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COVID-19

Neil Macdonald asks the most important COVID-19 question of all

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This is posted with permission from the author, Neil MacDonald.  It is originally posted at neilmacdonald.me

So. Who gets the ventilators?

I wish Sophie Gregoire Trudeau good health, and a complete recovery in her quarantine. The same for the lovely Margaret Trudeau, if she comes down with COVID-19. Both women were at the same speaking engagement in London; presumably, that is where Madame Gregoire Trudeau contracted the virus.

If, heaven forfend, either woman develops the sort of severe respiratory difficulties that have killed other COVID-19 patients, I hope they will both have access to peerless medical care, and a ventilator. Actually, I am certain they will.

One is the prime minister’s wife, the other his mother. Privilege has its privileges.

At the same time – and here comes the kicker – I am not at all certain that, if I or any of my aged relatives come down with the disease in the uncertain and increasingly terrifying weeks to come, there will be ventilators for us. And as one American epidemiologist put it recently, the alternative to ventilation for someone with extreme respiratory symptoms is death. As a despairing Italian physician put it on social media from the horrors of his triage centre in Bergamo: “Every ventilator becomes like gold.”

Here is the math: Health Minister Patty Hajdu says between 30 and 70 per cent of Canadians will likely be infected. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is between two and three per cent. Assuming the optimistic end of Hajdu’s estimate, and the optimistic end of the mortality rate, we are still talking about 225,000 people dying, and, as the despairing Italian physician says, the diagnosis is always the same: Bilateral interstitial pneumonia. Meaning those patients’ lungs are so badly compromised the only thing that has a chance of saving them is a ventilator, or mechanical breathing apparatus. It alone can infuse the lungs with enough oxygen to maintain life.

Now: We are told Canada has about 5,000 ventilators. That’s one ventilator for every 45 of those dying patients. Unless Canada somehow acquires a lot more of the machines, and the entire world is now chasing them, there will be rationing. That is what has been happening in Italy. Doctors there have been given the ghastly job of deciding who receives ventilation, and who is sent home to meet their fate.

Now, let’s add something else to the equation: In Canada, the law prevents citizens from paying for core medical care, which a ventilator surely is. In principle, ventilators will be rationed, well, rationally.

But that’s not how the system really works.

In Canada, influence and power get you to the front of the line. Does anyone really believe that cabinet ministers or premiers or captains of industry or very senior government officials sit in waiting rooms, or have a hard time finding a family doctor? Or that those of us with professional or family connections aren’t treated as privileged entities?

So the big question – the crucial, life-or-death question as this virus tears through the population – will very quickly be this: who gets the ventilators?

No doubt, an attempt will be made to lay down a set of objective criteria. They probably already exist. It makes sense to ventilate patients who stand the best chance of surviving. A physician friend in Italy unilaterally decided to send very old people home, along with anyone whose health was already severely compromised by previous morbidities.

But imagine the pressure on a Canadian doctor, or hospital dependent on government funding, when the aged relative of a very powerful politician needs ventilation. Or a very rich person who has donated generously to the hospital. Or the mother or father of a person whose role in the economy is considered so crucial that he or she must not be distracted by familial worries.

Jane Philpott, Justin Trudeau’s first health minister, once declared that not being able to buy your way to the front of the line is a “core Canadian value.” The remark was rather gormless, I thought at the time, given the reality of the system. Doctor friends of mine thought it was hysterical.
But the big test is coming. The public deserves to know precisely how lifesaving care will be allocated. The public has a right to transparent fairness.

My guess: fairness and objective allocation of resources will slam into the wall of privilege. We shall see. We shall also see how intrepid the media is on this subject. So far, it hasn’t been.

From neilmacdonald.me

Neil Macdonald spent 43 years reporting on politics, wars, elections, revolutions, booms, crashes, coups, and the struggles of ordinary human beings in the unforgiving, bewildering rush of history.

He worked as an editor and reporter in three newspapers before moving to CBC News, for which he covered Quebec before moving to Parliament Hill, then abroad as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and Washington, DC., and finally as the CBC’s opinion columnist.

