It looks that way. Usually death rates fall after a pandemic, as the vulnerable are hit hardest. The tens of thousands of excess deaths seem to be equally distributed across all age rangesâŚand the government/media are sayingnothing. Maybe glas or tracksuit could shed some light on the matterâŚthey usually have the answers?
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Theyâll need RTE to tell them it first.
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Staines? A friend has been hired to be part of a committee or panel or something that heâs on. She said sheâs looking forward to seeing what heâs actually like on such a group.
Heâs had a serious makeover by a PR firm so he can land NED gigs.
I see the ISAG lads are still tweeting away but trying to distract that they wanted us all to be like China. I havenât heard much about Vaccine+ for a while.
I really think people need to move on from such a circular debate. Watching people going round and round on a dream carousel â both sides of the debate, at times â is bizarre.
Covid happened. Mistakes were made, without a doubt â tragic mistakes in part. But just because some aspects of the preventative measures were errors does not mean all of those aspects were misplaced. To hold so would be both illogical and immature. There is no traction in being an inverted utopian.
Yes, there was an awful lot of grifting in certain realms, as per Michelle Mone â as per Ivor Cummins. So the awful predicament went. But humankindâs nature is not a pretty sight. How could a Covid pandemic have broken a mould established over millennia? Humankind is not a good animal.
The bottom line proved quite straightforward: no government was going to stand by and let everyone, more or less, contract Covid, thereby letting infection levels take hindmost at that point. Was never going to happen. This scenario never moved onto the cards, whatever the guff about Sweden.
Certain politicians blustered â and some politicians even now go in for retrospective bluster â but realpolitik won out. If nothing else, if the zero lockdown cohort had got their way, a large section of the Irish population would have put themselves into their own personal lockdown for the duration. A counterfactual, fair enough, but a well grounded one. Look at the subsequent take up rate for vaccination. This factor indicates what would have happened if the zero lockdown option had been entertained at state level. I frown at people complaining about mandatory vaccination in order to enter certain spaces. Does the same principle not apply many times over to mandatory exposure to unwanted risk? The Irish government drew this complex moral, even if some people here still cannot grasp the conundrum.
Which occasions little surprise. Covid needed to be seen for what it was: a virus causing a pandemic. An awful lot of people simply could not see the Covid wood for the ideological trees. Prior hostility to certain factors â the very idea of state intervention, public sector workersâ conditions, the notion that being unwilling to contract the virus was symptomatic of the Westâs feminization, and so on and on, via long saddled hobbyhorses â took the blinkers off the equine entity and placed them on the rider.
People are entitled to distrust Covid vaccines, to resist the idea of vaccinating children. Fair enough. I understand especially the latter conviction. And I learned a lot of important stuff about vaccines from one person on here, someone with markedly different views to me on the subject. I was happy and grateful to have my partial ignorance amended.
But the Covid pandemic, as even a total layman can see, ultimately went the way of pretty much all pandemics. I now wryly recall how people blithely thought nearly everyone getting infected would solve the problem in short order. Of course, this position was based on the fallacy that reinfection with Covid is impossible. You could be coldly amused at the âCovid is only a fluâ merchants also being âYou can only get it onceâ merchants. Had they never encountered real rather than metaphorical influenza, year on year? I likewise recall many people scoffing at the concept of âvariantsâ. Nonsense, they said. Just a ruse for the work shy to stay at home, they said. Some people claimed to have spent hours upon hours studying up on Covid and coronaviruses. If they had truly done so, they would have realized from the outset the crucial significance of variants.
This nonsense was of a piece with the view that Covid rates would wax and wane in seasonal patterns. We now know this assertion is untrue. A lot remains unknown about Covid â especially about the implications of the syndrome now labelled âLong Covidâ.
Which or whether, significantly less virulent but more infectious strains of the virus, aided by vaccination, brought the situation to heel. You can deplore this trajectory, as quite a few here do, but deploring the trajectory will not alter its status as fact. As broached, probably 80 per cent or more of Irish society would simply have disengaged in a non lockdown situation, causing social chaos â quite aside from the infection rate issue.
A few of the most vociferous people on here seem both intellectually and temperamentally incapable of grasping a key factor: viruses become less virulent, as long established by the relevant experts, via the passage of time. I have to laugh at people who affect to believe infection rates hold an unwavering significance, an unwavering danger. Obtuseness becomes a magnet for shallowness. Consider. At the moment, infection rates in Britain are notably high, as per Guardian article below. The reason lockdown is not required stands twofold: less virulent strains and vaccination (which reduces viral load among the infected and for those they infect).
Hard daftness still reigns in certain corners. To say that lockdowns could have been avoided in 2020 because of what is happening in 2022 is like arguing that 2022âs rainfall caused 2020âs floods. That type of specious reasoning rests on upon deleting sequence from causality. And to delete sequence from causality is, after all, precisely not to believe in causality. I will refrain from being sharp tongued about how such people manage to operate machinery.
This scenario â lockdowns followed by vaccination â is what happened in Ireland, whether you agree or disagree with the governmentâs actions. The situation in 2022 is markedly different to the situation in 2020. I think I know why. Which or whether, I am not going to debate, retrospectively, those actions precisely because they have now passed into the realm of fact. There was, effectively, no alternative. But hopefully certain agents will be held to account for some of those actions, such as the desperate situation around nursing homes.
