BEST OF 2024： The COVID lies they told us continue to warp our lives
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Summary
A new documentary tries to look at the unseen impacts of the Pandemic, of the lockdowns, and of the government responses in both Canada and the U.S. It features people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, another former guest on Full Comment, and the man that President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated to run the National Institutes of Health.
Transcript
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The COVID-19 pandemic may be behind us, but as we hit the five-year anniversary,
00:02:07.220
there are still lots of questions and a lot of anger over how things were handled back then.
00:02:15.780
We're on a hiatus until the new year, but wanted to bring you our most listened-to episode of 2024.
00:02:21.680
Back in June, I had the chance to speak with Vanessa Dillon, an award-winning director of the documentary,
00:02:28.220
COVID Collateral, and it shows how real scientific methods and debate were silenced,
00:02:33.280
even banished, as governments faked expertise during COVID-19 with the help of compliant doctors
00:02:42.220
It features people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, another former guest on Full Comment,
00:02:46.820
and the man that President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated to run the American National Institutes of Health.
00:02:56.700
We'll probably never know the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on society,
00:03:02.580
be it health, be it mental well-being, be it the amount of pounds we put on,
00:03:08.040
or the bad habits that we picked up as a result of it.
00:03:11.080
But COVID-19 and the pandemic that saw much of society locked down had a huge impact on us.
00:03:20.360
A new documentary tries to look at the unseen impacts of the pandemic, of the lockdowns,
00:03:28.060
of the government responses in both Canada and the United States.
00:03:32.400
Were the decisions being made driven by science?
00:03:38.200
These are some of the questions that we've asked and answered in the past,
00:03:40.880
but Vanessa Dillon, in her new documentary, COVID Collateral,
00:03:44.500
examines them again, including speaking to some voices that we've heard from in the past,
00:03:58.280
What was the reasoning behind making this documentary and making it now?
00:04:04.160
And I ask in the sense that the pandemic was a really dark time for a lot of people,
00:04:12.020
don't even want to think about it or talk about it anymore,
00:04:20.600
Well, I think it's a very good time to go back to this period in our lives,
00:04:27.520
because I think there needs to be some accountability for the policies
00:04:34.100
which devastated and really upended people's lives.
00:04:38.420
What motivated me to make this film was not just the level of human suffering,
00:04:46.000
but also the fact that I learned that some of the policies were not based on science.
00:04:56.020
I noticed that there were some prominent scientists who were speaking up against lockdowns,
00:05:02.520
people like Jay Bhattacharya, that you just mentioned, of Stanford,
00:05:07.820
Dr. Scott Atlas, who was a really well-known public health policy scholar,
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Martin Kulldorff at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta at Oxford.
00:05:23.380
They were speaking out against lockdowns, saying,
00:05:28.840
and we do not have the science to justify lockdowns.
00:05:44.480
and they were really being taken down in brutal ways by the media.
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I noticed that there was a discussion about the origin of the virus,
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and that Dr. Fauci, as the chief medical officer in the White House,
00:06:02.380
tried to explain the origin of the virus as a natural evolution of animal to human,
00:06:13.860
You know, something that had jumped out of a wet market in Wuhan.
00:06:17.340
But there were many leading scientists who noticed
00:06:22.800
that there was this insert in the COVID virus genome,
00:06:35.360
So these leading scientists who sounded the alarm and said,
00:06:43.900
Well, I remember writing on the lab leak theory early on,
00:06:49.000
and not from a critical point of view that just said,
00:06:55.580
But it was, I think the first time I heard it was CNN or the New York Times,
00:07:00.920
and they pointed to a paper published earlier that year,
00:07:07.340
from scientists at a Chinese medical university.
00:07:10.740
And everyone was talking about the lab leak theory as a very real possibility.
00:07:28.780
And that to me was the beginning of, wow, this is incredibly political.
00:07:32.900
Because the president mentioned something that the New York Times and CNN
00:07:37.020
and medical doctors around the world have been discussing in academic papers and journals.
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Because he mentions it, we suddenly have to discredit it.
00:07:53.420
And what we do see in the film is that through the access to emails between Dr. Fauci and his group of scientists,
00:08:07.440
we do see the early warnings from his own scientists saying,
00:08:19.140
and they basically published an article in Science,
00:08:28.560
saying that all the science points to the fact that this was a natural evolution,
00:08:37.060
that this all came out about, that the virus had escaped from a wet market and had jumped to a human being.
