The Candice Malcolm Show - Covid has torn apart our social fabric (Feat. Dr. Matt Strauss)

00:00:00.000 The COVID pandemic and the reactive government policies have torn apart our social fabric.

00:00:05.860 Many Canadians will never trust authorities or experts, including doctors, ever again.

00:00:10.780 How did we get here and how can we fix it?

00:00:12.480 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:14.320 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

00:00:30.320 So the health scares associated with COVID have mostly passed, but many Canadians are still trapped in their own form of COVID purgatory.

00:00:38.780 Some may even call it COVID hell.

00:00:40.660 They can't get on an airplane. They can't get on a train. They can't visit their loved ones.

00:00:45.060 They can't go see family. They can't leave the country. They can't even flee if they want to.

00:00:49.000 Many have been excommunicated by their friends and their family.

00:00:52.280 Many have lost their business, lost their livelihoods.

00:00:54.820 Many have lost their jobs despite having contracts or unions that were designed and supposed to protect them.

00:01:01.720 Countless Canadians feel excluded and alienated. They feel ignored and marginalized and doomed to failure.

00:01:07.480 Worse, some feel targeted, harassed, and singled out by their government and by cynical politicians for the crime of making a health choice that the elites don't approve of.

00:01:19.280 So while some political leaders are interested in the plight of these types of Canadians, including those who came out to support the trucker convoy,

00:01:27.940 the much more popular opinion among politicians and leaders and elites in our country is to use these marginalized Canadians as a scapegoat, as a target, and as a punching bag.

00:01:39.380 Now, whether you call these elites, whether you call them the Laurentian elite, the expert class, the gatekeepers,

00:01:45.660 there is a powerful ruling class in our country that is maddeningly out of touch with the concerns and the anxieties of the typical working Canadian.

00:01:55.900 So how did we get here and how can we work towards rebuilding our civil society?

00:01:59.680 We need to rebuild our civil society at this point.

00:02:01.860 We need to reconnect as Canadians.

00:02:03.980 We need to demand more liberalism and more democracy out of our liberal democracy.

00:02:08.340 So joining me today to have this conversation and to help me work through some of these ideas,

00:02:12.660 I'm very pleased to be welcomed once again by Dr. Matt Strauss.

00:02:16.660 Dr. Strauss was on the program as a previous guest, and I wanted to invite him back today to dive a little bit deeper into some of the conversations and some of the topics that we discussed last time.

00:02:25.940 So, Dr. Strauss, thank you so much for joining the program.

00:02:28.900 Pleasure to be here.

00:02:30.120 So for those of you who don't remember the previous episode we had with Dr. Strauss,

00:02:34.100 he is the acting medical officer of health for Haldeman Norfolk.

00:02:37.580 He's an ICU doctor.

00:02:38.860 He's a former professor of medicine and a former global journalism fellow with the University of Toronto.

00:02:43.860 He was one of the first public health officials in Canada to call for an end to vaccine mandates.

00:02:48.740 He has been a vocal critic of Canada's pandemic response written several op-eds calling for an end to unscientific mandates.

00:02:56.640 So, Dr. Strauss, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, I mean, you worked on the front lines.

00:03:02.100 You were there, you witnessed it with your own eyes.

00:03:04.440 You saw firsthand the effects of lockdowns, the sort of unintended consequences of government policies,

00:03:11.120 and in many ways how the prescription, the supposed cure, was worse than the disease in terms of lockdowns being worse than the pandemic itself.

00:03:20.260 So I was hoping you could walk our audience through a little bit of what that looked like,

00:03:26.020 some of the worst things that you saw as a doctor working in the ICUs,

00:03:29.560 and some of the things that maybe Canadians aren't even really aware of what was going on during COVID.

00:03:36.340 Okay.

00:03:36.780 Well, so I saw some horrible things.

00:03:39.240 I spoke last time I was on your show about in a single week admitting multiple elders from nursing homes who were starving to death

00:03:45.880 because their families were banned from the premises in the name of social distancing,

00:03:49.720 and so there was no one to feed them, and they almost died of starvation in Canada in 2020, 2021.

00:03:58.540 Some things I didn't get to speak about were the obvious worsening of addictions problems.

00:04:05.760 I saw some folks who quite literally drank themselves to death, and unlike starvation, that's not necessarily something we can fix when you get in.

00:04:14.660 So I did see some younger folks, mid-30s, mid-40s, who died of alcohol.

