Is parcel motel still a thing?
Dr. Feeleyâs article makes a lot of sense . . . itâs a shame that the powers that be have no interest in taking advice from him â I guess it must not fit into their agenda.
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He was brave to do it,
I thought he was spot on personally. Its no wonder a lot of other doctors donât speak out.
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Can you paste it up?
And there you have it. Egg-head Donnelly has ushered in a 2-tier system of freedoms, based on whether or not you have had the Covid jab. Connolly will be turning in his grave.
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Everything Dr. Feeley said is exactly what Iâm thinking and most of the people I know feel the same . . . is it a case of âthe cure being worse than the diseaseâ? â a lot of people think it is.
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George Lee is the grand wizard of the Stop Relaxing Brigade
Fearful that other people might be enjoying themselves, we have all fallen in line behind RTĂâs voice of doom
George Lee outside Leinster House when he was a Fine Gael TD. Picture by Damien Eagers
April 11 2021 02:30 AM
In simpler times I used to write about the Stop Relaxing Brigade â that obscure but powerful force which was always keeping an eye on us, fearful that we might be enjoying ourselves in ways that were upsetting to them.
The idea of watching three matches in a row on a Sunday would be a typical offence to set their antennae a-twitching, starting that voice in their heads, at first softly (âstop relaxingâŚâ), but growing in fervour until it became a terrible cacophony.
STOP RELAXING!!
Now we are all members of the Stop Relaxing Brigade, though in fairness to most of us it took a plague to bring it out in us â that watchfulness, that reproachfulness, that anxiety that someone, somewhere might be enjoying themselves in the wrong way.
Yes, in Stop Relaxing terms, Covid-19 has been the Rio Carnival, the Mardi Gras, the Fleadh Ceoil, the Puck Fair. And the voice that has most powerfully expressed this universal mood is probably that of RTĂâs George Lee.
Something in that voice of doom (which is his resting attitude) has made George the Grand Wizard of the Stop Relaxing Brigade.
And he has become so fixed in this theatrical position in the public mind that any effort to break out of it can result in a kind of tragicomedy. Like the moment recently on the Six One News when he declared that the vaccination programme was âgoing gangbustersâ.
It wasnât quite as tragicomic as the TCD neuroscientist, the otherwise excellent TomĂĄs Ryan, revealing to Eamon Dunphy on his podcast that he had never heard of Lionel Messi â which demonstrated that Zero Covid may be a fine aspiration but some of us wouldnât want to go on living anyway in a world without Messi.
But Georgeâs âgoing gangbustersâ had its own depths of pathos with this naturally saturnine individual trying to sound like one of the happy people â and unfortunately sounding like the HSEâs CEO tap-dancing like a man possessed, trying to give out the feel-good vibes.
This has no doubt been a time of torment for George, conveying the views of the authorities with whom he seems to be in harmony without sounding like he is the actual communications director of Nphet.
He has lived on that fault line for a long time has George.
He was there in 2009 when he left RTĂ to join Fine Gael â a switch that should have seemed as culturally unacceptable as a Liverpool player signing for Man Utd, given the supposedly adversarial nature of journalists and politicians.
Though in truth RTĂ and indeed the rest of our media have become more like âfeeder clubsâ for the politics and PR game, with George merely following a traditional route already travelled by Una Claffey, Pat Cox, Shane Kenny, Alex WhiteâŚ
But George came back to RTĂ, perhaps shedding further light on a documentary series heâd made about the fall of the Berlin Wall, based on a quiet obsession of his about the old dynamics between the East and the West.
(In this vision the crumbling institution of RTĂ would be the bureaucratic old monster from which he âdefectedâ for the exhilarating freedoms of Fine Gael, only to find that those glories of the âWestâ were illusory and he longed to return to the old certainties of the moribund regime.)
No, George is definitely not the only journalist with a weakness for âgoing over to the other sideâ â that great longing to spend some time inside the ropes, to be a player.
Yet itâs a conflict that seems to be dramatised most strikingly in his persona â which is perhaps not all bad when you consider that others couldnât give a monkeyâs either way.
Still there is this profoundly paternalistic aura about George. Perhaps itâs a result of his spending a lot of time talking about economics, aware that most of us neither know nor care much about such things â another sign of the innate fecklessness of the multitudes. And then comes the Great Crash, and weâre all like stunned mullets â and George is there chiding us that he tried to tell us but we were too busy out enjoying ourselves.