00:08:53.320
We do know that Dr. Fauci's department had been financing for a number of years
00:09:08.440
So it would not have looked good for the public to actually find out that the coronavirus may have escaped from a Chinese lab
00:09:23.800
And we all saw the State Department cables that came out showing that State Department officials had gone to visit the Wuhan lab
00:09:41.900
And they weren't calling to invest more for gain of function or anything.
00:09:45.880
They said, we need to invest more here to make sure things are secure.
00:09:54.360
What had happened at the Wuhan lab was that the FBI and medical officials knew
00:10:04.240
that the Wuhan Institute was classified as a level four biohazard lab.
00:10:10.360
That is the highest level of, let's say, danger in the world.
00:10:17.440
But they were functioning, as China will do, because they are rather careless about human beings and human health.
00:10:29.140
They were functioning at a level two, which is like your local dental office.
00:10:35.480
Now, the Americans had become so concerned about this.
00:10:38.620
A scientist called Peter Daszak, who was responsible, in a sense, for parceling out the American funding
00:10:56.620
He had become so concerned that as early as 2018, he asked for lab leak insurance from the NIH.
00:11:13.020
So people knew many years ago that there was danger, that the possibility of a lab leak was very possible.
00:11:30.960
Now, because of where this lab is, we will never know exactly what happened, how, and why.
00:11:37.420
Because the government of China will never allow it.
00:11:41.920
You know, I'm talking the very minute details, Vanessa.
00:11:45.900
But once we get beyond that, and the virus is introduced to the human population,
00:11:51.720
there's a lot of questions to ask about the reaction.
00:11:59.360
And I want to point out that because America is the biggest player in the world,
00:12:05.540
people listened around the world to what Dr. Fauci was saying.
00:12:10.160
And his public health advice impacted public health advice here.
00:12:15.740
And he was asked in a deposition or a committee hearing, I forget,
00:12:20.260
where did this social distancing keep six feet apart?
00:12:25.660
And he said, I don't know, it just kind of appeared.
00:12:32.940
Well, that was the, you know, it was, it seemed to be the same kind of somewhat careless attitude
00:12:44.640
Because I don't, you know, one of the most revelatory things that we have in the film,
00:12:50.800
and it's really right at the very end, is Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH.
00:12:59.580
And he admitted in a confession type of interview, that during the COVID crisis,
00:13:11.040
And it was the, and it was the public health mentality, which says that at any cost, lives must be saved.
00:13:22.500
They didn't need to, they didn't need to worry about the economy or social impacts.
00:13:29.000
So, what they didn't take into account, and he was very honest about this finally,
00:13:33.880
what that public health mentality did not take into account was the fact that damage from lockdowns can take many, many forms.
00:13:46.420
There's the social impacts, drug overdoses, mental health issues.
00:13:54.340
We all know that, we all know about all of the bankruptcies, all of the, we know how this,
00:14:01.720
how the lockdowns affected lower income people to a disproportionate level.
00:14:08.920
Not just the small business owners who went bankrupt, who lost their livelihood,
00:14:18.540
but there was a whole low-income group of people who didn't get paid unless they showed up somewhere to work.
00:14:30.160
Well, even post-vaccination, we were still closing restaurants or putting limits on them that made them economically unfeasible.
00:14:40.240
And, you know, who's working in a restaurant serving you your meal?
00:14:44.160
They're not exactly high net worth individuals normally.
00:14:49.240
They're people who are younger students on the economic margins.
00:14:54.940
And, you know, not to localize it too much, but I remember the public health officer for the city of Toronto
00:15:07.340
I said, how can you say that this is being spread in restaurants?
00:15:13.820
And they pointed to three cases that they thought had been spread via restaurants.
00:15:20.160
And I said, there's almost 8,000 restaurants in the city of Toronto,
00:15:24.580
and you're going to close them all because of three suspected cases.
00:15:31.480
And that's the mentality that Dr. Francis Collins was talking about there.
00:15:41.380
And, you know, we had all of the small business owners being driven bankrupt while the big box stores stayed open.
00:15:51.140
So apparently you could catch COVID buying a box of nails at your small local hardware store, but not at Best Buy.
00:15:58.380
And we all know that they kept the liquor stores open while shutting down churches,
00:16:03.540
shutting down AA meetings, shutting down gyms, everything that kept people healthy.
00:16:08.480
And so the big box stores were open, but children were being kept out of school for long periods of time.
00:16:18.700
And, you know, I know of a group of parents who would try to find these underground secret in-person classes for their children,
00:16:31.740
So it's the catastrophic effects on working people.
