Nphet’s mission creep has become a dystopian challenge to elected government

Nphet, the advisory body on the pandemic which has a history of making bad recommendations on mask wearing, antigen tests, air filtration in schools and the booster rollout, has begun promulgating its views in the media before presenting its advice to the government

Nphet is raising the prospect of schools closing in January, despite the fact that the government has explicitly ruled this out. Picture: Getty

Over the past week, the Irish public has been sent a number of bizarre and confusing signals around the ongoing management of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many of those signals have not come from the government, but from the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), an advisory group whose mission creep has by now exceeded any reasonable expectation.

This group, as previously outlined in this column, has repeatedly managed to make astoundingly bad recommendations on the ...