Juno News - Masks don’t do anything. Stop wearing them.

00:00:00.000 Anyone who promotes a return to cloth masking or masking for the sake of children would appear to

00:00:05.440 be out of touch with our knowledge base and therefore definitionally not an expert. I'm

00:00:09.840 Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning

00:00:24.520 into the program today. So that, what I just read off the top, was a quote from an excellent

00:00:28.900 article in the National Post earlier this week. As you know, the mask mandates are now gone in

00:00:35.640 Ontario. We no longer have to wear a mask and my guest today, Dr. Matt Strauss, wrote an article

00:00:41.300 in the National Post. It was a top trending article on that page. The headline said this,

00:00:45.740 I'm a doctor. Here's why I'm done with masking. And I was so interested in that piece. I feel

00:00:51.220 so strongly about this issue that I wanted to invite the author on, Dr. Matt Strauss, who I'm

00:00:56.660 very excited to have on the program. Dr. Matt Strauss is the acting medical officer of health

00:01:01.740 for Haldimand Norfolk. He is an ICU doctor at the Guelph General Hospital. Dr. Strauss is a former

00:01:07.640 professor of medicine at both Queen's University as well as McMaster and a former global journalism

00:01:13.260 fellow at the University of Toronto. Dr. Strauss has been a vocal critic of Canada's pandemic response.

00:01:19.240 In fact, he was one of the first public health officials in Canada to call for an end to vaccine

00:01:24.400 mandate. So we're really excited to have you on the program. Thank you so much, Dr. Strauss,

00:01:27.680 for joining us. Thank you for having me. Well, let's talk first about this op-ed that you had

00:01:32.420 published in the National Post explaining why you would not be wearing a mask. So first of all,

00:01:37.180 why don't you tell us about the study and the latest material that would lead you to that decision?

00:01:43.280 Sure thing. So what I talk about in the piece is that there are observational trials and

00:01:47.940 experimental trials. And in general, kind of first year of medical school training, any and really

00:01:55.780 philosophy of science training, experiments tend to be taken more seriously than observation or

00:02:00.340 observational trials. So there have been lots and lots of observational trials of masks, and many of

00:02:04.880 them have suggested that masks are helpful at preventing transmission. There's been only one

00:02:08.960 randomized control trial that is medical experiment on the on the question of whether masks prevent

00:02:14.660 transmission on a community level. And that was a paper done by Abeluk and colleagues. Abeluk,

00:02:20.360 I believe, is based at Yale. Many of his colleagues who did the did the study with him were at Stanford.

00:02:27.600 And it was done in Bangladesh. It was a monumental task to do something like this, because

00:02:32.580 there was an experiment of does my mask protect me? Can I can I wear a mask? And does that prevent me

00:02:39.140 from getting COVID? And the answer was doesn't seem so they weren't able to show it that was done in

00:02:44.200 Denmark, that was called the Dan mask trial. And that they only looked at about 3000 4000 people on

00:02:51.800 that order. To answer the question of does having the whole community mask prevent people prevent the

00:02:58.920 whole community from having more COVID, you had to enroll many, many more people. So they had 350,000

00:03:05.800 people in that trial, and they randomized them village by village. So half the not quite but about half of the

00:03:12.840 villages got this intensive mask promotion, and the other half they left alone. And what they found,

00:03:20.440 after studying these 350,000 people was no effect whatsoever from cloth masks.

00:03:28.280 There was a small effect from surgical masks. So the the blue ones that we that we've worn in

00:03:33.160 hospital for years and years, about an 11% decrease in transmission. So what I when I say in the pieces,

00:03:39.160 oh, and I should say the 11% decrease in transmission was only seen in individuals over 50. And they

00:03:44.840 couldn't see an effect in individuals under 50. What I say in the pieces, this shouldn't really come

00:03:50.840 as a surprise to us because we've studied masking for other infections such as influenza. There have been

00:03:57.640 many, many experiments. And the the medical consensus prior to COVID-19 was that it wasn't very helpful to do

00:04:04.840 this. And so we'll all remember Anthony Fauci telling us not to wear a mask. Because of, I think,

