The Candice Malcolm Show - Masks don’t do anything. Stop wearing them.

00:00:00.000 Anyone who promotes a return to cloth masking or masking for the sake of children would appear to

00:00:05.460 be out of touch with our knowledge base and therefore definitionally not an expert. I'm

00:00:09.880 Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning

00:00:24.540 into the program today. So that, what I just read off the top, was a quote from an excellent

00:00:28.940 article in the National Post earlier this week. As you know, the mask mandates are now gone in

00:00:35.660 Ontario. We no longer have to wear a mask and my guest today, Dr. Matt Strauss, wrote an article

00:00:41.340 in the National Post. It was a top trending article on that page. The headline said this,

00:00:45.760 I'm a doctor, here's why I'm done with masking. And I was so interested in that piece. I feel

00:00:51.240 so strongly about this issue that I wanted to invite the author on, Dr. Matt Strauss, who I'm

00:00:56.700 very excited to have on the program. Dr. Matt Strauss is the acting medical officer of health

00:01:01.760 for Haldimand Norfolk. He is an ICU doctor at the Guelph General Hospital. Dr. Strauss is a former

00:01:07.680 professor of medicine at both Queen's University as well as McMaster and a former global journalism

00:01:13.300 fellow at the University of Toronto. Dr. Strauss has been a vocal critic of Canada's pandemic response.

00:01:19.280 In fact, he was one of the first public health officials in Canada to call for an end to vaccine

00:01:24.420 mandates. We're really excited to have you on the program. Thank you so much, Dr. Strauss, for joining

00:01:28.120 us. Thank you for having me. Well, let's talk first about this op-ed that you had published in

00:01:33.060 the National Post explaining why you would not be wearing a mask. So first of all, why don't you tell

00:01:37.700 us about the study and the latest material that would lead you to that decision? Sure thing. So what I

00:01:45.700 talk about in the piece is that there are observational trials and experimental trials. And in

00:01:49.400 general, kind of first year of medical school training, any, and really philosophy of science

00:01:56.720 training, experiments tend to be taken more seriously than observation or observational

00:02:01.160 trials. So there've been lots and lots of observational trials of masks, and many of them

00:02:04.980 have suggested that masks are helpful at preventing transmission. There's been only one randomized control

00:02:10.300 trial that is medical experiment on the question of whether masks prevent transmission on a community

00:02:16.400 level. And that was a paper done by Abeluk and colleagues. Abeluk, I believe, is based at Yale.

00:02:22.680 Many of his colleagues who did the study with him were at Stanford. And it was done in Bangladesh. It was a

00:02:29.760 monumental task to do something like this, because there was an experiment of does my mask protect me?

00:02:37.080 Can I wear a mask? And does that prevent me from getting COVID? And the answer was, doesn't seem so.

00:02:42.360 They weren't able to show it. That was done in Denmark. That was called the Dan mask trial. And that

00:02:47.000 they only looked at about 3,000, 4,000 people on that order. To answer the question of does having the

00:02:55.480 whole community mask prevent people, prevent the whole community from having more COVID, you had to

00:03:02.000 enroll many, many more people. So they had 350,000 people in that trial, and they randomized them village

00:03:08.640 by village. So half the not quite, but about half of the villages got this intensive mask promotion,

00:03:15.480 and the other half they left alone. And what they found, after studying these 350,000 people,

00:03:23.400 was no effect whatsoever from cloth masks.

00:03:27.980 There was a small effect from surgical masks. So the blue ones that we that we've worn in hospital

00:03:33.540 for years and years, about an 11% decrease in transmission. So what I when I say in the pieces,

00:03:39.860 oh, and I should say the 11% decrease in transmission was only seen in individuals over 50.

00:03:44.580 And they couldn't see an effect in individuals under 50.

