Cassandra Voices

Tag: ISAG

  • Covid-19: Unanswered Questions

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

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

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

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

    Weaponising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    PCR Testing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Churchillian Speeches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Disproportionately Affected

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

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

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

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

    States of Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Flatten the Curve?

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

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

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

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

    https://vimeo.com/560523610

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

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

    Silencing of Dissent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Moneybags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Covid-19: A New Irish Social Contract?

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

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

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

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

    Times of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Recovery Position

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Leprechaun Economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Following Public Health Guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Frank O’Connor

    Guests of the Nation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Are you right there Michael?

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

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

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

    He added more controversially:

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

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

    Facing Up to Errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Science and Technology are not Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    On the Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

    A New Social Contract?

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

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

    They continue:

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

    They argue against reliance on lockdowns:

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

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

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

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

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

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

  • ZeroCovid’s Neoconservative Traits

    So-called ‘ZeroCovid’ is a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to the virus, promising to eliminate community transmission in Ireland. The concept has gained traction among young people, especially, desperate for an end to a seemingly endless cycle of lockdowns, and others worried by the danger posed by the disease itself.

    The original ‘zero-tolerance’ policy is identified with Donald Trump’s associate Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor of New York (1994-2001), and involved punishment for even minor infractions.

    Rudy Giuliani

    Most criminologists agree, however, that zero-tolerance, based on the ‘broken window’ theory of policing, made little difference to overall crime rates, which seem to have been falling in New York prior to Giuliani’s period in office. New powers of arrest simply handed police carte blanche to remove homeless people from affluent neighbourhoods. Thus Time Square became a safe haven for tourism, but ghettos remained no go.

    Zero-tolerance policies emerged in a neoconservative era alongside ‘humanitarian interventions,’ culminating in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, led by U.S. President George W. Bush, and supported by U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair also backed a zero tolerance approach to crime in the U.K., and has recently inveigled his way back to prominence as part of the ‘war’ effort against Covid-19.

    Neoconservatives engineered a War on Terror which, apart from direct military actions, included ‘shock and awe’ tactics to cow opponents, galvanising support through appeals to nationalist sentiment and by demonising – often phantom – enemies.

    Finally, neoconservatism is aligned with neoliberal austerity adopted in the wake of the Financial Crisis, beginning in 2007-2008. Austerity proponents assume purgative measures – described as ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein – are required to heal the body politic of its economic woes.

    Family Resemblances

    The ZeroCovid elimination approach in Ireland bears significant family resemblances to an illusory zero-tolerance policy to crime. There are also shades of the War on Terror’s ‘shock and awe’ tactic of elevating fear and appealing to narrow national self-interest. The imprint of austerity is apparent in a promise of deliverance after painful expurgation, as a population already frayed by successive lockdowns is exhorted to double down and accept greater stringency. Naomi Klein has also identified a Pandemic Shock Doctrine.

    It may seem surprising that Irish leftists should be attracted to a policy which seems to have a neoconservative mentality, but notably ‘recovering socialists developed neoconservatism in the sixties and seventies,’ and the Marxist dialectic permits great suffering before the achievement of a socialist paradise.

    Leading spokespeople do not, however, give the impression they welcome the embrace of leftists. Tomás Ryan recently called for ‘more of a grand coalition attitude’; while another, Anthony Staines is, or was, a member of Fine Gael. Among the few practising doctors associated with ZeroCovid is Maitiú Ó Tuathail, whose friendship with then Fine Gael Taoiseach Leo Varadkar gave him access to a confidential agreement between the State and the IMO, which is now the subject of a Garda enquiry.

    ZeroCovid is certainly not a blueprint for a socialist republic – the narrowness of its focus its quite striking – and advocates assert pro-business credentials, Ryan emphasising that ‘ZeroCovid countries are ranking highest in business confidence.’ Far from being treated as revolutionaries in the mainstream media, its spokespeople have become household names during the pandemic, blurring a distinction between expert witness and political actor.

    Some on the left may be attracted to ZeroCovid in the hope that ‘Napoleonic’ state mobilisation witnessed during the pandemic will be carried into ‘peacetime,’ to address poverty and environmental destruction. The shady dealings we have witnessed in this period, however, set a dangerous precedent, as the executive director of the British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi put it:

    Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. 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.

    Given the paucity of investigative journalism in Ireland it is difficult to assess corruption levels, but the one euro billion spent on PPE in 2020 raises a red flag, while allegations of contracts being awarded inappropriately are ventilated on social media.

