Rebel News Podcast - April 03, 2020


Canadian unemployment hits 16% — but as the latest coronavirus report from NYC reveals, it doesn't have to be that way

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Lauren Gunter David Menzies Donald Trump Patty Hajdu Theresa Tam Patty Haydew Doug Ford COVID-19 Sheila Gunn-Reed Vladimir Putin Ken Paxton John Tory Lyran Chu Panadol Chris Paul Tsai
Did the Chinese government cause the Coronavirus pandemic？ Here's what two Chinese government professors say. Trump calls it a “game changer” — is hydroxychloroquine a cure for Coronavirus？

Episode Stats


Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

165.47

Word count

6,790

Sentence count

523

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Unemployment in Canada hits 16%, the highest level since the depths of the Great Depression in 1933. Over 2.1 million people have been laid off in the past 2 weeks, and the number is on track to hit 3.2 million by the end of the month.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, my rebels. Today, I take you through a detailed report from New York City on the death
00:00:07.360 toll in that city, which is over a thousand people. But there's some fascinating things.
00:00:13.820 A single casualty under the age of 18, and he had an existing precondition. I'll go through
00:00:22.300 the demographics of who's dying. And of course, it's an unhappy business and we don't want anyone 1.00
00:00:27.100 to die. But the demographics of who dies and who doesn't is so striking. Maybe we can use that 1.00
00:00:34.920 information on how to fight the virus and let the rest of us go free. I'll take you through that
00:00:41.040 shortly. Before I do, please consider becoming a Rebel News Plus subscriber, especially when I
00:00:48.560 take you through that New York City chart. It really helps to see the chart with your eyes.
00:00:53.820 I'll do my best to describe it. But Rebel News Plus gets you the visual, the video version,
00:01:01.760 as well as Sheila Gunn-Reed's show and David Menzies' show. And it's eight bucks a month.
00:01:06.260 Not a bad way to pass the time in quarantine. All right, here's today's podcast.
00:01:10.640 Tonight, Canadian unemployment hit 16%, the highest level since 1933. But can I show you something
00:01:32.980 interesting out of New York City? It's April 2nd, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:37.380 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:43.180 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:47.240 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody
00:01:52.120 right to do so.
00:01:58.720 Incredible, shocking, terrible news today. Over the past two weeks, 2.1 million people have
00:02:04.180 been laid off in Canada. 2.1 million. A week ago, the number was 929,000 laid off. So this is the
00:02:12.200 same amount again, actually a little bit worse. And I have to say, there's no reason to believe it
00:02:16.680 won't be the same again next week. Another million. Yesterday was probably the last day a lot of these
00:02:22.100 folks will be able to pay their rent or mortgage on the first of the month. Not a lot of people have
00:02:27.200 a lot of savings. The economy was already slowing down before the pandemic. I haven't seen the official
00:02:32.860 math yet, but Canada's labor force is about 20 million people. Just a touch higher than that.
00:02:38.000 So that's people who work or want to work. That's what the labor force is. Obviously, it doesn't
00:02:42.460 include kids, retired people, moms or dads who stay home. So there's 20 million workers. Until
00:02:49.900 February, 1.1 million of them were unemployed. That means they were looking for work but couldn't find
00:02:54.960 it. That's a pretty low 5.6%. But obviously, it gets worse in certain regions. Alberta had it worse,
00:03:00.740 for example. So 1.1 million unemployed a month ago. Now it's 1.1 million plus 2.1 million new
00:03:09.280 unemployed. That's 3.2 million out of work, out of 20 million workers. By my math, that's 16%
00:03:17.060 unemployment. So we just almost exactly tripled our unemployment for 5.6% to 16% in just a month.
00:03:27.300 We used... So here's a historical study I found by Statistics Canada of unemployment rates going back
00:03:36.120 all the way in history to 1920. Sorry, this is low resolution, but I wanted to use this because it's
00:03:41.060 from StatsCan, so it's authoritative. You can see that the last time unemployment was this high
00:03:46.520 was in 1933. In fact, in 1933, that was the year of the highest unemployment in Canadian history,
00:03:53.400 19.3% at the absolute depth of the Depression. I'm sorry to be pessimistic, but do you doubt
00:04:00.360 that we'll exceed that historical number before the pandemic is done? 19.3%? We're almost there.
