COVID-19
Neil Macdonald asks the most important COVID-19 question of all
This is posted with permission from the author, Neil MacDonald. It is originally posted at neilmacdonald.me
So. Who gets the ventilators?
I wish Sophie Gregoire Trudeau good health, and a complete recovery in her quarantine. The same for the lovely Margaret Trudeau, if she comes down with COVID-19. Both women were at the same speaking engagement in London; presumably, that is where Madame Gregoire Trudeau contracted the virus.
If, heaven forfend, either woman develops the sort of severe respiratory difficulties that have killed other COVID-19 patients, I hope they will both have access to peerless medical care, and a ventilator. Actually, I am certain they will.
One is the prime minister’s wife, the other his mother. Privilege has its privileges.
At the same time – and here comes the kicker – I am not at all certain that, if I or any of my aged relatives come down with the disease in the uncertain and increasingly terrifying weeks to come, there will be ventilators for us. And as one American epidemiologist put it recently, the alternative to ventilation for someone with extreme respiratory symptoms is death. As a despairing Italian physician put it on social media from the horrors of his triage centre in Bergamo: “Every ventilator becomes like gold.”
Here is the math: Health Minister Patty Hajdu says between 30 and 70 per cent of Canadians will likely be infected. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is between two and three per cent. Assuming the optimistic end of Hajdu’s estimate, and the optimistic end of the mortality rate, we are still talking about 225,000 people dying, and, as the despairing Italian physician says, the diagnosis is always the same: Bilateral interstitial pneumonia. Meaning those patients’ lungs are so badly compromised the only thing that has a chance of saving them is a ventilator, or mechanical breathing apparatus. It alone can infuse the lungs with enough oxygen to maintain life.
Now: We are told Canada has about 5,000 ventilators. That’s one ventilator for every 45 of those dying patients. Unless Canada somehow acquires a lot more of the machines, and the entire world is now chasing them, there will be rationing. That is what has been happening in Italy. Doctors there have been given the ghastly job of deciding who receives ventilation, and who is sent home to meet their fate.
Now, let’s add something else to the equation: In Canada, the law prevents citizens from paying for core medical care, which a ventilator surely is. In principle, ventilators will be rationed, well, rationally.
But that’s not how the system really works.
In Canada, influence and power get you to the front of the line. Does anyone really believe that cabinet ministers or premiers or captains of industry or very senior government officials sit in waiting rooms, or have a hard time finding a family doctor? Or that those of us with professional or family connections aren’t treated as privileged entities?
So the big question – the crucial, life-or-death question as this virus tears through the population – will very quickly be this: who gets the ventilators?
No doubt, an attempt will be made to lay down a set of objective criteria. They probably already exist. It makes sense to ventilate patients who stand the best chance of surviving. A physician friend in Italy unilaterally decided to send very old people home, along with anyone whose health was already severely compromised by previous morbidities.
But imagine the pressure on a Canadian doctor, or hospital dependent on government funding, when the aged relative of a very powerful politician needs ventilation. Or a very rich person who has donated generously to the hospital. Or the mother or father of a person whose role in the economy is considered so crucial that he or she must not be distracted by familial worries.
Jane Philpott, Justin Trudeau’s first health minister, once declared that not being able to buy your way to the front of the line is a “core Canadian value.” The remark was rather gormless, I thought at the time, given the reality of the system. Doctor friends of mine thought it was hysterical.
But the big test is coming. The public deserves to know precisely how lifesaving care will be allocated. The public has a right to transparent fairness.
My guess: fairness and objective allocation of resources will slam into the wall of privilege. We shall see. We shall also see how intrepid the media is on this subject. So far, it hasn’t been.
From neilmacdonald.me
Neil Macdonald spent 43 years reporting on politics, wars, elections, revolutions, booms, crashes, coups, and the struggles of ordinary human beings in the unforgiving, bewildering rush of history.
He worked as an editor and reporter in three newspapers before moving to CBC News, for which he covered Quebec before moving to Parliament Hill, then abroad as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and Washington, DC., and finally as the CBC’s opinion columnist.
He has stood in Iraq watching missiles strike, in Bethlehem watching people welcome the new millennium, in Jerusalem watching an intifada erupt, and in Chicago watching Barack Obama accept the American presidency. He followed the Pope through the Holy Land, tracked down Hitler’s last general in Europe, covered the triumphant arrival and subsequent humiliation of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, revealed the plotters who killed Rafiq Hariri in Beirut, and documented the financial horrors unleashed on America’s cities by Wall Street.
He speaks French, having grown up in Quebec, reasonably good English, and sufficient Arabic. He lives in Ottawa.
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From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From LifeSiteNews
While Pat King has been labeled as one of the leaders of the Freedom Convoy by the mainstream media, he is largely considered by those who followed the event to be a tertiary actor.
A Canadian judge has found Pat King, a controversial figure connected to the Freedom Convoy, guilty of a total of five charges related to his involvement in the 2022 protests held in the nation’s capital which called for an end to COVID mandates.
An Ottawa judge found King guilty of two counts of disobeying a court order, one count of mischief, one count of counselling others to commit mischief, as well as one count of counselling others to obstruct police.
As reported by the Canadian Press, King was also found not guilty of four other charges, those being three counts of intimidation and one count of obstructing police.
King’s lawyers had argued that his involvement with the Freedom Convoy was peaceful in nature and did not warrant any of the charges laid against him.
Crown lawyers claimed that King was one of the main leaders of the Freedom Convoy who played a key role in the month-long protests that took place in January and February of 2022.
The Crown’s case relied heavily on videos posted to social media, which were shared by King throughout the protests.
While King has been labeled as one of the leaders of the Freedom Convoy by the mainstream media, he is largely considered by those who followed the event to be a tertiary actor.
For instance, True North’s Andrew Lawton, who wrote a book on the Freedom Convoy, wrote in 2022, “the media keeps calling Pat King the ringleader of the convoy, but in reality, organizers told him to get lost when they realized he was toxic.”
In 2022, King was granted bail after spending five months in jail for his involvement with the protests. He had to pay a $25,000 fine and was banned from speaking to other Freedom Convoy members and was placed under curfew.
In February 2022, during the height of the Freedom Convoy, King told protesters to “Hold the line, ladies and gentlemen,” and to “not back down, we got your backs.”
In late February that same year, King was denied bail by a judge. He was arrested on February 18 and was charged with various offenses, including mischief and counseling to commit mischief.
As it stands now, the Freedom Convoy’s actual main leaders, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, are awaiting their fate in their trial for their involvement in the 2022 protests. As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich and Barber face a possible 10-year prison sentence for their role in the 2022 Freedom Convoy.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, some protesters charged for participating the Freedom Convoy have seen their charges dropped.
In early 2022, thousands of Canadians from coast to coast came to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the Emergencies Act on February 14. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.
The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.
COVID vaccine mandates, which also came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.
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