Academic Inquiry- Missing In Action?

My article asking for open discussion on C19 has been retracted

Earlier this year (Feb 2023), I submitted an article to a venerated and trusted university magazine (Queen’s Quarterly) with the objective of facilitating serious, civil dialogue about the way that Canada has handled COVID-19. Thoughtful academics know that there has been no open critical analysis of Canada’s pandemic response; yet critical analysis is a responsibility that our universities should have embraced in the context of COVID-19. To make the case for the necessity of much needed dialogue, I presented enough basic evidence to show that Canada could have responded differently. I was prepared to support all my statements with citations but the magazine policy does not support referencing as we know it for scientific publications.  

On March 22, the article was accepted for publication; I anticipated publication in the summer edition. 

On May 04, I learned that the article would be sent to referees because of “QQ's liability issues and the piece's controversial nature”. 

On Oct 04, I received copies of two referee reports. The first stated “there are a lot of claims that are not referenced and are not thoroughly discussed”; references were not allowed and I was limited to 3000 words. Also said was “And it risks to be re-quoted or to attract the wrong kind of media attention that says “Queens says vaccines don’t work”… right when Public Health Canada is asking people to get a Covid booster.” That was the point- to have an open discussion now instead of just supporting one narrative; does this show bias on the part of referee #1. 

The second referee refers us to an “excellent publication” in Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2022 (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/25/e870) and the “Canadian Public Health Association Advocacy Statement, 2020." The former sang praises for Canada’s high rate of vaccination, but failed to mention that our excess death rate was maintained after the vaccination of large proportions of the population. This appeared to summarization without critical analysis. The Canadian Public Health Association website acknowledged platinum sponsorship by Moderna, Pfizer, Merck, AstraZenica and Novovax, all of whom benefited from the censorship of real dialogue, and especially censoring the application re-purposed, generic drugs for early treatment of C19. You have to question the objectivity of this agency and of referee 2. 

On October 19, the article was rejected for publication. 

QQ states that it “seeks submissions on any topic that presents a novel perspective and point of departure for thinking about our contemporary world”. I thought the article was well suited for this objective. I will let you decide; the article in question is presented below. 

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COVID-19: Could Canada have done better? 

I feel let down, disappointed by the past and ongoing absence of serious discussion around our experience with COVID-19 (C19). Did we ever debate lockdowns? Social distancing? Masking? Mandates? Vaccines?  

You know the answer.  

Normally, an event like the pandemic would generate among the medical, scientific and public health professions symposia, special lectures, seminars and workshops but the silence of colleagues, health practitioners and officials willing to discuss C19 and our national response to it has been deafening. Instead, ample resources have been spent on supporting undebated initiatives. See for example the recent report “Fault Lines” produced by the Council of Canadian Academies, which assumed that every Canadian who opted to not participate in the C19 public health regime was a victim of mis/disinformation and their susceptibility to conspiracy theories caused the deaths of 2800 people and had knock-on effects that cost the national healthcare system $299 million dollars.  

Why?  

Let’s start at the beginning. 

Between 1998 and 2019, Canada led the world in pandemic early warning because of GPHIN, the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, that was the brainchild of Drs. Ronald St. John, Larry Brilliant and Rudy Novak. In the 1990s, they recognized that global pandemics were only going to become worse because of increases in international business and tourist travel and invented an early detection and quick response system.  

While the World Health Organization (WHO) was the logical agency to take on such a job, it was hamstrung by its official status. It had to interact with self-interested sovereign nations who knew that incipient epidemics were bad for tourism and bad for business. But St. John, Brilliant and Novak knew that there was a better way. They could collect independently a lot of information if they used the maturing internet and didn’t depend on government sources alone. They saw the potential in collecting all sorts of disparate and apparently unrelated facts and assembling them into information about developing epidemics halfway around the world. For example, a financial report on a shortage of a particular drug in a distant country might be a signal of a developing problem. In its early implementation, GPHIN harvested information from unofficial sources like newspapers and television to detect health threats, often even before they were known by the affected country. For example, GPHIN sounded the 2003 SARS alarm to the WHO three months before the Chinese government acknowledged the virus. In a relatively short time, GPHIN was providing 70-75% of the WHO’s epidemic information. With access to information from more countries and in more languages, GPHIN could only get better.  

