Western Standard - October 15, 2021


Alberta’s government lied about the death of young teen Nathanael Spitzer, and the media buried it


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

147.851

Word count

860

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

14-year-old Nathaniel Spitzer was on his deathbed in palliative care when he tested positive for COVID-19. He died days later of his terminal brain cancer. But Alberta Health labelled his death as a COVID death, which was reported to the media. The Western Standard investigates.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Music
00:00:07.000 I'm Derek Vildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard.
00:00:10.000 On October 18th, Nathaniel Spitzer, just 14 years old, died.
00:00:16.000 The death of a promising child so young in this world is every parent's worst nightmare.
00:00:21.000 My heart, and that of every Albertan hearing the news was broken.
00:00:26.000 On Tuesday, Alberta Chief Medical Officer Dina Hinshaw reported that a 14-year-old had died in Alberta as a COVID-19 case,
00:00:34.000 although there were pre-existing conditions.
00:00:37.000 As it turns out, Nathaniel didn't die from COVID at all.
00:00:41.000 Those pre-existing conditions were, in fact, stage 4 terminal brain cancer.
00:00:46.000 He was on his deathbed in palliative care when he tested positive for COVID-19.
00:00:51.000 He died days later of his brain cancer.
00:00:55.000 But Alberta Health labeled his death a COVID-19 death, which Hinshaw reported to the media.
00:01:01.000 The media dutifully reported on the death.
00:01:04.000 A case showing that COVID-19 doesn't just kill the elderly and sick, but the young as well.
00:01:10.000 NDP leader Rachel Notley took to Twitter to express her outrage that the government would even mention pre-existing conditions.
00:01:18.000 Better that his death be counted among those lost to COVID entirely.
00:01:23.000 Better to lay his death at the feet of Alberta Premier J.C. Kenney.
00:01:27.000 Rachel Notley said,
00:01:29.000 Telling their loved ones that there were other health complications that contributed to their death offers no comfort whatsoever.
00:01:36.000 No matter what pre-existing conditions they had, this child died during a fourth wave that was preventable.
00:01:43.000 This shouldn't have happened. We need to know what will be done to stop it from happening again. End quote.
00:01:50.000 But Nathaniel's death had nothing to do with the, quote, fourth wave that was preventable.
00:01:57.000 In fact, his death was entirely due to what Notley called, quote, other health complications.
00:02:04.000 This is the morbid state of pandemic politics in 2021.
00:02:09.000 As the publishing, Notley has not apologized to the family or removed her tweets.
00:02:14.000 Nathaniel's sister, Simone, was devastated by the government and media falsely reporting that her brother's death was a COVID-19 case.
00:02:23.000 She took to Facebook to tell the truth about what happened.
00:02:27.000 She said,
00:02:28.000 He died from stage four brain cancer, not from COVID. This is fake news.
00:02:33.000 He was diagnosed in January 2021 and hospitalized in August.
00:02:38.000 Two days before his death, he tested positive for COVID and it turned out positive.
00:02:43.000 Well, this post came to the Western Standard's attention not long after it was posted.
00:02:50.000 Our reporters investigated and confirmed that Sabone was in fact the sister of Nathaniel.
00:02:56.000 Western Standard correspondent Melanie Risden published the story on Wednesday afternoon.
00:03:02.000 And unless I'm mistaken, every single last mainstream government funded media outlet in Alberta ignored the story entirely.
00:03:11.000 The family, who just might know something about the fate of their lost loved ones, were ignored.
00:03:18.000 Their story didn't fit the story that had already been put in print.
00:03:22.000 Their story didn't fit the narrative. Their story was best forgotten.
00:03:27.000 This is not an inconsequential news story.
00:03:30.000 This is not sensationalist clickbait.
00:03:33.000 This was not some QAnon conspiracy theory.
00:03:36.000 This was the government of Alberta inflating the COVID-19 death statistics.
00:03:42.000 This was the mainstream media ignoring the story of the family that contradicted the official government story,
00:03:49.000 which had already been dutifully reported by the media.
00:03:52.000 This didn't come out of left field.
00:03:54.000 We know that there have been bogus government reporting on what constitutes COVID-19 deaths in many jurisdictions.
00:04:00.000 The Western Standard kept at this story.
00:04:03.000 At our morning editorial meeting today, I instructed that this story remain our main focus.
00:04:09.000 And that we tell the story until someone listened.
00:04:12.000 By the afternoon, someone had.
00:04:15.000 Hinshaw took to her podium to apologize for misclassifying Nathaniel's death as a COVID fatality.
00:04:21.000 She promised that fatality numbers would be better classified for young people under 18, going forward.
00:04:27.000 From now on, only actual COVID-19 deaths will be labeled as COVID-19 deaths.
00:04:33.000 At least for those under 18 years of age. 0.98
00:04:36.000 At last, the mainstream media could report on what really happened.
00:04:40.000 Long after the Spitzer family publicly told the truth on social media for the world to see,
00:04:45.000 the legacy media felt comfortable enough to report on the issue.
00:04:49.000 It was now a part of the official story, as the government tells it.
00:04:54.000 As much as I might take glee in sticking it to our mainstream competitors,
00:04:58.000 I write this at the end of my regular workday, genuinely depressed about the state of government communications and media.
00:05:05.000 Errors happen. We've made them.
00:05:08.000 Newsrooms can be short-staffed and stories get missed.
00:05:11.000 We have.
00:05:12.000 But this was different.
00:05:14.000 This was mass omission of a key and indispensable element of a story that everyone had already published.
00:05:21.000 The only part of the story more important than the government lying about a child's cause of death
00:05:26.000 was that a child died before his time.
00:05:29.000 Our politicians need to stop playing football with life and death. 0.99
00:05:33.000 Our media need to stop trusting everything that they are told by the government.
00:05:38.000 And the public?
00:05:39.000 The public needs to stop trusting everything that they're told by the media.
00:05:43.000 The airlines.
00:05:44.000 What are the lines of perspective on a child's cause of death and death?