Juno News - November 28, 2020


The coronavirus shouldn't be a partisan issue

Topics
coronavirus deaths
Mentioned
Donald Trump Rachel Harder Patty Hadju
Standing up for the right to own a business Enforcing nonsensical coronavirus rules

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

200.0

Word count

694

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about why coronavirus and partisanship should not really be in the same sentence. And yet we re seeing a lot of examples of this happening, and I worry that we're seeing more examples in ways that are getting pretty damaging.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Coronavirus and partisanship. Those two words should not really be in the same sentence,
00:00:10.600 should they? And yet we're seeing a lot of examples of this happening, and I worry that
00:00:15.500 we're seeing more examples in ways that are getting pretty damaging. One of the first sort
00:00:20.360 of clear-cut examples of all of this happened months ago when President Donald Trump was saying
00:00:25.400 hydroxychloroquine, it's a great drug, it's going to do all these great things, it'll be a miracle
00:00:29.660 drug. Well, we've been used to four years of Donald Trump asserting X, and then a whole bunch of people
00:00:34.560 step forward and say Y. They say, no, that can't be true, and here's why, and you know, it's a
00:00:39.400 partisan issue. Donald Trump says this on climate change, or borders, or national security, and then
00:00:43.660 you have all these experts on CNN step forward and say, no, it's totally wrong, and so forth. And
00:00:47.620 they got themselves into the position where if Donald Trump says something, they must automatically
00:00:51.960 cobble together people to reject it. So we saw with hydroxychloroquine, Trump says, okay, this is a great
00:00:57.060 drug, and then the automatic assumption, well, it must be wrong, because Trump said it. It's kind
00:01:01.720 of dismaying, isn't it? I mean, maybe he's wrong, and I know you can Google around, and there's all
00:01:05.460 the latest research on that hydroxychloroquine, but you know, this should not be a partisan issue
00:01:10.100 at all. So what? If Donald Trump says it is, or it isn't a good drug, maybe it is, maybe it isn't,
00:01:14.760 it has no bearing on anything the American president says. Just answer the question, and don't devise
00:01:20.600 your opinions on what Donald Trump has to say about that darn drug. Maybe you're a Republican, 0.99
00:01:25.760 maybe you're a Democrat, you like the guy, you hate the guy, but come on, you got to filter out
00:01:30.820 really important questions like our health care in a non-partisan way. Now I worry we're just seeing
00:01:37.520 more and more examples of that, and not just over in the United States, but here in Canada. One thing
00:01:43.100 I've been dismayed about is how there is a lot of progress being made on the coronavirus file, and
00:01:48.500 there is a lot of good news out there. Things about how therapeutics are improving, treatments are
00:01:54.180 improving, hospitalizations are less likely to lead to deaths, and they have positive outcomes sooner
00:02:00.880 in terms of getting people out of the hospital, shortening their stays, and so forth. Things that
00:02:04.520 people aren't discussing. You may know that I've written a number of articles on comorbidities
00:02:09.840 revealing that 75 percent of the people in Alberta who died of coronavirus died with three or more
00:02:16.060 underlying health conditions, and the number of people who had no underlying health conditions were
00:02:20.240 2.5 percent. Those are facts released by the Alberta Health Services. I've written about this
00:02:25.300 a few times. Well, a lot of people are for some reason unhappy with that. Health Minister Patty Hadjew
00:02:30.380 even implied that this was fake news and dangerous. That was fake news and dangerous. That's what she said
00:02:37.020 about my writing in the House of Commons, and the reason she said it is because this Conservative MP,
00:02:41.860 Rachel Harder, she shared it on Facebook and so forth, and people politicized the whole thing,
00:02:45.940 and I'm going, hold on a second. You know, who cares? And I get the point that someone out there,
00:02:52.960 the Liberal government, wants to make a Conservative MP look bad. I mean, that's been going on since time
00:02:57.760 immemorial, but we're just talking about facts here, facts that are put out by the government, and you
00:03:04.780 should not be getting into these sort of bizarre partisan scraps over data about coronavirus deaths or
00:03:11.220 about a drug. Does it work? Does it not? It's really a question about science, and yet right now,
00:03:17.140 there are so few people who want to actually discuss it that way. At the beginning of this,
00:03:21.300 they said, trust the experts, trust the science, and a lot of people just aren't saying that anymore,
00:03:26.880 and I think that's kind of worrisome.