Dr. Chris Milburn is a family and emergency room doctor from Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes. He has a background in hard science and a long history of involvement with public health nationally, provincially, and locally. His strong commitment to free speech and scientific integrity put him at odds with the medical profession, which is increasingly politicized and unwilling to tolerate debate, especially in the age of COVID. In 2021, he was fired from his job as the Head of the ER in Eastern Nova Scotia, and accused of the crime of creating vaccine hesitancy. For speaking out against mandatory COVID vaccinations, school closures, and for suggesting that the Medical Officers of Health had been granted a dangerous amount of power. As a result of his experience, Dr. Milburn and his wife, Julia Kerwin, started Freespeechinmedicine, a yearly conference on controversial issues in medicine and science. Their substack is Paradox, B-A-R-O-D-E-C-S, a Paradox Collection of Tears, Heresy and a heresy! In this episode, we talk about: What is a blasphemy law? Why is it a de facto crime in Canada today? What does it mean to be a blaspheur? And what does it have to do with science and medicine? Why should we care about it? How is it really a crime now in Canada? Can it be a crime? Does it really matter if it's a crime to talk about something controversial? and so on? If you have a burning question you d like to ask Dr. Chris about something that's controversial, then please reach out to him via the link below. If he's listening to this podcast, then he'll be more than likely be listening to the podcast on his podcast on the next episode. Thank you. <3 - Caitlin Durante <3 - Caitlyn Durante, Thank you, Caitlin, ? Caitlyn, , & so on... Thanks, Caitlyn ~ :) ( ) . "This is not a thing that matters, but a separate thing, but I can complain about it as well, but that's a thing, right? " ...and so on, but so on and so forth ... , etc.,
00:00:04.000Chris Milburn, a family and emergency room doctor from Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes.
00:00:11.000He has a background in hard science and a long history of involvement with public health nationally, provincially, and locally.
00:00:19.000His strong commitment to free speech and scientific integrity put him at odds with the medical profession.
00:00:29.000is increasingly politicized and unwilling to tolerate debate, especially in the age of COVID. In 2021, he was fired from his job as the head of the ER in eastern Nova Scotia and accused of the crime of,
00:00:47.000quote, creating vaccine hesitancy, end quote, for speaking out against mandatory COVID vaccinations, school closures, And for suggesting that the medical officers of health had been granted a dangerous amount of power.
00:01:02.000As a result of his experience, Chris and his wife, Dr.
00:01:06.000Julia Kerwin, started freespeechinmedicine.com.
00:01:11.000And are organizing what they hope will be a yearly conference on controversial issues in medicine and science.
00:01:18.000Their substack is called Paradox, B-A-R-O-D-O-C-S, Paradox Collection of Tears, Heresy.
00:02:51.000And we usually get the issues just a day or two in advance.
00:02:56.000So the night before, I check my My email, and there it was.
00:03:00.000We were going to talk about COVID policy, and I kind of thought, uh-oh, you know, it's not exactly something that doctors feel free to be open about in Nova Scotia.
00:03:43.000So yeah, our regulatory college that grant or take away our medical license had sent us somewhat Threatening email to doctors basically saying that they expected unanimity was the way they worded it in our approach to COVID. And so I knew it wasn't very popular to speak about it, but I'm the kind of guy, damn the torpedo.
00:04:08.000So I went on the next morning and I gave my views.
00:04:11.000Snappy format with three people debating and I kind of gave my views that vaccine passes were highly unethical, that I mentioned that there could be unknown side effects to a vaccine that was at that time extremely new in Canada.
00:04:25.000We had only just begun vaccinating the populace and that I thought it was wrong to force people.
00:04:31.000I mentioned that the medical officers of health had too much power and that was not a good situation and I also felt that schools should be open.
00:04:39.000And the evidence was clear by that time.
00:04:42.000And so those are the things that got me in trouble and resulted a few days later in a phone call from my boss saying that I could no longer be the head of Emerge with those views.
00:04:52.000So did they take your medical privileges as well?
00:04:57.000A Twitter mob formed and suggested that people should complain about me to the Regulatory College.
