We’re in as good a place as we were last summer. Why six more weeks of this?
OUR mandatory quarantine system may be about to introduce exemptions to allow elite sporting fixtures take place – but not permit those fully vaccinated to leave hotel detention to attend to dying parents.
We’re not going to use the AstraZeneca vaccine for the under-60s any more even though the risks of blood clots to users are infinitely less than the danger of dying because of the illness against which they’d be vaccinated.
The numbers of people with Covid in our hospitals and ICUs has dropped to our lowest levels since last year but, even with vaccination of the most vulnerable well advanced, our health authorities are worried about a fourth wave and want the current restrictions extended for another six weeks. Just what is going on? While nobody is advocating recklessness and a ‘throw it all open again’ approach, there are significant and legitimate questions to be asked as to how much of this is necessary.
We have officials talking about an ‘abundance of caution’ as if it is a badge of honour and without wondering apparently if you can have too much of a supposed good thing.
It is legitimate to ask if excessive conservatism is now the dominant sentiment driving the agencies tasked with advising the Government on its actions. And if, in turn, a fear about being perceived to be doing anything different to this advice is paralysing the Government.
Failures
The implications of abundance of caution may be many, and in no particular order: the economic damage may go deeper and recovery be delayed; confidence in the essential vaccination programme may be undermined; other health crises are being allowed to fester and expand because of failures to deal with them during an almost exclusive concentration on Covid; the public buy-in to support Covid protection measures may be waning because too much emphasis is being placed on a lockdown – and of a scale nobody else in the northern hemisphere is trying and which the World Health Organisation does not endorse.
Take the quarantine issue first. There were good arguments made by the health authorities last May to introduce it for incoming travellers and many supported that, claiming that as an island we could be like Australia or New Zealand in keeping the virus, once suppressed, from returning.
Equally, there were plenty of good reasons put forward as to why it wouldn’t work, including the open border on this island with the North – a border that remains open in 2021 despite the quarantining of people coming in from nearly every other country in the world.
Now, when it is arguably less needed than it was before, we have a situation where a divided Government agreed under public pressure to belatedly bring in quarantine – and has been forced to apply it to more countries than many ministers wanted.
Clearly, Fianna Fáil wanted the measure far more than Fine Gael did (and Health Minister Stephen Donnelly was left to implement it when the more logical choices of Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney or Justice Minister Helen McEntee didn’t want the job). And then when logical flaws in the system emerged – such as those which required vaccinated people to undergo quarantine in any case – ministers objected when the issue should have been dealt with when the legislation was being brought in.
But changes could be made to allow the French international women’s rugby team into the country this weekend – while a young Dublin couple with a newborn son, born to a surrogate mother in Ukraine, is being told they must quarantine in a single hotel room for two weeks on their return here on Saturday.
Now we have a potential vaccine delivery crisis, as NIAC has told the government not to use the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for the under-60s because of some evidence of exceptionally rare adverse reactions to the jab.
The chances of that age cohort getting Covid-19 or being killed by it are much higher but the ‘abundance of caution’ rule has come into play. About one fifth of our supplies for between now and June are coming from this source but will the over-60s be willing to take something that is now not available to the younger, leading to so-called ‘vaccination hesitancy’?
Worse, now that similar doubts have emerged about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine the supply of vaccines for this quarter of the year is at serious risk of going well behind schedule, with all sorts of knock-on consequences. This, admittedly, is not our
Government’s fault, given that J&J has pulled distribution to the EU after a move against it by US federal authorities. It may prove too that this dominance of fear is not just an Irish issue: incredibly, J&J is reacting to six deadly cases out of 6.7 million vaccines administered.
Those numbers are actually impressive. All medication and vaccines involve a limited degree of risk. For new vaccines to be performing as well as they have is a positive story. One that is in danger of turning negative.
It is not possible to guarantee absolutely that some people won’t react adversely to vaccines. But if the number is much smaller than the number vulnerable to the disease itself then surely these are risks worth taking for the greater good.
There are many respected doctors who are despairing of the caution being displayed towards the AstraZeneca jab in Ireland.
We heard yesterday too that senior officials in NPHET believe we need a further six weeks of this lockdown (the changes that started last Monday are quite minimal) before we can start a gradual re-opening of society. These officials are telling the Government that while they can approve people from different homes meeting in the open air – as is happening all over the place – they don’t want it happening in gardens. The unspoken scolding here is that they don’t trust people not to be drinking alcohol in gardens and then going indoors to use the toilet.
The infantilising of the public is becoming quite shocking.
Reality
It is understandable that there is a fear among officials of a surge in cases along the lines being experienced in continental Europe at present. We all understand the warning that a few ‘superspreader’ events could send us back into a fourth wave.
There remain fears of cases and clusters arising in people who are vaccinated, suggesting some new variants could defeat vaccines, although there is also considerable evidence vaccines work well against those variants. And there are also doubts as to how long protection any vaccine gives against a virus.
But the reality is the number of patients in hospital with Covid is down below 200 and in intensive care units below 50.
This means that the concentration can now return to dealing with the dramatically increased waiting lists that have formed during a period when the number of seriously ill patients treated in our hospitals has dropped alarmingly.
While some of the drop suggests certain issues can be dealt with in the community, many people with serious conditions have been left in pain and their conditions will deteriorate while they wait for treatment.
That’s before we even get to mental health issues.
All life involves risk and chance. Sometimes it is necessary to take gambles, like Boris Johnson’s much maligned UK government did with its early pushing of the AstraZeneca vaccine and, it would seem, for considerable reward.
Nobody is asking for the pubs and restaurants to reopen fully, for crowds to be allowed at sports fixtures and all the other things we took for granted to be available to us immediately.
But there has to be a little more common sense applied on the part of Irish officialdom if public support for the battle against Covid-19 is to be continued.