Juno News - February 08, 2022The lockdown authoritarians continue to dig in their heels
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Summary
Lockdown has been around in Canada for the past two years, and it s time to take a hard look at the impact it s had on our society and the people who continue to defend lockdowns as a good or bad thing.
Transcript
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it's in some sense gobsmacking that there are still so many people out there who want to deny
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and just plug their ears to the fact that we have caused great harms to our society over the past
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two years. A new Johns Hopkins University study came out, a meta-analysis saying that lockdowns
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really had no benefit in terms of reducing mortality throughout COVID-19. Now I didn't
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really make much of a fuss about this study. I wasn't writing about it, tweeting about it because
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I saw the headline. I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course. You know, having read other studies the past year
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and talking to many experts on the ground, doing a lot of reports on how child and teen mental health
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is just absolutely massive and hearing personal stories, people emailing me, getting in touch with
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me to talk about all the sad things that have been happening in their lives the past two years. It's
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like, well, yeah, I mean, obviously we have a problem here where the benefits of lockdowns were
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vastly oversold and the negatives that came from them were ignored, dismissed, downplayed. And one
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thing I find particularly morally repugnant, laughed at. Yes, it's true. I would write a story
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about some harms that some individuals have suffered because of lockdowns the past two years and
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some smug individual online, many individuals online would just laugh and say some smart aleck
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remark about, well, you know, it's better that happened to them than they kill their grandparents
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and so forth. And you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you were saying it back then.
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One of the alarming things though, is that there's still a lot of people saying that sort of stuff
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now, that there are still people out there who are denying, downplaying, ignoring, and even laughing
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at the notion that lockdowns have been of limited, debatable, negligible benefit, but the harms are
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immense. Who knew? Who knew that basically shutting down all of society for two years could come with so
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many very visceral harms out there that I think have really traumatized people. Now, you know, it was
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one thing at the beginning, I think most people supported the first lockdown going, okay, what is
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this virus? I'm concerned. It's, it's super deadly out there. We got to shut everything down until we
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can figure out more about it. What's interesting is public health officials, World Health Organization,
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even Dr. Theresa Tam here in Canada in April, 2020, when we were under lockdown, she was talking as if
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lockdowns would not be used again. And just what we're going to do after this first lockdown, where we find
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our feet, there's actually a report out where she talks about that very interesting stuff. Then we
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got into this vicious cycle where supporting lockdowns became this ideological thing, it became
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this political thing, and people are still digging in their heels. But what's kind of interesting is
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public health officials actually aren't really digging in their heels much anymore about it. In fact,
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they're doing the exact opposite. Pretty much all of them are saying, we got to get away from this
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stuff. Dr. Theresa Tam just saying, we have to really very soon review all of this with a view to
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getting rid of it, including the vaccine mandates, the vaccine passports. I mean, she's clearly giving
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the politicians, giving people like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an out to say, we got national
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turmoil right now, we got quite a debate where people are protesting, you've got the convoy entrenched
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in Ottawa, you've got similar situations in other cities. And I got to say, whatever you think of
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what's going on in Ottawa, the request that they're making is actually a very mild and moderate one.
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They're just saying, can we get rid of all these rules? By all means, you know, if you want to get
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vaccinated, do it. 90% of people have already done it. You want to wear the mask in the store,
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whatever you want to do, do what you want to do, but stop bringing these onerous rules where
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it's against the law to not do these things. And by the way, public health officials are saying we
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have to go there. So many other countries around the world are going there and public opinion shows
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we're ready for it. So what's actually being asked of folks in the convoy and other people all around
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the country and public health officials is incredibly mild, incredibly moderate. We know
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the harms of all these restrictions. What are we waiting for? I think we're waiting for a lot of
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these people who still refuse to acknowledge that the lockdowns really haven't been all that
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beneficial to let go of that, to stop defending that, to just let people be. And I think that's