Exactly.
You can see why John Campbell hopped on board the anti-vaccine/Ivermectin grift train. Same reason young lads go into drug dealing. It pays.
Impressive AR management
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Fair play to him. Great to see intelligence, hard work, integrity and courage rewarded.
Susie should probably address something heâs actually said if she wishes to he taken seriously.
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Fools and their money.
Fools and their money what? Iâll give you ten euro to finish that sentence.
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âŚ.are easily parted
Give it to charity 
You probably wonât read it anyway.
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It would be great to see Pfizerâs books in comparison and how theyâve done peddling a murderous vaccine.
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I suppose tony etc could argue that they couldnât be expected to know it was unsafe when they assured us it was safe. Some people got it right though
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Pfizer are a benevolent group. They want whatâs best for all of us
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We need to live without modern medicine.
âPaid to destroy themâ
Iâd say they got blind drunk and sat around trying to outdo one another with the most fantastical, absurd and obscene scams they could imagine. And then they passed them into legislation, safe in the knowledge that earnest vaccine/lockdown woke types would earnestly applaud their efforts.
If it was in Yes Prime Minister youâd say it was a bit too far fetched. But⌠no matter how you look at it the tories are actually geniuses. They should actually be running the place, if they werenât so amoral, vile and disgusting.
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Butvthe woke lads will tell you that they thought that they were doing the right thing at the time
Same thing happened here. It was an exercise in transferring public money into private hands. Rich got a hell of a lot richer thanks to the lockdowns
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They took us for a helluva ride there fellas
*School closures and nursing home visitor bans were inhumaneâ: Nphet member breaks ranks on our Covid response
independent.ie | February 25, 2023 02:30 AM
One man is also shaking his head at these still-painful memories, but the difference between him and the rest of us is that he was in the room when the decisions to take these unprecedented steps were made.
Martin Cormican is a professor of bacteriology at the University of Galway who, for many years, was the national clinical lead for infection control who spearheaded the HSEâs efforts against antibiotic resistance. A gently spoken and erudite man, he was a member of the Expert Advisory Group, a Nphet subgroup that monitored research and developments in relation to the virus, before becoming a full member of Nphet almost a year into the pandemic.
Late last year, he was asked to address his peers in the Irish Society of Clinical Microbiologists and present his reflections on Irelandâs response to the pandemic. What he delivered was a stunning paper, a stark assessment of what Ireland got right as it battled the virus â and what we got very wrong.
The paper, called The Marianne Dashwood Test (after the Sense and Sensibilityheroine who compares her conduct âto what it ought to have beenâ), is rife with self-reflection. Cormican begins by berating himself for not recognising the potential threat of the new virus earlier in January 2020. He writes of his role in Nphetâs efforts: âAs I had the privilege of contributing to the key meetings, I had to live with the decisions even when I did not agree with them.â
It concludes with him admitting the part he feels he played in what we got wrong: âI share in the responsibility for the shortcomings either because I did not make the argument or because I failed to persuade.â
How did we get so much wrong when one of the many mantras of the pandemic was âfollow the scienceâ? A phrase favoured by the World Health Organisationâs Dr Mike Ryan â an Irishman who achieved superstar status for at least a time â it provided reassurance. Yet Cormican states in his paper that it is âboth misleading and amoralâ. âThe âfollow the scienceâ mantra tended to communicate to the public a degree of certainty about the expected benefits of certain measures that was not supported by evidence,â he writes. âWe depended too much on fear to influence behaviour.â
Expand Close âFollow the scienceâ: Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini via Getty Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp âFollow the scienceâ: Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini via Getty Images
Speaking to the Independent, Cormican denies that much of his criticism is tainted with the benefit of hindsight. He believed that many of the steps Ireland took â two-metre social distancing, closing schools, mandated mask-wearing, encouraging self-testing, among others â were without a solid evidence base at the time, and said so in Nphet meetings. Other missteps have only become obvious in the rearview mirror.
âThings are easier in hindsight. Everyone would have done some things differently if they had known then what they know now,â he says.
What most exercises him is the âunintended consequencesâ wrought by the swingeing restrictions imposed by the Government â guided by him and his Nphet colleagues. His experience of working during an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2015 had made him hyper-aware of this possibility. âAt the very first meeting of the expert advisory group, I was making this point about the consciousness of collateral damage or unintended consequences,â he recalls.
