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Jim Duffy ✍ Plagues and pandemics were and are a constant in the human condition. 

The Black Death was as far as we know the worst pandemic ever experienced. Its mortality rate was highest in percentage terms, killing 60% of the known population in Europe. Only the Plague of Justinian had a similar rate.

In terms of death numbers the highest was the Spanish Flu, at its height between 1918 and 1920 but which is believed not to have disappeared until 1960, with the 1957 flu pandemic that killed my grand uncle, Brother Thomas O'Brien, SJ in Sydney, Australia. In numbers of deaths, the HIV-AIDS pandemic comes third, while Covid is fifth to date, with 38 million dying. Covid isn't over though. Hopefully we are past its peak though you never know until it ends and you only know it is over when it has disappeared completely for a decade. Occasionally a pandemic can come roaring back but usually they don't.

Of course the death rate of Covid was suppressed by vaccines. Without vaccines it might have had a death rate akin to the Spanish Flu - which is thought now to have killed 100 million.

One figure gives an indication of how extreme the Black Death was compared to HIV-AIDS or Covid. Covid's death rate worldwide was 0.4375%. The Black Death was up to 60% of the known population. So the Black Death was up to 120 times more lethal than Covid. Even without the vaccines that saved so many, covid would never have reached the lethality of the Black Death. Our answers in the Black Death saw three out of every five people they knew die.

The trouble with pandemics and plagues is that they are a constant. They always occur. We just don't know when. We might not have a pandemic for fifty years, or one could appear next week. We have no idea. All we know is that they usually involve an animal virus spreading into humans, and as we have never had it before our immune system has no way of fighting it.

Covid appears to come from bats in Wuhan. It was a natural bat virus. Either a researcher in the research lab in Wuhan didn’t follow the strict rules to protect themselves and accidentally got the virus and unknowingly spread it. Or it came from the notorious wet markets in Wuhan, where live bats are sold to be used in soups. The WHO had been warning for decades that those markets needed to be closed. China panicked either because a staff member in the lab got infected through negligence, or because China had failed to close down the wet markets.

The Spanish Flu appears to have come from a pig in Kansas. The pig passed it to a farm labourer. He was scheduled to join the US Army as America had joined World War I and so went to the local unit. Unbeknown to him he carried the pig virus and infected the unit. It spread like wildfire through the army and families. Soldiers arrived in the port of Brest and infected port workers. Port workers infected crews arriving in the port. Those crews carried it all over the world.

So the world was thrown into chaos because one pig infected one farm labourer with the Spanish Flu. Or on bat passed its virus to one person in Wuhan.

The US army noticed that lots of soldiers were suddenly getting very ill and some were dying but had no idea what was going on. The same happened in Wuhan. People began getting sick and rumours spread that there was some strange illness spreading. People like Dr Fauci received reports and began wondering "is this a new pandemic?"

China hushed it up as it was either caused by sloppy research practices in the lab in Wuhan, or China's failure despite warnings to close down the wet markets selling bats. Either way, a fuck by China had unleashed a pandemic and China tried to hide it as its reputation was at risk.

Unfortunately, just as the port of Brest spread the virus through crews on ships, Wuhan is a major transport hub, with air flights all over the world and vast numbers getting trains and planes in Wuhan. Bad as that was, the outbreak happened during major holidays, when literally millions were travelling through Wuhan to visit families, or travelling abroad.

That is how easy pandemics start. One animal. One virus. One infected human. So we have no idea when the next one will start. But one will occur. It may come from a cow or a sheep or a cat or a rabbit or a pig or a dog or a pigeon or some other animal. All it takes is one person to catch it and a calamity awaits.

One thing the Black Death taught us is that to stop it spreading, humans have to stop mixing. That is why since mediaeval times we have had lockdowns. The spread can only be slowed down by shutting down the country - at least until you find a vaccine and begin vaccinating people.

That is the world of plagues and pandemics. Predictable in what has to be done. Predictable that another one will always occur. Unpredictable in that you don't know the animal that will pass on the virus the type of virus and when it will occur.

My grandmothers lived through the Spanish Flu, 1929 flu, 1957 flu and the beginning of HIV-AIDS. My grandfathers were two decades older than their wives, so they also lived though the Russian Flu (1889-90s). My great-grandparents lived through five pandemics between the 1840s and 1930s.

Shakespeare lived through two pandemics in one decade. He was primarily a jobbing actor but with London constantly in lockdowns the theatres were closed. So he spent lockdowns writing plays.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Pandemics

Anthony McIntyre ☠ There is growing disquiet in the US about the country's billionaire class continuing to supply the genocidal Israeli state with the weapons of war on children. 

