So, here’s the latest in my series of updates on the most miserable and incompetent COVID response in Western Europe, which comes to us via Ireland.
Just a few weeks ago Ireland’s former PM, now second banana, Leo Varadkar, said that he believed the Irish people just needed to hang on a bit longer and they’d be free in the summer.
But shortly thereafter, as Ireland’s elected government was preparing for reopening, the unelected public-health body to which they’d handed all real authority basically bullied the government into adopting a vaccine-passport strategy it hadn’t contemplated, planned for, or debated. Ireland could reopen but only for the provably jabbed. This was sprung on the government after a vaccine-passport system had failed in Israel, which has a far more competent public sector than Dublin does.
Well, now reopening is really being deferred until next year. This clip has to be seen to be believed.
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said he believes that Ireland needed to get through another winter before “we can safely say the pandemic is behind us”. He added teenagers needed to be vaccinated before there is population immunity | https://t.co/HmZIxSXyAt pic.twitter.com/TS926eI0mY
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) July 15, 2021
Now, currently, we expect but do not know for certain if vaccines for teenagers will ever be approved in the European Union. But what’s also shocking is this weird analogy he made, that COVID is like war: “You think you’ll be home by winter.” The man just analogized COVID to the first year of World War I. This is not a period of performance any government should want to occur to the minds of the opposition — but here it is from the lips of a leader in government.