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Health

Canada remains poor performer among countries with universal health care

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4 minute read

From the Fraser Institute

By Mackenzie Moir and Bacchus Barua

Canada reported far fewer physicians (ranking 28th of 30) and hospital beds (23rd of 29) per 1,000 people in 2021. And ranked low for the availability of MRI machines (25th of 29) and CT scanners (26thof 30) per million people in 2019

Earlier this year, the Trudeau government announced it will increase health-care spending to provinces and territories by $196.1 billion over the next decade. But patients hoping for improved access will likely be disappointed. In reality, Canada’s health-care system already ranks as one of the most expensive systems in the world, but only has mediocre results to show for it. In other words, the problem isn’t the amount of money we spend, it’s the poor value we get for our health-care dollars.

A new study compared the spending and performance of Canada’s system with 29 other universal health-care systems worldwide. According to the study (after adjusting for population age in each country), Canada was the highest spender on health care as a share of the economy (at 12.6 per cent) and ninth-highest on a per person basis in 2021, the latest year of available data.

And yet, compared to other universal countries, Canada reported far fewer physicians (ranking 28th of 30) and hospital beds (23rd of 29) per 1,000 people in 2021. And ranked low for the availability of MRI machines (25th of 29) and CT scanners (26thof 30) per million people in 2019 (the latest year of available data).

Unsurprisingly, scarce health-care resources are accompanied by long wait times. Using data collected in 2020 by the Commonwealth Fund, the study found that only 38 per cent of Canadians reported waiting less than four weeks for a specialist appointment—a much smaller percentage than countries such as Switzerland (68 per cent) and Germany (67 per cent). On this indicator, Canada ranked 10th out of 10 countries. Canada also ranked dead last (10th) on timely access to elective surgery—with 62 per cent of Canadians reporting waiting less than four months—compared to 99 per cent of Germans and 94 per cent of Swiss.

While these results were disappointing, Canada reported mixed results in other areas of performance. For example, although Canada performed poorly on safety indicators such as obstetric trauma during birth (23rd of 23 countries), it performed above the OECD average on other indicators including heart attack survival rates (9th of 25 countries). But while the Canadian system has in some areas performed in line with its high spending levels, overall it’s struggled to meet many of its basic obligations—especially timely access to care.

With its latest increase in health-care spending, the Trudeau government again ignores the fact that Canada already has one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the world. And although some of this new spending is predicated on provinces tracking progress and demonstrating improvement on certain indicators, international data reveal a simple truth—Canadians do not receive commensurate value for their health-care dollars. Without fundamental reform, it’s unlikely the new spending promised by the Trudeau government will produce improved performance for Canadian patients and their families.

Dr. Robert Malone

WHO and G20 Exaggerate the Risk and Economic Impact of Outbreaks

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Poor quality modeling is being used by WHO and a G20 panel to project our risk of infectious disease pandemics and the financial requirements to address them.

Previously considered a once in a century event, major pandemics are now predicted to occur every 20 to 40 years.

Global authorities view this as an existential threat, and have called for a coordinated international response led by the World Health Organization or the WHO…but not everyone agrees with this perspective.

Researchers from the University of Leeds, including policy experts, Professor Garrett Brown and Dr David Bell, are challenging the assumptions behind these dire warnings. They question whether the massive resources being allocated to pandemic preparedness are truly supported by the evidence.

One of their critiques centers on a chart frequently cited by the WHO, which appears to show a dramatic increase in the outbreaks over the past two decades. Brown and Bell say the chart omits crucial historical context and misrepresents today’s health threats.

Long-standing diseases like yellow fever, influenza, cholera, and the plague have been steadily brought under control, and outbreaks of diseases like monkey pox or natural coronaviruses have likely remained consistent over time, but what has changed, they say, is our improved diagnostic technology enabling us to distinguish diseases more readily than ever before.

Essentially, as surveillance increases, so does the likelihood of finding diseases that may have existed but previously went unnoticed.

In reality, mortality from infectious diseases has been declining for decades, thanks to advances in hygiene, nutrition, medical treatments and reduced poverty, even with COVID 2020, to 2021, mortality remained below 2010 levels.

The WHO has identified nine priority diseases for research and development, yet five of these diseases have never caused more than 1000 recorded deaths in history, aside from COVID 19, whose origins remain a topic of debate, the rest of the diseases are largely confined to specific regions, primarily in parts of Africa.

On the list the WHO also includes a hypothetical outbreak that they call disease X – it’s a placeholder for an unknown outbreak that could emerge in the future.

