The Candice Malcolm Show - The media pushes fake news left, right and centre

00:00:00.000 Trudeau bungles the border closure, the science is not yet settled on coronavirus,

00:00:05.260 and at a time where we really need the truth, the media pushes fake news left, right, and center.

00:00:09.940 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:17.300 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into The Candace Malcolm Show. We are back in our

00:00:21.940 studios, sort of running at half capacity. I finished my two-week self-quarantine after

00:00:26.340 returning from California. And as I mentioned on the show before, I went and got tested for

00:00:30.480 coronavirus, and I tested negative. So it's safe to have my producer here in the room,

00:00:35.960 but he is keeping his distance. He's six feet away, or as some Canadians like to say,

00:00:40.660 two meters away, but he's further away. So we are keeping safe at True North, and we hope that you

00:00:45.740 are as well. So Justin Trudeau finally announced that they were closing the border after months

00:00:51.700 and months of saying that this thing was like no big deal, saying that, you know, having flights

00:00:56.020 from China wasn't going to make us any more a threat during this sort of Wuhan outbreak.

00:01:01.380 The Trudeau government finally did an about-face. True North commended them for not only closing the

00:01:05.500 border, but closing the illegal crossing at Roxham Road. That was a huge about-face, sort of

00:01:10.480 ideologically, not only, you know, the right thing to do, but it goes against the ideology that they

00:01:16.340 possess. So that was the right thing to do. The problem is that this measure was absolutely

00:01:21.080 bungled. So just on Wednesday, Justin Trudeau finally announced that the government was making it

00:01:25.560 mandatory that people returning to Canada self-quarantine for 14 days. Up until then,

00:01:31.120 it had just been a recommendation. It was just recommended that people come back. In other words,

00:01:35.860 you didn't really have to do it, and no one was monitoring, and there was no enforcement

00:01:39.200 measures. So we had one million Canadians and permanent residents return to Canada last week.

00:01:44.500 So just to paint the timeline, you know, at first we had the Trudeau government saying border

00:01:49.540 closures don't work. Then they announced the border closure and said, look, all Canadians,

00:01:53.680 you have to come home right now. We're in the middle of spring break in a lot of the countries,

00:01:58.040 so families are, you know, in hot spots getting some sun and on vacation. A lot of people in Europe,

00:02:03.000 a lot of people in Asia. Trudeau made the call saying, hey, everyone get back to Canada ASAP.

00:02:08.400 So a million Canadians follow that advice. They get on a plane, you know, by any means possible,

00:02:13.240 they get back to Canada. It's a huge effort to get a million Canadians abroad back into the country

00:02:18.640 at once. And at that point, we learned that the Trudeau government wasn't even making it mandatory

00:02:24.100 that people self-isolate and self-quarantine. So if you just think about it, a million people coming

00:02:30.160 from all over the world, you could only imagine how many of those people could have been sick. I mean,

00:02:35.580 it only takes a small number. It only really takes one person who's very sick. This disease is very

00:02:40.640 contagious, as we know, and it can easily spread. So Trudeau said, come back. And there were no

00:02:47.740 measures. We've reported this as well at True North that people arriving at the airport,

00:02:51.660 supposedly there were enhanced measures to be tracking people who are ill. That wasn't the case.

00:02:56.540 There was a CBC report about how sick travelers were masking their coronavirus symptoms to get through

00:03:02.560 airport screening. You read the article and you hear about one woman who's coming back from Spain

00:03:07.100 and she was actually tested positive for coronavirus when she got back. But she just was so desperate to

00:03:13.760 get out of Spain. And as we know, there's a huge outbreak there right now. The hospitals are

00:03:17.420 completely overburdened. The death toll there has now actually surpassed China. So things are really

00:03:22.600 bad in countries like Italy, Spain and France. And so Canadians were, you know, hustling to get out of

00:03:28.480 there. I mean, you kind of understand and are sympathetic to this woman because if I was abroad,

00:03:32.820 I would want to come home to Canada where it's sort of safe and comfortable. But at the same time,

00:03:36.800 of course, she puts so many people at risk. And because Trudeau hadn't issued the mandate to