00:05:06.000And what I can say about that is I'm not allowed to talk about any matters that are before the Regulatory College.
00:05:13.000But a Twitter mob formed and shared the link on how to complain.
00:05:17.000So that happened As a separate thing, but in terms of my own job, I was left for now with my license, but that part of my job was pulled away from me.
00:05:28.000And I was basically left in a position where I didn't feel comfortable practicing emergency medicine in a place that had just fired me as head.
00:05:36.000I don't feel, and I continue, I no longer work in the emergency room here, even though we're very short of doctors.
00:05:42.000I didn't feel That it was an environment that would be very supportive of me if, God forbid, something actually did go wrong as it does.
00:05:50.000Emergency medicine is a high medical-legal risk subspecialty and I just didn't feel comfortable working in this area anymore.
00:07:27.000What is your bias against vaccine passports?
00:07:33.000So I go into this whole thing as someone who...
00:07:37.000As you may know from my CV, I've been very, very involved with environmentalism over the years, environmental issues.
00:07:45.000I was quite involved with the Green Party of Canada for a while.
00:07:49.000But I was involved with the Green Party at a time when it swung a little more libertarian, and I've really been uncomfortable with it in the last 10 or 12 years.
00:07:58.000I come in with the bias of someone who believes that in individual liberty to make decisions, and those include medical decisions.
00:08:06.000So right off the hop, when I saw that people's ability to work, to go into a restaurant, to travel, was going to be dependent on them taking what I saw as an experimental vaccine.
00:08:23.000Now, the problem that I ran into in the conflict was that the medical establishment and the medical officers of health were presenting this vaccine right off the hop as something that was proven to be, you know, safe and effective and safe and effective.
00:08:37.000And I don't know how many times I heard the word safe and effective.
00:09:05.000And that's the way I look at the research on vaccines so far.
00:09:08.000We've used these for a very short amount of time, and we haven't properly kept data.
00:09:12.000At least I can speak for Nova Scotia and Canada more as a whole.
00:09:17.000Well, let me ask you something that may be personal, and feel free not to answer it, but would you describe yourself prior to COVID as a Conservative, as a Liberal Party, or NDP, which essentially is the kind of Labour Party that That generally allied with the Liberal Party,
00:09:41.000but kind of a Labour-type party of the kind that they have in Europe, just so Americans have a frame of reference.
00:09:49.000Maybe I'll just give you my one-minute thumbnail sketch of Canadian politics.
00:09:53.000Canadian politics, Americans may know that we're far, far left of you guys.
00:09:58.000So even our, you know, quote unquote, conservative or right wing party, as they're called here, is sort of would be considered maybe moderate Democrat in the US. And our NDP party is far, far to the left of anything that you guys have there.
00:10:17.000I was considered a left-wing radical perhaps 15 years ago because of my work with the Green Party and my belief in environmental issues, you know, the importance of environmental issues, I would say.
00:10:30.000But as the political landscape has shifted to the left, I've been left, I've shifted.
00:10:37.000I don't think my views have shifted all that much, but I'm now considered a right-wing radical.
00:10:41.000So I've gone in Canada, even though my politics haven't changed that much, I've gone from being a left-wing radical to now some people have described me as being alt-right.
00:10:50.000So my own position, I don't know whether to describe it as conservative in the I would have conservative values in the sense that I want to conserve the classical liberal framework.
00:11:11.000I want to hear what you're about to say.
00:11:14.000You describe as the classical liberal framework, you know, on other issues like, you know, personal freedoms, freedom of speech, religion, etc., foreign policy, you know, interventionists, LGBTQ, you know, the rights of an abortion.
00:11:33.000These are kind of the defining cultural issues in our country.
00:11:39.000And of course, Immigration and race, which are perceived as a hostility toward immigrants on the far right of our country.
00:11:50.000And so we're, you know, on those kind of milestone benchmark issues, where would you describe yourself as standing?
00:11:58.000And the reason I'm probing you on this It's because of this kind of dominant propaganda theme that people who question the official orthodoxies are a right wing, extreme right, radical right.
