Juno News - August 23, 2022


Will the mandates return？ (ft. Dr. Kevin Bardosh)


Episode Stats

Length

37 minutes

Words per Minute

180.3705

Word Count

6,728

Sentence Count

7

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 hey everybody welcome back to the show hope you're all enjoying a great summer wherever you are
00:00:21.940 thanks once again for joining me today i'm looking at a very important question that
00:00:27.620 isn't being dealt with in a serious way in the mainstream media space whatever you may think
00:00:33.820 of covid19 restrictions such as mask mandates vaccine mandates and lockdowns in particular
00:00:40.700 the defenders of these public health measures claimed that they were a necessary tool to combat
00:00:47.000 the pandemic but those defenders often neglect whether willfully or not the costly and damaging
00:00:53.380 negative effects these public health measures had on us and those negative effects if they're large
00:01:00.360 enough could even outweigh the benefits the point is we won't know until we look at both sides of the
00:01:06.740 ledger and not pretend that lockdowns had only a good side to them this is to say nothing of the
00:01:12.680 fact that several of these policies themselves had a dubious rationale at best in some cases
00:01:19.060 for example as many of you know on august 2nd i broke a big story for common sense
00:01:25.140 that the federal mandate vaccine mandate for travel had no compelling scientific rationale
00:01:32.240 and whatever scientific rationale there was how is it that it applied to canadians and everybody else
00:01:39.760 except not to unvaccinated ukrainians arriving in canada after the war i understand why canada might
00:01:46.700 want to be compassionate towards those fleeing a war zone but it's hard to believe that the virus
00:01:53.180 understood this difference and then again where was the compassion to the millions of canadians who
00:01:58.380 couldn't travel to meet their loved ones and were essentially prisoners uh as soon as the federal
00:02:04.300 vaccine mandates came into effect let's also remind ourselves that these mandates haven't been trashed
00:02:10.700 uh they've only been suspended and can be brought back in at the drop of a hat today's guest is
00:02:16.460 ideally situated to talk about the harmful effects of covet 19 vaccine policies that both federal and
00:02:22.380 provincial governments are happy to sweep under the rug kevin bardosh is an applied medical
00:02:28.140 anthropologist and implementation scientist focused on using social science and community engagement to
00:02:34.620 improve public health delivery and policy he's affiliate assistant professor at the university of
00:02:41.100 washington he was a lead author in an academic paper in british medical journal global health
00:02:47.340 it's a peer-reviewed scientific journal and the study is titled the unintended consequences of
00:02:53.500 covet 19 vaccine policy why mandates passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good
00:03:00.540 the title of the paper pretty much gives us a sense of where kevin and co-authors come down on the issue
00:03:07.180 so without any further delay let's get started all right so um kevin welcome to the show um i
00:03:14.540 was hoping that we could chat about this very important paper that uh you and your co-authors
00:03:19.980 published in the british medical journal global health um you argue in the paper that contrary to
00:03:28.460 the policy boosters who always point to the upsides of vaccine mandates um passports lockdowns
00:03:37.340 etc you point to what you call the quote counterproductive and damaging effects on public health
00:03:43.820 of covet 19 vaccine policies in particular which you say not only infringe on civil liberties but can
00:03:49.580 result in societal polarization and worsen mistrust in government among other things
00:03:55.180 um could you tell me what led you and your co-authors to do this research in the first place did you
00:04:02.380 see the need to have um a corrective uh to the official narrative that focuses almost exclusively
00:04:09.660 on the upsides of covet 19 policies and i would argue that it pays short shrift to its harmful effects
00:04:17.740 absolutely i think there are lots of different motivations and i can't speak for all of my co-authors
00:04:21.900 but um from my side on the one hand it was uh just seeing a lack of debate about this issue and when
00:04:29.500 i say that i mean if you think back to pre-pandemic 2019 if you were to gather a bunch of global health
00:04:35.020 experts together and give them a scenario which was what took place in 2020 and 2021 most of them would
00:04:41.260 probably not advise the mandates and the man and the lockdown approaches that we ended up taking because
00:04:47.020 they were not standard seen as standard acceptable policy response um once we went down that road of
00:04:54.060 locking down with china italy and the us it became very difficult for political leaders to step back
