Juno News - April 21, 2021


The Perils of ＂COVID Zero＂ Policies

Topics
COVID zero ideology
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Anthony Fury Christine Elliott Doug Ford Paul Calandra Patrick Brown Theresa Tam Brampton Aurora
Policing the Police State Double Teenage Mutant Ninja COVID Variant

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

196.6

Word count

1,849

Sentence count

112

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, True North contributor and op-ed editor Anthony Fury joins us to talk about the dangers of policing public safety in public parks, playgrounds, and public recreation spaces, and why lockdowns are not the answer to public safety issues.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 Anthony Fury is a True North contributor and also the columnist and op-ed editor at the Toronto Sun.
00:00:15.920 Anthony, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on today.
00:00:18.220 Great to be here, Andrew.
00:00:18.900 Now, you made an observation that I thought was a very unique one.
00:00:22.880 We're not hearing it from a lot of people in the media,
00:00:24.820 which was that Ontarians didn't just rebuke this expanded law enforcement power,
00:00:30.800 but more broadly, they pushed back against this COVID-0 narrative.
00:00:34.840 Explain what you mean by that.
00:00:36.700 Yeah, I don't think they actively did that.
00:00:38.760 They didn't know they were doing that, but kind of implicitly through them rejecting all of these outdoor restrictions,
00:00:45.920 playground closures, and this basic idea that you have to stay at home regardless of the activity you're doing,
00:00:53.000 regardless of what you're getting up to.
00:00:54.600 They said, no, we don't care for that.
00:00:56.480 We're reasonable people.
00:00:57.660 We want to flatten the curve or, you know, all those buzzwords we've been hearing.
00:01:01.540 Okay, we're up for that.
00:01:03.020 But hold on a second.
00:01:03.920 These activities that we know have nothing to do with spread, why exactly are you forcing that upon us? 0.90
00:01:10.080 This is ridiculous.
00:01:11.220 And there's an important distinction, clarification to be made here, Andrew, 0.63
00:01:14.560 in that a lot of people think that what the Ford government is trying to do now is combat locations and activities that cause spread.
00:01:20.560 That is not what they are doing.
00:01:22.380 If you look at the latest Ontario Science Table PDF that was at the last presentation,
00:01:26.760 there are multiple pages on that slide deck that talk about bringing down mobility data.
00:01:31.480 So they are just obsessed with the idea, Andrew, that how we deal with coronavirus isn't micro-targeting the locations causing spread,
00:01:39.380 but just to force everyone to stay at home, to give fewer reasons for the Google Analytics chart,
00:01:45.900 which tells you how much people are driving around because they have anonymized cell phone data,
00:01:50.920 and bringing that down.
00:01:52.420 And there's even a table for recreation, meaning how much people are sort of going out and about in the parks
00:01:57.840 and hanging out there and they want to bring it all down.
00:01:59.880 And that is consistent with this COVID zero ideology.
00:02:03.460 We got to get to zero cases by any means possible.
00:02:06.680 Places like New Zealand, Andrew, which have actually closed the parks multiple times as recently as just last month.
00:02:12.800 They thought coronavirus was gone in New Zealand.
00:02:15.360 No, they still closed the parks, the playgrounds, last month.
00:02:18.040 That's an important point because I've had even from people that I would say are ostensibly on the right pushback when I criticize lockdowns
00:02:25.600 because they say, you know, if we just did an Australia or New Zealand style lockdown, a short but harsh one, we would beat it.
00:02:33.480 But you're right to point out that those jurisdictions haven't beaten it.
00:02:38.200 Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I always say is I find it really, really bizarre.
00:02:43.400 I mean, it flabbergasts me that we're in the 21st century.
00:02:45.560 There's so many really credentialed, bright minds in Ontario that we're privileged to have here.
00:02:50.100 We're told we live in the age of analytics, of big data.
00:02:52.820 It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
00:02:54.980 And you're telling me big data can't be used to actually deal with these problems here.
00:02:59.580 We can micro-target, you know, ad buys for particular products, but we can't micro-target the data coming out of public health.
00:03:07.040 Instead, we have this, quite frankly, really, really, the basic approach to coronavirus right now from COVID zero is,
00:03:13.440 well, this virus spreads from person to person, so let's make it illegal for people to be near people.
00:03:19.960 Look, if someone had put that on their public health final exam, the very people, the professors advocating for this right now,
00:03:27.480 they would have failed those students two years ago.
00:03:30.160 But it's no joke.
00:03:31.200 This has never been a part of public health literature.
00:03:33.720 Infectious diseases physicians who don't support lockdowns have made this very clear to me.
00:03:37.660 It's not in any of the plans that Dr. Teresa Tam signed off on as late as 2018 about how to deal with this.
00:03:43.780 I mean, lockdowns are actually not a traditional public health protocol.
00:03:48.440 Yeah, you're right about that.
00:03:49.620 And it's interesting how of the many shifts, even this is one that we've seen from the World Health Organization,
00:03:55.480 which has said, no, no, no, lockdowns are not something that we like.
00:03:58.940 And that's the one area where the governments have decided they're not going to defer to this.
00:04:03.180 But this COVID zero idea is also a complete inversion of that stated goal of just make it so that we,
00:04:11.720 if we do have harsh cases, we have hospital capacity, we can get our ducks in a row,
00:04:16.220 the flatten the curve line from, what, 13 months ago.
00:04:19.320 And now it's, you're right, moving more and more towards this idea that we need to do everything
00:04:24.180 and anything we can until there are zero cases.
00:04:27.060 And what is so bizarre is at the same time, if you ask those very COVID zero advocates,
