Juno News - February 02, 2023
The media got it wrong on Covid | Dr. Matt Strauss | Part 1.
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Summary
Dr. Matt Strauss has been critical of excessive government pandemic measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates, and recently sections of the mainstream media have tried to discredit and discredit him. Most recently, an article in the Toronto Star caricatured and ridiculed some of his comments. However, his health district has seen a 30% lower mortality from COVID than the provincial average, so I guess in a sense he feels vindicated and is stepping down from his position. To talk about all of this and more, please welcome Dr. Strauss to the show.
Transcript
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Rupa Subramanya show. I am of course Rupa Subramanya. I hope
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you're all doing well wherever you're tuning in from. My guest today is Matt Strauss who's a
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critical care physician and acting medical officer for Haldeman Norfolk. Dr. Strauss has been critical
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of excessive government pandemic measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates and recently
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sections of the mainstream media have tried to discredit and cancel him. Most recently an article
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in the Toronto Star caricatured and ridiculed some of his comments. His health district however has
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seen a 30 percent lower mortality from COVID than the provincial average so I guess in a sense he
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feels vindicated and he's stepping down from his position. To talk about all of this and more
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please welcome Dr. Strauss to the show. Matt welcome to my show. Welcome to the Rupa Subramanya show.
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I really applaud your courage in being one of the few brave voices in the Ontario healthcare system.
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You know you've had the courage to criticize some of these draconian and harsh measures from the
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government. First you know can we can we start by you describing to us what you do as a critical care
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physician. What what is it that you've seen during the pandemic as a critical care physician?
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Okay so critical care doctors or ICU doctors it you go to med school for four years you do a background
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specialty either internal medicine anesthesia surgery or emergency medicine for three to five
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years and then you do two years of a subspecialty in critical care medicine and the some of the things
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that define critical care medicine are very invasive medications that we give through the the the main
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lines uh main lines that we put in your jugular vein and also the breathing machine so life support.
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It might be fair to say that critical care doctors are life support specialists that's a huge part of
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what we do and I have been practicing as a critical care doctor for 10 years. I was the chief of my critical
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care unit in a community hospital in Ontario um I uh for the last five years I wouldn't say that I was burnt out
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I was something like uh I felt like I I was limited in terms of growth and that some some things were
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bothering me um about the sort of medicine I deliver um and what I was seeing in my patients that I was putting the
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same person on a breathing machine three times in one year um for lung disease from smoking but they
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were still smoking or um from overdose but they they were still being prescribed the medications that
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they were overdosing on or um uh or diabetics not taking their insulin that sort of thing um so I was
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concerned about these larger issues in population public health community health um and at the time I went to
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I went to journalism school and uh I just finished a fellowship of a monk school in journalism when
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and I'd written a couple pieces one for the national post and one for vice news um and and that's when
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the pandemic broke out so I I kind of already had these background concerns about um sometimes we're not
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doing what we wish we were or we're not achieving what we wish we were achieving uh in in our field um when the pandemic
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sorry to quickly quickly interrupt why did you go to journalism school you were already a doctor
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I wanted to write about these things that um oh okay these these counterintuitive things I was
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seeing where yeah um it's really easy to pat yourself on the back all the time as a medical
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specialist and being like I'm saving the world but it's like okay you're you're not there's there's
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these bigger issues in public health that that um I think have to do the word holistic captures a lot
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of it that health is so so much more than the absence of disease health is do you have someone
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you can call when you're in uh bad straits do you have um do you have adequate housing these sorts of
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things are like is your city walkable um and these are really public health concerns one might say now
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anyway so I had just started writing and I had a couple clips in mainstream media the pandemic broke out
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and uh I'd been on Twitter for like 10 years um and at one point I think in April 2020 I I
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two are two things happened around the same time I on March 26th I I tried to get a piece published
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about my concerns about lockdown that it was going to harm all these other things about health and
