- covid was never dangerous to healthy people under 60
- natural immunity from having had covid was superior to vaccine immunity
- the vaccines never prevented transmission
- the vaccines carried substantial risk of heart damage to young men
- masks never worked
- there is little evidence that lockdowns prevented infection, and that they did massive harm is obvious
- Canada, like many other developed nations, suffered little or no excess mortality in 2020, but substantial excess mortality in 2021 & 2022
- the main driver of covid case levels was seasonality, rather than NPIs
Were they discussed at the conference? Widely acknowledged even by govt "experts" as true, they pretty much destroy the argument for any part of Canada's covid response.
Instead of going after straw men and patting themselves on the back, perhaps attendees should have done some actual reflection on what they did.
Nothing's as boring as being proved wrong. :-) But seriously, at a conference devoted to our covid response, they probably should have considered these facts.
Brevity is the soul of wit, and I just found the greatest line on a Mastodon post by science-explainer author Katie Mack:
"Nothing exemplifies a complete failure to understand the point of science like demanding to settle a scientific issue through the medium of emotionally persuasive public shouting."
My original post hoped to dissuade other pro-vax/mask/etc voices from responding, was addressed to them. But people just had to respond, and a series of posts followed, at best tangential to Paul Wells' intent for the use of his space. Mr. Ch can also tell Wells' readers about similar long passages of comments at The Line - before they had to close off all comments in THEIR space.
Now I'll just beg you: stop. You may be on the side of Truth, Beauty and Justice, but you're fighting for them with flamethrowers in a quiet cafe' where people are trying to discuss larger topics.
It's Paul's space, and if you know your host, don't act like he wouldn't. Respect the tone he keeps. Or we'll lose our quiet cafe': he'll have to close it, like The Line did. Probably after wasting a bunch of his time as a bouncer, banning people - like The Line did.
So Stop. Take your very laudable fight for Truth, Beauty and Justice outside.
Roy, I should have read through more of the posts before responding. Oh well, I’m days late and it felt good.
The funny thing is that I haven’t talked about Covid in ages except in passing. It seems to me that while we are all still very aware of it we are very tired of talking about it...mostly. And that’s healthy.
The fact that sustaining the "official" view depends on silencing critics rather than addressing their criticism gives asymmetric opportunity to critics in any forum where they are not silenced.
There are stats online setting out the breakdown by age. Simply Google, there are plenty. You will also see the extremely low number for children, yet schools were closed.
Who were the first to have access to a Covid vaccine and any subsequent boosters? In my sightline, those in the 40 to 50 year old cohort were well down the list.
Masks helped.. They did lower amount of particles you were spreading/receiving. They worked very well if they were N95 or KN95 and well fitted.and tightened over the nose. Myocarditis did happen but mostly in young men/teen boys who were given moderna. By then Pfizer was offered as an alternative. It is important to note that in most of these cases of vaccine related myocarditis, symptoms were not severe and recovery ensued.. More importantly, those who did not get vaccinated and got COVID were far MORE likely to get myocarditis.
I perhaps should not have singled out Moderna here as studiies re mild myocarditis in young vmales who received vaccines seem to lump all the mNRA vaccines together.. I have had 6 doses now, 2 Pfizer and 4 Moderna and going strong at 81, thanks to modern science.
I have not caught Covid-19. I have an assortment of jabs from AZ to Pfizer’s bivalent. All I got was a sore arm for a day or so. I wear a mask on occasion still depending on the circumstances. My entire family, including the kids, has caught Covid, some more than once, one bout was worrisome but all were ok within a week. I’m old as dirt though not quite as old as you Mark. And I know quite a few people who also have not caught Covid. Your statements are absurd.
Vaccines are not medicine. They are designed to prevent or lessen the impact of specific diseases. Not to treat them. There is so much misunderstanding and distrust around scientific facts.
You nail it with "distrust". Another thing we're losing is deference to expertise - not to authority (too much deference to authority can be dangerous), but to expertise. I'm not an expert in science, and that's why I'm comfortable saying, "Anthony Fauci knows more about this than I do." Nowadays, everyone thinks finding someone on the internet who agrees with them means they're right.
A ridiculous quibble. Vaccines are biologically active substances. Whether you call them medicine, drugs, pharmaceuticals, or gene therapy is irrelevant.
I hear you Terry -- your last 2 sentences describe me to a “t” with the added bit that my first 2 shots were AZ cuz “the first is the best”. But the messaging from public health was so mixed from the get-go, and then especially in the last year as it got increasingly politicized that I have lost all faith in public health to be an unbiased resource fixated on the goal of my safety. Appreciating health is a provincial responsibility, this country would benefit immensely from an open public hearing -- not restricted by Chatham House Rules -- into how to ensure we are ready for the next one. I’m an avid reader of post-apocalyptic fiction so keenly sensitive that we got off lightly with this little wake-up call.
I understand the frustration with old computer technology, but it seems to be a secondary issue to me. There was a looming crisis that was obvious since mid January 2020, but it didn't become "real" to some top public health officials until Mrs Trudeau was infected? That's a real problem that fancy new computers won't solve.
My brother and I were making bets during Lunar New Year dinner about how bad this novel coronavirus would be (he won - it was bad). We, just regular dudes who pay a bit of attention to the news, were tuned into this in mid-January. We were making personal preparations for disaster by February. What did the public health apparatus do to prepare?
It sounds like a lot of government departments sit around gathering data and holding meetings, but don't have the capacity or the mandate to take meaningful action to head off a looming crisis. Everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to make a decision. This isn't just a public health problem either - this issue crops up all the time. We have passive institutions. If this crisis didn't light a fire under their butts, I don't know what will.
This piece may be your best. And a challenging piece to put together, given reports of hyper-partisanship and furrowed brow warning on the ills of today’s social media environment.
Some thoughts:
Broad policy consensus is Canada’s super power.