The government has approved a 2.8 billion arms deal which includes the provision of '2,000-pound bombs that have frequently been used in both Gaza and Lebanon to devastating effect.'

The New York Times, is reported to have identified '208 craters at least 40 feet across in an area of southern Gaza where Israel told civilians to move to safety.' Which means at least 208 of these bombs were used to target civilians herded by Israeli Mengele-types into areas designated safe zones which were in fact kill zones. We will be forgiven for remembering the Jews who were told to go to the shower rooms where they would be safely cleansed but which were in fact execution chambers where they were routinely and systematically gassed.

In one incident at the Jabaliya Refugee Camp 195 Palestinian civilians were killed and a further 777 injured by these bombs.

It is the brutal savagery and its penchant for child murder - Norman Finkelstein has described Israel as a nation of child killers - which has led to a drop in support for Israel within the US.

In July a headline in the Tampa Free Press proclaimed that Polls Show 67-Point Shift In American Views On Israel Over Eight Years. 

In the body of the report the figures were broken down:

Appearing on “CNN News Central,” CNN Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten pointed to a series of recent polls showing that net favorability ratings for Israel have turned negative across multiple tracking organizations. According to the data, net favorability stands at minus 10 points in Ipsos polling, minus 11 points according to Fox News, minus 20 points in the Marquette University Law School poll, and minus 23 points in findings from the Pew Research Center. Gallup also reported negative numbers earlier this year.
The figures reflect a dramatic pivot from past political norms. During Donald Trump’s first term, Israel’s average net favorability hovered at plus 51 points. Today, that average has fallen to minus 16 points, representing a 67-point drop in less than a decade.

Enten interpreted the figures:

We’re not just talking about the Democratic base anymore. We’re talking about the general electorate as well . . . The general electorate has turned against Israel. This is not just a left issue. It is an American issue when it comes to opinions on Israel.

Perhaps most welcome of all for those opposed to genocide and most worrying for genocide backers is a Gallup poll finding from last year that just 9% of those age 18-34 of all political parties support Israeli actions.

When Ed Sheeran struggles to keep his show on the road for denying moral support to Macklemore who was cancelled but not silenced by the billionaire class, when the UK government opts to take action against Israeli land thieves in the West Bank, when pro-Israel US Representative Brad Sherman claims Israel is losing the battle for worldwide public opinion and lambasts Israeli ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich as apostles of settler violence, we can feel the winds of change.

None of this change in mindset has come about because of goodwill on the part of those in power. We need think no further than the swine Starmer who dragged his trotters at every opportunity.  It is the result of public pressure, the persistent congregating in the public square by people like you gathered here today. Which makes it important to show up again next week, and the week after that, every week until the genocidal beast is no longer in heat.  

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Safe Zones Kill Zones

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  21-September-2026.

The all island party told its northern press officer she did not belong in Dublin. Five weeks later it named a number it could never take back.

Photo by atelierbyvineeth ... on Unsplash

The €300,000 tale has become the most repeated anecdote in Siobhán Fenton’s publicity drive. Over last weekend, The Irish Times led with it, adopting her own judgement of the incident: an absolute clanger. The reviews have seized on it too. One, from the left, argues that she assigns it far too much significance.

Most people are taking it to mean a gaffe. A leader spoke off the cuff, a press officer missed it, and the news cycle consumed a fortnight at Christmas. Seen that way, the criticism is understandable enough. A party that had been drifting since mid-2022 did not collapse because of a single figure in a single interview, and when Red C went in search of one defining moment behind the decline in November 2023, it said it could not identify one.

Yet the gaffe is the least compelling part of the chapter. The real issue is the eight days after the front page, which no one has discussed, and which account for something far bigger than a bad Christmas. They account for why Sinn Féin has not attached a number to anything since, and why it never will attach numbers to the thing for which it exists.

The Number

On Monday 18th December 2023, Mary Lou McDonald took part in the Irish Times Christmas interview with (Uncle) Pat Leahy. When he asked how much she wanted house prices to fall, she replied that, in a city such as Dublin, the €300,000 level was the aim, though it would differ by region. In the published interview, she described her goal, in her own words, as bringing prices “as low as we feasibly can”. Uncle Pat suggested that a decline of that scale would amount to a major reduction in home values and asked if she considered that a risky political stance. She rejected that wording, saying the much greater risk was a generation for whom owning a home had become an out of reach dream.

She was correct on that point, and the reporting that came afterward had little to do with it.

