The Alberta Task Force Report on Pandemic Response is Pure Snake Oil and Deadly Stupidity

If the government follows these recommendations, more people will die of preventable deaths, just as they did in the pandemic.

Premier Danielle Smith and the Alberta Government have released an absolutely shameful report into the pandemic response, written by ideologues and denialists, that makes deadly recommendations. It recommends against proven and effective vaccines for Covid, and says that disproven “cures” like ivermectin, a drug used to deworm horses, should be used instead.

The single most important question in evaluating a pandemic response was whether it was effective at saving lives and protecting the health care system.

Instead, it’s a platform for doctors with an axe to grind to get back at independent professional regulators who had disciplined them for showing that during the pandemic, they got things wrong. They were making statements that gave credence to dangerous and paranoid conspiracy theories, and instead of recognizing their mistakes in facts and reason, they doubled down on it and acted like martyrs.

This is not a scientific document, because that paranoia bleeds through into a report that editorializes using rhetoric like “authoritarian” and “prevailing public health narrative” as if these are facts and not politics.

If you are going to use terms like “authoritarian” in a report about a public health response published for a provincial government, you need to do something, very, very basic: define your terms.

And anyone who talks about everything being a “narrative” means they think other people are making everything up. When this is a report written by people who faced disciplinary action from the vast majority of their colleagues, because, in the middle of a state of emergency, couldn’t be bothered to do their scientific due diligence.

These are intelligent people, but the problem of “garbage in, garbage out” applies to people of intelligence as well. This was explained in one of the best Ted Talks I have ever seen - by a professor of statistics who explained how doctors getting statistics wrong resulted in people being wrongfully convicted for murder.

It is very easy to get statistics wrong, because multiplying odds may result in unexpected and counterintuitive results.

Most of what is called “intelligence” is the ability to reason quickly from false premises to mistaken conclusions. That’s why science and “higher learning” deals with weeding out bias. All the thousands of years we’ve spent arguing about “what is truth” and “how can we know reality” is that intelligent people are unaware of their own biases.

It’s not just that everyone now does their own research, it’s that everyone thinks their job is to be a politician - a bad one: the kind of politician who is sloppy with facts, takes criticism of their ideas personally, and who lash out and engage in name-calling and accusations that aren’t backed up by evidence, and who use their position of authority to an advance a point of view without declaring all their interests.

People might say “Well, that’s all politicians,” (a tempting conclusion) which isn’t quite the case, but it is close.

The point is, there are people who are not supposed to act like politicians. They are supposed to be unbiased experts - legal, scientific, economic, and that matters with a nearly 250-page report about how to deal with health states of emergency.

Part of the ongoing crisis in our politics is that notion of “duty” to anything other than partisan loyalty has been eroded.

David Paciocco wrote a paper in the Canadian Law Review about the challenges of expert testimony, entitled “Taking a "Goudge" out of Bluster and Blarney: an "Evidence-Based Approach" to Expert Testimony.

He writes:

“The Goudge Report is a hard but important read. It tells the infuriating tale of incompetence, neglect, and even cover-up in the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario (OCCO) between 1991 and 2001, with focus on pediatric pathologist Dr. Charles Smith, whose errors ruined lives. This is not the first time this kind of story has been told. The other public commission to focus intently on expert evidence, “The Commission on Proceedings Involving Guy Paul Morin,” made many of the same observations in a different context: experts acting as advocates; institutional allegiance to the Crown by publicly paid experts; overstatement by experts about their knowledge and supporting evidence; testimony on matters falling outside of the area of expertise; and the failure by experts to know of or acknowledge controversies within their own field.

He adds:

Professor Peter Singer has cautioned:

“Scientists are human and can be mistaken. They, like other humans, can be influenced by a herd mentality, and a fear of being marginalized. The culpable failure, especially when lives are at stake, is not to disagree with scientists, but to reject science as a method of inquiry.”

He adds that Goudge provided a road map for ensuring the integrity of expert evidence.

“The Mohan test has long insisted on an evidence based approach, but the Goudge Report now shows how best to achieve it, describing as it does, the four predicate conditions for practicing a "show me" strategy for ensuring the integrity of expert evidence:

1. the theory or technique used by the expert must be reliable, and so too must the use of that theory or technique by the expert;

2. the expert must not be biased;

3. the expert must be objective and complete in collecting evidence, must reject all information that is not germane to the theory or technique being used, and must be transparent about all information and influences they have been exposed to; and

4. the expert must clearly express not only the opinion, but also the complete reasoning process that led to it, and must be candid about the shortcomings of the theory or technique employed and the opinion reached, offering fair guidance on the level of confidence that can be placed in the opinion expressed.”

