Fergus Finlay: Covid is still here and so are the deniers

'I know how much people suffered from Covid in the early days, and I am immensely grateful that I live in a country where vaccines were made available — on a regularly updated basis — to as many people as possible as soon as possible.'

So I got it in the end. I worked through the pandemic, I was involved in all sorts of decisions about how to protect public health, I became really proud of how Ireland responded to the curse of covid. I’ve read all the studies about our relative performance. I know some of the things we did right and some of the mistakes we made — and I see no reason at all why we shouldn’t be completely honest about all of that.

Whenever a vaccination became available, I queued up like everyone else and took it. I never had any side effects, and have always been grateful for the protection they have given me and all the people I care about.

And then, five days before Christmas, I tested positive. There were snuffles in the house and we all thought it a good idea to ensure we were at no risk of infecting anyone over the holidays. We all tested, and we all tested positive.

Frieda and Mandy had flu-like symptoms for a couple of days. I was slammed. I spent most of Christmas on the flat of my back, and I’m still not right. As I’m writing this I’ve still got coughs and sneezes and the shivers and a headache. All I want to do most of the time is lie down — any physical exertion is beyond me. I know it will pass eventually, but my goodness it’s some dose.

And I’m not someone who ever gets particularly sick, even when I’ve had a couple of serious conditions in the past my powers of recovery are pretty good.

I don’t think I ever missed a day’s work through illness in my working life, apart from one occasion where I pulled a muscle very badly in my back and couldn’t move for four days. I’m nearly into three weeks of this thing now, and I’m only gradually coming back to my jovial lively self.

So here are three pretty banal things I’ve discovered (I’ve always known them, but now I’ve experienced them.) I know you can get covid. I know it can be rough. And I know that vaccines work.

I’ve always known that getting the vaccine is not a guarantee against getting the virus, but I shudder to think about what the last three weeks would have been like if I wasn’t vaccinated, and therefore protected from the worst of it.

I know how much people suffered in the early days, and I am immensely grateful that I live in a country where vaccines were made available — on a regularly updated basis — to as many people as possible as soon as possible.s

But it’s also why the covid deniers drive me crazy. It’s really hard to know how many of them there are because if you rely on social media there seems to be thousands of them. Only a few are what you might call mainstream, and if you explore the world of the covid denier a little bit, you gradually discover that it’s a circle of people who broadcast to each other and who constantly recycle each other’s opinions.

That can have a huge multiplier effect. To give you just one example, here’s an English lad who claims to be a doctor and a general practitioner. He may well be for all I know, though how he has time to see a patient I have no idea. He’s been on Twitter or X for two years and in that time has sent out, on average, 42 tweets a day to his 185.000 followers (imagine!). Here’s a bit of one from a few days ago:

“All morning….. ‘Hi doctor I have had this cough now for 6-8 weeks and can’t shake it off’ …….guess what they all had 8-10 weeks prior……..it’s beyond all reasonable doubt now! Not one single unvaxxed (patient with a respiratory problem) has been to see or speak to me in the last 4 weeks. Fact! … This is what is happening in my clinic room not your nefarious unqualified brought and paid for imaginations!!!!”

So, a doctor practicing in a community with a high take-up of covid vaccination is still seeing people with coughs, even though they have all been vaccinated. 

It has convinced this eejit that vaccines don’t work. In fact, it’s clear from the rest of his garbage that he believes the vaccines have caused the coughs.

It’s fine for some to be that stupid, I suppose. But this guy has followers, including a well-known covid denier in Ireland. Not only does this (Irish) guy approvingly quote the dopey English doctor, but he has also recently begun to publish the views of another guy (a Canadian this time) who believes that vaccination was a form of “lethal injection” and part of a worldwide conspiracy.

Our Irish friend has rebroadcast this Canadian loo-lah because, according to a tweet he sent out here last week, “covid was a hoax … Cows farting is a hoax, climate change is a hoax, the vaccines are toxic and are killing people, etc Well here is a scientist telling it straight for 10 minutes ...” The video of the Canadian “scientist” announces “with certainty” that there was no pandemic, and if there was it refused to cross borders, and there is no global warming. So that’s ok then.

That’s the other thing about these people. I have yet to come across a covid denier who isn’t also a climate change denier. And they virtually all also subscribe to the “great replacement theory” — the idea that there is some malign force out there determined to replace the white bits of the human race with darker-skinned folk. In America, of course, the climate-change-covid-denying white supremacists also passionately believe that Donald Trump’s free and fair election was stolen from him.

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Perhaps one shouldn’t really bother. Behind all of the mad theorising about lethal injections and climate hysteria is the even madder notion that somewhere in the middle of all this there is a tiny cabal of extremely rich, extremely powerful individuals working to remain in control of all the assets of the human race.

We’re supposed to believe that this conspiracy is based on Davos or Bilderberg. They control the World Bank and the World Health Organization, and they’re using them both to bend us to their will.

It's mad, of course. But it’s also age-old. You could call it punching up and punching down. The same people who are trying to make us believe there is a crazy power-hungry conspiracy above are also trying to persuade us that the impoverished and oppressed of the world are denying us houses and jobs when they come to Ireland. The oppressed are becoming our oppressors.

But here’s the thing. Just because it’s mad, doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. We have to keep calling this stuff out. I suspect some of the people broadcasting this rubbish really believe it, but there are others who have much more malign motivations for spreading all these conspiracy theories. The more truth is undermined by the relentless nature of this stuff — and the failure to take it on — the more danger we are in.

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