Irish Examiner View: Plan needed to end Covid-19 nightmare

The discovery of vaccines has moved the goalposts in the fight against Covid-19.

There can hardly be an Irish person who, on one long-ago, rainy Sunday afternoon or another, did not see the 1958 film, A Night to Remember. One of the last films of its kind, it used the Titanic's dying hours to celebrate the Corinthian ideal of public heroism. It did though recognise human frailty in the person of J. Bruce Ismay, the White Star director who defied the women-and-children-first edict and took a precious place on a lifeboat. That was a Pyrrhic victory for Ismay as he, shamed and shunned, lived the rest of his life in isolation in Connemara's Costelloe Lodge.

Last April's act of “modern piracy” — so described by Andreas Geisel, the interior minister for Berlin state — when a shipment of protective clothing destined for Germany was "diverted" to America at a Thai airport also seems a Pyrrhic victory. America's Covid-19 death toll has passed 250,000 souls and 12.5m out of 328m Americans have contracted the disease. German deaths have yet to pass 15,000 though that country has a population of 83m.