Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is deserving of sympathy. He inherited the arrogance of his father, former PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau, but not his father’s intellect. Arrogance without intellect is dangerous for someone in a position of considerable power.
The entire world is witnessing just how dangerous. A protest by truckers opposed to Canada’s vaccine mandates has morphed into an amorphous rage against all of Canada’s health initiatives. Ottawa, Canada’s capital, has been brought to a standstill for more than a week. The nationwide protests on Tuesday took a dangerous turn with protesters partially blocking access to the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest border crossing linking Windsor and Detroit.
Trudeau’s arrogance is entirely responsible for the debacle.
Dismissing the truckers and their supporters as a “small fringe” with “unacceptable views” poured kerosene on the smoldering rage that many Canadians, as well as countless millions around the world, are suffering from. Readers of mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post are blissfully unaware that anti vaccine mandate protests are happening with increased regularity in Australia, Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere. Two years of forced lockdowns aren’t good for the soul, particularly when there is growing evidence that the lockdowns caused more harm than good.
A just released study by researchers at Johns Hopkins, one of the top universities in the U.S., found “no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates.” Readers of the NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, and other mainstream publications are forgiven for having no clue what I’m talking about. I can find no record of Canada’s government subsidized CBC broadcast network covering the study.
Trudeau’s worldview, I imagine, is like President Biden’s and shaped by mainstream media narratives that those who oppose vaccines and vaccine mandates are ignorant, far right-wing, Trump supporters too stupid to know what’s good for them.
As best I can, I closely follow the leading doctors, epidemiologists, and others who oppose vaccines and vaccine mandates on LinkedIn. I say, “best as I can” because some of these people are routinely censored or banished from the site because they are allegedly spreading “misinformation.” I’m more inclined to believe someone when an anonymous tech geek decides I can’t.
The commonality I’ve noticed about vaccine critics is they overwhelmingly graduated or teach at the best schools. Harvard. Stanford. Oxford. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the top schools for public health. Among that school’s alumni are Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization; Max Theiler, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for developing a vaccine against yellow fever; Kevin Fenton, the former head of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS Viral Hepatitis; Adel Mahmoud, the former president of Merck Vaccines; and Anders Tegnell, the Dr. Fauci of Sweden.
Although LinkedIn will censor me for mentioning this, despite considerably less restrictions, Sweden has fared much better during the pandemic than most countries — even the Washington Post conceded this point. LinkedIn has censored me about a half dozen times, even removing this commentary that was based entirely on articles in a prestigious medical journal and the far-left Daily Beast.
Another lesson I’ve learned is that “fringe” is the buzzword used by the powerful to destroy those who question or express concerns about vaccines and vaccine mandates.
Email correspondence between Anthony Fauci and his former NIH boss Francis Collins obtained under FOIA revealed they dismissed signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration as “fringe” scientists. The Great Barrington Declaration, organized by leading epidemiologists and infectious disease experts around the world, argued that focused protection on the most vulnerable to covid would yield better results than wide-scale lockdowns.
“There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” Francis asked Fauci.
It seems obvious that Francis was expecting an organized campaign to discredit the scientists who organized the Great Barrington Declaration, which included Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta or Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. Check out their bios and consider if scientists with their credentials easy to dismiss.
Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, has admitted multiple times the Administration is in regular contact with U.S. social media companies; U.S. government involvement in the censorship of political critics is alarming.
The cancel culture mob has scored a partial victory getting comedian Joe Rogan to express remorse for having Covid vaccine critics on his show. One of those critics was cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who argued from the get-go that vaccines wouldn’t stop covid from spreading and that the pandemic could be better managed treating patients early with cheap and readily available medicines.
Prior to covid, McCullough was widely regarded as one of the pre-eminent cardiologists in the world, having published more than 1,000 papers and garnered more than 500 citations in the National Library of Medicine. I wrote a profile of McCullough back in August, but LinkedIn censored that post as well.
Seems to me, Justin Trudeau validates that McCullough knew what he was talking about. Trudeau is fully vaccinated and boosted, yet he still contracted Covid. Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with about four out of every five Canadians fully vaccinated. This accomplishment was despite Trudeau’s leadership, not because of it.
After dissing the protesters, Trudeau went into hiding, supposedly to recover from Covid. He resurfaced Monday to address an emergency meeting of Parliament, where he accused the protesters of “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy.”
That’s another example of Trudeau’s arrogance. The right to peacefully protest government leadership and policies is an integral component of a Democracy. I can’t recall any time where I’ve seen so many Canadians proudly displaying their flag as I’ve seen in videos and photos of the protests.
The protests so far overwhelmingly have been peaceful. I’ve yet to read reports of any deliberate property damage. In fact, I noticed in a video that there were garbage bags hanging throughout the Ottawa protest site; I saw one protester placing her garbage inside.
Ottawa residents talk about their city being “occupied.” They should talk to residents in Seattle and Portland for an education on what an occupation really looks and feels like.
If one believes the Canadian media, most Canadians don’t support or endorse the truckers’ protests. Tolerance will wane very quickly if there are food and other supply shortages because of delays or shutdowns at the border. The protest needs to be quickly diffused, but it will take an inspiring leader with considerable intellect and charisma to pull it off without events spinning out of control.
Trudeau isn’t that leader.