00:00:40.660They can't get on an airplane. They can't get on a train. They can't visit their loved ones.
00:00:45.060They can't go see family. They can't leave the country. They can't even flee if they want to.
00:00:49.000Many have been excommunicated by their friends and their family.
00:00:52.280Many have lost their business, lost their livelihoods.
00:00:54.820Many have lost their jobs despite having contracts or unions that were designed and supposed to protect them.
00:01:01.720Countless Canadians feel excluded and alienated. They feel ignored and marginalized and doomed to failure.
00:01:07.480Worse, 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.
00:01:19.280So while some political leaders are interested in the plight of these types of Canadians, including those who came out to support the trucker convoy,
00:01:27.940the 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.
00:01:39.380Now, whether you call these elites, whether you call them the Laurentian elite, the expert class, the gatekeepers,
00:01:45.660there 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.
00:01:55.900So how did we get here and how can we work towards rebuilding our civil society?
00:01:59.680We need to rebuild our civil society at this point.
00:02:03.980We need to demand more liberalism and more democracy out of our liberal democracy.
00:02:08.340So joining me today to have this conversation and to help me work through some of these ideas,
00:02:12.660I'm very pleased to be welcomed once again by Dr. Matt Strauss.
00:02:16.660Dr. 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.
00:02:25.940So, Dr. Strauss, thank you so much for joining the program.
00:02:38.860He's a former professor of medicine and a former global journalism fellow with the University of Toronto.
00:02:43.860He was one of the first public health officials in Canada to call for an end to vaccine mandates.
00:02:48.740He has been a vocal critic of Canada's pandemic response written several op-eds calling for an end to unscientific mandates.
00:02:56.640So, Dr. Strauss, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, I mean, you worked on the front lines.
00:03:02.100You were there, you witnessed it with your own eyes.
00:03:04.440You saw firsthand the effects of lockdowns, the sort of unintended consequences of government policies,
00:03:11.120and in many ways how the prescription, the supposed cure, was worse than the disease in terms of lockdowns being worse than the pandemic itself.
00:03:20.260So I was hoping you could walk our audience through a little bit of what that looked like,
00:03:26.020some of the worst things that you saw as a doctor working in the ICUs,
00:03:29.560and some of the things that maybe Canadians aren't even really aware of what was going on during COVID.
00:03:39.240I spoke last time I was on your show about in a single week admitting multiple elders from nursing homes who were starving to death
00:03:45.880because their families were banned from the premises in the name of social distancing,
00:03:49.720and so there was no one to feed them, and they almost died of starvation in Canada in 2020, 2021.
00:03:58.540Some things I didn't get to speak about were the obvious worsening of addictions problems.
00:04:05.760I 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.
00:04:14.660So I did see some younger folks, mid-30s, mid-40s, who died of alcohol.
00:04:22.020And, you know, in taking the stories from them, it was very clear they lost their job, they'd been shut in for three months,
00:04:26.960people aren't supposed to live that way, and they turned to drink and never recovered.
00:04:31.640I had read about catatonic depression as a medical student.
00:04:38.440That means depression is so severe that you're in a coma.
00:04:41.140I don't generally look after folks for depression because I'm not a psychiatrist,
00:04:45.900but if you're in a coma from your depression, you do often come under the care of a medical doctor.
00:04:51.120And like I said, I had never seen a case.
00:05:51.760And so the ravages thereof were just visible all over the system.
00:05:56.020And I hate to talk about this, but I had a colleague, a friend, a wonderful ICU nurse who died by suicide last summer,
00:06:04.800and her obituary pointed out that the effects of lockdowns have been very difficult on her mental health.
00:06:12.400So I saw, and then in terms of the public commentary, it was all, everyone stay home for the sake of our healthcare workers.
00:06:20.260But all of this was very hard on healthcare workers.
00:06:22.340I would say that every time I went to the hospital, there was a new rule about, you know, masking and checking in,
00:06:29.460and you can't, you can no longer have potlucks.
