I havenât heard a good argument against it yet. IF it is proved that death rates and hospitalisations fall away and stay away with vaccination (the UK should prove this one way or the other over the next few weeks ) there should be no more enforced isolation for asymptomatic contacts etc surely. Stay home if your sick same as any disease. We donât have 14 day isolations for any other illness covered by vaccination.
Vaccinated people donât have to isolate as close contacts anymore.
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Has there been a good argument on radio or TV between someone in favour of the current restrictions or against them? I know there are âexpertsâ on both sides of the fence. With qualified people actually listening to the others arguments and rebutting them and vice versa. Here you definitely canât get it both sides are too dug in and interested in firing off insults about how stupid the other side are.
Fairplay to them.
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1 Iâm not sure myself, best to wait for the usual trials, assessments of long term side effects etc.
What do we do while we wait? Just open up. Or not open up, which would be devastating in economic terms. Not possible to open up in proper terms, without mass vaccination. SoâŚ
2 Do you believe everything youâve been told about this virus/vaccine?
I consider what I believe not so important. And the absolutism of that âeverythingâ does not appeal to me. Certain points are clear:
a This virus is capable of sweeping through a country, leading to multiple infections, in a few weeks. Given certain circumstances, as with Indonesia at the moment, this experience will lead to many deaths, including deaths that involve a person that would otherwise have lived significantly longer. This point is inarguable. Yet the crux, as I think was flagged first on TFK by myself, is not death rates but infection rates. You can work out this reality simply by calm logical pragmatic thought. Infection rates, above a certain level, mean normal social and economic life becomes impossible. This point is likewise inarguable â if only because of what I termed âa rolling lockdownâ for contacts of the infected.
b There are philosophical and ethical aspects as well as medical and practical aspects. I believe, for the purposes of social stability, no healthy society cannot operate de facto apartheid. Meaning: a 26yo obese woman or a 45yo diabetic man cannot be told that their life is worth less, in effect, than the life of a healthy 30yo man or woman. We cannot tell people they are second class citizens and then untell them after the pandemic is over. This consideration entails, therefore, certain kind of restrictions in a pandemic. Here in Ireland, we live in a republic, where everyone is equal in principle as a citizen, be a person 87 or 17. Our response to this pandemic needed to be within the requirements of citizenship as a founding principle.
c Further on the political philosophy front: people are not entitled to take risk on other peopleâs behalf and the state should not facilitate them in this endeavour. Can I mention John RawlsâŚ? Risk is not a black and white matter. The fact that risk inheres, to some degree, in almost every activity, including car travel, is not the significant context. The significant context is assessing levels of risk. The risks posed by an unchecked Covid-19 pandemic far exceed almost all kinds of risk. We should not reach a situation, for instance, where medical staff have to choose between saving patients, as happened in 2020 and 2021. This situation, where the medical and the ethical are pushed into a desperate embrace, is horror come home from nightmare. Nor am I persuaded that asking people to work in food shops, for instance, is unethical, as claimed by GBD. This craic is typically childish right wing absolutism: âEveryone takes a risk or no one takes a risk.â Besides, there is no evidence that suggests supermarket workers are at significantly increased risk for contracting the virus. They worked, and work, in highly protected environments. And the human reality is that sourcing food is a priority, not sourcing socks or jewellery.
d Simple solutions do not work for complex problems. I respect your advocacy of vitamin D and exercise â and observe your advice in my own life â as a buffer against this virus. But these measures alone could not be, even remotely, an adequate response to the pandemic. This reality, sad or not, remains the fact.
e The GBD stuff and its like is part of a wider nexus focused on denying climate change and so forth. Therefore the GBD, to me, possesses not a scintilla of credibility. Their motto is, literally, âbusiness as usualâ. These shillsâ take on business has gone a long way towards ruining the planet, which is fact, as is currently being evinced in Australia and Canada. Kevin Myers on sun spots counted as this version of nonsense on stiltsâ acme (or nadir, depending on your point of view) before the pandemic.
3 What sort of advertising budget does the virus have?
I understand this statementâs tone but not the statement itself. But I get the drift. Is big pharma making serious coin out of this pandemic? Undoubtedly. Is there corruption involved, as with UK government-awarded contracts? Undoubtedly. Have we a lot of hapless, venial and incompetent politicians? Undoubtedly. Do these lamentable facts, along with cognate lamentable facts, mean response to the pandemic could have been substantially different? Yes and no â but mainly no. There are valid points about intensely restricting air travel and closing borders, about the timing of these measures. But exiting from this terrible situation was always going to pivot, ultimately, on vaccination. So, no. Some people, including myself, saw this truth about vaccination early doors. Other people, including a cohort of noisy people on this board, still refuse to see this truth. They profess to believe governments did far too much. I believe most governments did too little too late â and in some cases far too little far too late.
4 Is there any possibility that the stats have been inflated?
Possibly, of course. But what particular stats? If the thrust, here, implies this yoke is only a bad flu, the implication is nonsense, as events amply proved.
5 Is there an element of coercion anywhere to be seen?
Again, I dislike the inverted absolutism of that âan elementâ and that âanywhereâ. But you would have to be, besides, far more specific. I deal, pragmatically, in details and facts. I have no ideology or broad world view, beyond a repugnance at environmental destruction, to broadcast.
More importantly, I wish you and yours all the best as Ulster undergoes a difficult time.
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Bringing in vaccine passports is 100% coersion, discrimination and it is a total breach of peoples individual rights, privacy and freedoms.
The vaccines either work or they dont. Time will tell. No knows for sure yet. But the fact that theyâre pushing this legislation through tonight suggests they may not work down the line as people expect.
We had no deaths last summer relatively speaking with no vaccines. We wont know really until Autumn-winter kicks in.
Its a dark day for this country if this legislation passes as expected tonight.
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Childish absolutism.
Have you ever taken a malaria shot, yourself?
I donât watch current affairs these days so only go by what I read here about Claire Byrne et al which is typically the likes of Staines and McConkey. Which is odd as on other debates there is a need for âbalanceâ with Iona wheeled out for debates on social issues and a government rep usually counterbalanced by the most extreme opposition TD eg Brid Smith. The equivalent for Covid would be Staines Vs Ewan or Paul Treyvaud.
No, I canât say that I have.
Ewan me bollox in fairness.
Would you?
Well Dr Jack Lambert would be more credible but the media normally look for the most extreme viewpoint which will drive traffic and clicks. Although McGuirk may have scared them off bringing in too loose a cannon.
Why would you take a malaria shot living here? Can you catch malaria here? When you enter a country where you need to have a malaria shot do you need to bring proof that you have had the malaria to eat in a restaurant?
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Yeah of course, that jab is well established and has completed all its clinical trials. Iâd have no problem with that.
The media are loving Covid. They need to keep this going so that their gravy train continues to run. Look at RTE made a 20 million profit last year on covid alone.
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Do you get the flu jab every winter? Do you think it should be mandatory for every citizen to get it going forward?
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I donât know where to startâŚbut dismissing the advertising budget while coupling lockdowns with wildfires and heatwaves shows just how well the money has been spent.
Essentially youâre admitting most people donât need to worryâŚwhile taking the absurd position that locking down a relative few would be discriminatory towards them, therefore we must discriminate against everyone everyone in order to avoid being discriminatory.
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They should do, sure they practically invented it
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Thought it was Chinese scientists that the mentallers were blaming.
For long long covid?