Western Standard - October 14, 2021


Family says Alberta government & NDP spreading ‘fake news’ that Nathanael’s death was from COVID

Mentioned
Nathaniel Spitzer Rachel Notley Simone Spitzer Dina Hinshaw Janice Irwin Quentin Durand Moreau Jason Kenney Thomas Dang
Banned doctor calls out AHS for creating health crisis Alberta’s government lied about the death of young teen Nathanael Spitzer, and the media buried it

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

157.27

Word count

662

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

14-year-old Nathaniel Spitzer was on palliative care for stage 4 brain cancer when he passed away on October 7, 2019. His sister Simone Spitzer accused Alberta Health of falsely counting his death as a COVID death, even though he had complex pre-existing medical conditions that contributed to his death.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Simone Spitzer took to Facebook on Tuesday calling out Alberta Health for labeling her 0.94
00:00:12.160 14-year-old brother's passing a COVID death, despite the fact he was on palliative care for
00:00:17.400 stage 4 brain cancer. In the provincial government's COVID-19 update on Tuesday,
00:00:22.080 Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dina Hinshaw made mention of the boy's death. Although Hinshaw
00:00:27.120 mentioned the boy had complex pre-existing medical conditions that contributed to his death,
00:00:31.840 she included the boy's passing with the reported 33 new COVID deaths over the long weekend.
00:00:37.280 Spitzer confirmed the boy being mentioned was her brother in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
00:00:42.720 He died from stage 4 brain cancer, not from COVID. This is fake news, said Spitzer in the post.
00:00:49.040 He was diagnosed in January 2021 and hospitalized in August. Two days before his death, he was
00:00:55.360 tested for COVID and it turned out positive. Spitzer goes on to request people share her
00:01:00.800 post and inform others that this story is fake. The Spitzer family was not only devastated by their
00:01:07.440 loss, but they said they were shocked that Nathaniel's death was used to add to Alberta Health's COVID-19
00:01:13.440 numbers as the youngest COVID-19 death to date, and called it fake news in that Tuesday post.
00:01:20.480 Following the provincial update on Tuesday, Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley and her MLA's attacked
00:01:26.480 Jason Kenney and the Alberta government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the wake of the boy's
00:01:32.000 death. NDP leader Rachel Notley used the opportunity to criticize the UCP and Alberta Health on Twitter
00:01:39.360 for even mentioning that there were pre-existing conditions in Nathaniel's death. Telling their loved
00:01:45.200 ones that there were other health complications that contributed to the death offers no comfort
00:01:50.400 whatsoever, tweeted Notley. She also added, no matter what pre-existing conditions they had,
00:01:56.400 this child died during a fourth wave that was preventable. This shouldn't have happened. We
00:02:01.200 need to know what will be done to stop it from happening again. Thomas Dang, the NDP MLA for Edmonton
00:02:07.680 South, followed with another tweet. For the 12 percent of us in Alberta who have asthma,
00:02:13.200 downplaying the death of a 14-year-old for comorbidities is the opposite of comforting.
00:02:18.400 This is a life snuffed short. It's a tragedy and a disaster. NDP MLA for Edmonton Highlands Norwood,
00:02:26.400 Janice Irwin, also tweeted, I can't stop thinking about this. A family is grieving the loss of their
00:02:32.400 child in a preventable fourth wave. I don't care what other medical conditions this child had,
00:02:37.920 they are gone. We need to all fight for better. This cannot happen again.
00:02:42.720 Irwin also retweeted a post from Dr. Quentin Durand Moreau of the University of Alberta's
00:02:47.760 Faculty of Medicine. I'm disheartened by this, the tweet says, in reference to Hinshaw's mention of
00:02:53.600 the 14-year-old boy's complex pre-existing condition that played a role in his death.
00:02:58.720 He also tweeted, but I don't understand why we persist in mentioning the pre-existing condition.
00:03:04.400 Is COVID involved? Yes or no? And if yes, it was therefore an avoidable death with
00:03:09.840 better public health policies. Comorbidities do not matter.
00:03:14.320 The Western Standard spoke with Simone Spitzer, the sister of Nathaniel,
00:03:17.760 who died of brain cancer last week and said thank you for trying to get the truth out there with us.
00:03:23.280 Spitzer also shared a link to a GoFundMe page the family set up in loving memory of Nathaniel Spitzer.
00:03:29.600 The page mentions Nathaniel's fight with brain cancer that led to his untimely death on October 7.
00:03:35.680 It was created by siblings of Nathaniel to assist their parents with the cost of the funeral and
00:03:41.280 the financial toll this has had on them. The donation option has since been disabled,
00:03:46.320 as Spitzer told the Western Standard the family has reached their goal for the funeral costs.
00:03:52.400 The Western Standard reached out to Alberta Health for comment on the accusations from the family of
00:03:57.040 Nathaniel's death being falsely counted as a COVID death, but has yet to get a response as of publishing.