You personally @Batigol, if I may say so, really need to avoid two gravitations.
First, going even an inch down the road Gemma OâDoherty is smearing.
Second, you need to recall that many people on âyour side of the argumentâ (colloquially known here as OIUTF) argued that eighty somethings could not hold up economic and societal life via lockdowns supposedly undertaken on their behalf. Like it or not, this argument was repeatedly made on this board â in whatever tone of voice. I recall the phrase âwe all have to die sometimeâ regularly getting an airing.
Which or whether, I give you the ultimate case in point: Jonathan Sumption, legal eminence. His pronouncements were slavered over by the likes of Piers Corbyn, Laurence Fox, Allison Pearson, Toby Young and all the odious rest. Sumption has been explicit about how he believes the life of an 86yo is worth less than the life of a 26yo. If someone so eminent believes an 86yo has less of a right to life than other people in the context of a Covid pandemic, how are we fixed â even if we take that Examiner story at face value â as regards an 86yo reacting badly to a vaccine? Do we all not have to die sometime? Or has this mantra inverted?
Another lawyerâs take:
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Are you justifying Gemma OâDohertyâs newsrag?
I think a couple of them have shrewdly pivoted to climate change.
Iâve nothing to do with Gemma and other mentallers.
Youâve answered telling me that every life matters. By that standard, the woman in Longfordâs life also matters, and doctors think the vaccine may have killed her. Itâs well worth discussion imo
Good to see mentallers finally putting value on life.
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Well, what exactly could anyone discuss, us or any other people, about that misfortunate lady? Did you not see that âcouldâ in the headline?
Let me pretend to be a hardnosed VEUTFer for a moment. So I then say: âSo what if an 86yo woman got sick from the vaccine. She is 86yo. She was going to get sick from something. The vaccine has done so much good and brought back normality. So what if a few elderly people get poorly from it. We cannot hold up society and business because of the elderly. We all have to get sick and die sometime.â
Any of this stuff sound familiar?
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Ah lovely.
Hiw would you explain away âexcess deathsââŚand the fact that theyâre not being discussed. Clearly the vaccine is killing people, how many is difficult to say as no-one wants to have the conversation
Youâre totally misrepresenting my position during Covid and now. I never once said anyone was expendable or was going to die anyway.
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Well, you might not personally have said so in flippant or objectionable fashion (although several other people did) â and I do not recall you personally speaking in that tone, to be fair â but the fact remains that the corollary of non lockdown in 2020 would have been needless deaths. There is no gainsaying this facet. Some people happily embraced this consideration.
If memory serves, you were affronted by your liberty being impinged by lockdowns. I think your liberty, as Jonathan Compton remarked in the context of Jonathan Sumptionâs views, was not the most important factor.
But I am not going to get into pointless reruns of argy bargy about this stuff. I am just pointing out the inconsistency of instancing 86yos in the context of Covid vaccines.
My position was, and remains, that lockdowns caused more harm than good. I believe the places that didnât have them fared no worse that those that did.
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Completely incorrect. You have no authority or evidence for that statement other than the maunderings of John Campbell â sorry, Dr John Campbell, even though he is not a medical doctor â on YouTube. He is an attention-seeking crank who started off his online career by claiming not enough avoidance measures were being taken about Covid but subsequently flip flopped when he realized he could generate far more traffic by catering to the opposite view. Dr Campbell is just another grifter.
The UKâs Office of National Statistics refuted his claims in this regard:
The vaccines are not killing people. Far from it. For whatever psychological reason, you want to believe this nonsense â nonsense that is lining the pockets of knaves. You have not a scree of evidence on this front from any reputable source.
I accept there will always be questions around vaccines and none of them will be perfect â and there are questions around the Covid vaccines to be worked out. I entirely respect peopleâs right not to take a vaccine. But please respect in turn my right to take a vaccine. These vaccines are the major reason normality has largely returned to Ireland and Britain.
You unfortunately got the whole Covid issue completely wrong from the start. For one thing, you were one of the main scoffers at the very idea of âvariantsâ. But variants were always going to save us, same as in all pandemics. If you had truly studied the issue, you would have twigged this reality in short order.
You should accept this truth and move on. You would be a happier man. The simple fact that you are condoning the likes of Gemma OâDohertyâs poisonous activities â and do not come back and say you are not doing so, because you are â should give you serious pause for reflection on what this topic is doing to your mind. You used to be a wry, interesting, more than decent person, good on whisky and rural life in particular. I am sorry to see you altered. I wish you well and am concerned to see you travel the same road as Gemma OâDoherty. She seethes with hatred. Why would any right minded person want to associate with the likes of her?
Well, what can I say? You are totally wrong. With all respect, what you believe is irrelevant. You seem a decent sort, unlike others I could mention, but we were all discommoded by the lockdowns, myself included.
My point about how vaccination take up rates illuminate what would have happened if there had not been lockdowns is irrefutable. There was no credible alternative at the time, whatever anyone might believe.
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Grand fire on the stats there
Sure, you fire on the stats on how more harm was done than good. What are they?
I have given an argument of crystalline logic about the social chaos that would have unfolded, twice over, if there had not been lockdowns. If you do not want to engage with this logic, we can civilly leave it so.
Give me one example of that from Florida, Texas or Sweden
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