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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.
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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, or even agree who can fish where. Or the Israel and Iran, only just about able to hold off a potential nuclear war. The idea that they could have even agreed on such a massive sophisticated conspiracy is ludicrous, let alone carry it out.
The British can’t even manage the most basic implementation of Brexit, a policy that we know that they are highly motivated to achieve; anyone who thinks that even one government could pull off a conspiracy like this really has far too much faith in their competence.
But group-think is a different thing, and is a real problem that can lead to real disasters, particularly when decisions have to be made under pressure. I want to draw a clear hard line here between the science, what is known, and the political and moral response. Science can tell us what is. Science cannot tell us what ought to be.
Now, in some cases that second leap is so small that it almost disappears. Science can tell us that a nuclear war would kill millions of people; the follow-up, that that would be a terrible thing is so obvious that almost no further discussion is necessary, but things are rarely so clear-cut.
Science can estimate that any given Covid lockdown would save X number of lives, damage the economy to Y degree and make problems of depression, missed education for children, isolation for domestic violence victims Z much worse.
Science cannot tell us how to balance those concerns, it can’t say how much collateral damage is it worth to avoid how many deaths. That is a political and a moral question. I think that there are voices out there that have raised reasonable questions about those political and moral choices that are not getting the airing that they deserve. That’s why I wanted it on the podcast, because it’s an underserved debate.
There are a lot of people at fault for those voices not getting heard, but not least among them are those voices themselves. If someone is arguing that the cost of a lockdown outweighs its benefits, that is a reasonable debate to have; unless they are grounding their position in saying that Covid was invented by lizard aliens in lab in China to inject us all with a microchip so Bill Gates can kill us by remote control by using 5G. It’s just not possible to debate with someone like that.
I searched long and hard for a speaker who would debate the policy choices being made without dragging in the swivel-eyed nonsense; my email correspondent accused me of getting on the podcast someone who was easy pickings, as a straw man who couldn’t hold his own in a debate. That’s just not true. Professor Norman Fenton is the professor of Risk Information Management, an incredibly prestigious position at Queen Mary University of London, an incredibly respected institution, founded in 1785. This is his exact area that he has a mathematics PhD in.
I don’t have any maths beyond leaving cert; but over and over again in the podcast I had to stop him, because he didn’t seem able to make basic distinctions, such as between counting people who have died in the time since they got a Covid vaccine, and people, if any, whose death was attributable to the covid vaccine.
And before anyone accuses me of strawmanning there, that entire list, that Covid was invented by lizard aliens in lab in China to inject us all with a microchip so Bill Gates can kill us by remote control using 5G, all of that, though not all together obviously, all of that was within one or two clicks of the Twitter feed of Professor Norman Fenton, the professor of Risk Information Management, at Queen Mary University of London.
But, like I said the last time, I’m not an expert, so if I get anything wrong, I’m happy to receive any corrections, and if someone can debate the policy, without going into all the insanity, I’d be delighted to hear from you.
