Here's How ::: Ireland's Political, Social and Current Affairs Podcast

Marc Coleman is a business consultant, former broadcaster and journalist. He is currently working on a book on the persistence of western democracy. ***** ‘Magical thinking’ is a great phrase that I learnt years ago, it’s a concept that’s useful to understand someone’s thought processes, maybe even your own. If you know what it is, skip forward about two minutes; if you don’t, it’s important to understand that it’s not a positive thing, in fact it’s very negative. The concept of magical thinking is often used by therapists, psychologists and so on, to classify a particular thought process, and to help their patients to get over it. You see it at a comical level sometimes in kids, don’t step on the cracks in the pavements or the monster will get you. That’s basically the core of it, believing that one thing can affect another thing where two seconds of rational thought by an adult will tell you that it can’t. People with mental health problems frequently exhibit magical thinking. A very famous example would be John Hinckley, Jr, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, did it because he thought it would impress the actress Jodie Foster and make her fall in love with him. Everyone can see that isn’t rational thinking, but a lot of those people might well have a lucky pen they do the lotto with, salute a magpie, not want to stay on the thirteenth floor of a hotel or whatever. But those things are basically harmless, if they give people comfort, there isn’t really any point in doing anything about them. What therapists focus on magical thinking that harms people, interferes with their life to the point that they can’t live normally. There are people who have such compulsive obsessions that they can’t leave their house until they have spent hours switching on and off lights or locking and unlocking doors, and they are certain that their house will burn down if they don’t perform a ritual like this. Other forms of magical thinking include doing things are disconnected from the desired effect, but the disconnection isn’t so instantly apparent. This often crops up in people that have suffered abuse; they’re often quite tragic, such as an abused child doing anything that they can think of that will cause the abuse to stop. These cases are too sad to even give examples here, but you get the idea, a child or even an adult telling themselves that they caused this incident of abuse themselves, because they didn’t do this or that right, and clinging to that thought because the reality that they would be abused anyway is too horrific to confront. Even more tragically, these thought patterns can be exploited by an abuser, and used to put the blame for the abuse on the victim. It’s a therapist’s job to help the victim see that the magical thinking is just wrong. So that’s magical thinking. It’s something that’s not nearly as nice as the name sounds. I thought of that about two issues that have been in the news in the past few weeks. I think that magical thinking has a particular role when it comes to Irish whattaboutery – when people clearly on the wrong side of a political debate try to divert attention to a different topic and away from their own losing argument. The first was the emissions reductions that are going to be imposed on farming. Agriculture is really getting a big pass here. Agriculture is Defender of the faiths

Professor Julian Nida-Rümelin is is a Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was the State Minister for Culture of the Federal Republic of Germany under Gerhard Schröder. Professor Nida-Rümelin, along with dozens of other prominent Germans signed a letter in Die Zeit, a leading German newspaper, about the Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion, under the headline Ceasefire Now. In the second part of this series we will hear an opposing point of view from the international relations expert Jessica Berlin, that will go up on Thursday. ***** During the 1980s and 1990s, it cost up to 44 pence per minute to make a call from a landline in Ireland to a landline in Britain. I’m going to give you a minute to absorb just how huge that cost was, compared to today. 44 pence, that’s 56 cent in new money, 56 cent per minute. At the time, you could have bought two ice-creams for that, that would cost you about €2 each now, so in terms of purchasing power, that 44 pence per minute could easily be translated into €4 per minute now, and Britain was the cheapest international destination to call, everywhere else was much more expensive. In the early 1980s, British Telecom had been privatised, and competition was being brought in, first for businesses and then for home phones, and prices there were dropping sharply. The same was happening across the western world. In one 18-month period, Eircom, as it was, increased their prices three separate times in 18 months. Think about just how crucifying those costs were for any business trying to export, not to mention to families of people who had emigrated, counting out the seconds that they could afford to talk to their loved ones. It was nearly 20 years before Ireland to caught up and allowed competition. Eircom had their finger stuck in the dyke, but the floodwaters of competition were lapping ever closer. At some point, one enterprising business set up a service whereby people in Ireland could dial a Newry number, relatively cheap to call, but across the border and outside the control of Eircom, and then dial in an account number, a password and an international number into an automated system and call internationally much cheaper. Eircom responded to this glimmer of competition by reprogramming their entire network to block calls to this Newry number, and started a game of cat-and-mouse whereby the service tried to switch to new access numbers faster than Eircom could block them. If any private business behaved like this now, they would be lucky to avoid the worst of publicity on Twitter and Liveline, and could well be prosecuted under the Competition Act. And now, calling landlines in Britain or most of the rest of the world is functionally free. I was reminded of this when I heard the kerfuffle about AIB’s plans, hastily scrapped, to make 70 of their branches cash-free. You could go in and get a mortgage, apply for a loan or whatever but not withdraw or deposit actual notes or coins. AIB,

