Cassandra Voices

Tag: Luke O’Neill

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Pandemonium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “The big calls”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Deep Background

    A ‘Note on Sources’ says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Dictatorial                                                                                                                        

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Infection Fatality Rate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Loss of Proportionality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Pharmaceutical Industry

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

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

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

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

    He added that

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

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

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

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

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

    Micheál Martin

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

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

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

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

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

    Non-Sterilising Vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

    Against the Grain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Feature Image: (c) Daniele Idini

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

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

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

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Elusive Facts

    No facts without Judgment

    Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
    Mr Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).

    These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
    Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1955).

    The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that ‘facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.’ The term is derived from the Latin ‘factum,’ meaning ‘a deed, an action and sometimes in scholastic Latin an event or occasion.’ MacIntyre was not dismissing the importance of gleaning evidence from sources, or deriving conclusions from scientific studies, but asserting that no fact is ever ‘independent of judgment.’[i]

    Over the course of the current pandemic, as a recent opinion piece in the British Medical Journal puts it:

    uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable—tend to be elusive. Most decisions must be based on information that is flawed (imperfectly measured, with missing data), uncertain (contested, perhaps with low sensitivity or specificity), proximate (relating to something one stage removed from the real phenomenon of interest) or sparse (only available for some aspects of the problem).

    Similarly, the historian E. H. Carr considered facts to be ‘like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them.’ Thus partisan outlooks have always coloured understandings of historic events. Carr recalls: ‘Our picture of Greece in the 5th century BC is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens.’

    Journalists and editors in writing ‘the first rough draft of history’ therefore make judgments in determining facts. Unsurprisingly, during a global pandemic Covid-19 deaths and diagnoses are given greater factual weight than the equivalent statistics for heart disease, cancer or influenza. This is quite apart from deaths in developing countries from tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, which are set to double this year in part owing to the intense focus on Covid-19 – particularly in Africa which by mid-August had experienced just 23,000 deaths from Covid-19.

    Any journalist’s judgment in determining facts is not necessarily a product of sinister machinations, but orthodoxies and received opinions are easily enshrined in news organisations that are patronised, or owned outright, by vested interests, which throughout history have ‘manufactured’ consent.

    Moreover, as Noam Chomsky put it in a famous interview with Andrew Marr, there is ‘a filtering system’ that starts in kindergarten which ‘selects for obedience and subordination.’ Chomsky intimates that most journalists that rise to the top of major news organisations are conformists, including Marr.

    The pandemic has exposed the fragility of contemporary journalism in the era of the Internet, which, arguably, has exhibited over-deference to scientific authority, even where those authorities have proffered accounts that have proved wildly inaccurate, or contradictory. This passivity seems to be a feature of what Nick Davies has described as ‘churnalism’, whereby journalists become passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’

    Fake News

    In the Internet era we have witnessed an onslaught of so-called ‘fake news,’ which are accounts departing from journalistic convention that enter the realm of fiction and outright distortion.

    This is not, however, entirely novel. It is axiomatic that truth is the first casualty of war, a metaphor constantly applied to this pandemic. Journalists embedded in power structures have long spun outright falsehoods. We need only cast our mind back to uncritical coverage of claims around Weapons of the Mass Destruction prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the misleading accounts of Cuba in the U.S. press.

    Nonetheless, in this context such claims have become more outrageous, and even comical, with social media – Facebook in particular – acting as a conduit for misinformation from non-mainstream outlets, granting individuals unprecedented platforms to project fears, fantasies and delusions that are often manipulated by shadowy agencies, such as Cambridge Analytica.

    An apparent antidote to fake news has arrived in the form of fact-checking websites. While these may succeed in exposing outright falsehoods – which is undoubtedly important in an era of climate change – we should also examine which facts are being checked and also, why there are discrepancies in mainstream accounts. The funding for such sites also merits scrutiny. The facts do not speak for themselves.

    #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance

    In March this year the Irish online news website, www.thejournal.ie announced it had ‘joined a worldwide project of factcheckers debunking claims about Covid-19.’ According to their report: ‘This project, called the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, comprises more than 100 factcheckers around the world and it is the largest collaborative factchecking project ever,’

    That global alliance was launched in January by the Poynter Institute:

    when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally. The World Health Organization now classifies this issue as an infodemic — and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.

