Juno News - September 23, 2022


City of Toronto pulls child vaccination ad campaign


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

156.01277

Word count

1,466

Sentence count

94

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The City of Toronto is trying to convince parents that vaccination is a good idea for kids as young as 6 months old. But is it really? And what does it have to do with anything other than keep them indoors?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 I want to just segue this to another discussion, which is related not to the mandates in general,
00:00:05.580 but this idea of dehumanizing people based on vaccination status. And there's a bit of a
00:00:12.160 victory for True North in here, because all of this has come about in basically the last 24
00:00:17.260 hours. And I'll set the stage here. The city of Toronto launched on Friday, a five video ad
00:00:24.740 campaign. And in these five videos, they were promoting the fundamental message that vaccination
00:00:31.340 is something you should do for your children from six months to five years old. The vaccines for
00:00:36.220 COVID are not, well, against COVID theoretically are now available for infants as young as six
00:00:41.480 months old, right up to age five and then beyond. And they were trying to promote this to communities
00:00:47.720 that have lower vaccination rates. And quite frankly, children at that age have low vaccination rates in
00:00:53.380 part because the vaccines were just approved. But also a lot of parents are thinking that it's
00:00:57.440 just not necessary. The virus is mild enough at this point. The vaccine doesn't protect against
00:01:03.180 transmission. So it's just not necessary to get a six month old or a one year old or a four year old
00:01:08.840 vaccinated against COVID. And the city of Toronto evidently didn't like that. And they ran five
00:01:15.540 videos. And I want to share with you all five videos. They're only about 20 to 30 seconds each.
00:01:21.780 In fact, I think all of them are like just 20 to 22 seconds with the exception of maybe one,
00:01:26.180 but they're all very short. And oddly enough, I agree with like the first 80% of most of them,
00:01:32.940 but they all just go a few seconds too far. And the first one I want to play is the one that went
00:01:37.240 absolutely viral yesterday. And I think triggered most of the backlash. I caught wind of it on Twitter
00:01:42.460 and it was after everyone was tweeting about this, that I actually looked and found there were more of
00:01:47.080 these things which had gone under the radar. But this is one that effectively talks about kids
00:01:53.420 being indoors and the harm of that, which may sound like a message you agree with, but take a look.
00:01:59.440 It's actually rather heartbreaking. A girl who is being
00:02:29.420 kept indoors by her mother, by a government. I mean, it's not quite clear. And the implication
00:02:35.520 is that all her friends are able to play and have fun and have a good time outside, but she can't
00:02:40.580 because she's unvaccinated. Is that why that it's not safe for her to be outside playing?
00:02:46.740 This was the one that really exploded. The one that bothered me the most. And again, I may be alone
00:02:51.960 in this one was this one that actually had an infant in it. And that was why I, I don't know that the
00:02:58.560 girl, I mean, obviously this may just be like a really talented baby. I mean, who knows her facial 0.93
00:03:02.940 reactions were perfect for the message they were trying to convey, but it was telling parents not
00:03:07.600 to miss certain moments. So again, a good message. You don't want to miss moments with your children,
00:03:11.320 but again, take a look.
00:03:14.560 Oh, you're so cute. Yes. Yes, you are. Yes, you're very cute.
00:03:24.760 Oh, when can we see her? We would love to see her and squeeze those cheeks. 1.00
00:03:30.260 Look over here. Look over here. Oh, cutie. 1.00
00:03:33.320 Don't miss those moments. Connect in real life. And again, the only way you can visit that newborn,
00:03:44.200 the only way you can see that little cherub of an angel is if she gets vaccinated at however many
00:03:50.180 months old she is in that shot. No pun intended on shot. And the list went on and on. This one,
00:03:57.500 again, talking about human connection, the importance of human connection.
00:04:03.320 Human connections stronger than internet connections. I agree. It's a shame he can't
00:04:29.660 just go out and see his friend face to face. Well, he can. He can. Oh, but he's not vaccinated,
00:04:35.980 I guess. Oh, yeah, there we go. We have to push the vaccination message six months to five years old.