00:04:07.200 And what will it be like, that high unemployment, after a week, a month, God forbid, six months? Do you
00:04:13.380 think that the thousands of little businesses and companies that are shutting down now, going broke
00:04:18.080 now, will simply just start right back up again on command? And it's a domino effect. Airlines, hotels,
00:04:24.200 the whole tour industry, travel industry, hospitality industry, retail industry, so many things are wiped
00:04:30.600 down. So how will that go? So far in Canada, there have been 134 deaths from the virus, and that's a
00:04:39.600 tragedy. But you put 3 million, 4 million, God forbid, 5 million men out of work, and you put
00:04:45.220 their families in crisis and put people in poverty, I promise you there will be more deaths just from
00:04:51.220 suicide alone, let alone economic crimes of desperation, let alone just the sickness that
00:04:58.220 goes up when people are poor, too poor to eat right, too poor to buy medicine. And what are our leaders
00:05:03.120 doing? They don't know what to do, is what? In the United Kingdom, police have deployed drones
00:05:09.160 to shame people who were going for hikes in the wilderness in groups of two. So they're obviously
00:05:13.800 husband and wife, they obviously live together. So they're not going to spread the virus, they're
00:05:18.720 already living together, they're not going to catch the virus out there in the wilderness or give it to
00:05:22.840 anyone. Why are the police doing that? Well, because maybe they don't know what to do, they just want to
00:05:27.060 make sure they're doing something, or look at this clip.
00:05:29.060 You'll get a fine, and if you can't prove who you are, you'll get arrested. Take right the fine, we're going to drive.
00:05:34.060 All right? So simple fact is, you can drive this car home because you're the driver. The rest of the passengers
00:05:40.060 have to walk to wherever they want to go to, that's a dispersal. Where your final destination is, is down to you.
00:05:45.060 But you are allowed to be on the street together. But we're in the car now together. It doesn't matter.
00:05:49.060 So you're going to separate more people into the streets. Separately? Away from each other?
00:05:54.060 Why? We're in the car together now. It doesn't make a difference. You're all round us. You've
00:05:59.060 surrounded us with how many police are here? Five? That just doesn't make sense in itself,
00:06:04.060 especially when you juxtapose it with those jam-packed subways and buses in London, if we're
00:06:11.060 talking about the UK. And of course, no one has any masks, because all the masks were stolen by China. 0.96
00:06:17.060 Structured to drop everything and source bulk supplies of essential medical items to ship
00:06:23.060 back to China. A whistleblower from that same company said it was a worldwide fleecing of
00:06:29.060 stock. So in cities and rural towns around Australia, and you remember the shots of those
00:06:34.060 buses in places like Orange and Parks, in an almost military operation, massive numbers
00:06:40.060 of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitizers, gloves and Panadol
00:06:47.060 were stripped from the shelves and shipped to China. They even had the temerity to exhibit
00:06:52.060 the packing on social media. This carried on unabated for two months. Most of these employees
00:06:59.060 would be Australian residents and citizens. But with an overwhelming loyalty to their old communist
00:07:05.060 masters back home. That's from Australia. It's in the United States too. Here in Canada,
00:07:13.060 Trudeau was part of the plan to send all our masks to China. As you know, he just shipped
00:07:17.060 them 16 tons worth. So I guess if you don't have masks, and if you refuse to close the borders,
00:07:24.060 that's another headline from today. Over 150 flights that have come into Canada over the last few weeks
00:07:30.060 have had virus people on them. And we've been showing that every day and the government doesn't
00:07:34.060 care. But what else are you going to do? But police people going for a walk if you're not
00:07:38.060 going to close the borders and you don't know what to do and you don't have masks to do it.
00:07:42.060 Trudeau is still doing that self-hiding thing. For three weeks he's been lounging around at home.
00:07:47.060 Is any other world leader doing that? Here's Vladimir Putin. He's not lounging around at home.
00:07:53.060 Trudeau is working half an hour a day. Trump's working seven days a week as he always does.
00:07:59.060 Talking for an hour a day with the press. Detailed questions and answers. Calling up business people.
00:08:04.060 I guess that's the difference between a lifelong businessman and entrepreneur, Donald Trump,
00:08:09.060 and a mascot, selfie guy, which is what Trudeau is. The other day Trump revealed a graph,
00:08:16.060 a model, a projection. It's a guess. Scientific guess. How many deaths might happen if there was no
00:08:24.060 public health reaction to the virus and how many deaths they were trying to squish that number down
00:08:29.060 to based on their interventions, their quarantine rules, social distancing, clamping down on travel,
00:08:34.060 et cetera. So that's his model, his projections. As they say in computers, garbage in, garbage out.
00:08:40.060 Or to be more polite, a model is only as good as the people who make it and the assumptions they plug into it.
00:08:45.060 We know from global warming models that they're only as good as the person building them.
00:08:52.060 They all do exactly what the people who designed them want them to say.
00:08:56.060 So in global warming, they all predict doom and gloom. None of the climate models ever actually come true.
00:09:00.060 Are we making the same mistake with the pandemic models? Could be.
00:09:04.060 One of the problems is that we don't have any reliable information because China lied and covered up and still is.
00:09:10.060 So was it really, really bad or just no big problem, just a little problem, as China has said?
00:09:16.060 They said they've already solved it.
00:09:19.060 Well, U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed that China lied and covered up perhaps 20-fold.
00:09:25.060 Perhaps they had 20 times the deaths they acknowledged.
00:09:28.060 So you see, relying on China's stats could actually have been a deadly mistake,
00:09:33.060 which is why Taiwan is so lucky to have a built-in distrust of China, their mortal enemy.