00:04:22.020 And, you know, in taking the stories from them, it was very clear they lost their job, they'd been shut in for three months,

00:04:26.960 people aren't supposed to live that way, and they turned to drink and never recovered.

00:04:31.640 I had read about catatonic depression as a medical student.

00:04:38.440 That means depression is so severe that you're in a coma.

00:04:41.140 I don't generally look after folks for depression because I'm not a psychiatrist,

00:04:45.900 but if you're in a coma from your depression, you do often come under the care of a medical doctor.

00:04:51.120 And like I said, I had never seen a case.

00:04:53.020 I saw two in 2020.

00:04:55.180 One man, after six months of not leaving his house, who his wife said was a perfectly lovely gentleman, 35 years of marriage,

00:05:03.140 he tried to strangle her, and he collapsed and fell into a coma.

00:05:07.020 I saw a woman who tried to kill her grandchildren after being locked in with them for three months, 0.63

00:05:12.960 and when she sort of came to, out of whatever that state she was in, she said, that wasn't me.

00:05:18.680 She couldn't believe that she'd done it.

00:05:21.800 We, you know, working in Kingston, where all the federal prisons are, I have looked after serial killers,

00:05:30.580 and I've learned a little bit about the prison system in Canada.

00:05:33.260 And Paul Bernardo gets an hour of sunlight a day.

00:05:39.460 So if you're a serial killer and you're in our federal prison system and you behave badly, you get put in isolation.

00:05:45.780 Isolation is considered a punishment for the very worst of the worst.

00:05:48.880 And we did that to all Canadians. 1.00

00:05:51.760 And so the ravages thereof were just visible all over the system.

00:05:56.020 And I hate to talk about this, but I had a colleague, a friend, a wonderful ICU nurse who died by suicide last summer,

00:06:04.800 and her obituary pointed out that the effects of lockdowns have been very difficult on her mental health.

00:06:12.400 So I saw, and then in terms of the public commentary, it was all, everyone stay home for the sake of our healthcare workers.

00:06:20.260 But all of this was very hard on healthcare workers.

00:06:22.340 I would say that every time I went to the hospital, there was a new rule about, you know, masking and checking in,

00:06:29.460 and you can't, you can no longer have potlucks.

00:06:32.200 At a hospital I'm familiar with, the nurses received an email from the management on Christmas Eve saying the management was going to walk around

00:06:41.040 and make sure nobody was having a potluck on Christmas Eve.

00:06:43.100 And if you were, you'd be fired on the spot.

00:06:45.940 So there were just all sorts of inhumane things.

00:06:49.540 I saw patients of mine who the healthcare team had to fight for them to get to see their loved ones before they died.

00:06:57.760 I had patients who were between life and death in the ICU for three months,

00:07:01.820 whose families were not allowed to visit them for the duration.

00:07:04.600 I was at a time when patients from Scarborough were being transferred elsewhere,

00:07:08.780 and Scarborough was considered a red zone.

00:07:10.820 And so their families were not allowed to come visit.

00:07:13.720 And one of the worst things I saw was a young indigenous man with a disability and a severe medical problem 1.00

00:07:23.420 flew down from a reserve, and his mom came as his translator, and she was kicked out of the hospital.

00:07:31.800 So she'd flown in, and when she arrived, she was told there's no hospital visitors,

00:07:36.880 and she was kicked out at four in the morning in a strange city where she didn't know anyone.

00:07:41.300 And I'm sorry to say I don't know what became of her.

00:07:44.200 But so I guess I would say I saw all sorts of miserable things that I call Russian novel levels of despair. 1.00

00:07:54.520 And none of these things make it to the CP24 news crawler.

00:07:58.240 They were breathlessly reporting cases of COVID and deaths from COVID, and those things are important.

00:08:04.100 My background, I came to medicine with a degree in English literature.

00:08:06.840 My background's in the humanities, and I think that some things can only be expressed humanistically.

00:08:13.060 And maybe some of those folks in those terrible situations will write novels about what they went through.

00:08:17.180 But I think it'll be many years before we fully grasp what was perpetrated on our population these last two years.

00:08:23.000 And so, I mean, some of it you can sort of chalk up to, okay, there was this novel virus,

00:08:29.260 and no one knew where it came from or what it was capable of doing.

00:08:32.780 We looked at what was happening in China, and we kind of just mimicked their response, right?

00:08:36.880 We saw mass lockdowns and people getting arrested for being out in the streets in Wuhan.