He has stood in Iraq watching missiles strike, in Bethlehem watching people welcome the new millennium, in Jerusalem watching an intifada erupt, and in Chicago watching Barack Obama accept the American presidency. He followed the Pope through the Holy Land, tracked down Hitler’s last general in Europe, covered the triumphant arrival and subsequent humiliation of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, revealed the plotters who killed Rafiq Hariri in Beirut, and documented the financial horrors unleashed on America’s cities by Wall Street.

He speaks French, having grown up in Quebec, reasonably good English, and sufficient Arabic. He lives in Ottawa.

Learning at home? Here’s a list of links to take you on a “Virtual Field Trip”

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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COVID-19

Pfizer reportedly withheld presence of cancer-linked DNA in COVID jabs from FDA, Health Canada

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

According to information released by the Epoch Times, Pfizer purposefully failed to advise drug regulators, including Health Canada, the U.S. FDA and the European Medicines Agency, that the cancer-linked SV40 DNA enhancer was present in their experimental COVID shot.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer reportedly “chose not to” inform Health Canada, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies that the cancer-linked Polyomavirus Simian Virus 40 (SV40) DNA sequence was in their widely distributed COVID-19 vaccine.  

According to information released April 23 by the Epoch Times, Pfizer purposefully failed to advise drug regulators, including Health Canada, the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration, and the European Medicines Agency, that SV40 was present in their experimental COVID shot.   

“I understand that there have been internal discussions at CBER [Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research] regarding the presents [sic] of an SV40 enhancer/promoter sequence, noting that its presence is unrelated to the purpose of the Pfizer’s plasmid as a transcription template for their mRNA COVID-19 vaccine,” Dr. Dean Smith, a senior scientific evaluator in Health Canada’s Vaccine Quality Division, wrote in an email to a colleague at the FDA about SV40. 

The August email was obtained by an access to information request by the Epoch Times.  

“Pfizer has communicated to us recently, that they apparently chose not to mention this information to EMA, FDA or HC at the time of their initial or subsequent submissions,” he added. 

Smith noted that Kevin McKernan, a microbiologist and former researcher and team leader for the MIT Human Genome project, and Dr. Phillip J. Buckhaults, who is a professor of cancer genomics as well as the director of the Cancer Genetics Lab at the University of South Carolina, had raised in a public manner earlier this year how SV40 was present in the jabs. 

While Health Canada originally told Canadians it was unaware of the SV40 enhancer’s presence, the agency has since confirmed the presence of the monkey-linked DNA sequence known to cause cancer when it was used in old polio vaccines. 

SV40 is used to enhance gene transcription when the shots are made. It has been linked to the spread of turbo cancers in those who have been exposed to the virus via contaminated injections.   

According to a 2002 study published in the Lancet, there is evidence that links the older polio vaccines, which were filed with SV40 contaminants, to certain forms of cancer.  

The authors of the 2002 study claim that the SV40-contaminated polio vaccine may have caused up to half of the 55,000 cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosed each year.  

SV40, according to the late vaccine developer Dr. Maurice Hilleman, was put in the polio vaccine and then put into wide circulation by Big Pharma company Merck inadvertently. 

Unfortunately, this is not the first evidence that Pfizer hid the presence of SV40 from drug regulators.  

According to Dr. Janci Lindsay, who works as the director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services, Pfizer did not disclose the presence of SV40 “promoters” to both Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as the European Medicines Agency.  

She said, as reported in The Epoch Times, that the drug company “hid them.” 

“So it’s not just the fact that they’re there, it’s the fact that they were purposefully hidden from the regulators,” she noted. 

The news of Pfizer’s purposeful withholding of information comes as adverse effects from the first round of COVID shots have resulted in a growing number of Canadians who have filed for financial compensation over alleged injuries from the jabs, via Canada’s Vaccine Injury Program (VISP). 

Thus far, some VISP has already paid over $6 million to those injured by COVID injections, with some 2,000 claims remaining to be settled. 

Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots as well as boosters. 