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population health if if you're if your faith group isn't meeting if if grandparents can't see their
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grandchildren if you if you don't have a good job like this is all going to cause more disease and
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critical illness um and we're just being a bit short-sighted in terms of the two weeks to flatten
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the curve canard um so I wrote this piece I I had read every paper on COVID like swear to God at that
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time there weren't that many papers on COVID there's now 700,000 papers on COVID um so I felt like I I
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understood the medicine really well I had this this honest concern about what we were doing to our
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society and no media in Canada would publish that piece period full stop I sent it everywhere um people
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editors who had printed my last pieces suddenly stopped returning my emails um and what when when
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was this in the pandemic uh March 2020 so like oh two weeks after the first lockdown I think wow yeah
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so it was like March 20th that I wrote this piece and I felt obsessed about it I was like I
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I gotta get this out um and one Canadian editor of an international publication who I view as something as
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a mentor uh accepted my piece for international publication and the next day said sorry my my
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boss um like you know so we might say the publisher says absolutely not um but I'll have you on my
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podcast but then he called back and said no I can't even have you on the podcast but he sent it to an
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editor at the spectator uh in the UK which blew my mind as somebody who just started writing a couple
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pieces to get into spectator it was amazing so I was writing for spectator I I couldn't believe my luck
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um and I I had a couple tweets that went insanely viral um like 25 000 likes in a week one of which
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where I just said hey my my ICU is actually empty it's never been this empty before uh we have 13 beds
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we only have two people in our ICU seems like we flattened the curve like maybe we should start
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liberalizing things that I think was a very banal statement but then suddenly Ben Shapiro was
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retweeting it and I was like what is going on and with that attention or I guess you might
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say journalistic success um came a lot of criticism of me um and I basically from day one in that spring
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of 2020 I um I was criticized by colleagues I was criticized by administrators there were some back and
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forth a bunch of meetings I had to go to some emails and at the end of the day I was like look I
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I I'm the most kind of doctrinaire evidence-based doctor people were getting really excited about
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ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and I was not excited about those things I'm really a dyed and
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wool skeptic I want to see the international multi-center randomized control trial in a peer-reviewed paper
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journal before I get very excited about things yeah um and then suddenly I was being painted as on the
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fringe because I wasn't um applauding these very draconian measures so I for about six months I was
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just engaged in the this criticism and concern about lockdowns um in November 2020 the university
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administration the university I was affiliated with started giving me a very hard time and I made some
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noise about hey hey look like if you go to the main webpage uh academic freedom is supposed to exist
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here um like please stop sending me these things um yeah so that got turned up more and more as time
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went on and then I became more and more alarmed because in December of 2020 we were suddenly um plunged
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into another lockdown in Ontario which was yeah it was unbelievable to me I I could not believe it um
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and uh it felt like I had done all this public commentary and critique had been in good faith
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I'd been referencing the medical literature I um I described some some I was seeing firsthand things
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that were also reflected in the medical literature so I was seeing more people dying of uh substance abuse
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and uh overdose yeah we we now know I think it was published in JAMA in Ontario uh overdose deaths in young
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men quadrupled during spring 2020 um which is horrendous and tragic and then and the first hand I was
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seeing elders from nursing homes who were starving to death because their families weren't allowed to
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come in and feed them which they had been depending on yeah um so I I always felt like I'm just honestly
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describing what I'm seeing I'm honestly referencing the medical literature I honestly kind of am an expert
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in this stuff um and I'm I'm not going to stop talking about it but it seems like it's having no effect
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then in spring 2021 Ontario didn't even more draconian lockdown where they were going to have the
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police stop you a block from your house to ask what are you doing out and it was the chiefs of police
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in Ontario who said no we're we're not doing that this is police state stuff the premier to his credit