The Alberta report fails this test.

Richard Feynmann, the Nobel-prize winning Physicist, said that “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Part of being doing the work to ensure one is free from bias is that you have to seriously consider other explanations.

Paciocco writes:

An Open Mind to a Broad Range of Possibilities

It is trite to say that having an open mind when forming an opinion is essential to the integrity of that opinion. As evident at this is, the sad truth is that in fact expert testimony is often biased. Bias is a complex problem.

It can arise because the expert is not independent, being connected in some way to the party calling them. Or it can be a form of what has come to be known as "adversarial" bias, which arises either because the witness has been selected to fit the needs of the litigant rather than for the integrity of the opinions ("selection bias"), or because of "the natural bias to do something serviceable for those who employ you and adequately remunerate you ("association bias")."' In our system we notionally assign experts to teams, and this has a strong tendency to predispose the witness. Bias can also stem from the professional interest of the expert in their theory or technique, or in their own credibility once having taken a position, or it can arise from "noble cause distortion," the belief that a particular outcome is the right one to achieve.

What makes the bias of expert witnesses so invidious is that it is often unconsciously held. Whenever anyone is attracted to a particular outcome for whatever reason there is a natural tendency to search for evidence that supports the desired conclusion or to interpret evidence in a way that supports it-the phenomenon known as "confirmation bias." The Goudge Report is fittingly sensitive to confirmation bias, and has much to offer, both in its examples and its recommendations.

Part of this bias is because people naturally think of themselves as good and well-intended persons, which they are, and therefore that what they say or do cannot be harmful.

What all of this misses is what people do not understand about the exercise and decision making of government, which is that from municipal, to provincial or state to federal governments, politicians make decisions that will determine whether people live or die, even outside natural disasters and global health emergencies. Decisions about the police, toxins in the environment, funding health care, access to medications, food and shelter, as well whether people are getting sound advice to make decisions for themselves and for those around them.

During the pandemic, there were many deaths, including unnecessary deaths, because policymakers “putting politics over safety.”

In March 2020, I read an account of what actions helped keep people alive in the pandemic of 1918-1919. John M. Barry’s book, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History had a resurgence, with a focus on the most important aspect of ensuring that people survived - which was to communicate the unvarnished truth in order to maintain trust in authorities.

“So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that.

Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best.

A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.”

This did not happen. In Canada’s provinces, pandemic and emergency plans were ignored, as were direct pleas from the public and from people on the ground for funding for the most basic levels of infection control.

Part of the reason for this is simply that people were in denial. They were unable to accept what was going on, and embraced conspiracy theories that effectively denied every aspect of the danger. It was denied that the disease was deadly, it was denied that masks worked, it was denied that vaccines worked, and what’s more, it was claimed that public health orders violated rights, when courts made it clear they were constitutional.

Some of the reason for this denial is terror, fear, but also from having no experience of living in a time when infectious diseases like polio, measles, rubella, smallpox meant that people, especially babies and children, died or were maimed and rendered infertile or paralyzed by these diseases.

The refusal to apply even basic lessons from past pandemics was incredible.

It’s a fact of history that plaques and riots go hand in hand. The global pandemic was declared March 11, 2020 - and just ten days later, Nicole F. Roberts made an important prediction:

History - And Psychology - Predict Riots And Protests Amid Coronavirus Pandemic Lockdowns

“history has taught us that whether it’s caused by fear, frustration, or the helplessness that comes with imprisonment, human beings do not respond well to forced lockdowns. These feelings are often exacerbated by sentiments that the vulnerable are being taken advantage of. There is also outrage that accompanies the gained knowledge that in almost all cases, the resources needed are not available – as it is difficult to prepare for the unknown.”

Charles MacKay’s quote from his evergreen book on mass hysteria, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,

“During seasons of great pestilence, men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come. Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity.”

Many of the contributors to this report faced discipline or severe criticism for their statements about the pandemic.

It is worth focusing on the work of David Speicher, who is listed as being responsible as “Author / Contributor / Report Editing.”