00:08:41.940 This is in sort of early 2020, and I was watching it unfold in social media.

00:08:46.940 It's sort of in disbelief.

00:08:48.140 And then it just seemed like it was a matter of time before we imported that sort of not to be hyperbolic,

00:08:54.580 but sort of an authoritarian approach to controlling everything and everyone to help prevent the spread of disease.

00:09:02.920 Why do you think that that was our reflective approach as a society in terms of just sort of like the absolutism of everything's about COVID?

00:09:13.060 I know the news media were drumming it up.

00:09:14.440 I don't know if you mentioned CB2 before with their time picker, but it was like a scoreboard, right?

00:09:18.240 Like a score count, and we were only hyper-focused singularly on COVID.

00:09:23.020 All of the kinds of misery that you're describing, it's inhumane, and it was our own system that was perpetrating it.

00:09:28.840 It wasn't a foreign mysterious virus.

00:09:31.700 It was us doing it to one another, to fellow Canadians.

00:09:34.980 Why was that the approach?

00:09:37.140 What was it about our culture, our healthcare system, our institutions that allowed that and that led that and that enabled sort of two years of the elites and the people in charge of our society, not only justifying it, but sort of scolding anybody who stepped out of line?

00:09:53.500 Probably textbooks will be written, or at least PhD theses will be written to answer this question.

00:10:03.400 A few things that I can point at is this is the first pandemic we've gone through with widespread social media use.

00:10:09.380 And I don't think we're only starting to get a handle on how damaging to our individual psychologies, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram were.

00:10:19.500 So I remember the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2008-2009, and it wasn't as deadly.

00:10:28.240 Not as many people died.

00:10:29.540 I fully acknowledge that.

00:10:30.980 But I remember I was a young healthcare worker.

00:10:32.620 I was 25.

00:10:33.420 And as a 25-year-old, H1N1 was more deadly to me than COVID because COVID is extremely deadly to folks who are elderly and not so dangerous to folks who are younger.

00:10:42.120 When I got H1N1 from my work at the hospital, the only thing the hospital asked me was, when can you be back?

00:10:48.720 There was no talk about isolation and quarantine and getting swabbed.

00:10:53.220 Public health never called me.

00:10:56.040 So I think, similar to how people often talk about how the rate of child abduction is much lower now than it was in the 70s.

00:11:03.760 But fear about child abduction is much higher now because we all have cable news.

00:11:07.640 And anytime any child is abducted anywhere in the English-speaking world, it's broadcast on CNN just about 24 hours a day.

00:11:14.540 But I think the fact that we were all having a device ringing in our pocket, letting us know when there was COVID in our country, in our province, in our town, how many were in the hospital, I don't think we were ready for that amount of stimulation.

00:11:28.600 The other thing I will say is, it's become clear to me that communist China is just as bad as any authoritarian regime that has ever existed.

00:11:42.600 They have 1.5 million Uyghurs in concentration camp.

00:11:46.320 They have mass censorship.

00:11:48.240 They shot protesters at Tiananmen Square.

00:11:51.060 And yet our elite class has been cozying up to China all along. 0.92

00:11:58.060 So it's a bit, well, it's not exactly a coincidence that COVID started in China.

00:12:04.780 But because it did, we had the opportunity to pattern our response off of the Chinese response, which was deadly. 0.94

00:12:13.040 Because that is a very evil regime and we shouldn't be patterning anything off of what China does. 0.96

00:12:17.220 And yet the World Health Organization receives a lot of money from China.

00:12:21.300 And while this was going on, Taiwan had a much more liberal democratic approach to COVID-19 that was actually much more successful than China's.

00:12:29.280 So they barely closed schools.

00:12:31.300 They just did not, they certainly didn't weld people into their homes.

00:12:35.340 And it was very upsetting to me that instead of co-opting the Taiwanese response, the World Health Organization sort of COVID czar, Bruce Owlward, he gave this famous interview where he refused to even acknowledge the existence of Taiwan.

00:12:49.980 And because the question was asked, he pretended that his laptop wasn't working and ended the interview.

00:12:54.700 So I think there was a problem with us misunderstanding the threat that China portends. 0.62

00:13:02.860 The thing I will say is we'd all been a little bit deranged by American politics and Donald Trump, and I never was a Trump supporter.

00:13:09.920 But when he started saying things about hydroxychloroquine and the like, everyone really panicked.

00:13:18.640 And then after that point, anything that Trump said was the worst and all of Canada had to be against it.

