Rebel News Podcast - April 29, 2020


How quarantines are supposed to work： The story of the plague in Marseilles, France


Episode Stats

Length

39 minutes

Words per Minute

153.31566

Word Count

5,995

Sentence Count

423

Misogynist Sentences

12

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary

In 1720, a new plague outbreak struck the port city of Marseille, France, and the whole city was quarantined. How did they manage to handle it? And why did they do it in the first place?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well hello my rebels. Today I do my best to give an amateur history lesson and forgive me for all
00:00:06.440 the history experts out there who will point out my errors. I apologize in advance but I started
00:00:12.440 reading about the Black Plague in Marseille, France in 1720 which for those of you who know
00:00:19.520 something about the plague that will strike you as a very late date. I mean wasn't the plague much
00:00:25.160 earlier. I mean the 1350s and then there was another outbreak in the 1600s. 1720 the Black
00:00:31.240 Death in Marseille. Oh yes and there's so many things we can learn about what went wrong that day
00:00:37.520 that I think we can apply to our thinking today. At least I'll try and make that point and along the
00:00:43.860 way maybe I'll show you a few things and tell you a few things you didn't know. I want to show you
00:00:48.260 some pictures. I want to show you pictures of the ship that brought the plague in but mainly I want
00:00:55.000 to show you the gorgeous gorgeous city of Marseille, France. Oh I've never been there but I want to
00:01:02.640 go. You can get the video version of this podcast at rebelnews.com. It's eight bucks a month. Get the
00:01:11.120 videos of this podcast and all our other shows but in the meantime please enjoy this podcast of the
00:01:17.520 Plague of Marseille.
00:01:33.380 Tonight how are quarantines supposed to work? Well let me tell you the story about the Black Plague in
00:01:38.480 Marseille, France in 1720. It's more interesting than it sounds. It's April 28th and this is the
00:01:45.100 Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:48.060 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:51.800 There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:55.860 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my
00:02:00.460 bloody right to do so. Yesterday I showed you some artifacts from the Spanish flu of 1918-1919.
00:02:12.260 How everyone was wearing masks. How doctors found that sunlight was actually an important way to
00:02:17.600 treat patients. I never knew that the phrase sunlight is the best disinfectant was literally
00:02:22.760 true medically. I always thought that was just a metaphor for talking about political and journalistic
00:02:27.900 transparency. Shining a light on bad behavior but no it's it's how you fight a flu virus. It was
00:02:34.820 interesting to see the knowledge that was gathered a hundred years ago as the era of modern medicine
00:02:40.080 was just getting underway. Remember penicillin still hadn't been invented for another decade so
00:02:45.820 it was just the basics. Wear a mask, get the patient sunlight, isolate them, quinine water,
00:02:51.920 the medicine for malaria. It's like we unlearned those lessons and replaced them with I don't know
00:02:57.640 telling people they're racist or something for asking questions. Imagine if Prime Minister Robert
00:03:02.920 Borden shut down any questions about the Spanish flu by calling anyone an anti-Spanish racist
00:03:09.060 if they mentioned it. We've seen a spike in anti-Asian violence in different parts of our
00:03:13.740 country. In BC an elderly man with dementia was shoved out of a store by an assailant that
00:03:18.000 brought up remarks about COVID-19. We now have a conservative leadership candidate that
00:03:22.920 is asking for Dr. Tam to be fired and is accusing her the WHO in China of being in cahoots. What is
00:03:29.760 your message to Canadians as they see this? Intolerance and racism have no place in our country.
00:03:38.860 Yeah anyway my point was that I think there was a lot of common sense back then. We've lost some of
00:03:43.720 that. Some of the know-it-alls today who are banning people from going to the beach or the park
00:03:47.900 should read up about sunlight treatment. It's interesting to learn from the past or at least
00:03:52.040 to know about the past before discarding it. So I want to follow up in that vein for one more day
00:03:58.280 and maybe one more day also. I came across the story of the plague of Marseille. I've never been to
00:04:06.200 Marseille. It looks incredible. It's on the Mediterranean coast of France not far from Cannes or Monaco.
00:04:13.380 It's a port city. It's so so unbelievably pretty isn't it? You can see some little islands out at
00:04:22.300 sea a little bit. The Frioul Islands. People live there now. It's got a great view of Marseille
00:04:28.280 and everyone in Marseille looks at them. And those islands are where ships were quarantined
00:04:34.700 when they arrived in Marseille from exotic places. But they did it wrong in 1720. The plague
00:04:41.480 had been to Marseille before. The great black death of the 1340s and 50s that killed half of Europe.