00:03:43.000 say it is absolutely necessary, it's not just advised, but it's legally necessary for you to

00:03:48.140 stay at home. A lot of the people that came back last week, the millions of Canadians, million Canadians

00:03:53.820 are potentially out and about, out, you know, doing grocery shopping, going for a walk, doing the

00:04:00.560 things that we are permitted to do under this self-isolation ruling. And yet, you know, the law

00:04:07.760 is only going into effect as of today, as of Thursday. So anyone who came last week is just

00:04:12.340 sort of a free for all. This is just the government completely bungling this thing. Like, you know, a lot

00:04:17.380 of people are giving Trudeau credit for his daily press briefings, for the sort of transparency they're

00:04:22.460 operating, kind of giving assurances to Canadians. That's all well and good. But every major decision

00:04:27.260 the Trudeau government has made has been like two weeks late or three weeks late. And at a time like

00:04:31.720 this, where time is of the essence and it's so vital to stop the spread before it happens and

00:04:37.060 really contain the virus to the individuals that have it, Trudeau is really, really just letting us

00:04:41.740 down. So now, finally, it is legally mandated. But, and I went into this in detail yesterday in the

00:04:47.860 True North update with my co-host, Andrew Lawton, the details are really in the exemptions, not the

00:04:54.540 rule itself. So the rule is all Canadians have to self-isolate. But then there's like all these 0.95

00:04:59.480 exemptions, including flight attendants. So, you know, the people who are on the front lines that are

00:05:03.280 interacting with all these passengers, all these people interacting one-on-one with every single

00:05:07.540 passenger on a plane, they're not required to self-isolate. They should be the, in my opinion, they should be

00:05:12.540 the ones that are most required to self-isolate. They're the people that are most at risk because they're

00:05:16.180 interacting so closely with other people. Then there's other exemptions, including

00:05:20.960 frontline workers. So if you're a frontline worker, an essential worker, sorry, someone who's

00:05:26.460 working in an essential service, which could potentially even be at a hospital. If you're

00:05:30.220 working at a hospital, you're exempt from the quarantine. But come on, give me a break. Those

00:05:34.960 were the people who could also potentially interact with other people, interact with sick people.

00:05:39.080 If someone is a nurse at a hospital, they just returned from a vacation in Spain and they're exempt

00:05:43.720 from the 14-day quarantine so they can go to work. But what if they're, what if they have symptoms?

00:05:47.220 What if they're sick and they just haven't started showing symptoms? It's bizarre. We're either going

00:05:51.180 to take this health crisis seriously and have the rules being followed to a tee, or we're just kind

00:05:56.880 of going to go willy-nilly, which is what the Trudeau government has been doing. And again, I think these

00:06:00.660 exemptions really do make it problematic. Now, all this said, I think that it is very important.

00:06:07.300 Like I said, I personally self-isolated at a time where it wasn't even required, partially because I was

00:06:12.840 feeling some symptoms of the flu. But I also just thought, you know, not only for my own health and

00:06:17.560 safety, but for my community as well, I'm going to self-isolate. I think it's important to follow

00:06:21.740 these measures and to be overly cautious. I'd rather be overly cautious than utterly cautious.

00:06:27.160 I personally had a whole bunch of speaking opportunities and gigs this spring. I was supposed

00:06:32.100 to speak at the Manning Conference this weekend. I had a whole bunch of other speeches lined up across

00:06:36.800 Canada and they've basically all been cancelled. Not basically, every single one of them

00:06:40.680 has been cancelled. And I think that's for the better. I think at a time like this where there's

00:06:44.200 so much uncertainty, it's better to be cautious. But I want to make this point very clearly. The

00:06:50.800 science is not yet settled on coronavirus. It isn't something that we just all have a complete

00:06:56.380 agreement with. You know, the way that the Trudeau government looks, sort of almost absolves

00:07:01.440 themselves of responsibility for decision-making by saying, we rely on experts. We rely on the science.