What much of the coverage missed, and what this piece should not miss, is the actual meaning of the figure. It was aimed at new-build homes. Eleven days before the interview, the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland released its Real Cost of New Housing Delivery report. That report estimated the cost of delivering a three bed semi in the Greater Dublin Area at €461,000, which was ninety thousand higher than three and a half years earlier. It also placed the value of that same house at €464,000, leaving a margin of about €2,600 above delivery cost. Those were the numbers in play, and €300,000 was the level the party wanted delivery costs reduced to, using a package of measures to lower construction costs together with a major social and affordable housing programme. It was not a proposal to collapse the value of the existing housing stock.

Viewed alongside the surveyors’ figures, the policy amounts to asking for about one third to be stripped from the cost of constructing a house in Dublin. That is a substantial challenge to explain. It is not the same as telling a homeowner to absorb a one third loss in the value of their own property, yet the whole controversy unfolded as though the second question had been asked rather than the first.

Fenton is candid about the element that still made the position indefensible. The party was unable to assign a number to the effect on current homeowners, and once you talk about deflating a bubble, a knock on effect is plainly foreseeable. So there was both an answer that could be given and a question that could not, placed next to each other: the answer took three sentences, while the unanswerable question was short enough to fit in a headline.

The Thing That Cannot Be Unsaid

The section that makes the book worth reading arrives that night. Fenton, on her own in the press office and replaying the interview tape, senses something off about the figure and dismisses the feeling.

Her line of thought deserves to be laid out, since each stage is logically sound. The party had never hidden its desire for prices to come down. If she had been vague on the issue, that would have been framed either as deceit or as evidence that the leader did not understand her own policy. All told, not a real difficulty.

But the judgment was mistaken. That is how a structural breakdown appears from the inside: not as stupidity, not as negligence, but as a skilled professional using sound judgment on a question whose answer had already been constrained by the party’s position.

The story appeared on the Wednesday front page. What followed is the crucial part, and it is why this is more than merely a tale of a slip up.

All night, Fenton worked through ways to bury it. She intended to get McDonald onto RTÉ’s Morning Ireland under some other pretext, knowing full well she would be questioned about the interview, and have her retreat publicly there and then: she had misspoken, no precise figure had been committed to, the numbers were still being finalised and would differ from area to area. A few days of embarrassment, then Christmas would smother it.

But she talked herself out of that, and the reasons she gives are the real discovery. A reversal would reinforce the accusation that the party was full of populists offering make believe economics and incapable of sticking to a line. It would deepen the impression of constant flip flopping. Worse, it might make the whole matter bigger by seeming like an effort to hide something.

Now take another look at that, because it’s a trap with no way out. Saying a price is risky. Taking back a stated price is worse, because the retreat shows you were never serious about the promise attached to it. Once the number is public, the only choices left to you are to stand behind it or to validate the charge.

The party stood behind it, and the room’s logic for doing so is the chapter’s most revealing sentence. The figure could trigger backlash among middle-class and upper-middle-class voters with valuable homes. The meeting decided that group probably would not have supported the party anyway.

That is a calculation of cost, and it is the same one the party had made a month earlier on different terrain. Fenton’s account of the reaction to the November riots shows a party that named the Garda Commissioner, the Justice Minister and the collapse of policing, while mentioning the organised far right only once, without organisers, politics, or a name. It cost nothing to blame the guards. It would have cost the Sinn Féin base to name the far right. By December, the same arithmetic concluded that owners of expensive houses were not voters they could afford to lose. Uncle Pat, writing the next morning, expressed the link more plainly than anyone else since: after faltering on law and order, the party had turned to housing as its safe, familiar ground. It was injured on the ground it claimed as its own.

The counteroffensive was swift. Within hours Varadkar held a press conference, and he handled it in two stages: first the economics of negative equity and lender confidence, then the broader framing, this was not just a row over a housing figure, but a test of whether a party that talks like this is fit to govern at all. Fine Gael then used the oldest press office trick, one Fenton says she herself had used many times: keep the story alive by feeding it through new voices so every comment looks like a fresh turn. A senator’s statement said the figure implied a 35% fall and warned of a generation trapped in negative equity, collapsing the new build target into existing values just as everything else had done. The FG party website added a ticker counting the days since Sinn Féin tried to fool the public.

The Christmas calendar handled the rest. No Dáil, no ministers making announcements, newsrooms running on bare bones staffing and with no desire to hunt for a rival story. Fenton says she even hoped for the usual late December death of an elderly celebrity to shift the cycle along. It never happened.

Not a Proper Dubliner

Two events unfolded five weeks apart, and the party’s difficulty is that they both involved the same person.