00:13:24.100 So those are three things I can point to.

00:13:25.800 I think there's many, many others.

00:13:27.620 Well, I think you're right about a little bit of the Trump derangement sort of spilling onto it, because it seemed to me at the time that the news media in the United States really had an interest in drumming up just how bad everything was to try to humiliate Trump, to try to derail him and make sure that he wasn't reelected.

00:13:43.660 And because of that, we sort of just, it all snowballed a little bit.

00:13:47.940 I want to pick up on something you mentioned about Taiwan not locking down schools, and you mentioned how H1N1 was more deadly for younger people.

00:13:58.160 You know, it seemed like we knew.

00:13:59.480 I mean, True North had a report that came out over a year ago in April 2021 about how more Canadians died under the age of 65 from depression, suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism than COVID.

00:14:11.520 We kind of knew who were the vulnerable ones and who was sort of generally more safe.

00:14:19.580 And so rather than taking a targeted approach, we just sort of continued to lock down, lock down, lock down, right up until even 2022 we had lockdowns.

00:14:28.760 It seemed like the people in charge in this country were just not learning from the mistakes that we had made.

00:14:37.180 I mean, do you observe that?

00:14:40.220 And why is it that our political leaders and public health leaders to this day continue to sort of drum the idea that the solution to COVID is by locking down our site,

00:14:51.580 our site, including little kids and people who don't really pose a big risk of getting very ill from COVID?

00:15:01.680 It's hard to read other folks' minds.

00:15:03.500 I do think there's a bit of a generational issue.

00:15:07.180 I only recently became aware you wrote a book on Generation Screwed.

00:15:11.360 And I do think that baby boomers are at great risk of death from COVID, or they were until they were vaccinated. 0.84

00:15:16.800 And it happens to be the case that baby boomers run our society. 1.00

00:15:21.560 They're in the positions of power.

00:15:22.620 They own all the wealth.

00:15:24.480 So frankly, they were right to be scared.

00:15:27.640 I don't think they were right to scapegoat the younger generations who were trying to make a living or just trying to enjoy their lives.

00:15:37.020 And I think it's something dark and unfortunately natural about human psychology that if you have a mortal threat, it's much nicer to scapegoat 20-year-olds having a picnic at Trinity Bellwoods Park than it is to consider the ways that...

00:15:55.020 I mean, so another thing to mention, besides the age issue, perfectly healthy elders were at much less risk of death from COVID than folks with multiple medical problems.

00:16:08.540 And so in my own experience working as an ICU doctor for the first year and a half of the pandemic before I went to a less clinical role in public health, the youngest person who was perfectly healthy that I met who was critically ill from COVID-19 was 76.

00:16:26.640 Everyone else had multiple medical problems and I'm sorry to say, I think there is a role for personal responsibility, but I can understand how rather than looking at, you know, could I get in shape?

00:16:41.760 Could I stop smoking?

00:16:42.840 These sorts of things.

00:16:43.500 It's much nicer to blame the 21-year-olds for having a nice time at the park.

00:16:47.320 Certainly for me, one of the breaking points just personally, because my family and I, we just bought a new house in Toronto.

00:16:53.800 We were right across the street from a park and, you know, they would put the tape up on the playground every day.

00:17:00.060 You know, if anyone cut it down, they would come back and they would wrap it up.

00:17:02.460 And it was so demoralizing for my little son to want to go to the park and, sorry, sweetie, we can't go on the swings today because the government said no.

00:17:11.140 And then one day I was sitting in a park with my son in Toronto and these trucks literally drove onto the park.

00:17:18.640 This is Trolley Park in Toronto and picked up the picnic tables and the park benches and took them away because they just didn't want anyone congregating in the park.

00:17:29.680 And, you know, this was in like April or May.

00:17:31.680 It was still pretty cold out.

00:17:33.020 It wasn't like it was like, you know, warm spring.

00:17:35.100 It was still kind of chilly.

00:17:36.520 And the fact that they were kind of just punitively saying, like, no, you cannot come in this park and this picnic table is somehow going to, you know, cause people to get COVID or something.

00:17:46.360 It was just so mean-spirited and so like sort of the epitome of the mindset of these sort of just mindless bureaucrats who are carrying out these ridiculous orders that somehow having benches in parks is going to contribute to COVID.

00:18:02.460 But I want to continue on the topic of little kids, though, because I know, you know, there's an Ontario election going on.

00:18:08.320 No one's paying any attention to it.

