Vacuous tweets by attention seeking hurlers solve pandemics, not vaccines.
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Now you believe in vaccines?
Damascus is just over the next hill.
The mask? Us.
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What a strange post by a very strange person.
Iâm not the one repeatedly banned from an online forum that tolerates almost any craziness pal.
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You donât seem to be able to formulate any sort of serious argument on this topic. Happens when you play a performative persona for likes. It must get pretty confusing.
Holohan spare arm tackled to the grund 
Walloped like Joe in the AISF
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I see GearĂłidâs Twitter tag line is âif youâre not first, youâre lastâ. Doesnât strike me as the mindset of somebody who cares very much about the lot of the ordinary person in society.
But sure I suppose if a few lines of his faux virtue signalling nonsense can get a few lads here to wet themselves like young wans catching a glimpse of Take That back in the day, itâs all good. 
Do you think all this will definitely turn out a disaster or is there a chance the vaccines have solved it ?
What do you think I think?
I think you think it will turn out very badly. I genuinely have no clue what will happen. I was wrong at Xmas when I thought we should open up and it went badly. Im wondering is there any eventuality where you will admit you were wrong ?
I think there is a significant risk of a significant backslide, to case numbers into the thousands, I think itâs likely because of the B.1.617.2 variant. I donât think it will result in the sort of death rate we had in January but I expect it will cause considerable problems of one sort or another. Thatâs in the short term, the next month or two or so. More medium term I expect there is a risk of more evasive variants emerging, whether they do or not I canât say but the more you allow spread worldwide the greater the risk. Vaccines should have the situation in this country largely under control by the end of the summer and allow something close to full re-opening, at least internally, but we are not there yet and the threat of variants will be present for quite a while. And if vaccination rates worldwide are not what we hope, thatâs a problem.
So in short, I am reasonably optimistic for the long term but wary in the short term and also cautious about the longer term. I donât really know how anybody could have a problem with that position.
Itâs too nuanced for this forum, I think, where everything always has to be either black or white.
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Absolutely no problem with the position but equally canât see how anyone would have a problem with the opposite position at this stage as it looks almost certain to be the right one to me.
Great stuff.
Hegarty is an exceptional young man.
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The opposite position throws caution to the wind. It throws out all the lessons of the last 15 months. Itâs bravado and dismisses the widely held views of experts. If the experts who are urging caution are wrong, nobody loses. Another short delay would make no difference. If those who are demanding everything open up at once were wrong - and luckily, even with the opening up plan, they arenât getting their way just yet, lots of people lose.
That isnât suspicious at all. If they wanted to fuck up the West economically why would they start with infecting their own country? Why not just release it in the west?
Is there any scenario where youâd come back and say âjesus do you know what I was completely wrong that time it doesnât often happen but in fairness the other side were right and that was the time to open upâ what would deaths and hospitalisations by say August 1st need to be for that to happen ?
But they had the ability to stop it spreading in China quickly, the advantage of being a totalitarian regime and a compliant population. If your goal was to fuck with the west economically it couldnât have worked out much better really.
I donât think it was released deliberately I think if it came from the Wuhan lab it was an accidental release.
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But thereâs a medium position. Extended lockdowns in western societies donât work because enough people especially the young wonât put up with them. Itâs insanity to expect young people would accept being told to stay at home for months on end, and give up all the activities young people like to engage in. Young people always find a way around the ârulesâ. You also have a significant subset of the population who wonât comply at all, and also lots of people for whom their work (to them) was essential regardless of what the government said. Governments are not that connected to the real world, a lot of politicians have never had to deal with it.
I know you donât agree, but California is the best example of lockdowns failing. By May of last year most US states had opened up partially but CA stayed locked down through the summer and had minimal easing of restrictions for a month or so in the fall and then a hard lockdown again through January. But the reality on the ground was that young people in general had said fuck it by May, the parks were full, house parties in full swing, life was back to normal for them. I happen to have a fair bit of insight as I have âkidsâ in that cohort, and Iâd estimate 25% of their social media acquaintances and friends got infected and didnât give a shit, for some it was a badge of honor.
So how could you stop that? Send out the army and round them up, shoot them? Internment? I think we would have been far better off if we followed the lead of other states and gradually opened from May of last year, absolutely hammered the message home about how to avoid transmission, especially the message that it is airborne and if you are indoors for long with other people even with a mask you are not safe. But that message never got effectively transmitted, how many people actually know what airborne means? Do they know that whether you are 3 feet or 100 feet away from someone else indoors it makes no difference if the virus is in the air? Getting Covid or not in that environment was essentially a lottery.
In my opinion Ireland should have started to open up in May of last year and kept sensible restrictions in place, your outcome would have been far better than extending lockdown for longer than any country in the western world, and then opening up in early December and effectively telling people it was OK to go party for December and we would deal with the aftermath in January.
In summary I think Ireland should open up sensibly.
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