What if I told you that I had a new product – never before used on a population-wide basis – and after coming into use the manufacturer requested that a court compel the authorities to lock away the results of the initial trials from prying eyes for seventy five years? This same product is made … Read more
Northern Ireland has already conducted a statutory inquiry into how Covid was managed. In contrast, the Republic is set to have a ‘review’ without statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend. This despite the Republic having had both a relatively high fatality rate and punitive restrictions that don’t appear to have worked. Maybe there is … Read more
Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep8-bonus-flawed-103879168 Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cassandra-voices-podcast/id1728086643 In our latest Podcast Frank Armstrong interviews Toby Green, Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College, London and the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). Toby … Read more
Listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from just €5 p.m.) on Patreon. You can also listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from €15 p.a. for all episodes) on Apple Podcasts. Did COVID-19 originate from a pathway connected to China’s trade in wildlife-for-consumption, or did laboratory activity trigger the pandemic? Where do … Read more
Covid is a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. But whether the unprecedented response represents a singularity, or the beginning of an era of authoritarian capitalism, is unclear. Many of us remain incapable of distinguishing a reliable version of reality from lonely projections. Thankfully, telling insights arrive in a new publication: The … Read more
A new book COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK (Bloomsbury, 2023) co-authored by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose explores how the British government under Boris Johnson used shame as an instrument of coercive control during the pandemic. ‘Shame’, the authors contend, ‘is commonly understood to be a personal … Read more
Irish Times health correspondent Paul Cullens reported on February 13, 2023 that a disturbing 1,300 patients had ‘died over the winter as a result of delays in hospital admission from emergency departments, according to an analysis of Health Service Executive data.’ This followed a longer article by Cullen the previous Saturday exploring what is driving … Read more
Did you a struggle to understand and navigate your way through events surrounding our response to Covid-19 in Ireland? Did what at first appear to make sense, as a reasonable and decisive reaction to a dangerous virus, seem, over time, to become increasingly absurd? Even cursory examination of the data shows large inconsistencies in our … Read more
Foremost among Utopian absurdities, we had the false promise of ZeroCovid. This continues to inflict untold damage on millions of lives and livelihoods that have been lost along the mystical path to salvation. Although the ZeroCovid leaders identified themselves with logic and rationality, the fanciful idea of every country excluding an influenza-like virus appears to … Read more
‘Harold Evans used to say that an investigation only really began to count once the readers – and even the journalists – were bored with it’ Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news? In New York city on Easter Sunday 1929, in a premeditated move, a group of women brought the annual parade to a halt … Read more
Robert Fisk wrote: ‘we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know, no one told us.”[i] To be an … Read more
We need to sing again. We need to be Irish. We need to socialise. We need to be ourselves. So said Sarah, professional singer and mother from Ballina, County Tipperary, on the Late Late Show, only a few hours after Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin’s address to the nation and his surprise announcement that most … Read more
On March 11th, 2020 the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in Turkey, followed by the first mortality on March 15th. Then on April 1st Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced that cases had spread all over Turkey. So how has the pandemic been managed since? And how have measures affected people. A total of 5.34 … Read more
Confusion and fear are to be expected in novel situations where experience is limited; this should fade as understanding grows. Such is the natural cycle. When governments employ behavioural psychologists to induce fears in order to control and coerce the population, however, we have to question their motives and methods. Initially we were advised that … Read more
Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of … Read more
4,915. And rising. This number can only increase or, at best, stay the same. It can never go down. Of all the innovations that governments and media around the world have come up with, seemingly independently of each other, during the ongoing Covid period perhaps the most insidious is the daily running total of deaths. … Read more
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics “That’s how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you’ll eventually get it. And then you’ll make new mistakes.” Louis Sachar, The Card Turner (2010) Managing … Read more
The pandemic has changed life as we know it. We are dealing with the ‘New Abnormal’ where certain aspects of life, such as our café and pub culture are no longer viable. Alas, many places have closed down permanently due to reduced customer footfall and loss of incomes. So, what does this mean for our … Read more
In a recent survey of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) by Ernst and Young [i], 79% of board members stated that their organisations were not well-prepared to deal with a crisis such as today’s pandemic. Several other analyses also indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic will push down the full-year gross domestic product (GDP) globally … Read more
A zoom panel discussion organised by Lindau, which included two other Nobel-prize winning scientists, provided Stanford biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt with a platform to vent his fury over the global scientific community’s flawed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as he saw it. In particular, he condemned Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson for failing to … Read more
