emergency doctors in Northern Italy, a call to #flattenthecurve resounded across social media. The global force of hashtag activism led millions to renounce meeting friends and family in an extraordinary display of solidarity with vulnerable older people.

    Twitter, which had previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’[v], allowing all manner of unmoderated content to appear on controversial subjects such as climate change – as well as hate speech from President Donald Trump – abruptly changed policy on March 16th saying it would be:

    Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports, we will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners, including public health authorities and governments, and continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content.[vi]

    Problematically, however, there is no canonical response to the global pandemic and significant debate has occurred between authoritative sources, as different governments pursue varied policies, with mixed results. This has created potential for national authorities to impugn or disqualify reasonable criticism by grafting health warnings on accounts at variance with a particular government’s guidance, or wider political objectives.

    Twitter has not acted alone, Google has taken unprecedented steps to erase material that violates ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’[vii]

    Typically, Facebook adopted a laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website.[viii]

    Whatever one’s view on the importance of social distancing, our readers may recall Ronald Dworkin’s pronouncement that ‘free speech is a condition of legitimate government.’ He argues that the universality of speech as a mode of rational discourse and scientific inquiry could act as truth-seeking counterweight to mass hysteria, negating unreason and prejudice.[ix]

    Moreover, Stephen Sedley, the great English judge, called freedom of expression ‘the lifeblood of democracy;[x] or as George Orwell put it in the introduction to Animal Farm (1945): ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

    Accepting Covid-19 represents an extraordinary challenge requiring a concerted response, censorship by Big Data in such a blanket form, including of recognised academic authorities, surely only lends credence to conspiracy theories, fomented by the far-right in particular. Disregard for freedom of expression casts doubt over the integrity of scientific inquiry and inhibits rational debate.

    Reappraisal

    The English-speaking world was led to believe in early March that Covid-19 had a mortality rate of between 2% and 3% [xi], and that its spread would be exponential, with a reproductive (R) value of 3 (i.e. one person would infect another three), compared to an R value of 1.28 for seasonal influenza.[xii] Moreover, based on Lombardy’s experience, it seemed the death toll would include hundreds or even thousands of health service workers tending to the sick.

    As the weeks passed the assessment of the mortality rate was scaled back to 1.4%,[xiii] but by then the virus seemed to be moving through Europe like a forest fire at the height of summer. Soon the number of daily mortalities from the disease was dominating news headlines.

    Insofar as possible, most reasonable citizens abided by the popular injunction to #staythefuckathome, entrusting governments with emergency powers to guard against errant behaviour.

    As time passed, however, we learnt that early projections on the infection fatality rate seem to have been significantly wide of the mark. Lone Simonsen professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark recently said she expected a infection fatality rate ‘possibly as low as 0.2% or 0.3%’, while Professor Emeritus at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Professor Johan Giesecke has suggested an even lower figure of 0.1%.[xiv] The U.S. Centre for Disease Control’s best estimate implies a COVID-19 infection fatality rate below 0.3%.[xv]

    Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford has gone lower still estimating an infection fatality rate of between 0.1% and 0.01%.[xvi] She bases this on an assumption the virus has been in circulation far longer than initially assumed, an argument gaining traction, with satellite data suggesting the pandemic hit Wuhan in China a far back as October,[xvii] while France’s ‘first known case’ was in December.[xviii] In truth, however, the infection fatality rate appears to depend hugely on the nature of any society, and not simply its age profile, for reasons to be discussed.

    An aggravated perception of danger is also likely to have occurred through media reports juxtaposing confirmed cases, with mortalities. Thus The Guardian reported on May 16th that, ‘According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker there are 4,531,811 confirmed cases worldwide. The number of people who have lost their lives is 307,001 according to official tolls, but the true number is likely to be much higher.’[xix]

    On a cursory examination, one might assume a infection fatality rate of 6-7%, or “much higher”. Little wonder then that people have been jumping out of the way of one another on footpaths.

    This infection fatality rate may well prove to be considerably higher than a seasonal flu mortality rate of 0.04%, but it is instructive that during one such outbreak in 2017-2018 that there were 61,000 influenza-associated deaths in the United States alone.[xx] Yet these preventable deaths hardly registered on the national consciousness, unlike like the victims of Covid-19.