00:04:59.020 and say no we're not going to do that we're going to do something different um you had policy lock-in
00:05:03.260 around lockdowns um so on the one hand we wanted we just saw a lack of critical debate um people were also
00:05:09.900 they might have had skeptical views but they felt unable to come forward and express those because of
00:05:14.860 reputational damage etc so um we felt like a responsibility to articulate that um in a
00:05:21.180 scholarly way and in a way that um would challenge people and offer a space to critically evaluate
00:05:27.820 these these mandates and sort of policy culture around them um also secondly uh just in my own
00:05:34.380 social network seeing people um kind of freaking out in different ways experiencing the mandates in in
00:05:40.940 in in polar opposite ways so people saying i'm not going to go around unvaccinated people you're not
00:05:45.660 welcome to come to my christmas party even though i'm a christian for example um and then other people
00:05:51.340 ending up in psych wards because they were so negatively impacted by the the sort of uh inspection
00:05:57.740 of the motivation of what was taking place right and i'm reticent to use the word conspiracy theories
00:06:03.180 there um but alternative power theories around why governments would mandate a product like that
00:06:09.100 at that time uh and in that particular way given concerns um that predate the pandemic about the
00:06:15.340 direction of uh of government um and this sort of increase of bureaucratic um sort of yeah culture
00:06:22.940 around uh around health and around um just general service delivery so um yeah i've seen it in my own
00:06:30.540 social network the negative impacts and i think we've also seen it in canada and the irony is this paper
00:06:35.500 was written before the freedom convoy uh started so clearly we were feeling the social pulse of the
00:06:41.740 time in canada but then also elsewhere as you know these these protests were global in scope yeah
00:06:47.260 they were covered in a very specific framing in the media which i disagree with um and i think you do
00:06:52.940 as well so just trying to add nuance you know i think one thing here is in this perpetual cycle of
00:07:00.300 the death what i call the death of nuance so we're hoping to add to that debate um and i think we've
00:07:05.740 we've succeeded in in some degree i think so because you you marshal a lot of uh data and facts and you
00:07:12.140 point to uh you know you cite lots of studies uh to to you know to support uh the the you know your
00:07:20.140 your study um you know i just i'm always intrigued you know how is it that everybody just was you know
00:07:26.140 there was so little dissent is especially from the media you know or from our um and anybody who
00:07:33.740 dissented i think any scientist a doctor epidemiologist who said hey wait a minute this is not making any
00:07:39.820 sense i don't i think we're going in in the wrong direction here when it comes to school closures when
00:07:44.940 it comes to things like vaccine mandates uh and anybody who said that was uh you know shouted out of
00:07:51.580 the room was seen as it was smeared and called a conspiracy theorist uh not a real doctor uh and
00:07:59.260 and and and it was incredibly damaging i think and in in a sense uh created this culture of fear uh
00:08:06.220 that uh a lot of us you know and i've explained this in a recent national post column um you know i
00:08:11.580 consider myself to be fairly rational minded and you know i'm not someone who's prone to hysteria and panic
00:08:16.780 but i have to say that you know at some level some of that fear even got to me and uh and you know
00:08:23.420 i remember searching um for anything at that time you know is there anybody who says who's who's pointing
00:08:29.980 to uh the opposite and saying you know these these intuitively i knew that these policies were very
00:08:36.860 damaging it made no sense to me why you would cordon off park benches um you know it just or where the
00:08:45.420 you know the top doctor in my city of ottawa uh said that no more than 20 people could be on a hiking
00:08:51.660 trail in the middle of winter um so and we were told outdoors is one of the safest places you can be
00:08:58.380 uh and but but uh but outdoors also became an issue you couldn't be outdoors so essentially you know our
00:09:05.820 movements were being restricted and uh and you know and i'm very grateful for you know your contribution
00:09:12.300 you and your co-authors for um for um you know for coming out with this because you know now i
00:09:17.820 hopefully more people are starting to realize the damaging effects of these uh policies and starting
00:09:23.900 to um question because you know we are not quite done there's no guarantee that these policies are not
00:09:29.020 going to return right i mean we've we at least here in canada with the vaccine mandates even though