00:06:32.200At 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
00:06:41.040and make sure nobody was having a potluck on Christmas Eve.
00:06:43.100And if you were, you'd be fired on the spot.
00:06:45.940So there were just all sorts of inhumane things.
00:06:49.540I saw patients of mine who the healthcare team had to fight for them to get to see their loved ones before they died.
00:06:57.760I had patients who were between life and death in the ICU for three months,
00:07:01.820whose families were not allowed to visit them for the duration.
00:07:04.600I was at a time when patients from Scarborough were being transferred elsewhere,
00:07:08.780and Scarborough was considered a red zone.
00:07:10.820And so their families were not allowed to come visit.
00:07:13.720And one of the worst things I saw was a young indigenous man with a disability and a severe medical problem
00:07:23.420flew down from a reserve, and his mom came as his translator, and she was kicked out of the hospital.
00:07:31.800So she'd flown in, and when she arrived, she was told there's no hospital visitors,
00:07:36.880and she was kicked out at four in the morning in a strange city where she didn't know anyone.
00:07:41.300And I'm sorry to say I don't know what became of her.
00:07:44.200But so I guess I would say I saw all sorts of miserable things that I call Russian novel levels of despair.
00:07:54.520And none of these things make it to the CP24 news crawler.
00:07:58.240They were breathlessly reporting cases of COVID and deaths from COVID, and those things are important.
00:08:04.100My background, I came to medicine with a degree in English literature.
00:08:06.840My background's in the humanities, and I think that some things can only be expressed humanistically.
00:08:13.060And maybe some of those folks in those terrible situations will write novels about what they went through.
00:08:17.180But I think it'll be many years before we fully grasp what was perpetrated on our population these last two years.
00:08:23.000And so, I mean, some of it you can sort of chalk up to, okay, there was this novel virus,
00:08:29.260and no one knew where it came from or what it was capable of doing.
00:08:32.780We looked at what was happening in China, and we kind of just mimicked their response, right?
00:08:36.880We saw mass lockdowns and people getting arrested for being out in the streets in Wuhan.
00:08:41.940This is in sort of early 2020, and I was watching it unfold in social media.
00:08:48.140And then it just seemed like it was a matter of time before we imported that sort of not to be hyperbolic,
00:08:54.580but sort of an authoritarian approach to controlling everything and everyone to help prevent the spread of disease.
00:09:02.920Why 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?
00:09:13.060I know the news media were drumming it up.
00:09:14.440I don't know if you mentioned CB2 before with their time picker, but it was like a scoreboard, right?
00:09:18.240Like a score count, and we were only hyper-focused singularly on COVID.
00:09:23.020All of the kinds of misery that you're describing, it's inhumane, and it was our own system that was perpetrating it.
00:09:37.140What 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?
00:09:53.500Probably textbooks will be written, or at least PhD theses will be written to answer this question.
00:10:03.400A few things that I can point at is this is the first pandemic we've gone through with widespread social media use.
00:10:09.380And 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.
00:10:19.500So I remember the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2008-2009, and it wasn't as deadly.
00:10:33.420And 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.
00:10:42.120When I got H1N1 from my work at the hospital, the only thing the hospital asked me was, when can you be back?
00:10:48.720There was no talk about isolation and quarantine and getting swabbed.
00:10:56.040So 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.
00:11:03.760But fear about child abduction is much higher now because we all have cable news.
00:11:07.640And anytime any child is abducted anywhere in the English-speaking world, it's broadcast on CNN just about 24 hours a day.
00:11:14.540But 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.
00:11:28.600The 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.
00:11:42.600They have 1.5 million Uyghurs in concentration camp.
00:11:48.240They shot protesters at Tiananmen Square.
00:11:51.060And yet our elite class has been cozying up to China all along.
00:11:58.060So it's a bit, well, it's not exactly a coincidence that COVID started in China.
00:12:04.780But because it did, we had the opportunity to pattern our response off of the Chinese response, which was deadly.
00:12:13.040Because that is a very evil regime and we shouldn't be patterning anything off of what China does.
