I am sorry to be so frank, so publicly frank, to a man whom I admired for a long time and from whom I expected good things. I confess that in younger days, when shuttling between the Kootenays and Calgary, I thought of Albertans mainly as people who cornered too slowly on mountain roads. But I learned, partly from you, that I must think much more of them than that. At the moment, however, I am struggling to make sense of your driving. You seem to be spinning your limo in circles, making us all dizzy.
Back on May Day, when “Alberta is open for business” reverted to “Alberta is in lockdown,” I made a few notes to myself. By your government’s own figures, there were at the time active covid cases – not to be confused with sick people, though a few sick people there were – in every provincial zone, at a testing proportion of 10%. Of those who had positive PCR results, which aren’t worth much in real terms, there were only 2.9% in care and 0.7% in intensive care. Of these the vast majority were elderly or suffering multiple co-morbidities. Some 60% of deaths in the province thus far had taken place inside long-term care units – where, as we are now discovering, malicious, even murderous, protocols were used in some jurisdictions (not in yours, I hope) at the very outset of the pandemic – and most of the others who died were also in the advanced-age category.
Your government, which by then had enjoyed more than a year to create any additional intensive care facilities it might need, at far less expense than lockdowns and with none of the collateral damage, had not done so, despite constant fussing about overwhelmed hospitals that (again by your own figures) were not actually overwhelmed. Instead, it determined that Alberta must rejoin the parade of provinces that, rather than quarantining those who are genuinely sick, preferred to quarantine everyone: an oxymoronic notion, medically and tactically absurd, as Lt-Col. Redman, Dr Modry, and others had pointed out to you. Moreover, Alberta would persist in its draconian efforts to suppress resistance and incarcerate its leaders.
What was true in Alberta was also true here in Quebec, where I followed the official numbers even more closely. The choice not to expand ICU capacity dramatically had in both places obvious implications. Either the government (1) didn’t really believe it was necessary, in which case it was lying about the severity of the covid threat, or (2) it supposed the withdrawal of civil liberties, the lapsing of routine medical care, and the destruction of the economy more tolerable than allowing that those extra beds might be necessary, or (3) it was working to some different agenda altogether.
The first and the third of these options are fully compatible, of course, while the second simply beggars belief. The low mortality rate, the categories in which deaths were occurring, and the futility – nay, the destructiveness and brutality – of the “emergency” measures being taken convinced me that the third required much more attention. I have since given it that attention, directing the results especially to our co-religionists, but I’ll not trouble you with that. If you are interested, you can discover my conclusions in my essay, The Emerging Nowa Huta.
Anyway, summer arrived and the inmates of Alberta’s province-wide quarantine camp soon received back from your government a few of their rights in the form of temporary privileges, though you did not call them that in your Open for Summer program. Autumn is barely upon us and those privileges are already being withdrawn. My May Day musings have thus become Labour Day musings, which suggests a review of the statistics.
At the beginning of May, Alberta had 21,385 active cases, 632 hospitalizations, with 151 in intensive care. And at the beginning of September? There are 13,495 such “cases,” only 515 hospitalizations, with 118 in intensive care. In the few fatal cases, the average age at death is still in the eighties, as it has been all along.
I don’t need to tell you that people do tend to pass away in their eighties, if nothing takes them earlier. “Three score years and ten, or by reason of strength four score,” such are the years allotted to man. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, either, that in Canada for many weeks now the covid mortality rate per 100,000 people has been sitting at or near zero (in Alberta at the moment 0.6). In other words, almost no one is dying, directly or even indirectly, from covid. Meanwhile, more than 70% of Albertans over 12 years of age are fully vaccinated.
But there’s the rub. The “active case” number has dropped nearly 40%, as one would expect over the summer, while serious cases requiring hospitalization and sometimes intensive care have come down by more than 20%. The general infection rate is relatively stable. Most who are infected barely know it, if indeed they do know it. What will happen this winter (winter no. 2 in most reckonings, but actually winter no. 3) remains to be seen. Why then this latest 180 degree turn?
I will tell you why, or at least I will tell others why. It is necessary in order to obscure the fact that the so-called vaccines are having very little positive effect and, as evidence from elsewhere suggests, may even be having a negative effect. Negative not in the sense that they are capable of producing serious adverse reactions and deaths even among those who were not at risk from covid itself – something governments cannot deny but are not keen to admit – but rather in the sense that they do not work very well at preventing infection and, in the most vulnerable, suffering or even death. When the numbers climb again in the winter, this will become apparent even to those who have not yet noticed.
Now, those who were paying attention already suspected that. The much vaunted 85-95% risk reduction from early studies of certain of these mRNA treatments was only relative risk reduction; absolute risk reduction was closer to 1%, since most people are not at risk in the first place. But even the former holds good only for a few weeks or months, unlike naturally acquired immunity, which ordinarily is good for life. Hence the need for regular booster shots, of which the authorities were aware from the outset. Did Mr. Trudeau not order or take options on supplies sufficient to jab each Canadian ten times? In point of fact there is no such thing as being “fully vaccinated.” There is only such a thing as having been jabbed as often as presently demanded.
What we did not know when orders were being placed is how much damage these jabs would do to their recipients. We know more about that now, and the statistics are not at all pretty. No other product has ever survived such adverse event numbers, or been deployed anyway with such determination, such desperation – despite the low fatality rate of the pathogen. And there is much yet to find out about their long-term effects, as people are herded back into the clinics and cubicles every few months for yet another booster to their newly acquired artificial immune system.
