Juno News - May 31, 2022


Covid has torn apart our social fabric (Feat. Dr. Matt Strauss)


Episode Stats

Length

35 minutes

Words per Minute

192.5091

Word Count

6,740

Sentence Count

319


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The COVID pandemic and the reactive government policies have torn apart our social fabric.
00:00:05.820 Many Canadians will never trust authorities or experts, including doctors, ever again.
00:00:10.740 How did we get here and how can we fix it?
00:00:12.420 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:14.280 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
00:00:30.240 So the health scares associated with COVID have mostly passed, but many Canadians are still trapped in their own form of COVID purgatory.
00:00:38.740 Some may even call it COVID hell.
00:00:40.620 They can't get on an airplane, they can't get on a train, they can't visit their loved ones, they can't go see family, they can't leave the country, they can't even flee if they want to.
00:00:48.920 Many have been excommunicated by their friends and their family.
00:00:52.240 Many have lost their business, lost their livelihoods, many have lost their jobs, despite having contracts or unions that were designed and supposed to protect them.
00:01:01.640 Countless Canadians feel excluded and alienated.
00:01:04.400 They feel ignored and marginalized and doomed to failure.
00:01:07.440 Worse, some feel targeted, harassed and singled out by their government and by cynical politicians for the crime of making a health choice that the elites don't approve of.
00:01:19.260 So while some political leaders are interested in the plight of these types of Canadians, including those who came out to support the trucker convoy,
00:01:27.880 the much more popular opinion among politicians and elites in our country is to use these marginalized Canadians as a scapegoat, as a target, and as a punching bag.
00:01:39.720 Now, whether you call these elites, whether you call them the Laurentian elite, the expert class, the gatekeepers,
00:01:45.320 there is a powerful ruling class in our country that is maddeningly out of touch with the concerns and the anxieties of the typical working Canadian.
00:01:55.880 So how did we get here and how can we work towards rebuilding our civil society?
00:01:59.640 We need to rebuild our civil society at this point.
00:02:01.820 We need to reconnect as Canadians.
00:02:03.940 We need to demand more liberalism and more democracy out of our liberal democracy.
00:02:08.300 So joining me today to have this conversation and to help me work through some of these ideas,
00:02:12.640 I'm very pleased to be welcomed once again by Dr. Matt Strauss.
00:02:16.620 Dr. Strauss was on the program as a previous guest, and I wanted to invite him back today to dive a little bit deeper into some of the conversations
00:02:23.060 and some of the topics that we discussed last time.
00:02:25.900 So, Dr. Strauss, thank you so much for joining the program.
00:02:28.860 Pleasure to be here.
00:02:30.080 So for those of you who don't remember the previous episode we had with Dr. Strauss,
00:02:34.060 he is the acting medical officer of health for Haldeman Norfolk.
00:02:37.520 He's an ICU doctor.
00:02:38.820 He's a former professor of medicine and a former global journalism fellow with the University of Toronto.
00:02:43.820 He was one of the first public health officials in Canada to call for an end to vaccine mandates.
00:02:48.700 He has been a vocal critic of Canada's pandemic response, written several op-eds calling for an end to unscientific mandates.
00:02:56.600 So, Dr. Strauss, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, I mean, you worked on the front lines.
00:03:02.220 You were there.
00:03:02.820 You witnessed it with your own eyes.
00:03:04.320 You saw firsthand the effects of lockdowns, the sort of unintended consequences of government policies,
00:03:11.080 and in many ways how the prescription, the supposed cure, was worse than the disease in terms of lockdowns being worse than the pandemic itself.
00:03:20.200 So I was hoping you could walk our audience through a little bit of what that looked like,
00:03:25.980 some of the worst things that you saw as a doctor working in the ICUs,
00:03:29.520 and some of the things that maybe Canadians aren't even really aware of what was going on during COVID.
00:03:34.400 Okay, well, so I saw some horrible things.
00:03:39.200 I spoke last time I was on your show about, in a single week, admitting multiple elders from nursing homes
00:03:44.760 who were starving to death because their families were banned from the premises in the name of social distancing,
00:03:49.680 and so there was no one to feed them.
00:03:50.860 And they almost died of starvation in Canada in 2020, 2021.
00:03:58.280 Some things I didn't get to speak about were the obvious worsening of addictions problems.
00:04:05.840 I saw some folks who quite literally drank themselves to death,
00:04:09.200 and unlike starvation, that's not necessarily something we can fix when you get in.
00:04:14.560 So I did see some younger folks, mid-30s, mid-40s, who died of alcohol.
00:04:21.940 And, you know, in taking the stories from them, it was very clear they lost their job,
00:04:25.600 they'd been shut in for three months, people aren't supposed to live that way,
00:04:28.460 and they turned to drink and never recovered.
00:04:33.820 I had read about catatonic depression as a medical student.
