Juno News - February 18, 2023


Canada’s pandemic panic： a retrospect (ft. Barry Cooper)


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

175.61908

Word Count

3,033

Sentence Count

3

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the Andrew Lawton Show
00:00:05.920 now getting right back into the thick of things yesterday we did the retrospective on
00:00:14.040 one year since the Emergencies Act and it's impossible to talk about the Emergencies Act
00:00:18.620 and the Freedom Convoy without the broader question of what context gave birth to those
00:00:24.940 things and that was at the time two years and a little bit of COVID policy in Canada which has
00:00:30.240 been analyzed in a newly expanded book by Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro Geni called Canada's
00:00:37.740 COVID the story of a pandemic moral panic now we are supposed to be talking to Marco and Barry
00:00:44.800 although Marco seems to have drifted off into the ether so Barry the floor is yours solo for the
00:00:50.540 first little while here it's good to talk to you thanks for coming on today yeah you're welcome
00:00:55.640 Andrew yeah the first edition came out in November of 2020 and it dealt with events up to about the
00:01:05.140 beginning of the fall we discovered that it didn't end in November 2020 and there was so much more
00:01:13.100 interesting stuff that came along over the next 18 20 months that we decided we would you know keep
00:01:20.840 notes as things were going on and pull this new expanded version together the main purpose of it
00:01:28.580 is to document the I don't know how to characterize it politely but there's let's say the mendacious acts
00:01:39.020 of governments of governments government bureaucrats the media academics particularly guys in the in the
00:01:46.280 medical schools that otherwise it'll be forgotten ten years from now because there won't be any record
00:01:55.880 people there'll be a remembrance maybe that some people didn't like the government responses but we
00:02:01.940 basically provided an analysis about why people didn't like it because of the lies that were told by
00:02:08.960 bureaucrats by docs and especially by politicians in the mainstream media that was the purpose of
00:02:15.800 it one of the things just to go back to January 2020 here that I think is important to note is that
00:02:22.600 you know we were looking at the people in the lab coats and the people in the suits on television
00:02:27.420 as being authorities on what was happening but they were largely getting their information from the
00:02:33.080 same place as we were they didn't know what was going on they didn't know what was happening they were
00:02:37.640 looking at the news footage out of China eventually Italy and Iran and I think that was a big problem
00:02:43.340 is is that they seem to be a lot more confident than they should have been and I think that was
00:02:48.920 where a lot of that public trust was eroded quite early on yeah I agree that's exactly what happened
00:02:55.140 because the rest of us could read the sources that not that very many people did mind you but it was
00:03:01.000 certainly available it wasn't hidden and the behavior particularly of that's a senior people in the in the
00:03:11.180 interface between government policy and and the rest of us chief medical officers of health in this
00:03:19.120 country people like Tony Fauci in the States what they said was being contradicted by other people who are
00:03:28.800 just as well credentialed as they are in many cases much better they actually knew what they were talking
00:03:35.400 about and and the result was since the rest of the world could read this stuff people just just didn't
00:03:43.860 believe them anymore it took a while anybody who believes anything that comes out say of Bonnie Henry's
00:03:50.280 mouth right now uh you know it's just gullible as as uh you know as a frog I mean I don't know what the
00:03:58.200 why anyone would after she's been uh criticized on the basis of facts for for so long
00:04:05.900 I believe we might have Marco back on the line now so if so uh hopefully he'll magically appear in front
00:04:13.700 of us and uh we will be able to carry on if not we'll uh put you on the hot spot hot seat for a
00:04:18.680 couple more minutes and get him on uh momentarily all right it sounds if there's an issue where he
00:04:24.260 is not appearing so Marco if you are there uh perhaps you can try reconnecting and we'll we'll get you in
00:04:29.360 here uh and I apologize for the technical issues this is the nature of live broadcasting Barry your
00:04:35.780 background is obviously in political science and I think one of the interesting things that a lot of
00:04:40.740 people pointed out and government officials didn't really acknowledge ever and still to this day have
00:04:45.900 not is that their actions seem to be largely driven by political science rather than health science and
00:04:52.040 not the uh the good astute political science that you are a purveyor of but oftentimes a a more cynical
00:04:57.880 and less freedom oriented variety and and I think this is the big problem that I had with it is that
00:05:02.960 health policy was and and by that I mean the stuff that was being put out by public health officials
00:05:08.380 like Teresa Tam or Dina Hinshaw Bonnie Henry and so on these people have a singular focus they're not
00:05:16.180 constitutional scholars they're not holistic uh health officials that are looking at the broader
00:05:22.440 implications of their policy they were looking at largely the single metric of cases and nothing else
00:05:29.160 so if their input was being treated as one of many inputs throughout COVID and politicians were also
00:05:35.520 taking in uh inputs from other places I I think there might have been different results but instead
00:05:40.160 what we seem to see was an a complete delegation of all decision making to these unelected people
