Sometimes, Only Satire Does the Job 

Here is my review of Oisín MacAmadáin, Busting Anti-Vax Myths! Seriously EXPERT Arguments for the Covid-Deniers in Your Life (2022), with a Foreword by Dr. Anthony Faucet.

This is a slim, wickedly funny satire of 126 pages organised into ten chapters of rollicking hilarity. It’s a hugely enjoyable book for all those who were critical of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. As the Brits say, it takes the piss out of all the self-proclaimed Covid experts, the public health clerisy, the media, and people with blind faith in the experts. 

Thus the fictitious professor Oisín MacAmadáin informs us of “a good friend in Dublin whose fully vaccinated father died from Covid. He also told me how much worse he knew it could have been.” And all the grannies going merrily about their way in Stockholm “must be brainwashed. A perfect example of state propaganda.” The true believers are likely to be offended. 

The book is successful in skewering the many Covidian dogmas because MacAmadáin closely tracks the many gaslighting tropes used by the experts and the authorities to attack critics, dissenters, Florida, and Sweden. The last, for example, is dismissed as irrelevant because its vast empty spaces make it very difficult to encounter the virus and anyway, we all know the Swedes are so reserved they rarely hug.

It’s been many a long year since I laughed so much while reading a seriously serious book. The greater your familiarity with the lies, obfuscations, and gaslighting by health experts and governments in the last three years, and with the range of scientific literature and controversies, including the leading names, the more you will be entertained by this book.

American readers will especially enjoy the chapter on Florida and the attempted puncturing of Robert Malone and Peter McCullough as anti-vaxxer ringleaders. That they were removed from Twitter is proof they were spouting anti-scientific drivel. Their knowledge is so shallow that they can be shown up even by the likes of Neil Young and Meghan Markle.

MacAmadáin is inventive with names in the mould of JK Rowling, referencing the CDLWQ (CatDogLynxWolfQuestioning) + community for those who self-ID as catgender etc. The encomia on the back cover are from eminent world experts like President Macaroni who adores the book because it will “really ‘piss off’ the anti-vaxxers;” Santa Klaus who is incredulous that the author “was never a WEF young leader;” the CEO of Pfizzle; and Gubnet O’Foole, the correspondent in residence of the Oirish Times. The final encomium is signed off “The author.”

We meet Prof. Nadir Jibjab and Dr. Smärtz Aleks. Austria has a Mr. Hündbisket and a Prof. Ann Schlüss who has written a treatise on The Jab as Moral Good. She holds firmly to the view that the government decisions tick all ethical boxes, “even those of Kant whose ethical boxes are notoriously hard to tick.” A German schoolteacher named Gretel Voopingkoff praises Oisín’s “awesome work in exterminating anti-vaxxer propaganda.” She informs him that her multi-jabbed kids “play the geese marching game” from which the unvaxxed are, of course, excluded.

One of the authors of the famous 2020 Danish mask study was Henning Bundgaard. He gets misnamed as Herring Bumgaard in a letter to the British Medical Journal (a riff on the many people who reported studies for retraction), then successively as Dr. Bumgås, Bümflüff, and Bumfårt. In the letter, he asks of their flawed study:

how do we know that up to 100% of those infected in the unmasked group didn’t end up ultimately dying due to greater viral exposure? Were they only asked about whether they were infected and not whether that infection had killed them?

The Termonfeckin Institute of Expertise (TIE), one of the world’s leading institutes, has just one Faculty, Prof. MacAmadáin who is the Provost, Head of Department, and Lecturer: “a real Trinity of wisdom and education,” says Dr. Faucet in his gushing Foreword. He breezily dismisses the IFR calculations of Prof. Ioannidis (“never heard of him”) of 0.27 percent in favour of the TIE calculation of 34 percent.

MacAmadáin is an expert on expertise, with a “long and incredibly distinguished career.” The opening sentence of the book declares “I am an expert.” This gives him the unique ability to become an instant expert on any topic. He is vainglorious and breathlessly boasting, with any errors in the book the responsibility of the editor, TIE’s “sole and perennial graduate student.” 

He sat down to write this book after getting his eighth shot and predicts by 2030 we will be into jabs in the fifties, fantasises about a movie to be called The Amazing Mr. Spike, extends the slogan “No one is safe until everyone is safe” to animals, and holds mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic to be probably the best idea in the world, so there, Dr. Geert Van Der Dishwasher. If this fuels new variants, the obvious solution is to create new vaccines.