00:04:12.520 some amount of panic, some amount of herd mentality. The mass mandates came down, there was nothing else

00:04:18.760 to do, we didn't have effective vaccines, we're going to throw everything but the kitchen sink at

00:04:22.120 the problem. Now we do have vaccines. Now we do have this better type of study and experimental study

00:04:29.880 that says that cloth masks didn't really do very much and, and no sorts of masks really do very much for

00:04:34.360 people under 50. So I think now the dust is settling and we have to respond to the best evidence that 0.97

00:04:40.360 we have, which is that cloth masking is basically a security blanket for your face. And, and no sort of

00:04:49.400 masking is really protective for young people. So I, what inspired me to write the piece was I've seen a

00:04:54.920 lot of people saying we know masks work and we have to protect children. And I was like, that's not,

00:04:59.240 that's not what the best evidence shows. So that's, that's really the thesis of the piece.

00:05:04.920 And how long have we known this? Because it seems like that the end of masks sort of happened in

00:05:10.040 stages that for some places like, you know, in southern United States or red states, they got rid

00:05:14.680 of them really soon. And then you kind of had people that were maybe more liberal or progressive

00:05:18.520 holding on to it. Like when was it known by the medical community, by professionals, that these masks

00:05:24.760 just don't really do anything?

00:05:28.760 Known is a funny word because I'll, I'll, I'll say that frankly, many of my colleagues don't agree

00:05:34.040 with me on this point who are practicing in public health. They want to maintain mask mandates

00:05:40.280 because of all of the observational trials that exist. And, and partly my piece was saying, yeah,

00:05:46.040 but that's not, you know, we, we usually have a, a hierarchy of evidence and we usually put experimental

00:05:52.600 data at the top of that. I think that it's difficult. And I've seen this throughout my career.

00:05:58.440 It's difficult for folks to climb down from a tree. Once they've climbed up, once you've taken a position,

00:06:04.120 it's hard to reverse it. And so I'm not going to say that it's a hundred percent known. Everyone agrees.

00:06:12.520 I'm going to say, this is the best evidence we have. We should follow the best evidence.

00:06:16.040 That we have. But this trial that I'm talking about, the Abaluck paper that was performed in

00:06:21.240 Bangladesh. The trial was performed over the winter of 2020. I believe the results were first released

00:06:28.760 in the spring of 2020. I would have to fact check that part, but as a preprint, and they were only

00:06:34.360 published. Sorry. They were released in the spring of 2021 and only published in the fall of 2021. So

00:06:44.360 it's been about almost six months that this has been public information. But it does take longer

00:06:52.040 than that for knowledge to translate into action. Interesting. Well, you sort of alluded to the

00:06:58.120 reason, but I'm going to ask the question anyway, early on in the pandemic, you mentioned that Fauci

00:07:03.000 down in the States said that not to wear a mask, but in Canada as well, chief medical officer, the federal

00:07:09.960 one, Dr. Theresa Tam, she came out and said that she wasn't really sure about masks. Some of the

00:07:15.400 recommendations, because if you recall, she was one of the lead investigators that looked at Canada's

00:07:20.440 SARS reaction from the SARS virus. And I remember reading some of the recommendations that she had

00:07:25.800 put in place, including the fact that taking people's temperatures didn't really help because

00:07:30.040 a lot of times people were asymptomatic or they didn't have a temperature, but they did have the virus.

00:07:35.000 Why is it then that so many of these recommendations that didn't really seem to be backed up

00:07:41.800 by science or even backed up by the people who were out there, the ones we delegated these decisions to

00:07:47.720 the chief medical officers, why did we put in place these measures if we knew that they weren't really

00:07:53.400 doing what we needed to in order to protect us? So there's a, there's a few things. And I look,

00:08:01.400 I'm not a social scientist. And I think anyone who is a social scientist is not going to be able to tell

00:08:06.280 for 10, 15 years, they're going to go through everyone's old tweets and try and try to figure out

00:08:10.280 what what on earth was happening. And when they do that kind of archaeology of what happened, I think a

00:08:16.520 really important tweet in Canada was in mid-March, 2020, Patty Haydou, the health minister posted this

00:08:23.880 picture of herself at the major public health agency, natural public health agency in Ottawa.

