Paying the Piper to Call the Tune—COVID 19, Vaccines, Big Pharma, and Public Money

Abstract

At the time of writing, Ireland has just passed another significant anniversary in the ongoing global COVID 19 pandemic, the one-year anniversary of our first lockdown. We have spent that anniversary not—as most of us would have believed a year ago—by looking back on a difficult year, remembering the dead, and fighting to change all the existing inequalities newly highlighted by the sharp glare of the pandemic, but in the midst of a third lockdown following from the government’s ‘Living with COVID’ plan and the catastrophic failure of three weeks of ‘meaningful Christmas’.