00:03:49.180 What I say in the pieces, this shouldn't really come as a surprise to us, because we've studied

00:03:52.760 masking for other infections, such as influenza. There have been many, many experiments. And the

00:03:59.820 medical consensus prior to COVID-19 was that it wasn't very helpful to do this. And so we'll all

00:04:06.380 remember Anthony Fauci telling us not to wear a mask. Because of, I think, some amount of panic,

00:04:13.600 some amount of herd mentality. The mask mandates came down, there was nothing else to do. We didn't

00:04:19.480 have effective vaccines, we're going to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the problem.

00:04:22.660 Now we do have vaccines. Now we do have this better type of study and experimental study that

00:04:30.120 says that cloth masks didn't really do very much. And no sorts of masks really do very much for people

00:04:34.620 under 50. So I think now the dust is settling, and we have to respond to the best evidence that we

00:04:40.560 have, which is that cloth masking is basically a security blanket for your face. And no sort of

00:04:49.520 masking is really protective for young people. So what inspired me to write the piece was I've seen

00:04:54.900 a lot of people saying, we know masks work, and we have to protect children. And I was like, that's

00:04:58.800 not what the best evidence shows. So that's really the thesis of the piece.

00:05:05.200 And how long have we known this? Because it seems like the end of masks sort of happened in stages that

00:05:10.840 for some places like, you know, in southern United States or red states, they got rid of them really

00:05:15.220 soon. And then you kind of had people that were maybe more liberal or progressive holding on to it.

00:05:19.520 Like, when was it known by the medical community by professionals, that these masks just don't

00:05:25.240 really do anything?

00:05:28.820 Known is a funny word, because I'll say that, frankly, many of my colleagues don't agree with

00:05:34.380 me on this point, who are practicing in public health, they want to maintain mask mandates,

00:05:39.560 because of all the observational trials that exist. And, and partly, my piece was saying,

00:05:45.960 yeah, but that's not, you know, we usually have a hierarchy of evidence, and we usually put

00:05:51.680 experimental data at the top of that. I think that it's difficult. And I've seen this throughout

00:05:57.940 my career, it's difficult for folks to climb down from a tree once they've climbed up. Once you've

00:06:03.240 taken a position, it's hard to reverse it. And so, I'm not going to say that it's 100% known,

00:06:11.520 everyone agrees, I'm going to say this is the best evidence we have, we should follow the best evidence

00:06:15.620 that we have. But this trial that I'm talking about, the Abaluck paper that was performed in

00:06:21.360 Bangladesh, the trial was performed over the winter of 2020. I believe the results were first released

00:06:28.760 in the spring of 2020. I would have to fact check that part, but as a preprint, and they were only

00:06:34.420 published, sorry, they were released in the spring of 2021, and only published in the fall of 2021.

00:06:43.880 So it's been about almost six months that this has been public information. But it does take longer

00:06:52.120 than that for knowledge to translate into action. Interesting. Well, you sort of alluded to the

00:06:58.220 reason, but I'm gonna ask the question anyway, early on in the pandemic, you mentioned that Fauci down in

00:07:03.360 the States said that not to wear a mask, but in Canada as well, chief medical officer, the federal

00:07:09.920 one, Dr. Theresa Tam, she came out and said that she wasn't really sure about masks, some of the

00:07:15.540 recommendations, because if you recall, she had was one of the lead investigators that looked at

00:07:20.140 Canada's SARS reaction from from the SARS virus. And I remember reading some of the recommendations

00:07:25.480 that she had put in place, including the fact that taking people's temperatures didn't really help

00:07:29.980 because a lot of times people were asymptomatic, or they didn't have a temperature, but they did have

00:07:34.100 the virus. Why? Why is it then that that so many of these recommendations that didn't really seem to

00:07:40.760 be backed up by science, or even backed up by the people who were out there, the ones we delegated these

00:07:47.160 decisions to the chief medical officers? What why did we put in place these measures if we knew that they

00:07:52.980 weren't really doing what we needed to, in order to protect us? So there's a, there's a few things.