    This global response is in line with a war-gaming exercise for a global pandemic (coincidentally a fictional coronavirus: Coronavirus Associated Pulmonary Syndrome) called Event 201 organised by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this exercise where no one has immunity from that virus, the model predicts the pandemic will only end when 80 percent of the world’s population has been infected, which takes 18 months and results in 65 million deaths.

    The participants addressed the issue of disinformation and misinformation from ‘state sponsored groups’ and specifically pointed to the importance of ‘fact-checking efforts.’

    Notably, the Poynter Institute has received charitable donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of $382,000 in 2015, earmarked for improving ‘the accuracy in worldwide media of claims related to global health and development.’ The organisation now receives donations from, among others, Facebook, Google News Initiative and climate-change denying Charles Koch.

    Died ‘From’ or ‘With’?

    Most of www.thejournal.ie’s investigations into online claims result in slam dunks, where obvious fake news is dismissed. This may indeed be in the public interest; although it is questionable how many people actually believe claims such as that children are going to be taught how to masturbate as part of their education, or that Bill Gates briefed the CIA in 2005 on a vaccine against religious fanatics. This latter claim, interestingly, was also debunked on other fact-checking sites, demonstrating that www.thejournal.ie is a small cog in a global campaign.

    More relevantly to Ireland, in carrying out its fact-checking remit www.journal.ie has bolstered the Irish government’s emphasis on the serious danger posed by Covid-19 to all age groups. Consolidating government messaging during a pandemic may be considered a civic duty, but it can also over-simplify “elusive” facts that merit revisiting.

    On July 24th, Radio DJ Niall Boylan’s tweet from July 14th claiming just eight people under the age of sixty-five had died from Covid-19 became the subject of a fact-checking inquiry.

    The relevant fact checker, Rónán Duffy, recalled that the Health Protection Surveillance Centre had recorded a total of 1,763 deaths related to Covid-19, of which 113 related to people under the age of 65. Duffy thus concluded that ‘At the time that Boylan shared the original tweet on 14 July, the number of Covid-19 deaths among people under 65 was 113, not eight’

    In response to a request for clarification, however, Boylan said he specifically used the term ‘from Covid-19,′ not ‘with Covid-19′. He went on to argue that it was important to distinguish deaths among people with and without underlying health conditions, ‘in other words people who had died from coronavirus.’ He claimed the figure of eight people was a direct quote from a statement made by Independent T.D. Michael McNamara, who said at a sitting of the Special Committee on Covid-19 that only eight of those under the age of sixty-five who died did not have an underlying condition.

    Duffy concluded the claim was ‘misleading because it omits crucial details that may lead to readers forming an incorrect conclusion.’

    Boylan’s tweet may indeed have been unsatisfactory, but the original death toll was itself a simplification: a bald statistic that omitted to mention that the vast majority of those who died were afflicted with underlying conditions. Perhaps some of these were patients would have succumbed to a respiratory infection in an ‘ordinary’ year, considering influenza or pneumonia are the cause of up to a thousand deaths a year in Ireland.

    A Covid-19 infection may not have been the primary cause of death; or an infection could have accelerated by a short time that mortality. Any death comes as a shock to those left behind, and all reasonable efforts should be undertaken to preserve life, but it is not uncommon for patients weakened by long-term illness to succumb to respiratory infections, such as Covid-19, rather than the chronic degenerative disease to which the cause of death is ordinarily ascribed. Members of the public unacquainted with medical science may not be aware of this. According to one G.P. consulted in researching this article attributing cause of death is never an exact science.

    A more thorough fact-checking exercise might examine the nature of comorbidities or underlying conditions. Conditions are described in papers, but a loose definition can easily yield to wild claims around the number of those in the Irish population who are at risk of death from the virus.

    https://twitter.com/DonnellyStephen/status/1303632455107260422

    Yet a recent article in Nature emphasises that age is by by far the strongest predictor of an infected person’s risk of dying :

    For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die. For people in their fifties and early sixties, about five will die — more men than women. The risk then climbs steeply as the years accrue.

    The suggestion that 1.5 million among an Irish population of less than five million that is the youngest in the E.U. are susceptible to death from Covid-19 is a wild exaggeration.

    All 1,777 deaths?

    In another recent article Fact Checker claimed: “the virus was a factor in all 1,777 deaths.”

    Yet HIQA reported in July:

    Excess mortality was found to be 1,072 (95% CI: 851 to 1,290) between 11 March 2020 and 16 June 2020 inclusive. The officially reported number of COVID-19 deaths for the same period was 1,709. Therefore, the estimated excess mortality is less than the officially reported COVID-19-related mortality by 637 cases.