00:09:38.060 We, on the other hand, have a prime minister who is so in love with China,
00:09:41.060 he actually sent them all our masks, even though they have two Canadians held hostage.
00:09:45.060 Oh, look at this just today.
00:09:47.060 There's no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified in any way.
00:09:55.060 In fact, if you look at the death rate overall in China, it's much higher than the one we're seeing now.
00:10:00.060 And so we rely on the World Health Organization to do this important work because, of course, we're all in this together.
00:10:08.060 And I think one of the most important things to understand about this pandemic, this global pandemic,
00:10:13.060 is that as long as coronavirus exists in one country and it exists in all of our countries,
00:10:18.060 that we actually have to work collectively as a world now to defeat this virus,
00:10:23.060 to find better ways to treat and then eventually prevent this virus through vaccination or other kinds of methods.
00:10:30.060 And that's going to take everybody working together.
00:10:34.060 Sorry, please let her finish. No. 0.99
00:10:38.060 Ian.
00:10:43.060 So I would say that your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet.
00:10:50.060 And it's important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic
00:10:55.060 if we're actually not willing to work together as a globe.
00:10:58.060 Got it. So trusting China, which would be like trusting the Soviet Union's explanations about Chernobyl in the weeks after the explosion. 0.66
00:11:06.060 Trusting China is sound, but questioning China is a conspiracy theory.
00:11:11.060 You can tell why these people want to censor the internet, Trudeau.
00:11:15.060 Curiously, Trudeau won't release his model like Trump did. Why not?
00:11:19.060 I think people can imagine a range of scenarios that shows everything from
00:11:25.060 everyone gets suddenly better within the next few weeks to this situation just keeps getting worse.
00:11:31.060 And we face a situation like some other countries in the most dire situations have.
00:11:37.060 There is a range out there.
00:11:39.060 And just highlighting that range is not as useful or important as being able to get clearer numbers
00:11:47.060 and clearer analysis of what we are likely to face.
00:11:51.060 Ontario's Doug Ford, who has been universally praised for his handling the crisis even by his nemesis,
00:11:57.060 the Toronto Star, says he will reveal his model.
00:12:00.060 You can disagree with it, you can agree with it, you can try and improve it,
00:12:03.060 but he'll treat you like a grown-up and let you see it.
00:12:06.060 Which also suggests that he himself is thinking about it a lot.
00:12:09.060 He's guided by it, which is more than our childish Trudeau can say.
00:12:13.060 Tomorrow, our top doctors will provide an update on where Ontario was,
00:12:19.060 on where Ontario is, and where Ontario could be.
00:12:24.060 Over the past few weeks, we've shown we will not hesitate to take every step necessary
00:12:30.060 to slow the spread of COVID-19.
00:12:33.060 I don't trust anyone's model that much.
00:12:36.060 Canada's is obviously based on Chinese lies. 1.00
00:12:39.060 Who knows what Doug Ford's is based on, perhaps on worry-wart doctors
00:12:43.060 who want to bring the medical risk to zero, which I guess is their job,
00:12:46.060 but they're not thinking of unintended consequences outside their field of expertise,
00:12:50.060 such as what happens when you have 3, 4, 5 million Canadian men out of work
00:12:55.060 and out of hope for 6 months or 12 years, or as the Great Depression went, 10 years.
00:13:00.060 But look at this. Look at this from New York.
00:13:04.060 This is the number of people who have died from coronavirus in New York City.
00:13:08.060 New York City has some of the best hospitals in the world.
00:13:11.060 And I trust their accuracy and honesty.
00:13:13.060 So this is a tale of tragedy, of course.
00:13:16.060 1,397 people have died as of the moment this was published.
00:13:20.060 But look at those vertical columns.
00:13:22.060 The first is called underlying conditions.
00:13:25.060 The second is called no underlying conditions.
00:13:27.060 And the third is underlying conditions pending.
00:13:30.060 So the first column is people who might have diabetes or cancer or respiratory problems
00:13:34.060 or lung, I don't know, chronic illness of some sort.
00:13:38.060 And they get the coronavirus.
00:13:40.060 The second is people who just get the virus.
00:13:42.060 And the third is, well, they're still waiting for info about those patients.
00:13:46.060 So a grand total of 18 deaths in New York City are the result of people who died only of the virus.
00:13:56.060 18.
00:13:57.060 The rest died of the virus and something else.
00:14:00.060 Or perhaps they died of something else, but they just also had the virus.
00:14:03.060 Now that doesn't lessen the tragedy or the public health urgency of fighting the virus.
00:14:07.060 And it suggests we have to protect people with a pre-existing condition.
00:14:10.060 But it suggests that we can have a different approach to different people based on their risk profile.
00:14:15.060 Let's treat low people differently than we treat low risk people differently than we treat high risk people. 0.55
00:14:21.060 Protect people with underlying conditions.
00:14:24.060 Let the rest of the country go back to work. 0.60
00:14:27.060 Perhaps the most striking fact from New York City's stats is that of age.
00:14:32.060 Only one person under 18 has died in New York and he had an underlying condition.