00:08:00.540 And I look, I'm not a social scientist. And I think anyone who is a social scientist is not going to be

00:08:05.760 able to tell for 1015 years, they're going to go through everyone's old tweets and try to and try to

00:08:10.040 figure out what what on earth was happening. And when they do that kind of archaeology of what happened,

00:08:15.940 I think a really important tweet in Canada was in mid March 2020, Patty Haydew, the health minister

00:08:23.340 posted this picture of herself at the major public health agency, natural public health agency in

00:08:31.920 Ottawa. And it was like a group photo where they were all kind of doing a group hug, not wearing

00:08:36.240 masks saying, don't worry, guys, we're gonna we're gonna protect us from COVID. And the Twitter comments

00:08:40.880 were, were so critical of the public health experts at the national agency saying, why aren't you wearing

00:08:48.500 masks? Why aren't you socially distanced? So it's, it is true that there was a there was a big gap between

00:08:54.380 the public's expectation of someone doing something and establish public health practice. And what the experts

00:09:02.540 were suggesting at that time. So I, it is my suspicion that panic herd mentality, political pressure did

00:09:11.960 have something to do with why a lot of things were brought into place. Without, I would say, a very

00:09:19.040 strong evidence base. And I think that, as the, you know, the fear of widespread death is receding as the

00:09:27.340 pandemic recedes. And I think we're going to be able to have cooler, calmer conversations about what

00:09:33.600 we did that actually made sense and what didn't make that much sense.

00:09:36.740 Well, I hope so. And I hope we do a full postmortem and figure out where the mistakes were made. So

00:09:40.940 hopefully, we'll listen to our, our future selves will listen to the people now who are talking about

00:09:46.400 it. But when you said it's sort of a security blanket for the face, I, I can relate. I remember the

00:09:50.440 first time I went grocery shopping, during the pandemic, you know, we've done the two weeks to stay

00:09:55.520 home. And fortunately, we had just stocked up. So I didn't need to go out. But the first time I went

00:09:59.120 out, you know, I was like wearing gloves and masks, and I was keeping away because like, you just,

00:10:03.860 we had no idea what was going on. And it made me feel like, okay, I can go out. But I'm going to come

00:10:09.100 home and I'm going to wash all my clothes. And I'm going to like spray disinfectant over all the

00:10:13.700 grocery bags before I wash them and put them in the fridge to give to the family. But Dr. Trouse,

00:10:19.620 it seems that over time, we became more knowledgeable about this virus, we became had

00:10:26.560 better tools, including vaccination. So once we hit a point where most of the population did what

00:10:33.000 they were told to do, which is go out and get vaccinated. Why is it do you think that we held

00:10:37.280 on to some of these rules for so long? Why didn't we I mean, if this study that you're referring to

00:10:42.040 was was performed in 2020, and it was sort of published and broadly known, you know, this is the sort of

00:10:48.980 gold standard when it comes to studies of randomized control trial. Why is it that it wasn't listened to

00:10:55.860 and that we continue to push things like masking in some jurisdictions, we still have masking in some

00:11:00.880 places, like I know, when you go to an airport, when you go to a hospital, you're still made to wear

00:11:04.440 a mask, even if it's a even if it's a cloth mask. So what why is it that that we haven't evolved our

00:11:09.760 thinking as we've learned more about this virus?

00:11:11.820 Um, I think, so it's a few things. And one is to a bit more of an answer to the last question,

00:11:21.040 the the impetus to put all these things in place were, well, we don't know so much about this virus.

00:11:26.400 And remember, at the beginning, the pandemic, people are talking about a three to 5% mortality

00:11:29.440 rate, which is probably something more like a 10th of that we now know. So people were really scared.

