Juno News - Everything wrong with mandates and lockdowns (ft. Dr. Neil Rau)

00:00:00.000 Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. It's great that you can join me once again. I hope you're

00:00:21.640 enjoying the last few days of summer and getting ready for Labor Day. Speaking of Labor Day,

00:00:27.520 this is the time of year when many young people are returning to schools and universities across

00:00:33.040 the country. And again, we're in the midst of a raging debate about masking and vaccine mandates,

00:00:39.480 especially for universities in Canada. The fact that there's no uniform policy is sparking a

00:00:45.460 controversy. For example, the three major post-secondary institutions in the Ottawa area,

00:00:51.120 the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College, and Carleton University suspended their vaccine and

00:00:57.880 mask mandates this past summer and remain suspended as the fall term approaches.

00:01:03.980 This has caused faculty and student unions at these places to protest. The university

00:01:09.660 administration has apparently their leadership seems to prefer to live under mandates, although

00:01:14.920 it's not clear what the rank and file membership thinks about it, or for that matter, what the

00:01:19.400 students think. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, you have Western University insisting

00:01:27.480 on at least three doses for students and faculty returning to campus. This is even though Ontario's

00:01:34.180 Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Karen Moore, is not necessarily in favor of booster doses for

00:01:40.420 younger people, especially young men who have a higher risk of myocarditis and likely don't need the

00:01:47.400 booster given that they're young and healthy. To make sense of all of this and more, I have a superb

00:01:53.480 guest with me today. Dr. Neil Rau is an infectious diseases specialist and medical microbiologist,

00:02:00.840 assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and works at Halton Healthcare in Oakville. So without

00:02:07.480 any further delay, please welcome Dr. Rau to the show. Hey, Neil, welcome to the show. It's great to have you

00:02:13.760 here. So I've told our viewers about the controversy over mask and vaccine mandates, especially now with

00:02:21.440 Western University taking this extreme step of insisting on boosters. Is it just the university

00:02:27.680 being extra cautious, or is it simply refusing to move past the pandemic and remain in this constant

00:02:34.220 state of emergency? And you know, what's even more bizarre, Neil, is that they've exempted visitors and

00:02:40.220 service personnel from the mandates. So apparently, the science is different for a big donor, or a

00:02:45.900 visiting sports team, or for your local delivery guy. And it's different for students and faculty.

00:02:52.300 Also, I noted that faculty and student unions at some schools in Canada, that sensibly got rid of the

00:02:59.580 mandates a few months ago, from back in the summer, and now they want them back. What do you make of all

00:03:05.180 of this? You know, this is awfully confusing, not just for the students, but even for the public at

00:03:10.780 large. And we have many similar confusing scenarios I can recount to you. You know, if you go on a via

00:03:16.860 rail train, you have to wear a mask. But if you take a go train, or a commuter train, you don't, or a

00:03:21.500 tourist train, you don't. If you are unvaccinated, and you arrive in Canada, you have to do quarantine.

00:03:28.300 But if you're vaccinated, you don't. If you're unvaccinated, you should be tested, if you come from abroad. But 1.00

00:03:34.540 if you're vaccinated, you know, you're tested at random. We have so many contradictions like this,

00:03:40.300 that of course, now add universities to it. And moreover, the Western University appeal to the

00:03:45.980 higher authority of the Ivy League schools in the US, citing that other Ivy League schools are

00:03:51.100 doing something crazy. Therefore, we should follow them and do the same thing. So no wonder they're

00:03:55.900 confused. If an august organization like, say, Brown University or Harvard University chooses to do it,

00:04:01.180 why shouldn't we do it? They must be right, we must be wrong. So the problem with any form of a vaccine

00:04:08.060 passport system, or a vaccine mandate, is that there's an assumption that those who are vaccinated

00:04:14.940 are somehow less contagious, less infectious than those who are not vaccinated. That premise is being

00:04:22.460 destroyed day by day, variant by variant. So originally, there was this lovely data, late 2020,

00:04:31.980 which suggested we have the silver bullet, our exit out of the pandemic, that if we vaccinated everyone

00:04:37.100 and achieve herd immunity, we would stop this in its tracks. It's not true. We didn't know about the

00:04:43.340 variants. We didn't know about waning immunity, that immunity would fall over time following vaccination.

00:04:49.900 We didn't know that after three doses of the Pfizer vaccine, four months later, your vaccine protection

00:04:55.660 against these circulating Omicron screens is not 10 or 15 or 20%, it's zero. It's 20% at two months,

00:05:02.700 and it's zero at four months. So no one knew this when these policies came up. But the policies lagged

00:05:08.700 the science. And once that freight train of these policies, these mandates, this virtue signaling,

00:05:15.020 shaming those terrible unvaccinated people, teaching them a damn lesson for their bad behavior, 1.00

00:05:20.700 spanking them if you will, once that started, it couldn't stop itself. And we went around and we 1.00

00:05:27.180 caused mayhem. And there's no acknowledgement of the error. There's no silent discussion. Maybe we should

00:05:33.580 get back on this. Maybe we should just pull it away. Maybe we can secretly quietly get rid of those

00:05:37.740 vaccine mandates that are leading to some staffing challenges in hospitals, for example. Like maybe it's

00:05:42.620 time to rethink this. That's what hasn't happened. And wow, when universities go backwards like this,

00:05:47.900 am I ever glad those students are speaking up? Triple vaccinated students, no less. Like myself,

00:05:53.420 I'm triple vaccinated and once infected, at least, by Omicron.