00:04:48.860 Took 200 years for the continent to repopulate. And then the plague came back again to Marseille
00:04:56.280 finally ending in 1580. So bear with me. So Marseille was this great port city like Venice was. That's how
00:05:04.020 the plague traveled on ships from the east because ships carry rats and rats carry fleas and that's where
00:05:08.880 the plague bacteria lives. So when a ship would arrive in any of these ports it would anchor offshore
00:05:15.440 for 40 days. That's where the word quarantine comes from. From the Italian. Quarantagiorni. 40 days.
00:05:22.000 Doctors from the city would go to check on the health of the ship's crew. I mean in 40 days that's a long
00:05:28.540 enough time to wait to see who's sick. With the city so so close after journeys like that. So these ships
00:05:35.240 were at sea for months or even years. They were so close but they had to wait because the alternative
00:05:42.380 if they got it wrong was death. So that's how Venice did it where they invented the phrase quarantine
00:05:48.680 in the 1340s. And so after Marseille had the last black death in 1580 they set up a whole system.
00:05:57.340 They set up a city hospital. They set up a list of reputable doctors. Accredited them.
00:06:01.960 They had a sanitation board. They set up a lazare which in Italian is lazaretto.
00:06:09.020 You can see it comes from the word Lazarus. It was basically a quarantine hospital island
00:06:15.960 where the ships would say this is a lazaretto in Venice. It's about 400 years old.
00:06:23.200 So they set up these lazarets in Marseille too on those little islands. So here's how they would do it.
00:06:28.060 The ship would come in and a delegation from the city's sanitation committee, politicians and doctors,
00:06:34.740 would go to meet it and give it one of three different bills of health depending how they
00:06:41.060 were doing. Isn't that interesting? That's where that phrase came from. Bill of health. Clean bill
00:06:46.140 of health. So they would check where the ship had been. That's very important. Where did you come from?
00:06:51.040 And cross-reference that to what they had heard about different cities around the Mediterranean.
00:06:54.960 They'd inspect the cargo, inspect the crew, inspect the passengers looking for disease.
00:07:02.060 And if anyone looked sick, well, the ship would not be allowed to dock in Marseille itself.
00:07:08.660 So if everything was fine, you would get a clean bill of health. But there were two other kinds of
00:07:13.480 bills of health. If the ship had been somewhere risky, even if no one seemed sick at first,
00:07:18.600 the ship would be sent to these islands, the Lazaret. Very, very pretty. But I can imagine
00:07:25.360 very, very frustrating, but better than killing half of Marseille with the plague. I found it hard
00:07:31.200 to get all the details in English, but there evidently had a pretty complicated system. You'd go to a
00:07:35.520 different Lazaret, depending on how bad or how good you seemed in the eyes of the sanitation board. So you
00:07:42.200 could be quarantined for up to two months and away from other ships and other crews if you were really
00:07:47.600 bad, if you had the plague, if you had leprosy. They were just going to really, really wait to make
00:07:53.060 sure you weren't sick before letting you in the city. So a ship like this, called the Grand Saint Antoine,
00:08:01.960 Well, it left Marseille in July of 1719 for Syria to pick up precious fabrics and cloths apparently
00:08:13.900 worth a hundred thousand écous. That's what they call these golden coins. I hope I'm pronouncing it
00:08:22.080 right. Ecous. Just to give you an idea of how valuable that ship's cargo was at the time, the average
00:08:27.940 monthly pay for a laborer, for a sailor, would be one ecu. So it's hard to compare, but in terms of
00:08:34.540 purchasing power in today's dollars, that ship's cargo would be worth a hundred million dollars.
00:08:40.600 So it started sailing back from Syria, very exotic, but along with these precious fabrics, it had
00:08:49.220 the plague on the boats. On April 3rd, a Turkish passenger died.
00:08:55.080 Seven sailors and the ship's doctor died of the plague on the return voyage.
00:09:03.320 So the captain stopped at Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean, where he got a bill of health.
