COVID-19
So. Who gets the ventilators?

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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COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
Freedom Convoy
Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich, Chris Barber found guilty of mischief

From LifeSiteNews
Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.”
Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been found guilty of mischief for their roles as leaders of the 2022 protest and as social media influencers, a Canadian federal judge has ruled.
“The Crown has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Lich and Barber have committed mischief,” said Justice Heather Perkins-McVey, the federal judge overseeing the pair’s mischief trial, during the verdict hearing Thursday.
The Democracy Fund, who has been helping the defense in the case, also noted on X, “Mischief is proven beyond a reasonable doubt here. Both Lich and Barber are guilty of mischief.”
“When freedom of expression collides with the need to uphold public order is when the line is crossed,” the judge said during court.
Perkins-McVey seemed to agree with the Crown’s case that Lich and Barber’s influence on the Freedom Convoy constituted public mischief but did dismiss the Crown’s Carter Application accusing Lich and Barber of conspiracy outright.
The government’s “Carter Application” asked that the judge consider “Barber’s statements and actions to establish the guilt of Lich, and vice versa.”
A “Carter Application” requires that the government prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there was a “conspiracy or plan in place and that Lich was a party to it based on direct evidence.”
Lawyer Eva Chipiuk noted that Perkins-McVey “acknowledged that there was disruption on Ottawa and said its citizens and that downtown was jammed, loud and busy.”
Court will reconvene later today for additional information to be revealed.
Lich and Barber both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews reported extensively on their trial.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September of 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.
Lich and Barber were arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa for their roles in leading the popular Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates. During COVID, Canadians were subjected to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, extensive lockdowns and even the closure of churches.
Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich recently spelled out how much the Canadian government has spent prosecuting her and Barber for their role in the protests. She said at least $5 million in “taxpayer dollars” has been spent thus far, with her and Barber’s legal costs being above $750,000.
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