He acknowledges the difficulty of doing so in the early stages of any new infection, as everyone essentially operates in a vacuum of information. In the paper, he is unequivocal, writing, âin the continued pursuit of managing case numbers, we did not achieve a good balance with the loss of health and well-being imposed on societyâ.
âFuture pandemics will require better checks and balances of making sure that we are conscious of the unintended consequences of denying rights, freedoms and health as part of our response,â Cormican tells the Independent.
Evidence of these unintended consequences is already apparent, with record waiting lists throughout the hospital system. In December, it emerged that as many as 10pc of all cancers had been missed in 2020 due to the cessation of screening programmes and reduced access to health services.
Expand Close 'We had a situation where people treated masks like a rabbitâs footâ â Martin Cormican on mask mandates / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp 'We had a situation where people treated masks like a rabbitâs footâ â Martin Cormican on mask mandates
We all clapped our sanitised hands for the healthcare heroes who were forced to stride into the belly of the beast, especially in the early days as we watched the fate of Italyâs stricken health system. But Cormican says there were more than a few credible accounts of those who imposed âinhumane restrictionsâ in the name of infection control.
âThere were so many healthcare workers who took risks and behaved magnificently but itâs a bit like other events in the past like the Blitz â the pretence that everybody was a hero, and of course they werenât, because we are all human and healthcare workers are just as human as everyone else,â he says.
âOf course, there were people who didnât intend to be inhumane, but they were frightened and fearful, and hadnât thought about the fact that their work put them in the firing line for this kind of risk. I certainly have heard accounts from colleagues that I have no reason to doubt of circumstances where people just werenât able to do their job. I am not saying they are bad people â these are people who are very brave in other contexts and just werenât psychologically prepared for the risk of infection and therefore werenât able to deal with that level of stress.â
According to Cormican, preparing healthcare workers of all types for the realities of a pandemic must be a priority; he now brings it up in all his undergraduate medicine lectures. Counselling and psychological support should also be offered. âEven the people who did do the wonderful things that we were all clapping for, there is also the question of what we can do to support them because they paid a price for it too.â
Those who were admitted to hospital during this time were denied visitors. Cormican expresses his admiration for those who campaigned for an end to the restrictions that prevented partners from accompanying pregnant women to appointments, being with them for the duration of labour or visiting their newborn baby.
He notes it was âa great pityâ that other cohorts did not have âequally forcefulâ groups representing their needs. And when he talks about nursing home residents prevented from seeing their families, even towards the end of their lives, his absolute conviction that this was the wrong decision is obvious. Even as a man for whom infection control is his bread and butter, his verdict is that it was âover the topâ.
âIt was excessive,â he says. âI donât believe I have ever in my life recommended that somebody should not be allowed visitors; visitors are really important. This isnât in retrospect â the restrictions placed on access were in many cases not justifiable and not reasonable.â
In the paper, he criticises the âpaternalistic and condescendingâ attitude towards protecting certain vulnerable groups. âPeople should have had the right to decide,â he says. âWho did we ask about what was important to them â we wanted to protect all the old people, but what did all the old people want?â
This was, he believes, a result of what he sees as a misguided attitude towards the extension of life. âGlobally, not just in Ireland, it was treated as if the duration of life was the only thing that was important,â he says. âItâs not the only thing thatâs important. And to try to protect the duration of life for some people, there were all sorts of consequences. And there were plenty of people who thought life was not worth living under those conditions.â
Expand Close âVery little of it was about the childrenâ - Martin Cormican on the closure of schools / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp âVery little of it was about the childrenâ - Martin Cormican on the closure of schools
Cormican is also passionate about the persistent disruption to education. Schools shut their doors here on March 12, 2020 and did not open them until September of that year, leaving one million children and adolescents â and their parents â to grapple with online learning.
Schools then failed to open again in January 2021 after the Christmas holidays, before a phased reopening in April of that year. This does not include the ad hoc closures of individual schools following sporadic outbreaks, nor the thousands of children who experienced enforced absences as a result of being a close contact, awaited PCR test results or simply because they had a mild cough.
It has since been recognised that schools here were closed for far longer than the international average. Cormican is adamant that children will pay the price for this âfor decades to comeâ, noting education is one of the single biggest determinants of health.