00:14:38.060 Yet all the schools are closed to everyone.
00:14:42.060 The schools.
00:14:43.060 One minor.
00:14:45.060 That is lightning strikes you rare.
00:14:48.060 There are almost 2 million people who are minors in New York City.
00:14:53.060 Almost 2 million kids.
00:14:55.060 And none of them have died of the virus only.
00:14:58.060 Not one.
00:14:59.060 One kid died of a condition he had already plus the virus.
00:15:04.060 That is less than a 1 in a million chance.
00:15:06.060 I'm sad, but that is not a youthful pandemic.
00:15:11.060 Only 61 people under the age of 45 have died.
00:15:14.060 And all except for 5 of them had underlying conditions.
00:15:18.060 But under 45s are 61% in New York City's population.
00:15:24.060 But under 45s are only 5% of the deaths.
00:15:29.060 And of course most of those are people with underlying conditions.
00:15:33.060 How about let's not waste medical attention, medical equipment on people who are extremely
00:15:41.060 unlikely to need it.
00:15:43.060 And how about we then take that and double or triple the attention on those who do need it.
00:15:52.060 Seniors, people with an underlying sickness. 1.00
00:15:56.060 And by focusing on those who need it, we'll let working age people get back to work. 0.98
00:16:02.060 Only 6.6% of New Yorkers are aged 75 and up.
00:16:08.060 And yet they represent 42% of the deaths.
00:16:13.060 How about stop the total lockdown on the entire population and give all the care and protection to the sick and the elderly.
00:16:21.060 And let everyone else go back to work to pay for it all.
00:16:26.060 I can guarantee you that out of the 3 million plus unemployed people in Canada today,
00:16:32.060 those in the labor force, that those age 75 and up are less than 1%.
00:16:38.060 Old people are getting sick, but it's young people who are being told not to go to work.
00:16:45.060 That cannot be sustained.
00:16:47.060 People won't accept it.
00:16:49.060 But more importantly, how does it protect anyone from the virus?
00:16:53.060 That's the model I'm interested in.
00:16:56.060 Learn from Taiwan and its focus on masks and its tightly controlled borders. 1.00
00:17:02.060 Learn from New York about who is really vulnerable and who isn't.
00:17:06.060 But I don't think we're going to get either part right, though, with Trudeau and his team of second raters, do you?
00:17:13.060 Stay with us for more.
00:17:26.060 There's no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified in any way.
00:17:34.060 In fact, if you look at the death rate overall in China, it's much higher than the one we're seeing now.
00:17:39.060 And so we rely on the World Health Organization to do this important work because, of course, we're all in this together.
00:17:46.060 And I think one of the most important things to understand about this pandemic, this global pandemic, is that as long as coronavirus exists in one country and it exists in all of our countries, that we actually have to work collectively as a world now to defeat this virus, to find better ways to treat and then eventually prevent this virus through vaccination or other kinds of methods.
00:18:08.060 And that's going to take everybody working together.
00:18:09.060 And that's going to take everybody working together and.
00:18:11.060 All right.
00:18:12.060 Please let her finish.
00:18:13.060 No.
00:18:14.060 Ian.
00:18:15.060 So I would say that your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the on the Internet.
00:18:29.060 And it's important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we're actually not willing to work together as a globe.
00:18:36.060 That is Patty Hajdu, Canada's health minister, the same health minister whose first advice was everyone should run to stores and stockpile and hoard on mass.
00:18:48.060 The same health minister who later said that arriving international passengers at our airports would be given face masks before traveling on on domestic connections.
00:19:00.060 Remember, she said that asymptomatic passengers are given public health masks.
00:19:05.060 Public health advice, including the order to quarantine when they get to their final destination, along with a mask and told to don the mask should they become ill at any point of their onward travel.
00:19:16.060 Yeah.
00:19:17.060 Our own David Menzies and Kian Bexty have been to the airport half a dozen times in the past week.
00:19:22.060 And that simply isn't happening.
00:19:24.060 Well, today she's saying that it's simply conspiracy theory to not believe the Chinese Communist Party.
00:19:32.060 This speaks to a problem that Lauren Gunter addresses in his latest column about political correctness. 0.99
00:19:38.060 The headline of his essay, which I highly recommend, is political correctness got in the way of a swift COVID-19 response to the extent our initial response was the result of an it could never happen here mentality.
00:19:51.060 It's forgivable, however, the extent to which our leader's less than optimal response was driven by political correctness.
00:19:58.060 It must change dramatically.
00:20:00.060 And joining us now via Skype from Edmonton is our friend, Lauren Gunter.
00:20:03.060 Great to see you again, my friend.
00:20:04.060 I hope you're staying safe and healthy.
00:20:06.060 Yeah, likewise.
00:20:07.060 I hope you are, too.
00:20:08.060 Well, thank you for that.
00:20:10.060 I understand there is a public health aspect to keeping people calm.
00:20:19.060 But at a certain point in time, people no longer believe calming platitudes.
00:20:25.060 And especially when there's a disconnect between what you say and what you do.