00:12:16.000And Justin Trudeau, who is an old friend of mine, who I've known for many, many years and kept a personal friendship with, has characterized, I think, Very, very badly mischaracterized the truckers' convoy as motivated by a right-wing impulse, by bigotry, by hatred, by xenophobia, by misogyny.
00:12:42.000You know, it's interesting to me to talk to people, including the truckers, who would not describe themselves that way.
00:12:52.000Yeah, you've put a lot out there, but maybe I can wrap it up into a little ball by saying that what happened to me over the COVID issue and speaking out against mandatory vaccinations, etc., I think is symptomatic of the dyslexia.
00:13:06.000Uncomfortable shift we've felt in society.
00:13:09.000So rather than have good arguments and be able to discuss difficult issues, one person to have one opinion, one person to have another, and then come away disagreeing but still respecting the other person, there's been this automatic tendency to label someone.
00:13:24.000So if you do not agree with mandatory vaccinations for everyone in Canada, you're automatically an alt-right, misogynist, neo-Nazi racist, right?
00:13:35.000And the other things you asked me about my political views in general, I would put myself in the same category.
00:14:08.000I think Justin Trudeau, and I actually wrote about this on our substack called, you know, what to do when your prime minister jumps the shark.
00:14:16.000Rather than have a reasonable conversation about these truckers who represent a good chunk of the Canadian population, instead he just jumped right to trying to label them and render their opinions invalid and somehow dangerous to listen to.
00:14:34.000And in general, again, just one further comment.
00:14:37.000So what's happened in Canada is the same as for you folks in the States.
00:14:42.000The Democrat Party used to be the party of the little guy, the working people.
00:14:46.000But more and more, if you look at it, they've become the party of the upper crust university professor with extremely kind of what we call woke views.
00:14:58.000And by moving to that direction, they've actually alienated their traditional base of working class people who have moved, you know, in your case, to kind of Donald Trump and the right end of the political spectrum.
00:15:10.000And in our case, what's happening is the NDP and liberals who are traditionally the party of the working class and the conservatives were seen as the party for big business.
00:15:19.000It's flipped here as well, where they've gone so far off the end of anybody who argues with us as misogynist, racist, anti-trans, this and that.
00:15:29.000That they've driven all these people with just what are very centrist views.
00:15:32.000They've driven them to the other end of the political spectrum.
00:15:35.000And the Conservative Party and what we call the PPC, which is a little bit to the right, I suppose, of the Conservative Party, is picking them up.
00:15:43.000So it's been a real political landscape shift here.
00:15:48.000And maybe one more thing, sorry, but the last thing I'd say is I don't even like to look at it as a left-right shift.
00:15:54.000There's a better axis to look at it on, I think, is authoritarian versus libertarian.
00:15:59.000I think that's a much more accurate axis.
00:16:03.000There's a whole bunch of us who don't believe that we might have very liberal views, but we also don't believe that you should force other people to do things like take vaccines.
00:16:12.000And that's gotten us labeled as right wing now, but I believe it's more correctly labeled us as believing in individual right.
00:16:21.000I mean, I think this is a really interesting discussion because We're at this, you know, period of realignment, and at least there's been a series of realignments throughout American history in the Democrat and Republican Party, the Republicans, of course, or the, you know, party of Abraham Lincoln and of Black civil rights for African Americans.
00:16:51.000And then, you know, beginning during the, and also in many ways kind of anti-corporate, it was Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning of the 20th century and, you know, other Republicans have to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act and who were pushing for corporate income taxes, graduated income taxes.
00:17:15.000It was the Republican reformers in the city.
00:17:18.000Who were pushing for women's rights, for reform of child labor laws, the 40-hour work week, and then, you know, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt.
00:17:32.000I mean, at that point, there was literally no Black in the South who would vote Democratic.
00:17:38.000And that was changed during the New Deal, when Blacks started coming over to the Democratic Party and Labor became the Democratic Party kind of fulcrum.
00:17:50.000And that was one of the great realignments.