In November, after the riots, Fenton voiced worries twice about the direction the party was heading. The first reply was that the leadership was sure of itself and that McDonald understood the community better than any of them. The second turned back on Fenton: she was an outsider, “not a proper Dubliner,” and Belfast had accustomed her to riots in a way that was unhealthy. She recoiled and then ceased to raise the issue again.

Then, in December, she says plainly that she could not make sense of the southern response to the housing figure. She grasped negative equity as an economic idea, but not as a psychological one, because the 2008 crash hit the two sides of the border in different ways. In the South, a generation had seen their parents trapped in homes worth less than the debt attached to them. In the North, where prices were already low, the crash came through austerity and benefit cuts, and very few homeowners ended up in negative equity at all.

Taken together, the two episodes amount to something more pointed than either on its own. The northern voice inside the southern operation was brushed aside where she was correct, and constrained where the South most needed her. Partition was operating in both directions simultaneously, within a Sinn Féin press office, on the fifth floor of Leinster House.

This is a party that likes to present its defining strength as its ability to organise across the entire island, and it regards that as the singular advantage it has over every opponent. What the book shows, though, is that being the all island party did not provide it with two pairs of eyes. Instead, it gave it staff shaped by two distinct economies who could not offset each other’s blind spots: one rejected for not belonging, the other unable to see precisely where belonging would have mattered.

Nor was the rest of the system any better. Fenton describes a party with genuine, immediate, instinctive understanding of working class communities, because its politicians and staff came from those places and could judge how a policy would land by listening to their own neighbours. But for the middle class voters who arrived in 2020, it had no equivalent. Those people do not attend clinics and do not meet TDs in the street on a housing estate, so the party relied instead on focus groups and polling, which she describes as artificial environments where it is impossible to tell whether people are being truthful or simply courteous.

So when the number arrived, the party could read one side of its coalition accurately and the other only through tools that encourage agreement. And when Eoin Ó Broin stepped forward to explain it, the man who had both designed and embodied the housing policy, he could stand firm on new buyers but could only speak vaguely about existing homeowners, because the numbers were not available for him to present.

63%

On 6th January, the Sunday Independent asked the public outright. 69% said prices ought to drop to the figure. 63% said the same even if doing so reduced the value of their own home. Sinn Féin was up two points.

Three weeks afterward, the Irish Times had the party at 28, down from 34 in its own series. In the Red C series, which had placed them at 29 before the riots and 36 the previous summer, the decline was already firmly in motion and merely kept going.

These two polls are not interchangeable: they use different tools and pose different questions, so neither cancels the other out, which is exactly what makes the pair so valuable. Fenton’s interpretation is the candid one, and she arrives at it unaided. Telling a pollster, or a focus group full of peers, that you stand in solidarity is not the same as stepping into a voting booth and casting a ballot against your own financial self interest. That is the point she has been stressing in interviews all week: the party never understood the distance between what people said to it and what they did once the issue got close to home.

From inside, she could not have seen what the published analysis of that Irish Times poll shows. The setbacks were clustered among older and more affluent voters; support among ABC1s fell by nine points, and rural support dropped sharply. The property owning cohort, on the record, three weeks after the party concluded that the property owning cohort was never theirs anyway.

The response within the building is the case study. Those who had pressed to hold the line read the Sunday Independent result as proof that the crisis had become so severe that the nation’s homeowners had turned radical. Meanwhile, the unfriendly Irish Times coverage was blamed on that paper’s wealthier readership. An unfavourable signal was dismissed because of the class of the messenger delivering it, even as a favourable signal one page earlier was accepted without question.

What Else Has Not Been Priced

The real harm was not the number. It was the doubt the number generated, and Fenton presents it in the party’s own nervous register.

If this had come out by chance, during a Christmas interview, because a reporter had tossed in one extra question, then what else was the programme hiding? What other policies depended on voters accepting a sacrifice that had never been made explicit to them? If they surrendered the keys, would they only later discover what they had agreed to?

That is the trap. To specify is to create something that cannot be taken back, because a charge cannot be erased without acknowledging it. And once one price is identified, the unnamed ones start to look suspicious, so specifying spreads. After December 2023, silence is no longer prudence; it is the only shield left.

Fenton herself carries the logic further in a section on doublethink, and that is why this book matters more than the reviews imply. In principle, people back climate action, but at the pump they resist fuel taxes. They want the housing crisis fixed, yet they want their own home excluded. Likewise, she notes, some members of the Irish public support a united Ireland, but their enthusiasm fades when they are asked whether they would still want it if it meant higher taxes for them personally. She also says Sinn Féin advisers ought to have been especially alert to that point.