00:20:30.060 I think that Canada has been untransparent, unresponsive, and now they're just, especially Patty Hajdu, it's a blend of political correctness.
00:20:43.060 Don't criticize open borders.
00:20:45.060 Don't criticize Chinese people or China.
00:20:48.060 And, hey, guys, we're all going to be fine.
00:20:51.060 What's your take on it?
00:20:53.060 Well, I think that's a pretty good summation is that we have far too many leaders who are still saying, don't blame China.
00:21:06.060 Interesting.
00:21:07.060 Two days ago, there were several reports in American outlets of a U.S. intelligence report that had just gone to the White House and to senior intelligence people in the United States saying, the situation in China is not over.
00:21:26.060 And it's much worse than they let on.
00:21:30.060 You can't believe their numbers of 80,000 infected and 3,000 dead because both are gross underestimation.
00:21:38.060 So, you know, here we have politicians and political doctors like Theresa Tam, who is the chief medical officer of health for Canada, saying things all along, particularly in January when this was forming up first of all in China.
00:21:56.060 We were first becoming aware of it, that it existed in China, saying it's just racism, racism to say that this is a problem with China or that that we should be screening people coming from China.
00:22:09.060 There was even a Chinese heritage parent in Toronto who started an online petition to get the school board in Toronto to recommend, not, you can't enforce anything, but just to recommend that people who had gone to China for the Lunar New Year celebrations be asked to stay at home for 17 days when they returned.
00:22:30.060 And the school board rejected doing that, saying that it was racist and hateful.
00:22:36.060 Even though the suggestion came from a Chinese Canadian family.
00:22:39.060 Exactly.
00:22:40.060 Exactly.
00:22:41.060 So, you know, they're so caught up in their cult of multiculturalism and in progressivism and showing how woke they are on racism.
00:22:55.060 I mean, John Tory, the mayor of Toronto, said that, you know, we can't allow racism to affect our community values.
00:23:03.060 And to the extent that people who are Chinese Canadians who had never been to China during the last year, you know, were being looked down on in the street.
00:23:17.060 That's right.
00:23:18.060 But there was no evidence of that.
00:23:20.060 I remember that story.
00:23:21.060 No one could point to any examples.
00:23:23.060 To the extent that that was happening at all, that's wrong.
00:23:27.060 But that's separate from do you screen people who are coming from a pandemic hotspot?
00:23:35.060 And people in the government in Taiwan is very good example.
00:23:40.060 Taiwan is just a few miles from China off the coast.
00:23:44.060 And as soon as the announcement was made that China had an infection, it didn't understand it wasn't able to control.
00:23:52.060 Taiwan started testing everyone who arrived in their country from China.
00:23:58.060 And if they had any symptoms at all, they were compelled to go into a 14 day self isolation.
00:24:04.060 The self isolation was enforced with your phone.
00:24:07.060 Yeah.
00:24:08.060 You have to give governments your phone number and then they will call you at any time, day or night, and insist that you show them using your phone that you are staying in place.
00:24:19.060 So that is a pretty good measure.
00:24:22.060 A few days after that, they said, look, it's just too much risk.
00:24:25.060 We have to refuse all travelers from China. 1.00
00:24:29.060 We're simply not going to take anybody in from China.
00:24:32.060 And as a result, 24 hours ago, Taiwan had about 300 infections in a country of 24 million people, and it had five deaths.
00:24:44.060 Yeah.
00:24:45.060 So it's infection rates much lower than our own.
00:24:47.060 And that's because they're not politically correct.
00:24:49.060 They realize there's a giant threat across the straits in mainland China and they act very quickly.
00:24:56.060 Yeah.
00:24:57.060 Well, we've been going deep on China.
00:24:58.060 In fact, yesterday we had a former head nurse in a Taiwanese hospital talk to us at some length.
00:25:04.060 Fascinating.
00:25:05.060 The key point, Lauren, to me, is not just that they've held the infections and the deaths so low, but that they've done so while their schools are still open, while their restaurants are still open.
00:25:16.060 Yeah.
00:25:17.060 You know, the most incredible statement by that same Patty Hydu the other day was she said, if we all stop talking to each other, freeze in motion for two weeks.
00:25:28.060 Now, she was using it as a hypothetical, but it was so insane here.
00:25:32.060 Let me just play that clip because I don't think people will believe me if I don't show you what Patty Hydu said.
00:25:37.060 Take a look at this.
00:25:38.060 In fact, one of the things that I read recently that I thought was fascinating was that if we all stopped moving for two weeks and nobody talked to anybody for two weeks and we all just stayed put, in fact, we would see this virus die.
00:25:50.060 That is that is the reality.
00:25:52.060 The virus needs hosts to continue to infect in order to continue to grow.
00:25:57.060 Lauren, I mean, I know she didn't literally mean that.
00:26:00.060 Right.
00:26:01.060 But I should tell you, at the same time she's talking about us not even talking to each other, there are flights from China landing every day in Canada, Lauren.
00:26:11.060 Every day.
00:26:15.060 Yeah, I mean, we have to be smarter about it.