00:09:10.780 He was quarantined, not a clean bill, a bill he was quarantined, and the ship sailed on to Livorno,
00:09:16.740 Italy. And the Italian doctors said to the ship, keep going on, move on. And the captain wanted to
00:09:25.920 move on quickly, too. He had such valuable cargo, and he wanted to arrive at Marseille before the
00:09:33.100 annual Bocquer Faire, a medieval festival that actually continues on to this day. Huge party,
00:09:42.740 dancing, drinking, commerce, the running of the bulls, believe it or not, like in Pamplona.
00:09:48.740 So this ship's captain wanted to get back to Marseille quickly, because he had a hundred thousand
00:09:54.040 ecu, let's call it a hundred million dollars, worth of stuff he wanted to sell. So this captain,
00:09:59.920 Jean-Baptiste Chateau, he pulls into Marseille, and he tells the owners of the ship and the goods
00:10:10.560 within it, what's really going on. As in, there's no way they're going to allow that ship into Marseille
00:10:17.200 without the maximum quarantine, 40 days, maybe more. Well, the owners, they got a fortune on this
00:10:25.640 boat. So the owners, they go to work on their friends on the sanitation board. Oh, the plague
00:10:32.560 is a thing in the past. What are you worried about? So the sanitation board simply tells the
00:10:39.020 captain to go back to Livorno, Italy, another beautiful port city, to get a clean bill of
00:10:46.640 health from there. Go back to Livorno and have them give you a clean bill of health, not just a
00:10:50.660 bill of health. Have them say you're clean. Now, had they checked the captain's log, they would see he
00:10:57.580 was in Syria where there was the plague. Had they made inquiries, they would find that a bunch of
00:11:02.960 sailors and the ship's doctor had died. But instead, they just sent the ship to get someone else's
00:11:09.220 paperwork in another town. Now, Livorno is about 500 kilometers away, approximately. So several days
00:11:16.480 each way. But that's better than a 40, 60-day quarantine in Marseille that you might never be
00:11:24.360 allowed in. And the Livorno authorities in Italy, for whatever reason, they just issue him a clean
00:11:30.680 bill of health, which he sails right back to Marseille, arriving back at the island of Pomeghi
00:11:38.800 on May 25th. So after a short quarantine, he's let in on June 4th.
00:11:46.000 And there it went. The plague was back in Marseille in 1720. That is very recent when you think about
00:11:56.300 it. That's 100 years after Shakespeare's time. That's 50 years after the Hudson's Bay Company is
00:12:02.360 founded in Canada. So it's not medieval times. Within weeks, it was obvious what had happened.
00:12:10.040 They quarantined the ship, then they burned the ship. Yeah, a bit late for that, fellas.
00:12:15.380 There were about 90,000 people living in Marseille then. 50,000 of them died. Of course, even in those
00:12:27.540 days, people traveled. Another 50,000 died in neighboring areas of France. The plague raged on
00:12:37.120 for two and a half years until January 1723. The authorities literally built a wall, a plague wall,
00:12:49.220 to seal off Marseille from the rest of France. That wall is still there today.
00:12:56.020 So what's my point of this horrible, horrible story? I suppose like the Spanish flu details I shared with
00:13:01.300 you yesterday, it's just a reminder that in the sweep of history, this coronavirus will likely not be
00:13:06.120 remembered for its death toll, but rather the fumbling of the issue in the first place by our
00:13:10.960 political leaders, the making it into an economic crisis, the restricted civil liberties. We've had,
00:13:16.640 thankfully, fewer than 3,000 deaths in Canada compared to the 50,000 deaths from the Spanish flu,
00:13:22.460 and that was when our country had one quarter of the population, much less than the countless
00:13:26.860 millions dead from the plague. It's interesting. I was reading that throughout the 18th century,
00:13:31.540 there were more than 20,000 ships that arrived in Marseille from Syria or Turkey or North Africa,
00:13:38.060 places where the plague was rampant. Out of those 140 ships, or less than 1% were contaminated.
00:13:45.480 Plague ships continued to arrive in Marseille for decades, but they were stopped and quarantined.