00:08:32.520 And it was like a group photo where they were all kind of doing a group hug, not wearing masks saying,

00:08:36.920 don't worry, guys, we're going to we're going to protect us from COVID. And the Twitter comments were

00:08:41.000 were so critical of the public health experts at the national agency saying, why aren't you wearing

00:08:48.440 masks? Why aren't you socially distanced? So it's, it is true that there was a there was a big gap between

00:08:54.440 the public's expectation of someone doing something and established public health practice. And what the

00:09:02.040 experts were suggesting at that time. So I, it is my suspicion that panic herd mentality

00:09:10.600 political pressure did have something to do with why a lot of things were brought into place

00:09:17.000 without, I would say, a very strong evidence base. And I think that as the, you know, the fear of

00:09:23.240 widespread death is receding as the pandemic recedes. And I think we're going to be able to have

00:09:31.560 cooler, calmer conversations about what we did that actually made sense and what didn't make that much

00:09:35.720 sense. Well, I hope so. And I hope we do a full postmortem and figure out where the mistakes were

00:09:40.520 made. So hopefully we'll, we'll listen to our, uh, our future selves will listen to the people

00:09:45.080 now who are talking about it. But when you said it's sort of a security blanket for the face, I,

00:09:49.240 I can relate. I remember the first time I went grocery shopping, uh, during the pandemic, you know,

00:09:54.280 we'd done the two weeks to stay home and fortunately we had just stocked up. So I didn't need to go out.

00:09:58.280 But the first time I went out, you know, I was like wearing gloves and masks and I was keeping away

00:10:02.760 from, cause like you just, we had no idea what was going on. And it made me feel like, okay, I can go out,

00:10:08.280 but I'm going to come home and I'm going to wash all my clothes and I'm going to like spray disinfectant

00:10:13.000 into overall the grocery bags before I, um, you wash them and put them in the fridge to give to

00:10:17.400 the family. But Dr. Charles, it seems that over time we became more knowledgeable about this virus.

00:10:24.520 We became, had better tools, including vaccinations. So once we had a point where most of the population

00:10:32.440 did what they were told to do, which is go out and get vaccinated.

00:10:35.640 Why is it, do you think that we held onto some of these rules, uh, for so long? Why didn't we,

00:10:40.360 I mean, if this study that you're referring to was, was performed in 2020 and, and it was sort of

00:10:45.880 published and broadly known, uh, you know, this is the sort of gold standard when it comes to,

00:10:50.600 uh, studies of randomized control trial. Uh, why is it that, that it wasn't listened to and that we

00:10:56.200 continued to push things like masking in, in some jurisdictions, we still have masking in some

00:11:00.760 places. Like I know when you go to an airport, when you go to a hospital, you're still made to wear

00:11:04.440 a mask, even if it's a, even if it's a cloth mask. So what, what, why is it that, that, that we haven't

00:11:09.240 evolved our thinking as we've learned more about this virus?

00:11:14.200 Um, I think, so it's a few things. Um, and one is to, a bit more of an answer to the last question.

00:11:20.840 The, the impetus to put all these things in place were, well, we don't know so much about this virus.

00:11:26.280 And remember at the beginning of the pandemic, people were talking about a three to five percent

00:11:29.000 mortality rate, which it's probably something more like a 10th of that we now know. Um, so people

00:11:34.520 were really scared. And even if you thought cloth masks probably don't work, if you're talking about

00:11:39.720 one in 20 people dying who get this, could it hurt, could it hurt to put on a cloth mask, cloth mask?

00:11:45.000 I think the short term, no, it doesn't really hurt that much until you know more. Um, I think,

00:11:50.600 unfortunately, fear is a little bit self propagating habit is a little bit self

00:11:55.800 propagating. Um, and now we, now we know that this, this disease COVID, it kills, it kills and

00:12:03.880 it killed a lot of people. It's a serious disease, but it is 10 times less dangerous, uh, than what

00:12:10.360 we were initially were told. Um, so I think that the, the fear and the panic and frankly, social isolation,

00:12:18.200 um, have, uh, have really done a number on people and, and it's going to be, um, something like, uh, detox or, or, uh,

00:12:28.280 de-traumatizing to, uh, to, to let these things go finally.