00:17:53.000And that was kind of completed during my uncle's administration.
00:17:56.000And he really split the Black vote in 1960 with Richard Nixon.
00:18:02.000But within four years, 98% of Black votes were going to the Democratic Party.
00:18:09.000And so you have a realignment at that point.
00:18:12.000And it's happened a couple of other times in American history.
00:18:15.000And something like that appears to be happening now, where there's a perception that the Democratic Party in the United States is no longer, you know, the party of the traditional democratic values, liberal values of labor and essentially class equality.
00:18:38.000And now Democrats have become kind of the cancel culture party, which seems antithetical to traditional liberal values, which, as you say, were about debate, discussion, and respectful interchange, and absolute adherence to freedom of speech, the Bill of Rights, and all those.
00:19:04.000It's interesting what's happened because If you talk to some of these truckers, the way they see what happened during COVID and the anger, because most of them are vaccinated.
00:19:19.000But they see this as a war of the elites against the poor.
00:19:23.000And it really was the COVID mandates were really a war on the poor around the globe.
00:19:29.000There's 100 million children were pushed into food insecurity and came from COVID. The impacts of the lockdowns are much more dramatic.
00:19:40.000And today you see this, the same truckers are saying, you know, if you were rich, if you lived in Beverly Hills or Greenwich, Connecticut, the lockdown was just a pajama party with, you know, DoorDash delivering food to you.
00:19:53.000But if you go into the poor neighborhoods, to Harlem, to Compton, there were padlocks on the basketball courts and people were locked and children were locked.
00:20:02.000In homes deprived of schooling, you know, their IQ points among children dropped 22 points, according to the Brown University study.
00:20:11.000You had a $3.8 trillion shift in wealth, poor to billionaires.
00:20:17.000We created 500 billionaires during the pandemic.
00:20:22.000And they see this as really as now a class war.
00:20:27.000And, you know, the Democrats are ending up on the wrong side, which is dismaying to me because I'm a lifelong Democrat and a liberal.
00:20:36.000Well, just to kind of riff off that bit, me too, because I come from kind of that, I suppose, that left-wing caring thing that society should try to care for everyone and, you know, a society can be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable people.
00:20:53.000And I really believe in those concepts.
00:21:25.000So a good example is here in Canada, our doctors were very well paid.
00:21:31.000We're right at the top of society in terms of our pay.
00:21:34.000And if you poll doctors, we were very on board with lockdowns.
00:21:38.000But, for instance, here in Nova Scotia, the doctors here cut a sweetheart deal behind the scenes, not announced, that they could get paid up to $50,000 per month to be off, right?
00:21:53.000So a doctor who was furloughed, let's say an ophthalmologist who couldn't do cataract operations or a dermatologist who couldn't see patients, they could get paid up to $50,000 per month.
00:22:02.000Well, that kind of changes your view on whether you're in a hurry to go back to work or not, right?
00:22:07.000And I'd like to think that doctors are all so altruistic that we're motivated only to be giving the best care to our patients.
00:22:15.000But if that was true, we would have been trying to get back in the office as soon as possible.
00:22:20.000And when you Talk to doctors and when they were polled, we didn't seem to be in a big, big hurry to do that, you know?
00:22:27.000Another thing you said was about how, you know, these basic liberal values of free speech.
00:22:32.000When you look at how disadvantaged minorities were emancipated, particularly in the 60s in the US and Martin Luther King and whatnot, if you think about the hate speech laws that are coming into play, coming in in Canada right now, Your speech will be judged by whether you hurt somebody else's feelings.
00:22:54.000It's free speech that has allowed people to drag themselves out of the basement of society.
00:23:00.000And so now it seems like it's the people who were the beneficiaries of those free speech in the past who want to shut it down.
00:23:08.000So it's the transgender movement, the racial minority movement, etc.
00:23:13.000who's trying to shut down free speech, saying that it's a danger.
00:23:16.000I think it's a misunderstanding of history because we need to keep free speech.
00:23:20.000We did so many things wrong for so many years.
