Juno News - July 04, 2022


The public health ＂experts＂ are back

Topics
masks
Mentioned
Andrew Damocles COVID-19 Harrison
Canadians react to Tamara Lich’s arrest ArriveCAN is here to stay

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

176.17

Word count

1,064

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of fears of a COID19 surge, some health professionals have called for a return to masking in the summer. We talk about whether or not this is a good idea, and why we should be worried about it.

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.
00:00:00.160 So, well, we've got, of course, and it was just a matter of time when they dropped the vaccine, where they suspended, I should say, when the government suspended the travel mandate, the vaccine mandate, and they said many times, we'll bring it back if we have to.
00:00:13.600 We knew the clock started ticking at that point until the media started to bring back the COVID fear-mongering.
00:00:19.700 Andrew, tell us that COVID is coming, it's just around the corner, we have to prepare for a summer surge, as the media said, the Globe and Mail just basically recycling headlines from the beginning of 2020.
00:00:31.700 Here, the Globe and Mail wrote on June 29th, fears of a COVID-19 summer surge prompt experts to call for a return to masking.
00:00:40.940 So, here it is, the masks are going to come back, the fear is going to come back, and we're going to have to likely, if this continues, well, the restrictions are going to come back, too.
00:00:51.080 And it was just, as I said, a matter of time.
00:00:53.160 So, the article writes, it's time to bring back indoor mask-wearing requirements, says some health professionals, amid concerns of a potential surge in COVID-19 cases this summer.
00:01:02.560 So, all I say to these health officials, Andrew, is good luck with that.
00:01:06.840 Good luck convincing Canadians to bring back masks indoors.
00:01:10.940 I don't think it's going to happen.
00:01:13.080 No, this is the number one way to get another convoy to Ottawa, to reimpose a wave of restrictions.
00:01:19.820 And it's not going to be like the Bouncy Castle one this time.
00:01:22.060 I think they're going to hold out longer than three weeks.
00:01:24.220 And they're going to do it in the summer, too.
00:01:25.720 Yeah, yeah, exactly, when they don't have the weather working against them.
00:01:28.780 I saw this, and my first response, and I tweeted about this, is that the experts, nothing is stopping them from wearing their masks as long as they want.
00:01:37.400 They can double mask, triple mask.
00:01:38.860 They can do an N95 with some duct tape.
00:01:41.740 They can wear a full body suit, do whatever they want.
00:01:44.460 That is absolutely their choice.
00:01:46.500 It's the idea of imposing this, reimposing some national or, at the very least, province-wide mask mandate that I find so absurd here.
00:01:55.220 And I was looking at this, and just one example from this week, and I know there are others like this.
00:02:01.000 Western University in my neck of the woods, London, Ontario, they announced on, I think it was Wednesday, that they're going mask-free as of this week.
00:02:09.640 But their vaccine mandate, their vaccine mandate, they say, well, we're not going to tell you what we're going to do about that on September 1st.
00:02:16.880 So if you're a student at Western or a faculty member at Western, you can't actually plan the next year because you won't know until days before the school year starts what the vaccine policy is.
00:02:28.440 And the reason I bring that up in the context of this story is because it's that sort of Damocles that's always dangling in front of people now, that we're always just one day away from some new wave of restrictions coming back,
00:02:42.040 one wave away from more concerns, more lockdowns, more restrictions, more vaccine mandates.
00:02:48.140 And this could just come and hit us at any point.
00:02:52.080 And this is something that I feel, I mean, for the first, you know, 97 waves of restrictions and lockdowns and all that, Canadians did seem to welcome this all.
00:03:02.840 But I'm not convinced that patience is there because I just, and I know it's anecdotal, but people that dutifully went along with every lockdown, they got double vax, triple vax, they did everything.
00:03:13.000 They hit a breaking point not long before this summer, and in some cases a little bit earlier.
00:03:19.840 But I just don't think the will is there, even among people that have followed every restriction up until this point to deal with any more of them.
00:03:27.520 No, and the cat's out of the bag.
00:03:29.000 I mean, what you're seeing now are you're seeing Canadians traveling to Europe where no mask, basically no one is wearing any masks.
00:03:36.440 There were no restrictions months ago, and they weren't getting COVID.
00:03:40.060 They weren't getting infected.
00:03:41.020 They were coming back to places where there were masks, people were wearing masks, and there were some restrictions, and they were ending up with COVID.
00:03:47.500 So people are starting to realize that, you know, it's not the masks that are protecting them.
00:03:53.060 And now, with everyone getting, you know, boosted and still getting wave after wave of COVID, I mean, people, like you said, are just going to realize that this is not working.
00:04:04.400 This is not going to happen, and if they try this, people are just going to openly, you know, disagree with this.
00:04:11.540 They're not going to follow along, and they're going to kind of lose the respect for the public health bureaucrats, the institutions of these people telling us what to do.
00:04:21.240 And just to get into some of these absurd headlines we saw at the beginning of the week, the fear-mongering has come right back.
00:04:29.720 CTV wrote at the beginning of the week, and I can't even believe this was a headline written by CTV.
00:04:35.120 They wrote, people with COVID-19 can infect and sicken cats and dogs by cuddling them, and they referenced a study.
00:04:43.320 They say that the research that they referenced published this month in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases involves 69 cats and 49 dogs, including pets and animals from shelters and neuter clinics.
00:04:55.960 Transmission from humans to animals can be minimized by owners keeping their distance, wearing a mask, and taking other precautions, Andrew.
00:05:02.860 So people in Canada are supposed to distance themselves from their own pets and wear masks around their own pets? 1.00
00:05:11.220 Do they really take us for total idiots? It's crazy. 1.00
00:05:15.520 No, you're being insensitive, Harrison. This is the whole point, is that they know that even the most cynical, myopic, misanthropic people love animals.
00:05:23.660 So now if you're not prepared to wear your mask to save grandma, you have to wear your mask to save Fido.
00:05:28.640 This is the rule now. How dare you?
00:05:32.940 For more sources, go to visit Fido.
00:05:38.360 HILTON
00:05:39.260 HILTON
00:05:41.940 HILTON
00:05:42.520 HILTON
00:05:43.620 HILTON
00:05:46.280 HILTON
00:05:47.200 HILTON
00:05:50.080 HILTON
00:05:51.840 HILTON
00:05:53.380 HILTON
00:05:55.280 HILTON
00:05:56.500 HILTON
00:05:57.680 HILTON
00:05:59.600 HILTON