00:26:19.060 Now, the Americans shut off all flights from China on January 31st, and they are in bigger trouble than we are because they didn't get on to social distancing and stay in place as quickly as we did.
00:26:34.060 So closing down the borders is not a cure all.
00:26:38.060 You know, that's not the only thing you do.
00:26:40.060 And then you're going to be OK.
00:26:42.060 The other thing we need to do, and we have got to get ready to do this because there could easily be a second wave of COVID after this first wave dies down.
00:26:51.060 If not COVID-19, there'll be a COVID-20, there'll be a COVID-21.
00:26:55.060 They might not all be really, really awful, but at some point there's going to be another pandemic.
00:26:59.060 And we have got to be ready to test, test, test.
00:27:03.060 Iceland now, because it's a country of only 340,000 people, and it has about 1,000 infections, it's been quite scared about this, has decided that it's going to test the entire population.
00:27:15.060 And so far they've tested well over 100,000 people out of, so about a third of the population.
00:27:21.060 And they found that about half of the cases of COVID go undetected because the people don't even know they have it.
00:27:30.060 And they develop an immunity to it, which then can be used to determine who should get back into the economy, who should be allowed more freedom of movement.
00:27:40.060 And we've got to have, the Germans are starting to talk about this now too.
00:27:44.060 The Germans have been very good about testing a lot of people, which is why even though their infection rate is quite high, their death rate is nowhere near as high as it is in Spain and Italy and France.
00:27:54.060 That's testing, testing, testing.
00:27:56.060 And the Germans are now saying, well, we think we will find people who have had COVID and don't know it.
00:28:03.060 And we will give them an immunity certificate and they will then be allowed to go back out into the economy.
00:28:08.060 They can open up shops, they can go to restaurants, they can open their offices, they can do those sorts of things.
00:28:14.060 And it's, unfortunately, what we have here I think now is a perfect storm between the economically illiterate, which is the federal liberal government, and the ideologically driven political correctness types.
00:28:28.060 And so we've shut down the entire economy rather than identifying where the real problem is.
00:28:34.060 To some extent, I don't blame governments for that, because this hit us out of nowhere.
00:28:38.060 Who would have known in mid-January that this was going to happen here?
00:28:42.060 Right.
00:28:43.060 So I give them a bit of a pass.
00:28:46.060 But going forward, their job has got to be not just to protect the population from infection, it's got to be to protect the economy from collapse.
00:28:55.060 And there has got to be a smart way of doing that, the key to which is testing.
00:29:01.060 Yeah.
00:29:02.060 Testing, and I think, masks.
00:29:04.060 You know, I saw a campaign in another country, my mask protects you, your mask protects me.
00:29:11.060 I thought, yeah, well, not only is that a very compelling argument, it's actually community cohesion building.
00:29:19.060 It's like, let's all trust each other, let's all work with each other, let's do this for each other.
00:29:24.060 One little problem with getting the protective equipment that, A, frontline workers need, and B, the rest of the population need.
00:29:33.060 Getting it in sufficient numbers is tricky.
00:29:37.060 You know, when the truck says, I'm going to order General Motors to make ventilators.
00:29:43.060 Well, you know, you can't just stop making pickup trucks and turn over the same equipment to make and ventilate.
00:29:48.060 It just doesn't work.
00:29:49.060 Right.
00:29:50.060 Ventilators are high-tech.
00:29:51.060 We have to start stockpiling the stuff in advance.
00:29:54.060 Yeah.
00:29:55.060 Ventilators, I guess, are high-tech, but a mask is actually a very low-tech garment.
00:30:01.060 And you don't need an N95 mask.
00:30:03.060 The stuff that I'm, I'm sure you're seeing the same stuff.
00:30:06.060 The stuff that's been coming out the last few days from infectious disease specialists is that, you know, a homemade cloth mask is not perfect.
00:30:15.060 It's not going to protect you 100%, but it beats nothing.
00:30:19.060 Yeah.
00:30:20.060 And nothing, by the way, is the advice of Theresa Tam, which is so infuriating.
00:30:24.060 It has been.
00:30:25.060 In Taiwan, I should tell you that I reached out to the Taiwanese embassy or the economic office they have here in Toronto.
00:30:33.060 And I said, well, our viewers would love to crowdfund.
00:30:36.060 I bet we could raise a quarter million bucks to bring over, like, a bunch of pallets of masks, I said.
00:30:43.060 And they wrote back and said, well, we love that idea, but we have an export ban on masks.
00:30:50.060 We're giving some as a gift to allies, but only limited numbers because we need to protect ourselves.
00:30:57.060 Because otherwise, I mean, masks are not expensive like those.
00:31:00.060 They're, frankly, pennies.
00:31:03.060 But because it's so critical and they started their mask industrialization two months ago.
00:31:09.060 So now they're making 10 million a day.
00:31:12.060 And I thought, well, can we buy a million?
00:31:15.060 And my idea was to distribute it to hospitals in Canada.
00:31:18.060 They said, sorry, mate.