Until it didn’t- just before C19 arrived. 

By 2010, the world had mostly put the SARS outbreak of 2003 in its rear-view mirror, and, as part of the Harper government’s broad defunding of scientific research, bureaucrats in Ottawa began to question the value of the federal budget’s annual $2 million allocation to GPHIN to diagnose other countries’ problems. GPHIN didn’t just stop improving but began to deteriorate. Without nurturing, its capabilities, especially its computer system, became outdated and of course, less and less able to do its job well. A series of articles in the Globe and Mail revealed that by 2018 GPHIN analysts required management approval to issue notifications of problems arising. Such interference continued under the Trudeau Liberals and effectively shut down Canada’s bespoke pandemic early warning system. On 24 May 2019, GPHIN issued its last warning about an outbreak in Uganda and then went silent.    

   In 2008, the federal, provincial and territorial governments adopted a “National Disaster Mitigation Strategy” with the goal to “protect lives and maintain resilient, sustainable communities by fostering disaster risk reduction as a way of life.” Subsequent national plans were confirmed in 2011 and, in 2017, updated. Municipalities, provinces and Ottawa were all on board and there was even a plan for a hypothetical influenza pandemic, which, according to the former head of Alberta’s Emergency Management Agency, Lt. Col. David Redman, could have been modified and applied to C19. He has said that the focus would have been protecting the vulnerable and keeping the rest of society open along guidelines laid out by the Great Barrington Declaration. This declaration, initiated by Stanford University’s Jay Battacharya, Harvard University’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta and signed by tens of thousands of medical doctors and scientists, suggested that containing the virus was impossible and that resources should be directed to protect the vulnerable. Federal, provincial and territorial governments, however, jettisoned the national pandemic blueprint in favour of lockdowns, social distancing, masking, mandates, and vaccinations. 

   Sweden followed a plan that hewed closely to Redman’s and the Great Barrington Declaration’s imperatives. Instead of adopting lockdowns and mandates, the Swedish government made public health recommendations to, for example, limit travel, limit social contact, and stay at home if one was sick. Upper secondary schools closed, but primary schools remained open. During the pandemic’s first wave, Sweden had more deaths than comparable countries but, after two years, it had proportionately lower numbers of deaths. On balance, education and letting people decide for themselves resulted in lower mortality than lockdowns. People were able to continue to visit their elderly relatives, businesses remained open, and a substantial proportion of the school-age children remained in live classrooms.   

  Official policy declared that non-pharmaceutical measures such as lockdowns, social distancing and masking were essential because the pandemic threatened our survival, however, reports written before the C19 pandemic’s arrival indicated that masking in response to an influenza pandemic would not be effective. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is similar in size and air-borne transmissibility to the influenza virus. Before masking was mandated, we needed information related to protection from SARS CoV-2. We could have conducted studies to answer the mask question by carrying out Canada-wide investigations. Instead, Canada followed other countries’ studies that offered a mix of answers, the balance of which weighed in on the side of masks being of little or no utility. The 2023 Cochrane Review supports this assessment; these high-quality, structured reviews are often considered to be the gold-standard for informing healthcare decision-making. 

  We now know that C19 spreads through the air as infected people cough/exhale virus-containing droplets and aerosols. The droplets can be trapped by masks because the mask pores are sufficiently small, but the virus in aerosols passes through masking like mosquitoes through chain-link fencing and remains suspended in room air for minutes or hours. The consensus now is that ventilation is the superior way to reduce the spread of C19, but we do not know what levels of filtration, UV treatment and ventilation are best because no one has asked. 

Let’s have three cheers for meeting friends outside in the wind and sunshine. 

  Fairly early in C19, we were told that several risk factors or comorbidities made the disease more serious. Old age; kidney, lung and liver diseases; heart conditions; diabetes; obesity; lack of exercise; high blood pressure and weakened immune systems were the most important. Some such factors, like old age, cannot be mitigated while many of the others can. Obesity and lack of exercise was only made worse by closing gyms, playgrounds and golf courses. Weakened immune systems can be strengthened by appropriate nutrition and supplementation with vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin. It is now known that vitamin D does much more than maintain healthy bones. Relevant to C19, vitamin D is critical to immune health. If we had ensured that Canadians were sufficient in vitamin D, how would C19 have been affected? What other health benefits might have been observed in relation to diet and lifestyle? We won’t know until someone asks. 