00:05:57.660 Same here. And I think, you know, before we taped a couple of days ago, when we, you and I were

00:06:03.260 chatting about doing the show, I remember you saying something very interesting that the protests

00:06:08.220 happening at Western University are a protest by the vaccinated. So it's sort of the mirror image of 0.68

00:06:15.020 what happened with the truckers protests. But, you know, but having said that, the truckers protest,

00:06:21.180 you know, was not a protest by the unvaccinated. You know, having spoken to many of the people who

00:06:27.020 showed up to protest, including the truckers, many of them were actually vaccinated. They just

00:06:31.260 were protesting because they didn't think these mandates served any purpose. And, you know, they

00:06:37.420 were taking a principal position on it. So it's fascinating how, you know, that, that, you know,

00:06:43.500 I'm glad that the students at Western University are taking a stance on this. I mean, it's time that

00:06:48.540 people started speaking up. It absolutely is ridiculous that, you know, what is the scientific

00:06:54.060 rationale behind the booster, especially for those who are young? Yeah, I'm shaking my head with this. 0.72

00:07:01.740 I mean, some people kindly said it's a personal choice. Yeah, you know, at least just at least

00:07:06.060 let's talk about this from an informed consent perspective. That's what some people who spoke

00:07:09.660 at the protest said, some physicians who spoke at the protest said. But the other comment I would make

00:07:14.140 is, what's the medical value? When you do something, you have to look at the number to treat,

00:07:19.820 the number of vaccines I need to give to prevent a hospital admission, to prevent a death. Once

00:07:25.580 you're dealing with someone who is under 50, if they've had two doses of vaccine, that third dose

00:07:31.020 of vaccine doesn't add much. It's not like stepping on the gas pedal. The harder you step, the car goes

00:07:36.540 faster. Sometimes the car is going as fast as it's going to go. You don't get more by beating the

00:07:40.060 horse harder sometimes. That's what this is becoming. And then the other point is many people were

00:07:45.580 addressing with a third dose of vaccine have been infected with Omepron, but that was their booster.

00:07:51.500 It was waiting for you at the LCBO, not the antigen kit for the disease.

00:07:55.820 You know, this is this is the hilariousness of it. So it's just, you know, that we've never

00:08:00.700 acknowledged natural infection in the equation. And that is a game changer. The political science

00:08:06.620 analysis I'm going to give you as well, with reverse to Western, is it's not a bunch of people who had

00:08:11.820 so-called Confederate flags on the front of their trucks. These are students who are educated, who

00:08:17.020 are triple vaxxed, and they are the voting constituency for the government in power for the most part.

00:08:23.420 This is their target audience. A 30-year-old or 25-year-old female arts graduate or arts student

00:08:30.860 is likely to vote Liberal or NDP. And they have pissed off that subgroup of voters. They've blown it

00:08:38.060 this time as a government in power if this is what they allow. Now, this is a university

00:08:43.420 promoting this, but if the governments in power don't speak out against this, they might actually

00:08:47.820 lose voters. So they have to think about the implications, because if this type of policy

00:08:52.460 comes from upon high, not just from universities, but from governments in power, you won't see it

00:08:56.700 from the foreign government, I don't think, but if you saw it from other provincial governments

00:09:00.620 being promoted, I think they'd be running roughshod against their own votership.

00:09:03.980 Yeah. Yeah. I think this is going to become a political issue. It's already a political issue

00:09:13.180 at this point, but I think it's good that these students are speaking up. I want to touch upon

00:09:18.220 this, something you mentioned earlier. Since the advent of Omicron and its subvariants, we know that

00:09:24.700 COVID has become much less severe. It's highly transmissible. And even the booster shots, as you said,

00:09:33.340 don't really do much at preventing transmission at this point. First of all, would it be fair to say

00:09:40.460 that from a layman's perspective, COVID-19 is morphing into something like the seasonal flu

00:09:45.580 that we've been living with forever? And with the seasonal flu, as you know, taking the flu shot

00:09:50.620 was always voluntary and no one put a gun to your head. So, I mean, first of all, would it be fair to

00:09:57.500 say that it's basically evolved into something like the seasonal flu?

00:10:02.300 So, what you're getting at is what we call an endemic approach, is it appropriate, rather than

00:10:06.300 a pandemic approach? I think so. I don't think everyone's ready to get off the horse yet. It

00:10:11.340 depends who you ask. Okay. And that's where you're going to see a divergence between experts. But

00:10:15.740 one thing I can say is, as you said earlier, Omicron is not causing the health impact that the original

00:10:22.300 Wuhan strain, COVID classic, as I call it, did. The other point is you've got an immunologically

00:10:27.820 experienced population. Initially, we were so-called immunologically naive. Nobody had seen the vaccine,

00:10:33.020 nobody had seen the disease. Now we have large numbers of people who have seen the disease,

00:10:37.580 who have been vaccinated, who got the disease, then who were forced to get vaccinated or got the vaccine,

00:10:43.740 whatever might have happened. So, you've got this hybrid mix, or pure vaccinated, or pure