âAs a society we behaved as if education was something optional, and not something that is a constitutional right,â he says. âAnything you do to damage the expectation of health for somebody who is five, it affects their whole life in one way or another and education is fundamental to health and socialisation is fundamental to health.â
The decision to close schools was not a child-centred one, Cormican believes; he says that it was instead driven by âvested interestsâ. âThere were people who were very invested in not having the schools open, in relation to fears for themselves and others but very little of it was about the children, it was about other people,â he says.
âMeanwhile, all the healthcare workers were turning up and doing their job, as were the emergency services, the security services. We behaved as if education wasnât a critical service, and was one that could be suspended almost indefinitely, which to me enormously devalues education. And whoever benefited from the suspension of education for huge periods? It doesnât appear to me that it was the children.â
The strength of his feeling is apparent as he talks about the âabandonmentâ of children with special needs and those from deprived areas. âI donât think at the time anyone thought of the consequences for kids. I know families with children [with intellectual disabilities], where they lost all the gains of recent years and many people with disabilities suffered appallingly and unnecessarily, deprived of the most basic services, while kids from areas of deprivation lost everything for months and months.â
Expand Close âUnintended consequencesâ: Dr Tony Holohan and Prof Martin Cormican at a Nphet Covid briefing during the pandemic. Photo by Gareth Chaney/Collins / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp âUnintended consequencesâ: Dr Tony Holohan and Prof Martin Cormican at a Nphet Covid briefing during the pandemic. Photo by Gareth Chaney/Collins
Cormican did attempt to swerve the ship that was Nphet. He is on record as having voted against the mask mandate, asking the chairman of the Expert Advisory Group to record his dissent based on his view that there was no good evidence to support the widespread use of face coverings. Even in healthcare settings, where it was accepted practice and remains so, there is a lack of quality evidence, he says. Instead, wearing a mask indoors became a mandatory requirement in most settings, until this was removed in February 2022.
âWe didnât take it as far as they did in some countries where you had to wear a mask simply walking down an empty street, which made no sense at all,â Cormican says. âBut the thing was, once people started mixing, mask use made little or no material difference. Infection prevention control is not a theoretical thing, it is very practical, based on how people behave and anyone involved in it knows that people donât wear masks properly. Instead, we had a situation where people treated masks like a rabbitâs foot and they felt protected and it distracted them from the things that really mattered like vaccination and avoiding socialising within reason.â
And, according to Cormican, steering clear of social contact was the only strategy that truly worked when it came to avoiding infection. (Interestingly, he strongly believes everyone in Ireland has been infected with Covid-19, even if they have never returned a positive PCR or antigen test.) The âRapunzel strategyâ â the equivalent of everyone locking themselves in a tower â would have made the pandemic go away; âbut thatâs not a price that anyone would or should pay,â he says.
Yet âsocial distancingâ entered the lexicon as we were assured that a distance of two metres between you and another person was a safeguard against infection â the grubby remnants of the yellow stickers and signs are still to be seen here and there. Cormican says that this was at odds with the previous distance of one metre, which was the accepted standard here in the case of droplet-transmitted infection. This in itself was arbitrary, he says, and in his opinion, the evidence that two metres was safer than one metre âsimply did not existâ.
âAgain, that isnât retrospect. I never saw that there was an evidence base for recommending two metres. It had profound consequences for our delivery of all kinds of services and if the HSE had gone with it, then the healthcare delivery deficit throughout Covid would have been even worse than it was.â The commitment to the two-metre distance is âa cardinal example of what we got wrongâ, he says.
âPeople were almost coming to blows in public places because they werenât quite two metres apart â people had the notion that 1.9 metres was deadly and 2.1 metres was grand,â he says.
Of course, people were scared. In the early days of 2020, we watched disaster unfold in China and then Italy as the virus grew ever closer. Some of us began to quarantine voluntarily. Others went to Cheltenham. This is the problem in communicating risk, says Cormican: itâs interpreted differently by everyone. âFor example, we kept trying to say to people that there was very little risk to being outside on your own but some people were still afraid to go outside the door.â
Expand Close âItâs not the worst right to be taken awayâ â Martin Cormican on the failure to ban international travel. Photo by James D Morgan/Getty Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp âItâs not the worst right to be taken awayâ â Martin Cormican on the failure to ban international travel. Photo by James D Morgan/Getty Images
That said, he believes Ireland and the rest of the world were far too slow to shut down international travel. âWe place such emphasis on this mass travel and it seemed we wanted to protect it at a huge cost and we didnât value other things at the time as much as we should have. The right to travel all over the world is not the worst one to be taken away â itâs not like taking away their right to see their relatives or the right to be accompanied at the end of their life.â
By the time Ireland recorded its first official case on February 29, 2020, it is probable that the virus had already been here for some weeks. Cormican says that by then, Covid was âtruly out of the boxâ and our approach should have changed far earlier from one of containment to one of mitigation.