00:07:07.620 The science is what's guiding us. The experts are what's guiding us. That's all well and

00:07:11.400 good. But there is no agreement within the scientific community on this issue, as is the

00:07:16.660 case in most issues. But as we're seeing more and more, there are so many dissenting voices

00:07:22.840 that it's really hard to just say, you know, there's one specific train of thought and we're

00:07:29.440 following that. And so, you know, when you look through the science, when you look through

00:07:34.280 what the quote-unquote experts are saying, they're not all in agreement. And so I'm going

00:07:38.920 to go through some of the different, some of the scientific voices that are not really

00:07:44.920 being amplified. That, you know, there's a specific train of thought, which is this is

00:07:48.420 really, really bad. The entire country, the entire society, every single person in the

00:07:52.680 world needs to just stay at home for an indefinite amount of time. And that's sort of the prevailing

00:07:57.420 wisdom at this point. But like I said, there is a lot, quite a bit of dissent within the

00:08:03.040 community. So I'm going to start by talking about an individual called Michael Levitt.

00:08:07.180 He is a Nobel laureate in chemistry, won that in 2013. And he is a Stanford biophysicist.

00:08:13.000 So Mr. Levitt, Professor Levitt, correctly calculated that China would get through the 1.00

00:08:17.660 worst of its coronavirus outbreaks long before many health experts had predicted. He actually

00:08:21.660 created a model and predicted the number of cases and the number of deaths, like within

00:08:26.460 a few dozen. It was really, really impressive what he did. So he basically says, look, we don't

00:08:31.740 have all the information. We don't have perfect information right now. Everything is kind of

00:08:35.240 messy. And we're just basing it on what we know, which really isn't a lot. And so what he's saying

00:08:41.200 is that just as he predicted that the number in China sort of exponentially grew, but then it kind of

00:08:47.340 teetered off. And it didn't continue to exponentially grow until it hit the whole population.

00:08:51.760 It teetered off and stopped. And so he's saying that, you know, that's going to happen in North

00:08:57.480 America. In North America, we're still kind of on the upward trajectory, especially in the United

00:09:01.300 States, places like New York City, where it's very, very dense. That's a problem area because

00:09:07.180 this thing does spread very quickly. But he's saying, you know, we're close to the end. This

00:09:12.200 is not the apocalyptic scenario that people are suggesting. He says, what we need to control

00:09:16.980 is the panic. In the grand scheme, we're going to be fine. This is Professor Michael Levitt from

00:09:25.000 Stanford University. He's not the only one from Stanford University saying that we're really,

00:09:29.620 really overreacting here. So there was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. And I want to

00:09:35.860 read through this op-ed because it's really interesting. And again, it shows the opposite

00:09:39.380 opinion and the opposite perspective of what the sort of prevailing wisdom on coronaviruses.

00:09:44.740 The op-ed says, is the coronavirus as deadly as they say? Current estimates about the COVID-19

00:09:50.140 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude. Okay. So this is also written by

00:09:56.080 two professors at the University of, sorry, at Stanford University. They say, if it's true

00:10:01.920 that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter in place orders and quarantines,

00:10:06.100 then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are

00:10:10.440 surely justified. But there's little evidence to confirm that premise. And projections of the

00:10:15.980 death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high. So what these two professors do is they

00:10:22.360 say, look, we don't really have a correct control group. It's really hard to estimate how many people

00:10:27.300 die from this disease because we don't know all the people who actually have it. Like potentially

00:10:32.120 there could be tens of thousands or millions of people out there who have coronavirus, but because

00:10:37.000 their symptoms are so mild, they're not showing any symptoms and they kind of just get better on their

00:10:42.020 own. So they never get tested and they're not part of that number. So if we say like, for instance,

00:10:47.840 you know, there's a hundred people that test positive for coronavirus and 10 of them die,

00:10:52.120 it's really easy to say that the death rate would be 10%. But what the professors are really trying to

00:10:56.800 say is that it's not really a hundred people that have coronavirus. It's more like 10,000. And then the

00:11:02.060 10 people die. And you look at it that way and the percentage becomes much, much lower, a fraction of

00:11:06.080 a percent. And this thing is only really as deadly as the common flu. And so they're saying,

00:11:11.300 because there's not testing, because we don't really know how many people have it and aren't

00:11:14.940 really affected by it, it's hard to say what the death rate is. So they look at a couple

00:11:18.520 of population samples. They look at China, Italy, Iceland, and then they also look at the Diamond

00:11:25.400 Princess cruise. And they basically come to the conclusion that the death rate, oh, sorry. And they

00:11:30.020 also look at the NBA players. And they basically come to the conclusion that based on those different

00:11:34.840 sample groups, the death rate is much, much, much lower. So yes, coronavirus does massively increase

00:11:40.960 your risk at death if you get it. But so few people have that sort of very, very deadly stream

00:11:47.600 that it means that the mortality rate is much, much lower, essentially. So that's this point.

