“Two weeks to flatten the curve,” is what we heard across Canada1 just after March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization unilaterally declared a global “pandemic” according to new criteria developed in 2009 that emphasized transmissibility over lethality.2 We are now approaching two years of a crisis that is routinely and deceptively blamed on “Covid”. Politicians, public health officials, and the mass media have made persistent pronouncements that tended towards the inflation of grim numbers and the exaggeration of threats.3
The State of Emergency and its Consequences
Building on expanded threat perception, authorities have deliberately promoted fear, induced panic, and created stress.4 With the public suffering an epidemic of fear bordering on mass psychosis,5 states have multiplied and escalated the number and types of restrictions, few of which have the support of even a single published scientific study6: quarantining the healthy; school closures; shutting down small businesses; travel bans and internment of returning citizens; masking; social distancing; fines; curfews; vaccine passports7; and now, mandatory vaccination campaigns that threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands across Canada, including students, support staff, and professors, and impeding non-vaccinated Canadians from leaving the country.8 In the case of Quebec, such measures have been advanced under a State of Emergency deployed in accordance with the Public Health Act,9 which has seen the “emergency” renewed every seven days. Since the “emergency” was first declared on March 13, 2020, it was renewed 84 times (to October 27, 2021), and continues being renewed without consultation and approval by the National Assembly.10 On each occasion, the Government of Quebec has failed to explain the nature or even the existence of a situation that merits classification as an “emergency”.11
By displacing the political onto the medical, in biologizing and thus naturalizing political acts, both governments and the media typically assign blame to “Covid,” the “pandemic,” or the “unvaccinated,” to justify authoritarian emergency measures and to rationalize the ensuing social upheaval. But the virus is just a virus. The virus is neither a politician, a legislator, an economic adviser, a public health official, a corporate CEO, nor is it a media executive. The virus has not been “managed”: it has been worked.
The social, economic, political, medical, psychological, and cultural damage wrought by emergency measures, though inadequately documented and tallied in Canada, appears to be both vast and ongoing. At least 36 studies explain why our unnecessarily extended period of lockdowns not only failed to control the virus or lower mortality, but may even have increased excess mortality.12 Quebec’s Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, publicly acknowledged the impacts of the emergency on delayed treatments and surgeries, often for illnesses far more severe than Covid.13 The health system’s lopsided emphasis on Covid, coupled with fear that kept many patients with severe illnesses away from hospitals and clinics, created such a backlog of surgeries and treatments that emergency rooms exploded far beyond capacity by the summer of 2021, as reported Covid infections plummeted. Quebec’s Ministry of Health estimated that up to 4,000 people have gone undiagnosed with cancer as a result of a sharp decline in mammograms, pap smears and colorectal cancer screenings.14 Across Canada, projected cancer cases are expected to surge in the thousands.15 During the lockdowns, deaths caused by opioid overdoses rose by 88% in 2020 when compared to 2019.16 Alcohol abuse, suicides, and even homicides in domestic settings all increased substantially. Statistics Canada reported that during this emergency period, deaths from “accidental poisonings” (substance abuse) reached a new high, while the numbers for deaths caused by alcohol abuse, and drug use all increased, particularly for younger Canadians.17 StatCan noted that “the economic, social, and psychological impacts” as well as “the public-health measures in place may have played a role in increasing alcohol use”.18 In North America, lockdowns had a disproportionate impact on minority youths in terms of education and employment.19 Families with children at home reported dramatic degrees of deteriorated mental health.20 The economic devastation wrought by the lockdowns further increased the social, psychological, and medical harms.21 In Montreal, the homeless population doubled in size just from March 2020 to October 2021.22 Canada’s federal debt increased by 66%; provinces and even most universities also posted vastly increased deficits; and, hundreds of thousands of retail businesses were expected to permanently close.23 Both the savings and the ability to save for working-class Canadians simply vanished, and personal debt levels skyrocketed; women and minorities were among those hit hardest.24
How is public health served by spreading fear, creating stress, inducing anxiety, and terminating the livelihoods of those who do not comply with arbitrary and indiscriminate measures? What kind of public health is it that assaults the dignity of those to be saved, creating divisions, escalating tensions and conflict? We have certainly come a long way from “two weeks to flatten the curve”. Today, federal employees, healthcare workers, and educators across Canada are being suspended and fired, sentenced to a form of social and economic internal exile, thus effectively rendered aliens in a country which also traps them within its borders. Citizens are now effectively criminalized based on their medical status.
