Unfathomable isn't it?

What COVID inquiry can unravel the enormity of the deception?

"The original sin of the pandemic was the failure to recognize airborne transmission."

— Prof. Joe Allen, Harvard

It was an Irishman, Dr. Mike Ryan, who whispered something in the WHO director's ear, which made him withdraw the comment:

"Corona is airborne, COVID is airborne, it's more contagious."

The WHO insisted thereafter that COVID is spread by droplets that fall to the ground within a few feet.

It was entirely expected that a pandemic could be caused by an airborne SARS-like coronavirus. Dr. Mike Ryan had just conducted a drill on exactly that scenario in October 2019.

To this day, Irish doctors and nurses are apparently completely oblivious to the concept of airborne transmission.

It's not a new concept. Measles is airborne. Tuberculosis is airborne. They are fully accepted, textbook examples of airborne pathogens.

But when you have a look at the scientific literature, many of the other pathogens that kill and contribute to hospital overcrowding would be reduced with a greater focus on indoor air quality: Influenza, RSV, strep, whooping cough, norovirus, parvovirus, chickenpox, hand foot and mouth disease, most of the pathogens that cause common colds, etc.

ChatGPT produced a long list when I asked it for all the airborne pathogens that can potentially lead to sepsis.

In a review of the immunology of long COVID published in Nature Immunology in July 2023, one of many major reviews that have been published in the world's top science journals — all of which conclude that we should do our best to avoid infection and reinfection, and all of which have been studiously ignored by Irish politicians, journalists, public health officials, and medical professionals — Prof. Danny Altmann wrote this:

"The oncoming burden of long COVID faced by patients, healthcare providers, governments, and economies is so large as to be unfathomable, which is possibly why minimal high-level planning is currently allocated to it."

It is unfathomable.

Until we have begun to fathom the unfathomable, there is no point in having a COVID inquiry in Ireland.

It is unfathomable that two and a half years ago, our leaders and public health officials decided that we had hit the jackpot with Omicron.

We would all inevitably get infected, build up natural immunity, and we could get back to normal and pretend it never happened.

So there was no point in putting the HEPA filters they had just promised €62m for into classrooms after all. That would only slow the natural immunization process down.

It's unfathomable that they would ignore the big study being reported internationally on the brain harm COVID causes even in mild cases and the other studies showing that vaccination only marginally reduced the risk of long COVID.

"If you were hoping for Omicron to be less damaging to the brain, you will be disappointed."

—Prof. Andrew Ewing

So, Irish media completely ignored that because it's unfathomable to think that our government would have decided to maximally infect all the children in the country with a brain-damaging novel SARS virus.

It's unfathomable that after Luke O'Neill assured us COVID would be gone from Ireland by Paddy's weekend, and Philip Nolan called BA.2 an "exit wave," it would get so bad in Ireland that Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar would be infected, and Micheál Martin would very nearly infect the rather elderly Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and US President Joe Biden during his all-important St. Patrick's Day visit.

So, we erase that from our collective memory.

It was unfathomable that there would be another wave that summer. Weren't we supposed to be immune? Wasn't it supposed to now be a seasonal winter bug like flu?

Could be a blip, Leo Varadkar warned. We were assured that it was very mild now, even though we had seen the very high death toll Omicron was taking in places like Hong Kong and South Korea.

We were to live with this brain-damaging, cardiovascular system-damaging, immune system-damaging, type 1 diabetes-causing new virus in the same way we have always lived with flu.

Varadkar and our new CMO, Breda Smyth, would tell us there was no need to test anymore. We never used to test for flu, right? And COVID is just like the flu now.

Yet epidemiologists, immunologists, and virologists the world over were at pains to point out that, actually, it was nothing like the flu.

"Unlike flu, SARS-CoV-2 gets into the blood & infects cells throughout the body. It's also a clotting disease with strokes & heart problems. Imagining COVID is 'like the flu' is cutting thousands of lives short.

It's time to wake up."

