Juno News - April 04, 2020


Here's the problem when Trudeau refers to the ＂experts＂

Topics
travel restrictions and face masks debates
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Theresa Tam COVID-19 Leger
Calgary in Crisis – The Tragic Story of Alberta's Drastic Decline Social distance or pay up!

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

183.17

Word count

555

Sentence count

32

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Dr. Teresa Tam, the new infectious disease chief at the Canadian Public Health Agency, talks about the new coronavirus, C.O.V.19, and the challenges faced by public health officials and infectious disease experts.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The other day I found myself reading Dr. Teresa Tam's biography, her profile, on the Canada Public Health Agency's website,
00:00:12.660 talking about the various titles that she's held, the position she's held, and the publications and research papers that she's written for over the years.
00:00:20.340 Pretty impressive list. Hats off to her, and no wonder she got the job. 1.00
00:00:24.620 You know what I didn't see in that publication list, though I didn't see that she had authored any sort of report or study or thesis on coronavirus, on COVID-19, for obvious reasons.
00:00:35.120 Because this thing is brand new. We only realized it was around in December, in early January, when people started talking about it.
00:00:41.360 So we can't blame anybody in the infectious disease community for not being an expert in this particular illness.
00:00:48.040 Here's the thing, though. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and many other officials out there are doing a lot of appeals on science, evidence, and the experts,
00:00:57.220 as they justify the various measures they're bringing into our lives to beat this thing down.
00:01:01.740 Now, public opinion polls show that Canadians are largely in support of them.
00:01:04.960 Leger showed that over 90% of respondents said they back these social distancing measures.
00:01:10.660 Because we see there's a lot at stake, and we certainly want to do things to protect the most vulnerable.
00:01:14.500 I get all of that. But there's a little problem with these appeals to evidence and experts at this very moment right now.
00:01:21.440 When, and here's the thing that Canadian public officials are not acknowledging, experts are seriously divided over this.
00:01:28.780 All across the world, within countries, even within different medical associations, there's disagreement as to the basic nuts and bolts of COVID-19.
00:01:36.900 Just how deadly is this thing? Just how is it spread?
00:01:39.620 We know more now than we did, say, back in the beginning of January, back on January 25th, when the first case in Canada was reported.
00:01:47.220 But there are still many questions that remain unanswered.
00:01:51.180 And part of the challenge is that there's a great certainty that comes from Trudeau, from TAM, from others,
00:01:56.000 who one day suddenly say,
00:01:57.700 Travel restrictions do not work. The evidence tells us otherwise.
00:02:01.200 Face masks do not work.
00:02:03.240 The evidence, the science, says the opposite.
00:02:05.660 No, they don't. Or at least some very temporary science that is only ironclad truth for about 15 minutes until new stuff comes along and we change gears.
00:02:16.320 So, I think that if there's one thing we could see differently right now, we don't want to be browbeating people about,
00:02:22.080 You must follow the science when the science is very quickly ever-evolving.
00:02:27.340 And there's a debate between virologists, between epidemiologists, between infectious disease experts about the very basics of this.
00:02:35.360 Things are going to be changing day by day, week by week.
00:02:38.420 That's okay, because that is the nature of the thing.
00:02:41.560 But I think Canadians should also be allowed to be a part of this conversation
00:02:45.200 as they look around and assess what all these different experts are seeing around the world.
00:02:49.660 And is it okay for us to challenge our own public health officials based on our readings of everything going on around the world?
00:02:56.760 You bet it is.
00:02:58.020 It's all a part of the conversation that we're all going through together right now.