00:31:20.060 We need it for us.
00:31:21.060 And that's wise.
00:31:22.060 And that's why they're smart.
00:31:23.060 And we got Justin Trudeau.
00:31:25.060 Yep.
00:31:26.060 Yep.
00:31:27.060 And, you know, Singapore, same sort of thing.
00:31:30.060 Malaysia, similar, good numbers, better numbers than ours, and much, much closer to China.
00:31:37.060 And a fellow that I know who used to be involved with security at some of our embassies in Asia said, look, these countries all live in a dangerous neighborhood.
00:31:50.060 They know that this is going to happen periodically.
00:31:53.060 And so they're all ready for it.
00:31:55.060 And I think the lesson from this is we were ready for a second SARS.
00:31:59.060 After the SARS infection in 2003, we did get better at that.
00:32:04.060 There was more equipment available and more alertness to the early indications so that the health care in the SARS outbreak in 2003, two kinds of people died.
00:32:15.060 Older people with compromised immune systems and health care workers who worked directly with them.
00:32:20.060 And this time we knew better.
00:32:22.060 We knew to keep the health workers covered so that they didn't catch it the same way that they did in 2003.
00:32:29.060 But there were fewer than 500 people in Canada who got SARS in 2003.
00:32:35.060 And now we're looking at 10,000, probably many more, who have COVID-19.
00:32:41.060 So we got ready for SARS 2, but this is SARS times 20 or SARS times 50.
00:32:47.060 So we've got to think about this as a civil defense mechanism and start preparing material going forward, testing kits, and hopefully we'll get some vaccines.
00:32:59.060 But if we don't get a vaccine, which is not a guarantee, at least we'll have a lot of tests.
00:33:05.060 We'll be able to identify the people who are sick early.
00:33:07.060 We'll keep them out of the general population.
00:33:09.060 We'll hunt down their, hunt down. 0.96
00:33:12.060 We will gently look for their contacts and test those people too.
00:33:16.060 And then maybe like Taiwan and Singapore, Hong Kong.
00:33:20.060 Hong Kong has a much lower infection rate than you would ever imagine.
00:33:24.060 And it's smack dab up against China.
00:33:27.060 So, you know, it is trustable.
00:33:29.060 All the, you know, the less people trust China, the less health care systems trust China, the more I trust them. 0.92
00:33:38.060 So who in the world knows how the Chinese Communist Party lies, deceives, covers up?
00:33:44.060 Well, Taiwan knows more than anyone in the world.
00:33:46.060 Hong Kong would be a close second, Singapore.
00:33:49.060 So, Korea, ironically, as you point out, they are the closest to China.
00:33:54.060 So they are not in thrall with China, unlike Patty Hajdu and Justin Trudeau.
00:33:59.060 Lauren, I just got to get your comment on one last thing.
00:34:01.060 And thank you for all this time.
00:34:02.060 As you know, on February 9th, Justin Trudeau sent a plane load of our mask stockpile to China.
00:34:09.060 16 tons of masks.
00:34:12.060 I can only imagine how many thousands that was.
00:34:15.060 He did that for free, by the way.
00:34:18.060 Now, he didn't even sell them in foreign aid to the richest country in the world that was still holding two Canadian hostages and has to this day.
00:34:28.060 And Trudeau was just asked, well, what do you make of the fact we're out of masks?
00:34:34.060 He said, well, a lot of countries will have to reflect on this.
00:34:38.060 What do you make of the fact, how bad, how much of a moral error was it?
00:34:45.060 Was it a trifle or was it a sign of deep delusion that Justin Trudeau sent our mask stockpile to China just two months ago?
00:34:53.060 It's a sign of deep delusion.
00:34:56.060 I don't fault him for sending Canadian aid to a country that's suffering.
00:35:02.060 That's just part of our nature.
00:35:05.060 The problem I had with that shipment in February was, as you point out, the fact that the Chinese government still has two Canadians who are falsely imprisoned and they're doing nothing to let them out.
00:35:18.060 So I'm not real keen to help them as long as that's happened.
00:35:22.060 But nobody expected.
00:35:23.060 I certainly had no inkling that this was going to spread this far this quickly.
00:35:29.060 You know, you hear about these things in the news every other year.
00:35:33.060 There's something that wipes out, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of people in places far away from here.
00:35:40.060 You don't ever expect it's going to happen here.
00:35:42.060 I mean, for instance, in in Africa and India, there are six hundred thousand people a year who die of mosquito borne illnesses.
00:35:50.060 We don't expect that's going to happen here.
00:35:52.060 So so with this, I didn't expect it was going to come here.
00:35:55.060 I give them a pass on that.
00:35:57.060 But once it started to come here, the fact that they would not put travel bans on and wouldn't even test and isolate people coming from China, whether they were Chinese or not.
00:36:09.060 They could have been Canadian business people who have been over there doing deals.
00:36:12.060 I don't care.
00:36:13.060 You were in a hot spot.
00:36:14.060 You tested.
00:36:15.060 You get isolated.
00:36:16.060 Yeah.