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apologized I think the next day but if you look at any civics textbook anywhere in the western world the
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chiefs of police are not supposed to be the guardians of civil liberty like if that's your um if that
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that if that's who's protecting civil liberties in your country or your province that's a big problem
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so I I frankly began to despair a bit I was like I I thought I had I thought I'd done everything I
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could do in terms of public speaking and commentary and writing to just stop this tragedy unfolding um and
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I I I was sort of out of moves and then quite out of the blue some members of this community in
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rural Ontario on on the uh kind of cottage country uh farming community on the shores of Lake Erie
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um asked me if I would apply to their job to the job to be their public health official so I took that
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job yeah and when my appointment was announced like all hell broke loose the the Toronto Star the CBC
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um ran hit pieces on me um that included just straight misinformation um I'm I'm not a litigious
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person but I I did have to get a lawyer and that lawyer sent cease and desist letters to them and we
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received a number of corrections and some apologies um and then I I just did my honest best to put the
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medical literature and my clinical experience into practice um so for a year and a half now I've been the
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medical officer of health for Haldeman Norfolk and I did not extend vaccine mandates like many of my
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colleagues did I did not extend mass mandates um we did very little by way of school closures or
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we didn't do restaurant capacity restrictions and accessible what the province uh was doing and
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the proof is in the pudding we have uh 30 fewer covid deaths in my community that I serve than
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provincially so at the end of the day I feel like I proved my point in in real life yeah I'm not expecting
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any sort of victory parade but um hopefully the next time we have a pandemic we won't do these
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wrong-headed things that are not supported by the best medical literature yeah no I was uh gonna come
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to that actually uh because you um referring to your um recent op-ed in the national post where you say
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that uh your district your health district saw 30 percent lower covid mortality than the provincial average
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i i i i mean i do hope you feel a sense of vindication i think you do um but what what exactly did you
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do there that was different from the rest of the province so i i want to be really clear i am not taking
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credit for this 30 percent lower death rate um the mainstream media uh the toronto star the cbc uh uh
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the globe and mail more insinuated it but and and some loud uh kind of twitter celebrities were saying
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that i was going to kill people the the region was going to be on fire the hospitals would be
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overwhelmed and i was i was sure that wasn't going to happen i think why is there 30 percent lower
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mortality in the region has to do with what we talk about in public health as social determinants of
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health i think people are more connected there there's more compassion there's um uh there there's
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frankly more common sense um so but you know some of the things that i maybe can take credit for i i
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was passionate about getting vulnerable people vaccinated and and not coercing um young healthy
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people into getting vaccinated um and so i said hey i i want to build trust in public health if you
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don't feel that you have a physician you can talk to about whether you should get vaccinated or not
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call my office i'll call you back and i had dozens of phone calls with folks who were vulnerable and
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and some of them after speaking with me did decide to go get vaccinated perhaps that affected mortality
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rates um there was um when pax livid came out i i was very impressed by the trial data like i said i
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was not impressed by hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin i thought this could be a game changer but it wasn't
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available in my community so i i wrote a letter the board of health in my community um passed a motion
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supporting the letter i gave the letter to the mpp the mpp hand delivered it to the minister of
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health and they made packs of it available in our community um and that maybe saved some lives um
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so there uh oh and another thing was there's a whole thing about monoclonal antibody uh
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monoclonal antibody therapy right and we are very blessed um to be close to mcmaster in my community and
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mcmaster had an antibody monoclonal clinic um and the director of that clinic was like i can't get anybody to
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show up like nobody's referring patients it's almost i think because of trump arrangement
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syndrome people were like no it's it's there's no treatment it's vaccinations and it's only
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vaccinations we have to get everyone vaccinated it's like no there's many things we can do um