00:13:50.760 One in a hundred had the plague. One in a thousand contaminated Marseille at all. And then that one,
00:13:57.600 that one ship killed a hundred thousand souls. Boy, I'm glad I live now and here rather than then and
00:14:09.100 there, aren't you? But let me tell you what I have learned besides a horrific historical chapter of
00:14:15.760 which there were countless instances around Europe and around the world. The flu, remember the plague
00:14:21.980 came from Asia originally. Well, number one thing I learned is that quarantines, they work, or at least
00:14:29.420 they work well. They've worked for nearly a millennium. You check out new arrivals. You see
00:14:34.720 where they're from. You ask them questions. You observe them. You check their paperwork. Then you
00:14:39.160 give them a bill of health. You don't just let them walk right through from a danger zone in the middle
00:14:43.160 of a pandemic as Trudeau did. This picture of a touchscreen that I took on my last international flight back in
00:14:48.760 March. That's all there was. One button, one sentence. It wasn't even clear. It was like giving
00:14:53.620 a clean bill of health from Livorno. No one really checked. People are in a rush. They have a festival
00:14:59.040 to go to. Come on. I got to do a deal. It was meaningless. So you need to check and you need to
00:15:05.620 treat different people differently. If you're coming in from Syria in 1720 and there's a plague and your crew
00:15:12.480 are dying daily, yeah, that's a few red flags. If you're coming in from somewhere safe and your crew
00:15:18.500 and your passengers look fine, you can have a quicker quarantine. But the point is you quarantine
00:15:23.460 the sick people so you don't have to lock down all the healthy people. Taiwan did this. You'll recall
00:15:29.220 my guest the other day saying they only quarantined 50,000 people in the whole country. They didn't
00:15:34.300 quarantine the whole country, 23 million in Taiwan, just those coming in from China. Why treat everyone
00:15:39.980 as if they're a carrier? Why send everyone to the Lazzaretto? Just send the people who came in from
00:15:46.680 China. Marseille didn't make everyone live like a criminal in a prison, just arriving ships just for
00:15:55.180 a few weeks until one guy lied. And with the cooperation of the Marseille government sanitation
00:16:01.700 board and the Livorno government sanitation board, he lied his way through. One last thing, that plague
00:16:08.980 wall, that's a kind of border, isn't it? It's a border within a country, but it's a border nonetheless.
00:16:13.720 It's a fence, a six foot high fence. It's what you do no matter how painful it is. When the plague is
00:16:19.120 mowing down half your people, you enforce a real physical border. Not like we're doing at Roxham
00:16:24.900 Road. But oh, here's Patty Heidu on that. Canadians think that we can stop this at the border. But what
00:16:30.860 we see is a global pandemic, meaning that border measures actually are highly ineffective and in some
00:16:36.520 cases can create harm. Yeah, I know. Walls work. Quarantines work. The Marseille plague of 1720 is
00:16:43.000 the exception that proves the rule. It only didn't work because lying politicians foiled it.
00:16:49.260 I got to ask you, though, Marseille that made its money out of global trade, trade from the Far East,
00:16:55.220 trade actually from China that made its way slowly to Marseille. How rich did you have to get
00:17:04.640 for it? For it to be worth wiping out 50% of the city, half of your family? For hundreds of years,
00:17:13.400 Marseille made a bet that it could vet the plague because the money was so good.
00:17:19.660 Was it worth it when half of your children and grandchildren are killed? I don't know.
00:17:25.300 Well, thank God the coronavirus is not as deadly as the plague.
00:17:28.040 Huh. Or Patty Hajdu, like the Livorno Sanitation Board, would have got us all killed.
00:17:37.860 Stay with us for more.
00:17:39.060 Welcome back. Well, every day at around 11 a.m. Eastern Time, the media party lines up outside
00:17:58.660 Justin Trudeau's 22-room cottage. That's what they call a 22-room mansion. And like Groundhog Day,
00:18:06.780 he comes out and they ask him the softest of softballs. Let me just show you a snippet of that.
00:18:14.780 Today they asked the most pressing question, and they asked it again and again, different reporters,
00:18:19.540 I should say, how come some hand sanitizer being imported from the United States doesn't have French
00:18:27.360 and English labeling? I'm not even kidding. That's the kind of tough accountability journalism
00:18:33.920 that Trudeau gets for about half an hour a day before going back into his 22-room cottage. Take a look.
00:18:40.840 Good morning, Mr. Trudeau. Health Canada yesterday decided to lift certain restrictions
00:18:48.580 with respect to cleaning products. And the official languages committee says that this is about people's safety.
00:19:03.560 Why was that decision made? And why should there not be proper information on products coming in from the United States?
00:19:12.220 That's a very good question. We need to protect the safety of consumers,
00:19:17.220 and products must be labeled in both official languages. But in an extreme situation such as the one we're in now,
00:19:26.220 we also recognize that there needs to be a proper balance between some vulnerabilities,
00:19:33.220 and in some situations we are ready to permit unilingual information on packaging.
