The two most powerful tools that we have in the fight against Covid -19 are lockdown and testing. Locking the country down is extremely costly in human and financial terms. Each month of lockdown costs the state billions of Euro in direct welfare supports and each week of lockdown sends more and more businesses into […]
Covid-19 is raising new moral issues for us to consider. What once were unlikely dilemmas in moral philosophy textbooks are now matters of urgent practical concern. Two matters seem to stand out: what we owe poorer countries in the context of a lethal viral pandemic where life-saving resources are scarce, and what we owe our […]
The Minister for Health, Simon Harris, has refused to amend HSE guidelines on ethical decision-making in the Coronavirus pandemic to explicitly include people with disabilities. The guidelines, an Ethical Framework for Decision Making During a Pandemic, say that sometimes critical care may need to be ‘prioritised’, and that “rationing decisions” should “consider which patients are […]
They’re averaging 2000 deaths a day, and five million new job losses a week, now. Here are the numbers for this week alone: "The modest decline in initial jobless claims to 5,508,500 last week, from 6,615,000, means that the unemployment rate is now on track to hit somewhere between 15% and 20% in April, well […]
Down Syndrome Ireland has raised concerns with the Department of Health over concerns that their coronavirus guidelines may lead to certain vulnerable groups being unable to access essential care. The issue was sparked in response to the government department’s document on the ethics of prioritising patients, which states that when there are too many patients […]
The Guardian published the image above two months ago. A man lying dead in the streets in Wuhan, as people walk past. No wonder, then, that they missed so many dead people. They probably walked past another guy the very next day, and assumed it was just the same dead guy as yesterday. You have […]
“Globalism” – It’s a word which has become a staple part of our political discourse in the 21st century and describes the ideology of most Western elites today. From big business, to the media and the political establishment, they all adhere to this worldview in one form or another. In simple terms, globalism represents an […]
Remember, it’s not his own money Simon Coveney is spending here, it’s yours: #Ireland strongly supports @WHO in efforts to coordinate a global response to combat #COVID19. So many countries rely on @UN expertise and capacity to save lives. Ireland is quadrupling our normal annual financial contribution to @WHO for 2020 to €9.5 million. — […]
Because reactions to the President of the United States are so polarised along culture war lines, the reaction to his announcement the day before yesterday that he would seek to suspend US funding of the world health organisation has broadly been about exactly what you might expect. “Global Fury”, reports the Irish Times: “Although the […]
In my last post I looked at the end of the coronavirus and how the world will react in the light of China’s lies, threats and risky behaviour which has left so many people dead around the world and so much of the world’s economy in free-fall. Today I want to briefly discuss another impact […]
With almost half of all deaths associated with Coronavirus now taking place in nursing homes, the Minister for Health, has said that some nursing homes are still without proper personal protective equipment (PPE). Government decisions, including lifting a ban on visits to nursing homes and failing to make care homes a priority for PPE, are now […]
Coronavirus cases are now ‘soaring in care homes’, with around 2,200 care homes – one in seven – affected; Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty has ‘disclosed that outbreaks had been identified in almost 100 institutions in the past 24 hours’; with an infection rate of 13.5 per cent among the UK’s 17,000 care homes […]