00:09:34.380 they've been uh you know they've been suspended for now they could be brought back at the drop of a hat
00:09:40.380 and so there's no guarantee and i hope that more you know more people look at the study and look at
00:09:45.020 the harmful effects uh these policies have had on us um and and you know whether it was all worth it
00:09:52.700 than worth it in the end do you think that these policies were worth it in the end so it's really
00:09:57.500 difficult to make general statements obviously right like we're dealing with my own work crosses
00:10:02.860 lots of different countries different social groups etc so it's i'm somewhat reticent to make
00:10:08.540 general claims but i would say on the whole i think that we took a wrong approach here
00:10:12.700 and just to focus on the fear as as an example right yeah fear is incredibly stressful it has all
00:10:19.340 sorts of psychosocial and physiological effects and when you ramp up fear for so long which the media
00:10:25.500 did i mean looking just at the the journalistic stories there was a study looking journalism in the
00:10:31.020 u.s that found like 90 plus percent of media coverage was negative versus european countries where it
00:10:36.940 was like 40 or 50 so just the tone of media has a huge effect on the national psyche um i do think
00:10:43.820 that a lot of the policies that we implemented will be found and are currently seen should be seen as
00:10:49.180 causing more societal harm than benefit school closures are one of them like you said outdoor uh
00:10:54.860 mandates right um in in in ontario from april to june of 2021 you had stay-at-home orders right which
00:11:01.820 were effectively limiting the ability to go outside and gather and that was over a year into the
00:11:06.940 pandemic and i actually just finished a scoping review of the evidence on mental health in canada
00:11:13.900 for the pandemic and it's really quite striking i mean there is no study that's saying oh yeah people
00:11:19.260 are okay all the studies unanimously say um mental health of people suffered drastically anxiety depression
00:11:26.700 psychiatric conditions um and they also increased over time so by the time you get into 2021 they're
00:11:32.780 worse than when they were in may of 2020 right so was it reasonable to be uh locking people down
00:11:40.060 when you were already uh vaccinating the most vulnerable population group that's very puzzling
00:11:46.220 because i mean this is a question that i wanted to ask you uh um and i asked this to everybody uh any
00:11:51.980 expert why is it that we panicked so much in the uh we we panicked so much after after vaccination was
00:11:59.260 widespread uh and the variants were becoming milder and milder what what explains that panic uh uh we
00:12:06.700 were i yeah no that's so that's a fascinating question that i have you know scrawly notes everywhere
00:12:12.780 about different thoughts yeah and i think my conclusion would be on the one hand when you start with a
00:12:18.300 fear-based message it's really hard to backtrack right i mean we we heard very little empowering messages
00:12:24.940 we also had what i call a covetization of the world everything was seen through the prism of
00:12:30.620 covid cases covid deaths fear of covid the new social norms around social distancing and physical
00:12:36.300 distancing or whatever you want to call it and we became hyper obsessed with that and the best
00:12:41.340 sort of analog that i like to draw on um is the 9 11 attacks and i happen to have moved from
00:12:47.740 montreal to boston a few months right before 9 11. um and so i witnessed that as a as a canadian in a
00:12:54.700 foreign country and i was astounded at how the americans that just the the national psyche became
00:13:00.140 completely overwhelmed with this vision of we need we need retaliation and the narrative very narrow in
00:13:06.700 fact um howard zinn the famous uh leftist progressive historian came to my high school um a few weeks
00:13:14.380 after and his his message was questioning the government's response to this is not anti-american
00:13:20.700 right now that was that was the the flavor and if you remember new york times everyone was saying you
00:13:24.940 know they were they were doing the the drum beat to war war and people like chris hedges were completely
00:13:31.580 uh marginalized for their skepticism about the war and it took many years for the for the national
00:13:37.580 conversation to admit hey this is this is not this was a this is a wrong decision we had just more um
00:13:43.340 just war theory that emerged out of the ethics departments similar to the ethical discussion
00:13:48.060 around mandates i would i think there's parallels between that yeah um and then sort of um lastly the
00:13:54.540 the great iron or the tragic irony is that um the afghan pullout debacle was occurring as the pandemic was
00:14:02.060 still um still uh rolling on yeah we saw this sort of very stark reminder of the the power of empire or the