00:05:46.600 yeah that's right I mean if if this was in fact an emergency there are people around who prepare their
00:05:54.540 uh their work environment to deal with emergencies the first thing that happened in Edmonton was the
00:06:01.040 Alberta emergency plan was tossed out the window uh nobody paid any attention to it at all like zero
00:06:08.740 yeah but why have like I mean why have an emergency plan if you're not going to use it when there's
00:06:13.420 an emergency right uh that's exactly right and it this was almost unique because when you have say
00:06:19.080 um an earthquake in uh the say the lower mainland and and uh you know Chilliwack is uh is rocked to its
00:06:26.560 uh uh roots um you don't call upon geographers or volcanologists you talk upon emergency people and
00:06:34.660 ask them to to you know take charge and that presumably bc still has an emergency plan in place
00:06:41.840 they just don't didn't use it for this emergency uh we certainly have it and we didn't use it uh every
00:06:48.000 other province in the country probably had one and none of them used it it's uh it's just uh it's um
00:06:53.920 um I I would say it it brings up issues that have nothing to do with either emergencies or health
00:06:59.820 policy it has to do with the anxieties uh that were clearly present in the in the politicians they had
00:07:06.940 no clue what to do and so they basically freaked out and and uh and said okay it's about health what do
00:07:13.180 you say uh Dina uh what why should she know anything I mean she's she's a an MD she's not a an emergency
00:07:21.580 person she's not even a a a real uh med scientist you know she's not an epidemiologist she's just an
00:07:27.840 MD from U of A why should she do it or or you know Bonnie Henry the same thing uh it's a it's a
00:07:36.460 a political that's why we call it a panic it was a political panic that caused all of the incredible
00:07:43.360 amount of uh suffering that Canadians have put up with for the last you know now getting going on to
00:07:49.320 three years and it's completely unjustifiable on medical or any other grounds is your belief that
00:07:56.220 they I'll ask this in a different way because one theory that I've had is that they were pot committed
00:08:03.400 at a certain point and they had invested so much in their narrative that they didn't actually have
00:08:07.620 the ability to walk it back without just completely undermining anything they'd been telling us for the
00:08:12.560 last two and eventually three years but the flip side of that is that they're true believers and that
00:08:17.780 even now the people that have been championing the policies that you're uh poking holes in rightfully
00:08:22.840 so they still believe and will to their dying day that they were the right calls and I'm curious if you
00:08:28.860 have a sense of of which camp they're in do you think that they they got so far into it that they
00:08:33.440 couldn't walk it back anymore or do you think they're still true believers I think it'd be both
00:08:38.520 uh quite frankly most uh like I came from a medical family uh and one of the things my dad was a surgeon
00:08:46.860 uh my sister was a doc uh one of the things that you learn pretty clearly uh is that doctors
00:08:53.180 particularly when they they have responsibility for life and death uh don't generally uh take much
00:09:02.080 uh second thoughts they you know they have a job to do they do it uh they're not really good at
00:09:07.000 reflecting on whether or not they've done the right thing uh and that's certainly true for uh these sort
00:09:12.760 of uh you know I would say it's not even fair to call them second-rate docs but but the the bureaucratic
00:09:20.020 docs uh keep the same attitude without the same competence uh and so then when when you have
00:09:27.920 people who are who are genuinely expert in some of these matters uh like the the people who uh who
00:09:34.260 signed the great barrington declaration that said you've got to look after the people who are
00:09:38.180 vulnerable not everybody these were good these the three big universities in the world oxford harvard
00:09:43.880 and stanford that's where these guys were from uh dina henshaw said oh we disagree like that was it
00:09:51.800 she probably didn't even understand what these guys were saying uh and because at the time she had
00:09:57.840 the year of the premier uh nothing happened they just continued the same kind of of uh uh let's
00:10:05.120 say misguided to be polite about it uh policies that they had uh already put in place i i know to
00:10:11.960 to get to the bigger picture and i i'd say the more philosophical underpinning of this i i know that the
00:10:16.640 uh the book's blurb draws a reference to hannah erent who you know the author of the the famous book
00:10:21.900 the banality of evil and and her uh thoughts on bureaucratic tyranny and i was wondering if you could
00:10:27.180 elaborate a bit on that yeah the that's one of my i've i've memorized this and i've mentioned it in
00:10:34.780 class i don't know how many times uh it was not actually in the eichmann book but it was in another
00:10:39.980 place that that she says the great problem with bureaucratic tyranny unlike any other kind of tyranny
00:10:46.300 is that the desperate remedy of tyrannicide is unavailable if you if you get rid of one bureaucrat they
00:10:53.020 will be replaced by another one who will behave the other one will behave in exactly the same way
00:10:57.980 uh so it really is a problem i mean you can get rid of bureaucrats uh which is fine i mean that's one
00:11:03.260 of the first thing that danielle smith did uh was to fire uh fire dina handshaw she should have been
00:11:09.980 fired by jason kenny he'd probably still be creamier if he you know if he'd had the the imagination to
00:11:15.980 do that unfortunately he didn't well unfortunately for him i'd say you know it's obviously good for
00:11:20.860 danielle but uh it was uh that the amount of of consistent um errors that uh bureaucrats are capable
