Juno News - June 15, 2022


Canada’s perpetual state of crisis (Ft. Dr. Chakrabarthi)


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

187.94331

Word Count

4,266

Sentence Count

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 hey everyone welcome to the show once again it's great to have you back if you caught the inaugural
00:00:11.680 podcast last week welcome back and if you're new welcome the basic premise of the show is
00:00:17.760 to explore ideas and debates that go beyond what is considered permissible in the mainstream space
00:00:23.440 this week we'll go into a topic where i've spent a lot of time writing and thinking about in my
00:00:28.880 weekly column for the national post and it has everything to do with covet 19 vaccines and
00:00:33.920 mandates and all of the rules and regulations that continue to hamper our everyday lives
00:00:40.240 while much of the rest of the world seems to have moved on from the pandemic
00:00:44.400 here in canada we seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis most provinces have lifted vaccine mandates
00:00:51.200 and mass mandates ontario will soon be lifting its mass mandates for public transit and hospitals
00:00:58.720 but the federal government continues to be an outlier even within canada and sticking to its
00:01:03.840 vaccine and mass mandates for everything that falls under its jurisdiction which is the international
00:01:10.000 border domestic and international travel and of course federal workplaces so today we'll explore
00:01:17.600 whether the federal government has some secret information that no one else does whether these
00:01:23.760 vaccine mandates that they continue to insist on make any sense also we'll look into the discussion
00:01:29.920 on boosters because some experts are now suggesting that we need to mandate boosters before long some
00:01:38.080 other experts will come along and say that we need to mandate a fourth booster or fifth booster thereby
00:01:43.360 putting us on an endless carousel of boosters naturally of course this will make big pharma happy but
00:01:49.520 does that make any sense for us also canada and the us are two of the only western nations that i'm aware of
00:01:56.320 that don't recognize recovery from infection as being equivalent to vaccination yet science tells us that
00:02:03.120 natural immunity is as old as time itself sometimes even better than the vaccine to discuss all of
00:02:09.680 this and more i'm very excited to introduce you to my guest dr suman chakrabarti dr chakrabarti is an
00:02:16.880 infectious diseases specialist based out of toronto in a space which has been dominated by so many so-called
00:02:23.760 experts who've been fear-mongering and politicizing everything from lockdowns to vaccinations to the
00:02:30.640 mandates dr chakrabarti stands out as a voice of common sense and reasoning where he bases his expert
00:02:38.720 opinion on the science and the evidence suman welcome welcome to the show um so let's just jump right
00:02:46.080 into the question the questions that i have it's very clear from the evidence evidence from around the
00:02:51.600 world and something that i've written about quite extensively in my national post column that immunity
00:02:57.360 acquired from vaccination uh wanes over time uh british data for example speaks to this it shows
00:03:03.520 that the efficacy of the original two-dose series is now basically zero uh something even dr teresa tam
00:03:10.000 our chief medical officer of health uh has spoken about recently um there's a spanish study which just
00:03:15.760 came out a few days ago which shows that boosters are 51 effective at protecting you from infection uh for
00:03:22.960 a grand total of 34 days after getting the shot um and after that i suspect that we should expect
00:03:29.120 this to also go down to zero so this naturally brings us to a discussion on boosters um is it fair
00:03:35.840 to say that at some point uh someone who has a booster is basically like someone who is unvaccinated
00:03:42.960 unless they're on a carousel of boosters so they're on their fourth shot fifth shot or whatever
00:03:48.160 um what is your take on boosters uh should we revise the definition of what it means to be fully
00:03:55.520 vaccinated to include boosters should everybody get a third shot this is a very very complex situation i
00:04:02.800 think one of the things that we have to look at at the whole population is that there's now no longer
00:04:07.680 a full blanket statement that you can give not only because of uh the fact that people have a very
00:04:13.600 a differential risk to a severe cover so for example an 85 year old has a much higher chance
00:04:19.280 of being hospitalized if unvaccinated uh than say a 30 year old that needs to be taken into account
00:04:24.880 we also have to remember that a great massive proportion of the population uh not only is uh
00:04:30.240 protected with vaccine but many have also been exposed to covet which also adds that added layer of
00:04:35.280 of complexity one thing i'll say that's important is that i think we need to change the way that we're