And while it’s intended to promote vigilance, its severity is entirely speculative and can encourage modelers to use catastrophic scenarios to estimate future risk, causing governments to make fear-based policy decisions based on little evidence.

Brown and Bell are concerned that so much focus on speculative pandemic preparedness is diverting critical resources away from urgent health issues such as tuberculosis and malaria.

Tuberculosis alone kills 1.3 million people annually, while malaria accounts for over 600,000 deaths, mostly among children.

Although testing and treatment for these diseases is relatively inexpensive, their funding could be at risk as more resources are directed towards hypothetical future threats in 2022 a high level, independent panel was convened by the G20 to review our risk of pandemics and the financial requirements to address it.

But again, the two main pieces of evidence the panel relied on to draw its conclusions grossly exaggerated the actual risk of a pandemic.

The first report provided by the G20 panel analysed the major outbreaks of the past two decades, and it was poorly referenced, excluding Covid-19 and the 2009 swine flu, which caused fewer deaths than seasonal flu, the total number of deaths from these events over the last 20 years was under 26,000 a relatively insignificant figure in the context of global disease burdens.

The second report was from Metabiota, a former private. US based corporation, the two graphs provided appear to show an exponential increase in recorded outbreaks. Yet the researchers point out that this trend aligns with the development of modern diagnostic technologies, which naturally increase the detection of previously unnoticed diseases, indeed, the absence of recorded disease outbreaks in the 60s coincides with a lack of technology and communication systems needed to document them.

Metabiota report also included data from an article published in the British Medical Journal in 2023 it shows the rise in mortality outbreaks over the last decade is almost entirely due to Ebola outbreaks – and when these Ebola deaths are excluded from Metabiota data – the mortality trend over the last two decades shows a clear decline – a finding that contradicts the narrative of increasing pandemic risk, the financial demands of the pandemic agenda are another concern.

The G20 panel relied on a report released by the World Bank and the WHO in 2022, which sought $31.1 billion in funding, and an additional World Bank report, using poorly supportive data, sought another 10 to 11 billion annually.

On top this report referenced a 2020 study by Maryanne, which also claimed to show an increase in the frequency of disease outbreaks, but closer inspection reveals the opposite, a sharp decline in disease outbreaks between 2010 and 2020 – and like the Metabiota report – this World Bank report overlooks the fact that the development of new diagnostic tests could account for any observed increase In disease outbreaks since 1960.

Finally, the WHO report exaggerates the economic impact of outbreaks by including extraordinary costs of actions, such as stimulus packages, while downplaying the costs of endemic diseases used for comparison.

This creates a false impression that these relatively low fatality outbreaks were costlier than other diseases, and that such costs could be fully avoided while preparing for pandemics is undoubtedly important.

Brown and Bell argue that the narrative of escalating pandemic threats is misleading. They suggest that the risk from naturally occurring disease outbreaks may actually be decreasing with the rise in detected outbreaks, primarily a result of better diagnostic tools.

Researchers warn that essential global priorities such as cancer, tuberculosis, malaria and nutrition support could be neglected. For example, funding for nutrition development dropped 10% in 2020 and has yet to return to pre pandemic levels.

If resources continue to be diverted towards speculative future scenarios, proven efforts to combat the world’s deadliest diseases may be overshadowed and ultimately cause more harm than good.


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CDC stops $11 billion in COVID ’emergency’ funding to health departments, NGOs

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Fr0m LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been providing massive funds in the name of COVID despite the fact that Joe Biden admitted the ‘pandemic’ was over by 2022.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is withdrawing $11.4 billion in COVID funding to state and local health departments, non-government groups, and international recipients about two years after the U.S. government declared the COVID-19 “national emergency” over.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS director of communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement, NBC News reported.

“HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.

Despite the fact that former President Joe Biden admitted in 2022 that the COVID “pandemic” was over, Health and Human Services (HHS) has been continuing to allocate funds for COVID testing, “vaccines,” and “global COVID projects,” according to CDC talking points.

The funding cut comes as millions of dollars for other initiatives, including vaccine hesitancy research and HIV prevention, are slashed under new HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

HHS has made the greatest funding cutbacks government-wide, according to the Department of Government Efficiency’s website.

Dr. Robert Malone argued in 2023 that the only reason the Biden administration decided to end the national COVID “emergency” when it did is because of the congressional legislation seeking that end.

“The bottom line is that the imperial U.S. administrative state will never give up these unconstitutional powers until forced to do so,” Malone wrote.

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