Terry Prone: After two solid years, have we abandoned our 'duty of opposition' to Covid?

Familiarity breeds contempt and it seems we no longer care about a pandemic that is very much still here

As hospitalisations rise, people’s sense of worry tends to do the same. But this hasn’t happened with the latest wave of Covid.

Mon, 04 Jul, 2022 - 02:00

Terry Prone is an author, columnist and one of Ireland's most well known commentators on communications, politics and public life.

He was 84 years old. He was HIV positive. He was in a wheelchair. A year later, he was dead. But on the last day of June, 2019, Larry Kramer, Aids activist extraordinaire, took to the stage in Central Park at the conclusion of the Pride parade. He was worried about the younger generation who seemed to be abandoning what he called their “duty of opposition” to the Aids virus.

Kramer spoke just five months before another virus devastated the world. That virus, Covid-19, came out of China rather than out of Africa. The global reaction was quicker than the shameful response to HIV. But also quicker came the abandonment of the duty of opposition to the virus.