As it happens, he is also a candidate for the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). It’s to the right of Canada’s already extreme right Conservative party.

While this not a conflict of interest, it is certainly a conflict of loyalties but there are deeper problems with how bias is handled.

In fact, Speicher is one of a number of researchers who promoted the false idea that there were DNA fragments in the Covid-19 vaccine. This was then used to seed further, much crazier and more frightening conspiracy theories, including the idea that the vaccine would cause cancer, or harm people, which were linked to further conspiracies that the vaccine was created in order to sterilize or kill people.

This outrageous lie is particularly disgusting, because it targeted the people who were doing their genuine best to do the right thing and ensure that everyone was protected and that as few people died as possible, pushing themselves to their limit to do so, and it painted them as villains.

These blatant lies were used to terrify people who were already terrified, and uncertain, and losing their minds with fear, or grief, and uncertainty, and lied to them that the government was trying to kill them. This core conspiracy was widely shared and was a core belief of some of the “freedom convoy” protestors. Their opposition to vaccine mandates was because - despite the fact that literally everyone else in the country, tens of millions of Canadians, had had multiple shots; the goverment of Canada had a vaccine injury program; and the number of actual serious side effects was limited to very few people. The other was that when shots first started rolling out, people were being alarmist about deaths, having forgotten that centenarians were at the front of the line. When your sample group is people who are 95 to 100 years old and over, that is a group with an elevated death rate anyway.

However, people’s earnest, but mistaken belief is that they became convinced that vaccine mandates were a government / globalist plot to sterilize them or kill them, and whenever news stories and politicians repeated bullshit fake science findings lent credibility to the theory.

That resulted in an attemped overthrow of the Canadian government by the Freedom Convoy. It wasn’t just people getting that worked up about having to get a vaccine. It’s what people had convinced them the vaccine would do. And that belief has still not changed.

There were waves of hate and threats for elected and medical officials.

All sorts of people who really were doing their level best to keep everyone alive, even as politicians cut their funding, and as ICUs and morgues filled beyond capacity.

It may be that the pandemic was so painful, and raw, and terrifying, and divisive, that we act like it didn’t happen. The trauma of it has been sealed off by our memories. Tens of thousands of people died in Canada, hundreds of thousands across the U.S. and millions around the world. They haven’t been grieved, there are no memorials.

We act like the current insane state of the economy and politics right now has nothing to do with the hell on earth that was visited on all of us by a once-in a century plague.

Now, the report itself fails at due diligence, because the credibility of Speicher’s own claims of finding DNA in vaccines at all have been called into question. This is from a site

“David Speicher appears to be using methods similar to the ones used by David McKernan. Moreover, in the methods section, I found that he tested only three vials of vaccine, both of which had expired nearly two years earlier, and for one of the vials the seal had been broken, suggesting that the vaccine vial had been accessed. Seriously, get a load of this:

“On May 14, 2024, I received three Australian vials of COVID-19 modRNA vaccines at the University of Guelph (Table 1; from Left to Right in Figure 1). These vials were shipped on 15kg of dry ice, but when the package was received there was no dry ice in the package and contents were cool to the touch, but not warm. Temperature of the package was not recorded. The vials were immediately placed in a laboratory fridge (+2° -8° C ) until tested. The Pfizer vials were unopened were untampered as they had intact flip-off plastic caps with printed lot numbers and expiration dates. The Moderna vial did not have an intact flip-off plastic cap and appears to have been used as the septum appeared to be punctured, and the contents of the vial was at half volume.”

Does anyone see the problem with this right away? One thing I’ve emphasized in my previous discussions is how much less stable RNA is than DNA. RNA degrades in aqueous solution much faster than DNA does. We have no idea how these vials had been stored, and the longer they were stored at a temperature that allowed for the degradation of mRNA, the higher the apparent DNA-to-RNA ratio would become. That alone should make you question the results, whatever they are. This is, in fact, a useless experiment.

“A useless experiment”.

Speicher’s own website says “His research expertise includes saliva as a diagnostic fluid, oral cancers, and sexually transmitted diseases”.

It should be obvious that a disease that is spread through one person putting their infected body part in another person’s body spreads differently than diseases where you get infected breathing in airborne particles.

The Task Force gives a platform to doctors and researchers who are resentful that they faced discipline because they themselves didn’t have a clue about how to act in a public health emergency, who contributed to some of the most harmful lies - lies that have divided families and communities.