Coercive Medicine
All of the devastation, displacement, and divisions have been to what end? What is it about the nature of this particular virus that makes it so spectacularly special that extreme measures are not only said to be warranted, but must also be continually multiplied and extended? Why are these “public health” measures so narrowly focused on only one specific solution—universal “vaccination”—when that “solution” has been shown to solve so little at the core of this crisis?
Encouraged by government and the media to conflate the two, most Canadians seem to have trouble remembering the difference between transmissibility (i.e., infectiousness) and lethality, such that any report of “cases” immediately sparks fears of impending and generalized death. The appearance of a “case” in an institution is called an “outbreak,” an alarmist term that inspires fear. Yet it is still true that official statistics reveal that this particular coronavirus, with its non-distinctive symptoms, is responsible for the deaths mostly of the very elderly, and even then those with advanced co-morbidities. In Canada as a whole, 63% of reported Covid deaths occurred among those aged 80 years or more; that number increases to 83% when we include those aged 60 years or more.25
This virus was never a lethal threat to the general population, but it has been governed as if it were. The global survival rate for Covid, for persons under the age of 70, is 99.83%; others report that it is as high as 99.95% (without “vaccination”), and for those under 45 years of age the infection fatality rate is almost zero.26 For the vast majority of the infected, 76.5%, Covid produces no symptoms at all, and for 86.1% no symptoms specific to Covid; for most of the rest, the symptoms are mild.27 The Norwegian government and the UK parliament have both recognized that Covid has fallen in lethality when compared with the seasonal flu.28 What then is the medical basis for instituting emergency measures, imposed on the total population? In early 2020, a few national leaders declared a “war on the virus”—but how do the facts of the virus justify use of tools of war, such as a state of emergency?
Throughout this crisis, premised on the generalization of the threat of death, we have nonetheless seen a differential and selective valuation of deaths.29 Death, rather than the possibilities for normal life, has been greatly emphasized. Regardless of co-morbidities, those who died with Covid were almost always reported as “Covid deaths,” even if Covid was not the cause of death. Yet, when persons have died after receiving injections, their deaths are usually attributed to co-morbidities, and they are not publicly reported by the media or state spokespersons as “vaccine deaths”. Some deaths, we discovered, matter more than others.
Having succeeded in spreading generalized fear of “Covid death,” the authorities have singled out that one “solution” of theirs: inoculation of the entire population, regardless of age, health, or natural immunity.30 They have denied effective early treatment of symptoms. They have obstinately ignored the fact that natural immunity has been proven to offer longer-lasting, broader and stronger protection than the current crop of novel gene therapies.31 We have been told, with absolute conviction, that these experimental gene therapies are “safe and effective”.32 Less assuring, however, has been the authorities’ refusal to share trial data with scientists.33 Doctors and scientists who question the “vaccine” dogma are censored, silenced, suspended, or fired, even as hundreds of thousands of doctors and healthcare workers worldwide34 have precisely detailed why these novel therapies are neither safe nor effective,35 with abundant empirical support and a growing number of published studies.36 Between the US and UK alone, nearly 20,000 persons have already died from the injectables, and more than two million people have suffered severe adverse reactions, according to officially published data.37 Yet the injectables themselves offer, at best, a 1.3% reduction in absolute risk of becoming ill from Covid. “Herd immunity” via “vaccination” is clearly impossible,38 particularly when the “vaccines” in question provide no sterilizing immunity, and when the virus has ample natural reservoirs in the wider animal population.