Because this comes from inside the operation rather than from polling, it deserves to be taken at that level. Even so, from the housing angle, she is describing precisely what the constitutional case has never been forced to confront. At present, the case for unity has no price attached to it. Those who support it know the pricing has not been done, and everyone assumes that is because the sums are difficult.

The sums are difficult. Yet the December 2023 file points to a more straightforward explanation. After a party has learned, through a polling collapse, that naming a single figure invites scrutiny of every figure left unnamed, it is unlikely to volunteer a cost for a united Ireland, or say who would bear it. This is not because the arithmetic is beyond reach. It is because the party has already tried the experiment once, in public, on an issue where it was arguing the morally correct side, and still lost.

In Fenton’s own version of that night, she is racing from Leinster House to Connolly station, catching the last train north, packed in with Christmas shoppers and people returning home pished from office parties. By the time the train reached Lanyon in Belfast, the next morning’s Irish Times was already being printed.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

“Not A Proper Dubliner” 📚 Siobhán Fenton And The €300,000

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And One

 

Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 17

 

A Morning Thought @ 3273

Gary Robertson ⚽There are no longer any excuses.

Celtic are a team in terminal decline.
 
We witnessed the LASK fiasco, the Rangers capitulation, the humiliation by Ferencváros. And the icing on the cake - the white flag waving surrender at Celtic Park to Rangers once again on Sunday.
 
I’m certain I can’t be the only one who, whilst trying to remain outwardly optimistic, knew deep down that Celtic would lose.
 
Again - and I feel like a broken record - no one should ever expect victory. On any given day any team can pull off a result. It’s not the losing that hurts but how you lose.
 
It was a cowardly performance. There are too many on the park wearing a shirt they don’t belong in.
 
Celtic a team born from adversity, tragedy and necessity, a team with a fighting spirit, have become the whipping boys of Scottish football. No one fears us anymore and rightly so. What’s to fear? We’re as toothless as your average Tommy Robinson fanboy and as cowardly as the keyboard warriors on social media who know full well they’d never say to your face the things they’ll post online.
 
There’s no fight, no grit, nothing.
 
We all watched it. Some now celebrating and well done to them. Clearly McInnes has Martin's measure. Derek set up a plan, his team played their football and managed to outfox Celtic.
 
Of course, from my perspective and that of Celtic fans around the globe, it’s been as painful as nailing your genitals to the floor. Again we’re willing to endure if the team are at least giving us reason to believe but they’re not.
 
I checked player ratings after the game, and without singling out any particular player we had 3s and 4s with a couple of 6s At Home against The Rangers.
 
We’re not playing PSG, Barcelona or Bayern - it’s Rangers and our players are clueless.
 
Of course at the final whistle the rumour mill went into meltdown with tales of O’Neill leaving, takeovers, player strikes all sorts. And whilst these are fun to play with online I’d much prefer to stick to facts and the facts are this:

⚽The board are failing the manager
⚽The manager is failing the team
⚽The team are failing the fans
⚽The fans are becoming irate with the board
⚽The board are remaining silent (or at best some pathetic rebuilding for the future excuse)

. . . And so on. 

It’s a vicious circle that needs to be broken and fast. Celtic need major investment. A clear out from top to bottom. Dare I say a new manager? Yes, but more so for 74 year old Martin's sake and his health. A clear out of the dead wood and new younger hungrier players brought in. The old adage that Rome wasn’t built in a day applies here but I’m sure we’d all accept a few lean years if we at least saw progress. I know I would. Right now the only progress in the Glasgow fishbowl of football is with Rangers.
 
Celtic had an opportunity to open an eight point gap on Sunday. Instead our lead is cut to two.
 
Some may say it’s overreacting, melodramatic perhaps to be so concerned at this situation but I’d argue apathy is what’s landed us here now.
 
The happy clappers who tell people like me to “get behind the team it’s now they need you” are fucking deluded.
 
We got behind the team, we’ve been behind this team for decades, we’ve seen bad teams, bad players, bad managers but there was always hope, always something to believe in. Players would pull on that jersey and play with pride, they’d walk onto that hallowed turf and know Celtic isn’t a club, it’s a cause. They’d understand the history, what it meant to play there, and we would at least admire their efforts and performances. This Celtic team have given us nothing to cling onto in the last few games. As I said before scraping one goal victories against new promoted sides or bottom six side teams made us look far better than we are. Our first real challenge, and we crash out of the League cup. Our first real challenge in the league and we roll over and surrender.
 
I suppose we can be grateful for small mercies in that it’s three weeks now til Celtic play again (Away to Motherwell on Oct 11th) so that’ll give us time for the pain to subside. Instead we can be disappointed by Scotland, oh what joy.
 