00:14:10.620 being or the weakness of empire being shown in the frivolity of it as we're still arguing about masking
00:14:16.460 five-year-olds in new york city let's say yeah yeah i just think there's a lot of parallels there um
00:14:21.180 absolutely yeah and so the the second concept is this notion of safetism with which the the moral psychologist
00:14:27.180 jonathan hyde has talked a lot about which has been in the last 20 years as we've become a culture of
00:14:32.540 affluence we we we put safety as the sort of highest moral value a virtue in and of itself so everything
00:14:40.140 is about making sure everyone is safe um and i think what we've seen here is that there is a risk
00:14:45.740 to that perpetual obsession with safety um and and a miscalculation of risk also so like for myself
00:14:54.060 um i i was very alarmed at what was going on in china very early on uh i knew about this you know
00:15:00.460 as the first sort of whispers were occurring my kids were masked in january um we were you know
00:15:06.780 disinfecting uh our grocery groceries in january before anybody was doing anything um and then as i
00:15:14.460 learned about the age distribution and thinking okay we're healthy people our risk profile completely
00:15:20.780 dropped off sort of like may 2020 and also anyhow i won't get into all the nuances of our family
00:15:26.620 situation but yeah and you know uh i think that that was an appropriate response for my particular
00:15:32.700 age group and the way that i interact with people so yeah yeah so there was this uh one size fits all
00:15:40.460 approach to everybody right so we knew right from the get-go that um that the most vulnerable had to be
00:15:46.940 protected so people in long-term care homes retirement homes the elderly those who are
00:15:51.660 immunocompromised but why would say you know you know a teenager someone in their 20s or the 30s or
00:15:59.580 even 40s for that matter very healthy um you know why is it that we were also subject to the same measures
00:16:07.260 uh and that is something that i didn't understand as well you know very early on and and as you say you
00:16:13.100 know i i made my own risk assessment you know i possibly had covid very early on back in january
00:16:19.580 2020 um and uh and then i was triple vaccinated and and then i got omicron and then i still you know
00:16:29.500 was worried that i was unmasked in a crowded space and i was thinking to myself well where's the science
00:16:34.460 here the science says that i have all of these antibodies uh and what am i so afraid of and it just
00:16:41.340 made no sense and at that point i think you know everybody comes to this decision and they're
00:16:45.820 you know at their own pace and for me it took it took a while that i had ups and downs but i came
00:16:51.500 to the same conclusion that's it i'm done uh being fearful and i just want to move on with my life and
00:16:57.420 uh whatever happens happens you know and i'm you know i i accept that responsibility but
00:17:03.100 so far so good uh is all i can say but um but go yeah but going back to your paper kevin so you know in
00:17:09.740 in your paper you break down the potential unintended uh harmful consequences of covet 19
00:17:15.500 policies um into four categories uh which you describe as one behavioral psychology uh political
00:17:22.780 and legal effects socioeconomics and integrity of science and public health um would you like to
00:17:30.220 tell me how you narrowed down your analysis to these four areas um and why you believe these are
00:17:35.900 key to understanding the harmful effects of mandates or other public health measures yeah i
00:17:41.580 mean as a as a applied medical anthropologist we use you know uh in thematic analysis we try to
00:17:48.540 make sense of the complexity of social life by grouping things into major themes so that's
00:17:53.180 effectively what we did here just looking at the literature so doing a literature review
00:17:57.740 and then reading basically as much as we could about about this particular topic in different
00:18:01.900 countries and then also i think twitter was also a fabulous resource just to understand people's
00:18:06.780 responses and their opinions about about this particular topic um so and it's pretty standard
00:18:12.220 also if you think about the effects of a policy intervention these are pretty standard areas that
00:18:16.620 you would talk about um so that's that's how we determine the the structure of it um and uh yeah i mean
00:18:25.020 uh yeah yeah so um and and you know and your paper also has these um incredible quotes from major world
00:18:36.380 leaders including our own justin trudeau uh and i and i urge everybody to take a look at this table uh
00:18:42.780 table two of the paper uh these are major world leaders uh who are essentially scapegoating and
00:18:48.540 stigmatizing their own people uh who happen to be unvaccinated uh macron for example in france says
00:18:54.940 he wanted to piss off the small minority of the unvaccinated even more than before and went so