00:19:42.220 But as I say, companies are working hard to try and rectify that.
00:19:46.220 This is not something that should be accepted in Canada, and it's really just because of the extreme situation
00:19:55.140 in which we find ourselves. We decided to authorize this, but we would certainly prefer that this not happen,
00:20:01.140 because our linguistic duality is not just a question of our Canadian identity,
00:20:06.140 it's also a question of safety for consumers.
00:20:09.140 Well, rebel news journalists are not allowed to ask questions of Justin Trudeau, so to kill the time,
00:20:15.140 we actually have to do real journalism instead of softballs about why won't you be mad about this emergency equipment not being bilingual.
00:20:23.140 We've done that journalism in various forms, including, for example, our FightTheFines.com campaign,
00:20:30.140 where we're actually going to Canadians whose civil liberties have been violated.
00:20:34.140 But one of the things I'm so proud of in our journalism this past month has been the investigative journalism
00:20:41.140 about the misconduct on the part of the government.
00:20:44.140 You might recall, about a week or two ago, Sheila Gunn-Reed blew the whistle on an $838,000 gift
00:20:53.140 that Justin Trudeau made of our tax dollars, giving it to the Wuhan Virology Institute.
00:21:00.140 Yes, the selfsame virus lab from which this virus emerged.
00:21:06.140 Trudeau gave them money after the pandemic.
00:21:10.140 This wasn't years ago.
00:21:11.140 This was last month.
00:21:13.140 Sheila Gunn-Reed had that national scoop.
00:21:15.140 Other newspapers followed, even if they didn't always give credit.
00:21:18.140 Well, Sheila has another doozy today.
00:21:21.140 Without further ado, let me bring in our chief reporter, Sheila Gunn-Reed via Skype.
00:21:26.140 Sheila, how are you doing today?
00:21:27.140 Hey, I'm great.
00:21:28.140 Thanks for having me on the show.
00:21:29.140 Well, you're so welcome.
00:21:31.140 You know, Richard Nixon was once asked what it took to get through law school.
00:21:36.140 And he said, and it's a perfect Nixon quote, it takes an iron ass.
00:21:41.140 And what he meant was you just have to sit down and read the books and read and read and read and read.
00:21:48.140 That was his takeaway from law school.
00:21:50.140 Sometimes that's what journalism looks like.
00:21:53.140 Reading through a 400-page haystack looking for that golden needle, that's exactly what you did.
00:22:00.140 Yeah, that's what I do almost all the time.
00:22:04.140 I have a just a PDF file on my computer or on my tablet, and I just sit there and just leaf through every single page.
00:22:14.140 Because these things, you can't even search them, you know, using keywords most of the time.
00:22:19.140 But that's really all journalism is, is being curious and being willing to do the work it takes to find that needle in a haystack.
00:22:28.140 And in this instance, it was, you know, two paragraphs really or three paragraphs in amongst 400 pages of briefing notes provided to Theresa Tam by officials in her own ministry who were trying their best to warn her and the health minister that the coronavirus was indeed spreading person to person in Wuhan, China.
00:22:55.140 And they were doing that as early as January 15th of 2020.
00:23:02.140 Now, that's important because, of course, Taiwan knew something was fishy.
00:23:07.140 Even in December, they sent a crew right into China.
00:23:10.140 They rang the alarm.
00:23:12.140 They shut down the flights.
00:23:13.140 The rest of the world wasn't quite as alert.
00:23:16.140 But even as you mentioned, as early as mid January, Canadian public health officials were ringing the bell.
00:23:24.140 So let's put up the first document that on January 14th here, the risk assessment, public health assessment of what PHAC stand for again, Sheila?
00:23:36.140 Public Health Agency of Canada.
00:23:38.140 Got it.
00:23:39.140 So their assessment of public health risk to Canada associated with the virus in Wuhan, China was updated as of January 14th to consider the potential for exposure beyond the Huanan seafood market and limited human to human transmission.
00:23:56.140 So until January 14th, people were believing the World Health Organization, Chinese Communist Party cover up, which is, oh, don't worry about it, guys.
00:24:08.140 There's nothing. There's no human to human transmission.
00:24:10.140 It was just, you know, bats or something in the Huanan seafood market.
00:24:14.140 But on January 14th, the Public Health Agency of Canada said, no, that's not true anymore.
00:24:21.140 We're going to revise our thinking.
