Coronavirus: what Canadians need to know

Anecdotal update from me but it seems conditions in Alberta are really bad. This morning I heard Mayor Nenshi saying that their rate of positive diagnosis was higher than what was being experienced in India (not gross numbers obviously but the prevalence rate). I then heard from a friend that their son is working as a paramedic in Fort McMurray and that the cases there are through the roof and really severe.

A view from a doctor on the front lines:

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I worked in ICUs and Covid wards the last 20 days in a row, and some of the nights. It is a privilege to get to take care of sick people; I love my job. Whatever fatigue I might feel tonight is no justification to restrict anyone's human rights.

Thank you, Dr. Strauss, for your dedication and hard work on behalf of patients suffering from covid. Thank you also for tirelessly sharing your personal experiences and expert knowledge about public health, and advocating for a covid response strategy that takes into account all facets and that produces the best overall result.

The pandemic's
lethal twilight

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/when-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-...

Stephen Lewis keeps fighting for worldwide access to vaccines

https://rabble.ca/news/2021/05/stephen-lewis-keeps-fighting-worldwide-ac...

To Defend Public Health, We Need More Than Lockdowns

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/covid-19-lockdowns-panagiotis-sotiris-dem...

Get your second jab!

https://www.scmp.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjwhMmEBhBwEiwAXwFoEWwgm9zOlQesOSUTomj6...

Tragedy and Crisis in Ontario exposes the corporate influences over and conflicts of interest among members of the covid advisory board in Ontario:

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The Ontario Covid19 Science Advisory Table is comprised of over 30 academics from various disciplines, most of which, like Juni, are members of the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana school. 

They focus on predictive modelling of cases and deaths based on the comparison of current behaviours vs. no intervention vs. heavy restrictions and lockdowns. Their mysterious methodologies have a notoriously terrible track record, with their estimations of sickness and death consistently multiple times higher than reality.

For example, David Fisman, epidemiologist and professor at Dalla Lana, and one of their highest profile and most vocal members on social media, tweeted on January 12th, 2021, that there was ‘tsunami of death’ coming, which of course, turned out to be false. Ironically, he hoped there would be “consequences for those who knowingly pushed disinformation.” 

In a paper Fisman co-authored with Juni in May 2020, they drew the astonishing conclusion that “seasonality is likely to play only a minor role in the epidemiology of COVID-19, while public health interventions (school closures, restricting mass gatherings, social distancing) appear to have a major impact.” This directly contradicts decades-long, strongly supported science on seasonality for respiratory infections. 

Admittedly, the authors state that the “study has a number of important limitations.”, in total seven, of which the first is “because of considerable differences in testing practices between different geopolitical areas, actual rates of COVID-19 could not be reliably estimated.” 

The paper also states that “China was excluded as its epidemic growth had decelerated and the outbreak appeared to be contained.”, mirroring the official narrative told by the CCP, that ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ such as lockdowns could contain the virus.  

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Then we have Global Canada, a previously dormant organization founded in 2014 by Robert Greenhill, that suddenly became very active in October 2020, following a mega financial contribution of over half a million dollars by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They funded a “taskforce” called The COVID Strategic Choices Group, meant to inform the gov’t pandemic response with a goal of Zero Covid, citing  AUS, NZ, Taiwan as examples to follow. 

They call this strategy the “Canadian Shield”, and its methodologies include test and trace, isolation, and heavy, hard, ongoing national lockdowns, with closed borders, all of which it advocated for in a policy paper published on December 30, 2020 called, “Building the Canadian Shield”

Ontario Science Table members, including David Fisman, promoted the paper upon its publication. Although they are separate entities, the Covid Strategic Choices group created by Global Canada has members on the OST, such as Andrew Morris, and who contribute to the OST, such as Ashleigh Tuite, infectious disease epidemiologist, mathematical modeller, and assistant professor at U of T’s Dalla Lana.

Interestingly, shortly after the time that Global Canada was revived after receiving Gates money, Tuite, who regularly publishes papers with Fisman, attended a virtual conference in Beijing on Covid response, featuring key notes speakers from the WHO and Chinese Center for DIsease control and prevention.

Keeney O'Toole did you read the article? Do you understand that most headlines distort the content their purpose is to be click bait. For CNN this not a bad report, strange how the 1,000 doses that have been returned are the focus of the headline implying there was something wrong with the product.

Duterte's about-face on the Sinopharm shots highlights the regulatory roadblock faced by Chinese vaccines in the absence of an emergency use approval from the World Health Organization (WHO), even though the shots have been approved for use in dozens of countries.

When Sinopharm applied for emergency use with the Philippine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in early March, the agency's director said that, as with the case of Sinovac, it would take longer to decide on Sinopharm's application because it hadn't been approved by a "stringent regulatory authority," such as WHO.

But that could soon change. WHO said at a press briefing Monday that it expected to finalize decisions on the emergency use approval for both of the submitted Sinopharm and Sinovac's vaccines "by the end of this week."

 

In chasing zero Covid-19 infections, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and others have become trapped by their own success

• As more transmissible variants emerge, places with very low infection levels must consider ever more stringent controls to maintain the status quo
• A reluctance to accept the virus will become endemic and populations that see no urgency in getting vaccinated mean the early victors may be the last to reopen

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3132638/chasing-zero-covi...

NorthReport wrote:

In chasing zero Covid-19 infections, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and others have become trapped by their own success

• As more transmissible variants emerge, places with very low infection levels must consider ever more stringent controls to maintain the status quo
• A reluctance to accept the virus will become endemic and populations that see no urgency in getting vaccinated mean the early victors may be the last to reopen

 

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3132638/chasing-zero-covi...

We told you so at the outset. Had the approach of the Great Barrington Declaration of focused protection been applied at the start of the pandemic, especially given what we know from how the vast majority of passengers on the Diamond Princess never had any problems despite cruise ships being one of the worst possible environments for the containment of infectious diseases, the worst of the pandemic would have been behind us by now, even if it wasn't technically over.

Alberta and Ontario need to be put under trusteeship and the power taken away from the freaks running their provinces

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/06/canada-alberta-pandemic-no...

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-s-active-covid-cases...