Seán Keyes is the finance correspondent for the Currency, a subscription news website. ***** I spoke to a Sinn Féin supporter in the years after the Good Friday Belfast agreement, I think it was during one of the interminable negotiations trying to get DUP to participate and have the institutions up and running, and she said one thing about the peace deal that I thought was perceptive, if not very diplomatic. She said “The Unionists are too thick to realise that they’ve won, and the Shinners are too cute to admit that they lost.” Mindsets may not have changed for some at least, but I think that calculation may have changed in the years since. First off, there’s peace. In that sense alone, everybody won; that can’t be underestimated. But secondly, the Unionists may have won the war, if you want to call it that, but the nationalists may yet win the peace. Personally, I don’t think that we will have a border poll in the next couple of years, politics just isn’t aligned for that, even if you have Sinn Féin in power on both sides of the border, which is an open question in itself. But I think it’s certain we’ll have a border poll in the next couple of decades, the pattern of political and demographic movement in the north just makes that inevitable. The one outside factor, underestimated in my view, that could impact this in an unpredictable way is Scottish independence. The SNP have announced their intention to have a referendum in October next year, along with a sophisticated legal strategy to defeat the London Conservative government’s determination to prevent it. That’s almost a no-lose strategy. If the Tories don’t fold immediately, they just demonstrate every more clearly the case for independence. If you are against independence, you might point to the opinion polls that show support for independence marginally behind, 49 to 51, much less than the margin for error, but still behind. If you were for independence, you might point out that during the last referendum campaign, in 2014, that’s when support for independence really took off, going from 25 per cent to 45 per cent, making the current 49 per cent a good starting position. If you’re against, you could say that well might be dry now, with opinion polarised. And if you’re for, you could say… Boris Johnson. If Scottish independence comes off, and that’s a very big if, that would effectively leave northern Unionists with nothing to be united with; Scottish independence would most likely have a bigger impact on the lives of people in Derry and Dublin that it would on the lives of people in Dover and Derby. But that is a very big if, and we should be aware of it, but we can’t sit around waiting for it to happen. Possibly a more important thing to pay attention to is the mess over Roe v Wade being overturned in the US. If you haven’t kept up, Roe v Wade was a constitutional ruling from the US Supreme Court 50 years ago. Prior to that, abortion was legal in only a few states; the Roe v Wade decision set aside all those laws at the stroke of a pen and said that abortion was protected by the constitutional right to privacy, making it entirely legal in all 50 states, regardless of state law. Last month, the now conservative-dominated court said no it isn’t protected, so all those old laws that haven’t been repealed, and a bunch of new ones kick in, making abortion entirely illegal, or so restricted as to be impossible, in huge swathes of the US.

