Western Standard - October 15, 2021


Notley apologizes for using child’s cancer death to blast UCP on COVID

Topics
Spitzer family grief and COVID-19 politicization
Mentioned
Simone Spitzer Rachel Notley Nathaniel Dina Hinshaw COVID-19
Family says Alberta government & NDP spreading ‘fake news’ that Nathanael’s death was from COVID Shocking! Manitoba Pastor Arrested!

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

130.36

Word count

302

Sentence count

17


Summary

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

14-year-old Nathaniel Spitzer was already dying of stage 4 brain cancer and in palliative care, but tested positive for COVID-19 days before his expected death. The Spitzer family was not only devastated by their loss, but said they were shocked Nathaniel s death was used to add to Alberta Health s COVID19 numbers as the youngest death to date in the province.

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, News Editor of the Western Standard.
00:00:11.000 NDP leader Rachel Notley has apologized to the family of a 14-year-old boy who died of cancer for politicizing the tragedy by attacking the UCP on their COVID-19 policies.
00:00:24.000 On Tuesday, Simone Spitzer took to Facebook to call out Alberta Health for labeling her younger brother Nathaniel's death COVID-related.
00:00:33.000 Nathaniel was, in fact, already dying of stage 4 brain cancer and in palliative care, but tested positive for COVID-19 days before his expected death.
00:00:44.000 The Spitzer family was not only devastated by their loss, but said they were shocked Nathaniel's death was used to add to Alberta Health's COVID-19 numbers as the youngest COVID death to date in the province.
00:00:59.000 The family called it, quote, fake news in a Tuesday Facebook post.
00:01:04.000 NDP leader Notley and her MLAs used the death to attack the UCP's handling of the pandemic.
00:01:12.000 Quote, I am very sorry for any role my posts, which have now been deleted, played in drawing your incredible loss into a debate about how COVID-19 illnesses and deaths are reported, Notley tweeted to the family.
00:01:27.000 In a Thursday press conference, Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Dina Hinshaw also apologized to the family.
00:01:36.000 Hinshaw said she was sorry if her comments added to the Spitzer family grief.
00:01:42.000 She said in their normal reporting to Alberta Health, they include deaths where COVID-19 is a primary or secondary cause of death.
00:01:51.000 A primary cause would be where COVID-19 leads to pneumonia and the eventual death of a patient.
00:01:57.000 A secondary cause would be where COVID-19 makes a heart failure pre-existing condition worse.
00:02:05.000 At different times, we need to adjust the numbers, admitted Hinshaw.
00:02:10.000 Being transparent and timely means we will need to make adjustments.
00:02:15.000 For the Western Standard, I am Dave Naylor.