    As Simon Jenkins, one of the few Guardian commentators who has kept the pandemic in perspective put it: ‘When hysteria is rife, we might try some history.’[xxi]

    Epidemiological Modelling

    Based on a infection fatality rate of 0.9%, in late March an Imperial College team led by Professor Neil Ferguson predicted that unless stern measures were taken there would be half-a-million deaths in the U.K. and over two million in the U.S.:[xxii]

    But as early as March Nobel-prize winning bio-physicist Michael Levitt was identifying common sense flaws in prominent epidemiological modelling, saying:

    In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day …. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after sometime most passengers will either be infected or immune.[xxiii]

    Levitt assumed the R rate would decline once reasonable steps were taken, such as social distancing and removing the possibility of close confinement in pubs, at sporting events and other so-called ‘super-spreader’ events. [xxiv] In March Levitt told Ferguson that he had over-estimated the potential death toll by ‘10 or 12 times.’[xxv]

    Moreover, given only one branch seems to have closed its doors over the course of the outbreak in the U.K.,[xxvi] it appears early panic about contagions occurring in supermarkets, which is still leading to people disinfecting their shopping, were largely unfounded.[xxvii]

    Mistaking Flu for Coronavirus

    Mortalities from novel flu viruses tend to be among individuals under the age of forty. This is because ‘emergent viruses resembled those that had circulated previously within the lifespan of then-living people.’[xxviii] This means older peoples’ immune systems are generally better equipped with antibodies to fight off such novel infections.

    As yet it is still unclear whether exposure to other coronaviruses, including the ‘common cold’, provide greater immunity to Covid-19, although one recent paper does suggest, ‘cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating “common cold” coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.’[xxix]

    It remains to be seen whether the death toll from Covid-19 will scale the heights of the ‘Asian’ Flu (H2S2) of 1957, (with a an estimated median R value of 1.65[xxx]) which led to 1 million deaths around the world, including 80,000 in the United States; or the ‘Hong Kong’ flu (H3N2) of 1968 (with an estimated median R value of 1.80) that was responsible for between 1 million and 4 million[xxxi]; let alone the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 that carried off an astonishing fifty million people[xxxii], (with an estimated median R value of 3 [xxxiii]), most of whom were in the prime of their lives.

    Hugh Pennington emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen recently took an optimistic view on the prospect of avoiding a dreaded ‘second wave’ of infections:

    The idea of a second wave comes almost entirely from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The first wave occurred in June and July and the second in October and November. The first was mild, the second was lethal. It is yet to be explained why the infections occurred in waves and why the virus faded away after the first and then returned.

    ‘Flu is very different from Covid-19’ Pennington says, ‘Although both are commonly spread by the respiratory route, and both have infected prime ministers, the more we learn about Covid-19, the less its biology and epidemiology resemble that of flu.’

    He further contends, ‘In the absence of controls, flu has an R rate of seven [presumably he means at the height of a pandemic]; Covid-19’s is between two and three [lower seemingly than the earlier assessment]. And far more than with flu, Covid-19 cases have very commonly occurred in clusters.’

    Conflation with flu modelling may also be discounting wider “imperviousness” than assumed. UCL Professor Karl Friston famously drew on astrophysics to explain Germany’s low infection rate relative to the U.K.:

    it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance. This is like dark matter in the universe: we can’t see it, but we know it must be there to account for what we can see.[xxxiv]

    The curious case of Japan also indicates that certain societies – or nations – are considerably more impervious than others. As the country in the world with the oldest population in the world, and with heavy urban densities, one would have expected the virus to have had a devastating impact there, yet:

    No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to “test, test, test,” Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population — one of the lowest rates among developed countries.[xxxv]

    Japan’s population of over 125 million experienced less than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19.

    Nonetheless, apart from underlying exacerbating factors such as population density and an ageing population – relative to its Irish neighbour at least[xxxvi] – as well as a high obesity rate,[xxxvii] the U.K.’s high death toll can, at least in part, be attributed to Boris Johnson’s government’s ‘sleepwalking’ through the beginning of the crisis,[xxxviii] almost wlilfully ignoring the threat, and putting out highly inappropriate messages, including on shaking hands.

    Nevertheless, the suggestion aired on an episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches that 13,000 deaths would have been avoided if a lockdown or stay-at-home order had been introduced at the beginning of March came from a health analyst, George Batchelor, rather than a recognised academic authority, and should be treated with caution.