00:19:00.940 far as to claim that someone irresponsible in his opinion is not even a citizen and of course we know
00:19:06.860 what uh our prime minister justin trudeau uh when he when he infamously said uh he tarred all
00:19:13.660 of the unvaccinated as a group of misogynists and racists uh asking do we uh tolerate these people
00:19:20.700 um i mean this this this feels like it's right out of the 1930s um and uh so thank you for
00:19:27.260 assembling these incredibly disturbing quotes all in one place uh but why do you think that these
00:19:32.780 world leaders made these outrageous claims uh to marginalize and stigmatize their own uh citizens
00:19:39.260 uh do you think they genuinely believe this or was this a political tactic uh to perhaps increase
00:19:45.180 their power and authority or you know or in or in this case in canada in canada's case serve as a
00:19:52.540 wedge issue um as i recently argued in the case of uh trudeau's uh uh federal uh vaccine mandate for
00:20:00.140 travel which was conveniently announced um two days before uh last fall's election yeah it was a great
00:20:07.500 questions so on the one hand it depends on what the information that they had available at the time was
00:20:12.780 right i mean if you see if you if you thought that the vaccine would actually end the pandemic which
00:20:17.260 is what we were told right if you go back to mid 2021 that was the rhetoric this is 97 effective
00:20:22.540 and we are going to end the pandemic if everyone gets vaccinated um it's clearly was not true it was
00:20:28.700 it was it was obvious at the time if you were somebody who specialized in vaccinations and global
00:20:34.220 health you could understand that this was going to be and probably a non-durable vaccine there was data
00:20:39.020 out of israel and the uk in you know early to mid 2021 showing that the vaccines were not durable and
00:20:45.420 sense that they would stop transmission completely um etc so it depends on what their scientific advice
00:20:51.980 was um i would also say that there's just this sort of very narrow um uh view of vaccination as a totem
00:21:00.060 as something that's morally good and can't be questioned it's sort of a standard uh notion that vaccines are
00:21:07.660 always safe no matter what and everyone should get vaccinated what's your problem why aren't you
00:21:11.180 vaccinated so it's seen as it's almost like intelligence test um and i would argue that that's
00:21:16.220 that's also a fallacious concept um it erodes people's individual uh decision making agency um
00:21:24.940 so i mean one astounding thing about all this is the sort of complete denial of prior infection and
00:21:30.380 in fact if you go back and you there were papers pre-vaccine talking about the ethics of immunity
00:21:35.420 passport so if somebody had covid should they be given freedoms that the rest of us don't have
00:21:40.380 because they have this prior infection sort of immunity and that was seen as as a bad idea because
00:21:46.460 it would promote people to go and get infected so i think that that was also part of this logic was
00:21:51.100 well if we allow prior infection to be given equal status people who don't want to get vaccinated are
00:21:56.060 all going to go get infected at these covid parties um so you can see again this sort of um
00:22:01.020 uh sort of parental or or very kind of condescending perspective of the of our of our government on
00:22:08.460 citizens like you can't make decisions for yourself so we're gonna tell you yeah very paternalistic yeah
00:22:16.380 yeah um yeah um and and in exactly but in a sense what has ended up happening now
00:22:23.260 with the with with the current approach is that with vaccination uh essentially all of these countries
00:22:28.380 are like yeah i mean i think at this point you might as well get infected um and uh yeah and and
00:22:38.620 exactly and why do you think that they uh we they they they downplayed um something as old as time
00:22:45.900 itself which is natural immunity why is it that they um um you know double down on vaccination in such a
00:22:53.020 big way and just completely ignored the fact that you could recover from covet 19 and you
00:22:58.220 had these antibodies and now you have studies coming out saying that these antibodies are
00:23:02.620 in some in in some cases just as good as getting vaccinated um and and if you're vaccinated and
00:23:09.500 recovered that's even better perhaps i i don't know but the point is that there's a slow recognition
00:23:15.180 happening right now um that natural immunity does play a role but why did we just initially just ignore
00:23:21.100 it what do you think happened there so i think there's the scientific data about the vaccine and
00:23:25.660 you know we need to be give people some of the benefit of the doubt or be a little bit
00:23:30.060 um not compassionate but understanding in the sense that this was a very stressful emergency a