00:12:33.480 Yeah, we're certainly seeing that even with, uh, vaccine passports, you know, a lot of people really

00:12:39.080 outraged when those went away. They're still in place in British Columbia for the most part to, uh, to my knowledge.

00:12:44.200 Uh, you were one of the first, uh, health officers to say, we, we need to move on. We need to be done

00:12:49.960 with this. So can we talk a little bit about, uh, the vaccine mandates and what, what your position

00:12:54.840 is on those?

00:12:55.480 Sure thing. So at the, when they initially came down, I was not supportive of them. Um,

00:13:03.240 when I was asked, uh, by a journalist in Haldeman Norfolk, what I thought about them, I said, I think the

00:13:07.400 same thing the premier said, which is, I don't like them. Um, but I do follow the law. Uh,

00:13:14.680 my concerns about them were, um, so even at that time, it seemed like they weren't providing the

00:13:20.600 vaccines, weren't providing sterilizing immunity. And it seemed much more the case that your vaccine

00:13:24.520 protected you more than your vaccine protected other people. And for the most part, if you were

00:13:30.440 reasonably healthy, I'm not saying perfectly healthy, I'm saying reasonably healthy and double

00:13:34.200 vaccinated, you probably aren't, weren't going to die of COVID-19. Um, so it seemed to me that

00:13:40.200 the onus ought to have been on you to protect yourself, um, and not to worry so much about

00:13:44.760 what everyone else is doing. Um, because at that time in September, when they came down in Ontario,

00:13:51.560 we were talking about 50, 60% chance it prevents you from getting infected and prevents you from being

00:13:56.840 able to pass it on to someone else. This is in contradistinction to, um, older vaccines like the

00:14:02.280 MMR vaccine, which provides like 97 to 99% immunity to measles and mumps rubella for life.

00:14:09.080 Um, so I, I didn't think it was appropriate to bring them down in the first place when the

00:14:14.600 Omicron wave hit, um, it became clear very quickly by, uh, by December, January, that the two dose vaccine

00:14:24.120 series was providing about 0% um, prevention from getting COVID. So many, many, many people probably in

00:14:31.400 your life, probably many people listening to this were double vaccinated, got Omicron, um, and

00:14:37.720 probably gave it onto someone else. So when you're talking about something being 0% effective, a two

00:14:42.360 dose vaccine mandate, why would we have a policy that was seriously divisive, seriously hurt a lot of

00:14:51.240 people. And one of the things I wrote about was the folks who are unvaccinated. They're not in my 0.99

00:14:56.920 experience. And I've looked after some, unfortunately, who were dying in the hospital. Um, they weren't

00:15:03.800 angry Trump voters that they, that they've been characterized as they were often folks with lower

00:15:09.800 education. Um, some were highly educated. I'm not saying everyone who's unvaccinated is uneducated,

00:15:14.600 but many of them had low health literacy. Many of them, um, had reasons not to trust government or

00:15:19.240 reasons not to trust doctors. Either they had been hurt by doctors or government before, um, or they came from

00:15:25.800 a group who had been hurt by, uh, government or doctors before, uh, namely, uh, minorities and

00:15:30.680 indigenous folks. So, um, I, I, I'm very, um, uh, grateful for a philosophy professor of mine,

00:15:41.000 Maya Goldenberg. She wrote a book on vaccine hesitancy. Um, and she's been, you know, on,

00:15:45.560 on the CBC explaining it, um, vaccine hesitancy is a crisis of trust. And if you want to build trust with

00:15:50.680 folks, threatening to toss them out of their job and not letting them go to a swimming pool is not a way to

00:15:55.240 build trust with them. Um, it's right. This is a really long answer, but so for all those reasons

00:16:00.120 and marginalized folks were already marginalized, it was 0% effective and it was, it was causing,

00:16:05.640 um, extreme social discord, um, the trucker convoy, that sort of thing. So it seemed to me

00:16:12.920 like the, the easy solution here is to get rid of it. It's 0% effective. And that's why I wrote that

00:16:18.040 piece for the McDonnell Warrior Institute. Well, there's so much there, uh, that, that we can unpack.