00:11:35.420 And even if you thought cloth masks probably don't work, if you're talking about one in 20 people

00:11:40.740 dying who get this, could it hurt? Could it hurt to put on a cloth mask? I think the short term,

00:11:46.480 no, it doesn't really hurt that much until you know more. I think unfortunately, fear is a little

00:11:51.840 bit self propagating. Habit is a little bit self propagating. And now we now we know that this,

00:12:00.700 this disease COVID, it kills, it kills and it killed a lot of people. It's a serious disease,

00:12:06.160 but it is 10 times less dangerous than what we were initially were told. So I think that

00:12:13.880 the fear and the panic, and frankly, social isolation have really done a number on people and

00:12:22.360 and it's going to be something like detox or de-traumatizing to let these things go finally.

00:12:34.580 Yeah, we're certainly seeing that even with the vaccine passports, you know, a lot of people 1.00

00:12:38.940 really outraged when those went away, they're still in place in British Columbia, for the most

00:12:43.200 part, to my knowledge. You were one of the first health officers to say, we need to move on,

00:12:49.560 we need to be done with this. So can we talk a little bit about the vaccine mandates and what

00:12:54.160 what your position is on those? Sure thing. So at the when they initially came down, I was not

00:13:00.860 supportive of them. When I was asked by a journalist in Haldeman Norfolk, what I thought about them,

00:13:06.960 I said, I think the same thing the premier said, which is I don't like them. But I do follow the law.

00:13:13.260 So my concerns about them were, so even at that time, it seemed like they weren't providing the

00:13:20.680 vaccines weren't providing sterilizing immunity. And it seemed much more the case that your vaccine

00:13:24.600 protected you more than your vaccine protected other people. And for the most part, if you were

00:13:30.080 reasonably healthy, I'm not saying perfectly healthy, I'm saying reasonably healthy and double

00:13:34.280 vaccinated, you probably weren't going to die of COVID-19. So it seemed to me that the onus ought to

00:13:41.160 have been on you to protect yourself and not to worry so much about what everyone else is doing.

00:13:48.320 Because at that time in September, when they came down in Ontario, we were talking about

00:13:52.540 50-60% chance it prevents you from getting infected and prevents you from being able to pass it on to

00:13:57.760 someone else. This is in contradistinction to older vaccines, like the MMR vaccine, which provides

00:14:03.720 97% to 99% immunity to measles and mumps, rubella for life. So I didn't think it was appropriate to

00:14:12.080 bring them down in the first place. When the Omicron wave hit, it became clear very quickly by

00:14:19.680 December, January, that the two-dose vaccine series was providing about 0%

00:14:26.760 prevention from getting COVID. So many, many, many people, probably in your life, probably many

00:14:32.660 people listening to this, were double vaccinated, got Omicron, and probably gave it on to someone

00:14:39.120 else. So when you're talking about something being 0% effective, a two-dose vaccine mandate,

00:14:44.860 why would we have a policy that was seriously divisive, seriously hurt a lot of people? And one of the

00:14:52.620 things I wrote about was the folks who are unvaccinated, they're not, in my experience,

00:14:57.900 and I've looked after some, unfortunately, who were dying in the hospital, they weren't angry

00:15:04.440 Trump voters that they've been characterized as. They were often folks with lower education.

00:15:11.120 Some were highly educated. I'm not saying everyone who's unvaccinated is uneducated,

00:15:14.680 but many of them had low health literacy. Many of them had reasons not to trust government or reasons

00:15:19.600 not to trust doctors. Either they had been hurt by doctors or government before, or they came from 0.87

00:15:25.940 a group who had been hurt by government or doctors before, namely minorities and indigenous folks.

00:15:32.460 So I'm very grateful for a philosophy professor of mine, Maya Goldenberg. She wrote a book on vaccine

00:15:42.700 hesitancy, and she's been, you know, on the CBC explaining it. Vaccine hesitancy is a crisis of trust.

00:15:49.600 And if you want to build trust with folks, threatening to toss them out of their job and

00:15:53.620 not letting them go to a swimming pool is not a way to build trust with them. It's right, this is a

00:15:58.060 really long answer. But so for all those reasons, and marginalized folks were already marginalized,

00:16:02.260 it was 0% effective. And it was causing extreme social discord, the trucker convoy, that sort of

00:16:11.900 thing. So it seemed to me like the easy solution here is to get rid of it, it's 0% effective. And that's

00:16:17.620 why I wrote that piece for the McDonnell Warrior Institute.