00:16:41.500
I mean, the laptop class, the professional class who could work at home with minimal upheaval,
00:16:49.020
I mean, they were, you know, I'm not trying to minimize the way it upended people's lives,
00:16:56.960
but compared to people who actually had to show up somewhere at a warehouse or stocking shelves,
00:17:19.380
But I'd been in that frontline worker class before.
00:17:23.440
And having your life twisted up and down, sometimes with minimal notice,
00:17:29.000
just because I would say that there was a huge spike in fear during the pandemic.
00:17:42.840
As you spoke to people like Scott Atlas and Jay and Roman Baber and others who you interviewed in the documentary,
00:17:52.860
Or were you bringing together things that you already knew,
00:17:55.620
but that you hoped others needed to hear and understand?
00:17:59.060
What really shocked me was the statement from some of them that basically the expert class is not to be trusted.
00:18:11.800
That was kind of, you know, that was a shock for me.
00:18:14.900
I am one of those compliant Canadians who, when they're told, you know, they should be vaccinated, etc., etc.,
00:18:25.000
And I obviously, I shut down like everyone else.
00:18:29.260
But what I learned during the course of making this film was that scientists are just as political as anyone else.
00:18:40.220
And that scientists will sometimes twist information for political reasons.
00:18:51.340
And that, and I also learned that in my own industry, certain films were not being made.
00:19:04.360
Certain films about big pharma were never going to see the light of day,
00:19:10.060
simply because a lot of the big broadcasters have got, have got, are, are sponsored by, by big, big pharma.
00:19:22.360
Now, you've been a documentary filmmaker for many years, but not necessarily this type of film.
00:19:29.880
This is a bit of a departure for you, isn't it?
00:19:31.840
Well, in terms of, in terms of this being a rather hot and controversial topic, yes.
00:19:40.060
I mean, I've made, I've made other films, I've made films about terrorism, you know, brain science films that, that, that offered up new, new ideas, but nothing this polarizing, certainly.
00:19:55.780
All right. We need to take a quick break. When we come back, though, I want to talk about the fear that drove so much of this and whether that fear is still there, will people hear the message of your documentary? Back in moments.
00:20:25.780
During the worst parts of the pandemic, actually right up until the end, one of the worst things was, it was a fact-free environment and things were driven by fear.
00:20:37.460
Vanessa, I want to read you from something that I wrote in the fall of 2020, and it was about how in Ontario's first wave through, of COVID through nursing homes, which was, you know, incredibly devastating.
00:20:54.240
We, we, we had a huge number of deaths, but when you look at it compared to a bad flu year, it turns out there were just 3.7% more deaths than in 2018, which was a bad flu year.
00:21:08.240
And the profile of who would suffer and die from COVID was very similar to those who would suffer and die from influenza.
00:21:15.280
When I published this based on ministry data and showing over multiple years, what was actually happening, the minister was asked about it in a news conference here at Queen's Park and said, well, that's accurate.
00:21:30.880
And then was vilified by the media who didn't dispute the numbers, just figured this should not be said.
00:21:40.340
That was repeated around the world where people would raise, you know, the Barrington Declaration and the people behind that, for example, would raise issues.
00:21:50.400
Or the, the, the study that, that you talked about that was conducted at Stanford, the, raising facts did not change the, the fact that people were driven by fear.
00:22:04.540
And then that fear informed polling, which informed decision-making around lockdowns and other issues.
00:22:11.740
Yes, I, I think we will never know how many people actually died from COVID.
00:22:20.140
First of all, we do know that in, in the U.S. that many people who, let's say, died of cancer, but had, but had COVID were counted as COVID deaths, not cancer deaths.
00:22:35.740
They were counted as COVID deaths because those hospitals got, uh, supplementary financing for every COVID death.
00:22:48.680
To badger the Ontario government to start reporting died with COVID versus died from COVID because there is a difference.
00:22:58.100
And, and they did not have that financial incentive here, but they were still reporting all COVID deaths as the same.
00:23:04.440
In fact, I, I was counted as a COVID hospitalization at one point, not because I went to the hospital with COVID.
00:23:13.180
I went to the hospital because I smacked my head and had a traumatic fall and, and a horrible concussion.
00:23:19.600
And while I'm laying there, they test me for COVID and it came back positive, but I was counted as a COVID hospitalization.
00:23:29.440
Yes, that's, it, it, it, it's not, you know, your, your, your, your case isn't that uncommon.