For example, it’s Pride Month. And you’d hardly know it. Unless you have friends or family in the seemingly endless number of celebrations or saw local media coverage, mostly along the lines of covering a music festival or Fall fair. Yes, there’s coverage of more serious aspects of Pride, but there’s also no media of the existential variety we first heard when all this began it capture the public’s and policymakers attention.
Same-sex marriage legislation, perhaps Paul Martin’s greatest legacy as Prime Minister, is less than twenty years ago - but we did get there early in comparison to others. Obama, for example.
You could fill a book with other examples of broad policy consensus. It’s pretty remarkable, given the length and breadth of the country and the people. To say nothing of the noisy neighbours. Or how we got our start as nations. And how we got to 40 million as one nation.
So I too remain struck by Joel. The ‘take X add politics you get politics’. But I will add this to the equation. Take X and add the politics of an uber efficient 31% of the popular vote, and you get politics designed to attack areas of broad consensus. It’s how you get a Minister tweeting insinuations that the Leader of the Opposition harbours anti-LGBT opinions. The same leader who’s adopted father is in a same-sex marriage. And you get other Ministers trolling Conservatives on other issues.
And before anyone goes ‘well what about the other guy’ on me, the Opposition Leader has yet to propose a platform, let alone govern. So slow your ‘soldiers in the street’ roll. Your turn is coming up.
This is about nearly eight years of a government working their vote down to the nub, leaning heavily one way and never leaning the other way. And packing everything into one political lens to suit their own electoral needs.
Today’s Canada is the durable and admirable result of an improbable idea. But our future is never certain. And I would argue that it is less certain with a government that labels it’s critics as foes and threats to other Canadians - consistently the ones who correspond to the support the government needs to hold to retain power. Canadians are not the for of other Canadians. They’re just the government’s critics. And the balance of evidence says that in Canada, it’s a good thing for governments have critics. It raises the level of the lake allowing all the boats float higher. Makes it more resilient.
Well-written, but I have a question and a comment.
How is the current government "attacking areas of broad consensus"? I'm actually asking. My perception is that, as Paul discusses in this piece, the government's general approach to COVID has been onside with broad consensus, and that (Paul didn't say this part) it's been the Conservatives who are at odds with "broad consensus".
Not to engage in the whataboutism you attempt to pre-empt, but it is interesting that I (a Liberal) simply haven't heard about the incident you mention where a Liberal minister accused Poilievre of homophobia, but I certainly did see an incident in the House recently where Poilievre made a rather un-Parliamentary implication about the prime minister. We're all so deep in our own bubbles now - it's not good.
(I agree, for the record, that there's been a troubling trend in Canada over the past couple of governments where the government tries to "troll" the opposition, as you say - I don't think that's how the system should work. The government should govern, the opposition should oppose - a government that's trying to oppose the opposition doesn't have its priorities straight.)
(I won’t get into the mandatory COVID vaccination policy as an example, but the PM’s comments prior to imposing them are more aligned with the consensus than the comments he made when he imposed them, in the lead up to an election.)
I’ll use gun control as an example. Gun owners support gun control. Few, if any, argue for no rules. Yet last month, the Public Safety Minister said his gun Bill was the biggest thing in gun control in a generation. Oddly, Goodale’s 2019 Bill didn’t cut it. Bill Blair’s 2021 rifle ban wasn’t it. The hand gun sale/resale ban last year wasn’t enough. It’s rained gun measures but gun owners remain in possession (in the case of the Blair ban, for years) of guns the government says are a risk to the public. Despite those same ‘banned’ guns being associated with zero crimes. Yet I’m certain the next SFT or LPC platform will include more about guns.
Climate suffers from the same over supply of initiatives and torqued rhetoric versus proof points, detailed plans and underlying policy. Much of it, in reality. is piggybacked on longstanding climate policies across provinces governed by parties and doesn’t sum to the GoC’s targets let alone their ambition flex. The rest is jazz hands that are unlikely to see the light of day, let alone contribute to reductions - this emissions cap proposal and reworked ‘Just Transition’ are the show ponies to their base and red flags in search of bulls.
I won’t deal in the cut and thrust of the House. It is what it is. But it isn’t new. Hansard would tell you that if it could talk.
(To be clear, if I wasn't: the point of my second-to-last paragraph was not, "Your guy is worse than my guy!" It was that I haven't heard about the thing that my guy said - that we increasingly consume media that just tells us what's bad about the other guys and doesn't draw attention to the flaws of our own side.)
Glad that some pointed out that talking to all opposition parties and MPs in a crisis is pretty important.
In addition, listening to critics in the scientific field would have been helpful too. Are all criticisms and critics valid? No. But the scientists involved with the Great Barrington Declaration look to be closer to the truth than many health officials.
And traditional epidemic/pandemic response policies were often thrown out the window. Example: protecting the most vulnerable versus going China style and imposing restrictions on everyone.
Can Canada handle the next epidemic or pandemic? Well, looking at Covid and the opioid crisis I would definitely guess no.
I wonder about the future impacts of hybrid working from home models for federal civil servants - but more so Parliamentary. In the case of Parliamentarians there seems to be a need for greater dialogue, informal face-to-face engagement, and a fulsome bipartisan effort to counterbalance polarized social media.
I’m glad that there was an open discussion of how partisan advantage crept into a pandemic. In my opinion, this partisanship was in the picture pretty much right from the start. Perhaps this is because the reflex instincts of the Trudeau Government are to demonize and weaponize through talking points to suit the 24/7 news cycles. This tendency manifests itself through lunacy like accusing those who wanted flights to and from China cancelled every nasty name and then losing precious time figuring out how to close the air space because it was the right thing to do.
It’s worth pondering what kind of pandemic Canada would have had with a strong administration full of Cabinet Ministers who knew their files and could get things done. A government that knew how to consult and LISTEN.
Instead Canadians had to suffer through a pandemic with the most secretive, opaque and partisan federal government in recent times running the show. It’s hard to imagine Chrétien, Harper or Martin dreaming up a scheme to pay students to volunteer.