00:18:09.880 It's not very interesting, probably by design.

00:18:12.200 But one comment that sort of stood out was the Ontario Liberals and their leader, Stephen Del Duca, said that he wanted to make COVID vaccines mandatory for little kids to attend public school,

00:18:22.680 that it would be part of the regular vaccine regime for little kids.

00:18:27.920 And, you know, to me, that's like the perfect thing to drive people away from public schools, because it's like, you know, no matter what you say about COVID vaccines and COVID and, you know, all for vaccines and all that kind of stuff, it's like, you know, the idea of giving a little kid a vaccine when they don't really, there's no risk, there's not a real risk of that child getting sick or dying from COVID.

00:18:51.060 It just seems really unnecessarily divisive.

00:18:54.480 I want to know your opinion on that.

00:18:55.800 Yeah, well, the first thing I would say is COVID-19 is not a risk to the vast, vast majority of children, that influenza since the beginning of the pandemic has been a greater risk.

00:19:10.160 So if you get influenza as a child, it is riskier to you than COVID-19.

00:19:15.020 That said, there are children who are medically fragile who have very significant medical problems, and COVID can be a significant problem for them.

00:19:24.280 What we know at this point is that two doses of vaccine does not prevent you from passing COVID on to someone else, such as a medically fragile child.

00:19:34.080 So I absolutely think that if I was a parent of a child with medical problems, I would be in a terrific rush to get them vaccinated.

00:19:41.500 I think throughout all our thinking about the pandemic, the idea of risk-benefit analysis has been sorely lacking.

00:19:50.540 So yeah, there may be some benefit to getting more children vaccinated for COVID.

00:19:55.040 But what is the risk?

00:19:57.560 It's something like only half of the children in this country and in this province are vaccinated.

00:20:01.660 So kicking half of the children out of public school, is that, how do you weigh that against the sort of one in 500,000 chance that any child dies of COVID-19?

00:20:12.480 I think, obviously, that's a, in addition to being a mean-spirited policy, it's also likely to significantly backfire.

00:20:21.800 And if you have a generation of children who are even more unschooled than they are after two years of school closures, two years of school closures on and off,

00:20:30.820 I think the social problems and the personal health problems that those children might experience far, far, far outweigh the benefit that they might get from a COVID vaccine.

00:20:38.960 Well, I can't imagine a better way to galvanize people against public schools.

00:20:42.060 Because like you said, if half the kids aren't vaccinated, you know, this is more likely just going to drive people away from public schools.

00:20:48.460 And maybe they'll go find, you know, a better set of educational tools for their kids.

00:20:53.560 Or maybe they'll go to independent schools.

00:20:54.740 Or to your point, maybe they'll fall through the cracks and be part of the growing number of people who just don't go to school,

00:21:00.340 which is really sad and scary.

00:21:04.160 And again, these kind of issues are just never really mentioned.

00:21:07.800 I want to shift because this sort of reminds me, I don't know if you deleted it,

00:21:13.060 but there was a piece in the Toronto Star that just attacked you.

00:21:17.340 And it was written by their sports writer, Bruce Arthur.

00:21:19.720 I don't know why he chose you to kind of go after, but you really bother him and he let you hear it.

00:21:27.320 And you're not alone.

00:21:28.480 You're in good company, myself and many, many others have been the target of Bruce Arthur's, you know, snarly opinions.

00:21:37.820 But one of the things that he was really upset that you said was that you would sooner give your child COVID than McDonald's Happy Meal.

00:21:45.520 And I thought this was kind of amusing because I think that people need to take greater responsibility for their own health.

00:21:53.020 I think that one of the things we didn't really talk about at all during COVID was this idea that, you know,

00:21:57.540 a lot of people who were sick and had severe cases of COVID had underlying health issues.

00:22:03.900 They were obese or they weren't taking care of themselves in a healthy way.

00:22:07.160 And that was never a discussion.

00:22:08.900 It was never a topic that there's some individual responsibility in making sure that you're healthy, you're eating right, you're exercising, all this kind of stuff.

00:22:15.920 And so I thought it was amusing that you made that point.

00:22:18.700 But he mentioned that you deleted that tweet.

00:22:20.740 So maybe you had a change of heart on that.

00:22:23.180 But I just want to know what your reaction is to Bruce Arthur writing about you and the Toronto Star trying to take you down,

00:22:29.040 saying that you're not qualified to be the medical officer and kind of picking apart some of your things you've written on Twitter.

