An opinion piece published by the New York Times has named the current Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, at the top of their list of international personalities making the worst predictions of 2021.
According to the Sunday World, the opinion piece was written to list ten of the “worst predictions made about the year by overconfident people from many walks of life.”
As well as Leo Varadkar, the list included former US President Donald Trump and Citibank analyst Tom Fitzgerald.
But Varadkar took the top spot for his prediction that we would see the end of the pandemic in 2021. His comment came during an interview in December 2020 after Margaret Keenan received the first Covid vaccine outside of clinical trials.
Varadkar said, “With the vaccine, with mass testing and with the knowledge of how to prevent and treat this virus, I think the pandemic will end in 2021.”
Former US President came fourth in the list for his comment about the California wildfires in September when he said during a briefing “It’ll start getting cooler. You just – you just watch.” The list was prepared by economics and business columnist Peter Coy. Speaking about Trump, Mr. Coy said “Narrowly speaking, this prediction may have been correct. Broadly speaking, though, for Trump to say the world will ‘start getting cooler’ is quite a stretch.”
Mr. Coy said this when he was explaining why he was happy to include Varadkar on the list:
“Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said this in an interview on Dec. 9, 2020, daring to predict the course of a pandemic that has flummoxed the experts repeatedly. To his credit, he did qualify his prediction with ‘I think’”.
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