00:16:20.120 Well, there's so much there that we can unpack. So I just just curious, then, so at this point in

00:16:27.680 time, you know, Omicron came, everybody got it, everyone in my household got it, including, you

00:16:32.980 know, people who are fully vaccinated, the adults. And to your point, 0% effective. So at this point,

00:16:41.440 what do you say to someone who is not vaccinated, who made that choice, who said, I'm just going to

00:16:45.480 wait and see what happens? Well, what has happened is that they've seen that people who are fully

00:16:50.300 vaccinated, still got COVID. So what is the imperative? Or why do people keep telling the

00:16:58.580 unvaccinated to go get vaccinated, if they could see, you know, from experience that getting

00:17:02.600 vaccinated wouldn't actually stop you from getting Omicron?

00:17:05.420 Sure. So I was remiss in not mentioning this, because I was being a bit long winded. But so it

00:17:08.660 still is the case that two doses of vaccine are 95% effective at preventing you from being

00:17:13.860 hospitalized or dying of COVID, if and when you get it. So they don't prevent you from

00:17:17.480 getting COVID, which is, that's the public health interest. If I can stop you from getting COVID and

00:17:23.480 passing it on to someone else, on a population level, that's important. When that goes down to

00:17:28.540 zero, it's not a public health issue. It's a personal health issue. You cut down your chance of

00:17:33.540 dying of COVID by 95% if you get the vaccine. So probably you should get the vaccine.

00:17:39.160 One of the things I did when I started my role at Holden Norfolk, I said, if you're vaccine hesitant,

00:17:48.640 talk to your doctor. But if you can't talk to your doctor, talk to me, call my office. There's

00:17:51.940 nothing I would rather do than talk to someone about the benefits of the good news of vaccination.

00:17:57.280 It is by far and away the most life-saving thing modern medicine has done. I think in terms of

00:18:03.740 humanity's work at stopping disease, sanitation is first and vaccination is second. So I've had

00:18:10.380 dozens and dozens of conversations with folks who were vaccine hesitant. Most of them felt that

00:18:14.940 there was something particular about them. So many, many of them were not against vaccination

00:18:20.180 entirely. Many of them were vaccinated, but they felt that they had some particular issue that made

00:18:24.360 them different. Either they had heart disease in their family or they had a bad reaction to some

00:18:28.740 other vaccine. And they wanted some sort of personal counseling on that point. So nine times out of

00:18:35.860 the 10, if I personally counseled somebody about it, I would say, so, you know, I do recommend that

00:18:39.460 you get it. And in very, very few situations, but I say you shouldn't get it. But I do think people

00:18:44.540 deserve that sort of personal consideration when it comes to injecting something into your body.

00:18:51.120 Okay. Interesting. No, I appreciate that because so many, so many people who talk about

00:18:54.460 the vaccine, it very much is sort of like everyone must get it. There's no discussion

00:18:58.720 and they don't take any account to so many of the things you mentioned about, you know,

00:19:02.700 valid reasons that someone might be hesitant about getting a vaccine and, you know, talking to them

00:19:07.580 in a, in an open way, as opposed to just scolding them and threatening them and using fear and

00:19:11.980 coercion, which is unfortunately what we've seen. I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you,

00:19:17.300 Dr. Strauss, a little bit about the sort of mental health and economic health issues that we have

00:19:23.440 seen as a result of, of public health. So, you know, for, for yourself as a, as a public official

00:19:29.120 in medicine, a medical officer of health, do you, I'm just curious because it seems like for the last

00:19:36.480 two years, the entire focus has been on COVID and so many other areas of health have been neglected.