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so i i developed a procedure by which we would identify high-risk people in the community and get
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them referred to that clinic um uh right away so and you know i don't know but hopefully that saves
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some lives too well yeah no that's uh that's very interesting i mean i i know i saw the attacks um
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you know the attacks from sections of the mainstream media some journalists will come to that a little
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later uh just a quick question you know you mentioned to me that uh people in your community
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uh actually wanted you to um head head the public health unit in that district um what that you know i find
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that very interesting because at a time when you were saying um something that was going against
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sort of the mainstream narrative it was going against the grain of what was considered to be
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uh you know the right thing to do at that time um how is it that people in your community thought
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otherwise and how how is it that you were then you know you eventually got to this position how did that
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come about um all i can say is a member of the community dm'd me on twitter had me call a number
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of other community leaders who were interested in what i had to say i think that just demographically
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there are a lot of farmers in that community okay um i think that a lot of what happened in terms of
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the nonsense that we saw there was there was a few things one is if you live and work in the ivory
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tower in downtown toronto and you create uh sophisticated computer mathematical models to
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predict what's going to happen you can publish papers all day long you can go speak at conferences
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all day long and it seems like nobody ever asks you if your models actually successfully predict reality
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but you can have a sterling academic career based on these predictions that turn out to be false yeah
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um and i think that in an agricultural community you as a farmer you can come up with a computer model
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but how you're going to grow more rutabagas that are bigger and more delicious than anyone else
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yeah you find out six months later if your theory holds water and if you don't grow the rutabagas that
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you thought you're going to you might lose the farm um so i think i think throughout the world when
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you you go to these sort of rural agricultural places you're you're going to find a lot more common sense
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and a lot less um reliance on what uh what the the so-called experts of mainstream media media think
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and you didn't face any kind of resistance from the bureaucracy i uh like like um um the bureaucracy
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of these uh health care units at all like oh you know this is matt strauss he said all of these things
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about lockdowns and masks and uh you know and i don't think he would be good for this position you just
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don't feel that kind of uh resistance um when i was hired um uh the the board of health which is the
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the body to which i report uh voted nine to zero to hire me um and and everything that i had done
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was public yeah when the media started raising hell uh it you know it was largely the downtown
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toronto based media yeah there was a bit of um public outcry i think that um i i heard one member
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of the board of health say they got like the same email 50 times like a chain letter and and i think
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some of them were spooked um so a meeting to reassess the hiring was called okay um i wrote them a letter
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saying like look these these media reports are false the corrections have been printed here's what i
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actually said what i actually believe and then over that period of time i understood they they got um
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hundreds of like individuals in the community uh calling their office saying that we we uh the one
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the one board member who i think was concerned about the blowback initially said we had hundreds of
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phone calls saying we we don't want mandates we want dr strauss um so there was a bit of like
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astroturfing online slacktivism to get rid of me yeah in the end they voted eight to one to keep
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well i think that's a great story actually and it gives me some hope uh given that you know everybody
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was saying the same thing and you were saying something different and and then you know you headed this
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healthcare unit and uh and you know i think it's you know it gives me some hope and optimism that uh that
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there are sensible people out there and uh and that uh that we are capable of empowering uh sensible
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people among us and uh so that you know that's that's a great story actually um so um you know
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matt i mean could you tell me uh you know we were we've been you know you've opposed these draconian
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uh measures um you know how do you how would you assess the risk benefit trade-off between um you know
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between harsh measures such as lockdowns i mean did in the end did you do you think lockdowns saved
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lives did they did they make any difference at all so the the best medical papers i have about 13 of them