00:23:22.000We're still doing things wrong, clearly.
00:23:24.000What will we see in 50 years and look back at and say, oh my God, I can't believe we did that back then.
00:23:30.000But if we freeze ourselves And put ourselves into stasis by eliminating free speech.
00:23:36.000All we do is cement all the things we're doing wrong now.
00:23:39.000It's not only that, but ultimately the people who went from restricting our speech are large corporations and government technocrats and intelligence agencies and the military.
00:23:54.000And once you give permission to government or to large corporations like Facebook, To constrict speech, to control speech, they will use it for their financial advantage.
00:24:07.000And, you know, the people who have the illusion that it's going to help the poor, that illusion will quickly disappear because it is not.
00:24:15.000And, you know, one of the other emblems of this kind of shift of the Democratic Party away from, and liberalism, away from really representing the interests of the poor, the downtrodden, Is the masking mandates, which if you, it becomes really obvious that this is kind of a class war.
00:24:38.000When you go to a restaurant, you see the waiters and poor women are waiting on the table or wearing the mask.
00:24:46.000All the wealthy diners who are sitting in the restaurant are unmasked.
00:24:51.000And we've kind of now put, forced the poor into invisibility, into anonymity.
00:24:57.000And to me, it's a very, very disturbing thing to go into one of those restaurants and see that servers are all masked.
00:25:06.000And it's almost like the Delmonico Steakhouse during the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when you had all of these homeless men waiting outside.
00:25:19.000Looking through the big picture window at the wealthy people smoking cigars and eating sirloins and outside, anonymous, hidden...
00:25:30.000We're the poor who are increasingly poor.
00:25:33.000And the dominant feature of this pandemic, the dominant historical feature has been the acquiescence to the laws of our traditional civil rights, and combined with this giant shift in wealth to the super rich that is unprecedented in human history, the obliteration of the middle class.
00:25:55.000And those things are When you combine them and imagine what our future is going to look like, now the government has those powers, they will never give them up, and they will use them again and again and again to amplify that impact of making the rich richer,
00:26:12.000of making the poor poorer, And then building up police states and militaries and militarizing our society and, you know, all of these associated industries, the oil industry, the chemical industry, and all of these really powerful and dark, dark, sinister industries that have now been given this tremendous power, and they will not give it up unless we figure out a way to take it from them.
00:26:43.000We won't find that power if we allow free speech to evaporate, right?
00:26:48.000And I just, you know, kind of back around to the what got me fired.
00:26:52.000You know, if you look at science, Science as a concept, because science is not...
00:26:58.000One of the things, again, I wrote about this on my Substack, I hate that saying, follow the science, because there's two words there that are really bad.
00:27:06.000Number one is follow, number two is the, because there's no such thing as the science.
00:27:11.000Science is a method, it's a way of assessing and understanding reality.
00:27:16.000It's not like a definite, defined, concrete body of knowledge.
00:27:21.000It's just a way of processing knowledge.
00:27:34.000One of my favorite sayings in medicine was one of the very famous physicists, Richard Feynman, said, science is the belief in the fallibility of experts, right?
00:27:43.000So right off the hop, if it's science, nobody has the final word.
00:27:52.000But what we did immediately, almost within the first month of lockdown, Here, and I believe it was the same in the US for you guys, is we just basically bowed down in front of a Fauci statue or in our In our province, it's Dr.
00:30:19.000It was a militarized police state response, you know, to compel people to do things.
00:30:27.000Listen, in any pandemic in history, if somebody comes with a convincing cure, there's nobody in the society who won't rush to get it.
00:30:37.000What do you say about a cure that has to be guaranteed liability against litigation, that has to be compelled on people, you know, repeatedly?
00:31:29.000If they were going to change the brand of toilet paper that got stocked and Emerge, I got a three-page memo about it, right?
00:31:35.000So when we were in the midst of the COVID pandemic, when it first hit, we were understandably really nervous and we were meeting a lot and we kind of got ready and things progressed along.
00:31:46.000And then, you know, then the vaccines came and they were going to be released to the public.
