Juno News - February 20, 2021Public health officials need to be transparent and accountable
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Summary
Health officials are starting to conduct themselves more like politicians than like public servants or straightforward doctors, and that's a big problem. I think the public and media need to start treating them like the politicians they are behaving like by asking them some critical questions and not necessarily taking everything they said at face value.
Transcript
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Canadian public health officials are starting to conduct themselves more like politicians than like
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public servants or straightforward doctors. And that's a big problem. And I think the public and
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media need to start treating them like the politicians that they're behaving like by
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asking them some more critical questions and not necessarily taking everything they say at face
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value. I think more pushback is required now. Back about a year ago when the pandemic first started,
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take those press conferences with Dr. Theresa Tam. People listened with great interest. They
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trusted what she said with face value. She commanded a lot of respect in the Canadian public.
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Things have really kind of changed lately though. I mean, we've learned a lot about coronavirus.
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There's vaccines that have been developed. Our Canadian doctors and doctors all around the world
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have learned the therapeutics to treat the virus. We've got data and statistics about
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just how bad this is in terms of fatality rates. Who's actually being hard hit by the virus? Who's
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the high risk category? Who's in the low risk category? A lot of information that we should
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be able to use to evolve our response, to have a better, smarter approach. And yet on Friday,
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Dr. Tam released modeling that caused a lot of people to raise their eyebrows. Right now,
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Canada is at about 2,000 cases per day. Good news. It's going down. But her modeling says because of
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new variants, we are going to skyrocket. You should see this chart. It actually shows the line just
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shooting up within the next couple of weeks to over 20,000 cases per day or beyond. I don't know how
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high it goes because the line just goes off of the chart, out of the page. Some media were asking,
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where did you get these numbers from? They were asking some technical questions. To their credit,
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Dr. Tam couldn't answer or wouldn't answer, didn't provide that information. Later on,
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during the day on Friday afternoon, Michelle Rempel, she's the conservative health critic,
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she was asking similar questions to Public Health Agency of Canada officials. What's going on with
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this modeling? What are the inputs? Why are you actually concluding things are going to be so
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outrageous? And they couldn't really answer the question. They said, we'll have to get back to you
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next week. We don't know. Hmm. They're the experts. They don't know. And Michelle Rempel and
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others were asking, why is it that there's modeling in other countries that are showing
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that declines continue for these very weeks that you show rapid increases? And they just
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couldn't answer the question. And why this really matters is Dr. Tam and Justin Trudeau on Friday
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were saying, well, look, you know, cases are going to go out of control, which is why we need to keep
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the lockdowns in place and we need enhanced measures. Now, some jurisdictions in Canada, they don't
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have a lot of measures right now, but people in say Toronto and Peel region are going, I don't know
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how it can be more enhanced than it already is. So a lot of people were rather frustrated to hear
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that. And they're seeing cases decline all over the world and in their own backyard. And they're
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going, shouldn't this be the time for reopening? Well, you know what? Maybe if public health officials,
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they have a really good answer as to why not, and they have a really good explanation about what's
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going on in these numbers, then, well, tell us and maybe we can talk it out. But, well, they didn't
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give the answers. They dragged their feet. They were evasive. They said, we'll get back
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to you next week. Sounds kind of like something a politician would do. And I don't think people
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should accept those sorts of answers anymore. And, well, I don't think they are. I think people