We have learned already that the spike protein these treatments teach our bodies to produce (to say nothing of their lipid delivery system) are pathogenic in themselves and that they are not contained in the shoulder but spread throughout the body. We know that there is often a blood-clotting effect at some level. We know that each booster increases the likelihood of that effect in tissues that do not heal, such as those of heart and lung and brain. We know that children, who are not at risk from covid, are at risk from long-term damage to such tissue and are subject to other kinds of injury from our covid-zero fantasy. We know or ought to know that it is entirely unethical, monstrous in fact, to experiment on them, and to do so without even informing their parents that there is a risk.
But all this must be covered up. Statistics are not being properly kept, and where kept are not being properly disseminated. Some hospitals are changing referrals that mention possible vaccine injury to elide that preliminary diagnosis. Autopsies that ought to be done are not being done. Into the urns symbolically present on Alberta’s statistical summary page all that evidence disappears for good. Emergency workers, nurses, physicians, and specialists who insist on pointing out vaccine injuries, or who themselves refuse to be vaccinated, are being disciplined or even dismissed. Others, after honest questioning, are bemused to the point where they hardly know what to think or say.
You yourself, I now see, have resorted to the most calumnious of cover-ups. You have taken up the narrative that was prepared for just this eventuality and is now in use internationally. You have scapegoated the unvaccinated, and especially the young, as if they were the source of all these problems and as if their very existence justified your own harsh actions.
This narrative – this bald but well orchestrated lie – that we now face “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is soundly based on no science whatsoever. Lies never are, though they purport to be. It is evident in still more highly vaccinated countries, from Israel to Iceland, that the virus spreads among and between the vaccinated. The mRNA treatments are incapable of stopping that and may actually enhance it. But by incessant propaganda, by coercive measures, by cash awards such as you have just announced, the prospect of overcoming this coronavirus as we overcome others – that is, by weathering the storm through robust natural immunity – is disappearing.
At some level, there seems to be a general inkling of that. Why otherwise would people remain so fearful? Plainly they do not trust the very treatments they are taking to protect themselves, and in their propagandized state they are quite willing to turn on those who have not seen fit to follow their own example. Playing on those fears to produce compliance is unconscionable. Bribing people to produce compliance is unconscionable. Threatening people is unconscionable. Coercive mandates are immoral and unconstitutional. Even continuing to approve these products is deeply problematic, at both the moral and the legal level.
Of the primary means now being deployed to coerce vaccination, the so-called vaccine passport, I have said more in “Nowa Huta.” Here I will say only this: It is quite obvious that the whole exercise, from start to finish, has as its goal the passport system. That is why it has been pedal to the metal and the wheel hard left on this dizzying drive.
Last Friday you began introducing Albertans, very coyly, to the idea of a QR-coded society and a passport system. You are, I fear, being quite disingenuous by suggesting that it will be voluntary, provided only for those who want it. You are not leading Alberta down any other path than the one being taken by your counterpart in Victoria, Daniel Andrews – the Mao of Melbourne, as I think of him – and by our own prime minister, and by the premiers of Ontario and of Quebec, which is well out in front of you.
Let Albertans query you very carefully on that! But I too have some questions for you.
In your province, as in B.C., a few deranged or hateful people have responded to misinformation about the residential schools by burning churches. To your credit, you have called that out as a completely unacceptable response. Yet you yourself have threatened to come after the unvaccinated, in as yet unspecified ways. You have already defaced dissenting churches with fences and locks. You are standing by while people lose their liberties and livelihoods. What kind of example are you setting? When the scapegoating gets out of hand, when people start vandalizing or burning the homes or churches of the unvaccinated, will you accept any responsibility for that?
Or again, when it becomes more acceptable to force good citizens into bankruptcy or into purpose-built quarantine camps, as they are preparing to do in Australia and here in Eastern Canada as well, will you follow suit? Ontario is just dismantling its purpose built covid field hospital, without ever treating a single patient there. And, even as it does so, it begins building quarantine camps! Something tells me the latter will not long remain unoccupied.
Whatever the real reasons for the growing tyranny in the West – pandemics, through which many of us have lived before, are not the reason but only the excuse – we would like to be told honestly about them. We would like to have a hand in shaping solutions to the problems that tyrants and technocrats think they alone should solve. We would like to be at liberty to get on with our lives as best we can. We wish to be free.
To offer an example: I had a letter the other day from a young woman in Alberta who would like to be able to continue her college education without invasive questions about her personal medical decisions, demands for perpetual medical tests, acts of shunning, fees being extorted for activities in which she will not be allowed to participate, shaming from her premier, and so forth. I had another letter from a woman elsewhere, in her nineties, who was deeply concerned about the coercion of her grandson into the Great Experiment on penalty of being excluded from his military college altogether. She was not concerned that this beloved young man would bring her covid on her deathbed. She was concerned that he be able to live, as she had lived, in a free society where prudential judgments were in the hands of ordinary citizens – that there be such a society for him to defend.
Mr. Kenney, what I say to you I say to all our political leaders: Your policy doughnuts on the tarmac of our daily lives are an outrage for which you will be held accountable, in this world and the next! Do not mistake us for fools. Not only do we grate at the damage you are doing us; we recognize that a smokescreen is being laid down for something vastly more troubling than a mere coronavirus.
I speak of the Great Reset, as the Davos people call it. You are on record as wanting nothing whatever to do with that. Good for you! To lift a line from Travis Smith in The Arts of Rule, the Davos “hypocrites” (as you called them) fit the bill of that perfectly unjust man who “swindles others into consuming harms voluntarily and voraciously, remedying their indigestion with additional poisons.”
I want to believe you when you say that you don’t wish to be found in their company or be party to their program. But in that case I can only conclude that while you were reading Mr. Schwab’s book they must have hacked your onboard computer. Might I recommend disconnecting it permanently and doing your own driving? The result, I am confident, would be most reassuring to your own conscience, as to the rest of us.
Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Ethics at McGill University.