Opinion: Media hype around Covid has been irresponsible

Cavanman's Diary

In west Cork in the summer of 2020, I sat outside a hotel waiting for my friends to get ready to go out. I was at a table outside, over-looking a river. The open-air setting was beautiful; the sun shone and around me, people were having a good time.

The waiter came over to my table and I asked him for a bottle of beer. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you have to order a meal with that.”

I told him I was a guest in the hotel. Apologetically, he informed me that made no difference.

“I’ll have a bag of crisps then,” I said, chancing my arm, but he knew the rules. “It has to be to the value of €9,” he told me.

I pointed out that we had dinner booked in an hour and I was just waiting for the rest of them so we could go into town. No dice.

“What about these people beside me,” I said, pointing out a group of half a dozen with a table of drink in front of them. They were waiting for food, he said, so that was okay.

Finally, I gave in. I didn’t want a bottle of beer that badly anyway; I was just killing time, scrolling through Twitter on my phone. “Sure I’ll have a bottle of coke,” I said.

“No problem!” said my friend, heading back inside.

I had to laugh. What was the point getting worked up about it? The rules were a farce, an insult to people’s intelligence. And in the meantime, not very much has changed.

Fast forward 12 months to August, 2021 and I attended the Junior Championship final between Denn and Templeport. Only 500 were allowed to enter Kingspan Breffni for that match.

Earlier on in the day, the stadium had hosted a minor match between Sligo and Meath, which drew people from opposite sides of the country, surely increasing the risk of spreading a contagious virus. The limit on the attendance at that game? Two-thousand!

The restrictions were clearly daft. In years to come, these are the sort of examples we will cite when we look back at the collective mania in the way we reminisce about the Celtic Tiger years now.

Yet, let me play devil’s advocate here for a moment. I would argue that it is reasonable to expect a degree of incompetence from certain politicians. Nobody is perfect. Others, unelected, have gone from being more or less anonymous public officials to celebrities who – before they were gagged last week - bypassed the instruments of government and spoke directly to the people. We have to factor in, too, that they are human and a part of them is probably drawn to the novelty and new-found power and fame.

Their tweets can now lead the news, as we have seen when Dr Tony Holohan expressed his shock at seeing young people socialising on the streets and when Prof Philip Nolan dismissed antigen testing as “snake oil”.

We must also understand that the pandemic has been a fast-evolving situation and if it appeared as if those in charge were making things up as they went along, that’s because at times they were.

The greatest dereliction of duty, however, has been on the part of the media, whose job it is to speak truth to power, to hold these people to account. In print and on the airwaves, for the longest time, we have been fed a diet of doom and gloom, with a platform given to scare-mongerers with letters after their names.

Of late, admittedly, the tone of the coverage has changed. While many continue to parrot the party line, other journalists are queueing up to ask the hard questions, although by definition this means they are not the hard questions any more.

Here’s just one recent example. A headline last week in the Irish Independent screamed: ‘Health Minister’s deep concern for ‘worst’ strain of virus ripping through Africa’.

Now, I had read a report from Reuters just beforehand in which the chair of the South African Medical Association, who discovered this Omicron variant, stated that the UK is “panicking unnecessarily” and that what she was seeing clinically was “extremely mild” so this immediately raised a red flag for me.

Online, people were railing against Donnelly’s hyperbolic use of language and I tended to agree – until, that is, I actually read the article. Nowhere did the Minister say it was “ripping through Africa”. That was complete editorialising by the newspaper, presumably designed to generate web traffic. That, to me, is completely irresponsible.

All of this has fed into a prevailing conflict on the ground, where the culture wars continue to rage. There are still those who will not tolerate anyone questioning the infallibility of NPHET, for example.

Last week, our unelected overlords decided that small children must wear masks to school. The Indo reported on the matter.

‘Pupils from third class upwards who do not comply with the mask mandate as of today will be “asked to stand down from school”, Education Minister Norma Foley has said,’ began the piece.

The use of such militaristic language was bizarre but I suppose it sounded better than saying kids would be “excluded” or “sent home”. (Later, by the by, they rowed back on that and stated that non-compliant pupils would not, in fact, be immediately dismissed).

Against my better judgement, I quoted the headline on Twitter, sarcastically adding my own line that failure to stand down would result in immediate court-martialing.

The first reply was typical of the passive aggressive nature of much of the conversation which has surrounded our response to the pandemic.

“Are you Anti-Vaccination, Paul?” it read.

That was quite a leap to make and completely irrelevant – I am fully vaccinated, as it happens – but not surprising, sadly.

Although I’m sure this tweeter didn’t mean it that way, the term “Anti-Vaccination”, of course, is almost inter-changeable with phrases like “far right” and so on in our national discourse at present.

I decided not to reply to the tweet. There is no such thing as disagreement on social media; there is just agreement or unseemly argument. Better, like the pike I have been missing lately, not to take the bait.

This exchange, however, was indicative of the discussion, which surrounds our ongoing restrictions, in which there are a few entrenched camps. On one extreme are those who think there is no such thing as Covid, that it is just a flu and even that it is a power grab by a shadowy global elite, representing the conspiracy theorists’ favourite old chestnut, the New World Order.

On the other are those who believe Covid is some sort of unprecedented plague, which is decimating society and that those in charge have done everything right and cannot be questioned. To my mind, both are caught up in a sort of cult-like adherence to their beliefs. The truth of the situation is somewhere in the middle.

In time, I believe, we will accept that this virus is seasonal and cannot really be evaded by the masses, regardless of whether we employ mandatory quarantine or make sure people eat €9 meals or leave the pub an hour earlier or stop children playing outdoor sport or any of the other arbitrary measures we have endured.

We will learn that the only way to deal with it is to protect the vulnerable with early vaccinations and prompt boosters when needed and, for the rest, to carry on as best they can. The concern, though, is that civil liberties have been eroded now and a precedent set. The unvaccinated, in some countries, have been all but been criminalised and the right to peaceful protest has been denied.

When the dust settles, and hopefully it will, that may well be the biggest fall-out. And the media, in general, will have to take a lot of the blame for taking the easy option all too often.