However, it also explains the poor quality of the report.

It includes such pseudo-profound observations as this one:

“it became apparent after the first wave that there was a lack of scientific understanding concerning the virus”

No shit, Sherlock. That’s the whole issue, right there. It was a “Novel” coronavirus, and that’s the whole problem. It was brand new. People knew almost nothing about it, except that hospitals and morgues were starting fill up.

So, I’m going to make some fundamental points about why that matters so much, that the writers of this report want to ignore.

• The fact that it is was a virus

• The fact that it was new

• The fact that it was highly contagious, infectious disease

• The fact that it was deadly

• The fact that being wrong in a state of emergency kills people

• That fact that vaccines were safe, tested and effective

1. The fact that it is was a virus

The harsh reality for everyone was that a highly infectious disease with a higher-than-usual mortality rate was spreading like wildfire across the globe. In March 2020, there were people dying in hospitals in Italy, and thousands of people died in the first wave as it swept through seniors’ homes in Canada in Ontario and Quebec. Canada had one of the highest death rates in seniors’ homes of any country in the OECD.

The fact that it is was a virus meant types of treatment for other diseases will be worthless.

A virus is a small cluster of DNA that inserts itself into your body’s cells, and uses your body to make trillions of copies of itself. As these copies are made, and spread from person to person, they change throughout different generations.

That makes viruses incredibly hard to treat, and always have been. Bacteria that cause disease are actual living organisms - single-celled which can be treated with antibiotics, which date back to penicillin and before.

The way to treat viruses for centuries has been with inoculation. with certain infectious disease, if people get sick and recover, their body will gain immunity because their immune system generates antibodies that are specific to that strain of the disease.

The origin of the word “vaccination” comes from “vacca” - the latin word for “cow”. (The French word for cow is “vache”.) Edward Jenner (1749–1823), a British physician developed a method for inoculating people against smallpox - though the practice of inoculation was known for a thousand years at least. Inoculation was used in Asia as well as Africa and China. Jenner was following the practice of local farming communities where he worked:

“Milkmaids, who were renowned for their clear complexions, were often immune to smallpox and its scarring pock marks. Their work brought them into contact with cowpox, a mild disease of cattle that only left a single pustule on the hands of people who milked the cows. Locals who were aware of this phenomenon began to inoculate themselves with the cowpox pustule as a way to ward off the more deadly smallpox.”

Vaccinations are not perfect, but when they work it is because enlist your body’s own immune response. This is an image of two people with infected with smallpox: the one on the top has been vaccinated, the one on the bottom was not.

The critical point is that immunity depends on having already been exposed to a disease and having antibodies to it.

There is no immunity to a brand new disease.

2. The fact that it was new

This brings us to the next key part: the fact that Covid was new.

When no one has been exposed to a disease, no one is immune to it. This is why talk of “natural immunity,” physical health, being fit or “herd immunity” are all irrelevant. If you have never been exposed to the disease, you have no protection from getting sick from it.

“Herd immunity” is not based on the idea that everyone in a group has been infected. It’s based on the idea that so many people have been vaccinated that individuals who are unvaccinated are surrounded by so many people who have been vaccinated, that it is harder for the disease.

What’s more, as a new disease, there is absolutely no way of knowing what the long-term effects of a completely new virus will be. There are a number of diseases that result in long-term chronic diseases that can be debilitating or deadly. “Long HIV” develops into AIDS. It was discovered that the virus that causes mononucleosis turn into Multiple Sclerosis - so MS is “Long mono.” There are other diseases (like syphillis) that if left untreated lead to brain damage.

As it turned out, it also mutated into different strains that were more or less contagious, and affected different populations. That’s what viruses do. It’s why we get booster shots for flu each year.

What this also means is that early pronouncements all had to be subject to revision as new facts came in. As Keynes said, “When I learn new facts, I change my mind. What do you do?”

3. The fact that it was a highly contagious disease that was deadly

This is actually a perfect example of underestimating the risk because they are not including all the factors. For example, for a long time during the pandemic, the mortality rate was around 2%. To a lot of people that seemed low, or they would equate a 98% survival rate with a mark on a test.

They (quite literally) figured, “What are the chances?” especially if they were young and healthy.

Well, much worse than you think. First of all, it means that of every 50 people who get it, one will die.