00:04:32.360 hey, is coronavirus becoming an endemic illness, meaning it's just kind of here to stay for the rest of our natural lives,
00:04:39.200 hopefully at a much sort of lower level and hopefully much fewer deaths every year,
00:04:42.900 they will all agree yes, except one of the latest COVID zero documents that a lot of these people were co-signatories on,
00:04:49.500 the very doctors who were on television saying shut her down, but oh, no, we didn't mean the playgrounds,
00:04:53.640 we didn't mean the outdoor sports, those very documents, not only do they call for the New Zealand model,
00:04:58.040 which does involve playground shutdowns, they also call for continual suppression of the virus,
00:05:03.520 meaning various restrictions and lockdown measures, until Canada gets to 40 cases per day.
00:05:09.620 That's actually in this Canadian Shield document that COVID zero advocates, they liked,
00:05:14.300 and they co-signed it 40 cases per day.
00:05:16.440 They came up with that because it's one case per million,
00:05:19.240 40 cases per day with a country with a border as long as ours, not an island nation like Taiwan
00:05:26.060 and New Zealand, when it's an endemic illness that we're also admitting we will never get rid of
00:05:30.800 in our natural lives. I mean, it's crazy talk is really what we can call COVID zero. It is total junk science.
00:05:38.200 Explain to me what's happening with Doug Ford's legitimacy as a leader right now, 0.96
00:05:43.880 because one thing I saw on Friday was that a lot of the criticism that he was getting was from the
00:05:50.880 right and the left. I was not seeing any real defense of the Ontario police measures. Now,
00:05:56.440 the province has since backtracked a little bit on that, but as you know, they've not admitted
00:06:01.040 wrongdoing, and even the language they used was not, you know, we got it wrong. They said,
00:06:05.760 no, no, no, they were going to, quote, refocus, unquote, the powers. Paul Calandra yesterday
00:06:11.120 gave a little bit more. But even then he said, no, no, no, it was just a communications problem.
00:06:15.540 What's happening here?
00:06:17.360 Well, when you ask what's going on with Doug Ford's legitimacy, I mean, nothing's going on
00:06:21.060 with it. There is no legitimacy right now. They announced these measures on Friday. A lot of
00:06:25.320 people were immediately outraged, closed down the playgrounds, randomly stopped me. And then by the
00:06:30.180 weekend, you had most police forces in Ontario saying, we ain't doing those random stops. I was
00:06:35.720 bicycling around downtown and I saw all the new rules that are enacted. And there's a lot. Yes,
00:06:40.440 the playgrounds were shut down, but picnic tables are still banned. You can't sit on those. You can't
00:06:45.400 play catch with a friend in a park. That is illegal. All you can do is walk through parks and so forth.
00:06:49.940 I can tell you, traveling through the streets of Toronto, nobody was following those rules. Some
00:06:55.000 of them, because they probably said, I'm going to do civil disobedience. Others, because they don't
00:06:59.000 listen to this stuff anymore. They don't care. They've tuned it out. And then you've had mayors like
00:07:03.080 Patrick Brown and Brampton, the mayor of Aurora and others who have openly said these need to be
00:07:07.600 repealed. So there's a major legitimacy problem. They've got to get these laws off the books because 0.73
00:07:12.680 you can't have a society in which these laws are just everybody's kind of mocking them. Nobody's
00:07:19.080 following them because if they think they have a problem on their hands now, well, if we're asking
00:07:23.500 what's the point of these laws, why should we follow them? There's going to be a cascading effect.
00:07:27.780 I guarantee you more and more rule breaking is going to happen because of that. And the government's
00:07:32.560 put themselves in a very dangerous situation where their legitimacy is collapsing right now.
00:07:37.400 Yeah. And you're right that that then makes it very difficult for people to go along with advice
00:07:42.260 or guidance that may actually be rooted in science if they're so used to stuff that is not. And the
00:07:47.600 playground ban, I think, is a very real thing. I don't want to make it just about the symbolism,
00:07:52.440 but symbolically, it also, I think, does reveal the government has just completely abandoned that idea
00:07:58.900 of linking science with the guidance. And when you mentioned it at the beginning of our discussion
00:08:03.900 that it's not about targeting where transmission is occurring, parks, I'm not aware of any outbreaks
00:08:09.640 there. And then for Minister Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier Christine Elliott, to say that people
00:08:14.400 not wearing masks at parks is part of the reason for spread is, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, where's the
00:08:20.860 evidence? Yeah, it's absolutely shocking that they would go out and say numerous factually incorrect
00:08:26.700 things during that press conference, which I think really frustrated people. I mean, are there
00:08:30.900 anomalous examples of outdoor spread in the literature? Sure. One of my favourite lines in one of those
00:08:35.400 studies is that most examples of outdoor spread have an indoor component to them. And you're like,
00:08:40.160 what? What does that mean? So there's an outdoor barbecue. And then, well, people decide to take it
00:08:44.160 indoors to get some beer from the beer fridge, hang in inside and in a close, you know, space for 20
00:08:49.120 minutes. Oh, OK. So outdoor spread just wasn't outdoor spread. It was actually indoor spread. It's
00:08:54.320 basically not really a thing that's happening. And yet here we have all these restrictions
00:08:58.880 on outdoor activities. It's if the people of Ontario want to say that's unacceptable,
00:09:03.560 we got to get this rolled back. Well, they're already hearing from other mayors who are saying
00:09:07.160 just that. Anthony Fury is an op ed editor and columnist at the Toronto Sun and my colleague
00:09:12.480 here at True North. Anthony, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks for
00:09:17.320 listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.