A FORMER MEMBER of National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) during the Covid-19 pandemic has said that in the future more consideration needs to be given to the long term societal consequences of short-term measures to combat the spread of infection.

Professor Martin Cormican, a hospital consultant and professor of Bacteriology at the University of Galway, has been critical of many of the public health measures put in place during the height of the pandemic.

Cormican spoke this morning to RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor about his views that the strict restrictions had a disproportionately negative impact on the most vulnerable members of society.

In particular, Cormican criticised the long-term closure of secondary and primary schools in order to combat infection, and the restrictions placed on the movement of older people, particularly when it came to visiting nursing homes. 

“Children were deprived of education for a very long period of time,” said Cormican this morning.

The effects of that were most dramatic on the children who were already most marginalised and on children with special needs, who were deprived of education.

Cormican said he knew of families with children with special needs who had “lost years of progress” and skills that had been “painfully built up” by their parents. He said also that the “vast majority” of public health people he knew disagreed with the closure of schools.

“The vast majority of public health people that I knew on NPHET inside and outside believed that school closure was not required for public health purposes,” he said.

Older people 

The professor also that said older people were also disproportionately affected by Covid-19 restrictions.

He said that he did not know who recommended the ban on all visits to nursing homes, except on compassionate grounds, but that “a complete ban on visiting was never a humane thing to do.”

He said there were risks with people being allowed to visit nursing homes, but that these were risks that it was necessary to take. 

“What do we as a society value? Is it how I live and how I die that’s more important than how many days I live and when I die?”

He also said that his own mother died in nursing home during the pandemic. 

He said that for many older people “there was a huge loss of skill, there was a huge loss of muscle mass”.

“I’m not saying that all of that was avoidable, but I think that if we ever have to do this again, we need to think more carefully about the balance between the short term goal, about trying to stop the spread of infection, and the long term consequences of some of those measures that we’ve put in place.

I don’t pretend that that’s ever going to be an easy balance to find, but I think the focus needs to be clearer, we need to put a greater emphasis on that it’s a trade off, that policy decisions are a trade off.

Cormican was also critical of the maternity restrictions in place at the time, which “were well intentioned but the consequences were too great. The consequences were disproportionate to the benefit”.

Late to NPHET

The professor – who joined NPHET in 2021, a year after the pandemic started – was the HSE lead advisor on infection prevention and control at the time of the Covid-19 outbreak. He was questioned today on why he wasn’t a member of NPHET from the beginning.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I was surprised, I expressed my surprise, it was no secret.

It was an infection pandemic. It’s not about me personally… for the HSE’s lead advisor on infection prevention and control not to be on the advisory group never made any sense to me.

He also said that he was “never restricted from expressing my view.” And that there was a “diversity of opinion” on NPHET.

Throughout the interview, Cormican made it repeatedly clear that he was not singling out any individuals for criticism. He said that Ireland had gotten many aspects of its policy right, but there were important lessons to be learned if policies are to be improved in the future. 

For example, he said that a process should be in place to review any restrictions from a human rights or civil liberties perspective “within three or four weeks by people who aren’t intimidated by public health issues”.

Paper

Cormican was speaking to RTÉ following a paper he presented to the Irish Society of Clinical Microbiology in Dublin on 21 October last year. The remarks made in that paper were recently reported on.

In the paper, among the criticisms already discussed, he said that Ireland relied too much on fear to influence people’s behaviour. He has also been critical of mandatory mask wearing and said that mandatory vaccinations should have been considered.

He said now that a review of public health emergencies should be undertaken in order to learn how Ireland can “do better in the future”.

Speaking last Monday, Tánaiste Micheál Martin stated that lessons need to be learned in terms of how to handle pandemics.

“The global macro figures show that Ireland did well in terms of limiting the number of deaths although a lot of people suffered significantly, many families did, our health service came under enormous stress,” he told the RTÉ.

“But that said, given the nature of what is a once-in-100-years event we should evaluate all aspects of the management and handling of the pandemic.”

“Last year the health minister set up a public health team to analyse it from a public health perspective and that will feed into a wider evaluation of how Ireland did during the pandemic,” Martin said.