I agree with you, Darcy, that I wish we'd taken COVID more seriously, sooner.
I'm wondering (and I think we've been doing this long enough that you know I'm sincerely interested in your perspective, not trying to score rhetorical points): to whom do you think the government should have listened better, and do you think previous governments would have done a better job listening to those people?
The government should have read the SARS Commission Report.
The government should have paid attention as China was cancelling New Year celebrations and rushing to build hospitals in Jan 2020.
The public health officials were studying data that was inadequate and already obsolete. They were making recommendations with no basis in reality. "Following the science" was a fool's errand in the early days simply because the data wasn't there. But we could see what China was doing. We knew what happened during SARS. We knew the risks. But we didn't act in time. We should have.
Most (really, all) criticism that I see of the government is people saying they should have done less circa 2021-2022. I'm 100% on board with the notion that they should have done more in 2020.
They waited to act until it was too late. They didn't do very much to shore up the health care system with the time that the lockdowns bought. Then they waited too long to lift the lockdowns. The whole notion of public health policy became increasingly absurd.
The lockdowns were supposed to buy us time to get our act together. We never did get our act together. As Taleb says: a pandemic is an existential threat that must be killed in the egg. Don't gamble with a pandemic.
I agree with your comment about the SARS Commission Report. I read it, and Teresa Tam was one of the co-authors. In my humble opinion it was a good report, and I was terribly frustrated that Ms Tam didn't immediately roll up her sleeves and get started implementing it. I know hindsight is 20/20 but even at the time I remember thinking how weak and indecisive she appeared. No leadership at all.
It depends on whether you think lockdowns are doing something. If they are, then the government should also have done less in 2020. (I realize they were mainly provincial jurisdiction, but the federal govt funded and encouraged them)
Lockdowns absolutely slowed the spread of the virus, at the cost of a lot of social trauma. It's like amputating a limb to stop an infection. Border quarantine and vigorous contact tracing starting in Jan 2020 would have been a much less traumatic measure that probably would have produced better results.
I’ll never forget Teresa Tam quote: “the risk to Canadians is low” around or about January 2020. Famous last words for an incompetent government response on many levels. Not ALL levels but enough.
Yeah, they don’t know the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is known and quantifiable based on lots of historical data or predetermined odds. Uncertainty is the stuff you don’t know. Is there a tiger rustling in that bush? The risk is low, but the consequences of being wrong are catastrophic. Better take precautions just in case.
I remember a graph that PHAC put out in spring 2020 showing their strangely precise but wide-ranging prediction of case counts only three days in the future. It was something like “between 8267 and 16,734 cases in the next three days”. It turned out to be worse than even the worst-case scenario predicted.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets ya into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
The Government has an obligation to consult broadly across jurisdictions but this is complicated because of the division of health delivery within the provinces and oversight by Ottawa.
In my line of work, broad consultations alleviates the risk of Bunker Mentality. Sometimes an alternative point of view can produce an impetus to change course for the better. Once the Liberals established their talking points regarding travel, PPE supply, vaccine mandates etc, contrary opinions were not welcomed. That’s a shame because the continuing evolution of the virus required numerous resets in strategy that were mired in political gamesmanship.
Interesting article for sure. But for me, living and working in Ottawa, nothing is surprising here at all. A group of people who all owe their jobs to the prevailing narrative and to the Liberal government getting together to compare notes is not very interesting to me, despite Chatham House rules. What on earth would you really expect?
You mention you believe Covid-19 occurred naturally. This is a leap I believe and I would love to see you write a column after reviewing the recent statements coming from the US Government about this matter. It seems to me that they are pretty sure it was “manufactured” in Wuhan through gain-of-function research that the US Government helped finance; and “probably” so did Canada (again, please find out for us readers why 2 Chinese scientists were evicted from Canada, having worked in Winnipeg where our Level 4 Lab is located with the Liberal government ignoring Parliament’s demands for the facts as to their eviction.) That the Government ignored Parliament, a fact that has never before occurred in our country, is simply too suggestive that our Government was complicit.
I thought this at the time, but now with the Johnston fiasco behind and before us, I believe there was just too much truth to the speculation at the time that Canada too, was involved in the gain-of-function research taking place in Wuhan. And our Government contracting for a Chinese vaccine, to be manufactured in Canada under license even though we had no functioning facilities to do so, to my mind, supports the logic. How any Cabinet could approve such a deal is simply beyond me. Canadians needed a vaccine immediately, at the time, and because of this decision we were at the back of the line and many, many Canadians suffered.
To be clear, Paul, I am not suggesting for a moment that this virus was released on purpose. It was, I believe, an accident. Period. But no comment at the meeting you attended on this matter?
So my plea to you, as one of your earliest subscribers, is that you do the messy leg-work on the US reports and others, never mind the Barrington Declaration, and write up your findings for us. If they confirm your current view, fine, but at least write about it. The meeting of all the establishment in Ottawa would not be helpful here. None of them under any set of rules would be so foolish as to speak of this as a possibility never mind Canada’s own role in it all.
Sorry for the lengthy response. And keep up the good work.
I do believe a public post mortem on the strengths/weaknesses of our collective governments’ response to Covid is warranted, if not, a necessity for what will surely be future challenges. If I have a lingering thought it is a belief that, generally, our government failed to show humility- “we are in unchartered territory, we will stumble”, compassion- we acknowledge these are onerous, exacting measures, and most importantly did not seize the opportunity to galvanize our nation in an unified literal fight for our lives.
Thanks for the thoughtful article. My take (stand?): the virus is real. The government initially responded effectively with Canadians interests in mind. The vaccines were also real and effective, if not a complete solution. The virus continually surprised and required adaptive strategies. Later, both the government and those who did not believe the virus was a real threat acted politically. But viruses don't care what you believe, and only a little about how you behave. The next virus will itself behave differently and these lessons will be a reference, not a solution. The most effective response - the one that moves humans most quickly back to a normal existence - may well require understanding and sacrifice. A challenge awaits.