    End of the Truce

    It is also notable that despite the obvious distinction between the government’s suppression approach, and ZeroCovid’s elimination policy, there has been no direct confrontation between the two groups. At the end of January, however, the truce ended with the chair of the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group Philip Nolan decisively branding ZeroCovid ‘an utterly false promise.’

    This intervention may have been linked to recent politicisation, as the Social Democrats, and to a lesser extent Labour (which announced ‘a national aggressive suppression strategy, zero Covid-19 by another name’), followed People Before Profit’s earlier embrace of the project.

    Throughout the pandemic ZeroCovid spokespeople have been welcomed within the dominant media consensus – assessing the virus a once-in-a-generation challenge – with nationalist appeals – adopting the hashtag #wecanbezero – perhaps seen as a way way of channeling latent radicalism away from opposition to reliance on strict lockdowns.

    Origins of ZeroCovid

    The genesis of the movement in Ireland is unclear. Last summer the Wellcome Trust, whose offshore dealings were exposed in the Paradise Papers, launched a global ‘Zero Covid’ fundraising initiative for vaccine research, with the support of Goldman Sachs Gives and others.

    The Irish initiative traces its origins to a disparate group of academic scientists led by Staines that brought forward a Crush the Curve petition in July, preceding the emergence of a Zero Covid Island group. It has since morphed into another organisation called ISAG: ‘a multidisciplinary group of scientists, academics, and researchers who have come together to advocate for a SARS-CoV-2 elimination strategy for the island’.

    Yaneer Bar-Yam preparing to speak at an event in 2014.

    Among those involved is a MIT Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, who does not appear to have had any previous connection to Ireland. Bar Yam previously advised the Pentagon ‘about global social unrest and the crises in Egypt and Syria’, and the National Security Council and the National Counter Terrorism Council on global strategy, elsewhere described as ‘preventing ethnic violence.’ He also advised policymakers on the elimination of Ebola, a disease which presents a very different challenge to Covid-19.

    Tomás Ryan is himself a former Post-Doctoral Fellow (2010-2016) at MIT, having previously been a Junior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wolfson College, Cambridge (2009 – 2010). Ryan’s background is in neuroscience and has no publications in virology or epidemiology.

    Bar-Yam set up an organisation called ENDCRONAVIRUS.ORG (https://www.endcoronavirus.org/) in February 2020, and may see Ireland as a potential testing ground for counter-viral methods.

    ZeroCovid appeals to national self-interest, requiring exclusion of a diseased ‘other,’ through mandatory quarantines for foreign arrivals, and promotes the creation of zero-transmission zones within the country. In August Bar-Yam co-authored a paper entitled, ‘A green zone strategy for Ireland,’ which recalls Baghdad’s ‘Green Zone’ under U.S. occupation, and districts ‘purified’ by the application of a zero-tolerance approach to crime.

    Indefinite elimination of what appears to be an endemic seasonal virus from a globally integrated country such as Ireland appears Utopian however, with most scientists assuming Covid-19 will be with us forever.

    Last month, Nature asked more than one hundred immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists working on Covid-19 whether they believe it can be eradicated. Almost 90% responded to say it will become endemic

    According to one of those surveyed Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. ‘Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon.’

    Jacinda Arden

    New Zealand

    For obvious cultural reasons, Irish ZeroCovid strategists often cite New Zealand’s as a model to follow – factors other than suppression policies appear to be inhibiting Covid-19 in east Asian countries –  but this ignores the extreme isolation of a sparsely populated island nation situated on the other side of the world, under a depleted ozone layer that brings elevated levels of virus-killing ultraviolet light. Moreover, New Zealand does not have a disputed border with another jurisdiction to contend with. Also, importantly, New Zealand’s imports arrive in containers, as opposed to Ireland’s reliance on ‘roll-on roll-off’ trucks.

    https://twitter.com/John_McGahon/status/1360552471345717249

    Moreover, it seems significant that there have been less than two thousand cases of Covid-19 detected in New Zealand so far during the pandemic. Common cold viruses display infuriatingly unpredictable behaviour, waxing and waning seasonally, like influenza, which derives its name from the influenza degli astri, or ‘influence of the planets.’

    A paper from 1973 entitled ‘An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation’, discusses the case of six of twelve men wintering at an isolated Antarctic base that sequentially developed common cold symptoms after seventeen weeks of complete isolation.

    According to the authors: ‘Examination of specimens taken from the men in relation to the outbreak has not revealed a causative agent,’ which the authors say could ‘well have been the effects of a coronavirus.’ Bewildered, they conclude: ‘in some way virus persisted, either in the environment or in the men.’