00:16:23.720 So I just, just curious, uh, then, so at this point in time, you know, uh, Omicron came,

00:16:29.480 everybody got it. Everyone in my household got it, including, you know, people who are fully

00:16:33.880 vaccinated, the adults, um, and to your point, uh, 0% effective. So at this point, uh, what do you say

00:16:42.040 to someone who is not vaccinated, who made that choice, who said, I'm just going to wait and see

00:16:46.040 what happens. Well, what has happened is that they've seen that people who are fully vaccinated,

00:16:51.080 uh, still got COVID. So, so, so what, what is the imperative or why, why do people keep telling

00:16:58.280 the unvaccinated to go get vaccinated? If they could see, you know, from experience that, that

00:17:02.200 getting vaccinated wouldn't actually stop you from getting Omicron.

00:17:05.160 Sure. So I was remiss in not mentioning this because I was being a bit long-winded, but so it,

00:17:08.520 it still is the case that two doses of vaccine are 95% effective at preventing you from being

00:17:13.720 hospitalized or dying of COVID if, and when you get it. So they don't prevent you from getting COVID,

00:17:18.680 which is, that's the public health interest. If I can stop you from getting COVID and passing

00:17:23.640 it on to someone else on a population level, that's important. When that goes down to zero,

00:17:28.760 it's not a public health issue. It's a personal health issue. Um, you cut down your chance of

00:17:33.320 dying of COVID by 95% if you get the vaccine. So probably you should get the vaccine, um, with,

00:17:41.800 with some, one of the things I did when I started my role at Holden Norfolk, I said,

00:17:46.120 if you're vaccine hesitant, um, talk to your doctor, but if you can't talk to your doctor,

00:17:50.600 talk to me, call my office. There's nothing I would rather do than talk to someone about the

00:17:54.600 benefits of, you know, the good news of vaccination. Um, it is by far and away the most, um, life-saving

00:18:00.920 thing modern medicine has done. I think in terms of humanity's work at, at stopping disease,

00:18:05.800 sanitation is first and vaccination is second. So I w I've had dozens and dozens of conversations

00:18:11.720 with folks who were vaccine hesitant. Most of them felt that there was something particular about

00:18:16.280 them. So many, many of them were not against vaccination entirely. Many of them were vaccinated,

00:18:21.400 but they felt that they had some particular issue that made them different. Um, either they

00:18:25.880 had heart disease in their family, or they had a bad reaction to some other vaccine. Um, and they

00:18:30.360 wanted some sort of personal counseling, um, on that point. So nine times out of the 10, if I personally

00:18:36.920 counsel somebody about it, I would say, so, you know, I do recommend that you get it. Um, and in very,

00:18:41.000 very few situations, but I say you shouldn't get it, but I do think people deserve that sort of,

00:18:46.200 um, personal consideration when it comes to injecting something into your body.

00:18:50.760 Okay. Interesting. No, I appreciate that because so many, uh, so many people who talk about

00:18:54.600 the vaccine, it very much is sort of like, everyone must get it. There's no discussion

00:18:58.920 and they don't take any account to so many of the things you mentioned about, you know, valid reasons

00:19:03.080 that someone might be hesitant about getting a vaccine and you're talking to them in a, in an open way,

00:19:08.680 as opposed to just scolding them and threatening them and using, uh, fear and coercion, which is

00:19:12.520 unfortunately, uh, what we've seen. I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you, Dr. Strauss,

00:19:18.200 a little bit about the sort of mental health and economic health, uh, issues that we have seen

00:19:23.560 as a result of, of public health. So, uh, you know, for, for yourself as a, as a public official

00:19:29.320 in medicine, uh, uh, medical, um, officer of health, uh, do you, do I, I, I'm just curious

00:19:35.080 because it seems like for the last two years, the entire focus has been on COVID and so many

00:19:39.800 other areas of health have been, um, neglected, um, in, in, in your opinion, in your professional

00:19:45.160 opinion, uh, what, what was that a mistake? How can we avoid that from happening in the future?