Thanks Paul, as always, thoughtful, intelligent and, most importantly, based on reporting. Substack is great, I pay for several writers, but none (sorry The Line) go much beyond punditry. Your writing is always informed by actually talking to the people you’re writing about. I learn more here than almost anywhere else. And you make the nerdy policy stuff relevant and interesting.
I would like to see a neutral, careful study of Sweden's response - did they really not lockdown as I've heard? Did they really not close schools at all? Did school children never wear masks? Was their Covid rate roughly the same as ours?
Depending on which report you are using, you may get very different results. The World Mortality Dataset, widely accepted by European and other countries has Canada (12%) significantly lower than almost every country, including Sweden (18%). At the same time Statistics Canada reports 7.6%. The key fact is that Canada performed significantly better in this area than most countries so a detailed study of our actions during the pandemic would be of value, both to Canada and other countries in preparing for the next pandemic.
This much I know for sure, I would not have had the patience to sit through the "Learning from Canada's COVID-19 Pandemic" conference. Kudos to you. My take on the government's handling of the pandemic would have been one of those using the "terribly" descriptor, and that would then place me with one of those folks the conference attendees describe as having a "misunderstanding of what happened."
Because from my vantage point, this is what happened. The government initially dithered whether COVID would even be a concern for Canadians. Remember how they criticized the U.S. for restricting travellers from China for fear of transmission. Later, of course, Canada too restricted travellers from China and other countries from entering Canada. Canada dithered whether or not masks would be necessary and doubted whether they would be effective. Later they were mandated.
Over time we learned, much to our surprise that those of us who were vaccinated, and boosted, we could still catch and transmit the virus. My argument is then it does not provide immunity which is a criteria to being identified as a vaccine. Nevertheless statistics for Ontario tell the tale regarding the "vaccine". Among those individuals who were hospitalized due to COVID, higher percentage of the unvaccinated ended up in the ICU. The "vaccine" may not have provided immunity, but odds were it would result in one being less ill. We also know that the vaccines did not provide the herd immunity as touted by the government.
The Prime Minister said in January 2021 that mandating vaccines through a vaccine passport would be unfair and divisive. A few weeks later he imposed those unfair and divisive mandates, and so it came to be that without proof of vaccine one could not take public transit, enter restaurants, movie theatres, etc.
In early 2020 we were all complaining that the government was ill-prepared and did not have a plan in place to handle a pandemic. As much as I am uneasy about opening old wounds, there is certainly merit in conferences as the one you describe, if in the end the government is prompted to take steps toward formulating a plan of preparedness in the event of another pandemic. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!"
Not sure if you follow Public on here but they published an article this week that makes a case for a lab leak theory. It is fascinating to me how people pick a side and tend to stick there....who knows who or what to believe anymore.
Paul - was there any discussion of the many pandemic plans for flu or coronaviruses that governments had pre-‘20? The ones I’ve read (like the 2019 WHO plan) don’t recommend locking down. Indeed, they look more like focussed protection.
Anybody remember that thing in the Stephen King novels about Derry, where everybody forgets the impossibly horrible thing that just happened, IT or whatever?
I think the "lessons learned" from the pandemic, would include "go back to those 1990s and 2000s reports on care-homes, and follow them."
And, I note that the word "care", my computer assures me, does not appear in article or comments. I didn't have to type "home". We forgot, already. This is Derry.
I think that "Maybe our society should value even the last years of lives enough to hire a few more care-aides, like we keep promising to" could be a statement that vaxxer and anti- alike could sign on with. And the High and Mighty at the great meeting could have swept out of the way in the first hour.
I remember early days and one of the first deaths from Covid in BC was in a care home in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver. A couple of days later it is revealed that the care-aides in order to get more hours (but not overtime) will work 4 or 5 hours in one location and then another 4 or 5 hours in another, usually a bus ride away. Long hours, many elderly who need their attention, the pay and benefits are not fantastic and many are not considered full-time employees as they don’t reach a 40-hour week at one location. I do not know if this is still the case but I expect it is as I have not heard of any changes. I do hear of more for-profit “care” homes being built in the Lower Mainland. They are even unionized. I am not impressed.
I recall reading that "care aides", along with nurses and family doctors, got offered a better deal by (BC Premier) Eby a few months ago. That's something.
Bonnie distinguished herself by forbidding any care-aides going to multiple homes, early on, greatly reducing transmission. Quebec continued letting them move around for well over a month, and had Canada's worst pandemic performance, mostly because of *their* care-home debacle.
Thanks so much for covering this, Paul. With the lingering death of mainstream reporting, more and more we're forced to go to original sources. I would like to read the series of articles Policy Options wrote on this topic, but one can only have so many hobbies.
I'm wondering if people spoke about the lack of data. Waste water monitoring was a godsend but for the most part we were proceeding with our lives, or not, without having a good understanding of the level of risk in our community. It amazed me that public health units didn't immediately randomly select people to track the progress of the virus, its symptoms and spread, over time, adjusting for different cohorts (front line vs work from home; families with school kids vs not) to provide statistically significant insights.
What about the claims that:
- covid was never dangerous to healthy people under 60
- natural immunity from having had covid was superior to vaccine immunity
- the vaccines never prevented transmission
- the vaccines carried substantial risk of heart damage to young men
- masks never worked
- there is little evidence that lockdowns prevented infection, and that they did massive harm is obvious
- Canada, like many other developed nations, suffered little or no excess mortality in 2020, but substantial excess mortality in 2021 & 2022
- the main driver of covid case levels was seasonality, rather than NPIs
Were they discussed at the conference? Widely acknowledged even by govt "experts" as true, they pretty much destroy the argument for any part of Canada's covid response.
Instead of going after straw men and patting themselves on the back, perhaps attendees should have done some actual reflection on what they did.
Maybe they got bored engaging with all those arguments. People do. I have.
Nothing's as boring as being proved wrong. :-) But seriously, at a conference devoted to our covid response, they probably should have considered these facts.