    Similarly in the U.K. Dr Jason Oke of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford has found that almost one third of Covid-19 deaths in July and August were ‘primarily caused by other conditions’. There is therefore significant doubt over whether the virus was the primary factor in all 1,777 of these deaths.

    Also, the coroner’s office was not conducting post-mortems on suspected cases and testing was pulled from the entire care home sector for three weeks at the height of the pandemic, meaning in many cases doctors were making educated guesses that Covid-19 was the cause of death.

    Then CMO Tony Houlihan also acknowledged: ‘Clinically, the “index of suspicion” for the disease would be “a good deal higher” than would normally be the case for flu.’

    RTÉ’s Feargal Bowers

    The Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ says that ‘nine out of ten people in Ireland say RTÉ has been their main media source for accessing information on Covid-19.’ The broadcaster recently launched an initiative against fake news entitled: ‘The truth matters at RTÉ – here’s why,’ claiming:

    Now that society is grappling with the challenges of a pandemic, and the inescapable anxiety that comes with it, the potential for manipulation of the facts is huge.

    But RTÉ has at times provided an unreliable account of the danger posed by Covid-19 to the Irish public. Throughout the pandemic RTÉ’s health correspondent Feargal Bowers has pointed to the exceptional danger posed by Covid-19, which fits within what Nancy Tomes has called the “killer germ genre of journalism”.[ii]

    Bower’s describes a Grim Reaper that is redolent of the character of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal:

    This virus could visit any of us, at any time, in our homes, or in work.

    It does not make an appointment.                                                        

    Going outside involves a certain roll of the dice.

    Inside you may also encounter this intruder.

    Like any lottery, there are things people can do to improve their chances.

    And hold onto the most valuable prize of all – your life.

    In fact, we are dealing with a virus with an infection fatality rate below 1% according to Nature magazine, or ‘possibly as low as 0.2% or 0.3%,’ according to Lone Simonsen, a professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark who has worked at the CDC and National Institutes of Health in the U.S.; others such as Professor Johan Gisecke, a member of the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards (STAG-IH) previously suggested a figure as low as 0.1%. The IFR has varied from region to region, with New York, Madrid, London and Lombardy particularly badly hit, but in Africa, as indicated, the IFR appears to be exceptionally low.

    With better treatments – especially the use of the generic drug Dexamethasone – and protection of vulnerable groups, chances of survival have improved since the early stages of the pandemic. This seems evident from the relatively low death toll currently witnessed across Europe, including in Ireland, despite rising case numbers. Many of us also harbour T-cell immunity from other coronaviruses, as we will see.

    Yet Bowers has continued to make factually incorrect claims in a succession of articles, including on September 5th, which stated: ‘The World Health Organization says data to date suggests 80% of Covid-19 infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical, requiring ventilation.’

    Ventilators are now used sparingly in the treatment of Covid-19, and large orders were cancelled in April.

    Remarkably, Bowers seems to have copy and pasted that information from a WHO Situation Report from March 6th, stating ‘data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation.’[iii]

    The continued use of data from March undermines RTÉ’s credibility and should be a source of embarrassment.

    IFR or CFR?

    In a widely circulated tweet at the height of the pandemic then Minister for Health and current Minister for Higher Education, Simon Harris confounded the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is the percentage of deaths from diagnosed cases, with the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), which is the percentage who die after contracting the virus. This surely elevated fears around the ‘deadly’ virus.

    More recently Fianna Fáil TD Cathal Crowe displayed the same confusion when he called a TikTok video ‘almost treasonous’ and ‘only a step or two away from being culpable for manslaughter.’

    He added:

    And at a time when those who contract Covid – there’s a fatality rate at the moment in this country of 6.2% of those who contract Covid – I think their actions in trying to draw the Covid virus onto themselves and pass it onto others, I think it’s only a step or two away from being culpable for manslaughter.

    Reference to the CFR may give the impression the virus is more lethal than we now know it is. Raising alarm bells may serve a short term end of confining people to their homes, but will ultimately only lead to distrust as reliable scientific information is now easily accessible.