After the match on Sunday I noticed I’d spilled coffee on my shirt so I quickly removed it and launched it across the kitchen to my washing pile. It landed in the bin and for several hours I swithered whether to leave it there but at 0130am it got its reprieve. However it might be stuck on a hanger and hidden away in the wardrobe for a while as right now Celtic are genuinely affecting my mental health.
I’m sure I’m not alone.
 
So yes I apologise that this weeks column is shorter than usual and nothing but gloom and despair but right now a very heavy dark cloud hangs over Paradise.
 
We’re left now to speculate. Will Martin walk? Will Desmond sell up? Will the team find the form we so desperately need them to? Or will we in fact be travelling home from Motherwell after another rank rotten performance?

Time will tell but one thing is for certain we will still be Celtic fans/supporters. That doesn’t change. The one constant is in our DNA. We’re not “fair weather” fans, we’re people who over the years have invested hundreds if not thousands of pounds into Celtic. We’ve been entertained, we’ve celebrated and we’ve cried together but we’ve walked on with hope in our hearts as the song says but right now I think it’s safe to say that hope is wearing thin.
 
I’ll wake up tomorrow, next week, next year (if God spares me) a Celtic fan but I beg of this team - find some passion, some pride. Give us fans a team to believe in. We’ll accept defeat if that defeat is matched with determination. What we can’t continue to witness is this Celtic team thrashing around like a beached salmon waiting to be put out its misery.
 
There’s a magpie that often lands on the fence outside my sitting room window. I wish he’d bring a friend.

Finally fuck Ed Sheeran

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Nailing Genitals To The Floor

Barry Gilheany ✍ When President Donald Trump makes unscripted announcements which spring from what could be either damaged or under-developed frontal lobes of his brain, immediate responses can range from pressing the panic button to shrugging off “that’s just Trump being Trump, he’s not being serious”. 


The latter response is probably the correct reaction to his recent public musings about a United Ireland being “a good idea” which although coming from a well of insouciant ignorance of and wilful blindness to the history, complexities and current equilibrium of forces on the island of Ireland do not actually change anything vis-a-viz the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement despite the predictable nationalist/republican glee and unionist harrumphing. 

Likewise the gory threats that Trump issued over, for example, to bring “fire and fury” to North Korea; to “erase Iranian civilisation” and to annex Greenland and Canada which have eventually resulted in sheepish climbdowns suggesting that his bark is worse than his bite or that the Emperor has no clothes. However, these pronouncements were made in the realm of foreign affairs where despite his deluded beliefs in his divine omnipotence, the hallmark of tyrants throughout history, he simply bends the rest of the world to his will at the click of fingers. A different calculus emerges when he deploys his ignorance and cognitive illiteracy at home with the power of Presidential fiat in the trifecta polity that is currently the United States of America. Such is the case with his executive order of 10 August 2026 on childhood vaccinations

This order – which gives recommendations only, since vaccine policies are set by individual states, says that all children should receive just 11 of the current 18 vaccines recommended by the American Academy of Paediatrics. It recommends separating all the combined MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine into three separate shots. And it says that each vaccine should be given on a separate medical visit, not together.[1] The Order also directs the Department of Justice to investigate where starts are in violation of exemptions for childhood vaccine mandates, including parental authority and disability accommodations as well as religious and medical reasons.[2]

This was followed by an announcement by Trump on 18 September 2026 that his administration will recommend that some childhood vaccines be separated into five 20% doses six months apart. In justifying reduction of vaccine strengths; he forecast, using powers of scientific observation and forecasting known only to him, he predicted that there would be a “massive reduction” in autism. He did not state which vaccines would be affected. Not coincidentally, The Washington Post linked remarks by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, US Health Secretary and prominent vaccine sceptic, telling his Children’s Health Defence organisation that “they have a friend in the White House” to these announcements.[3]

Trump’s justifications for the vaccine restrictions were depressingly one of a piece with his stream of consciousness, shooting from the hip, deranged statements and the rehash of the totally debunked connection between receipt of the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism in infants. He said that the MMR shots were “sort of like a nuclear weapon “and could be “quite lethal”. On being asked for evidential proof for the latter; he said in typical folksy wisdom: “What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say that it is that way.” He went on to claim that the doses were the size of a soda bottle, and were being “poured” into the child. Such anonymous attribution is a significant vector of misinformation transmission in relation to vaccination. In fact a single three-vaccine shot is the equivalent of about 10 drops of water.[4]

Measured scientifically based response came from the American paediatrician and vaccine, immunology and virology expert, Paul Offit, best known as the co-inventor of the rotavirus RotaKey, credited with saving hundreds of lives. Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Philadelphia and Director of the Vaccine Education Centre at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of numerous books and scholarly articles on the subject area, Offit makes the case against vaccine shot separation using the following scientific logic:

When you create a vaccine, you do a dose response curve, and you’re trying to give the least amount of vaccine that induces an immune response that’s protective. So you don’t want to give too much, where you know you don’t need all that, and you don’t want to give too little, where you know is sub-immunogenic.[5]

Jose Romero, a former CDC (Centre for Disease Control) official told the Washington Post that vaccines are formulated in such a way that the total dose produces the intended immune response, so separation into individual shots wouldn’t necessarily make them safer.[6]

While Trump’s stance on vaccine reflects the skin-deep knowledge and reflective practice which he brings to practically every public matter, a more insidious and pernicious strategy around vaccine scepticism is taken by Robert F, Kennedy, Jr. Following the playbook of plausible deniability set out by Dr Andrew Wakefield in his notorious study of twelve gastro-intestinal child subjects in 1998 when he postulated but did not definitively state that there was a causal link between MMR and autism; Kennedy assures Americans in a recent CNN interview that he “never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine," he cultivates doubt and confusion with lies every available opportunity, for example stating the vaccine causes many deaths every year as well as the same afflictions as measles itself: encephalitis, blindness, etc. The CDC on its web page on “Autism and Vaccines” has stated that “… ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility.” So far, Congress has not reacted to correct these outrageous contortions of the truth and the trashing of scientific expertise.[7]

The logistics of the proposed new vaccine regimes will likely lead to more measles outbreaks and deaths. The full schedule of jabs will necessitate many more visits to the doctor; some will inevitably be missed. Single shots for mumps, measles and rubella are currently not available in the US; making them will be expensive and some children will contract the diseases before completion of all the shots.[8]

So these measures will likely worsen the incipient and interconnected public health crisis concerning measles incidence across the US which developed last year. That year’s outbreak began in February 2025 in unvaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people died; two children in Texas and adult in New Mexico and dozens of people were hospitalised. Public health experts maintain the true number of affected persons may be higher that state health departments have confirmed. In the first six months of 2025, there were 1,288 cases nationally surpassing 2019 when there were 1,274 cases.[9]

This year has seen more than 2,500 confirmed measles cases in the US, in previous years the numbers were usually in the low hundreds or lower; before a measles vaccine was licensed in 1963, they could approximate to half a million[10]. Back to the future then for the revenge of the purebloods in a country where private wellness literally and figuratively carries a higher premium than public health.

References

[1] Philip Ball … on MAGA v vaccines. The New World Issue 3 September 2026 p.37

[2] Trump proposes splitting sone childhood vaccines into five separate doses. Independent Journal Review.19 September 2026

[3] Anniko Kim Constantino and Jacobh Premuk. Trump signs executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccines, falsely linking shots to autism. CNBC. Health and Science 1 September 2026.

[4] Ball, op cit.

[5] CNBC, op cit.

[6] Ibid

[7] Ball, op cit

[8] Ibid

[9] CNBC, op cit

[10] Ball

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Making America Unhealthy Again 🪶 Trump And Vaccines

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred

 

A Morning Thought @ 3272

Independent Derry Republicans     slam the British government and the Multi Agency Review Arrangements (MARA). 


Britannia Waives The Rules

People And Nature ☭ A guest post by John Davies.

1-September-2026

The Serbian general and war criminal Ratko Mladić, the butcher of Srebrenica and too many other places to mention, died last week. It’s an opportunity for reflection, and I felt I couldn’t let it pass.

Bosnia, of which I had previously barely heard, played a big part in my life in the 1990s. I got involved with Workers Aid in 1993, and it sort of swallowed me up.

At the height of the Serbian wars on Bosnia and Kosova, this working class solidarity initiative sent about twenty convoys of aid to those countries. We started with the mining town of Tuzla, in Bosnia, whose miners had sent material support to the British miners in their great strike of 1984-85.

Ratko Mladić (left) and Dutch colonel Thomas Karremans (3rd from left), drinking a toast in
Srebenica in July 1995. Mladić went on to take charge of massacring civilians

When Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia (until 1992), Tuzla had the highest level of inter-marriage between the three religious groups (not that religion had much sway in many former Yugoslav towns). In the final census before the break-up it had the highest percentage of citizens who identified as Yugoslav, rather than Bosnian, Serb, Croat or other nationalities.

It was the spirit of places like Tuzla that Ratko Mladić and the Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic had to destroy. Mladić’s forces murdered hundreds in nearby Brcko, and threw the bodies into the river Sava. Other towns suffered similar fates, particularly in eastern Bosnia.