00:22:36.020 Well, let me address the tweet first.

00:22:38.300 That tweet was part of a long thread in which I looked at the data regarding childhood obesity, which is epidemic and on the rise.

00:22:46.720 And I know that these critics of mine were acting in bad faith because they always took the conclusion of that thread rather than the data and the scientific papers that were linked in that thread.

00:22:57.760 To show that if you're obese on your 18th birthday, you are twice as likely not to make it to age 30 as somebody who's a healthy weight on their 18th birthday.

00:23:04.380 That's crushingly bad.

00:23:09.400 And I feel awful for those kids.

00:23:10.580 By the way, if you're an obese child, you didn't do that to yourself.

00:23:13.800 That was neglect.

00:23:15.780 And not merely parental neglect, but our whole society is built in ways for children not to be healthy.

00:23:23.820 My wife is Dutch.

00:23:24.620 I will be Dutch soon.

00:23:25.740 After three years of marriage, I get a passport.

00:23:27.760 And their whole society is built around active living.

00:23:30.440 And we could do that here.

00:23:31.680 We just have chosen not to.

00:23:35.480 So it's just a fact that McDonald's is more of a health risk for children than COVID-19.

00:23:42.380 COVID-19 is a one in a million chance of killing a healthy child, less than that.

00:23:46.840 And it's also a fact that probably one day I will give my daughter COVID-19 because it's everywhere.

00:23:51.960 I may have had it.

00:23:53.080 I don't know.

00:23:53.840 We may have already exposed her to it. 0.97

00:23:56.300 I don't know.

00:23:56.880 But also, it happens to be the case that my wife is vegetarian.

00:24:00.060 And I can't imagine a situation where we'd be taking a toddler for a hamburger.

00:24:04.920 So yeah, a very bad faith criticism.

00:24:08.020 Now, it seemed to me that many folks were taking that line of thinking as a personal attack on their parenting skills, which is not my point.

00:24:17.340 And as a writer, if people are taking things the wrong way, then I failed in my purpose.

00:24:23.620 So I took down that tweet.

00:24:24.800 It was obviously causing more emotion than action.

00:24:29.680 Regarding that piece from Bruce, I think, and actually, there's a bigger social issue where people confuse credentials with qualifications.

00:24:40.940 What qualifies me to do my job is that I'm quite good at it.

00:24:43.500 And the COVID-19 mortality in Haldeman, Norfolk, since I came to the position, has gone down relative to other jurisdictions.

00:24:49.900 So I've been successful.

00:24:51.720 And that's what qualifies me.

00:24:53.600 And how I came by my qualifications were my work on the philosophy of science.

00:24:59.800 I'm currently enrolled in graduate school.

00:25:01.780 My 10 years as a critical care doctor.

00:25:05.180 I experienced teaching dozens, if not hundreds, of medical residents and students.

00:25:11.820 So I don't have the credential that Bruce seems to think is most necessary.

00:25:17.780 But credentials are not qualifications.

00:25:19.640 And then, obviously, there's just the great irony of the Toronto Star dispatching its sports writer to assess my qualifications.

00:25:25.380 Like, I don't think he's qualified to look at my qualifications.

00:25:29.040 And then the last thing I'll say is I spent a year and a half working as a frontline doctor in this pandemic.

00:25:33.860 I know what COVID-19 is.

00:25:35.100 I've seen what it does to people.

00:25:36.260 And I, frankly, have taken care of more desperately ill people with COVID-19 than Bruce ever will.

00:25:41.900 So I didn't really take his criticisms too seriously.

00:25:46.140 Let's leave it at that.

00:25:47.520 Yeah, fair enough.

00:25:48.080 I wouldn't either.

00:25:49.200 And I don't think that he deserves more.

00:25:51.520 But I will just say that I tend to agree.

00:25:53.880 I don't judge other people's parenting styles or whatever.

00:25:56.440 But my kids have never had McDonald's Happy Meal.

00:25:59.000 They have had COVID.

00:25:59.980 They were fine.

00:26:01.280 But I think that when I say personal responsibility, I'm obviously not meaning that little kids need to have personal responsibility.

00:26:07.020 But obviously their parents need to focus on making sure that the kids are eating healthy and getting outside.

00:26:13.260 And that's important for everyone.

00:26:14.560 And, yeah, I'd be interested to learn more about the Dutch philosophy because one of the things that just seemed totally absent to me was this idea that, you know, things like getting outside, getting fresh air.

