Coronavirus - Here come the variants

[gaillimhmick]

@Tierneevin1979

If this excuse for a government aren’t fucked out soon, you won’t have a country.

100% but replaced with what? The opposition aren’t very effective at the moment. All plagued by self-interest.

[glasagusban]

He nearly shat himself when asked about the Irish times article looking for him to be mentioned on twitter.

[Thomas_Brady]

Now that the vulnerable are as good as vaccinated it’s time to go out and get the virus. The human body is our best defence against this virus, time to let it do it’s thing.

[balbec]

The Irish electorate are very sophisticated. I am sure that they will work it out.

[Copper_pipe]

Simon Carswell (SiCarswell)

[Julio_Geordio]

The labels written on and then scanned back in. We have some fine minds in charge of the crisis

[FlakeAway]

Feels great waking up to Level 4.9 today.

[Biff_Egan]

The obvious conclusion here is we need to set up a load of Quangos and Committees that report into the Dept of Education so that there is a greater spread of Twitter mentions.

[balbec]

He’s definitely earned that increase.

[Copper_pipe]

I’d have done a better job myself.

[myboyblue]

This pandemic has tested us all. There’s no shame for any of you who have cracked. You’ll still be welcome in society afterwards.

[Ashman]

Actually the bit before was worse and really encapsulated everything that is wrong .

He was asked basically if NIAC have reservations re AZ will that slow down the vaccine targets . A child could tell you it would of course .

He still could not say that .

[Heyyoubehindthebushes]

Mallow News (MallowNews)

[mikehunt]

My opinion is irrelevant. I don’t have a medical qualification so wouldn’t be in a position to give an informed opinion. I remember Feely was OUITF prior to vaccines being approved. Had they gone with his suggestion many more would be dead. He was and is going against the general medical consensus.

I’m just curious if you have a medical qualification and if so which college taught you that washing hands had no impact on hygiene? There can’t be many medical professionals agreeing with that one.

[dodgy_keeper]

Donnelly and the authorities have pulled a lovely little mendacious stroke by taking Israel off the list of countries on the quarantine list, meaning individuals who have flown in from those countries don’t need to be locked up for a fortnight.

Very conveniently it removes the legal challenges from those two fully vaccinated individuals against MHQ. Only kicking the can down the road though, bound to be another challenge against it soon.

[Batigol]

There’ll be a heap of Americans arriving who will be fully vaccinated. Many of them will be Irish citizens too, attending funerals or visiting sick relatives.

[ironmoth]

@Tierneevin1979

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.

I was referring to Gerry Connolly from Castlegar. He was a Catholic, but I don’t think he wasa socialist.

[Thomas_Brady]

Did Dr Feely not merely say we know who the virus kills so they need to be protected and the young need to be let live? Something along those lines anyway… the logic is sound but putting it into practice in society is completely different - how, pre vaccine, do you totally alienate all over 70s? But I certainly think we could have done a far better job… why has Ireland had to suffer the longest lockdown in the world? What’s going on here that isnt elsewhere? Political cowardice and a poor health service is the answer … yes other countries have lockdown and are locking down, but that’s not a vindication for us being locked down the longest - they have snap lockdowns and open up… Feely was right in his sentiment but wrong insofar as we dont have the guts or integrity to introduce anything other than the easy option of locking down.

[Malarkey]

@Tierneevin1979

“A society cannot function normally with high infection rates”.

functioning fairly close to normal since last summer

You can point to the deaths, but like Sweden, the US is now

now far higher in death rates than the US.

Why is that if strict lockdown measures work?

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.

There is no realistic scenario where deaths could have been much lower

I have opinions on Brazil and specifically Manaus but will get back to it. It’s tragic,

What it suggests is the young people are better off getting exposed

– Your constant elision of death rates with infection rates, right from the start, is essentially why you are so wrong on this subject. Death rates are a separate issue.

– Even so, there is an entirely realistic scenario where deaths could have been much higher without lockdown – would have been. Your unwillingness to admit this reality is another reason why you are so wrong, whatever the spinning top act of repeating the same stuff over and over again.

– Young people, if infected, become carriers of risk to others. Your unwillingness to acknowledge this factor is another reason you are so wrong.

I have no more to say on this subject. The idea of ‘herd immunity’, which is all you ever have had to offer, was never clearer, not least because of developments in Brazil, as the notion of people emotionally and intellectually crippled by ideology.

[Malarkey]

@Iggy

George Lee is the grand wizard of the Stop Relaxing Brigade

Declan Lynch

Fearful that other people might be enjoying themselves, we have all fallen in line behind RTÉ’s 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 – 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 (“stop relaxing…”), 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 — 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 RTÉ’s 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 “going gangbusters”.

It wasn’t quite as tragicomic as the TCD neuroscientist, the otherwise excellent Tomás Ryan, revealing to Eamon Dunphy on his podcast that he had never heard of Lionel Messi – which demonstrated that Zero Covid may be a fine aspiration but some of us wouldn’t want to go on living anyway in a world without Messi.

But George’s “going gangbusters” had its own depths of pathos with this naturally saturnine individual trying to sound like one of the happy people – and unfortunately sounding like the HSE’s 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 RTÉ to join Fine Gael — 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 RTÉ and indeed the rest of our media have become more like “feeder clubs” for the politics and PR game, with George merely following a traditional route already travelled by Una Claffey, Pat Cox, Shane Kenny, Alex White…

But George came back to RTÉ, perhaps shedding further light on a documentary series he’d 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 RTÉ would be the bureaucratic old monster from which he “defected“ for the exhilarating freedoms of Fine Gael, only to find that those glories of the “West” 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 “going over to the other side” — that great longing to spend some time inside the ropes, to be a player.

Yet it’s a conflict that seems to be dramatised most strikingly in his persona — which is perhaps not all bad when you consider that others couldn’t give a monkey’s either way.

Still there is this profoundly paternalistic aura about George. Perhaps it’s 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 — another sign of the innate fecklessness of the multitudes. And then comes the Great Crash, and we’re all like stunned mullets — 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 it’s all quite tortuous, this business of giving information to the people — 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… it’s game over.

Declan Lynch is Brendan O’Connor’s fluffer – and an Athlone Town fan.

“Paddy”…

And an absolutely terrible writer. Published by Hot Press Books.

Enough said.