Juno News - September 06, 2021


Canada's anti-child COVID policies are not the norm

Topics
leave our kids alone vaccine policies for children
Mentioned
COVID-19
Quebec Conservative candidate says Erin O'Toole's plan allows provinces to succeed Trudeau dismisses pro-freedom protesters as “angry, racist and misogynistic”

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

187.48

Word count

945

Sentence count

70

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Kelly talks about the need to put our kids first when it comes to getting them vaccinated, and why it's time for provinces to stop holding our kids hostage to their fears and anxieties about coronavirus.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's time all of Canada really embraced the maxim that adults should not be using their
00:00:11.760 anxieties and fears about COVID-19 to hold our youth hostage. This is one of the things that
00:00:17.840 has frustrated me the most about the response to COVID for a number of provinces in Canada.
00:00:23.220 Ontario has been particularly bad about it when it comes to not putting our kids first. And there's
00:00:29.380 a number of examples that still continue. I mean for a lot of people the summer's actually been
00:00:34.100 pretty good. There haven't been that many restrictions. You've been out and about.
00:00:37.380 Many provinces dropped their mask mandates for months actually. People got to feel free from
00:00:41.940 those masks. They got to go about their business and hang out with friends and family. Do all of
00:00:46.220 the activities they love. Great news. Now as the fall returns a lot of people anxious about what
00:00:51.880 that means for coronavirus. Okay fine adults are going to make their choices. They're going to
00:00:56.680 deal with these issues. The news headlines. However they got to deal with it. Do what you got to do.
00:01:01.560 But here's the thing. Please leave our kids alone. What do I mean by that? I'm going to give you two 0.90
00:01:06.840 examples and these are examples basically comparing how the United Kingdom does things to how some
00:01:13.080 jurisdictions in Canada does it. Now it's different province by province. BC has actually largely been
00:01:19.240 the leader in terms of letting children live their lives in previous waves and so forth. Keeping schools
00:01:25.080 open and kids not wearing masks. In Ontario schools coming back in the fall kids all have to be masked
00:01:32.120 indoors even the kindergartners. Very frustrating. A lot of parents writing to me saying they're really
00:01:37.880 upset about that. I mean the small children. Whereas in the United Kingdom I'm just giving one example.
00:01:42.680 There are other countries that have similar policies. They say for the whole country masks in 0.93
00:01:47.320 schools. Kids, educators, staff members. They don't need to wear them. You're not doing it. It's not
00:01:55.240 happening. And I really wish Ontario and some other provinces in Canada which persist in an information
00:02:01.080 silo and that they only really know and consume news that comes from within their own province. They
00:02:06.440 only hear from doctors and epidemiologists who are sort of on the same page with their province's approach
00:02:12.360 and they're not actually broadening their horizons and seeing what's going on in other parts of the
00:02:16.680 world. And those parts of Canada which actually have very sort of well anti-child policies. I don't
00:02:22.360 know what else to call them. Those policies really restrictive on kids. That's actually the outlier.
00:02:27.080 That's not the norm for the western world. More people have to know that example. Another example is
00:02:32.280 when it comes to vaccines and vaccines for children and vaccines for young people. I can tell you in Ontario
00:02:38.360 there's there's a large appetite among many people to say we just got to approve these vaccines for
00:02:42.680 for small children not just the teens. It's currently approved for 12 to 17 year olds but for the small
00:02:47.320 children. You go hold on a second. I mean this is the job of experts to figure out whether or not the
00:02:52.520 risk benefit analysis actually says that this is something that should be done. Why are we pushing
00:02:57.560 for all this? Whatever your perspective on adult vaccines and clearly most adults in Canada are okay with
00:03:02.440 them because the vast majority of Canadians have in fact been vaccinated. The vast majority of adults
00:03:07.400 in those older cohorts. Whatever you think about the adult conversation. I mean in the UK they
00:03:13.160 actually recently redetermined that they're not going to be making vaccines available even to
00:03:19.480 younger teenagers. To 16 and 17 year olds yes they're making it available but under 16 they're not. So
00:03:25.880 there's an interesting disconnect here when we talk about vaccine passports for example in BC. This is
00:03:30.760 one example where BC does not have a child-friendly policy. BC and Ontario their vaccine passports
00:03:36.840 actually apply to people 12 and over anybody who is eligible to be vaccinated. So we've got this
00:03:43.480 situation where in the UK they're saying we're not even making the vaccines available to 13 year
00:03:48.200 olds. There are exceptions. There are certain underlying conditions where they will vaccinate
00:03:51.800 the 12 and 13 year olds but by and large it is not available to them there. Whereas in Ontario
00:03:57.080 and some other provinces a 13 year old can can be banned from having access to certain facilities
00:04:03.880 if they don't have two doses of this vaccine that they can't even get in the UK. I mean at the very
00:04:10.760 least one would think we can moderate the vaccine passports to make the teenagers the under 18s 0.96
00:04:15.800 exempt from all that. Whatever your position on the vaccine passports in general is surely
00:04:19.880 any reasonable person would agree why can't we exempt those younger people the people under the age of 18. 0.92
00:04:25.640 There you go just two examples of how I feel we've really got to do a better job of putting our
00:04:30.520 youth first. The persons who are at lowest risk of having a serious outcome of COVID-19 but I think
00:04:35.720 in many senses at highest risk of suffering poor consequences from lockdowns and well yes as the
00:04:41.800 reports say from vaccine side effects and so forth. I mean just let the kids live. Adults things to be
00:04:48.840 concerned about for sure. Older high-risk adults lots of concerns. I appreciate why people have those concerns
00:04:55.240 but please we gotta leave the kids out of it.