00:23:34.400
I mean, certainly at the, at the, uh, children's hospitals and the, and the, the, um, one of the pediatricians in our film, uh, who was, who was at, uh, who was at, uh, McMaster said that if a child was admitted, let's say for her tonsils, uh, and she just happened to have COVID, she was counted as a COVID hospitalization.
00:24:02.740
That is, um, you know, if, if, if, if, if we can't rely on our institutions for accuracy of information, where do we go?
00:24:12.060
Uh, this, this, this, this also played out on a very big scale when, um, with the, with the Imperial College of London, who had, um, who had put out, uh, the, the, the estimation of fatalities over, over, over several months.
00:24:34.600
This was in early 2020, and he had estimated that in the U.S. alone, there were going to be 2 million people that were going to lose their lives if they didn't lock down.
00:24:47.960
Well, what we do know was that the numbers were, were so wrong, they were exponentially wrong, that the actual number of fatalities were just a fraction.
00:24:57.880
And the, the, the, the, um, the numbers person, uh, Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College of London admitted that his numbers were grossly wrong.
00:25:09.100
But he did state that he didn't expect governments would base their health policies on, on his estimates.
00:25:17.180
So, my point again, if we cannot rely on these experts for, for accurate information, where are we supposed, where is the average person supposed to, to turn?
00:25:30.040
I, I, I'd say this, and I'd like to hear your view on it.
00:25:34.540
I can almost forgive those early days of mistakes like that, because we didn't know what we didn't know, and we didn't know what we were dealing with.
00:25:45.400
And the horrific scenes out of Italy and, and, and out of China scared everyone in North America, scared everyone around the world.
00:25:54.320
And we thought, well, okay, and now we've got this in, in, in, and then once we had real data, though, once we had real experience, it still didn't seem to matter.
00:26:06.540
Um, the fear drove the policy and parents demanded that schools be closed because doctors went on TV and said schools need to be closed.
00:26:17.720
And it didn't matter if you had five other doctors saying no, well, you've got, you know, nonstop TV channels saying kids are going to die.
00:26:24.180
Kids were not dying from COVID, not in any great numbers.
00:26:27.720
I am sure that we could find a small number somewhere, but normally, just like elderly people that died of COVID with underlying conditions, or as the doctors call it, you know, darkly, comorbidities.
00:26:40.820
Um, I, I, I still had people arguing with me at the end of COVID that we were all at risk and it, you know, it didn't matter what your risk profile looked like.
00:26:50.540
We were all facing the same risk, which is factually not untrue.
00:26:57.360
You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're right.
00:26:59.860
The average age of the, of a COVID patient was 83, which is, I think, uh, higher than, than, than life expectancy about, about risk stratification.
00:27:15.660
This is what I, where I think the public health, uh, where, where public health really fell down.
00:27:23.060
And, and, and, and, and, and also the, the, the media should also be held, uh, responsible for this.
00:27:29.420
The risk stratification was not explained to the public.
00:27:34.380
They didn't explain to the public that, that 97% of people were going to be fine if they were exposed.
00:27:42.720
If they, if, if they were exposed to, to, to COVID.
00:27:47.420
That young people, especially children, but young people, if they had no, if they didn't have,
00:27:53.520
if, if, if, if, if, uh, if they were not immunocompromised, they should be fine.
00:28:00.540
They, they, they, you know, they may not even know they, they, they, they, they, they had COVID.
00:28:07.180
But the media made it seem as if, as if everyone was at equal risk.
00:28:12.980
And, and, and I think this is one of the things that led to, um, one of the, one of our policies
00:28:20.960
that I will never be able to get my mind around and I think is very sad, is that we forced people
00:28:27.800
to die alone. We forced people who were either terminally ill or elderly people who were dying.
00:28:39.940
We forced the relatives to say goodbye to them through an iPad. Now, that to me is one of the
00:28:46.840
most cruel and inhumane acts that was ever committed during COVID. If you can imagine your
00:28:53.540
mother slipping away or your father slipping away and you can't be with them, you can't comfort them.
00:28:59.160
They're alone in that room. I've often asked myself, how could we have done this and who were
00:29:05.940
we protecting? One of my colleagues won a national newspaper award for a well-used, often used photo
00:29:16.560
of a mother at the window of her long-term care home trying to touch their loved one through the
00:29:24.160
glass. That was an absolutely horrific policy, one that was replicated around the world. And if
00:29:33.060
somebody came up with one bad policy, we all seem to just adopt it without stopping to think.
00:29:37.860
Um, and it, it, it was bizarre. We would have arguments over, uh, lockdowns or opening up.