Given that the “fully vaccinated” can still be infected and transmit the virus among themselves, the stated logic for the domestic “vaccine passport” system has been nullified39—yet the mandate remains in place. Even with such mandates in place on US college campuses, with almost all students, staff and faculty injected, “outbreaks” have occurred.40 It should now be obvious that the “vaccine passport” is not a public health measure designed to “protect” people and “save lives”. Instead, it is a political measure designed to maximize control and foment divisions among the wider population, deflecting blame away from the state and toward the new dangerous Other, the “unvaccinated”.41
Questions for Academia
Universities in Quebec and across Canada have internalized the “vaccine passport” system, notwithstanding public knowledge of the facts as shown above. They have done so even when aware of the differential impact on religious and ethnic minorities.42 Institutions that have adopted principles of “equity, diversity, and inclusion,” have failed the first real test of their policies. In Canada, as in the US, Black and Indigenous communities are among the most “vaccine hesitant” or “vaccine resistant” of all ethnic groups.43 However, given that the “war on the virus” has become a de facto war on the people, a larger segment of the national population has been created as a new minority suffering discrimination, one that has been as stigmatized as it has been caricatured.44 Where do academics stand here?
If “vaccination” was intended as a means of exiting the WHO’s declared pandemic, that has clearly not happened. Is it in fact intended as an exit, or as a gateway to something else? This is just one of many questions that academics should have been addressing, instead of cowering in fear before Covid, deferring to political authority, and clamouring for still more draconian restrictions.
As academics who have committed ourselves to ethics, integrity, and honesty, do we not see anything problematic in what is happening before our very eyes? Are we not disturbed by what is being committed in our name, for this alleged “common good” which none of us were ever called upon to define? What “common good” is it that thrives on coercion, exclusion, and works towards the monopolistic profits of Pfizer, which has an established criminal history,45 and Moderna, which has never before produced a vaccine?
Whether one is “adequately vaccinated” or not—according to the shifting standards and definitions of the moment—is not the core issue that should concern us. What should concern us is that the legal rights of all citizens are being transformed into temporary privileges; that coercion trumps democratic participation; that key institutions—including academic ones—are being rapidly conscripted for political purposes, and their basic missions are being undermined and distorted.
While many believe and assert that a “public health emergency” must limit basic human freedoms, it is precisely when faced by a real or alleged emergency that we need to be most careful and protective of human rights. Basic human rights are inalienable, and cannot be “suspended” because of any war, disaster, or other emergency.46 Bodily autonomy,47 informed consent, and by extension not being subjected to invasive testing or genetic treatment, are among the key rights which have been suspended or violated.48 Rights of conscience, as guided by religious and spiritual beliefs, along with the right to political beliefs and freedom of expression, must also be protected.49
Did we as scholars anticipate living in a country where our universities would purge tenured professors, fire support staff, and expel registered students (even escorting them off campus in front of other students), because of their health status, their innate biological characteristics, and their desire to preserve their privacy and bodily autonomy free from discrimination? When did we become comfortable with violating the right to an education and the right to work? How did we come to accept this discrimination, this deliberate segregation of a category of persons from the rest of society? Did we predict that one day we would see a demarcated group of Canadians being targeted not just for segregation, discrimination, and demonization, but that they would also be denied their livelihoods? Did we imagine that leaders, from the Prime Minister to the Premier, would verbally assault this same group and use the most threatening and dehumanizing language against it? This is happening, right now, all around us, right in front of us. Now that history has found us, how do we meet history? Do we even stop to take notice? When are we going to stand up and speak out?
In Canadian universities, many if not most scholars and students are not living up to goals of offering critical and independent perspectives on a crisis of momentous proportions. Ethics, freedom of choice, privacy, and democracy, have not been defended by our universities. Instead what has risen is a culture of silence, with some willingly reinforcing an instant orthodoxy that could only have been produced by widespread fear and unconditional trust in the authorities. Is this what we expect from our universities? Should students and professional scholars not be dedicated to developing independent, critical analytical abilities? Should they be trusting the authorities to the point of silently acquiescing with or even staunchly upholding their edicts and decrees? By not defending basic ethical principles of bodily autonomy, informed consent, and freedom of choice, and by even going as far as denying these rights, universities are actively engaged in violating human rights that are protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and by international human rights law. By not challenging mandatory “vaccination” and “vaccine passports,” we allow a ready-made canon, furnished by the state and media, to supplant our own investigation and knowledge production. Worse yet, by directly engaging in censoring and silencing scientists, and by allowing intimidation and mobbing, universities in Canada appear to be engaging in intellectual, moral, and ethical suicide. What kind of university will emerge from this process? Can we even properly speak of a “university” in such a context?