00:12:17.220And yet the World Health Organization receives a lot of money from China.
00:12:21.300And 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.
00:12:31.300They just did not, they certainly didn't weld people into their homes.
00:12:35.340And 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.
00:12:49.980And because the question was asked, he pretended that his laptop wasn't working and ended the interview.
00:12:54.700So I think there was a problem with us misunderstanding the threat that China portends.
00:13:02.860The 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.
00:13:09.920But when he started saying things about hydroxychloroquine and the like, everyone really panicked.
00:13:18.640And then after that point, anything that Trump said was the worst and all of Canada had to be against it.
00:13:24.100So those are three things I can point to.
00:13:27.620Well, 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.
00:13:43.660And because of that, we sort of just, it all snowballed a little bit.
00:13:47.940I 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.
00:13:59.480I 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.
00:14:11.520We kind of knew who were the vulnerable ones and who was sort of generally more safe.
00:14:19.580And 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.
00:14:28.760It seemed like the people in charge in this country were just not learning from the mistakes that we had made.
00:14:40.220And 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,
00:14:51.580our site, including little kids and people who don't really pose a big risk of getting very ill from COVID?
00:15:24.480So frankly, they were right to be scared.
00:15:27.640I 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.
00:15:37.020And 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...
00:15:55.020I 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.
00:16:08.540And 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.
00:16:26.640Everyone 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?
00:16:43.500It's much nicer to blame the 21-year-olds for having a nice time at the park.
00:16:47.320Certainly for me, one of the breaking points just personally, because my family and I, we just bought a new house in Toronto.
00:16:53.800We were right across the street from a park and, you know, they would put the tape up on the playground every day.
00:17:00.060You know, if anyone cut it down, they would come back and they would wrap it up.
00:17:02.460And 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.
00:17:11.140And then one day I was sitting in a park with my son in Toronto and these trucks literally drove onto the park.
00:17:18.640This 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.
00:17:29.680And, you know, this was in like April or May.
00:17:36.520And 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.
00:17:46.360It 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.
00:18:02.460But I want to continue on the topic of little kids, though, because I know, you know, there's an Ontario election going on.
00:18:09.880It's not very interesting, probably by design.
00:18:12.200But 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,
00:18:22.680that it would be part of the regular vaccine regime for little kids.
00:18:27.920And, 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.
00:18:51.060It just seems really unnecessarily divisive.
00:18:55.800Yeah, 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.
00:19:10.160So if you get influenza as a child, it is riskier to you than COVID-19.
00:19:15.020That said, there are children who are medically fragile who have very significant medical problems, and COVID can be a significant problem for them.
00:19:24.280What 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.
00:19:34.080So 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.
00:19:41.500I think throughout all our thinking about the pandemic, the idea of risk-benefit analysis has been sorely lacking.
00:19:50.540So yeah, there may be some benefit to getting more children vaccinated for COVID.
00:19:57.560It's something like only half of the children in this country and in this province are vaccinated.
00:20:01.660So 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?
00:20:12.480I think, obviously, that's a, in addition to being a mean-spirited policy, it's also likely to significantly backfire.
00:20:21.800And 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,
00:20:30.820I 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.
00:20:38.960Well, I can't imagine a better way to galvanize people against public schools.
00:20:42.060Because 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.
00:20:48.460And maybe they'll go find, you know, a better set of educational tools for their kids.
00:20:53.560Or maybe they'll go to independent schools.
00:20:54.740Or 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,
00:22:08.900It 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.
00:22:15.920And so I thought it was amusing that you made that point.
00:22:18.700But he mentioned that you deleted that tweet.
00:22:20.740So maybe you had a change of heart on that.
00:22:23.180But I just want to know what your reaction is to Bruce Arthur writing about you and the Toronto Star trying to take you down,
00:22:29.040saying that you're not qualified to be the medical officer and kind of picking apart some of your things you've written on Twitter.
00:22:38.300That tweet was part of a long thread in which I looked at the data regarding childhood obesity, which is epidemic and on the rise.