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Alberta

Red Deer Doctor critical of Alberta’s COVID response to submit report to Danielle Smith this May

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Leading the task force is Dr. Gary Davidson, who was skeptical of mandates at the time.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will soon be receiving a little-known report she commissioned which tasked an Alberta doctor who was critical of the previous administration’s handling of COVID to look into how accurate the province’s COVID data collection was, as well as the previous administration’s decision-making process and effectiveness. 

As noted in a recent Globe and Mail report, records it obtained show that just less than one month after becoming Premier of Alberta in November of 2022, Smith tasked then-health minister Jason Copping to create the COVID data task force. 

Documents show that the Alberta government under Smith gave the new task force, led by Dr. Gary Davidson – who used to work as an emergency doctor in Red Deer, Alberta – a sweeping mandate to look at whether the “right data” was obtained during COVID as well as to assess the “integrity, validity, reliability and quality of the data/information used to inform pandemic decisions” by members of Alberta Health Services (AHS).  

As reported by LifeSiteNews in 2021, Davidson said during the height of COVID that the hospital capacity crisis in his province was “created,” was not a new phenomenon, and had nothing to do with COVID.

“We have a crisis, and we have a crisis because we have no staff, because our staff quit, because they’re burned out, they’re not burnt out from COVID,” Davidson said at the time. 

Davidson also claimed that the previous United Conservative Party government under former Premier Jason Kenney had been manipulating COVID statistics.  

In comments sent to the media, Smith said that in her view it was a good idea to have a “contrarian perspective” with Davidson looking at “everything that happened with some fresh eyes.” 

“I needed somebody who was going to look at everything that happened with some fresh eyes and maybe with a little bit of a contrarian perspective because we’ve only ever been given one perspective,” she told reporters Tuesday. 

“I left it to [Davidson] to assemble the panel with the guidance that I would like to have a broad range of perspectives.” 

After assuming her role as premier, Smith promptly fired the province’s top doctor, Deena Hinshaw, and the entire AHS board of directors, all of whom oversaw the implementation of COVID mandates. 

Under Kenney, thousands of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare and government workers lost their jobs for choosing to not get the jabs, leading Smith to say – only minutes after being sworn in – that over the past year the “unvaccinated” were the “most discriminated against” group of people in her lifetime. 

As for AHS, it still is promoting the COVID shots, for babies as young as six months old, as recently reported by LifeSiteNews.  

Task force made up of doctors both for and against COVID mandates  

In addition to COVID skeptic Dr. Gary Davidson, the rather secretive COVID task force includes other health professionals who were critical of COVID mandates and health restrictions, including vaccine mandates.  

The task force was given about $2 million to conduct its review, according to The Globe and Mail, and is completely separate from another task force headed by former Canadian MP Preston Manning, who led the Reform Party for years before it merged with another party to form the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada. 

Manning’s task force, known as the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel (PHEGRP), released its findings last year. It recommend that many pro-freedom policies be implemented, such as strengthening personal medical freedoms via legislation so that one does not lose their job for refusing a vaccine, as well as concluding that Albertans’ rights were indeed infringed upon. 

The Smith government task force is run through the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) which is a provincial agency involved in healthcare research.  

Last March, Davidson was given a project description and terms of reference and was told to have a final report delivered to Alberta’s Health Minister by December of 2023. 

As of now, the task force’s final report won’t be available until May, as per Andrea Smith, press secretary to Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, who noted that the goal of the task force is to look at Alberta’s COVID response compared to other provinces.  

According to the Globe and Mail report, another person working on the task force is anesthetist Blaine Achen, who was part of a group of doctors that legally challenged AHS’s now-rescinded mandatory COVID jab policy for workers. 

Some doctors on the task force, whom the Globe and Mail noted held “more conventional views regarding the pandemic,” left it only after a few meetings. 

In a seeming attempt to prevent another draconian crackdown on civil liberties, the UCP government under Smith has already taken concrete action.

The Smith government late last year passed a new law, Bill 6, or the Public Health Amendment Act, that holds politicians accountable in times of a health crisis by putting sole decision-making on them for health matters instead of unelected medical officers. 

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