00:04:38.400 That means depression is so severe that you're in a coma.
00:04:40.580 I don't generally look after folks for depression because I'm not a psychiatrist.
00:04:46.520 But if you're in a coma from your depression, you do often come under the care of a medical doctor.
00:04:51.060 And like I said, I'd never seen a case.
00:04:53.060 I saw two in 2020.
00:04:55.160 One man, after six months of not leaving his house,
00:04:59.040 whose wife said was a perfectly lovely gentleman, 35 years of marriage,
00:05:03.100 he tried to strangle her, then he collapsed and fell into a coma.
00:05:06.060 I saw a woman who tried to kill her grandchildren after being locked in with them for three months.
00:05:13.260 And when she sort of came to, out of whatever that state she was in,
00:05:17.620 she said that wasn't me.
00:05:18.640 She couldn't believe that she'd done it.
00:05:21.760 We, you know, working in Kingston,
00:05:25.440 where all the federal prisons are,
00:05:28.100 I have looked after serial killers and I've learned a little bit about the prison system in Canada.
00:05:33.940 And Paul Bernardo gets an hour of sunlight a day.
00:05:37.960 So if you're a serial killer and you're in our federal prison system and you behave badly,
00:05:43.980 you get put in isolation.
00:05:45.740 Isolation is considered a punishment for the very worst of the worst.
00:05:48.860 And we did that to all Canadians.
00:05:51.700 And so the ravages thereof were just visible all over the system.
00:05:57.140 I hate to talk about this, but I had a colleague, a friend, a wonderful ICU nurse who died by suicide
00:06:02.860 last summer and her obituary pointed out that the effects of lockdowns have been very difficult
00:06:09.960 on her mental health.
00:06:12.620 So I saw, and then in terms of the public commentary, it was all,
00:06:16.800 everyone stay home for the sake of our healthcare workers.
00:06:20.220 But all of this was very hard on healthcare workers.
00:06:22.580 I would say that every time I went to the hospital, there was a new rule about, you know,
00:06:28.200 masking and checking in and you can't, you can no longer have potlucks.
00:06:32.000 At a hospital I'm familiar with, the nurses received an email from the management
00:06:36.640 on Christmas Eve saying the management was going to walk around and make sure nobody was
00:06:41.740 having a potluck on Christmas Eve.
00:06:43.060 And if you were, you'd be fired on the spot.
00:06:45.820 So there were just all sorts of inhumane things.
00:06:49.580 I saw patients of mine who the healthcare team had to fight for them to get to see their
00:06:56.060 loved ones before they died.
00:06:57.700 I had patients who were between life and death in the ICU for three months.
00:07:01.160 I had patients whose families were not allowed to visit them for the duration.
00:07:04.580 I was at a time when patients from Scarborough were being transferred elsewhere and Scarborough
00:07:09.640 was considered a red zone.
00:07:11.520 And so their families were not allowed to come visit.
00:07:14.160 And one of the worst things I saw was a young indigenous man with a disability and a severe
00:07:22.600 medical problem flew down from a reserve and his, his mom came as his translator and she was kicked
00:07:31.020 out of the hospital.
00:07:31.680 So she, she'd flown in and when she arrived, she was told there's no hospital visitors.
00:07:36.860 And she was kicked out at four in the morning in a strange city where she didn't know anyone.
00:07:39.540 And I, I'm sorry to say, I don't know what became of her, but so I guess I would say I saw all
00:07:46.340 sorts of miserable things that I call Russian novel levels of despair.
00:07:53.400 Um, and none of these things make it to the CP24 news crawler.
00:07:58.240 Um, they were, they were breathlessly reporting cases of COVID and deaths from COVID and those
00:08:02.060 things are important.
00:08:02.700 Um, my background, I came to medicine with a degree in English literature, my background's
00:08:07.260 in the humanities.
00:08:07.880 And, and I, I think that some things can only be expressed humanistically and maybe some of
00:08:13.500 those folks in those terrible situations will write novels about what they went through.
00:08:16.680 Um, but I think it'll be many years before we fully grasp what, what was perpetrated on
00:08:21.620 our population these last two years.
00:08:23.880 And so, I mean, some of it, you can sort of chalk up to, okay, there was this novel virus
00:08:29.380 and no one knew where it came from or what it was capable of doing.
00:08:32.660 We looked at what was happening in China and we kind of just make their response, right?
00:08:36.820 We saw mass lockdowns and, and, and people getting arrested for being out in the streets
00:08:41.040 in Wuhan.
00:08:42.040 This is in sort of early 2020 and I was watching it unfold in social media is sort of in disbelief.
00:08:48.720 And then it just seemed like it was a matter of time before we imported that sort of, uh,
00:08:53.400 not to be hyperbolic, but sort of an authoritarian approach to, you know, controlling everything
00:08:58.800 and everyone to help prevent the spread of disease.
