Juno News - January 08, 2021


The shifting goalposts of Canada's public officials

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Doug Ford
Breaching Democracy A wild week to start off 2021

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

195.27

Word count

644

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the shifting of the goalposts in the pandemic conversation, and why we should not accept them. What is the justification for restrictions on low-risk persons' activities in society beyond January 21st?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 One of the most frustrating, dare I say, most gaslighting components of the pandemic conversation
00:00:10.100 right now is the shifting of the goalposts that has been going on since, well, since this all
00:00:15.360 began and the things our politicians say, public health officials, and those quote-unquote experts
00:00:20.140 who are really big advocates of big lockdowns. You know, the old joke, we're now almost a year
00:00:24.860 into two weeks to flatten the curve. Now, I think there's one aspect where we should not accept the
00:00:31.220 shifting of goalposts, and that's when it comes to the vaccines and what number, what percentage of
00:00:36.440 people supposedly need to be vaccinated before you can say, all right, all these onerous restrictions
00:00:41.680 on our lives, enough. We don't need them anymore. So what am I talking about here? Well, we hear from
00:00:46.520 people like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that everybody who wants a vaccine will have access
00:00:50.340 to it by September. Okay, that's great because anybody who wants it should be allowed to get it.
00:00:55.040 And then there's people talking about the percentage needed to get, you know, herd immunity and so forth,
00:00:58.920 80 percent, this or that percent, and so forth. Okay, that's a part of the conversation as well,
00:01:03.260 but let's talk about the number who need to be vaccinated before we can acknowledge we no longer
00:01:09.140 have this five alarm fire on our hands. I think the number in Ontario, we got to talk about this
00:01:14.720 province by province because, well, that's where these things are playing out. In Ontario, the number is
00:01:19.000 about 150,000. You go, wow, Fury, that's a pretty low number. Where do you get that from? Because
00:01:26.280 that is the number of people who are living in long-term care facilities and the staff members
00:01:31.500 in those facilities. Now, Ontario has rightly prioritized those people getting the vaccine
00:01:36.260 first, and they had committed to a deadline of January 21st to roll out those vaccinations.
00:01:42.940 So on any given day when we announce the people who have tragically died of coronavirus,
00:01:46.500 the majority of them are usually long-term care residents. In fact, on some days, like the day
00:01:51.620 Doug Ford announced the province-wide lockdown back on December 18th, all of them, all 17 of them
00:01:57.980 were long-term care residents. So you vaccinate that entire population, that group of people in the
00:02:03.820 long-term care system, and, well, that's it. That's the majority of people who are dying of all of this.
00:02:10.780 So if we are going to accept some of these more ridiculous restrictions on low-risk persons'
00:02:16.300 activities in society beyond January 21st, you've got to say, why? What on earth is going on here?
00:02:23.460 Now, the government may shift the goalposts and say, well, did you know there are still, you know,
00:02:26.580 people in their 50s, people in their 60s walking out and about who could have a serious outcome
00:02:31.140 from this? And some have died, not many, nowhere near as many in the post-80 category and so forth.
00:02:36.640 And you go, okay, fair enough. So let's take precautions for them and let's warn them about
00:02:41.640 the risks out there. What does that have to do with low-risk people out there going to a boutique
00:02:47.040 clothing store, a bookstore, going out on a skating rink and not, for heavens, getting taser, as we've
00:02:52.380 seen in some videos. So that's really what we have to watch. And that's where the conversation has to
00:02:57.060 be at now. Who are the people who are most at risk of dying of this, of having serious outcomes,
00:03:02.320 of being hospitalized? Let's vaccinate them. And then after that happens, I'm sorry, what is the
00:03:08.120 justification for any of this? And why should we accept any of it? That's where the conversations
00:03:13.520 have to head. And I think that's the pressure that folks have to put on their government officials. 0.99