—Prof. Peter Doherty, immunologist, Nobel Laureate, Sept '22

Unfathomable.

So, we ignore that. Our government wouldn't have chosen a maximal infection policy with this rapidly mutating novel virus if it wasn't true that it's now no more of a threat than the flu.

And on and on it went. Surge upon surge.

Never dropping to a low level before the next even more transmissible, even more immune-evasive variant took hold.

Breda Smyth would go through her entire tenure as CMO without once mentioning the words "long COVID," despite having warned quite clearly about it before taking on the role.

"The only way to avoid long COVID is to not catch COVID" — she said in 2021 as Director of Public Health, HSE West.

Now, as CMO, she would launch a glossy campaign to encourage elderly people back to bingo with zero mitigations. Loneliness was now the far greater threat.

But "the only way to avoid long COVID is not to catch COVID" is exactly what Prof. Ziyad Al-Aly said in the recent US Senate hearing, and it's also exactly what the Victorian public health department says in their recent video campaign on the reality of long COVID.

Of course, the US Senate hearing chaired by Bernie Sanders would receive zero coverage in Irish media.

No international evidence can penetrate our little bubble of denial.

The summer surges of Eris last year and BA.5 the year before somehow escaped the memory of HSE/HPSC Director for National Health Protection, Dr. Eamonn O'Moore.

"We haven't had a summer surge for a few years, so this is a concern," he told the Irish Medical Times at the beginning of June.

The spring booster vaccination campaign was then ended as scheduled on the 14th of June, so even those who fit in the narrow band of eligibility — those over 80, healthcare workers, and the immunocompromised — couldn't get it during the summer FliRT surge.

The surge then peaked at the end of June and stayed high all through the summer.

Our top experts, Luke O'Neill and Kingston Mills, were wheeled out two weeks after the peak of this summer surge when some broadcasters finally noticed it, after hospitals had been closing doors to visitors weeks earlier.

It then dropped from the news cycle very quickly. The All-Ireland winning teams were visiting children's hospitals maskless while Tour de France cyclists and Olympic athletes were catching COVID and FFP2 masks were being worn.

Take Dr. Catherine Conlon's recent Back to School public health advice article in the IMT.

COVID isn't mentioned. Whooping cough is. Measles is. The fact that both of these pathogens are also airborne is not mentioned.

The same public health doctor wrote an article at the end of May advising us on keeping safe on our holidays.

As the FLiRT/FLuQUE variants, which would cause higher levels than ever by the end of June, were surging and positivity levels in Spain and Portugal were 40% and 30%, respectively — data that is not available for Ireland because we decided to stop publishing the positivity rate in January.

COVID wasn't mentioned by this public health doctor then either.

The only mention of the word "airborne," as if to mock us —

"Once you're airborne, careful hand hygiene is important."

This is the alternative reality created by Prof. Martin Cormican, where COVID is just another bug now like any other.

It is unfathomable that the head of AMRIC, the top infection control chief in the HSE, could hold this view —

"There is very little evidence that improved ventilation would have reduced COVID transmission," he asserted as late as February 2023.

COVID always must be spoken of in the past tense.

He boasted on the Brendan O'Connor Show that he had never used an antigen test himself.

Brendan lapped it up, and Cormican was the new darling of Irish media.

It's unfathomable that this man, who shaped much of the laissez-faire HSE policy that we see now, didn't think healthcare workers should have worn masks in March 2020, while Dr. Mike Ryan said the idea that healthcare workers should be left without masks in the face of this novel virus was horrific.

It's unfathomable that, as people were dying in care homes, it was men like Martin Cormican who were the people making decisions on infection control.

Another AMRIC representative, GP Dr. Paul Ryan, was on the radio for World Hand Hygiene Day.

COVID must not be mentioned.

Except jokingly, in the past tense.

"We learned during the pandemic, didn't we, about the importance of hand hygiene, but we're slipping, are we?" the host asked.