In our universities, we have looked on silently as the media, backed by powerful private interests and our own bureaucrats, actively censor fellow scientists’ research and stifle critical questioning, to the benefit of transnational corporations such as Pfizer.50 We have watched tenure being invalidated, rendered null and void according to the whims of the state, as the terms and conditions of our employment are radically altered to depend—in clear violation of the Privacy Act—on disclosure of our medical status.51 Professors have been involuntarily deputized as auxiliary police forces, made to enforce mask mandates in their classrooms. Simply questioning the logic of such measures, and asking to see the scientific evidence that supports them, risks censure for “spreading misinformation”. Faculty unions have turned against faculty who resist the mandates, while most faculty either remain silent, or loudly support harsh restrictions.52 Academic freedom is in greater peril in Canada today than it ever has been.53 We have witnessed science succumb to the dictates of politics. As one concerned epidemiologist observed, with obvious restraint: “there will be lasting consequences from mingling political partisanship and science during the management of a public-health crisis”.54
In both medicine and international human rights law, the principle of voluntary and prior informed consent is fundamental and inviolable. Yet without adequate information, consent cannot be informed. The denial of informed consent is a grave violation of human rights, as established under multiple instruments of international human rights law. Coercion is also a denial of informed consent. Penalties, punishments, and threats offer the same kind of “choice” that is offered during the psychological torture of detainees under abusive interrogation. It is strange medicine that restricts family members from gatherings, worshippers from communing, workers from working—that creates unemployment and targets dissenting persons’ ability to clothe, house, and feed their families. “Vaccine hesitant” adults are treated as children, with medicine forced down their throats by a paternalistic state. Even if we had been dealing with actual children, in Canada we were supposed to have moved past our history of such abusive treatment. Mandates and restrictions have been overbearing, indiscriminate, redundant, authoritarian, arrogant, and punitive. Our strange medicine is the outcome of the politics of dispossession, which has reached such an extreme that it would have people sign off the rights to their immune system to a giant pharmaceutical corporation with a criminal record.
In such an environment, “vaccine refusal” is treated as tantamount to treason, an expression of “selfishness,” and a “threat to the community”. Yet a more sober and considered view would highlight the realization that, “mandatory vaccination amounts to discrimination against healthy, innate biological characteristics, which goes against the established ethical norms and is also defeasible a priori”.55
Independent, rational, critical analysis that seeks truth has been supplanted by deference to authority and its alternative “science”: the science of politicians, technocrats, the media, and lawyers. This alternative science has us thinking what was previously unimaginable, and doing what was previously unacceptable: never do you quarantine the healthy; never do you vaccinate the immune; never do you inject new treatments into children who do not need them;56 never do you vaccinate during a pandemic; and, never do you try new drugs on pregnant women.57 As we think the unthinkable, collaborate with the unimaginable, and support the unsupportable, we as academics are conspiring with those who demand we assert the unquestionable.
This has to change, and it has to change now.
NOTES
Notes
1 “Here’s what each Canadian province is doing to ‘flatten the curve’ of the novel coronavirus,” Toronto Star, March 15, 2020; “Our window to flatten the COVID-19 curve is narrow, says Dr. Theresa Tam,” The Canadian Press, March 15, 2020.