Tuzla, however, survived – as did its Serb Orthodox church, protected by its citizens, of all faiths.

Seeing the success of the Serb ethnic cleansers, from 1991 western governments were happy to oversee Bosnia being carved up into ethnic statelets. They drew up a series of plans to do just this, all of which failed in the face of determined Bosnian opposition.

Western complicity was evident from the beginning. For example, although the CIA knew about Serb death and rape camps in the Prijedor region, it kept shtum for more than a year.

The worst of the killing took place in 1992, when Bosnia had very little with which to defend itself – the bulk of the Yugoslav army, with its largely Serb officer corps, had gone over to Mladić.

In the face of this huge military disparity, Douglas Hurd, the old-Etonian British foreign secretary, opposed lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia – as did David Owen before him and Malcolm Rifkind afterwards. Hurd drawled that “we don’t want a level killing field”.

This was a patrician, Tory, and thoroughly laughable nod towards pacifist opposition to war in general.

It echoed the condescending drivel in the media about Balkan people being predisposed to war and fighting (rather like the Irish – remember them? – or for that matter the “fascist Ukrainans”) and of having “primitive ethnic hatreds”, the cliché of the hour.

But when people are attacked they defend themselves. And un-level killing fields are particularly bloody places.

Although the killing by Mladić’s forces continued after 1992, it did so at a slower pace, as the Bosnian defences became organised. But as we moved into 1995 everyone who had been paying attention knew that two eastern Bosnian enclaves, Srebrenica and Zepa, were vulnerable.

These contained largely Muslim populations and were a demographic anomaly for those planning ethnic division. Srebrenica’s citizens had organised its defence well, with one particular heavy gun commanding a large area.

But in 1994 they handed over these defences to the UN military force UNPROFOR, on the understanding that both Srebrenica and Zepa would become designated “Safe Areas” under UN protection. Then, in the spring of 1995, Mladić’s forces surrounded Srebrenica, the larger of the two enclaves.

In July 1995, some days before the massacre which ensued, I attended a large public meeting at Leeds University. On the top table were Tariq Ali and Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Tariq Ali called for the UN to intervene – it already had, catastrophically – and Callinicos pushed the SWP line of “a plague on all your houses”.

Far from calling for lifting the arms embargo, imposed at the beginning of the war – so as to allow the defenceless Bosnians to defend themselves – Callinicos argued that the Balkan working class had to pull its socks up and unite. Taking sides was out of the question.
A Bosnian woman walks among gravestones at the Memorial
Centre Potocari near Srebrenica. Photo: Daily Sabah

The slogan “self-defence is no offence” was relevant, as far as the SWP was concerned, to an attack on an Asian grandmother in Bradford … but deemed out of bounds for her Muslim counterpart in Srebrenica.

The SWP – like most of the “left”, to be fair – preserved its pristine rhetoric throughout the war, a condescending neutrality maintained while watching more than a hundred thousand Bosnians murdered. All whilst mouthing vapid slogans.

And UNPROFOR, having taken over control of the military positions defending Srebrenica, handed over those same positions to Mladić’s Serb nationalists. The UNPROFOR Dutch soldiers then helped Mladić separate the men and boys, thus facilitating the murder of about 8,000 innocent civilians.

More than 30 years later, many on the “left” still feel uncomfortable talking about Bosnia and Kosova. Some – including, shamefully, Noam Chomsky – even went as far as to question the reality of what had happened.

NATO had bombed Serbia: surely, the logic went, the Serbs could not therefore be the bad guys.

I saw a similar skewed, binary logic at play in the 2010s, when “left” groups denied the crimes of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. And today, when they deny Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

Ratko Mladić was a monster. You can read first hand accounts of his chilling behaviour at Srebrenica – statements given by mothers, describing how Mladić watched and smiled reassuringly, as sixteen-year-old boys were taken away to be mowed down in a nearby field.

But Mladić was aided by the UN’s complicity, and in the case of Thomas Karremans, the Dutch UNPROFOR commander at Srebrenica, they toasted that complicity with slivovitz.

As for the British “left”, the vast majority of it kept their slogans clean.

More about Bosnia and Workers Aid

🔴 Bosnia: unite for mineworkers, for land and for water. No to unjust transition

🔴Workers’ solidarity in wartime: Bosnia 1993, Ukraine 2015

🔴Internationalism series: some reflections on Workers Aid to Bosnia (2020, Libcom)

🔴International Workers Aid to Bosnia (December 1994, The Anarchist Library)

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The Butcher Of Srebrenica 🪶 A UN officer Had Drinks, ‘Lefts’ Had Clean Slogans

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