Dr. Ryan said his own son was, in fact, ill at that moment. So presumably, being a loyal AMRIC representative, he didn't test his son for COVID and dutifully went to work the next day himself, maskless, and treated all his maskless patients — some of whom may be particularly high-risk, in his ventilation-less, HEPA filter-less GP surgery.

No, Colm Henry, Kingston Mills, and Luke O'Neill have assured us they know better than the CDC, NIH, HHS, the Canadian public health authorities, and the WHO, etc. — hybrid immunity is the way to go. It gives you the best, most up-to-date immunity, so no need for vaccines for those of us who aren't "at risk."

So just get infected, that way you'll have better protection against getting infected.

Which, of course, makes perfect sense to Irish people, and we're all very happy with that explanation.

If they are wrong, the consequences would be truly unfathomable. So we take them at their word.

Prof. Eric Topol demanded a retraction when Luke O'Neill lied to the Irish public that he had said the pandemic is over.

Topol later wrote in the L.A. Times—

"The U.S. is facing the biggest COVID wave since Omicron. Why are we still playing make-believe?"

"Now in its fifth year, SARS-CoV-2 has once again proved to be highly resilient, capable of reinventing itself to infect us. Yet we continue to make-believe that the pandemic is over, that infections have been transformed to common cold status by prior exposure(s), and that life has returned to normal. Sadly, none of this is true."

This will not be mentioned in Irish media.

This must not be mentioned.

State pathologist Dr. Margot Bolster concluded recently that COVID is causing fatal road accidents.

We will hypothesize every imaginable reason behind the rise in road fatalities, no matter how outlandish. People have forgotten how to drive. We're rushing around more now, even though more of us work from home.

The fact that state pathologist Dr. Margot Bolster has concluded that the chronic fatigue and brain damage COVID causes is leading to road fatalities, and the mountains of evidence of cognitive decline from COVID infection, will not be entertained as a possible factor as we plough headlong into massive surge after massive surge, with it never going down to a low level in between surges.

In countries that actually track the true prevalence, they record numbers like 1 in 12 people actively infected at the peak of surges. So 1 in 12 drivers are driving around actively infected. Now add in the brain fog from 2 and a half years of unmitigated infections. Add in the chronic fatigue, the dysautonomia, etc. Factor in the increasing risks on reinfection.

But COVID is in the rearview mirror.

Denis Naughten's survey found that 62.6% of female long COVID sufferers have had their ability to conduct daily activities reduced a lot.

The figure is just 14.7% for male long COVID sufferers.

We had been warned. HIQA said women are more at risk in May 2023.

We'll just say 40% of adults with long COVID. That's more palatable.

We'll ignore that it's more than tripled in the last year.

We'll ignore that Yale's Prof. Akiko Iwasaki tells us female sex is also a risk factor for long COVID in children.

How could that possibly matter now? COVID is over years ago. It's just like any other bug now.

Micheál Martin must be right to question the methodology, joke about it, and reassert that COVID "was" a disease that only affected the elderly.

We'll wait for the results of the HSE survey. I'm sure they'll release it sometime soon. Any day now.

The mountains of international peer-reviewed research published in the world's top science journals are not enough for Micheál Martin.

We'll have to wait for the HSE to check the methodology.

The statements made by experts in the UK COVID Inquiry, the US Senate hearing, and the German Health Minister, immunologist Prof. Karl Lauterbach's statements do not cut the mustard.

We must wait for bona fide HSE research. For the input of men like Martin Cormican, who have assured us that long COVID does not exist, ventilation makes no difference, antigen tests are no use, children aren't affected, HEPA filters are no use, healthcare workers shouldn't have worn masks in March 2020.

In the meantime, make sure to follow official HSE advice. "Some parents teach their children the dance move dabbing."

It's the kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse so hard he won't believe what's just happened approach to public health.

But at some point, it's going to hit the Irish public what has actually happened to us.

And when that moment comes, sheer rage will be the only reasonable response.

And maybe that will be the time for an inquiry.

For now, it's all just so utterly unfathomable.