00:23:34.940 lot of people died from covid a lot of people suffered because of the consequences and the
00:23:38.860 restrictions and i do think i i don't want to just create this increased polarization of the conversation
00:23:46.060 um but there's also a need to take stock of what happened so that it doesn't happen again if you go and
00:23:50.940 read bill gates his recent book on pandemics he basically lays out this plan that if there's
00:23:54.780 another respiratory pandemic or whatever we need to lock down for six months while the pharmaceutical
00:23:59.420 companies and the government creates a vaccine and up again so this idea uh this is going to be now in
00:24:06.060 the rule book going forward and that's that really needs to be questioned in my opinion um so what you know
00:24:12.700 what data were they looking at um second of all would be um just the the the the um i just lost my
00:24:21.420 train of thought for the second oh right this increase of bureaucratization so a vaccine is something
00:24:25.820 that you can standardize in the sense of okay how many people are vaccinated 60 70 blah blah blah you can
00:24:32.140 you can easily sort of monitor it you can easily track it so i think that that's one of the things
00:24:38.460 whereas prior infection it's almost like a natural thing um it's unruly uh how do we know if somebody
00:24:44.860 was really infected at what time what antibody level do they have there was all this conversation
00:24:49.740 about about this so i would say that on one hand it reflects this bureaucratic culture in government
00:24:55.420 um on this on the third this third kind of thing and you know to be controversial here but this is
00:25:00.380 an obvious thing the pharmaceutical industry made a huge amount of money 100 billion dollars i mean
00:25:08.380 this is the same pharmaceutical industry that pre-pandemic a lot of people who were very forceful
00:25:14.460 about the mandates would be skeptical saying exactly crisis look at mental health uh conditions where we
00:25:21.260 just drug everyone up with prosem oh the pharmaceutical industry you know is is is manipulating the trial data
00:25:28.380 and yet when some when a pandemic happens no no you can't question the pharmaceutical industry
00:25:33.260 and yet the revolving door between government and pharmaceutical industry is actually increasing
00:25:37.580 with time it's not decreasing uh and you know for example the freedom of information act that this
00:25:43.420 ngo in the u.s um you know initiated pfizer and the fda tried to stop it um and and tried to uh
00:25:51.660 basically argue that it would take them 75 years to release all of the internal communications between
00:25:56.460 pfizer and pfizer and the fda so take off your preconceptions about the pandemic and just put
00:26:01.260 on that hat for a second i think that that needs to be looked at a lot more carefully um you know this
00:26:07.420 whole notion of of 97 effective at transmission it seems like we were also very very hopeful people
00:26:13.980 were hoping that this would stop you know it would be this sort of okay now we can go back to normal
00:26:18.620 everyone's vaccinated so there was this massive sort of social hope um that unfortunately didn't quite
00:26:25.020 pan out in the way that that it did um yeah yeah yeah so you know so that that was you know that
00:26:32.060 leads to my next question perfectly which is you know one of the points you make in the paper uh which
00:26:37.260 i thought was very striking and salient was you know the lack of transparency about the vaccines
00:26:43.340 themselves uh for example pharmaceutical companies and governments you know don't release haven't released
00:26:49.660 all of the relevant data um it fosters suspicions and fuels conspiracy theories uh which could be
00:26:56.540 you know easily diffused if the data were simply made public i think uh and you know forgive me for
00:27:02.220 being cynical here but i feel like one obvious reason for not releasing such data is that it doesn't
00:27:07.180 support the idea that the vaccines were the greatest thing since sliced bread and um and as we've seen
00:27:13.820 governments around the world um you know including canada they keep watering down the claims and this
00:27:19.820 is a point that you make in the paper as well originally we were told getting double jab would
00:27:24.780 be the route to return to normalcy then we were told getting a booster would reduce the seriousness of
00:27:29.660 symptoms and um and even though vaccination was supposed to prevent you from getting infected
00:27:35.100 now we're told it's to help our collapsing healthcare system which was already collapsing even before
00:27:39.500 the pandemic um and uh in elderly homes exactly exactly these are not new issues uh but what do you
00:27:48.940 what do you make of this constantly shifting goalposts and what you know and and and what and how does it
00:27:54.780 affect the future uh of public health policy especially in canada will you know people trust the government