00:04:41.200 presenting what the vaccine is doing so right now we keep talking about infection so meaning getting
00:04:47.200 the virus and then getting symptoms from it the vast majority of people at this point are now getting
00:04:52.240 something that's very mild like you know upper respiratory tract sore throat maybe a fever for a
00:04:57.120 couple of days and they recover uh and i think a lot of that is thanks to immunity in general but also the
00:05:02.640 fact that omicron is milder so when you think about that situation that you know if you're saying that
00:05:07.920 you're getting a zero percent uh efficacy from the from the vaccine to preventing that well then that's
00:05:13.680 not as important to me as now the fact that you are preventing somebody still very well with two doses
00:05:19.920 or three doses from being hospitalized and that's what's important uh the important outcome so i'll
00:05:25.360 give you an example we stand right now in june 2022 not just over a year ago uh i was working in
00:05:33.040 the hospital and we were routinely admitting 40 and 50 year olds who were going on ventilators some dying
00:05:40.240 and now we're seeing multiple people who are mainly over the age of 85 multiple health conditions when
00:05:46.480 they come to the hospital they're barely requiring oxygen i've seen multiple 97 year olds sent home from
00:05:52.720 hospital it's a very different disease now and i think that this is why i think that calling somebody
00:05:57.920 fully vaccinated with uh three doses or two doses is not as important as somebody who's protected
00:06:04.160 i will say one thing to close this out that the third dose of vaccine was very important for us
00:06:09.680 back in you know december especially for individuals who were um older than age 60 with multiple health
00:06:17.120 conditions that was very important it was much less important for say a 30 year old with two doses to
00:06:21.920 get that third one so i think to kind of tie this all in one one big bow is that it's complex i don't
00:06:28.640 think that it's possible to give a one-size-fits-all summary to everybody right no i i agree that's a
00:06:34.880 great point just to uh uh just to follow up on that when you said that last year you saw 40 and 50 year
00:06:41.600 olds uh hospitalized in the icu uh were they uh unvaccinated uh and and and also what kind of health
00:06:49.760 issues that did they have did they have comorbidities did were they obese uh i've heard i've
00:06:55.920 heard from other doctors that they've seen a lot of obese patients being admitted into the icus is
00:07:00.800 that has that been your experience i think that uh at the time that many of these individuals were
00:07:06.480 coming in the uh vaccine wasn't actually available so this was back uh so the vaccine was out for
00:07:12.080 healthcare workers and elderly people but uh a lot of these individuals that i saw were working in
00:07:17.520 factories so they often had very high amounts of exposure for prolonged periods of time uh and yeah
00:07:24.320 there were some that were healthy but many did have kind of early diabetes centripetal obesity and
00:07:30.000 just frank obesity as well that's very important to note uh but that said even still many of these
00:07:36.320 individuals if we saw them in the icu for something else today they do relatively well so i think the the
00:07:42.320 fact that people have been vaccinated the fact that the variant is more mild and the fact that look
00:07:48.320 many people have now also been exposed to the virus has all kind of made what we're seeing today
00:07:53.360 very different than compared to a year ago right exactly so i want to turn to vaccine mandates um
00:07:59.600 you know most countries in the world have dropped them except canada uh many have realized that it's
00:08:06.400 useless essentially preventing transmission especially when it's based on the two-dose series
00:08:12.000 and even if you were to include the booster dose um you know i speak as someone who got the booster
00:08:16.720 back in december and then shortly after that i got omicron uh so this suggests that just because
00:08:22.560 you have a booster doesn't necessarily prevent you from getting covid um so that begs the question
00:08:28.400 what purpose do the federal vaccine mandates serve at this point uh whether it's for travel or for the
00:08:34.640 workplace this is something that i've also had an issue with and i think the answer is that there is
00:08:40.800 not a clear medical reason i think that when we first had the vaccine available and we were in
00:08:45.840 the middle of the emergency phase of the pandemic i can understand wanting to do uh what you could to
00:08:51.280 stop transmission and at that point assuming that the the vaccine could do that but it became evident
00:08:57.280 you know i would say probably around may june july of 2021 that the vaccine there was significant
00:09:02.320 amount of breakthrough infections they were mild thankfully but the thing is people were still
00:09:06.240 transmitting with significant viral loads even if vaccinated so with this uh information in mind
00:09:12.720 i think that uh even with the third dose maybe you get a bit of protection but then afterwards you're