    Revealingly, in Hong Kong where 90% of cases were contact traced, ‘the number of individual secondary cases was significantly higher within social settings such as bars and restaurants compared to family or work exposures.’ In time it may be determined that Boris Johnson’s hesitation in closing pubs was his most costly mistake.[xxxix]

    QALY

    In Italy, where average life expectancy is approximately eighty-three-years-of-age, the average age of mortality from Covid-19 was approximately eighty years-of-age.[xl] This figure includes over one hundred health care workers.[xli] Many of these premature deaths occurred in the clusters that Hugh Pennington refers to – perhaps from heavy ‘viral load’[xlii] encountered in poorly ventilated hospitals and care home facilities.

    The overall loss of life years from the Covid-19 pandemic may prove minimal, however, compared to novel flu viruses, which have mainly afflicted the young over the past century.

    This is not to diminish the value of any life, but public health interventions are conventionally given a comparative value (QALY – Quality-adjusted Life Year), ‘which is routinely used as a summary measure of health outcome for economic evaluation, which incorporates the impact on both the quantity and quality of life.’ The financial cost of any intervention, including a lockdown or stay-at-home order, must be measured against its impact on both quantity and quality of life.

    There are now serious question marks around the efficacy of lockdowns. Using ‘Bayesian’ modelling a team led by Professor Simon Wood in Bristol University supports Michael Levin’s assessment that early epidemiological models were flawed, suggesting that ‘the number of new daily infections in the UK peaked some days before lock down was implemented, although it does not completely rule out a slightly later peak.’[xliii]

    Furthermore, a quasi-experimental study carried out by the University of East Anglia concluded that stay at home orders, or lockdowns were ‘not associated with any independent additional impact.’[xlvi] Another recent study in Nature, however, offers a different assessment, but includes data from China, which may be unreliable, and where the extremity of the measures are  incompatible with democratic norms. Lockdown advocates also generally assume a higher infection fatality rate than recent reappraisals.

    During lockdown, across Europe and beyond, cases and deaths occured in clusters: within enclosed spaces such as care homes,[xliv] hospitals and meat packing plants,[xlv] but also households. Hashtag activism informed the public in most Western countries about the pandemic, who were refraining from unnecessary social encounters, and travel, already.

    This may be why the Norwegian Institute for Public Health has recently called for the government to avoid such a far-reaching measure if the country is hit by a second wave.[xlvii] Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg also bravely admitted before a national television audience: ‘I probably took many of the decisions out of fear.’[xlviii]

    The adverse consequences of lockdowns – including a spike in domestic violence[xlix], its effect on children[l] and unprecedented economic impacts, especially on SMEs and casual workers, also cannot be discounted.

    Worst of all has been the effect of draconian lockdowns on developing countries, such as India. Vikram Patel and Richard Cash (both of Harvard University) wrote in The Lancet:

    we suggest that countries must let people get on with their lives—to work, earn money, and put food on the table. Let shop keepers open and sell their wares and provide services. Let construction workers return to building sites. Allow farmers to harvest their crops and to transport them to be sold on the open market. Allow health workers to do their daily work as before, with sensible precautions such as use of gloves and masks to minimise the risk of exposure to the virus. And allow the average citizen to travel freely with restrictions only applied to clusters where lockdowns are necessary. Livelihoods are an imperative for saving lives. Some will say such an approach, which runs the risk of spreading disease, implies that the lives of poor people are not as valuable as those in wealthy countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. The policies of widespread lockdowns and a focus on high-technology health care might unintentionally lead to even more sickness and death, disproportionately affecting the poor.

    These arguments also apply in wealthier societies, as many among the poor do not have the privilege of being able to work from home, and may participate in the black economy. Government supports are generally inadequate and do not last indefinitely.

    The preceding points are not a definitive argument in favour of Sweden’s policies during the pandemic, faults in which have been acknowledged by its chief architect Anders Tegnell. But it is important for policy makers to recognise the cost of lockdowns, especially for extended periods. Also, importantly, handing discretionary powers to police forces in such circumstances establishes a dangerous precedent.

    Fatalism

    In solitude we have been consumed by a story that feeds into pressing contemporary dilemmas, including on the role of scientific expertise. This can be situated within a long-standing division in Western culture between rationality and intuition, evident during World War II in the conflict between Communism and Fascism.

    As Martin Glover put it:

    Stalin, as a version of the Enlightenment idea of redesigning society on a rational basis, shared the catastrophic implications of carrying out such a project without moral or human restraints. Nazism was against the universalism of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers. It was tribal: not rights of man, but the German right to lebensraum … Stalinism shows what can happen when Enlightenment ideas are applied wrongly, Nazism shows what can happen when unenlightened ideas are applied rightly.[liii]

    A form of this has spilled into the so-called Culture Wars, including identity politics, that have raged in particular since the 1990s, culminating in Brexit and President Trump, but it is also perhaps evident at a psychological level within most of our personalities. Importantly, excesses of rationality can be as destructive as Fascism, as we saw under the guise of Communism.