 The longstanding official assertion has been that: there is no treatment for C19; non-pharmaceutical measures such as lockdowns, social distancing and masking are essential, because the pandemic threatens our survival; any dissent and critical interrogation is, like the virus, socially harmful; vaccines are our way out of the pandemic. Moreover, the vaccines would “stop the spread” and are “safe and effective.” 

Months after the first vaccine roll-out when thousands of vaccinees had become infected by C19, both the American Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and Pfizer acknowledged publicly that mRNA shots did not “stop the spread” of C19. In fact, the CDC changed its definition of “vaccine” to accommodate the shortfall. On 26 August 2021, the CDC defined a vaccine as “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease” meaning stopping infection. On 1 September 2021, the CDC redefined vaccine as “A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” The latter definition allowed health authorities to cling to the position that the mRNA vaccines still protected against “serious illness and death.”   

 Did the mRNA vaccines prevent death? A loud “YES” was the answer one research team writing in The Lancet offered in 2022; they estimated that vaccines had prevented 14.4 to 19.8 million deaths worldwide. A recent publication, coauthored by Dr. Teresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, stated that C19 vaccines and government policies prevented some 800,000 Canadian deaths up to 24 April 2022. This modeled salvation seems overly optimistic because it exceeds the ~160,000 lives lost during two world wars and the 1918 influenza pandemic, combined and is 32 times the number of deaths attributed to C19 during the first 17 months of the pandemic when Canada was largely unvaccinated- ~25,000 according to ourworldindata.org. During the next 17 months when almost 30 million Canadians were vaccinated, deaths decreased by only 17%, disappointing for an “effective” vaccine. Even in Pfizer’s phase 3 clinical trial, there was one more death in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated controls. 

 Another way to assess the relationships between C19 vaccines and mortality depends on “all-cause mortality.” The great strength of this approach is that death is incontrovertible and all-cause mortality doesn’t depend on anyone’s diagnosis of the cause of death. For most populations, graphs of all-cause mortality show the expected increase in excess deaths immediately after C19 arrived in 2020, but they also show an unexpected maintenance of excess deaths in 2021 and 2022 well after the vaccine roll-out. One analysis found that excess deaths in the United States were 15-25% higher in 2021 than predicted from historical records and that they remained anomalously high in 2022. The analyst suggested that the continuing excess mortality was caused by C19 vaccinations. A more detailed and wider analysis across several countries corroborated the findings and neither study suggested that the vaccines were our path out of C19. 

Let’s also remember that it’s not always clear if someone died “of” or “with” C19. 

Were the C19 vaccines “safe”? Unfortunately, manufacturers, in partnership with government health authorities’ consent, stopped phase 3 trials early and offered inoculations to the control group making it impossible to monitor, as planned, vaccine safety throughout 2022 and into 2023. Moreover, we still don’t know if laboratory animal tests were done to assess the potential effects of mRNA vaccines on reproduction or on offspring. In the absence of the usual comprehensive testing studies and assessments, we have to rely on medical personnel and affected vaccine recipients’ willingness to report adverse effects to government agencies even though such reporting is not policed and adverse events are under-reported by perhaps 41-fold. An often-cited self-reporting source is the United States’ Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting Systems (VAERS). It showed that from its start-up in 1990 until 2019 there were just 6157 deaths from all non-C19 vaccines. After the C19 vaccine introduction in 2020 up to September of 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million reported adverse events. Could the C19 vaccines have caused more deaths in 21 months than all other vaccines in 30 years? 