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um there are the 13 that i'm talking about looked at actual differences in population-wide mortality so
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and we can do this ad hoc we can say we'll look at california versus florida florida was more liberal
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with age-adjusted mortality for covid they had about the same outcomes you can look at brazil
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versus argentina brazil was criticized because bolsonaro uh took a more oddly liberal approach um
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given his politics otherwise whereas argentina did very strict lockdowns and there's not much
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difference there either you can look at sweden versus the uk or sweden versus belgium
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um all of these things people like to compare sweden versus denmark but denmark also or sweden
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versus norway but all the scandinavian countries actually had more liberal approaches in general um
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so we can do that and we can be accused of cherry picking but when researchers will will take all of
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the u.s states or all of the countries in europe or all the countries in the world and and then
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do um uh multivariate logistic regression analysis yeah and for those 13 papers that i that i have
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there's no difference based on how severe your um measures were in terms of the body count at the
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end so i'm i'm very comfortable saying no on the on the large scale they didn't i think that there's
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still the theoretic possibility that if you're if your hospitals are overwhelmed and you do lockdowns
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for two weeks and you make it instead of a two weeks of being overwhelmed four weeks of being
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just stressed there might be a mortality benefit there but ultimately like the lock lockdowns can
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only work for as long as you do them so it always felt to me like we're building a bridge to nowhere
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every every case that you prevent with this lockdown um you're just going to get when the lockdown is
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relieved and that's what we saw in ontario like the the vast majority of ontarians ended up getting
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covid despite all of the time we spent in lockdown so it's it's a it's a delaying tactic it doesn't
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change the game yeah um yeah no i just want to come to uh this uh question that uh you know i i i
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refer to this uh in my recent national post column actually um uh it's not about lockdowns it's about
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vaccines and um and it was a wall street journal uh opinion column by a member of the editorial board
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uh citing three different studies that point to how uh viruses are actually adapting to the vaccines
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um um just as i suppose evolutionary biology would predict this um uh and that's my layman's
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understanding of evolutionary biology i wonder what you think about this are vaccines actually uh
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abetting the rise of new variants i think that um i think that there were always going to be new
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variants no matter what we do if you have a if you have any organism and you're not eradicating it
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you're it's not on the endangered species list um covid will be with us forever um covid will continue
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to mutate forever um if you uh if you give a population of an organism a uh an evolutionary
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push in one direction where you say well we're going to use this defense the vaccines the virus
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will evolve around the vaccines so there always were going to be variants um what sorts of variants
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we see may in fact be responsive to what mitigation measures we we use i think that and i just want
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to be very clear i think that it's a bit of a modern miracle that a new disease came out and nine
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months later we had a vaccination that saves lives that's incredible um and i i never want to take away
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from that scientific achievement um it seemed to me but and and we're talking about evolutionary
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evolutionary theoretical speculation okay i like to talk about what the numbers show afterwards but yeah you
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i would conjecture and i and i did conjecture i didn't like to tweet or write about it but
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probably the best time to get covid is is three weeks after your vaccination and if you get it five
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years from now hey you'll be five years older um and your vaccination might have worn off but also
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it'll be a variant that is not the same as what you were just vaccinated for so um that's how i view it
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yeah i mean the last time i was vaccinated was more than a year ago and uh i probably um i i mean i i
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i suspect i had covet at some point before the vaccines uh were uh you know were even available
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i mean i i suppose i'm just basically more or less walking unprotected but i'm also assuming i have these
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antibodies right from um from from having recovered from a covet infection um you know so do you do you
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think that everybody should get vaccinated should we be on this constant sort of uh round of boosters
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i mean some people have had seven or eight shots at this point which um which i'm thinking that even
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with the flu shot you you wouldn't take that many flu shots over the course of two years right uh so