00:11:53.860 Again, you know, these are scientists, these are experts as well, but they're not being included

00:11:58.420 in the sort of mainstream idea of how we should react to this. There's so many more examples. So

00:12:05.460 the University of Toronto in Canada, one doctor predicted in early March that exaggerated reactions

00:12:12.100 by the public about coronavirus will end up being worse than the disease itself. He says,

00:12:18.360 I'm scared that our hospitals will be overwhelmed with anyone who thinks they probably have it,

00:12:23.200 but then so they might as well go get checked out no matter what, because you never know.

00:12:28.100 A McGill researcher also says that the public should not mistake coronavirus spread for being

00:12:33.220 particularly deadly. So his point is that like, you know, the spread is very contagious and it does

00:12:38.120 spread very rapidly, but that's not the same thing as it being very deadly. We still don't know,

00:12:42.440 like I talked about earlier, we don't know the exact mortality rate because we don't know who has it.

00:12:46.720 And so he's saying, you know, people conflate the two just because it spreads really quickly

00:12:51.200 does not, is not necessarily an indication of how dangerous it is. I could go on and on and on.

00:12:57.320 So again, I think we should be very cautious of just saying simply, you know, we're going to rely

00:13:02.640 on scientists and experts to guide our public policy here because of course there's, you know,

00:13:07.720 so many different opinions and voices in the scientific community. And so for Trudeau to sort

00:13:14.380 of rest on that just shows his lack of leadership and his inability to be a leader. Another problem I

00:13:20.600 have is that, again, you're so overemphasizing the worst case scenario. So an official at the Trudeau,

00:13:26.920 every day that Justin Trudeau gives a briefing and then the sort of ministers are in charge of the

00:13:31.200 coronavirus response team also give a briefing on sort of all the different things that they're

00:13:36.420 working on. And one of the officials yesterday said, look, when we're talking about the self-isolation,

00:13:41.500 the self-quarantine and dealing with coronavirus, we're not talking about days. We're not talking

00:13:46.020 about weeks. We're talking about months. So months of this sort of shelter in place orders,

00:13:51.480 quarantine, self-isolation. You just can't even imagine. I went into this in some detail,

00:13:56.920 my show on Tuesday. The economic outcome of that kind of decision-making is just catastrophic.

00:14:03.940 And I think, again, it has to be weighed with the public health concerns. I'm not saying that

00:14:08.980 the public health concerns should be ignored, no, but we should also consider that massive,

00:14:13.960 massive economic collapse and burden that will happen if we really have to follow these orders

00:14:18.660 for months. I also just don't think that Canadians will abide by that. I think that that's the point

00:14:22.880 where you're going to get a lot of people just saying, you know, forget it. I don't care what

00:14:27.420 the government says. I live in a free society. I'm going to go out for a walk. I'm going to go to the

00:14:30.920 park. You can't force me to stay in my house in a free society. And that's when you're going to get

00:14:36.160 the sort of civil unrest. And just by contrast, Donald Trump, who's getting lots and lots of

00:14:40.620 criticism for optimistically saying, look, I hope this is over by Easter so people can go about their

00:14:45.740 lives this spring. You know, he's getting condemned by that. But he literally said the opposite. He

00:14:50.340 said, look, we're talking about weeks here and not months, trying to give assurances to the economy

00:14:55.940 and to the people that, you know, things are going to get better. Don't, let's not take the worst case

00:15:00.440 scenario here. So unfortunately, I think the Canadian government is taking the wrong approach

00:15:05.180 being overly draconian now when they were overly lax for the last three months, in my opinion.