00:09:03.200 Why do you think that that was our reflective, uh, approach as a society, um, in terms of just
00:09:09.820 sort of like the absolutism of everything's about COVID.
00:09:13.060 I know the news media were drumming it up.
00:09:14.500 You mentioned CP24 with their time taker, but it was like a, it was like a scoreboard,
00:09:18.060 right?
00:09:19.060 Like a score count.
00:09:20.060 And we were only hyper-focused singularly on COVID, all of the kinds of misery that you're
00:09:24.460 describing.
00:09:25.460 It's inhumane.
00:09:26.460 And it was, it was our own system that was perpetrating it.
00:09:28.500 It wasn't a foreign mysterious virus.
00:09:31.500 It was us doing it to one another, to fellow Canadians.
00:09:36.260 Why was that the approach?
00:09:37.260 What was it about our culture or healthcare system or institutions, um, that allowed that
00:09:41.780 and that, and that led that, and that enabled sort of two years of, of the elites and the
00:09:46.820 people in charge of our society, not only justifying it, um, but sort of scolding anybody
00:09:52.060 who, who stepped out of line.
00:09:54.500 Um, I, I, probably textbooks will be written, um, or, or at least PhD theses will be written
00:10:02.540 to answer this question.
00:10:03.540 A few things that I can point at is this is the first pandemic we've gone through with
00:10:06.940 widespread social media, uh, use.
00:10:10.180 And I don't think we're, we were, we were only starting to get a handle on how damaging
00:10:15.140 to our, uh, individual psychologies, uh, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram were, um, so I remember
00:10:21.660 the H1N1 flu pandemic, um, in 2008, 2009, and it wasn't as deadly, not as many people died.
00:10:29.460 I fully acknowledged that, but I remember I was a young healthcare worker.
00:10:32.540 I was 25 and as a 25 year old, H1N1 was more deadly to me than COVID because COVID is extremely
00:10:38.780 deadly to folks who are elderly and not so dangerous to folks who are younger.
00:10:41.900 When I got H1N1 from my work at the hospital, uh, the only thing the hospital asked me was
00:10:47.820 when can you be back?
00:10:48.820 There was, there was no talk about isolation and quarantine and getting swabbed.
00:10:53.420 Public health never called me.
00:10:55.020 Um, so I think similar to how people often talk about how the, the rate of child abduction
00:11:01.420 is much lower now than it was in the seventies, but fear about child abduction is much higher
00:11:05.500 now because we all have cable news and anytime any child is abducted anywhere in the English
00:11:09.960 speaking world, it's broadcast on CNN, uh, just about 24 hours a day.
00:11:15.060 Um, I think the fact that we were all having a device ringing in our pocket, letting us
00:11:18.660 know when there was COVID in our, in our country, in our province and in our town, how many were
00:11:22.880 in the hospital.
00:11:23.880 I don't think, um, I don't think we were ready for that amount of stimulation.
00:11:29.280 The other thing I will say is, um, it, it's become clear to me that communist China is just
00:11:37.880 as bad as any authoritarian regime that has ever existed.
00:11:42.020 Um, they have 1.5 million Uyghurs in concentration camp.
00:11:46.340 They have, uh, mass censorship.
00:11:48.100 They, you know, they shot protesters, uh, at Tiananmen Square.
00:11:52.400 And yet our elite class, uh, has been cozying up to China all along.
00:11:58.040 So it's a bit, well, it's not exactly a coincidence that, um, COVID started in China, uh, but because
00:12:05.520 it did, we had the opportunity to pattern our response off of the Chinese response, which
00:12:12.120 was deadly because that is a very evil regime and we shouldn't be patterning anything off
00:12:16.380 of what China does.
00:12:17.780 And yet the world health organization receives a lot of money from China.
00:12:21.620 And while this was going on, Taiwan had a much more liberal democratic approach to COVID-19
00:12:26.840 that was actually much more successful than China's.
00:12:29.540 Um, so they, they barely closed schools.
00:12:31.120 They, they just did not, they didn't certainly didn't weld people into their homes.
00:12:35.580 Um, and it was very upsetting to me that instead of co-opting the Taiwanese response, uh, the
00:12:41.840 world health organization sort of, uh, COVID-star, uh, Bruce Alward, he gave this famous interview
00:12:47.520 where he refused to even acknowledge the existence of Taiwan.
00:12:49.740 And because the question was asked, he, uh, pretended that his laptop wasn't working
00:12:53.460 and, uh, ended the interview.
00:12:55.620 So I, I think there, there, there was a problem with us misunderstanding the threat that China
00:13:01.960 portends.
00:13:02.960 The thing I will say is we'd all been a little bit deranged by American politics and Donald
00:13:07.240 Trump.
00:13:08.240 Trump supporter.
00:13:09.240 Um, but when he started, um, Saying things about hydroxychloroquine and the like, everyone
00:13:16.920 really panicked.