    A similar caution should apply to emphasis by the current Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly on so-called ‘Long Covid.’ In June the UK’s Covid Symptom Study indicated that ‘one in ten people may still have symptoms after three weeks, and some may suffer for months.’ But the study fails to distinguish between asymptomatic and symptomatic cases, implying this is a reference to only confirmed symptomatic cases. Anecdotally, one Dublin GP consulted said he had not encountered a single case in his practice.

    Long Covid appears to fit into the category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue which ‘refers to a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’ The prevalence at this stage is unclear.

    Mortality Projections

    The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum writes: ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as “risky,” it is medical science – and the science of epidemiology in particular – that is often the source of … irrational and often prejudicial judgments … knowledge is constantly giving birth to new fears and anxieties.’[iv]

    Epidemiology cannot be an exact science as it projects into an uncertain future. Michael Levitt has claimed that epidemiologists see their function, ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore if they say it is 100-times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s ok.’ This approach may explain why a senior Irish health official told the Sunday Business Post in March that ‘1.9 million could be infected and become sick with the new coronavirus.’

    But crying wolf with claims that prove wildly inaccurate over the course of a long pandemic cannot easily be repeated. It corrodes trust in scientific authority, which is an important consideration in an era of climate change.

    Among the scientists that have risen to prominence over the course of the pandemic is Professor Sam McConkey. On March 11th he predicted ‘there could be between 80,000 and 120,000 deaths in Ireland from coronavirus.’ McConkey has not been adequately held to account for the inaccuracy of this prediction, yet his projections continue to be circulated:

    https://twitter.com/AodhanORiordain/status/1305613309752864771

    The main go-to-man among Irish scientists for the Irish media has been Trinity Professor of Immunology Luke O’Neill. On June 22nd he claimed that Ireland would have had 28,000 deaths if there hadn’t been a lockdown.

    Yet in a long Twitter thread data analyst David W. Higgins provided a compelling argument that mortalities peaked prior to the nationwide lockdown at the end of March.

    Higgins recalls the country went into lockdown in two stages. ‘The “first measures” were on March 12th with school closures, social distancing and a ban on large gatherings …. Then on March 28th, we began the ‘full lockdown,’ with non-essential workplaces shut and the 2km rule.’

    Higgins worked from the assumption that symptoms manifest after five days, and that deaths, on average, occur after twenty. He calculated that ‘the March 28th lockdown should have led to a peak in deaths taking place over 20 days later, any date after April 17th,’ which he said is ‘pretty much what the headline data shows. April 20th saw the largest number of new deaths.’

    ‘However’, he added, ‘we know that the date of death being announced is several days *after* the death actually took place,’ which, he reckoned, was typically about two days. Therefore, ‘the peak is more likely around April 15th.’

    ‘The problem is’ he said ‘that’s 2 days before the March 28th “full lockdown” should have had an effect.’ His conclusion was that ‘the full lockdown wasn’t the main cause for peak deaths!’, the implications of this were ‘profound’ he argued. He argued that ‘the social distancing alone (between March 12th and 28th) was the main driver of #FlattenTheCurve.’

    Based on Higgins’s assessment, the laws introduced on March 12th provided sufficient space for hospitals to handle a surge in cases that could have led to avoidable deaths from hospitals being overstretched. One may question O’Higgins’s assessment, but at least he has crunched the numbers, unlike O’Neill it would appear, who has offered no proof for his claim.

    Forming Memories…

    Another scientist to have gained a platform has been, Dr Tomás Ryan, a Trinity colleague of O’Neill’s, who is widely touted as an expert authority on this pandemic, despite being a neuroscientist, with no publications listed on Google Scholar related to contagious diseases or public health. Nor does he have a medical background. A recent paper, from June 2020 is entitled: ‘Memory: It’s Not a Lie if You Believe It.’

    Ryan has been among the leading advocates of ‘Zero Covid’ Ireland, dedicated to ‘Crushing the Curve’, a global initiative of the Wellcome Trust that also supported Ryan’s thesis work. Ryan has written a number of articles for both the Sunday Business Post and the Irish Times, which does not appear to mount a paywall for his contributions.

    Advocating a suppression of the virus in ‘the paper of record’ on June 10th, Ryan claimed that a strategy of ‘living with the virus,’ would involve:

    a cycle of successive lockdowns [which] would need to continue four to seven times until we reach a stage of herd immunity, with at least 60 per cent of the population infected. The health cost of this approach would be about 50,000 deaths.

