Cianan Brennan: Government hoped for the best but never prepared for worst-case scenario

Nphet had no choice but to advise a delay to reopening indoor dining but what's recommended is not practical

CMO Dr Tony Holohan's group has put the Government in a dreadful bind. And this is a Government not overly adept at achieving the achievable, let alone the impossible. Picture: Julien Behal. 

In the end, there are two main conclusions that emerge from the advice the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) gave to Government on Monday.

The first is that Nphet had no choice but to relay the advice that it did, and to suggest Ireland’s hospitality reopening needs to be delayed. The figures don’t lie, and if the proverbial were to really hit the fan, in the context of the Delta variant running amok and a couple of thousand deaths resulting, the public simply would not be able to forgive an administration that allowed it to happen. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst etc.

But the other conclusion is that what Nphet has recommended is simply not practical, or even doable. This means Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan’s group has put the Government in a dreadful bind. And this is a Government not overly adept at achieving the achievable, let alone the impossible.

You can take a further two things from Nphet suggesting that any hospitality reopening should be paused until a “robust, non-reproducible and enforceable system of verification of vaccination or immunity status is put in place” to support it.

Nphet had no choice but to relay the advice that it did, and to suggest that Ireland’s hospitality reopening needs to be delayed. Photograph: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

One, Nphet has either little knowledge of or little interest in the practicalities of pulling off such a task. You can take it as read – doing so would take a lot more than the two weeks which the Government has suggested the reopening should be delayed for. 

And two, Nphet wanted to shut off indoor dining for a lot longer and this is the compromise they reached. This is no longer even a supposition — Dr Holohan told opposition TDs as much at a briefing on Wednesday afternoon.

In such a situation, you are left with a choice between what can be delivered and what cannot.

“You’re faced with several issues – legal, practical, and symbolic,” says Antóin Ó Lachtnáin, director of Digital Rights Ireland. “But really it boils down to what can you do in two weeks, because, from our point of view, to do it properly would take months.”

“First of all you have a Government procurement situation, and the Government isn’t that fast,” he says of the vaccine verification tool the State is apparently contemplating producing or adopting.

“Second, it has to be done to a reasonably high standard because it’s a State product. Then you have the issue of public confidence, and what is being done with everyone’s data. Legally, you’re stymied because whatever you choose will have to be underpinned in legislation. Finally, you have to figure out how you’re going to do all this. Realistically you couldn’t implement it for weeks at best.”

Mr Ó Lachtnáin suggests that a compromise of some sort is the only viable solution.

“You could make it the rule that you have to be vaccinated to dine out, by producing your card [the vaccination record which anyone receiving a jab needs to hold onto to secure their second dose],” he says. “That’s far from foolproof, but it is the Government sending out a message. It would be a temporary measure to get us over the line.”

“It would be hospitality achieved via honour code – you’d be on your word that what you’ve produced is legitimate. That’s still problematic though legally because you’d be dependent upon a vaccine for service, or proof of a recent test. But it could get the country through a bind for six weeks or so as a stopgap, and by that stage the vaccination programme would be that much further along. Any longer than that and you’d have to have legislation in place realistically,” he says.

Mr Ó Lachtnáin dismisses the idea of the EU green cert as being a non-starter. “It’s not a great solution, because it’s just your name and date of birth and vaccination status, and no photo. It’s not verifiable and we wouldn’t be able to implement it for weeks,” he says.

Which brings us back to Nphet’s recommendation, for something that is robust and non-reproducible and enforceable. The only solution that seems to work in the timeframe allowed would be categorically none of those things. And if the early days of Ireland’s vaccine rollout has shown us anything, it’s that where a system is open to abuse, we will abuse it.

The natural corollary from what Nphet has said is that no one would be working indoors if they haven’t been vaccinated. Photograph: Sasko Lazarov / RollingNews.ie

There is a further, more disquieting interpretation of the Nphet advice also, and one that the younger unvaccinated members of the population are doubtless already aware of.

“The natural corollary from what Nphet has said is that no one would be working indoors if they haven’t been vaccinated,” says Mr Ó Lachtnáin.

How well whatever solution the Government comes up with works, only time will tell.

In terms of how this farrago was arrived at, there is however plenty of blame to go around.

On the Nphet side, it is just over a month since Dr Holohan observed at a Friday public briefing that “people would like to see things happening as quickly as possible and I would be one of them”.

Just two weeks ago, when the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group (IEMAG — Nphet’s forecasters in chief) were beginning to come to terms with the dangers represented by the Delta variant, Dr Holohan gave a (for him) resolutely positive performance at the Oireachtas Transport Committee, where he said that antigen testing for travel will soon be irrelevant.

“If we can keep transmission where it is at the moment, and up the vaccination programme as we want to, we’ll see extensive resumption of international travel in late summer, without the need for any testing whatsoever,” he said.

Such statements do not tally well with the letter he sent to Health Minister Stephen Donnelly on Monday. The Delta variant has been in circulation since March. We need only look at the UK to see the havoc it is capable of wreaking. Would it really have been that difficult to predict even the possibility of the current scenario? 

But nevertheless, the majority of the blame has to fall on the politicians. The adage is that Nphet advises, ministers decide.

In the Government’s haste to reopen industries which have been pummelled into the ground by Covid, little thought was given towards a contingency course of action should things not go to plan. Given the catastrophe which was the Christmas surge – which followed the Government ignoring Nphet advice, lest we forget – this seems negligent in the extreme

It’s all very well throwing the blame at Nphet, but its job is to watch out for and maintain the public’s health and wellbeing as best it can.

The Government’s role, meanwhile, is to weigh the options and navigate the country out of tricky situations. This particular pickle is one entirely of its own making.