In a population of a million people, that’s 20,000 deaths, and lots of other people sick enough that they might have to be hospitalized.

Going into the pandemic, the US had many more ICU beds per capita than Canada. In Manitoba, the provincial government was cutting and freezing health care and had closed ERs going into 2020. There was no surge capacity in the system, and under 100 ICU beds for a province of 1.3-million people.

Now, this is a perfect example of how people don’t understand the shocking power of exponential growth - where something doubles, and doubles again.

This video, from March 2020, predicts what happened. The difference in the infection rate of the flu and covid is that if you have the flu, it may spread to 14 people, but if you have covid, you’ll spread it to 59,000.

That would result in thousands of people being sick, at once, many of whom would only survive if they could be treated in the ICU.

If that happened, deaths would start to soar, for two reasons. One is that when the ICU hits its limit of beds, more people who would have lived if they could access ICU will die. The I in ICU is for Intensive, and the care is intensive because it requires huge numbers of staff around the clock. If all the ICU beds are full, and someone has a heart attack, or a stroke, or needs to recover from surgery, there will be no room, because there are no more staff to add.

Highly trained nurses and doctors, many of whom were traumatized by the experience. One of the hardest things I heard, again and again, was from peple who worked in health care who were so exhausted from overwork, that they were breaking because they feared that in their exhaustion that they might hurt their patient. The most conscientious people were being broken. They were good people tormented by the fear of letting their patients down. They held the hands of strangers as more and more of them died, with that doctor or that nurse alone, because their family couldn’t come in to see them.

That’s why the Alberta document is really just despicable.

It’s a complete insult to so many people who sacrificed so much doing everything they could to keep people alive while their work was sabotaged and undermined by information spread by some of the people in this document.

They are not heroes and rebels. They’re people who can’t admit they made a mistake, because they think that the title next to their name means never having to say you’re sorry. In fact, their defining fallacy is that they believe that because they are experts, they must be right.

The point of public health measures was to slow the spread enough that you didn’t get deadly surges. If you imagine covid as a fire, and people as trees or wood, the idea of the public health measures was to protect the health care system from overflowing. The idea behind public health measures like masks, distancing, and so on is to slow the pace of infection from burning so quckly through the population.

That was the goal. This is what no one was saying, or why it was important.

Yes, people would still get sick, but the idea was to slow the spread to try to manage it, until a vaccine was available. Once enough of the population was vaccinated, you would have herd immunity.

As the new variants came along, the Omicron variant was treated as “milder” because it had a lower mortality rate. This overlooked that it was much more infectious - meaning it would spread more quickly and infect many more people. The fact that it was killed one person in a hundred instead of two, wasn’t milder, especially if many times more people are infected. More people died.

4. The fact that being wrong in a state of emergency kills people

States of Emergency must allow governments special powers, in part because in an emergency or disaster - a natural disaster, extreme weather event, fire, flood, earthquake war or pandemic - routine behaviours suddenly carry new and unexpected risks to themselves and others, including the risks of sickness, disability and death.

If a building filled with a deadly gas like carbon monoxide, whether it is a hall or a church, authorities are legally justified in preventing people from gathering there. That is why Canada’s courts and courts of appeal ruled that public health orders were constitutional, and the basic reason these laws were just is that they applied to everyone.

5 That fact that vaccines were safe, tested and effective

When the epidemic struck, I knew it would be bad, because we were dealing with all of the above - a new virus that was highly infectious. I heard another interview with an anti-viral researcher who warned of the difficulties of creating anti-viral treatments, which he described as “like breaking rocks”. For many viral diseases, there are no treatments or vaccines. Where there has been success, it is usually a cocktail of multiple medications to suppress symptoms after infection (for diseases like HIV, for example).

Previously, vaccine development usually took two years. So I was also skeptical and surprised at the speed of development of the vaccines - ironically, directly as a result of Donald Trump’s “Warp Speed” program.

However, the reason for this was simply that the technology to develop vaccines has massively accelerated.

A huge amount of anti-vaccine propaganda started spreading, and online, the conspiracy theorists - including the experts - would accuse people of working from a playbook, or listening to people on the news, because they are.