00:09:16.960 transmitting again i really think that we have to accept the fact the vaccine is not preventing
00:09:21.600 transmission it's awesome at preventing severe disease but this now makes the mandate to something
00:09:26.400 that doesn't have a lot of rationale rationale to it and i do think that it really needs to be lifted
00:09:31.120 just as it has in most countries of the world right and speaking of lifting mandates uh there's news now
00:09:37.440 that ontario will soon get rid of masks on public transit and in hospitals i think the bit about
00:09:42.880 hospitals really surprised me because if you believe that masks work um you know you would want them in
00:09:48.640 hospitals uh and also i think most countries around the world as far as i i'm aware have not removed mask
00:09:54.960 use in hospitals so that came as a surprise to me uh does this make sense to you and more generally what
00:10:01.760 is your take on the usefulness of masks given that the messaging on this has been incredibly murky right
00:10:07.760 from the get-go when you've had well-known experts saying that masks are not really doing much for you
00:10:13.120 and then they quickly change the tune uh uh you know a few months uh from from having said that um so
00:10:19.600 you know what do you what do you think of masks and what do you think of the news from ontario
00:10:23.040 i'll put this into two parts so first of all in the public aspect of it i think that masks uh
00:10:28.800 understandably uh have a they've been a bit of a symbol for us part of our pandemic uniform for the
00:10:34.080 past two and a half years at least until march the 21st uh here in ontario so i think that we have to
00:10:40.320 realize the fact that i think that people um when you're really pushing the mask in a way you're
00:10:45.840 undermining what's happening with the vaccine which is doing amazingly to protect the vast majority of
00:10:50.480 people even those of us who are older who are immune compromised this vaccine is awesome at
00:10:56.000 keeping people out of the hospital so the mask at that point above that i'm not really sure what it's
00:11:00.880 adding and when you look at the literature with the less contagious virus influenza before the pandemic
00:11:06.880 we saw that a mask mandate or at least population masking is not preventing these things on a population
00:11:13.040 level in terms of the outcome that we care about the most which is preventing severe disease
00:11:18.240 so i think in terms of things like public transport we now have a great amount of immunity on the
00:11:23.760 ground i think it is fine to lift that the hospital is a little bit different one thing we have to
00:11:28.400 remember is just because the provincial mandate is lifted it doesn't mean that all of a sudden
00:11:32.560 hospital is going to throw away masks i think that we still have used them historically in clinical
00:11:37.520 settings especially with febrile respiratory illnesses i think that it will be at some point okay to
00:11:44.000 lift masks in non-clinical areas in the clinical areas i suspect they're going to be there for a
00:11:48.160 while longer until we go back to what we were before but the point is lifting the mandate does
00:11:52.960 not mean that we're going to be throwing off masks in the hospital and each hospital will have its own
00:11:57.760 infection control rules that's what i suspect will happen uh uh on saturday once this is lifted
00:12:03.680 yeah i was struck by something you said that mask mandates actually undermine the use of vaccines
00:12:09.600 it reminded me of something that i read uh recently that china's pursuit of zero covet has actually
00:12:15.760 undermined the use of vaccines so in a sense i mean you know we were um on the road to zero covet
00:12:22.000 at least there were advocates of zero covet and uh it's just ironic how these things play out um you
00:12:27.680 know when when when you think that you know they're well-intentioned but you know ultimately uh
00:12:32.560 counterproductive if you know if you think that vaccines save lives absolutely and i think that uh
00:12:38.320 something that was important for me is that uh i read this amazing line i believe it was in an
00:12:42.960 atlantic article that talked about one of the things that we ended up doing was our strategy
00:12:47.520 ended up becoming the goal so if you look think back to april 2020 our strategy to make sure that
00:12:52.960 we don't overflow our hospitals which is what our main concern was was to try to keep community
00:12:57.920 transmission low by you know masking physical distancing and all that the goal was to keep the
00:13:02.960 hospital safe and uh not full and the thing is that what happened is over time this morphed into
00:13:09.600 us basically trying to stop all transmission which is impossible with the respiratory virus especially
00:13:14.480 during the colder months when we're huddled inside so i think that it's important for us to take a step
00:13:19.360 back what was our goal here is to keep people out of hospital which we now do very well with the