    Furthermore, in an article for Cassandra Voices Justin Frewen observed how decisive political leadership encouraged personal responsibility:

    In addition to providing Covid-19 related information through standard media channels, the NZ Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has communicated directly with the public, making herself available to the media and holding daily public press conferences, led by New Zealand’s director-general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Together they have displayed “a reliable, measured and authoritative face for New Zealand’s Covid-19 response”.Of particular value has been the clarity of Jacinda Ardern’s communication on the virus. Her leadership style has been assessed by one commentator as ‘one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.’

    The virus returned mysteriously to Auckland in August, however, leading to a second lockdown. Civil liberties advocates may take issue with the mandatory confinement of anyone testing positive – and mandatory quarantining of all visitors – but the response to the virus has been to the benefit and satisfaction of the vast majority of New Zealanders, and the satisfies a principle of proportionality.

    But another outbreak at the beginning of February has brought yet another lockdown to Auckland, and Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has since signalled that the country’s elimination strategy is to be abandoned in the wake of the arrival of vaccines, stating: ‘Our goal has to be though, to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally, with the flu. It won’t be a disease that we will see simply disappear after one round of vaccine.’

    Yet surprisingly vaccines are not seen as a game changer by ZeroCovid advocates. An ISAG webinar on January 21st found Staines arguing in favour of mandatory quarantine facilities, on the basis that new variants could ‘dodge some of the effects of vaccines.’

    It begs the question: if new variants are swirling around the world indefinitely – just as strains of influenza vary from year-to-year occasionally evading the effect of vaccines – will Ireland maintain quarantine requirements indefinitely, as a true believer associated with Bar-Yam’s organisation has proposed? This seems unthinkable for a country with a diaspora of three million and a high proportion of immigrants, some of whom may leave Ireland if this approach is adopted. Unfortunately, as in the War of Terror, the enemy is within, and the war unwinnable.

    Australia

    A more tortuous, and arguably disproportionate, route to the elimination of Covid-19 was witnessed in Melbourne, Australia, which may serve as a warning to an Irish public desperate for the pandemic to end.

    With a similar population to the whole of Ireland’s Melbourne experienced a winter outbreak, beginning in June, that brought a stringent lockdown lasting almost three months. Notably, however, the number of cases peaked at seven hundred per day and the virus declined with the arrival of spring. Ireland has had ten times that number in a single day in January, and as of mid-February has still not brought case numbers down to that level.

    Just this month Melbourne went into another lockdown again after an outbreak in a Holiday Inn, giving the lie to the notion that elimination avoids recurring lockdowns; especially in a country such as Ireland conteding with leaky borders, a poorly resourced health system, and a history of distrust in State institutions.

    Advocates of ZeroCovid now call for a level of stringency that brought an end to the Melbourne outbreak, in particular advocating schools close until late April, seemingly oblivious to the damage on children, already denied months of education.

    Apocalyptic Warnings

    Irish ZeroCovid advocates have been unusually apocalyptic in their assessment of the danger posed by Covid-19, with Tomás Ryan projecting in June that a herd immunity approach, involving successive lockdowns, would result in 50,000 deaths, while Sam McConkey warned in March there could be up to 120,000 deaths.

    The latter death toll would be greater than has been witnessed in the U.K., which has the second highest mortality rate (after Belgium) in the world, and a population ten times that of Ireland. Even in almost libertarian scenarios – such as in the two Dakota states in the U.S. – death tolls have been nowhere close to those proportions.

    While ZeroCovid might be dismissed as a fringe organisation, or cult, the degree of media exposure its advocates have enjoyed, and their tendency to ‘shock and awe’ with outlandish projections has distorted debate in Ireland, drawing attention away from the profound damage of lockdowns.

    The Irish media has developed a fixation on the virus to the almost total exclusion of other challenges we face. Mortality from Covid-19 is not portrayed as equivalent to death by natural causes, but a consequence of moral failings in the population or an indulgent government. It has parallels with the attitude of the Pro Life movement.

    Looking forward to life improving.

    And yet, as spring approaches case numbers will surely recede, with a range of vaccines and new treatments reducing severity and mortality. Socially distancing has become second nature to many Irish people, and there is increasing knowledge of the importance of ventilation.

    The Irish government should resist a social experiment that holds no promise of success, and the public should look forward to life improving. In time we are likely to accept a seasonal mortality from Covid-19, just as we tolerate the burden of seasonal influenza, along with many of the environmental factors that cause or exacerbate the non-infectious diseases that remain our leading killers by far.

    Percentage breakdown of top ten registered causes of death, January – October 2020. Source CSO