Juno News - January 31, 2025


Scathing report slams Alberta’s Covid response

Topics
Alberta COVID-BS report
Mentioned
Gary Davidson Danielle Smith Trump Jay Bhattacharya Andrew Lawton Jason Kenney Joe Rogan Malcolm Pfizer Biriam
Danielle Smith calls for a Canadian BORDER CZAR Alberta COVID report draws ire of “experts” and media

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

188.07

Word count

1,473

Sentence count

113

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Candice talks with Dr. Gary Davidson about the Alberta government's new report on childhood vaccine use in the wake of the deadly flu pandemic, COVID. Dr. Davidson is a pediatric infectious disease physician who has spent the last four years investigating the impact of childhood vaccines on children and young adults. She is also the co-host of the popular podcast, The Other Side of Health.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 I want to talk first just this whole thing.
00:00:02.740 You know, you said that you kind of ended up reluctantly having to talk about politics.
00:00:06.060 You started wanting to talk about competitive hockey and sports.
00:00:09.000 And then you kind of pulled into the political world.
00:00:11.640 I mean, you interviewed some of the real lightning rods that were raising the alarm bell with concerns about our entire approach to COVID.
00:00:19.860 And then last Friday, we saw the Alberta government release its COVID report.
00:00:24.120 So this is kind of one of those rare instances where the government that was in power, Premier Jason Kenney, got ousted, replaced by Danielle Smith.
00:00:32.540 And she said, OK, let's let's open up the books and let's figure out what happened.
00:00:36.200 True outsider, because I don't think like in any other province, liberal or conservative, they would allow this sort of like forensic accounting.
00:00:42.980 Like, let's look back and really discuss what went wrong and what happened.
00:00:46.900 So to me, there's value in this report for all Canadians and for everyone in the world, because so many governments went down the same disastrous path of like lock it all down, shut down the schools.
00:00:58.880 I mean, you're a parent of young kids.
00:01:00.440 So am I.
00:01:01.360 I was just so totally outraged by the way that they treated us during COVID.
00:01:05.960 I mean, I was already pretty, you know, conservative and political.
00:01:10.680 This like really radicalized me.
00:01:12.160 I think radicalized a lot of people to just say, like, I don't trust you.
00:01:15.340 I don't want you in charge of anything to do with my life.
00:01:18.080 Like, maybe a lot more vocal about it anyway.
00:01:20.500 So I saw you commenting on this Alberta COVID report.
00:01:24.540 Really interesting things, things that you don't really hear from government urging, halting vaccines for youth and low risk individuals, talking really about lack of data behind a lot of these protocols that were brought in.
00:01:38.620 Why don't you sort of tell us about your thoughts on this report?
00:01:41.740 Well, one of the things I'm originally from a small town in Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan and Alberta are very similar.
00:01:48.500 But now I live in Alberta.
00:01:49.820 OK, so for your listeners, just so there's a background.
00:01:52.400 And one of the things I love about being Albertan now is they are an unruly bunch. 0.98
00:01:56.780 We are an unruly bunch, which means if you do stupid things, we are going to absolutely cat call you until we try and get things right. 0.98
00:02:06.460 And so I would I would sit here and say I just actually had Dr. 0.99
00:02:10.820 Gary Davidson on the podcast.
00:02:12.280 Right.
00:02:12.880 And it wasn't an applaud moment of like, wow, you did an amazing job.
00:02:16.600 Although Dr.
00:02:17.280 Gary Davidson, if you're listening to this, I think he did do an amazing job.
00:02:20.200 I was more irritated right off the hop, Candace.
00:02:22.800 OK, and I read this to Gary and I'll read it to you.
00:02:25.380 OK, chapter one of this report is governance and flow of information.
00:02:29.660 Sounds lovely.
00:02:30.880 And this is what I commented.
00:02:33.740 There's a few things written in here that were in the report and then some of my comments.
00:02:36.640 And I said, the flow of information is hardly a flow when the author points out there's a reluctance of key stakeholders to acknowledge and engage with our mandate and that there appears to be a fundamental lack of transparency and willingness to reveal information and discuss decisions and actions taken by AHS during the pandemic.
00:02:52.520 HLS, sorry, is Alberta Health Services.
00:02:55.140 So, right, a lot of what happened here, we've already had court cases tell us it was the politicians making decisions, that they didn't have the data and on and on and on.
00:03:04.320 I'm irritated with this report because the report is supposed to be all the data.
00:03:08.940 Where's all the data held?
00:03:10.520 AHS.
00:03:11.300 AHS wouldn't give it to them.
00:03:12.860 So, like, we got a report that isn't fully complete.
00:03:16.640 In my mind, you know, like, this report is amazing because it kind of gives credence to what a lot of people have been saying.