00:10:48.540 unvaccinated, but infected. And there's a very small percentage of people who are unvaccinated,

00:10:53.500 who can still be hit hard even by Omicron and end up in hospital. To be fair, I'm not sure the

00:10:58.380 severity of the disease has changed, but I think the population at risk has changed. So, with infectious

00:11:04.860 diseases, we look at three things. We look at the host, we look at the environment, and we look at the

00:11:10.140 virus, the triangle, the epidemiologic triangle. If the virus hasn't changed, one thing that has changed

00:11:16.780 is the host, the host situation, the immune status of the host. The environment, we learn more about

00:11:22.380 where it spreads. We don't have to have people crying on TV because we're having outdoor parties

00:11:27.340 at Trinity Bellwoods Park anymore. We had stories like a doctor going on TV crying because people

00:11:33.020 were outside in May of 2020. I don't think we need that anymore. There's no need to cry. We don't need

00:11:38.380 people to mask outside, although some people like to do it to show how amazing they are to other people.

00:11:43.420 This is a talisman. This is not really a personal protective measure anymore in that setting. Now,

00:11:48.780 we do know that people, if they want to, can go ahead and wear a mask. They can even wear an F95 mask,

00:11:53.500 FN95 mask if they want. That's great. They can also wear it as they walk into a restaurant and

00:11:58.460 promptly take it off as they eat, and they can feel protected. This is the kind of folly that I see.

00:12:02.620 We see people getting on airplanes with masks and taking it off as soon as the plane's at cruising altitude

00:12:08.700 and the flight attendant shows up with a coffee. It all comes off. Why are we doing this? If we're

00:12:13.260 going to keep doing things, we have to be selective. Asking university students to do this on a campus,

00:12:18.940 to me, is just pure folly. Wrong population, not the best intervention if they're wearing just a 0.99

00:12:24.940 surgical mask, in the wrong era of COVID-19, where we have an immune experienced population,

00:12:32.300 either through vaccination or disease. It's a triple fail, in my view.

00:12:36.940 Yeah. Speaking of people who refuse to get off the horse, you have countries that have more or less

00:12:44.300 fully moved on and aren't having these debates of what way we're in and what the wastewater signal is

00:12:50.780 telling us. I always thought that we, as Canadians, tended to be pragmatic. What I see is a state of

00:13:01.180 what I can only call COVID psychosis at this point, where especially many public health experts and

00:13:06.940 doctors whose voices get amplified by the mainstream media, they simply don't want to let go. Meanwhile,

00:13:13.820 you have courageous experts and doctors like yourself who don't share the so-called consensus

00:13:20.460 view, and you're criticized and vilified and ridiculed. This seems like a very unhealthy state of

00:13:27.260 affairs and does a lot of damage, in my opinion, to public health messaging in the end and instills fear.

00:13:34.300 I still meet people who are triple vaccinated, triple masked. They live in a state of perpetual fear.

00:13:42.060 What do you make of all of this? How did we end up in this mess and where do we go from here?

00:13:48.060 So some of this started even before COVID. I'm going to kind of walk through. You mentioned flu. We had campaigns,

00:13:53.900 let's get flueless, you know. So there was a vision that if we all got the flu shot, we could stop this

00:14:00.620 disease. It's not true. I've written in the Globe and Mail a number of years ago that we were taking the

00:14:05.980 flu shot too seriously. This is well before COVID. We haven't managed our expectations. We are trying to

00:14:12.300 create a belief that what happened with measles for the vaccine actually stopped transmission

00:14:17.820 would apply to other respiratory viruses, including influenza and COVID-19. It just isn't the case.

00:14:24.620 If you don't manage expectations and you keep going with this view that you can stop something in its

00:14:28.940 tracks, that you can stop the wind, as people describe trying to stop the flu, in terms of its

00:14:34.460 impossibility, this is what you get. The other thing is there's a cultural dislike, disdain for the so-called

00:14:42.380 anti-vaxxer. And I've been labeled an anti-vaxxer for questioning the idea of going on and on with

00:14:49.340 a carousel of boosters to quote one of your prior phrases, the carousel of boosters. Because this is

00:14:56.300 where it doesn't stop. And I think it's like a movement. It's much easier for me to go on mainstream

00:15:02.620 media or media and just say, get the shot at your best defense. It's a bromide. Who's going to question

00:15:08.300 a bromide like that? If I say, listen, there's a certain group of my older patients who would benefit

00:15:13.820 from a fourth booster or a third booster, at least a third booster. And maybe we should wait for a new

00:15:18.300 vaccine to give a fourth booster or wait, maybe if they've already just had Omicron or had COVID in

00:15:24.460 the last three or six months, we can take pause. We don't have to hammer them with another vaccine.

00:15:29.340 When I make those comments, someone will turn around and say, that's an imprudent, irresponsible view.

00:15:35.340 I am morphing into the anti-vaxxer league. And that label is terrible. That's a terrible label to

00:15:40.700 have. So this is why you see people backing off private emails to you, to other journalists,

00:15:47.180 to myself, people reaching out, chat groups forming where people don't want to speak out publicly,

00:15:51.980 except for a few of us. But the insanity has reached a level now where young students who are

00:15:56.620 triple vaxxed are saying, what the hell is going on? And rightly so. So that's the turning point.