00:19:42.840 In your opinion, in your professional opinion, what, what was that a mistake? How can we avoid that

00:19:48.740 from happening in the future? And how can we now shift the focus to make sure that,

00:19:52.760 that people's wellbeing, their, their mental health and, and just their ability to, to work,

00:19:58.780 to go out, to communicate with people, to live our lives like Canadians, to go back to 1.00

00:20:03.760 having our country, being Canadians, to make sure that that's a priority and not, you know,

00:20:09.740 a mysterious next wave that could come up and shoot us all back into, into the same scenario

00:20:14.380 that we've seen for the last two years.

00:20:17.280 That's a terrific question. If I could just add one more thing to the discussion of vaccines,

00:20:20.240 and it's not to toot my horn, but when I, when I talk about taking a personalized approach to folks

00:20:25.560 and accepting and acknowledging their concerns,

00:20:28.300 I believe that not only is that sort of ethically correct is practically correct. I believe you get

00:20:35.940 more folks vaccinated that way. And the proof is a little bit in the pudding. When I came to

00:20:40.080 Haldeman Norfolk in September, we were fifth from the bottom in terms of public health unit

00:20:44.240 vaccination rates. Three months later, we were 15th from the bottom, which I'm very proud of. Then 1.00

00:20:50.420 the new census data was applied. And it turns out that actually we were, we were at the bottom

00:20:54.320 the whole time, but, but much less at the bottom, but for a shining moment there, the difference that

00:20:59.620 we, that this approach was making, I think was palpable. I'm very proud of that. Regarding your,

00:21:04.280 your question about mental health and all the other sorts of health. Yeah. I think everyone can tell.

00:21:08.100 I mean, I could tell after the first lockdown, I was living in Kingston and to walk down the street,

00:21:13.940 a lot of people visibly were not doing well. It's actually, it's difficult to take a proper

00:21:21.320 census of how many folks are under housed and living and sleeping rough. But it wasn't difficult to see

00:21:27.800 that clearly the rate had gone up a lot and, and our pandemic policies had left the most vulnerable

00:21:34.200 people visibly behind. I'll also say that as an ICU doctor, the people who I was seeing

00:21:40.160 were by and large essential workers. So if you are a copywriter for an ad agency, you were in your

00:21:49.960 condo downtown working on your Mac book, totally safe getting your Uber Eats. If you were the Uber

00:21:55.660 Eats driver, you weren't totally safe. If you're the Amazon warehouse worker, you weren't totally safe.

00:21:59.640 Um, those folks were often, um, lower income, uh, often from immigrant communities. Um, and they 1.00

00:22:06.600 bore the brunt of, uh, COVID-19 in each of those waves because the, the lockdowns were not protecting

00:22:13.660 them in the slightest. They were, if you were a bus driver, you still had to go to work. Um,

00:22:17.600 so even the, the physical effects of, um, the COVID-19 pandemic policies that we pursued didn't seem

00:22:27.240 to stop the outcomes. It seemed to displace the outcomes onto, onto, um, less fortunate folks.

00:22:34.460 Um, but that said, so even if you were a more fortunate person, uh, who got to, uh, have Uber

00:22:40.060 Eats delivered to you and still got a full paycheck or availed yourself of CERB, um, I, social

00:22:46.240 isolation is not good for anybody. And then as I do general medicine on the ward and the hospital as

00:22:51.100 well, and I was seeing the outcomes of that. I was seeing more folks with overdose. I was seeing more

00:22:55.200 folks with self-harm otherwise, um, more, um, of the ravages of alcoholism. Um, one thing that

00:23:03.440 really affected me a lot that I wrote about early on was, um, I had in one week, I admitted

00:23:08.960 to elderly women, one from a retirement home, one from a nursing home with starvation, because, um,

00:23:15.140 as you may recall, families were banned, uh, from visiting their elders in care. Um, those

00:23:21.960 homes were often understaffed and it turned out that these women who had varying degrees 1.00

00:23:28.380 of dementia would forget to eat, um, and their families were the ones feeding them. So they,

00:23:33.400 they came into hospital with biochemical evidence of starvation. Um, and this was occurring in