    Responses to the pandemic have also been conditioned by prior faith in, or suspicion of, the Western medical system – including from so-called anti-vaxxers – with Populist right-wing politicians dismissing concerns about a bad flu,[liv] and offering to take it on the chin.[lv] In contrast, some on the left seem to have viewed the crisis as an opportunity to enlarge the role of the State, leading to countervailing scientific authorities to be dismissed on ideological grounds.

    There may also have been a tendency, evident in The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere, to heighten outrage against the administrations of Donald Trump in the U.S. and Boris Johnson in the U.K. by front-loading mortality statistics.

    Another explanation for the extreme response of individuals who consented to prolonged periods of self-isolation – including those of an age profile suggesting they had little to worry about themselves – is an evident fatalism haunting a globally dominant capitalist system. As David Graeber put it:

    Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other has, yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity. Could these two facts be linked?[lvi]

    An understandable fatalism in the face of climate change and mass extinctions, perhaps spilled into reactions to this pandemic, with self-isolation a form of repentance.

    Moreover, the idea of plague as representing divine retribution may operate at an unconscious level. Apart from Biblical episodes such as that visited on Egypt, it is found in ancient epics such as Homer’s Iliad. Thus, when King Agamemnon makes a war prize of Chryseis the daughter of Chryses a priest of Apollo, the sun god takes revenge by unleashing poison-tipped arrows against the Greek army, many of whom succumb to plague.

    More recently, films, such as Outbreak (1995) starring and Dustin Hoffman, and novels such as Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1997), have played on these fears.

    What was Covid-19 but God or Gaia punishing us for our consumerist sins?

    Guardian Angle

    The so-called hashtag activism that prompted civil society to take preventive measures against Covid-19, and which led to many governments to adopt draconian suppression policies, including lockdowns, has been led in the U.K. and Ireland in particular by The Guardian newspaper

    The free digital site with an estimated 42 million monthly visitors[lvii] devoted unrelenting rolling coverage to Covid-19, emphasising the simple moral calculus with a banner across its home page. This has been to the almost complete exclusion of all other content for the months of March, April and May.

    The Guardian’s loss of proportion, and nuance, has been particularly damaging as it is the most trusted newspaper brand in the U.K., including, importantly, among readers aged 18 to 29.[lviii] This may be traced to its position as a global news provider of free content dependent on maintaining an enormous click rate to derive a profit.

    In a recent memoir the former editor Alan Rusbridger describes how: ‘Only by going for reach could you make up for … the ‘frightening disparity’ between the yields in traditional and online media.’[lix]

    He reveals that by mid-2018:

    The Guardian was reaching 150 million browsers each month and a billion page views per month. There was no talk of paywalls: even so, reader revenues had overtaken advertising. And digital revenues – at £109 million – had, for the first time, overtaken the £107.5 million of print revenues. The paper was confidently talking of hitting break-even in 2018/19.[lx]

    The difficulty is that once you have reached such a high threshold, and have taken on hundreds of staff, you have to keep that readership transfixed.

    The Guardian’s increasingly monopolistic position has come at the expense of journalistic diversity, as smaller publishers cannot compete with its reach. Moreover the perceived reliability of its reporting creates a difficulty for competitors wishing to mount a pay wall without significant marketing investment. In such a squeezed field alternatives are increasingly the preserve of billionaires, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos. This is having a corrosive effect on democracy, as many of these publications are ideologically tainted, and support vested interests.

    Underling all this, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[lxi] This pattern has been seen all around the world as revenues diminish and workloads increase. In the U.K. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. They discovered the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they used to have to do their jobs.[lxii]

    This results in what Nick Davies has described as ‘churnalism’, whereby most journalists are passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[lxiii]

    Hyperbolic Coverage

    An exhaustive assessment of Guardian coverage is beyond the scope of this article, but two examples of their unsatisfactory reporting throughout this crisis should hopefully suffice.

    On Friday, May 15th an article ran under the headline: ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’.[lxiv] It referred to a video experiment simulating ‘how quickly germs can be spread across a variety of surfaces in environments such as restaurant buffets and cruise ships.’