Crank that up a few categories to a pandemic and you can sense the scale of his unease.
Like Ryan Tubridy at times, George can seem unsure how much needs to be explained to the audience.
Indeed, some of us are still in awe of an observation he made in a documentary on Brexit, reminding us that English is the main language in both Britain and Ireland.
With George you get the feeling that itâs all quite tortuous, this business of giving information to the people â like some secretary-general of the department who is deeply unconvinced that Paddy can handle the truth.
Ah Paddy⌠you have to either let it out to him very gingerly or frighten the life out of him. Because once he starts relaxing⌠itâs game over.
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What sort of gobshites can stand over doing this to an Irish citizen? Fucking outrageous. 200,000 have flown into Ireland since January 1 and a man who has been vaccinated and had multiple negative tests is the threat? If this excuse for a government arenât fucked out soon, you wonât have a country.
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I think only time will tell how bad the cure has been, excess mortality in the next decade, numbers that emigrate, how many businesses have closed permanently, and how many are likely to reopen (knowing they could be shut down again for the threat of a new variant from some obscure Pacific island). I think they are flying far more blind than they were in 2008/9, and maybe a bit fooled economically by how Ireland has done since then (relatively). No guarantee that will happen again.
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âA society cannot function normally with high infection ratesâ.
This seems to be the core of your argument. Iâll have to differ, societies have been functioning fairly close to normal since last summer, more than half of US states in fact. You can point to the deaths, but like Sweden, the US is now more towards the middle than the extremes. There are large EU countries (in eastern Europe) that are now far higher in death rates than the US. Why is that if strict lockdown measures work? Did they not lock down hard enough? Even though some on here were complimenting them last year on how good they were doing. Strange how it turned for them, something about having a large susceptible population in winter.
The truth of course is that western governments have not been able to control infection rates at all (bar the few Scandinavians). Some like Germany and Netherlands have lesser deaths, due to having highly efficient health care systems. Most countries of say reasonable population >5M, are converging around 100 to 200 deaths per 100,000 with a few outliers (the zero Coviders Finland, Denmark and Norway on one extreme, Hungary and the Czech Rep on the other).
What have we accomplished? There is no realistic scenario where deaths could have been much lower, unless Ireland in mid March 2020 shut its northern border and hotel quarantined all entrants (especially the high risk ones, Cheltenham, Anfield, ski slopes, traveller weddings and funerals, etc).
I have opinions on Brazil and specifically Manaus but will get back to it. Itâs tragic, but it may lead to some breakthroughs. Hopefully. There is something we are missing imo and itâs related to the common cold coronaviruses. There were studies done on AIDS patients for a few decades, looking at the changes in their metabolism. A high percentage had had multiple infections of the same cold virus, so never kept immunity for long, but it was much milder each time and eventually they didnât notice it at all. All documented in a peer reviewed scientific journal.
What it suggests is the young people are better off getting exposed as they will likely encounter many versions of this virus, and will need a good base of immunity to build from. Some of this could come via a vaccine, but in all honestly the hard evidence is that natural immunity is broader than a vaccine.
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Interesting you chose Connolly. Are you some kind of socialist now?
To make matters worse he was a Christian socialist, so the vision he would have had for Ireland was a very Catholic influenced one, not that dissimilar to Dev. We know how well that worked out.
â According to the records, an analysis of the departmentâs Twitter feed was completed for the Minister in mid-January in the midst of the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemicâ
Apparently this was at the worst of the health crisis but Donnelly was on top of the important things âŚ
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How could he possibly compete with the social media star that preceded him? The department needed to redouble their efforts for a bald impression.
Vaccine passports are just a conspiracy theory lad.
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âDeirdre, the Minister completed an analysis of the departmentâs Twitter feedâ
An anal swabâŚ
In fairness to Donnelly Iâd imagine Harris makes it mandatory for his department to mention his social media in every memo
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Its a conspiracy theory until donnelly or chump say we will be using them
Donnelly on morning Ireland now. Talking about the system the NZ and Australia run. Weâve spent the last year outlining why weâre not them and canât apply their rules. FFS.
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For EU countries variants of concern is the criteria, for third countries itâs also incidence rate.
I still maintain this goes further than the legislation allows.