00:13:24.000 vaccine to keep people from becoming extremely ill which the vaccine does very well but yeah
00:13:29.440 transmission unfortunately has been hard especially with with omicron to try to prevent and at this
00:13:35.120 point in time if people are getting cold which you know you get sick for a couple of days and you're
00:13:39.520 better and you don't need to be hospitalized well this happened to everybody before the pandemic and
00:13:44.000 i'm not sure why we're trying uh with all our might to stop that because we can't it's a normal part of
00:13:48.960 living life and being with other people yeah so um just uh turning to something that i find uh very
00:13:55.280 puzzling and i think it's a very important issue um is why countries like canada and the us um don't
00:14:01.600 recognize natural immunity that is immunity you gain uh from uh recovering from an infection uh we have
00:14:08.480 ample evidence that shows that um you know natural immunity in some cases is as good as being vaccinated
00:14:15.680 um and uh you know i i looked at my own uh i looked at this data from the ministry of health
00:14:20.960 um hospitalization icu admission data and i just did some basic number crunching and it also tallies
00:14:27.520 with what public health ontario has been saying in its regular surveillance reports which is that as
00:14:32.400 far as hospitalizations and icu admissions go there is no statistically significant difference between the
00:14:38.400 unvaccinated and the vaccinated especially when you're looking at the two dose series can you help us
00:14:44.160 understand what this data is telling us it's important that as time has gone on this has become a
00:14:50.800 bit fraught in terms of the calculation one thing we have to remember is that the vaccine efficacy
00:14:55.600 calculation is done as kind of like a comparison of the uh people who are vaccinated versus those who
00:15:01.280 are unvaccinated the thing is at the very beginning of the of the pandemic or at least when we were
00:15:06.160 vaccinating people let's say in december 2020 there was a substantial proportion of the population that
00:15:11.280 had not yet been exposed to covid so when you're looking at vaccine protection uh versus people who are
00:15:17.360 unvaccinated there's people who are still susceptible but now a massive proportion of people have been
00:15:23.520 exposed to covid even if they're unvaccinated so all of a sudden the the two seem a lot closer together
00:15:29.040 and it seemed like the vaccine isn't working as well which is which is obviously not true in keeping
00:15:33.200 people out of hospital but i completely do agree with you that when you are exposed to covid
00:15:38.720 yes there might be waiting protection against infection but your protection against severe disease
00:15:44.080 is just as good as with the vaccine and in fact we have multiple uh studies that show this why
00:15:49.440 this hasn't been recognized i'm not entirely sure i do think part of it was uh wanting to get people
00:15:54.240 vaccinated not assuming that if you've been exposed that you shouldn't get vaccinated uh it does make
00:15:58.880 things complicated so for example uh if you've had two doses and gotten covid well it's really hard if
00:16:04.560 you have if you haven't been able to document that covid infection so now is that person fully vaccinated
00:16:10.560 or is that person now partially vaccinated it's messy you can see how that is but i think you're
00:16:14.960 right though the bottom line is that uh if you've been exposed to covid and recovered you have very very
00:16:20.480 good protection against severe disease that's equal to if not better than the vaccine but i think that
00:16:25.200 we need to now be looking at immunity rather than just uh you know a vaccination status that's a
00:16:30.560 that's a very important point and uh it's it's really uh strange that we don't even address
00:16:36.800 natural immunity uh european countries for example will uh you know take proof of recovery as uh you
00:16:43.840 know for you to board a plane or uh or a border train um and and so i don't know why we we don't
00:16:50.080 really even uh discuss this issue and the messaging around vaccination and natural immunities has been
00:16:55.760 very very confusing we were told early on that everyone should get vaccinated um so basically implying
00:17:01.680 that vaccines will prevent you from getting coveted in a way that perhaps natural immunity would not
00:17:07.920 um do you think this early messaging perhaps well intention was ultimately counterproductive
00:17:13.920 or did it make sense that governments pushed vaccination aggressively uh thereby implying that
00:17:20.560 it was going to be vaccination or nothing yeah this is an important question for us to consider
00:17:26.240 and i think that obviously uh standing uh almost a year after more than a year after the vaccine
00:17:31.520 campaign started it's easy to look through this in retrospect and we should learn from this
00:17:36.400 i think at the time it actually wasn't evident to us that the vaccine wouldn't prevent you from
00:17:41.520 getting infected in fact it seemed like that within the first couple of months uh and we assumed that