    To begin with, one guest of 10 at a restaurant buffet is shown with the substance on his hands meant as a stand-in for the coronavirus. Over the course of a typical dining period, the rest of the guests behave in predictable fashion, selecting utensils from serving stations, enjoying their food, checking their phones and so on.

    At the end of the experiment the black light is turned on and the substance is revealed to be smeared everywhere: plates, foodstuff, utensils and even all over some of the guests’ faces.

    A few paragraphs into the article, however, a second experiment demonstrates the positive effect of improved hygiene techniques, after ‘the “infected” person and the other diners take the simple precaution of washing their hands, and utensils and other implements are cleaned or replaced.

    The first difficulty with the study itself is that it is conducted in a canteen-style restaurant – a worst case scenario where cutlery and plates are exposed to many hands. But the most obvious problem is that the headline feeds into a narrative of fear and paranoia, to the detriment of anyone struggling to keep a restaurant afloat.

    Another headline from May 26th paints a lurid picture: ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’.[lxv] Yet it soon apparent that the “disastrous” consequences for children, who are more likely to die after being struck by lightening than from a dose of Covid-19 and barely register as mortalities from the virus,[lxvi] is from increased vulnerability to forced labour and underage marriage. The “second peak” warned of by the WHO in the headline is a non-sequitur that has nothing to do with any elevated danger to children,

    Choice of headline is crucial as many browsers simply scan news sites. A 2010 Pew analysis found that the average visitor spent only 3 minutes 4 seconds per session on the typical news site. That compared with a 2005 survey showing about half of U.S. newspaper readers spent more than thirty minutes reading a daily paper.[lxvii]

    What has gone wrong?

    Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody (2008):

    When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to a bee … The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and co-ordination that keep the colony viable. Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks.

    He asserts that the ‘Web didn’t introduce a new competitor into the old eco-system, as USA Today had done. The Web created a new ecosystem.’[lxviii]

    The Guardian embraced a form of ‘collaboration media’, which companies and politicians rapidly learned to respect, and fear. Former editor Alan Rusbridger recognised that ‘social media would disrupt conventional politics and transform the speed at which it happened.’ He acknowledges, however, that, ‘It was, obviously, not necessarily good at complexity – though it could link to the complexity. It could be frustratingly reductive. It didn’t patiently and painstakingly report, in the way a good new organisation still did. It was to some extent parasitical.’[lxix]

    Rusbridger also quotes former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans to the effect that ‘an investigation only really began to count once the readers and even the journalists were bored with it.’[lxx] But in an all-consuming demand for clicks, and in the frenzied political era of Trump and Brexit, balance has been lost. Lacking detached and independent journalism we have walked into a prolonged social experiment that will take considerable unravelling.

    A New Hashtag

    On May 25th, 2020, George Perry Floyd, a 46-year-old black man was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. His death brought a wave of demonstrations in major U.S. cities that have spread to other countries, with many protestors donning masks as protection against the virus.

    The hashtag generation has discovered another noble cause in #blacklivesmatter – to be clear #flattenthecurve was certainly well motivated – but let us hope balance and nuance is not lost, and that a deadening conformity does not ensue in debates over race, poverty and the ambit of the state.

    The extraordinary scenes witnessed around the world could also be interpreted as a proxy for societies throwing off the heavy knee of lockdowns, containing a basic human impulse to interact with one another, honouring the exuberant Dionysian element in our nature that had been contained by Apollonian rationality.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s unnamed narrator from Notes from the Underground (1864) seems to envisage the poles of this division. First, he describes the archetypal rationalist that ‘scientifically’ predicts all outcomes in society:

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear, like the present-day encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    But he suggests this would create a reaction:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: “Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will![lxxi]

    Thus an excess of rationality may create conditions for profound irrationality, or even absurdity in the case of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s felicitous calculus.

    What Next?

    We still have to address the public health crisis of a pandemic, requiring substantial reforms in healthcare, architecture and spatial design to contend with a disease that should not be treated as a flu pandemic.

    Once unsustainable lockdowns ease, Western societies with susceptible populations must adapt to life with the virus. A policy of elimination is unrealistic and even cruel, unless we essentially exclude entrants from the outside world, as in New Zealand, or become a police state like China.

    Like a thief in the night, Covid-19 discovered weaknesses in the wealthiest countries in the world that also happen to be among the most unequal. Most obviously it found its way to older individuals, many weakened by increasingly poor diets and sedentarism that is behind a pernicious obesity pandemic.

