Juno News - February 08, 2022


The lockdown authoritarians continue to dig in their heels

Topics
lockdown harms debate
Mentioned
Theresa Tam Justin Trudeau COVID-19
Canada’s socialized healthcare system is at the center of our failed COVID policies Quebecers are rallying behind the freedom convoy

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

199.41

Word count

827

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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

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 it's in some sense gobsmacking that there are still so many people out there who want to deny
00:00:10.640 and just plug their ears to the fact that we have caused great harms to our society over the past
00:00:16.360 two years. A new Johns Hopkins University study came out, a meta-analysis saying that lockdowns
00:00:22.020 really had no benefit in terms of reducing mortality throughout COVID-19. Now I didn't
00:00:27.960 really make much of a fuss about this study. I wasn't writing about it, tweeting about it because
00:00:31.940 I saw the headline. I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course. You know, having read other studies the past year
00:00:37.320 and talking to many experts on the ground, doing a lot of reports on how child and teen mental health
00:00:43.440 is just absolutely massive and hearing personal stories, people emailing me, getting in touch with
00:00:48.640 me to talk about all the sad things that have been happening in their lives the past two years. It's
00:00:52.400 like, well, yeah, I mean, obviously we have a problem here where the benefits of lockdowns were
00:00:57.720 vastly oversold and the negatives that came from them were ignored, dismissed, downplayed. And one
00:01:05.460 thing I find particularly morally repugnant, laughed at. Yes, it's true. I would write a story
00:01:11.040 about some harms that some individuals have suffered because of lockdowns the past two years and
00:01:16.560 some smug individual online, many individuals online would just laugh and say some smart aleck
00:01:21.560 remark about, well, you know, it's better that happened to them than they kill their grandparents 0.60
00:01:25.380 and so forth. And you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you were saying it back then.
00:01:29.500 One of the alarming things though, is that there's still a lot of people saying that sort of stuff
00:01:33.260 now, that there are still people out there who are denying, downplaying, ignoring, and even laughing
00:01:39.160 at the notion that lockdowns have been of limited, debatable, negligible benefit, but the harms are
00:01:45.600 immense. Who knew? Who knew that basically shutting down all of society for two years could come with so
00:01:51.960 many very visceral harms out there that I think have really traumatized people. Now, you know, it was
00:01:57.140 one thing at the beginning, I think most people supported the first lockdown going, okay, what is
00:02:02.400 this virus? I'm concerned. It's, it's super deadly out there. We got to shut everything down until we
00:02:06.600 can figure out more about it. What's interesting is public health officials, World Health Organization,
00:02:11.180 even Dr. Theresa Tam here in Canada in April, 2020, when we were under lockdown, she was talking as if
00:02:16.560 lockdowns would not be used again. And just what we're going to do after this first lockdown, where we find
00:02:21.340 our feet, there's actually a report out where she talks about that very interesting stuff. Then we
00:02:25.460 got into this vicious cycle where supporting lockdowns became this ideological thing, it became
00:02:30.900 this political thing, and people are still digging in their heels. But what's kind of interesting is
00:02:37.300 public health officials actually aren't really digging in their heels much anymore about it. In fact,
00:02:41.000 they're doing the exact opposite. Pretty much all of them are saying, we got to get away from this
00:02:45.520 stuff. Dr. Theresa Tam just saying, we have to really very soon review all of this with a view to
00:02:50.780 getting rid of it, including the vaccine mandates, the vaccine passports. I mean, she's clearly giving
00:02:55.400 the politicians, giving people like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an out to say, we got national
00:03:00.200 turmoil right now, we got quite a debate where people are protesting, you've got the convoy entrenched
00:03:05.140 in Ottawa, you've got similar situations in other cities. And I got to say, whatever you think of
00:03:10.060 what's going on in Ottawa, the request that they're making is actually a very mild and moderate one.
00:03:16.080 They're just saying, can we get rid of all these rules? By all means, you know, if you want to get
00:03:19.900 vaccinated, do it. 90% of people have already done it. You want to wear the mask in the store,
00:03:23.720 whatever you want to do, do what you want to do, but stop bringing these onerous rules where
00:03:27.720 it's against the law to not do these things. And by the way, public health officials are saying we
00:03:33.000 have to go there. So many other countries around the world are going there and public opinion shows
00:03:38.100 we're ready for it. So what's actually being asked of folks in the convoy and other people all around
00:03:43.900 the country and public health officials is incredibly mild, incredibly moderate. We know
00:03:50.520 the harms of all these restrictions. What are we waiting for? I think we're waiting for a lot of
00:03:56.720 these people who still refuse to acknowledge that the lockdowns really haven't been all that
00:04:01.060 beneficial to let go of that, to stop defending that, to just let people be. And I think that's
00:04:07.460 where we're really at right now in Canada.