Brevity is the soul of wit, and I just found the greatest line on a Mastodon post by science-explainer author Katie Mack:
"Nothing exemplifies a complete failure to understand the point of science like demanding to settle a scientific issue through the medium of emotionally persuasive public shouting."
My original post hoped to dissuade other pro-vax/mask/etc voices from responding, was addressed to them. But people just had to respond, and a series of posts followed, at best tangential to Paul Wells' intent for the use of his space. Mr. Ch can also tell Wells' readers about similar long passages of comments at The Line - before they had to close off all comments in THEIR space.
Now I'll just beg you: stop. You may be on the side of Truth, Beauty and Justice, but you're fighting for them with flamethrowers in a quiet cafe' where people are trying to discuss larger topics.
It's Paul's space, and if you know your host, don't act like he wouldn't. Respect the tone he keeps. Or we'll lose our quiet cafe': he'll have to close it, like The Line did. Probably after wasting a bunch of his time as a bouncer, banning people - like The Line did.
So Stop. Take your very laudable fight for Truth, Beauty and Justice outside.
Roy, I should have read through more of the posts before responding. Oh well, I’m days late and it felt good.
The funny thing is that I haven’t talked about Covid in ages except in passing. It seems to me that while we are all still very aware of it we are very tired of talking about it...mostly. And that’s healthy.
(It’s all Paul’s fault, he brought it up:)
The fact that sustaining the "official" view depends on silencing critics rather than addressing their criticism gives asymmetric opportunity to critics in any forum where they are not silenced.
Outlier cases shouldn’t drive policy. Most 49 year olds were not at serious risk from Covid even before the vaccine.
There are stats online setting out the breakdown by age. Simply Google, there are plenty. You will also see the extremely low number for children, yet schools were closed.
But teachers and staff still got sick. My daughter, a teacher in an elementary school and my young g’kids (under 12) all caught covid-19.
True, but statistically the fatality rate for children was extremely low. For children no more serious than the common cold.
And recovered, because it's harmless to healthy young people.
Who were the first to have access to a Covid vaccine and any subsequent boosters? In my sightline, those in the 40 to 50 year old cohort were well down the list.
Did masks work? Did vax immunity work better than natural immunity? Did myocarditis not happen? ...
Masks helped.. They did lower amount of particles you were spreading/receiving. They worked very well if they were N95 or KN95 and well fitted.and tightened over the nose. Myocarditis did happen but mostly in young men/teen boys who were given moderna. By then Pfizer was offered as an alternative. It is important to note that in most of these cases of vaccine related myocarditis, symptoms were not severe and recovery ensued.. More importantly, those who did not get vaccinated and got COVID were far MORE likely to get myocarditis.
I perhaps should not have singled out Moderna here as studiies re mild myocarditis in young vmales who received vaccines seem to lump all the mNRA vaccines together.. I have had 6 doses now, 2 Pfizer and 4 Moderna and going strong at 81, thanks to modern science.
Essentially nobody wore masks the way you describe. And did "lowering particles" prevent people from getting covid?
Everyone got covid anyway, so the choice is between vax and covid vs covid only: vax and no covid wasn't an option.
And of course, your claim that myocarditis is a more common effect of covid than of the vax has been thoroughly debunked for young men.
Your views are as absurd as the "plandemic" person Mr Wells references in his article. And just as embarrassing to many people on your side.
I have not caught Covid-19. I have an assortment of jabs from AZ to Pfizer’s bivalent. All I got was a sore arm for a day or so. I wear a mask on occasion still depending on the circumstances. My entire family, including the kids, has caught Covid, some more than once, one bout was worrisome but all were ok within a week. I’m old as dirt though not quite as old as you Mark. And I know quite a few people who also have not caught Covid. Your statements are absurd.
Please stop embarrassing yourself.
Forcing medicines with dangerous side effects on people who don't benefit from them is problematic in many ways.
Vaccines are not medicine. They are designed to prevent or lessen the impact of specific diseases. Not to treat them. There is so much misunderstanding and distrust around scientific facts.
You nail it with "distrust". Another thing we're losing is deference to expertise - not to authority (too much deference to authority can be dangerous), but to expertise. I'm not an expert in science, and that's why I'm comfortable saying, "Anthony Fauci knows more about this than I do." Nowadays, everyone thinks finding someone on the internet who agrees with them means they're right.
A ridiculous quibble. Vaccines are biologically active substances. Whether you call them medicine, drugs, pharmaceuticals, or gene therapy is irrelevant.
I hear you Terry -- your last 2 sentences describe me to a “t” with the added bit that my first 2 shots were AZ cuz “the first is the best”. But the messaging from public health was so mixed from the get-go, and then especially in the last year as it got increasingly politicized that I have lost all faith in public health to be an unbiased resource fixated on the goal of my safety. Appreciating health is a provincial responsibility, this country would benefit immensely from an open public hearing -- not restricted by Chatham House Rules -- into how to ensure we are ready for the next one. I’m an avid reader of post-apocalyptic fiction so keenly sensitive that we got off lightly with this little wake-up call.
Me, too. And my wife makes three!
I understand the frustration with old computer technology, but it seems to be a secondary issue to me. There was a looming crisis that was obvious since mid January 2020, but it didn't become "real" to some top public health officials until Mrs Trudeau was infected? That's a real problem that fancy new computers won't solve.
My brother and I were making bets during Lunar New Year dinner about how bad this novel coronavirus would be (he won - it was bad). We, just regular dudes who pay a bit of attention to the news, were tuned into this in mid-January. We were making personal preparations for disaster by February. What did the public health apparatus do to prepare?
It sounds like a lot of government departments sit around gathering data and holding meetings, but don't have the capacity or the mandate to take meaningful action to head off a looming crisis. Everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to make a decision. This isn't just a public health problem either - this issue crops up all the time. We have passive institutions. If this crisis didn't light a fire under their butts, I don't know what will.