    It has already been argued that life expectancy is declining in the United States,[lxxii] after two centuries during which it climbed steadily. Our lives, and diets, are simply unsustainable, and perhaps Covid-19 is nature’s (God or Gaia’s?) way of telling us so. The question is whether we are prepared to adopt the environmental approaches to lower the risk of further zoonotic episodes that lead to viruses.

    On a more basic level we need to retrofit buildings – embracing the idea of a healthy home[lxxiii] or workplace that diminishes viral load – and redesign transport systems to prevent contagions. As a priority we require hospital design for better infection control as ‘Building ventilation, whether natural or mechanical serves to dilute droplets nuclei in the air and is the single most important engineering control in the prevention of transmission of airborne infections.’[lxxiv]

    Yet surely we cannot lose the joy of social interaction, or turn romance into an online transaction controlled by algorithms. Great gatherings of people are still the lifeblood of politics, the arts and sport. For these to become historical curiosities, outlawed indefinitely as “super-spreader” events, would be lamentable.

    We have to shake the trauma off somehow, or dance it off perhaps. Above all children cannot be confounded by the fear of their parents and other adults, and have natural inclinations to play frustrated indefinitely. Let us restore the friendly hug or kiss in time. We have to accept a measure of death in exchange for the expression of lives we all value. Society cannot be broken by social distancing.

    Another vital lessons from this pandemic is that we require greater freedom of expression and media diversity. It is unacceptable for unaccountable corporate bodies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook to control narratives indefinitely. In truth, people may have to get used to paying for journalism once again, or at least acknowledge that without payment you are (mostly) getting clickbait.

    In writing ‘the first draft of history’ on Covid-19, The Guardian may be excused for making errors, but nor should the publication be viewed as a neutral conduit of facts either, unmotivated by profit, and without a seat at the highest tables of power. As Rusbridger reveals in response to the Edward Snowden and Julian Assange accounts: ‘I once remarked to a senior intelligence figure that the British and American governments, instead of condemning our role, should go down on their knees in thanks that we were there as such a careful filter.’[lxxv]

    All Images © Daniele Idini

    [i] Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359610120300927

    [ii] Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ May 5th, 2020, The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31089-8/fulltext

    [iii] Untitled, ‘’Greatest propaganda machine in history’: Sacha Baron Cohen slams Facebook, other social media companies’, NBC November 22nd, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/greatest-propaganda-machine-history-sacha-baron-cohen-slams-facebook-other-n1089471

    [iv] Simon Rogers, ‘Data journalism in action: what is Facts are Sacred about?’ April 4th, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/apr/04/data-journalism-facts-are-sacred

    [v] Josh Halliday, ‘Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We are the free speech wing of the free speech party’’ March 22nd, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech

    [vi] Vijaya Gadde and Matt Derella, ‘An update on our continuity strategy during COVID-19’,  https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/An-update-on-our-continuity-strategy-during-COVID-19.html

    [vii] Jon Levine, ‘YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown’, New York Post, May 16th, 2020,   https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist-knut-wittkowski-for-opposing-lockdown/

    [viii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Facebook alters virus action after damning misinformation report’, BBC, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52309094

    [ix] Ronald Dworkin ‘The Right to Ridicule’, March 23rd, 2006, The New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/the-right-to-ridicule/, accessed 26/4/19.

    [x] Stephen Sedley, Law and the Whirligig of Time, London, Hart Publishing, 2018.

    [xi] Sharon Begey, ‘Lower death rate estimates for coronavirus, especially for non-elderly, provide glimmer of hope’, March 16th, Stat, https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xii] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir & Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’ BMC Infectious Diseases, September, 2014, https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-14-480

    [xiii] Ibid, Sharon Begley, Ihttps://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xiv] Justin Fox, ‘The Coronavirus is worse than the flu, bro’ Bloomberg, April 24th, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-24/is-coronavirus-worse-than-the-flu-blood-studies-say-yes-by-far

    [xv] Jacob Sullum, ‘The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%’, Reason, 24th of May, 2020, https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/

    [xvi] Freddie Sayers,  ‘ Sunetra Gupta: Covid-19 is on the way out’ Unherd, May 21st, 2020, https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/

    [xvii] Kaitlyn Folmer and Josh Margolin, ‘Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers’, ABC News, June 8th, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests-coronavirus-hit-china-earlier-researchers/story?id=71123270

    [xviii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: France’s first known case ‘was in December’, BBC, May 5th, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554