00:26:29.600 You know, this is part of going back to my frustration with them taking away the park benches at Torley Park and trying to block off the trails.

00:26:35.400 It's like, let people get outside, get fresh air.

00:26:38.560 Not only is it better for their health, but, you know, we're talking about people suffering from depression and alcoholism.

00:26:44.580 Let them have social connections.

00:26:47.300 Let them, you know, for me, I loved going to the park because sometimes I'd bump into friends or other parents or, you know, just getting fresh air.

00:26:54.920 And the fact that they were trying to deter that and, you know, finding people and taking away the park benches, it just showed complete reversal.

00:27:01.920 I remember at one point the health minister, Patty Haju, told people not to take vitamin D supplements, which to me was just so absurd.

00:27:12.660 I think, I mean, you're a doctor, I'm not, but I think given the climate and the, you know, the, the lack of sun in the winter, I, you know, me and my family, we always take vitamin D.

00:27:21.760 That's, and, and, and for me, I mean, I was pregnant for most of the initial COVID lockdowns.

00:27:29.000 I had a daughter in November, 2021.

00:27:31.200 And the first thing that your doctor recommends when you're pregnant is to start taking vitamin D when the baby's born and put them on vitamin D supplements.

00:27:37.800 So, you know, this idea that the top health officer of the country was telling us not to take vitamin D just seemed really strange.

00:27:46.780 I did want to ask you about one of the recent positions that you've taken that's also been controversial, Dr. Strauss.

00:27:53.220 And that is that in April, you vouch for a new antiviral drug made by Pfizer called Paxivoid.

00:27:59.620 And, and, you know, you, you, you said that you were excited about this.

00:28:03.540 So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about this drug and whether you think it will help us finally end this pandemic and, and, and how it would do that.

00:28:13.060 Yeah. So the, the randomized control trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the benefits of Paxivoid for folks who are unvaccinated and have some other risk factor for having a bad time with COVID-19.

00:28:26.860 And it found that I, hopefully I have the numbers right off the top of my head, the rate of hospitalizations for these individuals, if you gave them Paxivoid versus a sugar pill went down from 6% to 1%.

00:28:41.320 So if you give it to 20 people, you save one hospitalization.

00:28:46.680 The study was not intending to look at deaths.

00:28:49.500 They didn't think they would have enough, a large enough sample size because death is still, even in this unvaccinated and higher risk population is still uncommon.

00:29:01.760 But they, what they ended up seeing was I think 12 deaths in the, in the, I think it was 600 people who got the sugar pill and zero deaths in the 600 people who got the Paxivoid.

00:29:14.360 So we don't see medicines that are 100% effective at preventing death very often in clinical methods, in medicine, certainly not for infectious diseases, certainly not for an infectious disease that's only existed for two years.

00:29:29.520 So this is a stupendous result.

00:29:32.100 And I, I was very excited about it because it, I mean, my, my, my life's work is saving lives.

00:29:42.980 It's what I've spent the last 10 years of medical practice trying to do.

00:29:46.540 And so I was very excited to make sure that as many people who qualify for this medicine get it.

00:29:51.360 And I was concerned that there was a bit of gatekeeping going on.

00:29:54.800 You use that word.

00:29:55.620 So I will too, where initially the government wanted for this medicine to only be delivered to COVID assessment centers and for, you know, an infectious disease specialist to, to assess you and decide whether it was necessary.

00:30:11.460 And it just seemed like we were reinventing the wheel.

00:30:13.480 We already have a way of getting medicines out to people.

00:30:16.180 It's called family doctors, offices, and pharmacies.

00:30:18.820 So rather than trying to run all of this through hospitals and COVID assessment centers, I just felt very passionate, like send us a box of this medicine.

00:30:24.440 I've talked to the family doctors in our town.

00:30:26.200 They understand.

00:30:26.860 Well, every physician in Canada, if they're not totally incompetent, is constantly having to learn about new drugs and new treatments and how to apply them.

00:30:33.080 And that's part of all of our, our professional competency upkeep.

00:30:38.840 So I'm, I was really glad that ultimately the provincial government decided the right thing and sent it out to each community and doctors are prescribing it all over the place.

00:30:49.420 Interesting.

00:30:49.900 Yeah, it seems like, uh, there, there was a lot of sort of controversy around alternative treatments and, you know, the idea of natural immunity versus, um, taking, taking drugs.

00:31:00.800 It seems like that kind of conversation has passed.