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that's certainly correct um yeah the it's really really hard to make blanket statements about should
00:25:05.440
everyone in general in medicine if absolute absolutist statements are always wrong should everyone
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always get vaccinated always all the time for with every vaccine um probably not should no one ever
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get vaccinated with no vaccines definitely not um and i think my concern i understand why they
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felt they could not deliver nuanced information to the public because it it's just hard to do um
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but i think you have to try so i don't know where the cutoff is for who will benefit and who will
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not frankly because it's a new vaccine um my personal priority would be if you are over 40 definitely
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you should be vaccinated um if you have already if you're covered recovered um there is less uh benefit
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to getting vaccinated if you are under 40 there is less uh benefit to getting vaccinated if you have
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severe medical problems you should definitely get vaccinated if you don't there's less benefit and
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the just common basic principles of medicine and ethics like um pharmaceutical ads in the state
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say talk to your doctor i think if you're not sure you deserve to have a doctor that you can talk about
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this with and some folks did call me and they would say i have heart disease in my family and i heard
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that this vaccine causes heart issues so i don't think i should take it and i was like well what heart
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disease is in your family well that's not what the the vaccine causes and what risk factors do you
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have and um some of them elected to take it after that so what i was really uncomfortable with was on
00:26:47.120
the side of the road there were light up billboards on the 401 that said get the jab and i was like
00:26:52.000
no that's not that's not how individual like health is really complicated and every individual
00:26:57.120
has a rich context and even as a physician if i spend 20 minutes with you i'm not going to know your
00:27:00.240
whole life um but i hopefully will know enough to come to uh be able to give you a recommendation so
00:27:07.040
um there are there are folks who look we we have this um paper that came out in november uh 2021 where
00:27:15.760
they they looked at everyone who died suddenly uh 20 days within a vaccination and they did autopsies on
00:27:21.680
them and for they had 35 people in at the heidelberg medical center in baden-wittenberg germany um which is a
00:27:30.240
province of 11 million people so they only had 35 who died suddenly um and they they looked at their
00:27:37.040
hearts and they found that four of them had myocarditis that couldn't be explained by anything
00:27:41.840
other than the vaccine um so it's not that there's zero risk to this so maybe there's a four and 11
00:27:49.040
million chance of this happening with a vaccination that's not zero that's incredibly rare and i believe
00:27:54.240
that in general at a population level the vaccine saved way more lives than four out of 11 million
00:27:59.760
but you have to take people's concerns about that seriously because the number is not zero exactly
00:28:06.320
i mean it is exactly it is not zero and uh yeah i mean since you mentioned died suddenly and you
00:28:13.840
probably have um i don't know if you saw the movie uh and and all of the references to died suddenly
00:28:20.960
that have been making the rounds on social media lately um you know it it's you know i i i trained as
00:28:27.920
an economist so i look for data and hard evidence before i come to some kind of a conclusion when
00:28:34.560
it comes to a certain thing like what are other factors that could be contributing to a person
00:28:39.200
suddenly collapsing for example right how do you how do you discern all of the you know the the the
00:28:44.640
various um things at play here and and so the conclusion seems to be increasingly by by you know
00:28:52.720
uh by some people that it's the vaccines that are causing these um heart attacks and uh you know
00:29:00.480
you have these professional athletes were just uh collapsing uh maybe a few weeks after a booster
00:29:06.240
some people have died what exactly is going on here i mean is there is there some truth i mean and and
00:29:12.800
and here before you know before i finish that question i mean one of the things that i've learned
00:29:17.440
during the pandemic is that yesterday's conspiracy theory uh is today's reality and so i've um i'm
00:29:23.760
not quite sure what is going on here do the skeptics the vaccine skeptics have a point here
00:29:29.600
i think that you are wise to say that you don't know what's going on um the wisest man uh
00:29:36.480
are in let's say western philosophy socrates says i i only know that i don't know um and on both
00:29:44.240
sides of this issue so the first thing i'll say is i didn't watch that movie some people who i think
00:29:49.280
are very thoughtful and reflective who did watch it gave a description to me and i was like yeah that
00:29:54.880
that doesn't sound credible and it's not i'm gonna spend two hours on a friday night um the what i what
00:30:03.600
i have seen happening so like one thing you could take from that german pathology study with the autopsies
00:30:08.160
is only four out of the 35 people who dropped dead unexpectedly at home um died because of vaccine
00:30:16.160
induced myocarditis and that's not completely confirmed but it seems like the most likely
00:30:20.160
explanation so i think it's deeply irresponsible if you're on twitter and somebody faints somewhere
00:30:26.960
or has a heart attack somewhere to say this is the vaccine you they might not even have been
00:30:31.440
vaccinated so there's just a lot of deeply irresponsible claims coming out from anti like
00:30:38.880
the sort of the old traditional anti-vaccine movement um and then i think they're in the
00:30:44.720
medical establishment is a reflexive like they're conspiracy theorists they're uh misinformation
00:30:50.160
mongers uh they're very bad people we need to censor them and no the vaccine doesn't kill anybody
1.00
00:30:56.080
it's perfectly safe and it's like well no hang on absolutism on both sides i understand why
00:31:01.120
they're falling into a reflexive absolutism because the claims made on the anti-vaccine side are
00:31:05.840
irresponsible and often false but four out of 35 out of a population of 11 million is still not zero
00:31:13.360
so we have to be really careful to be nuanced at all times