   What about non-lethal toxicities? Vigiaccess.org, the WHO’s website for recording adverse events from drug/vaccine treatments, counted a total of 4.8 million incidences reported for “COVID vaccine” by January 2023. For context, the reported numbers of adverse events for two other extensively distributed drugs, ivermectin and acetaminophen, over a span of more than 30 years, were 6944 and 184,910, respectively. The most publicized serious toxicities of mRNA vaccines have been myocarditis and pericarditis. Early reports of myo/pericarditis suggested that its occurrence was around 15 in one million, but recently higher estimates have been published. In young males, the risks of symptomatic myo/pericarditis after a second vaccination are 15- to 30-fold higher than normal. Thai investigators reported that of 301 high school students who received the BNT162b2 vaccine, 29% had heart signals ranging from tachycardia to myo/pericarditis.   

In the Thai study there was one confirmed case of the latter and six suspected cases, which were supported by the presence of laboratory markers of cell damage such as troponin. The authors reported that all of the students recovered from the adverse events, which are often cited as being “mild,”; however, cardiologists tell us that there is no such thing as mild myo/pericarditis. In myo/pericarditis, no matter the severity, heart cells have died and will not be replaced. We do not know if these students will live shorter lives, whether they will be physically compromised over time and whether or not they should take boosters. 

  Whatever one thinks of the medical and statistical aspects of the pandemic and the vaccines, it is harder to dispute the mutual support support between government agencies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and public media that moderated our access to free speech, debate and discourse.  We can start with the mantra that for C19 “there is no treatment.” The assumption and lack of any challenge to it preserves the market for patent-protected vaccines and novel antivirals. The claim further laid the foundation for Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) in the United States and Interim Orders in Canada. When government regulatory bodies, professional colleges and major media outlets demonized the re-purposing of generic drugs for the treatment of C19, they benefitted manufacturers’ profit margins and market share and, at the same time,  limited public choice and access to information. 

  The censorship of any consideration of competition for the vaccines fit well with the operation of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI). This consortium of big tech and news operations was established with the stated goal of combatting erroneous information that was being distributed to the public through the internet. It was logical for members of the legacy media to form an alliance wherein members would work together to stop the spread of misinformation, which had the potential to cause harm when disseminated widely.  In July 2019, the UK and Canadian governments hosted the FCO Global Conference on Media Freedom, at which BBC Director-General Tony Hall announced “Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation and bias…. to create a global alliance for integrity in news… to help promote freedom and democracy worldwide.” Hence, TNI was formed and CBC/Radio-Canada confirmed its membership in the group two months later. The current core members comprise the world’s mainstream media. Subsequently TNI claimed success in curbing misinformation/disinformation during the Taiwan and British elections. At that point the motives and actions of the TNI appeared rational and reasonable. 

But the C19 pandemic changed all of that. 

In March 2020, the CBC reported that the TNI would “tackle harmful coronavirus disinformation” and that the TNI partners would “alert each other to disinformation about coronavirus, including ‘imposter content’ purporting to come from trusted sources. Such content will be reviewed promptly to ensure that disinformation is not republished.” For the TNI, harmful disinformation included the ideas that the SARS CoV-2 originated in a Wuhan lab; that there are effective existing and generic treatments for C19; that rational debate with health professionals holding different opinions should be welcome; that mRNA vaccines may cause serious adverse effects; and that natural immunity is effective against C19. Critically, TNI decided what constituted misinformation/disinformation. By adopting TNI’s policies, public news outlets like the CBC did not report on effective treatments for C19; substantially delayed reporting on the “lab leak” hypothesis of the origin of C19; supported no public discussions regarding alternatives to lockdowns, mask wearing or social distancing; provided no coverage of medical experts who offered alternative opinions; delayed reporting on the vaccines’ adverse effects; and made almost no mention of either natural immunity or the intricacies of the vaccine contracts the government signed with manufacturers. 

 Did Canada botch or ace its response to C19? We have never really had the space to ask such a question. Outside of the “Fault Lines” report, which assumes that anyone who questioned the government’s approach to the pandemic was a dupe—hardly an endorsement of Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”—we have not had the chance to think back and reflect. To ask how we think about what we did and how we might respond to such a crisis in the future. What do you think? About masking? Social distancing? Vaccines? And mandates? Questioning them does not make you a victim; it makes you a citizen. 

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Excess deaths rose in 2020 and remained elevated through 2022. In Canada, 50% of the population had at least one vaccination by 2021 May 22. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11671593/America-suffered-300-000-non-Covid-excess-deaths-2020.html