00:28:02.220 uh going forward if they say you must do xyz in the interest of public health and your own public safety
00:28:08.460 uh when the promises of these mandates of these covet 19 restrictions have run hollow uh on so many
00:28:15.980 occasions yeah so so two things one is in the paper we make the argument that when you mandate a vaccine
00:28:22.540 you should be held to a higher standard of transparency uh than if you don't mandate it so if you know the
00:28:29.580 the the the vaccine efficacy is not as effective over time if you didn't mandate it you're going to
00:28:34.860 maintain population trust more than if you mandate a vaccine and it doesn't turn out quite in the
00:28:39.260 way that you were saying it which is what what kind of is taking place or has taken place here
00:28:43.580 number two is it really depends on whether the population the citizens of the country really care
00:28:48.860 right like how many canadians still think that lockdowns were a wonderful intervention that was
00:28:54.300 necessary how many of them think that vaccine mandates were absolutely necessary and and think that you
00:28:59.740 know people who were protesting against them were sort of far right trump conspirators that are related
00:29:05.980 to qnon i the data you know is there's not a lot of data out there yes i think that it's it's certainly
00:29:12.220 shifted over time there's a lot less people that are supportive of that as they become infected
00:29:16.060 themselves and sort of experience different things in their own social networks um so but i i think that
00:29:23.260 we are going to see a mass we already have seen a massive backlash against trust in public health
00:29:28.780 and in government because of the way that this has been handled um and for example uh um there's no to
00:29:36.060 my knowledge there is no cost benefit of analysis of boosters for people under 40 from the u.s with
00:29:42.300 omicron or even delta going forward so the the u.s cdc and fda and whatnot are advocating for you know 20
00:29:50.540 10 year olds 20 year olds 30 year olds 39 year olds to get boosted but they don't actually have like
00:29:56.140 an age-based harm benefit uh analysis uh for that age group and so um another paper that we have
00:30:04.140 hopefully coming out soon um we offer the first risk benefit analysis in that group okay i won't get
00:30:09.900 into the the results but then we make we pivot and we make five ethical arguments against booster
00:30:14.700 mandates um and um you know some of those uh include like if you don't have a clear benefit
00:30:21.820 you shouldn't mandate a vaccine right so like there's a trustworthiness issue there you're
00:30:25.980 damaging trust in regulators and in public health authorities if it's not clear um second of all if
00:30:31.900 you don't have a vaccine injury compensation program that is functional and that's the case in the u.s
00:30:37.180 and i would say even canada these people you know rare rare cases sure i'll use the word rare
00:30:43.340 um you know people have been injured from the vaccine we acknowledge that in in public health
00:30:47.660 that all vaccines have some side effects and those people have not been compensated and they've
00:30:51.580 actually had horrible experiences many of them through the bureaucratic byzantine maze of seeking
00:30:56.700 compensation so if you don't have a functioning compensation thing you're asking people to
00:31:00.540 part to mandating people to participate in something and you're not providing compensation
00:31:04.060 that's unethical um and then we look at also for for under 40 you know a lot of schools and
00:31:09.980 universities are mandating boosters so individuals who have prior infection maybe they're concerned
00:31:14.620 about myocarditis whatever they have you know humans are complicated we have all sorts of reasons
00:31:19.020 why we do something we don't do it um you're effectively taking away their ability to go to school
00:31:24.700 to keep a job etc and um you know this late in the game it doesn't really make sense when so many
00:31:30.700 people have already been infected um it's yeah it's it's quite surprising to me that booster mandates
00:31:37.660 are still on the table at this point yeah but do you see a shift happening at all anywhere um um
00:31:43.980 whether it's in the us or canada a shift uh from our public health officials um a recognition that
00:31:51.020 you know public trust has been lost to some extent to a large extent and that hey you know maybe we need
00:31:57.500 to step back a little bit and rethink this uh and not have this top-down uh technocratic approach to
00:32:04.620 public health and uh do you do you see that happening at all i mean absolutely it's happening
00:32:11.500 it's been happening for for over a year now i think when people felt like they could voice dissent
00:32:16.620 and not be classified as deviants that were you know killing grandma or whatnot um i don't know where