00:19:49.880 And how can we now shift the focus to make sure that, that people's wellbeing, um, their, their, uh,

00:19:55.800 mental health and, and, and just their ability to, to work, to go out, to communicate with people,

00:20:00.440 to live our lives like Canadians, to, to go back to having our country, being Canadians, 0.88

00:20:05.960 um, to make sure that that's a priority, um, and not, uh, you know, a mysterious next wave that could

00:20:11.000 come up and, and shoot us all back, um, into, into the same scenario that we've seen for the last two

00:20:15.240 years. Um, that's a terrific question. If I could just add one more thing to the discussion of

00:20:19.720 vaccines and it's not to toot my horn, but, um, when I, when I talk about taking a personalized

00:20:24.600 approach to folks and accepting and acknowledging their concerns, um, I believe that not only is

00:20:32.040 that sort of ethically correct is practically correct. I believe you get more folks vaccinated

00:20:36.920 that way. And the, the proof is a little bit in the pudding. When I came to Haldeman Norfolk

00:20:40.760 in September, uh, we were fifth from the bottom, uh, in terms of public health unit vaccination rates,

00:20:45.320 uh, three months later, we were 15th from the bottom, uh, which I'm very proud of. Then the new census

00:20:51.080 data was applied and it turns out that actually we're, we were at the bottom the whole time,

00:20:55.080 but, but much less at the bottom, but, uh, for a shining moment there, um, the, the difference

00:20:59.400 that we, that this approach was making, I think was palpable. I'm very proud of that. Um, regarding

00:21:03.960 your, your question about mental health and all the other sorts of health. Yeah. I think everyone can

00:21:07.720 tell. I mean, I could tell after the first lockdown, um, I was living in Kingston and to walk down the

00:21:13.080 street, a lot of people visibly were not doing well. Um, it, it's actually, it's difficult to

00:21:20.520 take a proper census of how many folks are under housed and living and sleeping rough. Um, but it,

00:21:26.360 it wasn't difficult to see that clearly the rate had gone up a lot and, and our, um, pandemic policies

00:21:33.000 had left the most vulnerable people visibly behind. I'll also say that as an ICU doctor, um, the people

00:21:39.160 who I was seeing, um, were by and large essential workers. Um, so if you are a copywriter for an ad

00:21:48.760 agency, you were in your condo downtown working on your Mac book, totally safe, um, getting your Uber

00:21:53.880 eats. Um, if you were the Uber eats driver, you weren't totally safe. If you're the Amazon warehouse

00:21:58.280 worker, you weren't totally safe. Um, those folks were often, um, lower income, uh, often from immigrant 1.00

00:22:04.120 communities. Um, and they bore the brunt of, uh, COVID-19 in each of those waves because the,

00:22:12.360 the lockdowns were not protecting them in the slightest. They were, if you were a bus driver,

00:22:15.480 you still have to go to work. Um, so even the, the physical effects of, um, the COVID-19 pandemic

00:22:25.480 policies that we pursued didn't seem to stop the outcomes. It seemed to displace the outcomes onto,

00:22:30.600 onto, um, less fortunate folks. Um, but that said, so even if you were a more fortunate person,

00:22:37.400 uh, who got to, uh, have Uber eats delivered to you and still got a full paycheck or availed yourself

00:22:43.080 of CERB, um, I, social isolation is not good for anybody. And then as I do general medicine on the

00:22:50.120 ward and the hospital as well, and I was seeing the outcomes of that. I was seeing more folks with

00:22:53.960 overdose. I was seeing more folks with self-harm otherwise, um, more, um, of the ravages of

00:23:00.520 alcoholism. Um, one thing that really affected me a lot that I wrote about early on was, um, I had in

00:23:07.960 one week, I admitted two elderly women and one from a retirement home, one from a nursing home

00:23:12.360 with starvation, because, um, as you may recall, families were banned, uh, from visiting their elders

