There’s a phenomenon in American politics where hyper partisan Americans, answering polls, will reflexively answer almost any question in the way that most conveys their dislike of “the other side”. So, for example, when Barack Obama was President, absurd numbers of otherwise sensible Republicans would tell pollsters who asked them if Obama was born in America that they didn’t think he was – sparking, of course, media outrage about racism and conspiracy theories. And when George W Bush was President, otherwise sensible Democrats would tell pollsters in huge numbers that they believed he had something to do with 9/11. Sparking, of course, a bout of the media dutifully looking the other way.
I mention that because of the interesting figure in the latest poll on covid attitudes, which suggests that 10% of Irish people told the pollster that they thought 5G towers, of all things, had something to do with the number of covid infections. Some people believe that, for sure. But 10%? My guess is that there’s a section of people in Ireland now so mad at the Government that if you asked the public in a poll whether Leo Varadkar is secretly an alien from the planet Mothra put on earth to lay the groundwork for invasion, 10% or so would say “yes”. But who knows.
Anyway, here are the more interesting figures, courtesy of Paul Cullen at the Irish Times:
Almost one-third of Irish people believe the Government exaggerated the number of Covid-19 deaths, according to a study of trust in expertise across Europe.
However, it found trust in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines is generally higher in Ireland than in the other countries surveyed, while belief in conspiracy theories is lower, and Irish people professed greater willingness to comply with Covid-19 regulations.
Some 31 per cent people in Ireland think the Government is exaggerating the number of deaths from coronavirus – roughly in line with the average across the six countries. At the upper end of the range, 43 per cent of people in Poland believe their government is doing this, while at the other, 24 per cent in Norway believe the same.
Three-quarters of those surveyed in Ireland said it was true that nearly all scientists agreed that Covid-19 vaccines were safe, the highest figure for the six countries. Yet, one in seven (16 per cent) thought otherwise, the largest recorded figure across the nations involved in the study. Ten per cent of Irish people believe the symptoms mostly blamed on coronavirus are linked to 5G network radiation, but this is the lowest figure in the study – in the UK, 17 per cent of people hold this view.
The feeling that government is not honest and truthful was shared by 48 per cent of Irish people, with 58 per cent thinking the Government communicates inaccurate and biased information.
That the Government “exaggerated” deaths from Covid is not really in dispute. The only thing you could really argue there is the use of the word “exaggerated” itself: Was there a deliberate policy to overcount deaths, or was it just a good faith mistake? Because even RTE, remember, found that the official number of covid deaths was probably a considerable over-estimate – an investigation by Mark Coughlan of Prime Time put the figure at 3,200 in April 2021, while the Government estimate at the time was 4,847.
In fact, you won’t find a single independent estimate of Irish covid deaths which exceeds, or even matches the official Government figure. Not from the CSO, or from any media outlet, or any external agency. The Government did over-estimate covid deaths. The only question is by how much they did. On this point, the 31% of people in the poll are factually correct, and the other 69% are just wrong. Which says something about the limits of democracy, unfortunately.
Of course, one issue with polling – which, I suspect, is a bigger problem in Ireland than elsewhere – is the social pressure people can feel to tell a pollster the “right” answer. So, for example, look at the final paragraph quoted above. When asked whether the Government communicates inaccurate and biased information, 58% of people say “yes”. That’s not surprising, since there’s really no social pressure involved in saying that you’re not a fan of the Government.
Ask those same people, though, whether the covid figures were trustworthy, and a meaningful percentage of them will say “yes”. So, they trust the Government on covid deaths, but little else? That doesn’t make much sense, unless you consider that many of them don’t feel good telling a pollster that they have doubts about covid figures. Saying you don’t trust the Government is a reasonable position. Saying you doubt the covid death numbers, though, places you a little too close to the kind of people who Claire Byrne and Joe Duffy might call conspiracy theorists.
These figures tally, incidentally, with the CSO figures on trust, which show that only 42% of people say they trust the media, and far fewer than that again say they trust politicians. For all the talk of a “fake news” crisis, there’s a good chunk of the population who look at politicians and journalists and say “physician, heal thyself”.
Anyway, in its own way, this is all sort of old news. What would be much more interesting, if some pollster had the courage to do it, would be to ask the public whether they believe that, in hindsight, locking down for as long as we did, and as severely as we did, was a mistake. I have a hunch, you know, that in the years to come, that position is quietly going to become the majority one. The long-term damage to trust in institutions from lockdown is something that we’re not talking about enough, in the west. A meaningful number of people are beginning to come to the quiet conclusion that they were duped by the experts. And that will have consequences, the next time a crisis comes along.