Ellie O’Byrne is co-editor of Tripe and Drisheen, a Cork-based local news substack, and we discussed a recent article of hers. ***** In talking to Ellie, I mentioned a tweet from Cllr Fiona Ryan of People Before Profit, who claimed that there are 25,000 ‘Airbnb vacancies’ in Ireland. I used the website InsideAirbnb.com to show that these are mostly rooms in occupied houses or regular Bed & Breakfasts, or houses that are normally occupied by residents, and let on Airbnb when they are away. Of those that remain – about 8,000 throughout the country, of which about 400 are in Dublin – they are concentrated in tourist areas and a number of them are purpose-built tourist accommodation, not suitable for residential use. But as others have also pointed out, we have 25000+ Airbnb vacancies. What a functional housing market we have! https://t.co/st2cvV1kFs— Fiona Ryan (@CllrFionaRyan) May 16, 2022 It is clear that the number of units being used for Airbnb that have the capacity of being returned to the rental market is a tiny fraction of the number of vacant properties – 180,000 throughout the country, of which 50,000 are in Dublin (2016 Census), yet the Airbnb issue attracts a disproportionate amount of comment and political energy. I referred to the Edward Bernays, a founder of the US PR industry, who persuaded 1920s feminists to smoke in public, labelling cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom‘, while he was in the pay of the tobacco industry. I also noted BP’s highly successful campaign to frame climate change as the responsibility of ‘each individual‘ by promoting the concept of ‘carbon footprint‘, thus avoiding corporate responsibility. BP also duped a number of stars including Sandra Bullock, Blake Lively, Lenny Kravitz, Harry Shearer, John Goodman, and the Democratic political consultant James Carville, into supporting a campaign to have the US taxpayer, rather than their corporate funds, pay for the cleanup after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In each of these cases, BP was successful at exploiting an apparently environmentalist message to suit their corporate interests. I discussed with Ellie the twitter account BanShortTermLet and how it seemed to pro...

Derek Mooney presents Mooney on Politics. Give it a listen.

Frank Armstrong is the editor of the magazine called Cassandra Voices. ***** I got a lot of the ideas for this discussion from an article by Yuriy Gorodnichenko on Berkeley Blog.

Reinhard Bütikofer is the senior member of German Green Party delegation to the European Parliament. *****

Sarah Hurst is a journalist who has been reporting on Russia for thirty years – her interview starts at 15:00. ***** Sharon Keogan is an independent member of Seanad Éireann, she’s one of those independent politicians who discovered her deeply-held belief in independent politics, just after she discovered that she had failed to get a nomination to run as a Fianna Fáil candidate, despite being on that party’s national executive. She’s made a career of gaining publicity off the back of baiting public outrage with ludicrous statements targeting vulnerable members of society, such as when she said that disabled children should be microchipped. She’s cute enough to couch her trolling in terms of concern, while dog-whistling to the lowest instincts in society. She hit the news again recently when she was criticised for saying to witnesses before the Joint Committee on International Surrogacy – a married gay couple who had adopted a child via surrogacy – that surrogacy was “harmful, exploitative and unethical” and “not in the best interest of the child“. She went on, “I don’t believe it is everyone’s right to have a child. It is a privilege to give birth.“ The Committee chair, Sinn Féin’s Kathleen Funchion suspended the meeting after Senator Lynn Ruane complained that a personal attack on witnesses was not appropriate, and asked for an apology, which Keogan refused. Keogan later resigned from the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, in an email with the subject line “Unsafe Working Environment/ Resignation”, she wrote “I no longer feel safe or protected as a member of the committee and have made this difficult decision as a result of that.” I don’t want to talk about surrogacy here, I more want to talk about Keogan’s excuse, particularly this guff about being safe or protected as a member of the committee – she is clearly trying to draw a link between perfectly valid criticism of her – and her not being safe. And let’s be clear here, Senator Keogan is not behind the door when it comes to dishing it out, the incident started when she made a personalised attack, not on a political opponent, but on witnesses who came to a private committee meeting to tell their personal story. A political opponent criticised her for doing that, and she resigned in a huff saying that she wasn’t safe because of that criticism. Leinster House is not exactly the place you go if you want to avoid hearing nonsense on stilts, but even by those standards, the notion that she might be in physical danger in literally the most secure building in the country is really a special kind of stupid. Except she didn’t quite say that, she left herself a little escape hatch. She said that she didn’t feel safe, leaving open the possibility that she actually was safe,