00:16:02.060 The Western University protest is the turning point. I'm surprised it wasn't bigger. But if it

00:16:06.540 happens at multiple universities, or if they have a second round of this with more uptake,

00:16:10.460 you never know. Or maybe it'll come up during the political campaign. And that would be bad

00:16:14.060 news for the governing party. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, exactly. You know, speaking of young

00:16:20.140 people, Neil, you know, there's a growing consensus, at least from my reading of the situation,

00:16:26.860 especially for men under 40, I believe, that there's a greater risk of getting myocarditis

00:16:32.940 from the vaccine than from COVID-19. What do you make of this? Do you share this emerging consensus?

00:16:39.660 I share that consensus. And this is why I think we have to be cautious about boosters. I'm not saying

00:16:43.500 it was wrong to give one or two doses in the pandemic, fog or war. Fine. But I think when you

00:16:49.260 start pushing boosters, and when we have this evidence about waning immunity, that basically,

00:16:54.380 it's like a short top up, it's like having a gas guzzling car, and you're going to fill up the

00:16:59.020 tank all the time, you can't you never, you can't drive more than a certain kilometers before you

00:17:03.100 top up again. When you have this type of of a practice developing, and you apply it to people

00:17:09.340 who are low risk of bad outcomes from the disease, a rare outcome of myocarditis, heart inflammation,

00:17:17.500 starts to become an appreciable concern. Do the benefits outweigh the risks or vice versa?

00:17:23.260 In that sub population. Again, these questions can't be openly discussed. I think there's a

00:17:28.140 tendency not to discuss these adverse effects. You even hear the line that the disease causes

00:17:32.860 myocarditis more than the vaccine. But the point is that their people can also get the disease anyway

00:17:39.100 with the vaccine or without the vaccine. We know that the vaccine efficacy is not 80 or 90 or 100%.

00:17:44.700 After a while, you're at the same risk anyway. So what that argument doesn't hold water anymore.

00:17:48.940 You know, in the early phases with earlier variants, there was better data about at least

00:17:54.300 some vaccine efficacy, meaning stopping infection, not preventing bad outcomes. The bad outcomes part,

00:18:00.460 we've already gotten that benefit from either getting the disease or the vaccine. That holds true

00:18:04.140 anyway. But at least in the early days with the earlier variants like Delta and Alpha, the argument

00:18:08.780 can be made. But once Omicron showed up, this was a game changer. And the policy lags the science.

00:18:13.260 A lot of this is very political as well. Yeah, well, and you know, you talked about masking earlier,

00:18:21.580 you know, masking on a plane and then taking it off and then having a drink and then you have to put

00:18:25.580 it back on. What is the current consensus on masking in schools, for example? Does it make sense to impose

00:18:34.220 mask mandates on young kids? What is the evidence currently saying on mask masks?

00:18:40.380 So very good evidence now showing there's no difference in schools that did and did not mask.

00:18:45.500 Okay. And just as we discussed the idea of imposing a vaccine on people who have very low

00:18:51.820 direct risk from the disease and minimal direct benefit from the vaccine, meaning to themselves.

00:18:57.420 Similar thing here with the masking. When you make kids mask, you're doing this with the view that the

00:19:02.860 masks are preventing transmission. You're not doing it to protect them from the disease. Yeah, you'll hear

00:19:07.660 all this hullabaloo of a long COVID that you're somehow preventing long COVID. But we know that

00:19:12.140 the masking doesn't really change the rate of infection. So what you're doing is imposing

00:19:17.100 something of a theoretical benefit to stop transmission, say, to the teacher or to other students

00:19:24.300 to generally a group that's at low risk of bad outcomes. Unless you say you have an older teacher

00:19:29.100 who's already vaccinated, by the way, likely. And you're impairing their learning, language development,

00:19:36.220 comprehension, social development. If English is a second language for them, there's a second way to

00:19:44.220 learn a language. It's not just auditory, it's visual, it's facial movement, pronunciation. Also,

00:19:51.260 you're hearing development, like there's a whole bunch of developmental pediatric consequences

00:19:57.740 to continuing with this pathway of masking kids. Finally, the now debunked, or I shouldn't say,

00:20:04.460 but now dissolved Ontario science table had said, hey, maybe this isn't a good idea to keep pushing

00:20:10.540 the masking. But I would also say debunked because they were big proponents of masking in schools.

00:20:16.700 And they were also an example of a group that gave contradictory messaging to public health.

00:20:20.700 One big theme I've seen is that there is no leader of the orchestra. You'll have our chief medical

00:20:26.060 officer of health saying one thing, and then other people deciding they're going to go for the nines

00:20:30.860 and go beyond the broad advice. Exactly. As is happening with Western, right? Sorry to interrupt,

00:20:37.420 but as is happening with Western, when you have the chief medical officer of health for the province,

00:20:41.500 Dr. Karen Moore, saying that, look, when it comes to younger people, especially when it concerns my

00:20:49.580 the risk of myocarditis, you know, it's up to you to make that risk benefit analysis and come to a

00:20:55.660 decision based on that risk benefit analysis. But yet you have the schools like Western and

00:21:03.420 other schools essentially going rogue. So it's one thing if it's a private business,

00:21:09.100 they can do whatever they want. I guess you can't tell them what to do. It's their own private

00:21:11.980 home. You come to my house and I insist on antigen testing for you. You can't stop me. It's my home.