00:23:38.580 Canada in 2020. And, uh, I'm not going to get over that anytime soon. So I think, I hope

00:23:45.920 that there's, you know, a Royal commission or something like that. And we can talk about all

00:23:50.340 of these other health outcomes, um, and, and who, who didn't benefit, what were the benefits

00:23:57.500 of lockdown and what were the harms? Um, we now know that opioid overdoses in young men

00:24:03.100 in Ontario doubled over this period of time. It was already an epidemic. Um, and I hope that

00:24:09.100 there's, there's just some acknowledgement that health is not a single disease. Um, health

00:24:14.960 is, uh, health is a social phenomenon. If you can't go to your dad's funeral, if you

00:24:20.440 can't have your wedding, if your kids don't get to play on the playground, you, you're not

00:24:25.140 healthy. Um, the world health organization has this, this well-known, um, definition of

00:24:30.640 health, that it's not merely the absence of disease. It's, it's, it's psychological and

00:24:35.220 physical and spiritual, and it has to do with education and it has to do with the health of

00:24:39.000 your society and meaningful opportunities that like health is being able to do the things

00:24:44.280 that you want to do in the time that you have. Health is not living forever because none

00:24:47.520 of us are going to do that. Um, so in some ways I thought these were things we had already

00:24:55.620 learned, um, but we're going to have to relearn them. Another really important analogy is the

00:25:00.000 HIV epidemic. Um, it turned out that stigma wasn't helpful. Um, there was a lot of stigma

00:25:06.300 around who might get HIV and, and how, how are we to protect ourselves from such people? And

00:25:11.520 it turned out that was a positively backwards approach. And it was only once we started

00:25:15.080 going to the areas where folks who were at high risk, uh, for HIV and telling them that

00:25:20.220 we cared about them and this is how they could protect themselves. Um, that we really put a

00:25:23.980 stop to the epidemic in North America. People often forget, um, there was a travel ban on HIV

00:25:30.860 positive individuals going to the United States until 2008. Um, it like it's mystifying. And it,

00:25:36.560 and so some of the, some of the, I would say backwards things that were done about HIV took,

00:25:42.840 uh, 15, 20 years to undo. Um, I hope that we're faster this time in this sort of acknowledgement

00:25:49.820 that, that health is a, is more than the absence of disease.

00:25:54.340 Right. I mean, there's, there's so much wisdom, um, in, in what you just said and, and so many of

00:25:59.500 the things that we thought we had learned and clearly we didn't because, uh, you know, the,

00:26:03.900 to some of the points that you make, uh, you know, we know that more people under the age of,

00:26:07.860 uh, 65 in Canada died of diseases of despair, um, than COVID. Um, I just read a report earlier

00:26:14.020 this week about how alcohol related deaths, uh, were higher for individuals under the 65 in the

00:26:18.940 United States, um, than all of COVID. So, so all of these sort of second and third order

00:26:23.060 impact have been killing people at a higher rate, um, in some age groups than, than COVID itself.

00:26:29.140 I just have one final question for you, Dr. Strauss. I was researching you a little bit,

00:26:33.300 uh, for this interview. And I noticed that there's a lot of controversy around you. Uh,

00:26:37.780 there was a CBC piece, uh, about how some people were trying to remove you from office and some of

00:26:43.100 your tweets have, uh, gone under, uh, scrutiny and fire talking to you and you're such a reasonable

00:26:48.600 person and, and, and, and, you know, so thoughtful. Uh, I wonder why, why is it that people are,

00:26:54.380 are so, uh, triggered for lack of a better word by some of the things you, you put out there

00:26:59.160 and, you know, what, what, why is it, do you think that, that the CBC, um, you know, treats

00:27:04.400 you like, uh, you know, at least in the one piece I read, like, like you're some kind of a,

00:27:07.460 a threat or a prior or something like that. What, what, why do you think people react that way to you?

00:27:11.820 I hope that we have a large conversation about this too, um, in, in the months and years to come.