2 The WHO’s original definition of a pandemic specified simultaneous epidemics worldwide that were marked by “enormous numbers of deaths and illnesses”; this definition was changed just prior to the declaration of the 2009 swine flu “pandemic,” by deleting the criteria of severity and high mortality. See: Ron Law, “[Response] WHO and the pandemic flu ‘conspiracies’,” British Medical Journal, June 4, 2010, p. 340; Peter Doshi, “The Elusive Definition of Pandemic Influenza,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 89, pp. 532–538.
3 ON PCR TESTS AND THE PRODUCTION OF “CASES”:
One of the means by which numbers were inflated lies in the use of inappropriate testing procedures and their interpretation. Positive results using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR, or just “PCR tests”) were reported as “cases,” a term that denotes a patient receiving medical attention, when in most cases persons did not even show symptoms. Numerous scientists criticized the use of PCR tests, beginning with Dr. Kary Mullis who won the 1993 Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR testing process now in wide use to diagnose coronavirus infection. Dr. Mullis is on record for challenging the utility of PCR tests: “it’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something. That’s what it is. It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with really was going to hurt you or anything like that”—see: Patrick Howley, “Inventor of PCR Test Said Fauci ‘Doesn’t Know Anything’ and is Willing to Lie on Television,” National File, March 15, 2021. The World Health Organization advised caution in using PCR testing, warning of the potential for increased false positives and recommending that PCR testing be used only as “an aid for diagnosis”—see: “WHO Information Notice for Users 2020/05: Nucleic acid testing (NAT) technologies that use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for detection of SARS-CoV-2,” World Health Organization, January 20, 2021.
The original publication which advocated using PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 (the “Corman-Drosten paper”) came in for severe criticism from 22 scientists who identified 10 fatal flaws with the paper, including its rush to publication after a single day of peer review. The Corman-Drosten paper, which influenced policy worldwide, originally recommended using 45 cycles of thermal amplification of swab samples for SARS-CoV-2—yet a published study reported that even at 35 cycles of amplification, up to 97% of the positive results using RT-PCR tests would be false (see: Rita Jaafar, Sarah Aherfi, Nathalie Wurtz, et al. “Correlation Between 3790 Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction–Positives Samples and Positive Cell Cultures, Including 1941 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Isolates,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, 72(11), 2021). The Corman-Drosten article has since been subjected to three stages of correction. See: Victor M. Corman, Christian Drosten, et al., “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR,” Eurosurveillance, 25(3), 2020. For the critical review of the Corman-Drosten paper, see: Pieter Borger, Bobby Rajesh Malhotra, Michael Yeadon, et al., “External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-CoV-2 reveals 10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level: consequences for false positive results,” Corman-Drosten Review Report, January 2021; also see: Peter Andrews, “A global team of experts has found 10 Fatal Flaws in the main test for Covid and is demanding it’s urgently axed. As they should,” RT, December 1, 2020, and, Peter Andrews, “Flawed paper behind Covid-19 testing faces being retracted, after scientists expose its ten fatal problems,” RT, December 9, 2020.
The practical utility of using PCR testing to gauge infectiousness was also called into question by various public health agencies. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cautioned that, “detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms” (“CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel,” CDC, July 7, 2021, p. 38). The Department of Health of the Government of Australia cautioned, “that PCR tests cannot distinguish between ‘live’ virus and noninfective RNA” (“Novel coronavirus (COVID-19): Information for Clinicians,” March 2020, p. 2). This was echoed by Ireland’s specialist agency for the surveillance of communicable diseases, which stated: “PCR does not distinguish between viable virus and non-infectious RNA,” and warned of the dangers of false positives—see page 10: “Guidance on the management of weak positive (high Ct value) PCR results in the setting of testing individuals for SARS-CoV-2,” HSE Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), July 7, 2021. “RT-PCR detects RNA, not infectious virus”: this is stated at the outset of a published study supported by the Public Health Agency of Canada and its National Microbiology Laboratory—see: Jared Bullard, Kerry Dust, Duane Funk, James E Strong, et al., “Predicting Infectious Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 From Diagnostic Samples,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71(10), November 15, 2020, pp. 2663–2666. For similar cautions, see: “Interpreting the results of Nucleic Acid Amplification testing (NAT; or PCR tests) for COVID-19 in the Respiratory Tract,” BC Centre for Disease Control/BC Ministry of Health, April 30, 2020.
