Juno News - September 01, 2022


What's worse？ Covid or the flu？ (Feat. Dr. Neil Rau)

Mentioned
COVID-19 Omicron
More money won’t fix our schools Behind the scenes of CSIS with a former Canadian spy

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

188.46

Word count

1,307

Sentence count

92


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the evolving threat posed by the new strain of the flu virus known as Omicron Virus Type Ia, or "Omicron-19" and whether or not we should get on the horse yet.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Something you mentioned earlier, you know, since the advent of Omicron and its sub-variants,
00:00:04.940 we know that COVID has become much less severe. It's highly transmissible. And even the booster
00:00:12.280 shots, as you said, don't really do much at preventing transmission at this point.
00:00:19.280 First of all, would it be fair to say that from a layman's perspective, COVID-19 is
00:00:24.180 morphing into something like the seasonal flu that we've been living with forever?
00:00:27.980 And with the seasonal flu, as you know, taking the flu shot was always voluntary and no one put
00:00:34.140 a gun to your head. So, I mean, first of all, would it be fair to say that it's basically evolved
00:00:40.420 into something like the seasonal flu? So what you're getting at is what we call
00:00:44.720 an endemic approach, is it appropriate, rather than a pandemic approach? I think so. I don't
00:00:50.380 think everyone's ready to get off the horse yet. It depends who you ask. Okay. And that's where
00:00:54.120 you're going to see a divergence between experts. But one thing I can say is, as you'd said earlier,
00:00:59.460 Omicron is not causing the health impact that the original Wuhan strain, COVID classic, as I call it,
00:01:05.580 did. The other point is you've got an immunologically experienced population. Initially, we were so-called
00:01:11.200 immunologically naive. Nobody had seen the vaccine. Nobody had seen the disease. Now we have large numbers
00:01:16.340 of people who have seen the disease, who've been vaccinated, who got the disease, then who were
00:01:21.800 forced to get vaccinated or got the vaccine, whatever might have happened. So you've got this
00:01:26.480 hybrid mix or pure vaccinated or pure unvaccinated but infected. And there's a very small percentage
00:01:32.540 of people who are unvaccinated who can still be hit hard even by Omicron and end up in hospital,
00:01:37.840 to be fair. I'm not sure the severity of the disease has changed, but I think the population at risk
00:01:43.620 has changed. So with infectious diseases, we look at three things. We look at the host,
00:01:49.320 we look at the environment, and we look at the virus, the triangle, the epidemiologic triangle.
00:01:54.740 If the virus hasn't changed, one thing that has changed is the host, the host situation,
00:01:59.640 the immune status of the host. The environment, we learn more about where it spreads. We don't have
00:02:05.240 to have people crying on TV because we're having outdoor parties at Trinity Bellwoods Park anymore.
00:02:09.660 We had stories like a doctor going on TV crying because people were outside in May of 2020.
00:02:16.460 I don't think we need that anymore. There's no need to cry. We don't need people to mask outside,
00:02:20.780 although some people like to do it to show how amazing they are to other people. This is a talisman.
00:02:25.400 This is not really a personal protective measure anymore in that setting. Now, we do know that people,
00:02:30.640 if they want to, can go ahead and wear a mask. They can even wear an F95 mask, FN95 mask if they want.
00:02:35.820 That's great. They can also wear it as they walk into a restaurant and promptly take it off as they
00:02:40.520 eat, and they can feel protected. This is the kind of folly that I see. We see people getting on
00:02:44.560 airplanes with masks and taking it off as soon as the plane's at cruising altitude and the flight
00:02:50.020 attendant shows up with a coffee. It all comes off. So why are we doing this? So if we're going to keep
00:02:54.780 doing things, we have to be selective. Asking university students to do this on a campus, to me,
00:03:00.180 is just pure folly. Wrong population. Not the best intervention if they're wearing just a surgical
00:03:06.240 mask. In the wrong era of COVID-19, where we have an immune experienced population, either through
00:03:13.700 vaccination or disease. So it's a triple fail, in my view. Yeah. I mean, speaking of people who refuse
00:03:20.360 to get off the horse, you have countries that have more or less fully moved on and aren't having
00:03:27.180 these debates of what way we're in and what the wastewater signal is telling us, I always thought
00:03:33.760 that we as Canadians tended to be pragmatic about. But what I see is a state of what I can only call
00:03:43.480 COVID psychosis at this point, where especially many public health experts and doctors whose voices get
00:03:49.140 amplified by the mainstream media, they simply don't want to let go. Meanwhile, you have courageous
00:03:56.120 experts and doctors like yourself who don't share the so-called consensus view and you're criticized
00:04:02.880 and vilified and ridiculed. This seems like a very unhealthy state of affairs and does a lot of damage,
00:04:10.600 in my opinion, to public health messaging in the end and instills fear. I still meet people who are
00:04:17.540 triple vaccinated, triple masked. They live in a state of perpetual fear. What do you make of all of
00:04:24.680 this? How did we end up in this mess? And where do we go from here?
00:04:29.040 So some of this started even before COVID. I'm going to kind of walk through. You mentioned flu.
00:04:33.700 We had campaigns, let's get flueless, you know. So there was a vision that if we all got the flu shot,
00:04:40.520 we could stop this disease. It's not true. I've written in the Globe and Mail a number of years
00:04:45.860 ago that we were taking the flu shot too seriously. This is well before COVID. We haven't managed our
00:04:51.320 expectations. We are trying to create a belief that what happened with measles for the vaccine
00:04:56.660 to actually stop transmission would apply to other respiratory viruses, including influenza
00:05:01.700 and COVID-19. It just isn't the case. If you don't manage expectations and you keep going with this
00:05:08.180 view that you can stop something in its tracks, that you can stop the wind, as people describe trying
00:05:12.900 to stop the flu in terms of its impossibility, this is what you get. The other thing is there's a
00:05:19.480 cultural dislike, disdain for the so-called anti-vaxxer. And I have been labeled an anti-vaxxer
00:05:26.740 for questioning the idea of going on and on with a carousel of boosters to quote one of your prior
00:05:32.980 phrases, the carousel of boosters. Because this is where it doesn't stop. And I think it's like a
00:05:40.000 movement, it's much easier for me to go on mainstream media or media and just say, get the
00:05:45.540 shot. It's your best defense. It's a bromide. Who's going to question a bromide like that?
00:05:50.340 If I say, listen, there's a certain group of my older patients who would benefit from a fourth
00:05:55.320 booster or a third booster, at least a third booster. And maybe we should wait for a new
00:05:59.260 vaccine to give a fourth booster. Or wait, maybe if they've already just had Omicron or had COVID in
00:06:05.400 the last three or six months, we can take pause. We don't have to hammer them with another vaccine.
00:06:09.720 When I make those comments, someone will turn around and say, that's an imprudent,
00:06:15.000 irresponsible view. I am morphing into the anti-vaxxer league. And that label is terrible.
00:06:20.720 That's a terrible label to have. So this is why you see people backing off private emails to you,
00:06:27.140 to other journalists, to myself, people reaching out, chat groups forming, where people don't want
00:06:31.940 to speak out publicly, except for a few of us. But the insanity has reached a level now where young
00:06:36.840 students who are triple vaxxed are saying, what the hell is going on? And rightly so.
00:06:41.820 So that's the turning point. The Western University protest is the turning point. I'm surprised it
00:06:46.320 wasn't bigger. But if it happens at multiple universities, or if they have a second round
00:06:49.980 of this with more uptake, you never know. Or maybe it'll come up during the political campaign.
00:06:53.920 And that would be bad news for the governing party.