Juno News - December 20, 2022


The CBC's problematic reporting during Covid


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

159.87607

Word count

344

Sentence count

20


Summary

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

In this episode, Dr. Kelly reviews the CBC's coverage of the pandemic and vaccine mandates in response to the 9/11 pandemic. She discusses groupthink at the CBC and calls for a return to critical thinking in public health coverage.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 So give me an example of what you thought was groupthink at the CBC, and then also can you tell us what you found specifically problematic about the CBC's coverage of the vaccine, of the pandemic in general, and the vaccine mandates?
00:00:15.740 I'll start with the vaccine mandates. I just felt that this is a sweeping change to society. It has a huge implication on people's livelihoods, on their ability to provide for their families, and I would have liked to see more questioning of that.
00:00:31.160 At the time that those vaccine mandates came in, there were some signals that critical thinking was required at that time. We were seeing breakthrough infections, for example. Vaccine mandates rest on the premise that vaccines prevent transmission, and if we're seeing a large amount of breakthrough cases in the ICU, breakthrough cases in hospitalizations, breakthrough cases in the statistics, that indicates that maybe vaccines don't stop transmission.
00:01:00.420 So I would have liked to have a more fulsome conversation about that. I would have liked to hear more conversation about the risk-reward analysis. We've seen that come out in the last, you know, six months. There was a paper Kevin Bardosh did about looking at the risk-reward analysis for the vaccine mandates in the universities, for example.
00:01:22.060 A lot of questions that could be asked, and I didn't see them being asked on a large scale, and I felt like our coverage often uncritically accepted the kind of party line of public health, that that was like a line in the sand.
00:01:41.740 These are experts. These are experts. We have to just go with what the experts say. But public health people are like other human beings.
00:01:49.620 They are perhaps afraid. They are perhaps overly cautious. They are perhaps dealing with political stuff behind the scenes. I mean, there's all kinds of things that can happen in big institutions, and particularly in a moment of crisis, like the one that we were in.
00:02:05.560 And I just felt that there should have been a lot more critical thinking.