00:36:17.060 You're so right.
00:36:18.060 And by the way, I mean, it's been fascinating to me to watch David Menzies interview all these people getting off the planes.
00:36:23.060 And I find almost all of them are very conscientious, very worried, very attentive to their own health.
00:36:30.060 Many of them are wearing masks of their own device or provenance.
00:36:35.060 And every single one of them expresses alarm that they were not given a temperature test or clear instructions.
00:36:43.060 So I'm ready to get really mad as these people get off the plane.
00:36:47.060 And then David talks to them and they sound like me.
00:36:50.060 They say this is the like we just talked to a guy yesterday who flew from Mozambique, Mozambique to Lisbon to I think Frankfurt to Toronto, four airports to get home.
00:37:01.060 He's a Canadian.
00:37:03.060 And he said in the first three airports, they took his temperature.
00:37:07.060 Not in Canada.
00:37:11.060 I don't understand.
00:37:13.060 I really don't understand that because nobody is going to be offended by that now.
00:37:17.060 Oh, the opposite.
00:37:18.060 They're offended that they weren't checked.
00:37:19.060 They're scared that no one's on duty.
00:37:23.060 But you remember during the old war on Christmas, right, where we were told by public officials that they had to take down decorations from public locations because that was mixing church and state.
00:37:37.060 The people who were behind that always were nominally Judeo-Christian background.
00:37:44.060 They weren't people from other faiths.
00:37:46.060 They were nominally Christian, like they'd raised in a Christian home or at least in a nominally Christian culture.
00:37:53.060 They were they were doing it because they were sure others would be offended.
00:37:57.060 Nobody else was offended.
00:37:58.060 If I go to India, I don't expect them to stop all of their celebrations just because they're not my celebration.
00:38:05.060 And similarly with people who come to Canada, they don't expect us to stop the celebration.
00:38:09.060 Same with this.
00:38:10.060 You know, the people who are preventing the temperatures from being taken at the airport are not angry incomers who are saying, oh, I'm offended that you think I might be diseased because I'm not from you.
00:38:22.060 There are people in Ottawa who are saying, oh, my goodness, we couldn't possibly show our racism.
00:38:28.060 That's that's the mentality we're up against.
00:38:31.060 Yeah.
00:38:32.060 Well, Lauren, thank you for being so generous with your time.
00:38:35.060 Stay safe there in your library.
00:38:38.060 It looks like a good place to be holed up.
00:38:40.060 Lots of good reading.
00:38:41.060 It is.
00:38:42.060 It is.
00:38:43.060 Lots of reading.
00:38:44.060 Well, you take care, my friend.
00:38:45.060 Thanks for joining us.
00:38:46.060 OK.
00:38:47.060 All right.
00:38:48.060 There you have it.
00:38:49.060 Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun, and his column was also in the National Post.
00:38:53.060 It's called Political Correctness Got in the Way of a Swift COVID-19 Response.
00:38:57.060 Stay with us.
00:38:58.060 More ahead.
00:38:59.060 Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday on how bats linked to Chinese government labs cause the coronavirus outbreak. 0.91
00:39:14.060 Chris writes, I just hope the world doesn't forget that the government of China is responsible for this.
00:39:19.060 Well, Donald Trump certainly doesn't want them to forget it.
00:39:24.060 He keeps saying Chinese virus.
00:39:26.060 Some of the media does, but oh my God, so much of the media is just parroting Chinese propaganda.
00:39:33.060 Fred writes, you shouldn't have named the scientists.
00:39:36.060 I bet they will never be found again.
00:39:38.060 Well, listen, I didn't name them.
00:39:41.060 They named themselves.
00:39:42.060 And they published that paper, and obviously they were found because the paper was deleted from ResearchGate.
00:39:49.060 And the fact that it was deleted from ResearchGate made me worry, well, is this a genuine document?
00:39:55.060 By going back to the Internet Archive, I could check and confirm that that had indeed been published back in February.
00:40:03.060 On my interview with Dr. Lyran Chu, Paul writes, the world needs to disconnect from China.
00:40:10.060 They are a disaster in the making.
00:40:12.060 Across the board, Taiwan needs to maintain as much independence from China as possible.
00:40:16.060 Well, I agree with you, and apparently the people of Taiwan do, too, since they reelected President Tsai, who's doing a great job.
00:40:23.060 And as I mentioned to Lauren Gunter, I reached out to the Taiwanese representatives in Canada and I said,
00:40:28.060 can we crowdfund to get some masks or even mask equipment?
00:40:33.060 And their answer to me was, no, sorry.
00:40:35.060 We have a rule against exporting masks.
00:40:38.060 We have to take care of our own people.
00:40:40.060 And can you blame them?
00:40:42.060 Because no one else will take care of them.
00:40:44.060 I just wish we had a prime minister in Canada who wanted to take care of us as much as Taiwan's president wants to take care of her own people.
00:40:52.060 Well, my friends, that's today's show.
00:40:55.060 Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,
00:40:59.060 stay healthy and keep fighting for freedom.