00:15:12.540 And so in the midst of all of this, yesterday, the liberal government sort of quietly announced

00:15:19.480 another media bailout. It was really kind of jaw dropping. Justin Trudeau in the middle of his

00:15:24.680 briefing just sort of said, you know, and because it's a hard time for media, we're going to announce

00:15:29.280 new measures to support the media. Well, in a free society, we rely on a free press, a free and

00:15:34.880 independent press, not one that is bought and paid for by the federal government and by a political

00:15:39.620 party running the federal government, the liberal party. And yet liberals pat themselves on the back

00:15:44.820 and celebrate the fact that they're giving money out to journalists. So we later heard the details

00:15:50.540 about that. Liberal government announced it will be giving media companies $30 million in taxpayer

00:15:55.800 dollars as part of its national coronavirus awareness campaign. The federal government will

00:16:00.900 be purchasing advertisements on traditional and digital media platforms to inform the public about

00:16:06.620 the pandemic. It's crucial that Canadians can obtain authoritative, well-sourced and factual

00:16:12.420 information related to COVID-19. This is why the government of Canada is taking immediate action

00:16:17.780 so Canadians can continue to access diverse and reliable news sources, said the Heritage Minister.

00:16:23.820 So, hmm, interesting. So I guess at a time when advertisers aren't advertising in the media,

00:16:29.700 the government sees it as a priority to sort of shovel them a bunch of cash. Of course, it will only go

00:16:35.500 to the media outlets that they approve of, that they like, which, as we know, does not include media

00:16:40.440 outlets like True North. The government still refuses to recognize us as a media organization. And we

00:16:45.820 actually took them to court. We took them to court during the last federal election for a right to

00:16:50.600 report, to stand up for press freedom in Canada. We won. We got an emergency injunction. A judge ordered that

00:16:55.780 the Trudeau government had to let us go and report and be allowed to be reporters at the election debate.

00:17:02.220 The Trudeau government is still wanting to pick winners and losers. And this is just the latest example.

00:17:08.160 You know that it's going to go to the CBC. You know that the CBC is sort of the golden child and the chosen one

00:17:13.700 for the Trudeau Liberals. How could you not? They're always running interference for the Trudeau Liberals.

00:17:17.960 They're always kind of distracting from the real issue at a time where, again, Trudeau has bungled the response

00:17:24.200 of keeping Canadians safe and acting quickly and swiftly to ensure that the coronavirus doesn't

00:17:30.000 spread throughout Canada. Trudeau has been weeks and weeks late and slow and messing things up

00:17:35.200 left, right and center. So rely on the CBC to come in and change the entire narrative to bash Trump

00:17:40.660 instead. CBC will always rather bash Trump and talk about Trump, even though they're the Canadian

00:17:45.300 broadcaster they're supposed to be reporting on the Canadian news. If Canadians want to watch the media

00:17:50.080 bash Trump, all they have to do is turn on any number of news channels in the United States.

00:17:55.340 CNN runs, you know, 24-7 Trump bashing. So why do we have to have a Canadian voice doing that same

00:18:01.280 thing instead of looking at the Canadian stories? Well, here's a fake news of the week. We have the

00:18:07.540 CBC runs a story blaming Donald Trump for the death of a man who literally ingested fish tank cleaner.

00:18:15.580 This is a wild story. This is a wild story. So on Monday, a man from Arizona sadly died

00:18:22.020 after he and his wife consumed aquarium cleaner that contained chloroquine. Basically, Donald Trump

00:18:28.660 has been doing these briefings as well. He's, again, trying to paint a rosy picture, trying to be as

00:18:33.160 optimistic as he can in this sort of time of basically, I mean, he's been calling himself a

00:18:37.460 wartime president. This is basically, you know, the world at war against this virus and it's having a

00:18:43.020 similar kind of economic impact as a war would have, devastating the economy. So Trump's trying

00:18:49.320 to be optimistic. He went out and he sort of touted a couple of treatments that are being tried. And

00:18:54.520 he's, you know, he said there's a couple of treatments that have been out there that have

00:18:57.080 had some success. One of the examples that he gave was hydrochloroquine, which is a malaria drug or

00:19:03.020 an anti-malaria medication. And so Trump touted this as well as two other drugs as being potential

00:19:08.220 game changers in the fight against coronavirus. So this couple in Arizona, I guess they heard Trump

00:19:15.240 saying chloroquine is something that is helping people who have coronavirus. This couple didn't

00:19:20.240 have any symptoms. They don't have coronavirus. They didn't have coronavirus, but they were paranoid.

