Western Standard - October 13, 2021


Calgary doc who’s fighting for more COVID lockdown taking trip to pandemic hotspot

Topics
COP26 hypocrisy
Mentioned
Joe Vipond Glasgow Jason Loeb Hypocrisy
The battle continues between Without Papers Pizza and the city Family says Alberta government & NDP spreading ‘fake news’ that Nathanael’s death was from COVID

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

157.26

Word count

440

Sentence count

20

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Calgary Emergency physician Dr. Joe Vipond, who heavily criticized the Alberta government and Alberta Health Service s COVID-19 response, is shifting his fight to climate change and heading to Glasgow, a COVID case hotspot.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Calgary emergency physician Dr. Joe Vipond, who heavily criticized the Alberta government and
00:00:05.400 Alberta Health Service's COVID-19 response, is shifting his fight to climate change and heading
00:00:10.920 to Glasgow, a COVID case hotspot. Vipond tweeted Sunday that he and his daughter are heading to
00:00:17.100 Glasgow for COP26, the 26th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, despite reports COVID-19
00:00:25.620 infections are surging in the area. Vipond attended many protests in Calgary and Edmonton
00:00:31.520 and actively spoke out against the provincial government's easing of restrictions through the
00:00:36.380 summer. The emergency physician became the mainstream media go-to doctor for his stance
00:00:41.520 on continuing health measures and pandemic controls, then came under criticism when his
00:00:46.780 financial support of the Alberta NDP government surfaced and revealed a number of substantial
00:00:52.160 donations to the party. Vipond dismissed allegations of his partisan affiliations in an early August
00:00:58.700 interview with CTV, stating,
00:01:00.920 There is a record of me donating to one political party. I would just like to say that's a normal
00:01:05.760 part of our electoral process and it's a normal part of our democracy, end quote.
00:01:11.200 Now looking to focus on a new fight, Vipond will travel with his daughter, a climate change activist,
00:01:17.060 to Glasgow at the end of October for the two-week conference, despite the Greater Glasgow and Clyde
00:01:23.440 Health Board area currently recording the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the country.
00:01:29.200 Despite significantly lower infection rates around the country, a Glasgow news site says 507 cases were
00:01:35.720 recorded Sunday and a number of neighborhoods in Glasgow are seeing a seven-day positivity rate of
00:01:41.400 more than 400 per 100,000 of the population. A number of comments posted on Vipond's Twitter
00:01:47.420 thread accused those traveling to the climate conference of being hypocritical, citing the
00:01:52.280 footprints they will leave in the wake of their travels. Jason Loeb commented,
00:01:57.020 You mean flying on a jet plane around the world leaving a massive footprint?
00:02:01.060 Yes, her dad is teaching her what every climate change person knows.
00:02:04.880 Their own carbon footprint doesn't matter.
00:02:07.260 Another Twitter response, Non-essential jet travel in a pandemic. Hypocrisy is thy name.
00:02:14.500 Sandy B commented, The hypocrisy of the people flying to a climate change meeting is mind-boggling. 0.87
00:02:20.580 Wonder what that total carbon footprint of all those jets will be.
00:02:24.180 And finally, someone tweeted, So let me get this straight.
00:02:27.520 You're going to fly across the world to talk about how other people shouldn't be allowed to fly across 1.00
00:02:32.160 the world. An estimated 30,000 delegates from around the world are expected to attend COP26 in Glasgow
00:02:38.920 from October 31st to November 12th, including thousands of official negotiators representing
00:02:44.620 197 different countries in the talks.