00:11:31.500 of uh you actually have to know something about how public policy is made in order even to believe it
00:11:37.660 and it's it's was in this particular instance was really remarkable they just kept doing the same
00:11:43.100 stupid thing time and time again yes and i think i mean your point about jason kenny i i think is an
00:11:50.620 important dimension here because there was very little i mean some might even say no push back to
00:11:57.420 the overarching narrative regardless of which province you were in whether you had a conservative
00:12:02.940 or a liberal or a new democratic premier and and jason kenny again i mean uh at the time a lion of the
00:12:09.500 conservative movement going into covet doug ford again a recent conservative electee in ontario
00:12:16.860 they ended up doing the same as the ndp did elsewhere in british colombia as francois legault did in quebec
00:12:24.620 to some extent they went even further than that in ontario but there really was no escape from
00:12:30.380 this across the country and i'm wondering if when you were analyzing this you saw any major regional
00:12:36.460 variants or if it was really that everyone was singing from the same songbook it was a a remarkable
00:12:42.220 deference of elected politicians whatever side of the spectrum they were on uh to the uh alleged
00:12:49.260 expertise of self-proclaimed experts uh and toward the end of the book uh we started reflecting on uh on
00:12:57.660 tocqueville uh the great 19th century uh democratic theorist and he makes the point that that fear is
00:13:05.900 inherent in democracies and that politicians can see this and because they um are not immune from
00:13:13.980 the attractions of of increasing their power uh are quite willing to use fear uh to do so
00:13:20.780 and particularly when it's when it's fed up to them by uh alleged medical experts it's a it's a dish
00:13:28.700 that they could not refuse sampling and they certainly did and it had nothing to do with their
00:13:33.740 previous ideological predispositions one of the challenges of a book like this coming out now
00:13:41.100 is that there obviously has been now three years of material to analyze but i also wonder and and this
00:13:49.340 is a an issue i grapple with even on this show when i decide what i'm talking about if people are are less
00:13:54.780 willing or less i mean mentally capable of dwelling in this period so i guess my question would be do you
00:14:01.740 you and marco hope that this book sort of closes the book on coveting canada to move forward or do
00:14:07.260 you really think there still needs to be the beginning of a reckoning uh i'm sure that that i
00:14:13.820 can speak for marco on this we'd like it to be the beginning of a reckoning i mean it is a record of what
00:14:19.340 happened um but it is also a kind of uh not exactly a prediction but uh nothing that we have seen
00:14:27.740 particularly from the governor of canada uh shows any sense of how they've completely screwed up
00:14:34.460 that is that has never i'm sure entered the tiny mind of the prime minister uh that he has anything
00:14:40.540 to apologize for uh and in fact he seems to be doubling down on the kinds of errors that were uh
00:14:48.700 implicit in the in the say in the lockdowns well just just to interrupt you there barry today i believe
00:14:55.180 it was laurier university in ontario announced that it was ending its mask mandate which again
00:15:00.940 a lot of people are saying too little too late but there's no recognition when they do this that
00:15:05.260 they got it wrong it's well now the science supports us doing this is basically their answer so
00:15:11.420 so even when they lift these things there's never any contrition that comes along with it
00:15:15.980 no no that's right i mean the experts experts are never wrong this is this is the thing we have
00:15:20.940 to remember that could have been the title of the book right there i think one one of the uh things
00:15:25.900 that that i've uh i wrote this particular chapter so i remember it about masks and uh it was somebody
00:15:32.140 in the states who actually did a big meta-analysis of of i don't know 70 or 80 studies of masking
00:15:38.460 and he came to the conclusion that masks are as useful uh against uh covid uh as chain link fences
00:15:45.660 are against mosquitoes and i i thought yeah and and people who had looked at the evidence had looked
00:15:53.100 at the actual research would know that uh and if you hadn't looked at the research if you were
00:15:59.180 a medical officer of health in this province or in this country and you didn't know what the research
00:16:04.060 was you just weren't doing your job and i don't know which it was i've never talked to any of the
00:16:09.980 three graces that you uh mentioned earlier uh whether they actually knew anything or they just
00:16:15.420 decided uh on their own without any evidence it could be either way yeah and i think just on the
00:16:21.580 masks alone i remember at the beginning when teresa tam was telling everyone not to wear masks and then
00:16:26.220 eventually it became illegal to not wear a mask and now we're back to it being a choice and mandates
00:16:30.940 not helping and it's easy to get a little bit of whiplash on this so uh let's hope you get the
00:16:35.660 beginning of the reckoning and not just you and marco but i think all canadians here uh i apologize
00:16:41.500 for whatever technical issues uh were uh affecting this uh we'll happily get marco on the show next
00:16:47.980 week to broaden this discussion the book canada's covid the story of a pandemic moral panic an expanded
00:16:53.900 edition by barry cooper and marco navarro janey so uh barry thank you so much uh and marco in absentia
00:17:01.260 i i thank him as well but it's great to talk to you okay thanks andrew thanks for listening to
00:17:05.340 the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news