00:29:47.460
Well, you know, if, if we're being honest, you look at the United States, California had some of the
00:29:52.240
strictest lockdowns and at times had some of the worst COVID outcomes. Florida was more open, not as
00:29:57.660
open as people think, but more open. And, and theirs went up and down as well. Sometimes they were doing
00:30:03.560
great. Sometimes they were doing horribly. It, you know, so, and you could show that and say, well,
00:30:08.700
the lockdowns aren't helping. And the argument would be, yes, they are. You can't say that. Um,
00:30:15.240
again, back to people not wanting evidence. Now I want to ask you about this. You, you spoke to many
00:30:21.120
people who are against it, uh, including, uh, Roman Baber, who worked in the building I'm sitting in now as,
00:30:27.960
uh, an elected official. He, um, Roman would actually show up with data and information and,
00:30:36.340
and try and make the argument. But many in the, in the anti-lockdown camp would say, and this is where
00:30:44.960
I ended up breaking with them. They would say, well, you can't lock us down. And I would, I remember
00:30:51.780
saying to some leaders and organizers of it, I said, and I wrote a column about this. I said,
00:30:56.320
you've got to come up with a better argument than what you're using right now. That, which you're
00:31:02.320
just saying, you can't lock me down. It's a violation of my rights because the general public,
00:31:07.440
you can see that the general public does not care about your rights and is demanding
00:31:12.700
more lockdowns. I mean, the politicians gave people what they demanded and, and there, they said,
00:31:19.960
I shouldn't have to explain it. And I said, then I can't help you because you do need to explain it
00:31:25.420
because people are scared and mostly scared due to my colleagues and some doctors who have been
00:31:32.240
proven fundamentally flawed and wrong. Um, what do we do going forward with, with future pandemic
00:31:39.220
plans? I mean, we will have more pandemics. We had them before and we didn't react like this.
00:31:44.840
Um, the, you know, the swine flu pandemic, uh, several years ago was actually detrimental to
00:31:50.720
children. I remember holding my son like a, like, like a dead weight, a flopping doll at the hospital
00:31:58.440
to get him medical attention. Schools weren't closed. Daycares weren't closed.
00:32:03.720
No. You know, Brian, we've had a pandemic plan in place just like the U S and I know the U S has
00:32:10.420
been in pandemic plan, which is similar to ours has been in place since 2006 because medical leaders
00:32:18.580
knew it was, it was, it was just a question of when we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we dealt with
00:32:23.740
the pandemic because the last one was in 1918, the Spanish flu, and they knew that we were overdue,
00:32:30.220
but the pandemic plan generally stated that there were to be no school closures and no lockdowns
00:32:37.300
because of the, because of the impact on, on, on, uh, society, but that the most vulnerable
00:32:45.540
people in society needed to be, uh, protected, um, this pandemic plan was ignored because of
00:32:54.760
pressure from the WHO to, to, to, to, to lockdown. Um, but I think moving forward, I think people are,
00:33:05.560
I think people have lost trust in our institutions. And I, I think, I think moving forward, we need to
00:33:15.040
demand accurate information from our, from our, uh, leaders, from our, from our institutions. We need
00:33:22.420
to demand calm facts. We need to, uh, we need to expect better from our media because the media played
00:33:32.760
a huge role in this, in this, uh, fear mongering. And I think if we really need to drill deep down and go
00:33:41.480
back to basics, I, I think we need to start teaching our children, we start, we need schools that teach
00:33:49.880
children facts and critical thinking, not indoctrination. Otherwise, if we keep going down
00:33:56.780
this path, we're finished as a society. We really need to demand that, that we need to demand much
00:34:08.480
better information from our, from our, uh, leaders. And we especially need leaders that will,
00:34:16.260
that will serve Canada, not the globalists who serve the, the, the interests of the WEF or the WHO,
00:34:26.100
but leaders that serve their country's interests. Vanessa, it's a fascinating documentary,
00:34:32.000
extremely well produced, the highest quality, uh, let people know where they can find out more or
00:34:38.400
where they can watch it. Thank you. Um, they can, uh, find out more on the website at www.covidcollateral.com.
00:34:48.780
We will be posting when the film is where, and when the film is, uh, available. Okay. Thank you very
00:34:55.740
much for your time and, and for the film. Hopefully we'll talk again soon. Thank you, Brian.
00:34:59.800
Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host. This episode was produced
00:35:06.980
by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer. Remember to
00:35:12.260
subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Help us out by
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leaving us a rating or review and telling your friends about us. Thanks for listening. Until next time,