Michael Doherty is the PRO of the Mica Action Group. ***** I was talking to Billy Kelleher in the last podcast about Ukraine, and the west’s reaction, and in particular the attitude of MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace. Naomi O’Leary started and epic Twitter discussion over Easter about the contrasting attitude of Wallace and Daly to authoritarian regimes and to the west. My attitude to this is pretty simple, it’s that two separate things can be true at the same time. It can be true that the west is responsible for gross human rights abuses, resource extraction, environmental destruction in other parts of the world, it can be possible to condemn that, while still acknowledging that there are totalitarian regimes in different parts of the world that are worthy of being condemned, and that are, in fact, much, much worse. Saying that they are worse doesn’t undermine condemnations of actions by western governments that are bad, just not on the whole as bad. And condemning the abuses by western governments doesn’t undermine criticism of authoritarian governments elsewhere. Any attempt to calculate a hierarchy of inhumanity leads straight to nonsense. But what I’m concerned about today, and what cropped up on many of the negative replies to Naomi O’Leary’s article on Twitter was a cohort of people who seem to think that they had some special insight into Vladimir Putin’s inner thoughts, that they were in some way his councillor or therapist, that they could peer into his psyche, and know what really was going on in his poor, troubled soul. And with this special insight that they magically have, they can tell us what Ukraine could have done that would have avoided the war, or what the west could do now that would end the conflict. If only the west would dot dot dot; if only Ukraine had dot dot dot … a striking number of these comments came from Twitter accounts that had a fake, or no profile picture, no discernible name in the bio or Twitter handle, and a vast amount of Twitter activity for a very new account. These are fairly obviously coming from bot farms, located who-knows-where, and have very recently switched their obsession from sending dozens of tweets per day pushing a hard-line antivax, anti-mask positions to being instant experts on foreign policy, and the motivations of Vladimir Putin in particular. But this line also comes from what seem to be genuine accounts and genuine people. These are people who, for whatever reason, believe that however bad Putin is, the best way to prevent him from doing harm is to give him what he wants. There is a whole argument about whether that is true – are we in a Chamberlin letting Hitler dismember Czechoslovakia in a vain hope of avoiding war situation, or are we in a Cuba missile crisis situation, where statecraft can avoid a war that is possible but not certain. I’m not going to get into it here. I’m more interested in what Putin actually wants. Daly and Wallace, just days before the invasion in February said that the massive build-up of Russian troops and military hardware on the border with Ukraine was ‘clearly defensive’.

Billy Kelleher was Fianna Fáíl’s only MEP from being elected in 2019 for the South constituency until he was joined from the subs bench by Barry Andrews. He previously he served as a senator since 1993, and as a TD since 1997, including as and served as a minister of state from 2007 to 2011. There have been numerous credible reports of people being taken hostage by invading Russian troops in Ukraine, including that of Svetlana Zalizetska mentioned here. In 2011, when Billy was a government minister, it was reported that Ireland’s acceptance rate of refugees was 1.3 per cent, the lowest in the EU, far below the average of 25 per cent. The American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002 – informally known as the Hague Invasion Act authorises the president of the US to use “all means necessary” to bring about the release of US citizens extradited to the Hague to face trial by the International Criminal Court, which tries war criminals. Many Americans have been credibly accused of war crimes, notable at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In 2015, a US airstrike hit a hospital operated by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) killing at least 42 people in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The attack forced MSF to leave the area of Kunduz. The CIA is known to operate a network of torture facilities in Poland, Romania Thailand Afghanistan and other countries. Gina Haspel, who ran a black site in Thailand, became Director of the CIA during the Trump administration, though her involvement in CIA torture facilities was known. According to Village magazine (2005) an aircraft with registration number N313P [later changed to N4476S] was routed through Shannon and Dublin on 14 occasions from 1 January 2003 to the end of 2004 (1). N313P is known to be an aircraft owned by the CIA (2-3). It has been used to render numerous people including Khalid El-Masri.

Ewan Mackenna is a sports journalist who was written five books on sports. Recently, he has been blogging and tweeting about the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. *****