00:21:16.620 If you want to come to the internet or my place, you have to. This is a publicly funded institution,

00:21:21.820 thousands of students, thousands of faculty, and they can go rogue and contradict our chief medical

00:21:27.980 officer of health. No one accuses them of disinformation. But if I said, hey, maybe we should rethink

00:21:33.980 whether we need so many doses of vaccine, that's getting into the disinformation area.

00:21:37.980 Yeah. So this is this is the paradox. That's why you will have

00:21:42.060 commentators track towards the most cautious. And no one will really question, is this too much?

00:21:47.500 It's starting now a little bit. I saw signs of it with this Western university protest. But with the

00:21:52.860 truckers protest, there was no regard for that. They were treated the same way Hillary Clinton, 0.76

00:21:57.900 the so-called deplorables, the deplorables. This is the equivalent. This is our Canadian equivalent of

00:22:03.660 the deplorables in our midst, not engaging with why they feel the way they do. What are the consequences

00:22:09.660 for them? This is this is a new Canadian disease to review people with certain viewpoints as simply

00:22:14.700 deplorable, ignoring their personal circumstance. The worst thing I have seen in this pandemic has been

00:22:22.460 lower income people who refuse the vaccine, who had been infected and infected before many of us saw it,

00:22:30.860 and being thrown out of their jobs. Yeah, very un-Canadian. But perhaps, you know, I've been

00:22:37.100 reflecting on this. Maybe it is part of the Canadian psyche that we just haven't come to terms with.

00:22:43.180 And it just took a pandemic basically to bring that to the surface. But, you know, but that's

00:22:49.020 that's that's that's that can be debated for sure. And so, Neil, let's go back to natural immunity. And

00:22:55.580 this is a question that I ask every expert that I speak to. For some reason in Canada and the US,

00:23:01.980 there's no recognition of natural immunity. And yet in places in many European countries, for example,

00:23:09.660 that's natural immunity is essentially seen as being equivalent to vaccination. And what's more,

00:23:15.980 many of us, as we talked about this earlier, many of us have this hybrid immunity. Now we've had two

00:23:21.660 or even three doses, and we've gotten Omicron or maybe even the original strain. Why do you think

00:23:27.500 that natural immunity is simply not recognized in Canada when, you know, it's as old as time itself?

00:23:34.300 This is I mean, what did we do before the advent of vaccination? This is how humankind survived.

00:23:38.620 And, you know, I recall we, at least in Ontario, and maybe also in other provinces, hospital workers

00:23:48.220 who had recovered from COVID were fired because they were unvaccinated. Imagine firing a hospital

00:23:53.660 worker in a hospital, a worker in a hospital, a place that should have the science down pat when

00:24:00.460 it comes to things like natural immunity. Yet this was happening. And, you know, these are people who

00:24:05.500 advocate vaccination, but they don't acknowledge the role of vaccine immunity. So what's going on here?

00:24:12.780 It's vaccine zealotry. That's what it is. It's literally an undying faith in vaccines being better

00:24:19.180 than actual immunity. But the science, as early as January of this year, 2020, I think even late 2021,

00:24:27.580 was starting to show that people who had been previously infected, who had been followed when we had

00:24:34.300 lots of testing available, were testing everyone who didn't get infected, were better off in terms of

00:24:39.500 a chance of reinfection than those who had been vaccinated, but never positive. And Qatar showed 0.88

00:24:44.380 it beautifully. And it was shown in an MMWR from the US, California was shown through a large group of

00:24:52.140 people. Yet the science didn't shift. And no one and I questioned this in September 2021. It's in writing

00:24:58.540 what I said. I'm not just saying this with the benefit of hindsight. I questioned whether this was the

00:25:02.700 right way to go. I wrote a piece in the National Post saying five reasons or six reasons to rethink

00:25:08.540 vaccine passports. But people, the ban moved on. And what also happened is a lot of organizations

00:25:13.900 wanted to emulate each other. So if they're doing it, well, why shouldn't we do it? You know,

00:25:18.860 this hospital is doing it. We're going to copy and have a similar policy so people can't shop between

00:25:23.740 hospitals and places of employment. We're going to make it hard for them. And it was, you know,

00:25:28.860 a way of really irritating people to get them to do it. It was no longer a nudge. It was a stick.

00:25:36.060 And that's what really happened. The other thing is, there was this belief that if you acknowledge

00:25:40.060 natural immunity, you would dissuade people from getting the vaccine, that this was a

00:25:45.100 contradictory message. So you'd encourage people to unwittingly get infected or even willingly have a

00:25:52.540 COVID party for young kids, that this would dissuade people from getting the vaccine. The vaccine was

00:25:58.780 the answer. So I don't blame the policy of strongly having encouraged the vaccine, this herculean attempt

00:26:06.860 to vaccinate most of the population. Excellent. I'm glad we did it. But we couldn't stop. It was like

00:26:12.380 eating popcorn and you know you should stop or you just keep eating it. You finished the whole damn bag. 1.00

00:26:17.340 You just can't stop yourself. That's what happened. We got to two doses. We couldn't stop ourselves from 1.00

00:26:22.460 going for a third for everyone, not just some. And when I made the comments in November of 2021 saying

00:26:28.860 we need to take stock, applaud ourselves for having got what we got and rethink this booster for everyone,

00:26:35.020 it was criticized on Twitter. The claim that was made by one expert is it's a consensus view that we

00:26:41.900 should give third doses to everyone. That's not science. This is 10 people getting together and agreeing

00:26:47.340 that's not science. And the science now shows more and more boosting isn't going to be the answer.