00:24:24.140 Theresa Tam had that info on Jan 14, 15.
00:24:28.140 But she didn't follow it, did she?
00:24:31.140 She chose to follow Beijing's guidance instead of Canada's guidance, didn't she?
00:24:37.140 Right.
00:24:38.140 So on.
00:24:39.140 So they updated the information on the 14th.
00:24:41.140 She's presented with like a situational report on the 15th with this new information that it is spreading person to person, that a husband who worked in the seafood market gave it to his wife who had never been to the seafood market.
00:24:56.140 She had that information.
00:24:59.140 But not only did she have that information, she also had other credible information, information coming from the American CDC, as well as UK researchers who were saying this is far worse than what China is letting on.
00:25:15.140 But Theresa Tam chose to disregard that information from credible sources and instead opted to go on information from the World Health Organization, who was getting their information from China.
00:25:32.140 We know that as late as January 26th, so 11 full days later, after Theresa Tam's own officials were warning her about how the virus was being spread, she was still tweeting out that it wasn't spreading person to person at all.
00:25:52.140 Yeah.
00:25:53.140 Yeah.
00:25:54.140 So it had been 10 days since her own staff said, Dr. Tam, no, no, no, you can get it spread.
00:26:00.140 And by the way, the reason she tweeted that out on January 26, Sheila, is because the day before Ontario's provincial government had a press conference saying, yikes, we've got our first Canadian patient.
00:26:12.140 And wouldn't you know it, his wife got sick too, so obviously it was being transmitted patient to patient because a man got it, then his wife got it.
00:26:24.140 And the idea that on January 26th, she's still towing the World Health Organization line, despite the evidence in our own country and 11 days earlier, the advice from her own staff, she was ignoring independent Canadian science and substituting Chinese-backed WHO propaganda.
00:26:47.140 And she doesn't work for Canada only.
00:26:51.140 She works for Canada and the WHO and where they conflict, she chooses China's WHO instead of Canada.
00:26:59.140 Yeah.
00:27:00.140 And it conflicted almost immediately, didn't it?
00:27:03.140 This is the first pandemic that we've really had to deal with since Theresa Tam became the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada.
00:27:12.140 This is the first time where she had an opportunity to show her allegiance to Canada, as opposed to the World Health Organization.
00:27:21.140 And she didn't do what we are paying her to do.
00:27:24.140 She opted to side with the World Health Organization, an organization that refused early on to declare a pandemic when the world needed a pandemic to be declared.
00:27:36.140 And she herself is guilty of spreading the misinformation she now claims to be fighting.
00:27:43.140 I mean, how many times did she say that Canadians should not wear masks when eventually she had to flip flop on the issue of wearing masks and gave an interview very recently to Rosie Barton saying the new normal in Canada is going to be wearing masks.
00:27:59.140 Teresa Tam isn't using scientific evidence to protect Canadians.
00:28:06.140 She is political in nature, obfuscating about masks because her boss, Justin Trudeau, gave them away and telling Canadians that the virus wasn't spreading person to person because her other bosses at the World Health Organization were kowtowing to China.
00:28:20.140 Yeah, you know, I'm skeptical of public health officers.
00:28:27.140 They are technically medical doctors most of the time, but they haven't had an actual patient in decades.
00:28:30.140 They are really health care bureaucrats with an MD, which is different.
00:28:35.140 They have a different worldview.
00:28:36.140 They look at the whole ant colony of society and say, well, it's too bad we got to smush those ants.
00:28:43.140 But as opposed to a patient that cares about every ant, a patient.
00:28:48.140 And I'm using the ant colony example because that's the thing.
00:28:52.140 They don't think of each of us as a patient to be cared about.
00:28:55.140 They just have their vast schemes.
00:28:57.140 And the reason I say that is this.
00:28:59.140 Donald Trump has his public health experts also.
00:29:03.140 Dr. Fauci is one of them.
00:29:04.140 And Dr. Birx, I think, is her last name is another.
00:29:07.140 But it's very clear that they are operating based on their own expertise and ideology.
00:29:14.140 Now, I think that they can be quite wrong, but no one for a second would credibly think that Trump's advisers,
00:29:21.140 especially Dr. Fauci, who's a lifelong Democrat, is just giving an answer to paper over what Trump himself thinks.
00:29:28.140 You can even see some tension between them.
00:29:31.140 I think whatever you think about Fauci, I mean, I disagree with him more all the time.
