00:00:00.000An independent report commissioned by the United Conservative Party government on the government's pandemic response has finally been published.
00:00:08.360The author of the report is urging the government to implement several recommendations for future pandemics,
00:00:14.640including informed consent for patients who are going to be taking COVID-19 vaccines.
00:00:21.200The author of the report, Dr. Gary Davidson, joins me now.
00:00:25.260I'm Rachel Parker. Welcome to The Rachel Parker Show.
00:00:30.000Hey, everyone. I'm Rachel Parker. Welcome back to The Rachel Parker Show.
00:00:47.200As I said, I'm very excited about my guest today.
00:00:50.260We are joined by Dr. Gary Davidson to break down his pandemic response report that all of you have been asking me about.
00:00:57.440Hi, Gary. So I want to start by asking you first and foremost, with this report, do you expect the province to actually accept any of your recommendations?
00:01:07.220That is not up to me, but what I want them to do is to read the report, go through the recommendations, and see which ones they can incorporate into how we lead the province.
00:01:19.720So that's all I can hope for, and which ones they do and which ones they don't will be up to them.
00:01:23.880But yeah, obviously, they're the recommendations we put forward, and we think they're all good recommendations.
00:01:28.680I'd like to see them all done, but yeah.
00:01:33.260Do you feel like the province is taking the report seriously and wanting to publicize it as much as possible?
00:01:38.800It certainly caught my attention that it was released late on a Friday afternoon.
00:01:43.300Typically, the government releases things on a Friday afternoon that they want to bury, but what kind of reception has the report received from the government in your estimation?
00:01:50.100We've talked to quite a few people in the government.
00:01:56.780Obviously, the people that were helping us with this or asked us to do it, we've been in contact with them, and it's been, from what I see, well-received.
00:02:05.900And as they go through it and digest it, I'm sure we'll get lots of questions on it, but from what I see, it's been well-received.
00:02:13.440And yeah, I can't comment on when it was published.
00:03:29.600We talked to many people when we were writing the report and we put it out to all of them that we gave them an opportunity to read the report
00:03:39.600before we published it, before we attached their names to it.
00:03:45.100And Dr. Conley just wasn't able to go through the report before and then his name was not supposed to be on there.
00:03:52.960And as a final author, I take responsibility for that and apologize to him.
00:03:57.960And so we have actually changed that and have a footnote on the biographies explaining that.
00:04:04.400But we appreciated Dr. Conley's input.
00:04:07.280He has lots of experience and had lots of wisdom to share with us.
00:04:11.960And you'd like to understand that at the end, it just says that just because you're listed as an author doesn't mean you agree with everything in the report.
00:04:21.980And so, yeah, I wanted everybody to have the opportunity to read it before they allowed us or asked us to attach to me.
00:04:29.120And unfortunately, that was just a mix up and I apologize to him.
00:04:32.700Obviously, this United Conservative Party government led by Danielle Smith, you know, they have taken actions to sort of assuage Albertans' concerns about the way that they were treated during the COVID-19 pandemic with, for example, the Alberta Bill of Rights.
00:04:48.300Obviously, this pandemic report is another instance of the UCP government saying mistakes were made during COVID.
00:04:55.800We want to understand what those were so we can better inform our actions in the future.
00:05:00.260And so similar circumstances don't happen again.
00:05:05.560Do you feel like if the recommendations from this report, if none of them were made by the government,
00:05:10.740do you think that the province would be in a place that, let's say, a similar pandemic-type situation would happen, you know, a few years or maybe a few decades down the road?
00:05:20.520Do you believe that the government would handle it differently?
00:05:23.240Or do you think in order to add those safeguards for Albertans,
00:05:28.100recommendations from this report accepted by the government?
00:06:15.700Just give everybody – I want everybody to read it and come to their own conclusions from it and read it well.
00:06:20.720One of the recommendations in the report that really caught my attention, obviously, being in the media ecosystem,
00:06:27.320is that you want media companies to disclose who their donors are, and certainly if, for example, they're receiving advertising revenue from Big Pharma.
00:06:36.320Interesting that this comes up at a time, you know, with the federal conservatives sort of promising to pull funding for media outlets in Canada.
00:06:44.900Now, that's at the federal level, but to me it seems like there might actually be a way to push this type of thing through
00:06:51.460if we were to see a federal government, you know, in the election later this year.
00:06:56.000Are you hoping that this is something that the report that the federal government will look at?
00:07:01.440And, I mean, there was many of the things – I was in Ontario during the pandemic,
00:07:05.180and there was many of the things that caught my attention is, oh, we saw this in Ontario as well.
00:07:08.600So, you know, do you think that, like, that specific recommendation for media companies to have to disclose their donors,
00:07:16.960are you hoping that maybe this is something the federal government will have eyes on?
00:08:14.500On page 38 of the report, you were talking about how the government continuously made decisions that actually went against, you know, their own procedures for what they would have in place.
00:08:26.920I think we saw this all across North America.
00:08:29.500There's procedures in place for how a health care system should respond in the case of a pandemic.
00:08:34.320And in every single case, that evidence seemed to be roundly ignored in pursuit of things like contact tracing or locking people down.
00:08:42.780And, you know, we talk so much about the impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.
00:08:46.220That seems to be the lasting narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:08:49.760And while I think that there's a place where that there was so much damage done by the lockdowns,
00:08:53.640I remember reading reports of young children who were, you know, having suicidal ideation,
00:08:58.620which I think should have revealed that it was a failed experiment from the get-go.
00:09:02.120And I don't know if we talk about the lasting impacts of those lockdowns as much as we should,
00:09:07.280because there were so many people who were still harmed from that.
00:09:09.900And, you know, it really caught my attention when you said that the government ignored their own advice on how to deal with pandemics in favor of.
00:09:16.960And you couldn't really, you know, you see that was one of the questions you left in the report.
00:09:20.660And I have to ask you, you know, do you think that this was really a pandemic of social contagion?
00:09:24.660That there was things being pushed by other countries and the World Health Organization
00:09:29.300and governments around the world sort of hopped on that bandwagon?
00:09:34.300It sure appeared that there was outside influences, and we comment on that.
00:09:38.200I noticed yesterday that the United States just cut all ties between the CDC and the WHO
00:09:43.960because they felt as well that there was outside influence from the WHO
00:09:48.400that didn't have their population's best interest at heart.
00:09:51.880As a data review, we haven't done a full inquiry,
00:09:55.100but a full inquiry would show whether that was truly the case.
00:09:57.600But that's what it appears to be, that there's outside influence.
00:10:00.700If you looked around the world, you looked around the province,
00:10:03.000you looked around all these jurisdictions, and the same message was every day.
00:10:06.500That couldn't have been organic from Alberta.
00:10:09.080We had a great pandemic response plan in place.
00:10:12.420Lieutenant Colonel David Redmond was a huge part of writing that.