But at that stage, Irelandâs response was only beginning. We began the first of several lockdowns in the hope that this would âflatten the curveâ and even eradicate the virus.
âEven at the time, it should have been clear by April or May that there was no chance of containing it, but we continued in many cases with containment strategies long after they were appropriate,â he says. âThere was still a reason to flatten the curve to make sure the hospital system didnât get overwhelmed, which we witnessed in Italy and was horrific, with people dying on the streets.â
A national obsession with daily case numbers was, in Cormicanâs opinion, to our detriment. âWe kept counting the number of cases, every day, long after it was relevant.â
He also says that he has never taken an antigen test, dismissing them as a âwaste of moneyâ. The expression âtest, test, testâ was another Mike Ryan maxim that became almost a national motto. âCountries were just comparing how good they were,â recalls Cormican.
âIt stopped being about whether the testing was serving a useful public health purpose, it just became â hey, we are testing more than you are. And people were driving 70 or 80km to have a PCR test that changed absolutely nothing.â
Expand Close âA waste of moneyâ â Martin Cormican on antigen testing / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp âA waste of moneyâ â Martin Cormican on antigen testing
Focus should have been instead on the basics: âWe should have said, if you have a viral respiratory tract infection, you have to avoid other people as much as you practically can until you are better. We should have moved to that much earlier.â
Cormican believes mass testing fed into the tendency both globally and in Ireland to focus on the number of cases and the number of deaths associated with the virus. He makes the point that in many cases these were deaths associated with Covid but not caused by Covid, and this focus on specific metrics made it âvery hard to get a hearing on other perspectivesâ, he says. âPart of it was because some of the other perspectives were phrased in manners that were so extreme, you could be associated with these if you dissented.â
The game-changer was, of course, vaccines. Aside from some early hiccups, Ireland ran an exemplary vaccination programme, Cormican says. But this was when we should have begun to unravel the web of restrictions, he argues.
âThere was logic to slowing down the pace of transmission until everyone had the chance to get vaccinated. But once everybody had had that chance, and we had a virus that had become endemic, then everything changed and it became, âWhy are we doing this any moreâ?â
Itâs a question of balance, he adds. âClearly we needed to do a lot of things. Some of them we did very well and they worked to a point but some of the things we did were too extreme and we did them for too long and the consequences of this will be felt for many years.â
So what did we get right? Quite a lot, he says. Irelandâs response to the threat of pandemic was not the denial of a problem as per Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, nor the âdenial of realityâ as seen until recently with Xi Jinping in China. âCertain failures, tragedies and dodgy dealings seen in other countries were avoided.â
We maintained the security of our food and energy supplies, delivered a hugely successful vaccination programme and public communication throughout the pandemic was generally good, he says.
Which country did get it closest to right? Cormicanâs answer is somewhat unexpected: Sweden. âThey probably had the most balanced approach and did the minimum of mandating people to do things, and the most of letting people make decisions themselves,â he says. âThe final toll wasnât a whole lot different than ours.â
Sweden was of course criticised for its âlight touchâ regulation as its controversial ârock starâ chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell aimed for herd immunity. It was an outlier among its European counterparts, yet a final [Swedish] government commission report from February 2022 suggested there had been just 13,000 Covid-related deaths in a country with a population of 10.5 million. It concluded: âSweden has come through the pandemic relatively well and is among the countries with the lowest excess mortality over the period 2020â2021.â
The confirmed case/fatality ratio in Sweden was 0.9pc; in Ireland it was 0.5pc, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Swedenâs Covid death rate per 100,000 people was 234.02, while Irelandâs was 174.75. For comparison, the USâs death rate per 100,000 was 339.28; the UKâs 322.86 and Peru had the worldâs highest reported rate with 665.27.
Critics have suggested that more vulnerable populations such as the elderly and immigrants were effectively abandoned by the Swedish approach.