00:29:37.140 He's actually speaking what he thinks is the right answer.
00:29:41.140 Theresa Tam cannot say the same thing because her answers are flip-flopping based on whatever political boss of the day leans on her.
00:29:51.140 So it's not at least Dr. Fauci is going from what he in his heart of hearts believes.
00:29:58.140 He's not tailoring it to appease power, which is exactly what Theresa Tam is doing.
00:30:04.140 What's the point of a public health officer if it's simply a politician with an MD?
00:30:10.140 I find it I find it very frustrating.
00:30:12.140 And there's zero accountability for her.
00:30:14.140 Anyone who questions her is called a racist.
00:30:16.140 Derek Sloan, the conservative MP, proved that.
00:30:19.140 Yeah.
00:30:20.140 And I mean, when you look at President Trump and Dr. Fauci, there's a check and a balance there.
00:30:27.140 I'm sure Dr. Fauci would like it to go one way.
00:30:29.140 But Donald Trump is also taking all those other considerations into account.
00:30:33.140 The economy, people's psychological health in a bad economy.
00:30:38.140 Trump is worried about those real things to balance the examination of the ant colony that his chief medical officer is doing.
00:30:48.140 In Canada, we don't have that.
00:30:49.140 We have a prime minister who has basically abdicated full control over our economy to someone who's completely unaccountable.
00:31:02.140 She's unelected.
00:31:03.140 And she doesn't have any background to temper her medical observations that seem to be going back and forth all the time.
00:31:15.140 She doesn't care about the economy.
00:31:17.140 She doesn't care about getting people back to work.
00:31:19.140 Yet she seems to be the executive in control of everything right now.
00:31:24.140 Yeah, it's so weird.
00:31:25.140 She's a servant of elected politicians.
00:31:28.140 But you tell me who her master is.
00:31:31.140 It's like she has no one, she has no boss because Trudeau is hiding out every day.
00:31:38.140 I want to show you a clip of Dr. Tam that I came across yesterday.
00:31:42.140 A national film board movie about 10 years ago called Outbreak.
00:31:46.140 I watched the whole thing last night.
00:31:47.140 It's about two hours.
00:31:48.140 I thought it was interesting.
00:31:50.140 Professor Michael Bliss, the Toronto historian, basically describes the 1885 smallpox epidemic in Montreal.
00:32:01.140 It was very interesting to learn about that.
00:32:04.140 About 5,000 people died of smallpox in Montreal 135 years ago, which was proportionately quite large.
00:32:13.140 And it was quite a troubling time, obviously.
00:32:18.140 So what this film board movie called Outbreak did is it told that story and it juxtaposed it
00:32:24.140 with a hypothetical modern day story of what would happen if an epidemic broke out in Montreal, if someone flew in from London and infected Montreal.
00:32:34.140 And so they went back and forth between here's what happened in Montreal 135 years ago with here's what might happen now.
00:32:41.140 So they had this pretend scenario.
00:32:44.140 And one of the people who was interviewed in this documentary was Theresa Tam.
00:32:52.140 And I just want you to watch this 90 second clip from the movie where Theresa Tam, in her trademark unemotional catatonic style,
00:33:03.140 talks about licensing people, basically branding them.
00:33:07.140 Do you have the virus or not?
00:33:08.140 Do you have the vaccine or not?
00:33:10.140 We might put you in a detention center.
00:33:13.140 You have to comply.
00:33:14.140 Very Orwellian.
00:33:16.140 Take a look at this documentary from a few years ago.
00:33:20.140 I think the public has to know this is one of the worst case scenarios in terms of an infectious disease outbreak in that their cooperation is sought.
00:33:29.140 If there are people who are non-compliant, there are definitely laws and public health powers that can quarantine people in mandatory settings.
00:33:41.140 It's potential you could track people, put bracelets on their arms, have police and other setups to ensure quarantine is undertaken.
00:33:52.140 It is better to be pre-emptive and precautionary and take the heat of people thinking you might be overreactionary, get ahead of the curve, and then think about whether you've overreacted later.
00:34:13.140 But it's such a serious situation that I think decisive early action is the key.
00:34:24.140 Police checkpoints are set up on all the bridges, and everyone leaving the city is required to show proof of vaccination.
00:34:31.140 Those who refuse to cooperate are taken away to temporary detention centers.
00:34:37.140 Yeah, so that's the woman who not only doesn't bat an eye when talking about imprisoning us for not following her advice.