This piece may be your best. And a challenging piece to put together, given reports of hyper-partisanship and furrowed brow warning on the ills of today’s social media environment.
Some thoughts:
Broad policy consensus is Canada’s super power.
For example, it’s Pride Month. And you’d hardly know it. Unless you have friends or family in the seemingly endless number of celebrations or saw local media coverage, mostly along the lines of covering a music festival or Fall fair. Yes, there’s coverage of more serious aspects of Pride, but there’s also no media of the existential variety we first heard when all this began it capture the public’s and policymakers attention.
Same-sex marriage legislation, perhaps Paul Martin’s greatest legacy as Prime Minister, is less than twenty years ago - but we did get there early in comparison to others. Obama, for example.
You could fill a book with other examples of broad policy consensus. It’s pretty remarkable, given the length and breadth of the country and the people. To say nothing of the noisy neighbours. Or how we got our start as nations. And how we got to 40 million as one nation.
So I too remain struck by Joel. The ‘take X add politics you get politics’. But I will add this to the equation. Take X and add the politics of an uber efficient 31% of the popular vote, and you get politics designed to attack areas of broad consensus. It’s how you get a Minister tweeting insinuations that the Leader of the Opposition harbours anti-LGBT opinions. The same leader who’s adopted father is in a same-sex marriage. And you get other Ministers trolling Conservatives on other issues.
And before anyone goes ‘well what about the other guy’ on me, the Opposition Leader has yet to propose a platform, let alone govern. So slow your ‘soldiers in the street’ roll. Your turn is coming up.
This is about nearly eight years of a government working their vote down to the nub, leaning heavily one way and never leaning the other way. And packing everything into one political lens to suit their own electoral needs.
Today’s Canada is the durable and admirable result of an improbable idea. But our future is never certain. And I would argue that it is less certain with a government that labels it’s critics as foes and threats to other Canadians - consistently the ones who correspond to the support the government needs to hold to retain power. Canadians are not the for of other Canadians. They’re just the government’s critics. And the balance of evidence says that in Canada, it’s a good thing for governments have critics. It raises the level of the lake allowing all the boats float higher. Makes it more resilient.
Well-written, but I have a question and a comment.
How is the current government "attacking areas of broad consensus"? I'm actually asking. My perception is that, as Paul discusses in this piece, the government's general approach to COVID has been onside with broad consensus, and that (Paul didn't say this part) it's been the Conservatives who are at odds with "broad consensus".
Not to engage in the whataboutism you attempt to pre-empt, but it is interesting that I (a Liberal) simply haven't heard about the incident you mention where a Liberal minister accused Poilievre of homophobia, but I certainly did see an incident in the House recently where Poilievre made a rather un-Parliamentary implication about the prime minister. We're all so deep in our own bubbles now - it's not good.
(I agree, for the record, that there's been a troubling trend in Canada over the past couple of governments where the government tries to "troll" the opposition, as you say - I don't think that's how the system should work. The government should govern, the opposition should oppose - a government that's trying to oppose the opposition doesn't have its priorities straight.)
(I won’t get into the mandatory COVID vaccination policy as an example, but the PM’s comments prior to imposing them are more aligned with the consensus than the comments he made when he imposed them, in the lead up to an election.)
I’ll use gun control as an example. Gun owners support gun control. Few, if any, argue for no rules. Yet last month, the Public Safety Minister said his gun Bill was the biggest thing in gun control in a generation. Oddly, Goodale’s 2019 Bill didn’t cut it. Bill Blair’s 2021 rifle ban wasn’t it. The hand gun sale/resale ban last year wasn’t enough. It’s rained gun measures but gun owners remain in possession (in the case of the Blair ban, for years) of guns the government says are a risk to the public. Despite those same ‘banned’ guns being associated with zero crimes. Yet I’m certain the next SFT or LPC platform will include more about guns.
Climate suffers from the same over supply of initiatives and torqued rhetoric versus proof points, detailed plans and underlying policy. Much of it, in reality. is piggybacked on longstanding climate policies across provinces governed by parties and doesn’t sum to the GoC’s targets let alone their ambition flex. The rest is jazz hands that are unlikely to see the light of day, let alone contribute to reductions - this emissions cap proposal and reworked ‘Just Transition’ are the show ponies to their base and red flags in search of bulls.
I won’t deal in the cut and thrust of the House. It is what it is. But it isn’t new. Hansard would tell you that if it could talk.
That’s all I got for now. SK
(To be clear, if I wasn't: the point of my second-to-last paragraph was not, "Your guy is worse than my guy!" It was that I haven't heard about the thing that my guy said - that we increasingly consume media that just tells us what's bad about the other guys and doesn't draw attention to the flaws of our own side.)
Thanks for the summary.
Glad that some pointed out that talking to all opposition parties and MPs in a crisis is pretty important.
In addition, listening to critics in the scientific field would have been helpful too. Are all criticisms and critics valid? No. But the scientists involved with the Great Barrington Declaration look to be closer to the truth than many health officials.
And traditional epidemic/pandemic response policies were often thrown out the window. Example: protecting the most vulnerable versus going China style and imposing restrictions on everyone.
Can Canada handle the next epidemic or pandemic? Well, looking at Covid and the opioid crisis I would definitely guess no.
I wonder about the future impacts of hybrid working from home models for federal civil servants - but more so Parliamentary. In the case of Parliamentarians there seems to be a need for greater dialogue, informal face-to-face engagement, and a fulsome bipartisan effort to counterbalance polarized social media.
I’m glad that there was an open discussion of how partisan advantage crept into a pandemic. In my opinion, this partisanship was in the picture pretty much right from the start. Perhaps this is because the reflex instincts of the Trudeau Government are to demonize and weaponize through talking points to suit the 24/7 news cycles. This tendency manifests itself through lunacy like accusing those who wanted flights to and from China cancelled every nasty name and then losing precious time figuring out how to close the air space because it was the right thing to do.
It’s worth pondering what kind of pandemic Canada would have had with a strong administration full of Cabinet Ministers who knew their files and could get things done. A government that knew how to consult and LISTEN.