John McGuirk is the editor of Gript.ie There is no doubt about the extent of the housing problem in Ireland, certainly not if you’ve been listening to this podcast, I’ve been banging on about it for longer than I, probably longer than you, care for. And if you’ve been listening, you’ll know that I’m a sceptic about the more creative, more interventionist suggestions that are supposedly targeted at easing the crisis. There are two reasons why I don’t trust them. The first is that they generally don’t work – for example the focus on banning Airbnb, which sounds good, until you realise that, in Dublin for example, the number of houses or apartments on Airbnb that could potentially be released to the residential market is 253. When you compare that to the 31,000 residences that the CSO records as vacant in the capital, it’s clear that’s a vastly bigger factor, but if you look at the relative amount of political comment and energy that goes into those two issues, there is a complete lack of proportion. On Twitter you see a huge amount of energy going into criticising Airbnb, and almost nothing about vacancy, and the same pattern is reflected across the political discourse. I can’t quite work out why one topic gets far more attention than another that is objectively measured at more than 100 times greater – sometimes I begin to suspect that some dark political marketing agency is stoking up the Airbnb talking point to distract from the real issue, paid for by on the sly by people hoarding vacant land and housing, but that would be a bit too paranoid. Never attribute to evil anything that can adequately be explained by stupidity. That said, it takes an awful lot of stupidity to explain an article in the Irish Times from before Christmas, which was headlined “Central Bank to consider ‘step break’ from mortgage rules”. The first two sentences of the article said, Homebuyers earning less than €60,000 may be offered a “step break” from the Central Bank’s strict mortgage lending rules under a series of changes being considered by the regulator.As part of a review of the measures, the Central Bank said it would consider a number of suggestions made to it … including loosening the current loan-to-income (LTI) and loan-to-value (LTV) rates for certain categories of buyers. I was really shocked to read this, because what the Irish Times here is calling the Central Bank’s ‘strict’ rules, are the basic prudential measures that were brought back after the post-Celtic Tiger crash. During the boom, prices were driven higher and higher by people who could borrow more and more, and it all ended in tears. The Central Bank started enforcing prudential rules which are designed to prevent banks from going bust, just after the banks went bust – people can’t generally borrow more than 3.5 times their salary, or 90 per cent of the value of the house they are buying. But now with property prices back to boom-era levels or higher, developers and banks seem frustrated that there is a limit to how deeply they can drive the ordinary p...

Moore Holmes is a Loyalist and a member of the advocacy group Let’s talk Loyalism. ***** You probably think that you’ve never heard of the WSM, the Workers Solidarity Movement, but you probably have heard of them, even though you don’t remember it; most people don’t pay much attention when they are offered a leaflet from one of the various fringe political associations that set up stall at the pedestrian pinch-points in our city centres. The Workers Solidarity Movement aren’t to be confused with the Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Solidarity Party or any of the other small and sometimes minuscule groups on the far left. I say that, but in reality they are often confused with each other, which makes all the more ironic the ferocity with which these tiny groups sometimes dispute the most esoteric distinctions between each other. The WSM, for example, was a Platformist group. I would think that almost nobody outside the far left has even heard of that ideology, let alone have any idea what it is. In case that’s not you, platformism is, in short, a particularly puritanical version of left-wing anarchism, although I’m sure as I speak someone somewhere is drafting a motion of condemnation of me for misrepresenting the movement. The WSM never stood any candidates, though they did regularly campaign for people not to vote in elections, they even argued for people to boycott the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement for reasons argued in a leaflet so densely typed that I suspect nobody who had it thrust into their hand even read it, let alone understood it. But the curious thing about the WSM is that they were so strict about their ideological correctness – there are articles online where they describe the steps they took to prevent people who didn’t hold all the right views from joining – they were so strict that they ended up being one of the smallest of these fringe parties, and a few weeks ago got so small that they announced that they were winding up. That’s kind of an unusual thing for these groups to do, usually their core activists are so strongly attached to the cause that they stay with the party through thick and thin, and their statement does talk about the individuals remaining committed to the cause, but it’s clear that they have given up the ghost. I sort of feel sorry for these guys – these groups are overwhelmingly male; I don’t agree with much of their ideas, but their criticisms of contemporary society are often on point. It’s been said that the definition of a crank is someone who won’t change their mind and can’t change the subject. It’s difficult not to apply this to a lot of these groups, but I think that their motivation comes from a good place, and nobody is really in a position to critique the psyche of people who are tryi...