00:13:17.920 Um, and, and then, and then after that point, anything that Trump said was the worst and
00:13:22.240 all of Canada had to, had to be against it.
00:13:24.180 So those are three things I can point to.
00:13:25.720 I think there's many, many others.
00:13:26.960 Well, I think, I think you're right about a little bit of the Trump derangements or spilling
00:13:30.840 onto it because it seemed to me at the time that the news media in the United States really
00:13:34.840 had an interest in drumming up just how bad everything was to try to humiliate Trump, to
00:13:39.560 try to, you know, derail him and make sure that, that he wasn't reelected.
00:13:43.040 And, and because of that, we sort of just, uh, it's, it all snowballed a little bit.
00:13:47.960 I want to pick up on something you mentioned about Taiwan, not locking down schools.
00:13:52.000 And you mentioned how H1N1, uh, was, was more deadly for, for, for younger people.
00:13:57.160 Uh, you know, it seemed like we knew, I mean, True North had a report that came out over
00:14:02.120 a year ago in April, 2021 about how more Canadians died under the age of 65 from depression, suicide,
00:14:08.920 drug overdose, alcoholism, um, then COVID, uh, we, we, we kind of knew who were the vulnerable
00:14:15.880 ones and who was sort of generally more, more safe.
00:14:19.320 And so rather than taking it targeted approach, we, we, we just sort of continued to lock down,
00:14:24.360 lock down, lock down right up until even 2022, we had lockdowns.
00:14:28.600 Uh, it's, it seemed like the, that the people in charge in this country were just not learning
00:14:34.920 from the mistakes that we had made.
00:14:36.920 I mean, uh, did, did, do you observe that?
00:14:40.040 And why is it that our political leaders and public health leaders to this day, continue
00:14:45.320 to sort of, uh, drum the idea that, that, that the solution to COVID is by locking down our site,
00:14:51.560 our site, including little kids and, and, and people who don't, uh, really pose a big, uh, risk
00:14:57.240 of, of getting very ill from COVID.
00:15:01.720 It's hard to read other folks' minds.
00:15:03.320 I do think there's a bit of a generational issue.
00:15:06.280 Um, I, I only recently became aware you, you wrote a book on, on generations screwed.
00:15:11.160 And I, I do think that baby boomers are at great risk of death from COVID or they were
00:15:15.640 until they were vaccinated.
00:15:17.080 Um, so, and it happens to be the case that baby boomers run our society.
00:15:21.320 They're in the positions of power.
00:15:22.440 They own all the wealth.
00:15:23.640 Um, so I, they were frankly, they were right to be scared.
00:15:27.000 Um, I don't think they were right to scapegoat the younger generations who were trying to make
00:15:32.440 a living, um, or just trying to, uh, enjoy their lives.
00:15:37.640 Um, and I, I think it's something dark and unfortunately natural about human psychology,
00:15:43.480 that if you have a mortal threat, it's much nicer to scapegoat, um, 20 year olds having
00:15:49.720 a picnic at Trinity Bellwoods park, um, than it is to consider the ways that, I mean, so another
00:15:56.200 thing to mention, but besides the age issue, um, perfectly healthy elders were at much less
00:16:03.320 risk of death from COVID, um, than, uh, folks with multiple medical problems.
00:16:09.400 And so in my own experience working as an ICU doctor for, um, the first year and a half of
00:16:14.920 the pandemic before I went to a less clinical role in public health, um, the youngest person who was
00:16:21.640 perfectly healthy that I met who was critically ill from COVID-19 was 76, but, um, everyone else had
00:16:29.080 multiple medical problems and, and I, I'm sorry to say, I think there is a role for personal
00:16:35.400 responsibility. And, and I, but I can understand how rather than looking at, you know, could I get
00:16:41.080 in shape? Could I stop smoking these sorts of things? It's much nicer to blame the 21 year olds
00:16:45.000 for having a nice time at the park.
00:16:47.240 Certainly for me, one of the breaking points, uh, just personally, because, um, my family and I,
00:16:51.960 we just bought a new house in Toronto. We were right across the street from a park and, you know,
00:16:56.280 they would put the tape up on the playground, um, every day, you know, if anyone cut it down,
00:17:00.920 they would come back and they would wrap it up. And it was so demoralizing for my little son to
00:17:06.200 want to go to the park and sorry, sweetie, we can't go on the swings today because the
00:17:10.120 government said no. And then one day I was sitting in a park with my son in Toronto and these trucks
00:17:16.520 literally drove onto the park. This is Trolley park in Toronto and picked up the, um, the, the,
00:17:23.240 the, uh, picnic tables and the park benches and took them away because they just didn't want anyone
00:17:28.040 congregating in the park. And, you know, this was in like April or May, it was still pretty cold out.