In November of 2020 in Portugal, a verdict from the Lisbon Appeal Court ruled that a positive PCR test result could not definitively prove that someone was infected with SARS-CoV-2. In addition, the court cited published research that reported that, at the high cycle thresholds that were commonly used, the rate of false positives could be as high as 97%. See: Proc. 1783/20.7T8PDL.L1, Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa, November 11, 2020, and Peter Andrews, “Landmark legal ruling finds that Covid tests are not fit for purpose. So what do the MSM do? They ignore it,” RT, November 27, 2020.
In 2007, in an article in The New York Times titled, “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t,” what was believed to be an epidemic of whooping cough in New Hampshire turned out just to be a common cold—what is instructive is how health officials came to make this mistake which created what the paper called a “pseudo-epidemic”. At the centre of this pseudo-epidemic was reliance on PCR testing; experts quoted in the paper called them unreliable, and stated that they should not be used. PCR testing was applied to a sickness that had non-distinctive symptoms. This mistake led to further mistakes, that were not seen as mistakes: “Yet, epidemiologists say, one of the most troubling aspects of the pseudo-epidemic is that all the decisions seemed so sensible at the time”. Doctors tested anyone with a cough or runny nose, and the PCR tests returned false positive results for whooping cough. See: Gina Kolata, “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t,” The New York Times, January 22, 2007.
In July of 2021 the CDC announced that, “after December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only,” in part because of the test’s inability to distinguish between SARS-CoV-2 and seasonal flu (“Lab Alert: Changes to CDC RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 Testing,” CDC, July 21, 2021).
ON COVID DEATH STATISTICS AND EXAGGERATION OF THREATS:
Official reports on the numbers of deaths ascribed to Covid, have also been revealed to be highly controversial. In most countries, “Covid deaths” included both those who died with Covid, and those who specifically died from Covid, thus producing the largest possible number. On April 20, 2020, the World Health Organization published its “International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of Covid-19 as Cause of Death”. The WHO advised public health authorities that when Covid-19 is the “suspected”, “probable,” or even just the “assumed” cause of death, then it must always be recorded in death certificates as the “underlying cause of death” (see pps. 3-7). This was to be done even if a decedent suffered from serious chronic illnesses. Indeed, comorbidities such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or chronic non-Covid respiratory infections, should only be indicated as a “contributing cause” lower down in a death certificate. The WHO added: “Always apply these instructions, whether they can be considered medically correct or not” (p. 8).
In Quebec, both the Premier, François Legault, and the Director of Public Health, Horacio Arruda, publicly admitted that Quebec’s Covid ceath numbers were higher than Ontario’s, because in Quebec—regardless of the actual cause of death—once one had tested positive for Covid, the death was attributed to Covid. As Dr. Arruda explained, “Anytime, in Quebec, someone dies from cancer or another disease, if they have COVID-19 it will be counted as COVID-19”: Kelly Greig & Selena Ross, “Legault asks if Ontario’s under-counting COVID-19 deaths, drawing scientist’s ire,” CTV News, October 29, 2020.
Such practices, as recommended by the WHO and widely followed internationally, were subject to a successful legal challenge in Portugal. On May 15, 2021, a ruling from the Tribunal Administrativo de Círculo de Lisboa found that verified deaths from SARS-CoV-2 amounted to just 0.9% of all reported Covid deaths—that is, 152 deaths rather than the 17,000 plus Covid deaths reported by the state. See: Mordechai Sones, “Lisbon court rules only 0.9% of ‘verified cases’ died of COVID, numbering 152, not 17,000 claimed,” America’s Frontline Doctors, June 23, 2021; the ruling can be accessed here. In Italy there were also questions stemming from data published by the government’s national institute of health—Istituto superiore di Sanità—regarding the alleged Covid mortality rate; according to one interpretation, only 2.9% of registered Covid deaths from the end of February 2020 were due to Covid as such, thus of the 130,468 official Covid deaths, only 3,783 can be attributed to Covid alone—see: Franco Bechis, “Gran pasticcio nel rapporto sui decessi. Per l’Iss gran parte dei morti non li ha causati il Covid,” Il Tempo, October 21, 2021.