Cormican says this way of framing differences of view was part of the challenge we faced in having honest discussions when it came to management of the pandemic.
In Ireland, our pandemic tsar was, of course, chief medical officer (CMO) Dr Tony Holohan, a man who wielded so much power that it prompted government ministers to question who exactly was running the country in the early months of the pandemic. As time went on, the popularity of the unflappable âUncle Tonyâ waned as the public grew tired of Nphetâs ultra-cautious approach.
Cormican dissented on a number of occasions during Nphet meetings; he says diplomatically that there were âstrong personalitiesâ on the team and âcertain voices were louder than othersâ.
âThroughout the process of the discussions, I would have had concerns that I raised and in many cases didnât succeed in persuading,â he says. âEverybody had an opportunity to speak and there were occasions where votes were taken and on some of those occasions, I was in the minority and thatâs life.â
Yet, a veteran of health service committees, he is minded to criticise the process by which Nphet recommendations were communicated.
âShortly after the meeting a letter would go to the health minister with our recommendations. The normal process is that the minutes of the meeting are circulated and agreed by the people that were there as representing an accurate reading of the meeting, but instead decisions were being communicated in writing from the meeting directly to the Government,â he says. âItâs not that we wanted three weeks for everyone to read the minutes and agree on them⌠but the way it was structured there wasnât time or opportunity for everyone at the meeting to read what became the substantive record of the meeting. Did everyone at the meeting read the letter and agree with its content? They didnât, and that could have been done better.â
Dr Holohan was not available for comment this week.
Another of Cormicanâs former colleagues on Nphet was Professor Mary Horgan. A consultant in infectious diseases, she brought valuable clinical experience to a table that was densely populated by HSE and Department of Health officials. She agrees that it is already time to assess our pandemic performance.
Future pandemic emergency teams should have a broader membership, she says, with cross-sectoral involvement and not confined to public health. She adds that being âadaptable and agileâ will be key, and we will have to be conscious that âall the other diseases donât just disappear when you have a new infectionâ. But she disagrees with Cormican that the assertion that we were simply âfollowing the scienceâ was in any way misrepresentative.
âMartin was sceptical of following the science but I think thatâs really important because you have to make decisions based on the best available information at the time and I think thatâs most of what was done.â
As for Nphet processes, Horgan says that time was of the essence. âThe CMO had to come up with recommendations based on the discussions that were had and the letter had to go in a timely way,â she says. âThings were moving so quickly, if you had to go back around the committee again to sign off everything, that would be very challenging. There was an expectation by the Government to get the answers as quickly as possible so that they could intervene, whether it was opening or closing society.â
Another former Nphet member, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that the main problem with Nphet was that it was too big and âunwieldyâ. âThe group should have stayed smaller â there were 40 or 50 people on a Zoom call and that wasnât a situation that allowed for healthy discussion, that was very difficult.â
Dr Holohan did give people an opportunity to speak, âand was very overt in doing soâ, they say, but add: âIt wasnât going to change anything.â
The former Nphet member says that when Dr Ronan Glynn, the deputy chief medical officer, took over while Holohan took time off to care for his terminally ill wife, he was âmore receptiveâ.
The problem was that Nphet recommendations demanded âunityâ. âYou can absolutely disagree but at the end of the day you have to provide consensus. I donât think we got everything right but I think we did OK in the context of an emerging pathogen.â
What does Cormican hope to achieve by airing his views? He appreciates that people may disagree with some or all of what he says. Debate and discussion are good, he says, as we begin to reflect on our conduct during the pandemic â an inquiry into our handling of Covid is due to begin this year. A study in The Lancet last year found Ireland had one of the lowest rates of excess deaths of any country during the pandemic.
Human behaviour is the driving force in infection control, says Cormican. He concluded his paper with a simple wish: âIf this happens again in my lifetime, I hope we can all be a bit kinder to each other.â
And he emphasises that itâs now time to ask the tough questions. âWhat could we learn if this were to happen again â and I hope it doesnât happen again in my lifetime â how can we do as much of the good that we did and maybe do less of the bad?â
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The greatest cod of our lifetime. Youâd hope people wonât be as easily led the next time.
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There were lads on here wanting the âawkwardâ squad locked up sure.
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Natural immunity didnât exist at one stage sure according to some people on here.
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