00:17:32.680 It wasn't like it was like, you know, warm spring. It was still kind of chilly. And the fact that they
00:17:37.000 were kind of just punitively saying like, no, you could not come in this park and this picnic table
00:17:42.200 is somehow going to, uh, you know, cause people to get COVID or something. It was just so mean-spirited
00:17:48.040 and so like sort of the epitome of the mindset of these sort of just mindless bureaucrats who are
00:17:55.320 carrying out these ridiculous orders that somehow having benches in parks is going to contribute,
00:18:01.080 um, to COVID. I, I, I want to continue on the, the topic of little kids though, because
00:18:06.200 I know, you know, there's an Ontario election going on. No one's paying any attention to it.
00:18:09.720 It's not very interesting, probably by design, but they, the one, one comment that sort of stood
00:18:14.600 out, which the Ontario liberals and their leader, Steven Del Duca said that he wanted to make COVID
00:18:19.160 vaccines mandatory for little kids to attend public school. That it would be part of the
00:18:24.040 regular, uh, vaccine regime for little kids. And, you know, to me that that's like the perfect
00:18:32.360 thing to drive people away from public schools, because it's like, you know, no matter what you
00:18:36.360 say about COVID vaccines and COVID and, you know, all four vaccines and all that kind of stuff, it's like,
00:18:41.080 you know, the idea of, of giving a little kid a vaccine when they don't really, there's no risk.
00:18:46.200 There's not a real risk of that child getting sick or dying from COVID. Um, it, it just seems
00:18:52.680 really unnecessarily divisive. I want to know your opinion on that.
00:18:56.520 Yeah. Well, the first thing I would say is COVID-19 is not a risk to the vast, vast majority of
00:19:04.600 children. Um, that influenza, since the beginning of the pandemic has been a greater risk. So if you
00:19:10.360 get influenza as a child, it is riskier to you than COVID-19. Um, that said, there are children who
00:19:16.280 are medically fragile, who have a very significant medical problems and, um, COVID can be a significant
00:19:23.240 problem for them. Uh, what we know at this point is that two doses of vaccine does not prevent you
00:19:29.160 from passing, um, COVID on to someone else, such as a medically fragile child. So I absolutely think
00:19:35.640 that if I was a parent of a child with medical problems, I would be in a, in a terrific rush to
00:19:40.600 get them vaccinated. Um, the, I think throughout all our thinking about the pandemic, the idea of
00:19:47.800 risk benefit analysis has been sorely lacking. So yeah, there may be some benefit to getting more
00:19:52.840 children vaccinated for COVID. Um, but what is the risk? It's something like only half of the children
00:19:59.240 in this country and in this province are vaccinated. So kicking half of the children out of public school
00:20:04.200 is that, how do you weigh that against the sort of one in 500,000 chance that, um, any child dies
00:20:11.640 of COVID-19? Um, I think obviously that's a, in addition to being a mean spirited policy, it's also
00:20:19.640 likely to significantly backfire. And if you have, um, a generation of children who are even more
00:20:26.120 unschooled than they are after two years of school closures, two years of school closures on and off,
00:20:30.920 um, I think the, the social problems and the, and the personal health problems that those children
00:20:35.000 might experience far, far, far outweigh the benefit that they might get from a COVID vaccine.
00:20:38.600 Well, I can't imagine a better way to galvanize people against public schools, because like you
00:20:42.200 said, if half the kids aren't vaccinated, um, you know, this is more likely just going to drive
00:20:46.840 people away from public schools and maybe they'll go find a, you know, a, a, a better set of, uh,
00:20:52.040 educational tools for their kids, or maybe they'll go to independent schools, or to your point,
00:20:55.160 maybe they'll fall through the cracks and, and be part of the growing number of people who just don't go to
00:21:00.040 school, which is, is, is really sad and scary. And, and again, these, these kinds of issues
00:21:05.800 are just never really mentioned. I want to shift because this, this sort of reminds me, I don't know
00:21:11.800 if you, if you deleted it, but there was a piece in the Toronto Star that just attacked you. Um,
00:21:17.400 and it was written by their sports writer, Bruce Arthur. I don't, I don't know why he, he chose you
00:21:22.040 to, to kind of go after, but he, he really, you really bother him. And, and he, he let you hear it.