What they didn’t understand is that I was being inundated with complaints from people on the front lines who kept telling us it wasn’t safe. Public health and infectious disease experts. The schools weren’t safe. The hospitals weren’t safe. The seniors’ homes weren’t safe. There were no masks. No infection controls. No backup. No sick pay. Desperate people from all walks of life calling and telling us directly what was happening. Every single day, day after day for years.

In an atmosphere of fear, panic and desperation - where people have lost control of their lives and possibly their livelihood, someone who promises certainty can seem more reassuring, even though they cannot be telling the truth.

The vaccine was tested, and it did go through human trials. Before vaccinations occurred, people warned that there would be scare stories and false positives because in the entire population, people suffer accidents and unexpected health ailments and deaths from another cause that would occur with or without the vaccine.

The arguments against the vaccine often focused on trial data, or some other reports, while ignoring that in Canada and other countries, the vast majority of the population - tens of millions were vaccinated with no ill effects, while tens thousands of people died of Covid.

To these, I would add one more, which is political and economic ideology. Our current political and economic system cannot cope with crises, because the economic formulas do not recognize that crises can exist.

A good public health and economic response preserves the economy, and lockdowns are an emergency measure to prevent the health care system from collapsing and resulting in unnecessary deaths.

Being a fiscal conservative in a state of emergency is to be part of a death cult. While millions of people are losing their jobs and their businesses, the response was to cut taxes for the richest and keep cutting programs, and focued on loans instead of income and revenue. People in health care were laid off before and during the pandemic by provincial governments, which undermined the economy and the pandemic response alike.

SUMMARY

The recommendations of the Alberta report are deadly. Its baseless accusation about ethics, bias and groupthink apply to the report itself.

Now, Canada’s response was better than the U.S. That is not saying much.

There were some truly shocking failures of leadership in the pandemic. In Canada, everyone acted like everything is run by the federal government, where virtually the entire pandemic public health response was run by provinces. And they were absolutely terrible at it.

I was witness to many of them in Manitoba, which was lucky to escape without many cases in the first wave, in the spring of 2020, while covid ripped through old age homes in Quebec and Ontario. With staff sick and incapacitated, people died in their beds. It was the worst death rate in the OECD. It was all treated as if Manitoba was somehow immune. Throughout the summer of 2020, Manitoba’s care homes were pleading for funding for infection controls. We called on the government to learn from Quebec and Ontario’s lessons and set up teams who could go in to a home when the staff all got sick.

Every week, for weeks on end, they sent an e-mail to every single member of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly.

LTCAM wrote in the summer of 2020:

Manitoba's Regional Health Authorities and Government have ignored their responsibility to fund their Public Health Orders and Directions in long-term care.

Costs to implement and maintain the Public Health Orders and Directions from Shared Health and the Regional Health Authorities are unprecedented. These additional costs are crippling our residences in their enormity. Long Term & Continuing Care owners and operators (Personal Care Homes (PCH) and Supportive Housing residences) have the responsibility to provide safe care. However, the Covid-19 costs are in addition to the PCH situation in terms of fifteen years of funding freezes, no funding for increased supplies around Infection Prevention and Control and zero annual inflationary operational increases. As well, for the past two years direct funding reductions were implemented along with other regional "cost savings measures" which, many times directly and negatively impacted our members.

It turned out that the government had already shut everything down in June, but hadn’t told anyone. It was not hard to see that covid was not stopping, because it was tearing its way across the U.S. Manitoba was not immune: it just hadn’t been hit yet.

Instead, the government announced another round of cuts and layoffs in health care, planned for the months of October, November and December.

In such emergencies, experts in emergency planning are usually in charge. They were shoved aside.

In the legend of Troy, Cassandra is given the gift of seeing the future by one god, which another god then upends with cursing her that she will never be believed, which breaks her.

The pandemic was unrelenting nightmare for that very reason. Seeing that something terrible was coming, and warning people day in and day out that they needed to prepare, only to see the horrors come true, and people start dying in the dozens, then the hundreds, only to have authorities say they couldn’t have seen it coming.

When a government ignores your warning to send in help to a care home and a few days later half the residents are dead is soul crushing. And it happened in wave after wave. In the third wave, and the fourth.

There’s a saying that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. I understand why, now, because of all the times I saw people shrug and dismiss someone’s death, based on junk science and sense of their own superiority that was uncomfortably close to eugenics - the idea that the weak deserve to die, when no one does.

That’s why the Alberta report is not just junk science: it’s morally bankrupt. We all deserve better.

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