How about a moratorium on vaccine chat?

Radio

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Declan Lynch Twitter

March 21 2021 02:00 AM

LiveLine

RTE1, Monday, 1.45-3pm

Boom, Bust, Broke

RTE1, Fridays, 6.30pm

Sometimes you forget the world has changed. You’re listening to this woman on Liveline talking about some adverse effects of the AstraZenica vaccine experienced by her daughter, and it takes you a while to figure out that maybe you shouldn’t be hearing this conversation at all.

I mean the woman wasn’t making it up, and she assured Joe that she is not an anti-vaxxer, and part of you is almost unaware that anything might be questionable about this.

You forget the world has changed.

Maybe the people who run Liveline forget it too, forget that the world has changed to such an extent that even an apparently reasonable call to the show can now be doing far more harm than it is worth – we are talking about our old friend, “false equivalence”.

Because what they were doing here, was drawing attention to a risk that was so small in the overall scheme, it was virtually meaningless next to the much bigger risk of causing people to doubt the safety of the vaccine.

They were creating a debate, and as they say in the vaccine game, when you’re debating, you’re losing.

It was the day after the AstraZenica vaccinations had been paused, so Joe was rightly pointing out the dangers of “crying wolf”, just as Dr Luke O’Neill on Drivetime with Sarah McInerney was adamant that suspending the vaccinations was a huge mistake that would damage confidence in the vaccine.

But when you need to be saying that, maybe confidence is already damaged?

And confidence… ah, confidence is the most delicate flower in the pandemical garden, so delicate that any such talk can cause it to wither and die.

Misinformation is a terrible curse of our times, the bringer of all kinds of abysmal ideas from the badlands of the internet into the public realm – but this wasn’t misinformation we were hearing on Liveline, it sounded accurate and trustworthy.

And still we probably shouldn’t have been hearing it.

This, at least, is the conclusion I have reached after a few days thinking about it, so I understand that Liveline may have felt it was valid at the time, that they regarded this as an issue of free speech in the classical sense.

But then there’s a war going on, in which some restrictions on freedom of speech may facilitate other freedoms, such as the ability to leave the house at some point during the next year without worrying about being killed by the invisible enemy.

After all, there is the famous moratorium that is imposed the day before a general election, a complete cessation of all speech of a political nature – nothing must intrude on the sacred silence in which we can contemplate the agonising choice between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Yet in a situation where we’re locked up and told we are living minute by minute in the shadow of death, nobody is shouting stop.

So unless it’s coming from some reputable scientific body, maybe we should call a moratorium on such cautionary tales about the vaccines – at least until the world changes for the better.

As regards when that might be, and what it might be like, you could try Boom, Bust, Broke: 10 Years Since the Bailout.

The series itself finished last week, but there’s an RTÉ podcast of this impressive 10-part project, presented by Philip Boucher-Hayes.

Cleverly positioning himself at the point where Ireland’s last economic disaster dovetails with the one that is to come, Boucher-Hayes tries to figure out if we’ve learned enough from this last decade to prevent the horrors that the next decade may bring.

Like, maybe this time we don’t solve a financial crisis by creating a housing crisis.

As Dr Padraic Kenna of NUIG argued, punishing people who can’t pay their mortgage doesn’t really achieve anything, it just creates long-term problems for the financial stability of banks and households and society.

The series ran on Friday evenings at 6.30pm, and it made you wonder why there isn’t more of this sort of thing – radio devotes so much time to the daily banalities of Leinster House, when it has the capacity to do these deep dives into the state of the world.

But that Bailout “war” is over. While the Covid war is still on, maybe there are things we really don’t need to know.

Online Editors