Instead Canadians had to suffer through a pandemic with the most secretive, opaque and partisan federal government in recent times running the show. It’s hard to imagine Chrétien, Harper or Martin dreaming up a scheme to pay students to volunteer.
I agree with you, Darcy, that I wish we'd taken COVID more seriously, sooner.
I'm wondering (and I think we've been doing this long enough that you know I'm sincerely interested in your perspective, not trying to score rhetorical points): to whom do you think the government should have listened better, and do you think previous governments would have done a better job listening to those people?
The government should have read the SARS Commission Report.
The government should have paid attention as China was cancelling New Year celebrations and rushing to build hospitals in Jan 2020.
The public health officials were studying data that was inadequate and already obsolete. They were making recommendations with no basis in reality. "Following the science" was a fool's errand in the early days simply because the data wasn't there. But we could see what China was doing. We knew what happened during SARS. We knew the risks. But we didn't act in time. We should have.
Most (really, all) criticism that I see of the government is people saying they should have done less circa 2021-2022. I'm 100% on board with the notion that they should have done more in 2020.
They waited to act until it was too late. They didn't do very much to shore up the health care system with the time that the lockdowns bought. Then they waited too long to lift the lockdowns. The whole notion of public health policy became increasingly absurd.
The lockdowns were supposed to buy us time to get our act together. We never did get our act together. As Taleb says: a pandemic is an existential threat that must be killed in the egg. Don't gamble with a pandemic.
I agree with your comment about the SARS Commission Report. I read it, and Teresa Tam was one of the co-authors. In my humble opinion it was a good report, and I was terribly frustrated that Ms Tam didn't immediately roll up her sleeves and get started implementing it. I know hindsight is 20/20 but even at the time I remember thinking how weak and indecisive she appeared. No leadership at all.
It depends on whether you think lockdowns are doing something. If they are, then the government should also have done less in 2020. (I realize they were mainly provincial jurisdiction, but the federal govt funded and encouraged them)
Lockdowns absolutely slowed the spread of the virus, at the cost of a lot of social trauma. It's like amputating a limb to stop an infection. Border quarantine and vigorous contact tracing starting in Jan 2020 would have been a much less traumatic measure that probably would have produced better results.
I’ll never forget Teresa Tam quote: “the risk to Canadians is low” around or about January 2020. Famous last words for an incompetent government response on many levels. Not ALL levels but enough.
Yeah, they don’t know the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is known and quantifiable based on lots of historical data or predetermined odds. Uncertainty is the stuff you don’t know. Is there a tiger rustling in that bush? The risk is low, but the consequences of being wrong are catastrophic. Better take precautions just in case.
I remember a graph that PHAC put out in spring 2020 showing their strangely precise but wide-ranging prediction of case counts only three days in the future. It was something like “between 8267 and 16,734 cases in the next three days”. It turned out to be worse than even the worst-case scenario predicted.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets ya into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Excellent comments. Thanks.
The Government has an obligation to consult broadly across jurisdictions but this is complicated because of the division of health delivery within the provinces and oversight by Ottawa.
In my line of work, broad consultations alleviates the risk of Bunker Mentality. Sometimes an alternative point of view can produce an impetus to change course for the better. Once the Liberals established their talking points regarding travel, PPE supply, vaccine mandates etc, contrary opinions were not welcomed. That’s a shame because the continuing evolution of the virus required numerous resets in strategy that were mired in political gamesmanship.
No, I seem to manage. Thanks for your concern.
Interesting article for sure. But for me, living and working in Ottawa, nothing is surprising here at all. A group of people who all owe their jobs to the prevailing narrative and to the Liberal government getting together to compare notes is not very interesting to me, despite Chatham House rules. What on earth would you really expect?
You mention you believe Covid-19 occurred naturally. This is a leap I believe and I would love to see you write a column after reviewing the recent statements coming from the US Government about this matter. It seems to me that they are pretty sure it was “manufactured” in Wuhan through gain-of-function research that the US Government helped finance; and “probably” so did Canada (again, please find out for us readers why 2 Chinese scientists were evicted from Canada, having worked in Winnipeg where our Level 4 Lab is located with the Liberal government ignoring Parliament’s demands for the facts as to their eviction.) That the Government ignored Parliament, a fact that has never before occurred in our country, is simply too suggestive that our Government was complicit.
I thought this at the time, but now with the Johnston fiasco behind and before us, I believe there was just too much truth to the speculation at the time that Canada too, was involved in the gain-of-function research taking place in Wuhan. And our Government contracting for a Chinese vaccine, to be manufactured in Canada under license even though we had no functioning facilities to do so, to my mind, supports the logic. How any Cabinet could approve such a deal is simply beyond me. Canadians needed a vaccine immediately, at the time, and because of this decision we were at the back of the line and many, many Canadians suffered.
To be clear, Paul, I am not suggesting for a moment that this virus was released on purpose. It was, I believe, an accident. Period. But no comment at the meeting you attended on this matter?
So my plea to you, as one of your earliest subscribers, is that you do the messy leg-work on the US reports and others, never mind the Barrington Declaration, and write up your findings for us. If they confirm your current view, fine, but at least write about it. The meeting of all the establishment in Ottawa would not be helpful here. None of them under any set of rules would be so foolish as to speak of this as a possibility never mind Canada’s own role in it all.
Sorry for the lengthy response. And keep up the good work.
Interesting comments.
I do believe a public post mortem on the strengths/weaknesses of our collective governments’ response to Covid is warranted, if not, a necessity for what will surely be future challenges. If I have a lingering thought it is a belief that, generally, our government failed to show humility- “we are in unchartered territory, we will stumble”, compassion- we acknowledge these are onerous, exacting measures, and most importantly did not seize the opportunity to galvanize our nation in an unified literal fight for our lives.