Inspector Peter Woods is an inspector at the Dublin Roads Policing Division of An Garda Síochana and Seán O’Kelly is the cofounder of Access for All Ireland. ***** In the last podcast I talked to Professor Norman Fenton the professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London; he takes a position that could fairly be described as opposed to Covid vaccines, Covid lockdowns, and pretty much everything else he calls the ‘official narrative’ to do with the Sars Cov 19. We had a lot of feedback on that podcast, to say the least. Some of that feedback was around my interviewing style, people complained that I didn’t allow Professor Fenton to speak enough, that I interrupted him too much. There are a couple of things to say about that. Firstly, it’s certainly true that I interrupted him more than I usually do in interviews with other guests. Secondly, despite that there were five occasions in the podcast where Professor Fenton spoke for between one and a half and two minutes, completely uninterrupted. Given that a typical Morning Ireland interview might be three to four minutes in total, questions and answers together, I think that indicates he had ample opportunity to get his points across. But the most important thing to say is that, having listened back again since we put the podcast out, I think I was completely justified in interrupting when I did. In fact, not only do I think was I justified, I would say that if I hadn’t interrupted, and interrupted straight away, I would have been clearly in the wrong. The reason I say that is because I interrupted when the guest said things that were straight-up false. I don’t mean here something that I disagreed with, I don’t mean a flawed analysis that I might debate, I mean a plain-and-simple, externally verifiable, real-world fact. For example, Professor Fenton said in the interview that the CDC, that’s the Centres for Disease Control had announced that Covid most likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. That’s plain nonsense. They have said nothing of the sort, although that claim is made all over antivax social media. I immediately cut in and challenged him, and after some back-and-forth, he acknowledged that it was untrue. Listeners, you might disagree, but I think that was the right thing to do. There is a trope out there that goes ‘interviewers shouldn’t interrupt’, but I disagree. Otherwise, you end up with a party-political broadcast. As I said, I had quite a bit of correspondence, but one listener in particular went to a lot of trouble, firstly to write a very detailed email, but also to courteous and respectful, and engage with the issues rather than insulting people; that’s something that’s often missing in the debate so I really appreciated that. I can’t deal with all the points he raised, but I think that some of them are really important. One thing he said was What if there is no conspiracy? What if this is simply group-think which has led to a mass vaccination program? That’s a really interesting point. The authorities around the world are being forced to make decisions, very consequential decisions, at great speed. The idea that all these governments are part of a global conspiracy just doesn’t pass the smell test. In some cases, these are governments that can’t manage the most basic forms of cooperation, such as Britain and France, they are totally unable to solve the problem of migrants crossing the channel,

Professor Norman Fenton is a professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London. I want to clarify a couple of things that Norman said there. First off, Klaus Schwab is the founder of the World Economic Forum, this is basically an annual event where the captains of politics and business get together to hobnob. This organisation is the centrepiece of a whole slew of the craziest conspiracy theories, I’m not going to go into them here, but the core claim that Norman made was that Schwab and the WEF are making decisions that he doesn’t like. This is nonsense. The WEF has no legislative function, and no executive function other than to manage its own event. It doesn’t have the power to decide anything much bigger than what’s on the menu for their shindig. Now, I’m sure that Schwab is a pretty influential person, given who he probably has saved in his phone contacts, but that means soft power, access to decision makers, the ability to persuade them. Neither he nor the WEF have any authority over them. It’s certainly true that politicians meet at the WEF, it’s probably also true that to some degree they make plans there to coordinate their policies, but what Norman is claiming, that the WEF as a body is making legally binding decisions is just nonsense. It’s the equivalent of claiming that the manager of the Inchydoney Island Hotel is in control of Ireland, because political parties often have their think-ins there. Earlier, Norman claimed that the ONS confirms that people being vaccinated makes them more susceptible to Covid. The Office for National Statistics, the ONS is the official government statistics office in the UK. It’s a really good service, it was made independent for the specific reason of not having politicians pressuring it to come up with convenient statistics, and is generally well-regarded. I contacted the ONS about that claim, and although they don’t quantify it, they said that their latest figures available indicate vaccinated people are, in fact, less likely to test positive for coronavirus, but they emphasise that there can be confounding factors, such as people who refuse the vaccine also refusing to wear masks. I also found a study from Imperial College London that indicated that vaccinated people are three times less likely to get infected. I have emailed Norman asking him for a source for his claim, but he hasn’t responded yet. **Update** Norman has now kindly sent me some links for this, I will analyse them and report shortly. But even if what he was saying was true, and he can’t seem to back it up, and there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, this dodges the point that the purpose of the vaccine isn’t ultimately to prevent people getting infected, it is to prevent people from dying and getting seriously ill, and as even he seemed to admit, Build Back Better