00:19:24.360 They were scared, which you could blame just as much as the media sort of fear-mongering and

00:19:28.740 hypering this up as you could on the president. But regardless, they were looking, the woman was

00:19:33.480 looking through her cupboard and she found some fish tank cleaner, aquarium cleaner. She read on

00:19:40.620 the label, it said chloroquine. She decided, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to consume this.

00:19:45.280 I'm going to drink this because Donald Trump told me to. She mixed it with some water. Her and her

00:19:49.320 husband ingested it. So this is like a homemade cocktail of cleaning solution that she found. I mean,

00:19:55.900 you'd have to be so insane and I'm sorry, so stupid to drink something like that. This couple did.

00:20:00.820 Sadly, the man passed away. The woman vomited it up. And so she was in critical condition,

00:20:06.220 but she didn't. Of course, NBC ran there and put a microphone in her face. And so she said,

00:20:11.860 you know, don't listen to Trump. Trump told me to do this and don't listen to Trump. Trump kept

00:20:16.580 saying it was basically pretty much a cure. Don't take anything. Don't believe anything. Don't believe

00:20:21.380 anything that the president says. Call your doctor. Well, that would be good advice to everyone. You know,

00:20:26.280 don't just start taking homemade cocktails of, of random stuff in your, um, cleaning cupboard,

00:20:32.360 thinking that that will prevent you from getting coronavirus. No, um, chloroquine needs to be

00:20:37.420 prescribed by a doctor. And it's not just something that you can create a homemade version of in your,

00:20:42.680 in your laundry room. And so again, this is just a story of basically people acting very recklessly

00:20:52.460 in a chaotic situation. The media, of course, run and decide to blame this all, of course,

00:20:58.640 on Donald Trump. This is just such a dishonest take by the media. We saw it in the U.S. and then

00:21:03.280 they sort of backed off of it because it was just so brazen. But you trust the CBC to repeat every

00:21:09.700 single type of Trump derangement. So they had this headline from CBC News Alerts, Arizona man dead,

00:21:16.160 woman in critical condition after ingesting, after ingesting chemical touted by U.S. President Donald

00:21:22.340 Trump as potential COVID-19 treatment. Don't believe anything the president says, woman tells NBC,

00:21:28.340 call your doctor. The only problem is Trump didn't tout this particular drug as a cure for COVID-19 or

00:21:35.540 treatment. He said that the doctors are having some luck with using this in combination with

00:21:41.060 antibiotics and that it made him feel optimistic. He by no means told people to go and ingest a

00:21:47.260 homemade cocktail of random stuff. So this is pretty dishonest even for the CBC. So that gets this week

00:21:54.780 in fake news. So once again, instead of informing Canadians with the truth and in keeping us well

00:22:00.980 informed, the CBC instead goes and runs towards Trump derangement syndrome and pushing fake news.

00:22:08.120 They would rather tell a story about how Trump is wrong and how Trump potentially killed someone

00:22:13.860 than report the truth, which is that chloroquine is actually is having positive effects. There's

00:22:18.740 been plenty of doctors and plenty of experts, again, out there saying this is potentially something that

00:22:23.720 will help people with coronavirus. But the media is so deranged that they can't even see that.

00:22:28.360 Okay, I am going to leave it at that. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to check out

00:22:32.400 True North Update, which is a daily show I've been doing with Andrew Lawton, where we go through all the

00:22:36.540 latest with the coronavirus here in Canada and around the world. And we sort of pick apart what

00:22:41.900 Trudeau and his ministers say after their daily briefing every day. So check that out. Thank

00:22:46.500 you so much for tuning in. And we will be back again next week. I'm Candace Malcolm. And this is

00:22:51.460 The Candace Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - March 26, 2020

The media pushes fake news left, right and centre

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