00:32:23.900 we go from here it's hard for me to get a sense of the pulse of my colleagues that are outside of the
00:32:30.140 skeptical frame that i that i am very much in um and i am i am concerned um and i think as a as a
00:32:39.580 social scientist i'm interested to stay close to what what research data is showing and um you know
00:32:45.500 i am open-minded i'm not dogmatic or i'm not an ideologue here um but there's going to need to be a
00:32:52.140 pivot and to go back to the 9 11 example right how long did that take for the for the foreign policy
00:32:57.740 establishment in the united states to shift their narrative around foreign interventions in
00:33:03.580 afghanistan iraq north africa et cetera i mean it took decades and even now we're still dealing with
00:33:09.820 uh the the debt from those decisions and the loss of the loss of government trust i mean
00:33:16.380 you know uh 9 11 and and the wars in the middle east were predicated on phony information phony
00:33:22.780 intelligence in many you know and and they had devastating consequences for people's lives
00:33:28.300 yeah um so again i think that there this is going to be a process and i think i see it as as part of
00:33:34.220 my role is to just push people and say hey look this was was this really a good decision was this really
00:33:40.380 the way that we want to do things and look at the consequences yeah do you do you think that uh
00:33:45.740 do you do you envision um at some point some of these measures coming back um maybe sometime in
00:33:52.060 the fall do you think that's going to happen or we are or do you think that we're basically done with
00:33:56.860 lockdowns and mandates i don't i don't know i mean covet is you know it's not a nice virus it can be
00:34:04.220 quite um devastating for people and it's we're getting it we're going to be getting it you know going
00:34:10.620 forward into the future and so i am i i i'm not an expert in the long coveted literature i'm i mean
00:34:16.780 i am concerned about it um um and it's yeah it's going to be a difficult balance um of what we do
00:34:24.140 going forward and i don't have any yeah i haven't spent uh the time to sort of put my head together
00:34:29.340 and really think about what policies should be going we should implement going forward but it does
00:34:34.540 seem like most um school districts are um you know they're advocating against mass mandates
00:34:40.860 against closures even in massachusetts recently which was you know had very um maximalist approaches
00:34:46.620 for a while the cdc's new guidelines are certainly um a step in the right direction um but then we're
00:34:53.580 going to face a situation where if we just have nothing we have no control right then we need to sort
00:34:59.020 of flip the narrative and say okay how can we support reductions of covid mortality and morbidity
00:35:05.100 yeah right we don't want to just allow people to sort of suffer and and die from from a virus if we
00:35:11.420 can prevent it um so i think we're going to have to have a rethink and obviously ventilation plays a
00:35:17.180 good role there um paid sick leave a great idea um early treatment with you know anti-inflammatories
00:35:26.620 etc um and and hope right that's one of the most perplexing things about this whole pandemic is
00:35:32.460 we were told shut yourself in your house um don't go and gather with people and if you get sick
00:35:37.900 stay home don't do anything until you can't breathe and then go to the emergency room i mean
00:35:43.420 what kind of health policy is that i mean even so i i say i say that sometimes i think like with the
00:35:48.700 whole ivermectin debate even if ivermectin is completely not effective there's still a placebo effect
00:35:55.580 involved and right of doctors saying no we've got something that can help you so i mean yeah
00:36:03.740 yeah no it's been i think i will look back on this time i mean i think we're already kind of doing that
00:36:09.580 you know just how ridiculous some of these discussions were uh and how many of us went along
00:36:15.100 with it um you know and and but at least i think some of us are waking up and that's a good sign
00:36:21.820 uh but uh but hey uh kevin uh you know that brings us uh to the end of this uh discussion but uh you
00:36:28.140 know it was great having you on the show um you know of course we're just scratching the surface here
00:36:33.020 um so i hope you'll be back on the show again soon but hopefully not to discuss the next set of
00:36:38.540 mandates that come come come down from the government so i really appreciate you taking
00:36:44.220 the time to chat with me and also to you to you and your colleagues for uh i think uh you know
00:36:49.740 writing you know coming up with the study which is a very important uh um corrective to the official
00:36:55.580 narrative that uh lockdowns were uh amazing for all of us and they did all of these great things so
00:37:01.420 thanks for being on the show kevin my pleasure thanks for having me okay thank you