00:21:26.920 And, uh, you're not, you're not alone. You're in good company, uh, myself and many, many others,
00:21:31.560 uh, have been, um, the target of Bruce Arthur's, uh, you know, snarly, uh, opinions, but one of the
00:21:38.200 things, uh, that he, he, he was really upset that you said was that you would sooner give your child
00:21:43.240 COVID than McDonald's happy meal. And, um, I thought this was kind of amusing because I, I think that
00:21:49.480 people need to take greater responsibility for their own health. I think that one of the things we
00:21:53.720 didn't really talk about at all during COVID, uh, was this idea that, you know, the, a lot of people
00:21:58.360 who were sick and, and had severe, um, cases of COVID had underlying health issues. They were obese
00:22:04.520 or they weren't taking care of themselves in a healthy way. And that was never a discussion. It was
00:22:08.840 never a topic that, that there's some individual responsibility and making sure that you're healthy,
00:22:13.160 you're eating right, you're exercising all this kind of stuff. And so I thought it was amusing that you,
00:22:17.720 that you made that point, but he, he mentioned that you deleted that tweet. So maybe you, uh,
00:22:21.720 you had a change of heart on that, but, um, I, I, I just want to know what, what your reaction is to
00:22:26.440 Bruce, Bruce Arthur, writing about you in the Toronto Star trying to take you down, saying that
00:22:29.160 you're not qualified, uh, to be the medical officer and, um, kind of picking apart some of your, um, things
00:22:35.160 that you've written on Twitter. Well, let me address the tweet first. That tweet was part of a long
00:22:39.240 thread in which I looked at the data regarding childhood obesity, which is epidemic and on the rise.
00:22:45.480 Um, uh, and I, I know that these critics of mine were acting in bad faith because they always took
00:22:51.240 the conclusion of that thread rather than the data and the scientific papers that were linked
00:22:56.200 in that thread, um, to show that if you're obese on your 18th birthday, you are twice as likely not
00:23:01.160 to make it to age 30 as somebody who's a healthy weight on their 18th birthday. Um, that's, that's
00:23:06.520 extraordinary. That's crushingly bad. And I feel awful for those kids. By the way,
00:23:10.920 if you're an obese child, you, you didn't do that to yourself. That was neglect. Um,
00:23:15.800 and, and not merely parental neglect, but our whole society is built, um, in ways for children
00:23:22.360 not to be healthy. Um, my wife is Dutch. I will be Dutch soon. Um, after three years of marriage,
00:23:26.600 I get a passport and their whole society is built around active living. And we, we could do that here.
00:23:31.560 We just have chosen not to. Um, so it is, it's, it's just a fact that McDonald's is more of a health
00:23:40.600 risk for children than COVID-19. COVID-19 is a one in a million chance of killing a healthy child,
00:23:45.160 less than that. Um, and it is also a fact that probably one day I will give my daughter COVID-19,
00:23:50.360 um, because it's everywhere. I, I may have had it. I, I don't know. I, um, we, we may have already
00:23:55.480 exposed her to it. I don't know. But, um, also it happens to be the case that my wife is vegetarian
00:23:59.880 and I can't imagine a situation where we'd be taking a toddler for a hamburger. Um, so yeah,
00:24:05.880 a very bad faith criticism. Now it seemed to me that, um, many folks were taking that line of
00:24:14.200 thinking as a personal attack on their parenting skills, which was not my point. Uh, and as a writer,
00:24:19.240 you know, people are taking things the wrong way. Then I, I, I, I failed in my purpose. So I took down
00:24:24.120 that tweet. It was obviously causing more, um, uh, emotion than, uh, action, uh, regarding that piece,
00:24:32.360 uh, from Bruce, I think, and actually there's a bigger social issue where people confuse credentials
00:24:39.960 with qualifications. What qualifies me to do my job is that I'm quite good at it. And the COVID-19
00:24:43.960 mortality, um, in Haldeman Norfolk, since I came to the position has gone down relative to other
00:24:49.320 jurisdictions. So I've, I've been successful, uh, and that's what qualifies me. Um, how I came by my
00:24:55.400 qualifications were, uh, my, my work on the philosophy of science. I'm currently enrolled in
00:25:00.680 graduate school. Uh, my 10 years as a critical, uh, care doctor, um, the, my experience teaching, uh,
00:25:06.760 dozens, if not hundreds of medical residents and, uh, students. Uh, so I don't have the credential
00:25:14.040 that, uh, Bruce seems to think is, is most necessary, but credentials are not qualifications.
00:25:19.960 And then obviously there's, there's just the great irony of the Toronto start dispatching
00:25:23.400 its sports writer to assess my qualifications. Like, I don't think he's qualified to, um,
00:25:27.320 to look at my qualifications. And then the last thing I'll say is I spent a year and a half working
00:25:31.560 as a frontline doctor in this pandemic. I know what COVID-19 is. I've seen what it does to people.
00:25:36.040 And I, I frankly have taken care of more, um, desperately ill people with COVID-19 than Bruce ever will.