Wearing a mask when driving alone in a car is advisable because viral droplets can come in through the air filter. Besides, masks make you drop-dead, gorgeously sexy. A study from Cardiff University “demonstrably proved that face masks make people more attractive and … I will always follow the science.” Wearing them in combination with pantyhose will not only make you even sexier but will protect you amazingly against Covid, and so “I always wear protection.”

As for “the mad idea that the Covid vaccines are not even vaccines:” “The scientists call them vaccines, the governments call them vaccines, it says ‘vaccine’ on the label.” The vaccine is definitely a vaccine because it self-identifies as one and it’s frankly vaccine-phobic to suggest otherwise. A supposed scientific study alleging that the vaccine is actually gene therapy is debunked with the killer argument that it’s from Sweden and the Swedes all love ABBA, “so case closed.”

An Irishman who is fiercely proud of Ireland’s stringent Covid protection measures, he is a bit troubled by Australia and Canada’s more authoritarian enforcement actions. The Irish in him is somewhat embarrassed at channelling the Brit Churchill’s wartime fighting on the beaches speech. Melbourne’s “police efficiency” was “a joy to witness.” Four triple-masked and visored-up police officers wielding sterilised batons arrested an unjabbed woman with one officer striking her down, another tasering her, and a crew disinfecting her before she is winched up by a helicopter and flown to a Covid internment camp.

Canadian kids parrot Trudeau-like lines about the unvaccinated being racists. But, enamoured as Oisín is of Australia and Canada, he concedes that Austria had all others beat. It is a “Covidopia,” the Utopia of Covid. The public was enthusiastically supportive, “bordering on euphoria,” of the authorities’ tough crackdown on dissent.

The Great Barrington Declaration is dismissed as “The Declaration of Great Baloney” written by fringe scientists, one of whom probably works at Stanford Polytech rather than University. Oisín writes to his mate Tony Faucet urging him to publish a “devastating takedown.” Because “there is no ‘no risk’ group,” “focussed protection” is condemned as “discriminatory and ageist” that would “destroy the principles we hold dear.” Oisín commits to organising “The Great Termonfeckin Ejaculation” (spelt put in the final chapter on The Great Reset) as a counter to the GBD.

He is also besties with Canada’s PM Trudy-wudy and rushes to Ottawa to help quell the truckers’ rebellion by “black-faced up” racists. The resulting encounter with the protestors is a nice little dig at asking us to trust the experts over our own lying eyes. 

There is a hilarious chapter with advice on fact-checking: point out that “EXPERTS” disagree, that the person making the false claim is a crackpot, and that “even if the misinformation is correct, it still isn’t true.” For example, the claim to the protective benefits of natural immunity can be shown to be false by noting that “many who have died from Covid also had immune systems.” In another example:

The reports of over 29,000 deaths in the VAERS database do not prove that the Covid vaccines are dangerous: they merely show that 29,000 people happened to die shortly after their vaccination. Death is a statistically common phenomenon which experts have found to occur in most populations.

At the end of the chapter, however, Oisín berates himself for having wasted his time as the media everywhere have already been following these practices all along anyway.

He pays homage to all the brave soldiers who gave their lives in the world war so we can all be safe now. The expert’s unvaccinated Romanian housekeeper rebels at being reminded of Ceausescu’s reign: “Let me tell you, Ceausescu is turning in his f**king grave that he didn’t think of this! What genius to control everyone with the f**king flu!”

The book perfectly captures the epidemic of cognitive dissonance that still reigns. A doctor talks a woman out of her hesitancy and when she is rushed to emergency after a stroke, notes with smug satisfaction that “at least it wasn’t the Covid that landed her there.” Because the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh claimed success for Ivermectin prophylactic treatment, it must be the state of “UTT-ar RUBB-esh.” The myth about the protective benefits of Vitamin D is dismissed with the Trumpian label “Vitamin Death.” Mandating it for everyone would be a gross violation of bodily integrity. Compliance with government orders shows how compassionate we all are and this proof, that society is for real, must be enough to make Margaret Thatcher turn in her grave.

The fanatic faith of many vaccine enthusiasts is skewered in this woman’s comment on a radio program in Ireland, voicing support for Austria’s “jab or jail” program: 

I was delighted the day I got vaccinated knowing I was then fully protected but the thought that any one of these loons could still kill me just like that….so I’m all for doing what the Austrians are doing just so as to keep us all safe.

This is followed by the sentence: “Meanwhile an Oirish Times poll has indicated that 82% of respondents would support jail time for the unvaccinated, 13% aren’t sure and the remaining 5% are currently being investigated by the Gardaí.”

A bit like George Castanza’s epiphany in Seinfeld, about doing the opposite of his first instinct, just invert everything you read and you will be fine with your reading comprehension.