00:23:19.560 in care. Um, those homes were often understaffed and it turned out that these women who had varying

00:23:27.960 degrees of dementia would forget to eat, um, and their families were the ones feeding them. So they,

00:23:33.320 they came into hospital with biochemical evidence of starvation. Um, and this was occurring in Canada

00:23:38.840 in 2020. And, uh, I'm not going to get over that anytime soon. So I think, I hope that there's,

00:23:46.440 you know, a Royal commission or something like that, and we can talk about all of these other

00:23:51.000 health outcomes, um, and, and who, who didn't benefit, what were the benefits of lockdown and,

00:23:58.360 and what were the harms? Um, we now know that opioid overdoses in young men in Ontario doubled over

00:24:04.040 this period of time. It was already an epidemic. Um, and I, I hope that there's, there's just some

00:24:09.880 acknowledgement that health is not a single disease. Um, health is, uh, health is a social

00:24:17.960 phenomenon. If you can't go to your dad's funeral, if you can't have your wedding, if your kids don't

00:24:22.360 get to play on the playground, you, you're not healthy. Um, the world health organization has this,

00:24:27.960 this well-known, um, definition of health, that it's not merely the absence of disease. It's, it's,

00:24:33.480 it's psychological and physical and spiritual, and it has to do with education and it has to do with

00:24:38.440 the health of your society and meaningful opportunities that like health is being able

00:24:43.560 to do the things that you want to do in the time that you have. Health is not living forever

00:24:47.000 because none of us are going to do that. Um, so in some ways I thought these were things we had

00:24:55.240 already learned, um, but we're going to have to relearn them. Another really important analogy is the HIV

00:25:00.840 epidemic. Um, it turned out that stigma wasn't helpful. Um, there was a lot of stigma around who might

00:25:07.080 get HIV and, and how, how are we to protect ourselves from such people. And it turned out 0.88

00:25:11.720 that was a positively backwards approach. And it was only once we started going to the areas where

00:25:16.760 folks who were at high risk, uh, for HIV and telling them that we cared about them and this is

00:25:21.080 how they could protect themselves, um, that we really put a stop to the epidemic in North America.

00:25:27.160 People often forget, um, there was a travel ban on HIV positive individuals going to the United States

00:25:32.440 until 2008. Um, it like it's mystifying and it, and so some of the, some of the, I would say backwards

00:25:40.440 things that were done about HIV took, uh, 15, 20 years to undo. Um, I hope that we're faster this

00:25:48.040 time in this sort of acknowledgement that, that health is a, is more than the absence of disease.

00:25:53.400 Right. I mean, there's, there's so much wisdom, um, in, in what you just said and, and so many of the

00:25:59.400 things that we thought we had learned and clearly we didn't because, uh, you know, the, some of the

00:26:04.280 points that you make, uh, you know, we know that more people under the age of, uh, 65 in Canada died

00:26:09.640 of diseases of despair, um, than COVID. Um, I just read a report earlier this week about how alcohol

00:26:15.480 related deaths, uh, were higher for individuals under the 65 in the United States, um, than all of

00:26:20.440 COVID. So, so all of these sort of second and third order impact, been killing people at a higher

00:26:25.880 rate, um, in some age groups than, than COVID itself. I just have one final question for you,

00:26:30.920 Dr. Strauss. I was researching you a little bit, uh, for this interview. And I noticed that there's

00:26:35.800 a lot of controversy around you. Uh, there was a CBC piece, uh, about how some people were trying to

00:26:41.240 remove you from office. And some of your tweets have, uh, gone under, uh, scrutiny and fire talking

00:26:47.320 to you and you're such a reasonable person and, and, and, you know, so thoughtful. I wonder why,

00:26:53.080 why is it that people are, are so, uh, triggered for lack of a better word by some of the things

00:26:58.120 you, you put out there and, you know, what, why, why is it, do you think that, that the CBC,

00:27:02.680 um, you know, treats you like, uh, you know, at least in the one piece I read, like, like you're

00:27:06.760 some kind of a, a threat or a prior or something like that. What, what, why do you think people react