Thanks for the thoughtful article. My take (stand?): the virus is real. The government initially responded effectively with Canadians interests in mind. The vaccines were also real and effective, if not a complete solution. The virus continually surprised and required adaptive strategies. Later, both the government and those who did not believe the virus was a real threat acted politically. But viruses don't care what you believe, and only a little about how you behave. The next virus will itself behave differently and these lessons will be a reference, not a solution. The most effective response - the one that moves humans most quickly back to a normal existence - may well require understanding and sacrifice. A challenge awaits.
Thanks Paul, as always, thoughtful, intelligent and, most importantly, based on reporting. Substack is great, I pay for several writers, but none (sorry The Line) go much beyond punditry. Your writing is always informed by actually talking to the people you’re writing about. I learn more here than almost anywhere else. And you make the nerdy policy stuff relevant and interesting.
Thanks so much, Steve. Good to hear from you.
I would like to see a neutral, careful study of Sweden's response - did they really not lockdown as I've heard? Did they really not close schools at all? Did school children never wear masks? Was their Covid rate roughly the same as ours?
Their excess deaths over the entire 2020-2022 period were considerably lower than ours.
Depending on which report you are using, you may get very different results. The World Mortality Dataset, widely accepted by European and other countries has Canada (12%) significantly lower than almost every country, including Sweden (18%). At the same time Statistics Canada reports 7.6%. The key fact is that Canada performed significantly better in this area than most countries so a detailed study of our actions during the pandemic would be of value, both to Canada and other countries in preparing for the next pandemic.
And province by province, as health measures are provincial. I cannot forget the dreadful chaos here.
Over what time range?
Mark, I cannot help but be impressed by how you cling to your “facts” with a short sentence or two and the cavalier way you dismiss life and death.
Do you think any of my facts are actually incorrect?
Yes.
Hahaha - which? And on what evidence?
This much I know for sure, I would not have had the patience to sit through the "Learning from Canada's COVID-19 Pandemic" conference. Kudos to you. My take on the government's handling of the pandemic would have been one of those using the "terribly" descriptor, and that would then place me with one of those folks the conference attendees describe as having a "misunderstanding of what happened."
Because from my vantage point, this is what happened. The government initially dithered whether COVID would even be a concern for Canadians. Remember how they criticized the U.S. for restricting travellers from China for fear of transmission. Later, of course, Canada too restricted travellers from China and other countries from entering Canada. Canada dithered whether or not masks would be necessary and doubted whether they would be effective. Later they were mandated.
Over time we learned, much to our surprise that those of us who were vaccinated, and boosted, we could still catch and transmit the virus. My argument is then it does not provide immunity which is a criteria to being identified as a vaccine. Nevertheless statistics for Ontario tell the tale regarding the "vaccine". Among those individuals who were hospitalized due to COVID, higher percentage of the unvaccinated ended up in the ICU. The "vaccine" may not have provided immunity, but odds were it would result in one being less ill. We also know that the vaccines did not provide the herd immunity as touted by the government.
The Prime Minister said in January 2021 that mandating vaccines through a vaccine passport would be unfair and divisive. A few weeks later he imposed those unfair and divisive mandates, and so it came to be that without proof of vaccine one could not take public transit, enter restaurants, movie theatres, etc.
In early 2020 we were all complaining that the government was ill-prepared and did not have a plan in place to handle a pandemic. As much as I am uneasy about opening old wounds, there is certainly merit in conferences as the one you describe, if in the end the government is prompted to take steps toward formulating a plan of preparedness in the event of another pandemic. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!"
Not sure if you follow Public on here but they published an article this week that makes a case for a lab leak theory. It is fascinating to me how people pick a side and tend to stick there....who knows who or what to believe anymore.
https://open.substack.com/pub/public/p/we-deserve-answers?r=e83f1&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Paul - was there any discussion of the many pandemic plans for flu or coronaviruses that governments had pre-‘20? The ones I’ve read (like the 2019 WHO plan) don’t recommend locking down. Indeed, they look more like focussed protection.
Anybody remember that thing in the Stephen King novels about Derry, where everybody forgets the impossibly horrible thing that just happened, IT or whatever?
I think the "lessons learned" from the pandemic, would include "go back to those 1990s and 2000s reports on care-homes, and follow them."
And, I note that the word "care", my computer assures me, does not appear in article or comments. I didn't have to type "home". We forgot, already. This is Derry.
I think that "Maybe our society should value even the last years of lives enough to hire a few more care-aides, like we keep promising to" could be a statement that vaxxer and anti- alike could sign on with. And the High and Mighty at the great meeting could have swept out of the way in the first hour.
I remember early days and one of the first deaths from Covid in BC was in a care home in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver. A couple of days later it is revealed that the care-aides in order to get more hours (but not overtime) will work 4 or 5 hours in one location and then another 4 or 5 hours in another, usually a bus ride away. Long hours, many elderly who need their attention, the pay and benefits are not fantastic and many are not considered full-time employees as they don’t reach a 40-hour week at one location. I do not know if this is still the case but I expect it is as I have not heard of any changes. I do hear of more for-profit “care” homes being built in the Lower Mainland. They are even unionized. I am not impressed.
I recall reading that "care aides", along with nurses and family doctors, got offered a better deal by (BC Premier) Eby a few months ago. That's something.
Bonnie distinguished herself by forbidding any care-aides going to multiple homes, early on, greatly reducing transmission. Quebec continued letting them move around for well over a month, and had Canada's worst pandemic performance, mostly because of *their* care-home debacle.
Thanks so much for covering this, Paul. With the lingering death of mainstream reporting, more and more we're forced to go to original sources. I would like to read the series of articles Policy Options wrote on this topic, but one can only have so many hobbies.
I'm wondering if people spoke about the lack of data. Waste water monitoring was a godsend but for the most part we were proceeding with our lives, or not, without having a good understanding of the level of risk in our community. It amazed me that public health units didn't immediately randomly select people to track the progress of the virus, its symptoms and spread, over time, adjusting for different cohorts (front line vs work from home; families with school kids vs not) to provide statistically significant insights.