One exceptionally detailed empirical analysis of public health pronouncements and media reports in Canada found a consistent pattern of misdirection. The pattern was one that generalized from the situation of the deaths of very elderly persons with comorbidities (whose average age exceeded the national average for life expectancy), and who were primarily confined to long-term care homes, to the rest of the population. As of April, 2021, nearly 91% of all Covid deaths recorded in Canada occurred in long-term care homes for the elderly. By imposing a “one size fits all” approach, Canadians were thus increasingly taught to fear for the safety of their children. Canada had only one seriously deadly wave, and that was the first wave in March-May of 2020—the majority of those deaths took place inside of tightly controlled institutional settings which in many cases were publicly-administered. Long-term care and retirement homes, added to hospitals, and prisons, together accounted for 98.6% of all Covid deaths; thus if 13,611 Covid deaths occurred inside such tightly-controlled institutional settings, only 178 deaths occurred in the wider community. Yet what was an institutional crisis was then inflated into a population-wide health crisis. There was a massive failure that occurred on governments’ side of the institutional barrier, with attention subsequently and deliberately redirected to the rest of the population—healthy people had to be locked in their homes presumably to save the lives of those in nursing homes. For this, and much more, see: Julius Ruechel, “The Lies Exposed by the Numbers: Fear, Misdirection, & Institutional Deaths (An Investigative Report),” May 28, 2021.
Another study found that there was “no extraordinary surge in yearly or seasonal mortality in Canada, which can be ascribed to a Covid-19 pandemic” and that “several prominent features” in all-cause mortality per week during the Covid-19 period, “exhibit anomalous province-to-province heterogeneity,” one that is “irreconcilable with the known behaviour of epidemics of viral respiratory diseases”. The authors of the study stated: “We conclude that a pandemic did not occur”. See: Denis G. Rancourt, Marine Baudin, Jérémie Mercier, “Analysis of all-cause mortality by week in Canada 2010-2021, by province, age and sex: There was no COVID-19 pandemic, and there is strong evidence of response-caused deaths in the most elderly and in young males,” August 6, 2021.
In Quebec, the public is familiar with how during the “first wave” a massive number of deaths occurred in long-term care and retirement homes: 73% of all deaths occurred in such institutions (CHSLDs). About 92% of people who died between February 25 and July 11, 2020, were 70 and older, according to the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ). This was the high point of claimed Covid deaths; there has been no repetition of the mortality level we saw in that period. However, even here there is reason to doubt official numbers. Given the conditions in the homes, as reported by nurses, physicians, and by the Canadian military, an unspecified number of residents died due to starvation, dehydration, neglect, and even the deliberate administration of morphine to accelerate death—while all of these deaths were tallied as “Covid deaths”. In the UK there were similar reports of the administration of Midazolam which has been “been associated with respiratory depression and respiratory arrest, especially when used for sedation” according to published warnings. For more on these reports, see: Levon Sevunts, “Military report on conditions in Quebec nursing homes details several flaws,” Radio Canada International, May 27, 2020; Brig-Gen. F.G. Carpentier, “Observations sur les Centres D’hébergement de Soins Longues Durées de Montréal,” 2nd Canadian Division and Joint Task Force (East), May 18, 2020; The Canadian Press, “‘Systemic ageism’ to blame for CHSLD deaths during pandemic’s first wave, says expert,” CTV News, November 1, 2021; The Canadian Press, “Officials blamed COVID-19 for Herron deaths, when some were due to hunger, thirst: witness,” CTV News, September 14, 2021; The Canadian Press, “Health officials, Herron staff clashed as situation got worse, Quebec coroner hears,” CTV News, September 16, 2021; The Canadian Press, “Doctors concerned about rise in dangerous medications in long-term care homes during pandemic,” CTV News, December 3, 2020; Tu Thanh Ha, “Quebec nursing home often gave morphine rather than treat COVID-19 patients, inquest told,” The Globe and Mail, June 16, 2021; Emily Mangiaracina, “‘I had never seen deaths happen so quickly’: Quebec nursing home gave COVID patients morphine instead of virus treatments,” LifeSite News, July 22, 2021; and, despite the deceptive headline which adopts the perspective of an official responsible for instituting the use of morphine in Quebec nursing homes, see The Canadian Press, “No ‘euthanasia’ in Quebec care homes during COVID-19, expert tells coroner’s inquest,” CTV News, November 2, 2021.