00:27:10.280 that way to you? I hope that we have a large conversation about this too, um, in, in the months

00:27:17.560 and years to come. I think that in general, our society is not doing a great job at disagreeing

00:27:23.560 with each other anymore. I see that at every level. I see that on Twitter a lot, um, but,

00:27:29.000 but elsewhere. And I, I know that some of my colleagues in public health who maybe take

00:27:33.640 opposite views of mine in terms of, you know, perhaps, perhaps they thought we should have

00:27:36.440 been more restrictionist and they get harassed a lot. And some of them had angry people showing

00:27:42.760 up at their homes and felt that their security was threatened. Um, so I, I do think there is

00:27:47.960 in general, a decline in civility and our ability as adults to have reasonable discussions about

00:27:54.440 things. So I think that, I think that, you know, frankly, some of those CBC articles are, are part of

00:27:59.640 that. Um, I, I have felt at times that, um, like legislative media institutions were deliberately taking

00:28:05.880 what I had to say out of context, which probably that, and that is part of a larger phenomenon about,

00:28:10.920 uh, click bait and, uh, controversy, um, selling and getting more clicks. Um, I, I know,

00:28:24.360 I, I know that everything I tweeted about this pandemic, um, I stand by, it was all true. I, I,

00:28:31.400 I made some attempts to put risk into perspective, you know, as we talked about in the initial reports

00:28:37.480 where the, this was going to kill three to 5% of people who got it. And it turned out that wasn't

00:28:41.720 the case. It also turned out that the, the effects were highly age stratified. So people over 80 were

00:28:46.360 on the order of five to 10,000 times more likely to die of COVID than somebody who's eight. Um, and

00:28:53.560 I, I don't know why hearing that made some people so upset because to me, that's just the facts.

00:29:00.440 Um, and the facts ought to inform our approach. I, a classmate of mine actually emailed me very

00:29:06.760 early into my public commentary on the pandemic to say like, how can you write this? Um, people

00:29:11.640 aren't going to trust us if they're not scared. And I was like, no, I think that's the opposite. I

00:29:14.920 think that if we scare people into compliance, that's not going to, they'll comply, but they won't

00:29:20.680 trust us. Um, so I think some of it has been a strategic mishap misstep from some folks, um, who

00:29:27.880 believe they have the public health at heart, but I think the, the essence of improving the public

00:29:33.400 health is to build trust and to have trust. You need honesty and accountability. And for that,

00:29:37.800 you need to kind of boldly tell people some facts that maybe they didn't want to hear. So I think

00:29:42.360 that's, um, what engendered the quote unquote controversies that the, that the CBC has written

00:29:47.720 about. Oh, well, I mean that just that, that comment, and I don't mean to pick on your friend who

00:29:51.880 emailed you, but the idea that you have to scare people in order to get them to comply is, is just so

00:29:56.280 wrong in a, in a Western liberal democracy in my opinion. And I, I think you're right. I think

00:30:01.400 COVID made us all go a little crazy. Everyone's wound up so tight. I see it in social media. I

00:30:05.000 saw it in the way that, uh, people characterize the truckers. I saw it with some of the truckers

00:30:08.840 themselves, just, you know, people are very angry and, and they don't really have an outlet for that.

00:30:13.640 Sometimes you see it. Uh, you know, I saw it, uh, one day when I was shopping at Hudson's Bay,

00:30:18.200 I saw a woman just losing her mind, yelling at a store clerk. Um, you know, that kind of thing was, 1.00

00:30:23.560 would have been really rare and not really happening in a Canadian suburb, but it seems

00:30:28.280 that it does happen more and more. And I think that we certainly have to have a more well-rounded

00:30:34.120 approach as you mentioned when it comes to public health. Well, Dr. Strauss, I really enjoyed our

00:30:38.200 conversation. I hope we can have you, uh, back on the program again soon. So thank you so much for

00:30:42.120 joining us. I'd love to do that. Thanks for having me. All right. That's Dr. Matt Strauss.

00:30:46.680 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

Juno News - March 24, 2022

Masks don’t do anything. Stop wearing them.

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