    [xix] Guardian staff and agencies, ‘Global report: US House passes $3tn stimulus as experts track Covid-19-linked syndrome’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/global-report-democrats-push-for-3tn-stimulus-as-experts-track-covid-linked-syndrome?fbclid=IwAR1tpHpfNr_3zdSY68Yw6BUpUfAM6S56Dke8VANSk21Fhx2OQZO9pRDzFug

    [xx] Center for Disease Control, ‘Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States — 2017–2018 influenza season’, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

    [xxi] Simon Jenkins, ‘Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt’, The Guardian, March 6th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

    [xxii] David Adam, ‘Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19’, Nature, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

    [xxiii] Graig Graziosi, ‘Coronavirus: Nobel Prize winner predicts US will get through crisis sooner than expected’, The Independent, March 24th, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-michael-levitt-china-italy-a9422986.html

    [xxiv] Richard A. Stein, ‘Super-spreaders in infectious diseases’, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, April, 2011,  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971211000245

    [xxv] Tom Morgan, ‘ Lockdown saved no lives and may have cost them, Nobel Prize winner believes’, 23rd of May, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/lockdown-saved-no-lives-may-have-cost-nobel-prize-winner-believes/

    [xxvi] Amelia Winn, ‘Lidl becomes first supermarket chain to CLOSE a UK store after staff catch coronavirus – but shoppers are told doors will reopen on Monday’, Daily Mail, May 3rd, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8281995/Lidl-supermarket-chain-CLOSE-UK-store-staff-catch-coronavirus.html

    [xxvii] Emily Holden, ‘Do you need to wash your groceries? And other advice for shopping safely’, The Guardian, April 2nd, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/do-you-need-to-wash-your-groceries-and-other-advice-for-shopping-safely

    [xxviii] Tom Reichert, Gerardo Chowell & Jonathan A McCullers, ‘The age distribution of mortality due to influenza: pandemic and peri-pandemic’ BMC Medicine, December 12th, 2012, https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-162

    [xxix] Alba Grifoni, Daniela Weiskopf, Sydney I. Ramirez, Davey M. Smith, Shane Crotty, Alessandro Sette, Cell, ‘Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexposed Individuals’ May 14th, 2020, https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3

    [xxx] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir, and Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’, BMC Infectious Diseases, September 4th, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4169819/

    [xxxi] Mark Honigsbaum, ‘Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics‘,The Lancet, May 25th, 2020,  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31201-0/fulltext

    [xxxii] Center for Disease Control, ‘1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus)’ https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html

    [xxxiii] Emilia Vynnycky, Amy Trindall, Punam Mangtani, ‘Estimates of the reproduction numbers of Spanish influenza using morbidity data’, International Journal of Epidemiology, May 17th, 2007, https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/4/881/667165

    [xxxiv] Laura Spinney, ‘Covid-19 expert Karl Friston: ‘Germany may have more immunological “dark matter”’’ The Guardian, May 31st, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/covid-19-expert-karl-friston-germany-may-have-more-immunological-dark-matter

    [xxxv] Lisa Dua and Grace Huang, ‘Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?’ Bloomberg, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan-just-beat-the-virus-without-lockdowns-or-mass-testing

    [xxxvi] Nicola Davis and Rory Carrol, ‘ Experts divided over comparison of UK and Ireland’s coronavirus records’, The Guardian, April 13th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/experts-divided-comparison-uk-ireland-coronavirus-record

    [xxxvii] Untitled, ‘ Obesity crisis: The UK’s weight problem in seven charts’, Sky News, August 20th, 2019, https://news.sky.com/story/seven-charts-on-the-uks-obesity-problem-11583981

    [xxxviii] Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Leake, ‘Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’, The Sunday Times, April 19th, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

    [xxxix] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson orders pubs, restaurants and gyms to close across the UK’ March 21st, 2020, Sky News, https://www.skysports.com/more-sports/other-sports/news/12040/11961096/coronavirus-prime-minister-boris-johnson-orders-pubs-restaurants-and-gyms-to-close-across-the-uk

    [xl] ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [xli] Untitled, ‘Italy says number of doctors killed by coronavirus passes 100’ France24, April 9th 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200409-italy-says-number-of-doctors-killed-by-coronavirus-passes-100

    [xlii] Marta Gaglia and Seema Lakdawala, ‘What we do and do not know about COVID-19’s infectious dose and viral load’, The Conversation, April 14th, 2020, https://theconversation.com/what-we-do-and-do-not-know-about-covid-19s-infectious-dose-and-viral-load-135991