00:27:18.380 Um, I think that in general, our society is not doing a great job at disagreeing with each other

00:27:24.240 anymore. I see that at every level. I see that on Twitter a lot. Um, but, but elsewhere. And I,

00:27:30.100 I know that some of my colleagues in public health who maybe take opposite views of mine in terms of,

00:27:35.160 you know, perhaps, perhaps they thought we should have been more restrictionist and they get harassed

00:27:39.620 a lot. And some of them had angry people showing up at their homes and felt that their security was

00:27:44.960 threatened. Um, so I do think there is in general, a decline in civility and our ability as adults to

00:27:52.940 have reasonable discussions about things. So I think that, I think that, you know, frankly,

00:27:57.900 some of those CBC articles are, are part of that. Um, I have felt at times that, um, like

00:28:03.580 legislative media institutions were deliberately taking what I had to say out of context, which

00:28:07.760 probably that, and that is part of a larger phenomenon about, uh, you know, clickbait and, uh,

00:28:13.980 controversy, um, selling and getting more clicks. Um, I, I know, I, I know that everything I tweeted

00:28:26.460 about this pandemic, um, I stand by, it was all true. I, I, I made some attempts to put risk into

00:28:33.620 perspective, you know, as we talked about in the initial reports where the, this was going to kill

00:28:38.820 three to 5% of people who got it. And it turned out that wasn't the case. It also turned out that the,

00:28:43.120 the effects were highly age stratified. So people over 80 were on the order of five to 10,000 times

00:28:48.640 more likely to die of COVID than somebody who's eight. Um, and I, I don't know why hearing that

00:28:57.020 made some people so upset because to me, that's just the facts. Um, and the facts ought to inform

00:29:02.660 our approach. I, a classmate of mine actually emailed me very early into my public commentary

00:29:08.500 on the pandemic to say, like, how can you write this? Um, people aren't going to trust us if

00:29:12.800 they're not scared. And I was like, no, I think that's the opposite. I think that if we scare

00:29:16.860 people into compliance, that's not going to, they'll comply, but they won't trust us. Um,

00:29:22.020 so I think some of it has been a strategic mishap misstep from some folks, um, who believe they have

00:29:28.700 the public health at heart. But I think the, the essence of improving the public health is to build

00:29:34.080 trust and to have trust, you need honesty and accountability. And for that, you need to kind

00:29:38.740 of baldly tell people some facts that maybe they didn't want to hear. So I think that's, um, what

00:29:44.460 engendered the quote unquote controversies that the, that the CBC has written about.

00:29:48.620 Oh, well, I mean that just that, that comment, and I don't mean to pick on your friend who emailed

00:29:52.180 you, but the idea that you have to scare people in order to get them to comply is, is just so wrong

00:29:56.640 in a Western liberal democracy, in my opinion. And I think you're right. I think COVID made us all go a

00:30:02.560 little crazy. Everyone's wound up so tight. I see it in social media. I saw it in the way that,

00:30:05.920 uh, people characterize the truckers. I saw it with some of the truckers themselves, just,

00:30:09.600 you know, people are very angry and, and they don't really have an outlet for that. Sometimes

00:30:13.980 you see it. Uh, you know, I saw it, uh, one day when I was shopping at Hudson's Bay, I saw a woman

00:30:19.040 just losing her mind, yelling at a store clerk. Um, you know, that kind of thing was, would have been 1.00

00:30:24.040 really rare and not really happening in a Canadian suburb, but it seems that it does happen more and more.

00:30:30.320 And I think that we certainly have to have a more well-rounded approach as you mentioned,

00:30:35.600 when it comes to public health. Well, Dr. Strauss, I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope we can

00:30:39.280 have you, uh, back on the program again soon. So thank you so much for joining us.

00:30:43.280 I'd love to do that. Thanks for having me.

00:30:45.180 All right. That's Dr. Matt Strauss. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - March 24, 2022

Masks don’t do anything. Stop wearing them.

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