00:25:41.720 So I, um, I didn't really paint, I didn't really take his criticisms too seriously. Let's leave it
00:25:46.440 at that. Yeah, fair enough. I wouldn't either. And I don't think that he deserves, uh, more,
00:25:51.320 but I, I will just say that I, I, I tend to agree. I don't, I don't judge other people's
00:25:55.240 parenting styles or whatever, but my kids have never had McDonald's happy meal. Uh, they have
00:25:59.240 had COVID, they were fine. Um, but I think that when I, when I, when I say personal responsibility,
00:26:03.720 I'm obviously not meaning that little kids need to have personal responsibility, but obviously
00:26:07.480 their parents, uh, need, need, need to focus on making sure that the kids are eating healthy
00:26:12.360 and getting outside. And that's, that's important for everyone. And, um, yeah, I'd be interested to
00:26:17.800 learn more about the Dutch, uh, philosophy because one of the things that just seemed totally absent
00:26:23.640 to me was this idea that, you know, things like getting outside, getting fresh air, you know, this
00:26:30.040 is part of going back to my frustration with them taking away the park benches at Trolley Park and trying
00:26:33.960 to block off the trails. It's like, let people get outside, get fresh air. Um, not only is it
00:26:39.720 better for their health, but you know, we're talking about people suffering from depression
00:26:43.640 and alcoholism, uh, let them have social connections, let them, you know, for, for me, I, I loved going to
00:26:50.280 the park because sometimes I bump into friends or other parents or, you know, just getting fresh air.
00:26:54.680 And the, the fact that they were trying to deter that and, and, you know, finding people and taking
00:26:59.240 away the park benches, it would just showed complete reversal. I remember at one point the health,
00:27:03.240 uh, uh, the health, health minister, Patty Haju, um, told people not to take vitamin D supplements,
00:27:10.520 uh, which to me was just so absurd. I think, I mean, you're a doctor, I'm not, but I think
00:27:15.320 given the climate and the, you know, the, the lack of sun in the winter, I, you know, me and my family,
00:27:20.520 we always take vitamin D. That's, and, and, and for me, I mean, I was pregnant for most of, um,
00:27:26.920 the initial COVID lockdowns. I had a daughter in November, 2021. And the first thing that your doctor
00:27:33.000 recommends when you're pregnant is to start taking vitamin D when the baby's born and put them on
00:27:36.920 vitamin D supplements. So, you know, this idea that the top health officer of the country was
00:27:41.880 telling us not to take a vitamin D just seemed really strange. Um, I, I did want to ask you about,
00:27:47.960 um, one, one of the recent, uh, positions that you've taken that's also been controversial,
00:27:52.280 Dr. Strauss. And that is that in April, you vouch for a new antiviral drug made by Pfizer called,
00:27:58.360 uh, packs the void. Um, and, you know, you, you, you said that you were excited about this. So
00:28:03.720 I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about this drug and whether you think it will
00:28:08.360 help us, uh, finally end this pandemic and, and, uh, and how it would do that.
00:28:12.920 Dr. Yeah. So the, um,
00:28:16.520 the randomized control trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the benefits
00:28:21.800 of packs of it for folks who are unvaccinated and have some other risk factor for having a bad time
00:28:25.880 with COVID-19. Um, and it found that I, uh, hopefully I have the numbers right off the top
00:28:32.440 of my head, the rate of hospitalizations, um, for these individuals, if you gave them
00:28:37.640 packs of it versus a sugar pill went down from 6% to 1%. So, um, if you give it to 20 people,
00:28:44.760 you say one hospitalization, uh, the study was not intending to look at deaths. Um, they didn't
00:28:50.200 think they would have enough, uh, a large enough sample size because death is still even in this
00:28:55.400 unvaccinated and, and, um, uh, higher risk population, uh, is still uncommon, but they,
00:29:02.920 what they ended up seeing was I think 12 deaths in the, in the, uh, I think it was 600 people who got
00:29:08.760 the sugar pill and zero deaths in the 600 people who got the packs of it. So we don't see medicines
00:29:16.920 that are a hundred percent effective at preventing death very often in clinical methods, uh, medicine,
00:29:22.760 certainly not for infectious diseases, certainly not, um, uh, for an infectious disease that's
00:29:27.960 only existed for two years. So this is a, a stupendous result. And, um, I, I was very excited
00:29:37.320 about it because it, I mean, my, my, my life's work is saving lives. That's what I've spent the
00:29:43.640 last 10 years of medical practice trying to do. Um, and so I was very excited to make sure that as
00:29:49.160 many people who qualify for this medicine, get it. And I was concerned that there was a bit of
00:29:53.560 gatekeeping going on. You use that word. So I will too, um, we're, uh, initially the government
00:29:59.160 wanted, uh, for this medicine to only be delivered to COVID assessment centers and for, uh, you know,
00:30:05.640 an infectious disease specialist to, um, to assess you and decide whether it was necessary. And it just
00:30:11.880 seemed like we were reinventing the wheel. We already have a way of, of getting medicines out to
00:30:15.720 people. It's called family doctors offices and pharmacies. Um, so rather than trying to run
00:30:19.880 all of this through hospitals and COVID assessment centers, I just felt very passionate, like,
00:30:23.240 send us a box of this medicine. I've talked to the family doctors in our town. They understand
00:30:26.680 well, every physician in Canada, if they're not totally incompetent is constantly having to learn
00:30:31.000 about new drugs and new treatments and how to apply them. And that's part of all of our, um, our
00:30:35.480 professional competency upkeep. So, um, I'm, I was really glad that ultimately the, the
00:30:42.440 provincial government decided the right thing and send it out, um, to each community and doctors
00:30:47.080 are prescribing it, uh, all over the place. Interesting. Yeah. It seems like, uh, there,
00:30:51.560 there was a lot of sort of controversy around alternative treatments and, you know, the idea
00:30:57.000 of natural immunity versus, um, taking, taking drugs. It seems like that kind of conversation is
00:31:02.680 passed. I just, just to sort of wrap up the interview and, and, um, ask you, I mean,
00:31:07.880 what do you think it'll take in Canada to move past this? Uh, you know, we've, we've talked about
00:31:13.240 a lot of the just major problems that have presented itself or a pro or failed approach,
00:31:17.480 the sort of, um, maliciousness that we've been treating, uh, one another and the divisiveness.