00:04:41.540 And I have always, as a general rule on this program, steered away from talking about the
00:04:47.640 science of vaccines. And I think the reason is very clear. I'm not a scientist. I'm a civil libertarian.
00:04:52.600 I can talk about this issue. And I find it more interesting and more important to talk about
00:04:57.040 in the context of civil liberties and the right to make the decision for yourself.
00:05:02.100 So the reality is most people who comment on this are not scientists. So they're relying on
00:05:06.580 the scientific expertise of others. And you can find scientists saying conflicting things. So
00:05:11.280 it's a matter of which person in the white lab coat you trust more than the other person in the white
00:05:16.880 lab coat. But the one area where I do have more confidence speaking authoritatively, because the
00:05:21.960 science is so clear, is on the effect of vaccinations on children. And the risk that is really at the
00:05:31.080 core of why someone gets vaccinated is negligible for children. If you look at the numbers for the
00:05:38.260 entirety of the pandemic, for the entire country of Canada, 39 children, 39 children have died and have
00:05:44.940 been logged as COVID deaths since the very beginning. Now, I do not want to diminish those deaths. Any
00:05:50.380 death, any death of a child, any death of a person is tragic. But it's worth noting that in many of those
00:05:57.800 cases, most of those cases, it is a death after a COVID diagnosis. It's not even by the record keeper's own
00:06:04.820 admission, a case where it's a COVID caused death. If you're talking about a healthy child that doesn't have
00:06:12.220 underlying health issues, that doesn't have comorbidities, their risk of serious, serious ailment,
00:06:18.020 hospitalization, death from COVID is not what it is in an elderly person, a very obese person, someone with a
00:06:24.480 lot of underlying health conditions that we shouldn't pretend it is. Denmark, as just one example, a few weeks
00:06:29.860 back decided to ban COVID vaccination of anyone under 18, unless they had an underlying health condition, because they
00:06:37.100 said, in Denmark's case, they said that the risks outweighed the benefits. The UK has gone a bit of a
00:06:42.680 different direction. They've said it's available to kids as young as five, but they're saying it's
00:06:46.740 non-essential. And they're saying that you can't take a one size fits all position on this, which is
00:06:52.400 effectively what the city of Toronto is trying to do here, say that every child must receive the jab and
00:06:58.140 cannot live a normal life, cannot engage with the world around them, cannot do kid-like things without
00:07:03.360 it. Now, the little glimmer of good news here is that pretty much everyone thought those videos were
00:07:09.880 awful. Even the city of Toronto has acknowledged those videos were awful. Brad Ross, who is the
00:07:15.960 chief spokesperson for the city of Toronto, he has said they've been pulled. The city right now has
00:07:22.020 paused the campaign and is trying to go and reevaluate the meaning. Originally, he had said that they were
00:07:28.800 retracted, but they didn't really apologize for them. But I've seen some other reports. There's
00:07:33.680 one in particular here where he acknowledges that the message itself is just wrong. I'm reading an
00:07:39.840 article in the, I think it's Global News or it might've been CBC, but he said that the message is
00:07:47.540 not sending, or it's not sending the right message here. He's saying that even public health officials
00:07:52.560 were unhappy with them and hadn't seen them and hadn't reviewed them. I did a little bit of digging and
00:07:57.520 the videos, which cost $4,000 each, I think they should be demanding a refund on that, but it's
00:08:02.640 neither here nor there, were produced by some Toronto film program that mentors black, indigenous people
00:08:09.800 of color and LGBTQ2S, I think that's it. There might be another one in there, filmmakers. And they do this
00:08:17.840 in a way to, you know, try to foster the development of the media and arts industry. And they're the ones
00:08:24.000 that made the video. So at least it wasn't like some really expensive $100,000 contract to an ad agency.
00:08:29.920 But even so, the core message of this plays to parents that are so fearful, fearful of the world
00:08:37.440 around them, that either furthers them trying to keep their children isolated from the world,
00:08:41.680 or it shames parents, shames parents who, for whatever reason, have decided that vaccinating
00:08:46.560 their children against COVID is not something they want to do.
00:08:54.000 And therefore, the influence here was turned around. So also, today, the