00:26:52.460 The other elephant sitting in the rooms, we've got this other vaccine coming out now,

00:26:55.980 the Omicron one. Right. The Omicron vaccine is targeted at the original Omicron classic,

00:27:02.220 not the son of the son of the son of Omicron, which is out there now. So even that's out of date.

00:27:09.180 You know, it's like giving everyone the iPhone 8, but everyone's got the 13 now. But we offer the whole

00:27:13.820 population on iPhone 8s, but everyone's using the 13. And this virus is a bit like the iPhone.

00:27:18.540 The moment it saturates the population with either immunity due to vaccine or disease,

00:27:24.620 it reinvents itself to get into other people's throats. The goal of wiring this virus is to be

00:27:29.260 the new iPhone. So we've got 13.1 out there now. Well, what's troubling about this is, you know,

00:27:34.140 I shared a Wall Street Journal story earlier about the FDA authorizing this vaccine. And some of the

00:27:42.860 details from the story are very disturbing. For example, this Omicron-specific vaccine has not

00:27:50.620 been tested on humans. It's only been tested on mice. And the other thing that comes out of the story is

00:27:57.100 that it's been, you know, all of the usual steps that would be involved in getting the vaccine

00:28:05.340 authorized for use. For example, a review process that involves experts who would then authorize the

00:28:14.380 vaccine. They've just completely gotten rid of that step. And this is not doing much to, you know,

00:28:22.860 get people to take the vaccine. I mean, I read the story. I'm triple vaccinated. And, you know,

00:28:28.940 I'm thinking, am I comfortable taking this Omicron-specific vaccine? And just the details

00:28:34.860 from this are very, very, are not very reassuring, even if you were pro-vaccine. But, you know,

00:28:42.220 I'm less worried about the safety side of this as much as I'm worried about the practicality and

00:28:48.140 whether it's going to deliver the dividends that it's supposed to deliver. This is what's bothering me.

00:28:52.540 We haven't learned from our mistakes of working with preconceptions and assumptions that something

00:28:58.220 will deliver these dividends. And we already know we're dealing with a vaccine that is addressing an

00:29:03.580 out-of-date strain. And who knows what the future holds? The next relative of Omicron,

00:29:09.260 are we going to suddenly have a big news story about a whole new Greek alphabet virus emerging

00:29:15.180 somewhere? And by the way, the emergence of these variants is not because people are not vaccinated.

00:29:21.020 That's another great myth out there that if only more people got the vaccine and more people got

00:29:26.060 the boosters, we could stop variants in their tracks. This is in their tracks. It's nonsense.

00:29:31.100 Nonsense. The variants emerge because there's immunity. The virus is evolving. The virus calls

00:29:36.060 the shots, not the vaccine. So the original alpha variant started in the UK, which was one of the

00:29:42.380 most vaccinated places on earth at that time. But then it happened in South Africa. They said, ah,

00:29:47.740 it's because they didn't get the vaccine in South Africa. But they had massive natural immunity as

00:29:52.620 well. They'd had a big round of this in 2020, of the original COVID. And then this Omicron strain

00:29:59.580 vaccinated them rather than the vaccine. The real vaccine didn't get into their hands

00:30:04.940 soon enough. So there's all this mythical talk about how if we had more people vaccinated,

00:30:11.180 we wouldn't have variants. If we had more people vaccinated, the virus would not be multiplying so

00:30:15.820 much in the community and variants wouldn't develop. These are quixotic, lovely beliefs.

00:30:22.140 That's what they are. And they're not proven. Well, these were expert opinions. I remember actually

00:30:29.980 believing this at that time. You mentioned South Africa. I was reading this in the context of India

00:30:37.820 that because many Indians, including my parents, were unvaccinated. That's the reason. That was why 1.00

00:30:45.180 the Delta variant came about. And these were well-known experts who were saying this. And I

00:30:50.300 don't recall them ever being challenged or maybe they were being challenged, but those challenges just

00:30:54.940 never made it to the public discourse space. But it's quite something that a lot of people do still

00:31:03.260 believe that these variants are emerging because there are unvaccinated people out there. But

00:31:09.500 variants, but viruses evolve, as you say, just like the flu virus, right?