    [xliii] Simon Wood et al, ‘UK Covid-19 infection peak may have fallen before lockdown, new analysis shows’, May 7th, Bristol University, May 7th, 2020, https://www.bristol.ac.uk/maths/news/2020/peak-lockdown.html?fbclid=IwAR2g2Mr0IudkXCnQo8leIdVBueq-fdkLNGk9lQjPYrrrO7GW2jfMT19Hg1Q

    [xliv] Observer Reporters, ‘Across the world, figures reveal horrific toll of care home deaths’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/across-the-world-figures-reveal-horrific-covid-19-toll-of-care-home-deaths

    [xlv] Megan Molteni, ‘Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots’, Wired, May 7th, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/why-meatpacking-plants-have-become-covid-19-hot-spots/

    [xlvi] Press Release, ‘New study reveals blueprint for getting out of Covid-19 lockdown’, May 6th, 2020, University of East Anglia  https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/new-study-reveals-blueprint-for-getting-out-of-covid-19-lockdown

    [xlvii] Untitled, ‘Norway could have controlled infection without lockdown’, The Local, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.thelocal.no/20200522/norway-could-have-controlled-infection-without-lockdown-health-chief?fbclid=IwAR1jJTUpQLXLgONVqWmLJHQ2-rd-FG7794lONTsaquGaw0DJmhIUEOqWLwk

    [xlviii] Richard Orange, ‘Coronavirus: Norway wonders if it should have been more like Sweden’, The Telegraph, May 30th, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

    [xlix] Emma Graham-Harrison, Angela Giuffrida in Rome, Helena Smith in Athens and Liz Ford, ‘Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence’, The Guardian, March 28th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/28/lockdowns-world-rise-domestic-violence

    [l] United Nations Sustainable Development Group, ‘Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on children’ April, 2020, https://unsdg.un.org/resources/policy-brief-impact-covid-19-children?fbclid=IwAR35l8582cnFgE_sWLurILYXeGWyg_PYSo8BApmmsarSwa_8_FQGzafxoI0

    [li] Johan Giesecke ‘The invisible pandemic’, The Lancet, May 5th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext

    [lii] Jon Henley, ‘We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy’, June 3rd, 2020, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-sweden-coronavirus-strategy-admits-too-many-died-anders-tegnell

    [liii] Jonathan Glover, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London, 1999, p.394

    [liv] Oliver Milman, ‘Seven of Donald Trump’s most misleading coronavirus claims’, The Guardian, March 30th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-misleading-claims

    [lv] Michelle Cottle, ‘Boris Johnson Should Have Taken His Own Medicine’, New York Times, March 27th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/boris-johnson-coronavirus.html

    [lvi] David Graeber, Debt – The First 5,000 Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.357

    [lvii] ‘Top 15 Most Popular News Websites | February 2020’, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/news-websites

    [lviii] Jim Waterson, ‘Guardian named UK’s most trusted newspaper‘ The Guardian, October 31st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/oct/31/guardian-rated-most-trusted-newspaper-brand-in-uk-study

    [lix] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.145

    [lx] Ibid, p.348

    [lxi] Ibid, p.163

    [lxii] Ibid, p.181

    [lxiii] Ibid p.181

    [lxiv] Luke O’Neill, ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’, The Guardian, May 15th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/how-coronavirus-spreads-in-restaurant-video

    [lxv] Guardian Staff and Agencies, ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’, The Guardian, May 26th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/global-report-disaster-looms-for-millions-of-children-as-who-warns-of-second-peak

    [lxvi] Statista, ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [lxvii] Rusbridger, Ibid, p.275

    [lxviii] Quoted in Rusbridger, Ibid, p.135

    [lxix] Ibidp.143

    [lxx] Ibid, p.161

    [lxxi] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, Alma Books, London, p.23-24

    [lxxii] S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Douglas J. Passaro, M.D., Ronald C. Hershow, M.D., Jennifer Layden, M.P.H., Bruce A. Carnes, Ph.D., Jacob Brody, M.D., Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D., Robert N. Butler, M.D., David B. Allison, Ph.D., and David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D. ‘ A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century’, The New England Journal of Medicine, March 17th, 2005,  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr043743

    [lxxiii] Kate Hamblet, ‘How to Design a Healthy Home ~ An Architect’s Blueprint’, HealthyGreenSavvy, January 5th, 2019, https://www.healthygreensavvy.com/healthy-home/

    [lxxiv] Fatimah Lateef, ‘Hospital design for better infection control’, Journal of Emergencies, Shock and Trauma, 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776365/

    [lxxv] Ibid, Rusbridger, p.250