00:31:22.760 Uh, you know, there's so many Canadians that still feel like they're in the midst of it because
00:31:27.320 they can't travel or they, they don't have their job. They don't have their livelihood.
00:31:30.360 Uh, obviously it's a huge, huge question and we have our work cut out for us as a society. It might
00:31:35.640 take us a decade to get past this, but what are, what are some things that you think, uh,
00:31:40.920 our leaders need to do and, and how can we start, uh, to mend our, our, uh, very frayed, uh, social
00:31:47.240 fabrics in this society, in this country? The mandates have to go away. They're completely unscientific.
00:31:53.480 Um, they're obviously cheap politicking. Um, and I, I don't, I'm not a, I'm not a politician. I'm
00:32:02.920 not a political scientist. I don't know how to make this happen, but it, it needs to happen.
00:32:08.040 Uh, frankly, there's, there should be a lot of apologies. Um, that's a good way to, to mend fences.
00:32:14.360 Um, and I think the, I, we talked about it last time, but it's just the basic issue of civility.
00:32:22.440 How do we disagree with someone? If I think something about the vaccine and you think something
00:32:26.280 different, how do we talk about that? Um, I, so even at, at, at the university that I worked at,
00:32:33.720 the, um, the chief of medicine said, if you, if you believe in a focused protection
00:32:38.760 plan and you sign the great Barrington declaration, you're a, you're a Trump supporter who wants people
00:32:42.840 to get sick. And that's, that's, so if even at the academy, and another thing he told us was,
00:32:51.480 if you have concerns about the vaccine, keep them to yourself, which is a, a hell of a thing to tell,
00:32:57.160 um, a hundred physician scientists. So, um, I, I think maybe it's civics education, maybe it's
00:33:06.280 liberal arts education, like getting back to enlightenment ideals of free inquiry and
00:33:10.760 respecting other humans. And, you know, you go your way, I'll go mine. Um,
00:33:15.240 um, so I, there's maybe some philosophical work that has to be done. I, I think there's,
00:33:21.960 there's problems with the whole cancel culture thing. And the idea that if a, if a professor
00:33:26.520 disagrees with you on a point of science, you have to have a petition to get them defenestrated,
00:33:30.760 um, such as was attempted with Byron Brindle, uh, and, and was attempted with me. Um, it's no,
00:33:36.280 it's frankly not a coincidence that they don't work at university anymore. Um, although that particular
00:33:40.120 attempt wasn't successful. Um, so yeah, I think there's a lot of rebuilding to do just in terms
00:33:46.520 of what is a civic society, what are enlightenment values and, and how do we cue to them, um, the
00:33:51.160 next time our system gets a shock like this. Well, uh, again, I'll just repeat that we definitely
00:33:55.800 have our work cut out for us, but I, I will definitely echo a lot of the things you say.
00:34:00.040 I think, you know, we, we could all make attempts to, to build bridges with those we disagree with.
00:34:04.760 And for me personally, I used to love Twitter. I used to have so much fun going on there and just
00:34:08.840 kind of ripping at stupid things that liberals would say. And I, I've stopped, I like, I'll stop
00:34:13.080 myself even when I see a dumb tweet from a journalist that I just really want to, you know,
00:34:17.720 pick apart, but it's like, you know, this is kind of mean-spirited and it's not really
00:34:21.880 a productive conversation here. It's just kind of dunking on someone because,
00:34:26.200 you know, they, they said something stupid and there's a more productive way to,
00:34:30.200 to go, go about this, this disagreement. And that's why, uh, you know, I, I like longer form
00:34:36.680 conversations. So I, I really appreciate you coming back on the show. Uh, Dr. Strauss,
00:34:40.520 it's always, uh, very, uh, clarifying to hear from you. We appreciate your time.
00:34:44.840 Thank you for having me.
00:34:46.440 Right. That is Dr. Matt Strauss. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:34:58.680 Thank you.