00:31:03.300 I just, uh, just to sort of wrap up the interview and, and, um, ask you, I mean, what do you think it'll take in Canada to move past this?

00:31:11.840 Uh, you know, we've, we've talked about a lot of the just major problems that have presented itself or a pro or failed approach, the sort of, um, maliciousness that we've been treating, uh, one another and the divisiveness.

00:31:22.840 Uh, you know, there's so many Canadians that still feel like they're in the midst of it because they can't travel or they, they don't have their job.

00:31:29.580 They don't have their livelihood.

00:31:31.100 Uh, obviously it's a huge, huge question.

00:31:33.160 And we have our work cut out for us as a society.

00:31:35.460 It might take us a decade to get past this, but what are, what, what are some things that you think, uh, our leaders need to do and, and how can we start, uh, to mend our, our, uh, very frayed, uh, social fabrics in this society, in this country?

00:31:49.040 The mandates have to go away.

00:31:51.300 They're completely unscientific.

00:31:53.620 Um, they're obviously cheap politicking.

00:31:56.780 Um, and I, I don't, I'm not a, I'm not a politician.

00:32:02.820 I'm not a political scientist.

00:32:03.920 I don't know how to make this happen, but it, it needs to happen.

00:32:08.160 Uh, frankly, there's, there should be a lot of apologies.

00:32:10.800 Um, that's a good way to, to mend fences.

00:32:14.360 Um, and I think.

00:32:16.220 The, I, we talked about it last time, but it's just the basic issue of civility.

00:32:22.420 How do we disagree with someone?

00:32:23.860 If I think something about the vaccine and you think something different, how do we talk about that?

00:32:28.640 Um, I, so even at, at, at the university that I worked at, the, um, the chief of medicine said, if you, if you believe in a focused protection plan and you sign the great Barrington declaration, you're a, you're a Trump supporter who wants people to get sick.

00:32:43.560 Like, and that's, that's, so even at the academy, another thing he told us was, if you have concerns about the vaccine, keep them to yourself, which is a, a hell of a thing to tell, um, a hundred physician scientists.

00:32:59.260 So, um, I, I think maybe it's civics education, maybe it's liberal arts education, like getting back to enlightenment ideals of free inquiry and respecting other humans.

00:33:12.020 And, you know, you go your way, I'll go mine.

00:33:15.020 Um, so I, there's maybe some philosophical work that has to be done.

00:33:21.020 And I think there's, there's problems with the whole cancel culture thing.

00:33:24.640 And the idea that if a, if a professor disagrees with you on a point of science, you have to have a petition to get them defenestrated, um, such as was attempted with Byron Brindle, uh, and, and was attempted with me.

00:33:35.140 Um, it's not, it's frankly not a coincidence that they don't work in a university anymore.

00:33:39.160 Um, although that particular attempt wasn't successful.

00:33:42.380 Um, so yeah, I think there's a lot of rebuilding to do just in terms of what is a civic society, what are enlightenment values and how do we cue to them, um, the next time our system gets a shock like this.

00:33:53.040 Well, uh, again, I'll just repeat that we definitely have our work cut out for us, but I, I will definitely echo a lot of the things you say.

00:34:00.260 I think, you know, we, we can all make attempts to, to build bridges with those we disagree with.

00:34:04.900 And for me personally, I used to love Twitter. 0.99

00:34:07.560 I used to have so much fun going on there and just kind of ripping at stupid things that liberals would say. 0.98

00:34:10.980 And I, I've stopped, I like, I'll stop myself even when I see a dumb tweet from a journalist that I just really want to, you know, pick, pick apart. 0.96

00:34:18.420 But it's like, you know, this is kind of mean spirited and it's not really a productive conversation here. 0.97

00:34:23.860 It's just kind of dunking on someone because, you know, they, they said something stupid and there's a more productive way to, to go, go about this, this disagreement. 0.77

00:34:32.720 And that's why, uh, you know, I, I like longer form conversations. 0.97

00:34:37.280 So I, I really appreciate you coming back on the show.

00:34:40.040 Uh, Dr. Stross, it's always, uh, very, uh, clarifying to hear from you.

00:34:43.300 We, we appreciate your time.

00:34:44.880 Thank you for having me.

00:34:46.420 Right.

00:34:46.780 That is Dr. Matt Stross.

00:34:48.560 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - May 31, 2022

Covid has torn apart our social fabric (Feat. Dr. Matt Strauss)

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