00:22:46.720And 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.
00:22:57.760To 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.
00:24:08.020Now, 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.
00:24:17.340And as a writer, if people are taking things the wrong way, then I failed in my purpose.
00:24:24.800It was obviously causing more emotion than action.
00:24:29.680Regarding that piece from Bruce, I think, and actually, there's a bigger social issue where people confuse credentials with qualifications.
00:24:40.940What qualifies me to do my job is that I'm quite good at it.
00:24:43.500And the COVID-19 mortality in Haldeman, Norfolk, since I came to the position, has gone down relative to other jurisdictions.
00:26:14.560And, 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.
00:26:29.600You 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.
00:26:35.400It's like, let people get outside, get fresh air.
00:26:38.560Not only is it better for their health, but, you know, we're talking about people suffering from depression and alcoholism.
00:26:47.300Let 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.
00:26:54.920And 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.
00:27:01.920I remember at one point the health minister, Patty Haju, told people not to take vitamin D supplements, which to me was just so absurd.
00:27:12.660I 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.
00:27:21.760That's, and, and, and for me, I mean, I was pregnant for most of the initial COVID lockdowns.
00:27:31.200And 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.
00:27:37.800So, you know, this idea that the top health officer of the country was telling us not to take vitamin D just seemed really strange.
00:27:46.780I did want to ask you about one of the recent positions that you've taken that's also been controversial, Dr. Strauss.
00:27:53.220And that is that in April, you vouch for a new antiviral drug made by Pfizer called Paxivoid.
00:27:59.620And, and, you know, you, you, you said that you were excited about this.
00:28:03.540So 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.
00:28:13.060Yeah. 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.
00:28:26.860And 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%.
00:28:41.320So if you give it to 20 people, you save one hospitalization.
00:28:46.680The study was not intending to look at deaths.
00:28:49.500They 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.
00:29:01.760But 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.
00:29:14.360So 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.
00:29:55.620So 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.
00:30:11.460And it just seemed like we were reinventing the wheel.
00:30:13.480We already have a way of getting medicines out to people.
00:30:16.180It's called family doctors, offices, and pharmacies.
00:30:18.820So 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.
00:30:24.440I've talked to the family doctors in our town.
00:30:26.860Well, 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.
00:30:33.080And that's part of all of our, our professional competency upkeep.
00:30:38.840So 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.
00:30:49.900Yeah, 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.
00:31:00.800It seems like that kind of conversation has passed.
00:31:03.300I 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?
00:31:11.840Uh, 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.
00:31:22.840Uh, 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.
00:31:31.100Uh, obviously it's a huge, huge question.
00:31:33.160And we have our work cut out for us as a society.
00:31:35.460It 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?
00:32:23.860If I think something about the vaccine and you think something different, how do we talk about that?
00:32:28.640Um, 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.
00:32:43.560Like, 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.
00:32:59.260So, 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.
00:33:12.020And, you know, you go your way, I'll go mine.
00:33:15.020Um, so I, there's maybe some philosophical work that has to be done.
00:33:21.020And I think there's, there's problems with the whole cancel culture thing.
00:33:24.640And 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.
00:33:35.140Um, it's not, it's frankly not a coincidence that they don't work in a university anymore.
00:33:39.160Um, although that particular attempt wasn't successful.
00:33:42.380Um, 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.
00:33:53.040Well, 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.
00:34:00.260I think, you know, we, we can all make attempts to, to build bridges with those we disagree with.
00:34:04.900And for me personally, I used to love Twitter.
00:34:07.560I used to have so much fun going on there and just kind of ripping at stupid things that liberals would say.
00:34:10.980And 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.
00:34:18.420But it's like, you know, this is kind of mean spirited and it's not really a productive conversation here.
00:34:23.860It'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.
00:34:32.720And that's why, uh, you know, I, I like longer form conversations.
00:34:37.280So I, I really appreciate you coming back on the show.
00:34:40.040Uh, Dr. Stross, it's always, uh, very, uh, clarifying to hear from you.