Western Standard - October 14, 2021


Hinshaw apologizes to family of 14-year-old boy for claiming he died of COVID

Topics
Spitzer family grief and apology
Mentioned
Dina Hinshaw Simone Spitzer Nathaniel Rachel Notley
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

2 minutes

Words per minute

129.63

Word count

383

Sentence count

27


Summary

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

Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Dina Hinshawkins has apologized to the family of a boy who died of cancer after claiming initially it was a COVID that killed him. On Tuesday, Simone Spitzer took to social media to call out Alberta Health for labeling her younger brother Nathaniel's death as COVID-related. Nathaniel was, in fact, already dying of stage 4 brain cancer and in palliative care but tested positive for CODI-19 days before his expected death.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Hello, I'm Dave Naylor, the news editor of the Western Standard with some breaking Thursday
00:00:13.120 afternoon news. Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Dina Hinshaw has apologized to the family of a
00:00:19.760 boy who died of cancer after claiming initially it was a COVID that killed him. On Tuesday,
00:00:25.440 Simone Spitzer took to Facebook to call out Alberta Health for labeling her younger brother Nathaniel's
00:00:31.360 death COVID-related. Nathaniel was, in fact, already dying of stage 4 brain cancer and palliative care
00:00:39.200 but tested positive for COVID-19 days before his expected death. The Spitzer family was not
00:00:45.680 only devastated by their loss but said they were shocked Nathaniel's death was used to add to
00:00:51.520 Alberta Health's COVID-19 numbers as the youngest COVID-19 death to date. They called it fake news
00:00:58.960 in a Tuesday Facebook post. NDP leader Rachel Notley and her MLAs had used the death to attack
00:01:06.000 the UCP's handling of the pandemic. In a Thursday press conference, Hinshaw apologized to the family.
00:01:13.040 Hinshaw said she was sorry if her comments added to the Spitzer family's grief.
00:01:17.040 She said in their normal reporting to Alberta Health, they include deaths where COVID-19 is a
00:01:23.760 primary or secondary cause of death. A primary cause would be where COVID-19 leads to pneumonia
00:01:30.800 and the eventual death of the patient. A secondary cause would be where COVID-19 makes a heart failure
00:01:37.520 pre-existing condition even worse. Hinshaw said, quote,
00:01:42.640 At different times we need to adjust the numbers. Being transparent and timely means we will need to
00:01:48.720 make adjustments. Hinshaw noted the death of anybody under 18 will bring, quote,
00:01:54.560 higher scrutiny and she's promised to review all deaths under 18 before saying they were whether or
00:02:01.040 not they were COVID-related. None of the mainstream media has covered the Spitzer family's story until
00:02:07.760 Hinshaw apologized. We've it chronicled exclusively in the Western Standard. Also on Thursday, Hinshaw
00:02:15.280 reported 30 new COVID deaths in Alberta in the last 24 hours. That makes 68 people who have died
00:02:23.040 in the last two days. There were 916 new COVID-19 cases out of 12,700 tests. That's a positivity rate of
00:02:32.960 7.5 percent. There's 1,016 people in hospital. A decrease of 11 patients. 231 of those are in the ICU.
00:02:42.960 That's a decrease of five. For the Western Standard, I'm Dave Naylor.