Similar reports of inappropriate or questionable administration of sedatives such as Midazolam, that accelerated death among nursing and retirement home residents, were also registered internationally—see for example: Stephen Adams & Holly Bancroft, “Did care homes use powerful sedatives to speed Covid deaths? Number of prescriptions for the drug midazolam doubled during height of the pandemic,” The Mail on Sunday, July 11, 2020.
4 The Canadian Joint Operations Command used the WHO-declared “pandemic” as an opportunity to test new propaganda techniques on unsuspecting Canadians, using techniques similar to those used for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan; the Canadian Forces also invested in training public affairs officers on “behaviour modification” techniques: David Pugliese, “Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda on Canadians: report,” National Post, September 27, 2021. Also see: Susan Delacourt, “‘The nudge unit’: Ottawa’s behavioural-science team investigates how Canadians feel about vaccines, public health and who to trust,” Toronto Star, February 21, 2021. The behavioural science sub-group (SPI-B) of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) prepared a document in May of 2020 advising on measures to be taken to increase public adherence to social distancing measures. The promotion of fear was explicitly advocated: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat” (emphasis in the original)—see: SPI-B, “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures,” SAGE, March 22, 2020; also see, “How SAGE and the UK media created fear in the British public,” Evidence Not Fear, June 27, 2020. On the “doom loop” created by the UK government’s behaviour modification techniques—which dangerously spread fear when it is known to weaken immune systems—and which used the UK public for psychological experimentation, see Gordon Rayner, “State of fear: how ministers ‘used covert tactics’ to keep scared public at home,” The Telegraph, April 2, 2021, and Gary Sidley, “A year of fear,” The Critic, March 23, 2021. Sidely describes how the UK Government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) developed strategies that would create “‘low cost, low pain ways of ‘nudging’ citizens…into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act’. Several interventions of this type have been woven into the Covid-19 messaging campaign, including fear (inflating perceived threat levels), shame (conflating compliance with virtue) and peer pressure (portraying non-compliers as a deviant minority)”. See also Laura Dodsworth, “Winter is coming, and so are the nudges,” October 4, 2021.
5 Knowing that “a frightened population is a compliant one” (Sidley, fn. 4), state officials and the media promote fear, and thus justify ever accumulating and restrictions on civil liberties and negation of key human rights. The demonstrable result of the prolonged and coordinated promotion of fear is an emergent mass psychosis, one that inoculates those suffering from psychosis from rational questioning and normal scepticism. For some psychiatrists, the real public health crisis of this period has been the wide extent of mass delusional psychosis, an indicator of the harm done to mental health in the name of “controlling Covid”. What a psychosis fueled by a sustained sense of everpresent danger has spawned, is a culture of control, or authoritarian risk management that redirects blame away from the virus (and the fact that the state cannot control its spread) and directes blame toward the behaviour of “unruly” others, thus also fomenting divisions and inter-personal and inter-group hostility. In the US, such divisions have been enlisted in the service of heightened partisanship. In such a context, truth has been replaced by authority: people looking up to the authorities for guidance, rather than seeking out knowledge individually, independently, and critically. While stressing “scientific evidence,” the tendency in this culture of mass control is to steer away actual evidence, with fear-driven mandates persisting. For more on these points, see: Philipp Bagus, José Antonio Peña-Ramos, & Antonio Sánchez-Bayón, “COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria,” International Journal of Environmental Resear
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