    Ryan makes no reference to any study on which he bases this mortality claim. He seems to be referring to the epidemiological assessment of Imperial College’s Niall Ferguson, the methodology of which has come in for serious criticism. In March Ferguson’s ‘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.

    On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times wrote: ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s WHO ties, the authors noted, Imperial was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’ Yet despite a chaotic response from the Federal authorities, the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 remains below two hundred thousand, with daily deaths decreasing according to the New York Times.

    Contrary to Ryan’s stark warning, Ireland has registered just over fifty deaths, as of September 20th, since the start of July.

    A More Nuanced Approach

    One-sided reporting of ‘facts’ around Covid-19 in Ireland is consistent with a concerted global effort emphasising the unprecedented danger posed by Covid-19. This account is predicated on the assumption that a reliable vaccine is the only way to bring the pandemic under control.

    As mentioned, however, the pessimistic projections of Professor Niall Ferguson and others have proved unfounded, and recently the WHO’s Mike Ryan warned there is no guarantee that a vaccine will ever be found.

    This leaves us in a position of zugzwang, a term which Emeritus Professor of Public Health at Edinburgh University Raj Bhopal borrows from the game of chess, meaning when the obligation to make a move in one’s turn leaves one in a serious, often decisive, disadvantage. He concludes:

    The balance between the damage caused by COVID-19 and that caused by lockdowns needs quantifying. Public debate, including on population immunity, informed by epidemiological data, is now urgent.

    Hearteningly, after a relatively heavy death toll in the spring, having avoided lockdown, Sweden’s case numbers have remained below the European average throughout September – lower even than its high-performing Scandinavian neighbour Norway.

    This supports an hypothesis that a herd immunity threshold could lie at around 10-20%, ‘considerably lower than the minimum coverage needed to interrupt transmission by random vaccination,’ according to the University of Strathclyde’s Professor Gabriela M. Gomes et al. Professor Sunetra Gupta’s group at Oxford University have put the figure as low as 10%.

    The scale of pre-existing immunity to Covid-19 is discussed in a recent article in the British Medical Journal. The authors remind us that the ‘research offers a powerful reminder that very little in immunology is cut and dried.’ Yet there has been little debate on the crucial question of herd or population immunity in the Irish media. This would involve an age-targeted strategy that takes account of the significant health impacts of lockdowns, especially on younger age groups.

    We are now beginning to witness the emergence of a recognisably left-wing opposition to lockdowns as herd immunity ceases to be a dirty word; while Bill Gates has acknowledged: ‘the initial vaccine won’t be ideal in terms of its effectiveness against sickness and transmission. It may not have a long duration.’

    Lack of ICU Capacity

    Facts around Covid-19 remain keenly contested among scientists. It may well be that the extreme precaution advocated by the Irish government is indeed justified, but it is incumbent on the Irish media to validate carefully all claims, and permit frank debate to occur. Politicians can be forgiven for erring in not giving an accurate picture at the height of a pandemic, but more honest conversations are necessary as we move forward. It is incumbent on journalists to hold politicians, and scientists, to account.

    Unfortunately Ireland’s dysfunctional system of public health creates additional risks that discourages any change in approach, and perhaps explains an apparent faith in a reliable vaccine being produced.

    At the start of the pandemic Ireland had half the number of ICU beds and staffing compared to other E.U. countries. By the start of May, however, according to Feargal Bowers (who presumably can be relied on in this instance) there were 417 units; but by the start of June, that figure was 381; July 252; August 276. At the start of September it was 356. But, as of mid-September the number of ICU beds open and staffed is 278. Under questioning from Michael McNamara in the Dáil, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that just twenty-three had been added since the start of the pandemic.

    The pandemic has compounded a pre-existing health crisis, with 700,000 awaiting medical appointments by the end of May. Now restraints due to the pandemic are accelerating the highest rate of obesity in the E.U., with one in four adults falling into this category. But a recent study warns that any vaccine may not work effectively on someone who is obese.

    Under-resourcing of the health system might best explain the ultra-cautious and draconian approach adopted by the Irish government, which is increasingly out of step with most its European partners, where social life has been permitted to resume under restrictions.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] MacIntyre, Whose Justice: Which Rationality?, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1988, p.357.

    [ii] Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris, C Hurst, London, 2020, p.75.

    [iii] Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)Situation Report –46, March 6th, 2020,
    https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200306-sitrep-46-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=96b04adf_4

    [iv] Mark Honnigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris, C Hurst, London, 2020, p.viii.