00:34:45.140 Like I say, that's not a real doctor, that's a public health officer.
00:34:48.140 She's running around now, not just in charge, but taking direction from the World Health Organization.
00:34:54.140 Last word to you, Sheila.
00:34:55.140 You know, it's funny that Theresa Tam would advocate for such things as stripping Canadians of their charter rights during the time of a pandemic,
00:35:04.140 because that's just how you generally live in China.
00:35:08.140 And it seems as though she's beholden to the World Health Organization who's taking all their advice from China.
00:35:14.140 China has always had imperialistic designs on the rest of the world, and it seems as though they're getting their way.
00:35:22.140 We're submitting to China's imperialism, and we're doing it to ourselves,
00:35:28.140 because we didn't listen to the people that Theresa Tam should have been listening to back on January 15th.
00:35:37.140 Yeah, that's so crazy.
00:35:38.140 Well, folks, I invite you to watch all of Sheila's report.
00:35:42.140 It's about a 10-minute report. You can find it elsewhere on our website, including the documents that she refers to.
00:35:49.140 One of the things we like to do at Rebel News is when we have a source document, a primary document,
00:35:54.140 we like to put that on the website so you can see for yourself the basis of our reports.
00:35:59.140 Sheila, congratulations. I'm so proud of your journalism.
00:36:02.140 Scoop after scoop, and not to diminish in any way what you do, but you're based at home on the farm in northern Alberta.
00:36:11.140 You're not in Ottawa, Toronto. You're not in the center of the universe.
00:36:14.140 You're not asking those softball questions to Justin Trudeau, but you have managed to break more investigative scoops on this virus from your log cabin
00:36:24.140 than all the fancy-pants media party types in Toronto and Ottawa, and I think it's sort of clear why.
00:36:31.140 Yeah, because I'm not paid off. Is that why? Because I'm intellectually curious?
00:36:37.140 Well, because you're actually from a basic journalist to curiosity, follow the facts wherever they lead.
00:36:42.140 That's a phrase we have around here at Rebel News. Follow the facts wherever they lead.
00:36:45.140 Just follow them and just tell the story as you go. Ask basic questions, who, what, where, why, when.
00:36:51.140 And I guess if you're on the dole from Justin Trudeau, you're not allowed to ask anything other than that one Reuters reporter
00:36:58.140 who the other day said, Mr. Trudeau, how are you holding up?
00:37:02.140 You sure you're not facing burnout from working so hard?
00:37:05.140 Oh, I can't even believe Trudeau didn't crack a smile at that. I mean, it's just so funny.
00:37:09.140 Oh, my God. Well, Sheila, we're very proud of you, and we thank you for your work.
00:37:14.140 Thanks, Ezra.
00:37:15.140 All right, there you have it. Sheila Gunn-Reed, our chief reporter, breaking the stories.
00:37:18.140 Can I recommend that you watch her full video? Because we just showed a couple of documents from her,
00:37:22.140 but she really makes the case, and I encourage you to find it elsewhere on our site.
00:37:27.140 Stay with us. More ahead on the rabbit.
00:37:29.140 Hey, welcome back. What do you think about my amateur study into the history of the plague in Marseille, France?
00:37:45.140 I've never been to Marseille, but I certainly want to go.
00:37:48.140 And if I go, I think I'm going to try and go to those quarantine hospital prisons.
00:37:55.140 It's a strange combination of things, wasn't it?
00:37:59.140 They were called lazarettos in Italy.
00:38:02.140 Like Lazarus, you go there and you rise again.
00:38:06.140 I don't know. It kept the health and it kept an order to things for centuries until it didn't.
00:38:14.140 I guess the plague would have come to those cities no matter what.
00:38:18.140 Thankfully, the coronavirus has not killed half of us as it killed, as the Black Death killed half of Marseille.
00:38:25.140 But I think again, as when yesterday I went through the common sense of our great grandparents in the Spanish flu,
00:38:32.140 maybe the common sense of the sanitation board in Marseille 300 years ago, other than their one error,
00:38:43.140 maybe that saved the city for centuries.
00:38:46.140 I think we can learn from them.
00:38:48.140 I tell you, I would trust the wisdom of Marseille 300 years ago more than I would trust the wisdom of our own leadership today.
00:38:56.140 What do you think?
00:38:58.140 Well, that's our show for today.
00:38:59.140 Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.
00:39:04.140 Stay healthy and keep fighting for freedom.