00:31:50.000And because I got memos about everything, I expected to get a memo from public health about, okay, this is an experimental vaccine.
00:31:58.000I would have expected to know several things as I'd have emerged.
00:32:01.000What side effects might we expect and what should we look for?
00:32:04.000So if we get a patient who comes in with chest pain in the eMERGE after the vaccine, is that something, you know, what should we know?
00:32:11.000Number two, if we suspect a side effect, how do we report it?
00:32:15.000Because I've been perfectly involved with a few drug studies in the past, and I know enough to know that when you're doing a drug study, you report everything, everything.
00:32:24.000It doesn't matter if the patient If the patient broke wind, you're going to report it because you don't know what's related to the drug and what's not.
00:32:31.000You just report everything and it comes out in the wash.
00:32:34.000So my questions were, what should we look for and how should we report it?
00:32:36.000And I kept waiting for a memo and waiting for a memo and waiting for a memo and nothing ever came.
00:32:41.000And then we started to see some side effects or things that we were pretty sure were side effects.
00:32:46.000And it was very, very hard to report those in Canada.
00:32:50.000So you would have to find the form online, which was really difficult.
00:32:53.000And it was five pages, and it required things like the lot number of the vaccine and what time they got it and where.
00:32:59.000And most patients could only tell me, I went to the pharmacy and I got my vaccine on Thursday.
00:33:06.000They didn't know even what brand it was, let alone the lot number.
00:33:09.000So there was this really high bar to report it.
00:33:12.000Then the other thing, going into this, because you talk about belief, the problem that we ran into, a big problem we ran into in my mind was belief.
00:33:21.000So doctors were told the vaccine is safe and effective when it was released, even though it was experimental.
00:33:27.000So we had things happen, like for instance, we had a patient who died of of multiple blood clots in her lung several days after the second vaccine.
00:33:38.000Now, was that coincidence or was it the vaccine?
00:33:41.000Well, the only way to know is you report it and then statistically later we look back at all these reports and we say, geez, there was an increase in what we'd expect the number of blood clots to be.
00:33:54.000But what happened with that case was I was told about it through a friend of the person, a friend of the patient, and there was concern that that wasn't reported as a possible vaccine side effect, and there was some concern.
00:34:08.000So I looked into it, and the physician who was involved with the case said, oh, well, I talked to the specialist who was on call, and we knew that that wouldn't be related to the vaccine, so we didn't report it.
00:34:22.000They were already told by public health that these vaccines are safe and effective.
00:34:26.000So doctors were not reporting these things.
00:34:28.000And it's only in retrospect now, having talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of patients who had things like shingles and Bell's policy and blood clots and et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:37.000And it's too much for me to say it's coincidence.
00:34:41.000But we still don't have official data in Canada.
00:34:45.000So my problem is I'm still just going anecdotally by what I've heard.
00:34:49.000And I can get in trouble for being anecdotal.
00:34:52.000And I could be in trouble just for saying what I just told you.
00:34:56.000I'd love there to be data, but there's not because it was not kept properly.
00:35:00.000It's going to be a rat's nest to pull out.
00:35:02.000It's going to be very, very difficult.
00:35:04.000But as I'm sure you are well aware of, we're seeing things like insurance company data, et cetera, coming out already saying that there probably is, you know, what we call a signal in the data that maybe we were doing more harm than good with these vaccines.
00:35:19.000Extremely concerning that we went into the whole vaccination project with that mindset that these are safe and effective and anything you see after the vaccines is probably not from the vaccines.
00:35:39.000So, if people go to the, as you say, Paradox, so my wife and I are a Paradox, P-A-R-O-D-O-C-S, Paradox at Substack, or.substack.com rather, we're on Substack.
00:35:54.000We also are just getting a website up called freespeechandmedicine.com and we're planning a fall conference and currently securing what we hope will be some great speakers so people can watch for that.
00:36:07.000And we'll be announcing that on our Paradox, as well as when the website's set up next week, they can look there.
00:36:12.000So yeah, thanks for the opportunity and thanks for talking to me.