00:31:14.460 Yeah. So viruses evolve in response to population immunity. You think of yourself as a virus. Your

00:31:20.220 goal is to promote yourself. It's to infect more people. If every person you reach is blocking you,

00:31:26.060 you have to change your stripes, make yourself immune invasive. That's what's happening with these 1.00

00:31:31.020 Omicron variants. Delta came about because a lot of people had seen COVID classic in India

00:31:36.220 and there was no testing. And there's no sophisticated surveillance system, not to the

00:31:40.940 same degree as here or in Western developed countries, whatever, G7 countries. So you have

00:31:46.700 a population where there's an invisible outbreak, large number of transmissions, because of course,

00:31:51.420 most of this disease is mild and it goes below the radar. And then they say, hey, it's because people

00:31:57.180 aren't vaccinated. But that's simplistic. Because I remember the UK variant started in a population

00:32:04.780 that was immune. And these other variants that we're seeing now of Omicron are developing right

00:32:08.700 here. They're homegrown problems. And all that traveler testing isn't going to keep it up either,

00:32:13.820 by the way. It's really interesting. But every time we found a variant, we already have it here by the

00:32:18.380 time we actually find it. Yeah. So the same thing happened with Omicron. 50 countries had it when we

00:32:23.580 announced this in December of 2021. So yeah, December 2021. I bet history gets so hard to remember here.

00:32:29.900 Yeah. December 2021, 50 countries had Omicron already. So that traveler testing that we imposed

00:32:35.500 for countries, Sub-Saharan African countries was just, remember the ban we had on travelers coming here?

00:32:41.500 Insanity. Insanity. This is another pandemic fog of war boo-boo. Yeah. And I, you know, I hope people

00:32:48.380 look back at this and question their decisions. Like this was a year plus into this, that we did

00:32:54.140 that. And people were criticizing. The WHO was criticizing it. Yeah. Well, I mean, we panicked

00:33:00.060 post-vaccination in a way that I would never have imagined. I thought we were a little more sensible

00:33:06.620 before the vaccination. And I thought the vaccines would put us on this path towards normalcy. But in

00:33:12.780 fact, what ended up happening is that we panicked even more after vaccination, after having this

00:33:17.900 protection. Yeah. There's also a constant desire to show us to be different from the U.S., whether

00:33:23.020 it was right or wrong. So Trump speaks of natural immunity. Trump said it must be wrong. Yeah. Like,

00:33:29.740 you know, a broken clock can be cracked twice a day. That's the problem. You have to appraise

00:33:33.580 each statement one by one, really look at whether they're right or wrong. Governor DeSantis, you know,

00:33:39.020 despised by many, not everything he did with COVID is wrong. Yeah. Because they called it a disaster

00:33:44.860 south of the border. But later on, where was the disaster? They had population immunity. We were 0.73

00:33:50.460 having waves while they weren't. We also know that climate plays a role. We know that subtropical and

00:33:55.180 tropical countries have a different picture. The southern hemisphere is going to have a big swell

00:33:58.940 now as Australia is having because it's their winter. Also because they held the disease at bay as

00:34:05.020 an island nation with a stringent policy. So you pay now or you pay later. They're paying now. It's a

00:34:11.260 delayed payment program. That's what it is. So all the places, even in Toronto, places that were hard

00:34:17.340 hit earlier in the first waves of the pandemic were relatively spared more recently because they'd all

00:34:23.420 seen so much disease in northwest Toronto because you have a low socioeconomic group living in apartment 1.00

00:34:28.540 buildings, sharing elevators, sharing spaces, taking public transit to work in front facing jobs and

00:34:34.540 they can't work from home on their laptop. That's why they got it. So they're already immune. That's why we

00:34:40.700 didn't have the big wave. They weren't a big news story after the winter of 2021. There was no news

00:34:45.580 story about northwest Toronto. We always think about where the cameras were, not where they aren't.

00:34:51.740 Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned air travel briefly a little while ago. Air travel remains extremely

00:34:59.420 convoluted while arriving into Canada by air, both because of this funky and failure-prone Arrive Can

00:35:08.700 app. And also this random testing, which you mentioned earlier for everyone, even for the

00:35:14.380 vaccinated. So why are we doing this? And then of course you're asked boilerplate questions like,

00:35:20.380 do you have a fever or a cough? And something else you mentioned about the unvaccinated,

00:35:25.660 you know, they continue to be treated as second-class citizens as being more dangerous than the vaccinated

00:35:32.060 and are required to quarantine upon return. What do you make of all of this?

00:35:36.860 The travel policy. I don't understand the travel policy. It's amazing that with all the criticism

00:35:42.380 that this is receiving the media, that it's still alive. I think there's an element of this that has

00:35:46.380 sunk in costs. They've spent 25 million plus on this app and they want to get it used whether it's

00:35:52.460 useful or not. It'd be one thing if that app prevented you from actually using that whole device when you

00:35:57.820 arrive with your passport and so on. If it spared you that time, I can almost forgive them. What

00:36:02.300 they're really focusing on is your vaccine certificate and what dose you got and exactly when and which

00:36:08.620 formulation. Like this is useless information for border services. And then they've got a policy

00:36:15.340 driven by vaccine status in terms of how you have to behave. So if you're unvaccinated, you get a super

00:36:20.540 spanking again, even though you might have even been infected recently. It's not even a good idea to give

00:36:26.300 someone the vaccine right away after an infection. Now the funny thing is they did come up with a

00:36:30.700 provision for recent infections to exempt people, but you know they did sort of adapt to that quietly.