00:17:46.800 the transmission would be the same but we rapidly found out that that wasn't the case even though
00:17:51.360 thankfully the protection against severe disease uh for two doses for young and healthy and the third
00:17:57.440 dose if you're older has really proven to be quite robust at the time i think that governments really
00:18:03.360 had to deal with the limited information they had at the time and the fact that we were still in an
00:18:08.320 emergency situation but i think now taking it to june 2022 where we are right now if we are going to
00:18:14.560 make any population level uh interventions recommendations it should be based on prospective
00:18:20.240 randomized control trials because we have the time to do them rather than kind of just conjecture or
00:18:26.240 expert opinion because i really do think that um we this is an excellent intervention uh the
00:18:31.680 vaccinations but if our goal is to you know keep people out of the hospital we're doing that very
00:18:36.240 well right now things might change down the road but we want to make sure we have evidence to make any
00:18:41.280 uh widespread uh recommendations so uh finally someone what is what is your message to canadians um
00:18:48.400 should we continue to live in fear of covid dr tam now says that we might be heading into a seventh
00:18:54.400 wave in the fall what should we do are we supposed to live in fear perpetually um is it time to treat
00:19:01.200 covid as endemic like the winter flu and just get on with our lives i i think that the latter i think
00:19:08.080 it's important for us to now realize that covet is here we can live with this safely and i really wish
00:19:12.480 people could see what i'm seeing on the clinical side where it's a completely different disease than it
00:19:17.200 was before and if 97 year olds with multiple health conditions can uh get better from covet i i think
00:19:23.760 that it it bodes well for the rest of the population i'm in no way saying that the cove is gone it's not
00:19:29.200 we're still dealing with it what i am saying is we are in a different phase of the pandemic uh you mentioned
00:19:34.720 dr tam's announcement uh recently and this is something that i am very against this idea of benchmarking
00:19:41.760 every wave going forward of course we're going to see more covet activity in the uh fall and winter
00:19:47.280 that's what happens with respiratory viruses but if every single time that happens and you're
00:19:51.760 benchmarking it it kind of gives people fear uh then we all of a sudden start hearing recommendations
00:19:57.760 of having outdoor gatherings i think all of that stuff we need to move away from we know if you want
00:20:02.800 to keep away from covid and decrease the chance we know what you can do and i think people are free to
00:20:07.600 do that but going forward i don't think we should be benchmarking waves i don't think public health
00:20:12.800 should be telling people what to do in in their house uh and look when when it comes time that we
00:20:17.440 have evidence that further boosters might help reduce severe disease then we should put that out
00:20:22.160 there but i do think that we should now be living with this without living with living in fear of it
00:20:27.360 yeah no as i sarcastically referred to it on twitter i said i predict we're going to be in the
00:20:32.080 millionth wave of the flu next winter and uh yeah absolutely right and then there's this obsession
00:20:38.640 with the wastewater signal and where we're uh at in terms of the levels of uh covid and the wastewater
00:20:45.840 and i can't think of any other country really or maybe it's just an ontario thing that is so
00:20:50.880 obsessed with the next wave and wastewater signals but i think i i agree with you it's time to
00:20:56.080 move on and uh and uh and you know and and and you know and treat covid as as is you know it's going
00:21:02.960 to be it's here to stay it's not going to go anywhere and uh and get vaccinated and recognize
00:21:08.880 natural immunity and i think those that's the way forward um suvind thank you so much for a great
00:21:14.160 discussion um you know we'll be looking to you for the common sense that cuts through all the fear
00:21:19.040 mongering uh thank you for joining me and uh so good to have you here it was a pleasure thanks so much for
00:21:25.360 having me so in conclusion uh full disclosure i happen to be triple vaccinated and i find the
00:21:31.440 vaccine mandates are completely useless at this point they serve absolutely no purpose they're
00:21:36.960 punitive and they're not based on science if they were even based on science before boosters
00:21:43.520 make sense in my opinion for vulnerable groups and this is borne out by the data but not for the
00:21:50.160 population in general and many people now have natural immunity so let's hope that the federal
00:21:56.480 government gets the memo and drops these useless vaccine mandates so we can all get back to our lives
00:22:03.360 as normal as normal like in other countries that's it for today's show thanks for tuning in
00:22:20.560 um
00:22:41.840 you