00:03:23.000 It legitimizes what people have been saying for the last four years, right?
00:03:27.500 Like, masks, they weren't effective.
00:03:29.260 The vaccines, there's studies after study.
00:03:32.140 They quote in here about Pfizer's own trials.
00:03:35.600 They talk about therapeutics.
00:03:36.960 They talk about all these different things that have become very taboo.
00:03:39.600 You know, the most popular ones, ivermectin, probably because of Joe Rogan and CNN.
00:03:44.660 And they just walk back through all this stuff.
00:03:47.460 It's in a government form now.
00:03:49.420 There's 200 and I think it's 59 pages.
00:03:51.420 Don't quote me on that.
00:03:52.120 I urge any Canadian to go give it a read, especially if you're like, I'm easy talking about vaccines.
00:03:58.440 And if you don't know what I'm talking about, this would be eye-opening.
00:04:01.580 For me, talking about it for four years, I want to, and I think a lot of Albertans want, a little more teeth in holding our government accountable.
00:04:09.180 And so, um, it getting released at three o'clock on a Friday in the middle of, uh, you know, problems with the border.
00:04:19.120 Trade war.
00:04:19.820 Yeah.
00:04:20.160 Right.
00:04:20.620 We go cycle.
00:04:22.080 We see what you're doing and I don't like it.
00:04:24.080 And so it's what I love about Albertans.
00:04:26.060 We're not happy with the report just coming out.
00:04:28.620 We want, we want to see things like Trump is doing.
00:04:31.840 We want to see these action items, um, be laid out.
00:04:34.900 And there are some really cool things, um, that Dr. Gary Davidson and the group that, that built it, uh, kind of say you, you should look into getting rid of this vaccine for, for kids and youth.
00:04:46.600 And a whole bunch of, uh, you know, um, items that the government of Alberta can chew on.
00:04:52.680 And I really hope they're contemplating them.
00:04:55.000 I really hope they're going to take, uh, uh, some of the information that's been built by Gary Davidson, Dr. Gary Davidson and his team and, and use them.
00:05:03.040 That's my hope.
00:05:03.940 Um, but sitting here in media, after everything we've said about every other part of government, I'm like, well, I think it was Andrew Lawton once upon a time and, uh, others, I should say.
00:05:14.020 That told me, you know, you got great politicians, you got bad politicians, create the, the atmosphere, create the, the, the conditions for bad politicians to do the right thing.
00:05:24.620 I don't think Daniel Smith's a bad politician by any stretch of the imagination, but I certainly do want to create the conditions that, uh, they have to move on some of these action items.
00:05:32.440 And we've seen how mainstream media has demonized it.
00:05:35.760 Like, I mean, have you seen the, the picture?
00:05:37.680 I think it's out of the Globe and Mail of, you know, her talking to these ugly looking doctors.
00:05:41.860 Meanwhile, all the associations are against her.
00:05:44.660 And it's like, really?
00:05:46.360 Like, look at the people who are writing this.
00:05:48.700 This is where we're still at in 2025.
00:05:51.300 And, um, so yeah, I, I mean, it's always good though, for myself to hear an outside perspective of like, wow, I wish our province would do this.
00:05:59.020 Um, but here in Alberta, we're an unruly bunch and we want more.
00:06:02.760 Well, I, I think first of all, Danielle Smith deserves to be applauded for even doing this report. 0.65
00:06:07.560 Um, I'll just read through a little bit about what the report said.
00:06:10.560 So it was commissioned by Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith in 2022, mandate to explore the province's response to COVID-19.
00:06:16.580 The task force included prominent medical professionals, as you were discussing, including Drs. Gary Davidson, who's on your show, uh, Jay Bhattacharya, who's a prominent Stanford doctor who just got appointed, um, to, to, uh, the Trump administration.
00:06:28.720 And Biriam, uh, bridal, the final report, um, recommended that the provincial government stopped providing vaccines for healthy children and teenagers report revealed evidence to suggest that it was not effective.
00:06:40.740 Um, the, uh, report also alleged that Alberta health services removed a dashboard after it showed higher hospitalization rates among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
00:06:51.100 Um, and it also said that there was a lack of reliable data providing that COVID-19 vaccines protect children from severe cases, a task force that published the research said COVID-19 vaccines were not designed to stop transmission.
00:07:04.660 I mean, that's all pretty remarkable.
00:07:05.860 And I'll just get to, cause you mentioned the media response.
00:07:08.460 I mean, fake news is going to do what fake news does.
00:07:10.600 We used to do a segment on the Candace Malcolm show called fake news Fridays.
00:07:13.840 Uh, you know, now there's just too much fake news.
00:07:15.900 We have to include it in every show.
00:07:17.060 We can't just save it for Fridays.
00:07:21.100 Okay.
00:07:22.180 Bye.
00:07:22.580 Bye.
00:07:30.980 Bye.
00:07:32.360 Bye.
00:07:34.560 Bye.
00:07:49.360 Bye.