00:36:37.180 But if you, so if you read the fine print, you can get out of it if you've been infected,

00:36:41.100 you have documentation of infection. But many of us did not document infections. I happen to be

00:36:46.540 fortunate enough working in healthcare. I would know right away if I'm positive, I have access to testing

00:36:50.700 or I want to take it to a patient. But many people in the community don't know their status with

00:36:55.740 regards to recent infection. And we find these people, when we random test sometimes in outbreaks

00:37:00.140 in hospital, people have been infected, they didn't even know it. So the weird thing about

00:37:05.100 this arrive can policy is it doesn't even consider prior infection openly. It's buried in there if

00:37:11.340 you go deep digging and you can show the customs officer your proof in the last 180 days or 90 days,

00:37:16.860 whatever date they choose. And it really assumes that the vaccinated people are bigger transmitters

00:37:23.180 than those who aren't. And then the ridiculous thing you see when you put your passport into the

00:37:27.500 device is they ask you if you have fever or cough. I mean, who's going to say yes, first of all,

00:37:33.180 just stick your head under the guillotine and say yes, drop the, you know, drop the knife. Like, 0.99

00:37:37.100 why would you do that? And then also symptom screening didn't work. We had symptom screening in

00:37:42.060 long-term care in 2020. If it was so amazing, why did you get all those outbreaks? The problem with this

00:37:48.220 disease is you can have almost no symptoms or no symptoms and you can unwittingly spread this.

00:37:55.580 We know about choir groups spreading it in Washington state in the early days.

00:37:59.580 We know that singing, we know what the fitness studio outbreak in Hamilton, they were all just

00:38:03.340 working out no symptoms of the index first case. So when you use symptom screening for disease, which

00:38:10.060 can be spread perfectly well without symptoms, this is just theater. Hygiene theater is what this is. 0.93

00:38:16.380 And I'm so surprised to see that a government with a whole coitery of experts, Health Canada experts,

00:38:24.700 cannot update its policy. It's shocking. And we will be the last in the world. You go to Europe,

00:38:29.900 it was refreshing to fly to Europe after so long to see a totally different approach in Portugal,

00:38:35.500 for example. I saw none of this. Even going to the US, they're really starting to relax about this.

00:38:41.420 Yeah. And you fly to the US, you wear a mask, but you switch planes to Chicago,

00:38:46.220 the mask comes off suddenly in the terminal and it's off on the next plane. Really logical. So we

00:38:52.060 want to be different from the US. We want to show more cautious. It makes us feel good. There must be

00:38:56.780 political points scored by this. There has to be a political science explanation. Honestly, at this

00:39:03.660 point, I don't see it. I feel like it's actually there's going to be a backlash. There is already a

00:39:08.700 backlash. I don't really know why they're doubling down on this. And a constant refrain that I hear

00:39:17.260 from people returning to Canada, including myself actually, but I felt that I was coming back to

00:39:23.180 a prison essentially when I flew to Europe back in the spring and I went to India and I returned to

00:39:28.860 Canada. And I just really felt like I was returning to a prison because everything here was still, we

00:39:34.620 still had the mandates in place at that time. Masking, you had to be masked indoors. The vaccine

00:39:41.180 mandates were still in place. It was pretty ridiculous. But just a final question for you, 0.87

00:39:47.100 Neil. Are you optimistic now that we're truly in the end game of this pandemic and we can breathe a

00:39:54.300 sigh of relief that life should return to some kind of normalcy? Will we ever get back to pre-COVID times?

00:40:06.300 No. I'm optimistic about the disease and of course we're going to see. I'm optimistic that the next

00:40:11.580 variant will make a lot more news than it will really make impact on the healthcare system. But it

00:40:16.300 seems to be an obsession lately, okay? However, I am not sure our society will change. I think this

00:40:24.140 has brought out some really dark aspects of our society. We're going to have to do a lot of soul

00:40:27.420 searching. I think it's going to take many years for the mass to go away. I really, I'm not so sure

00:40:33.100 we have an exit strategy there. I also think it's going to become a political issue. It has been

00:40:39.260 very polarizing. I've never seen a disease become so political. One of the worst things I've seen,

00:40:46.060 so far in terms of our policy. When I was in Portugal coming home, I saw a somewhat impoverished

00:40:52.380 black man from Angola, being Portuguese speaking, he flew through Lisbon. He was trying to come to

00:40:56.460 Canada for work and he couldn't get on the plane because he couldn't show proof of vaccine status.

00:41:01.100 And he probably was coming here to work. So that's what our policies did. We kept poor people away from 1.00

00:41:07.900 making a living. There's no CERB in Angola. And I saw it with my own eyes. He was livid. He'd spent a lot of

00:41:15.100 his money to come to Lisbon to fly to Canada and he couldn't. And we allowed that to happen. We

00:41:20.540 didn't even look at testing or a strategy to bring someone like that here if they needed to. We lost

00:41:26.220 our heart as a country. Yeah. I mean, what a time to be alive. I mean, you know, as a doctor,

00:41:32.940 you're optimistic about the disease, but you're not optimistic about the policy makers or the people

00:41:37.340 who insist on being in this constant state of emergency. Well, on that note, Neil, I really

00:41:44.940 appreciate you being on the show. Sorry, on that dark note. Unfortunately, on that dark note,

00:41:52.380 thank you so much for being on the show and for sharing your insights with me and our viewers. And

00:41:58.540 I hope to have you back here soon. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Juno News - August 30, 2022

Everything wrong with mandates and lockdowns (ft. Dr. Neil Rau)

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