Category Archives: Epidemics/Pandemics

Vaccine Hesitancy and Distrust of Government

Epidemics/Pandemics, Trust and Distrust

 

Years after I first heard about vaccine hesitancy, I learned that a cousin of Christiane and her financial wizard of a husband, also believed the Covid-19 vaccines were unsafe. They tried to persuade their elderly and smart mother not to take them. Remember that at the time scientists were telling us all that the elderly were particularly at risk from Covid-19 and all of them should take the vaccines as soon as possible. The mother of her cousin consulted with her son who was a scientist.  He told his mother, in no uncertain terms, that her daughter and son-in-law were out to lunch. “Trust the scientists,” he said.

Who should you trust?

One of my favorite writers, not a physician, but a smart journalist, is Nesrine Malik writing for The Guardian, a respected political journal.  She understands politics well. Medicine not so much.

This is what Malik  said in an article in that magazine during the Covid-19 pandemic:

“People with the wildest theories about the pandemic can be found in countries even where most people don’t have access to the internet, cable TV or the shock jocks of commercial radio. A common impulse is to write off those espousing conspiracies, consigning them to the casualties claimed by WhatsApp groups, disinformation or silent mental health issues. These things may be true – but vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of broader failures. What all people wary of vaccines have in common, from Khartoum to Kansas is their trust in the state has been eroded. Without understanding this, we will be fated to keep channelling our frustrations towards individuals without grasping why they have lost trust in the first place.”

 

That run a bell for me.  I have attended anti-vax rallies. I have listened to vaccine deniers. I have heard their views.  I have listened to them and talked to them. Mistrust of the state and the government are in fact, from my limited experience, a common element.

In fact, as Malik wrote,

“This mistrust can run so deep that people will trust almost any source of information other than the government. In my birthplace of Sudan, fewer than 1% of the population have been fully vaccinated and ventilators are even rarer than vaccines. The story is much the same in several other African countries, where vaccine availability is so poor that people will drop everything and head to a hospital based on nothing but a rumour that free shots are available that day. But for many other people, those rare lifesaving vaccines sound suspiciously like too much of a good thing.”

 

In some of these places, distrust of government is well-founded.  In places like Canada, mistrust of government by indigenous people is well-founded. They know what it is like to be lied to by the government and to suffer the dangerous consequences.

Malik said that even in her family in Sudan two vulnerable members of her family had heard a rumour that an electrical power shortage, which happens there a lot, had resulted in the vaccines being improperly stored and hence were dangerous. When Sudan got a new batch, many of the people believed that “the West” had sent them rejected vaccines to test them on foreign humans. They wanted first to use African guinea pigs while getting favourable PR before trying the batches on their own people. Again, for a country recently colonized such theories were not as whacky as they might sound to us.

Distrust of governments in such places is understandable. What about Canada or the United States?

The Miracle of Vaccines?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

Few things have surprised me as much as vaccine hesitancy.  The first time I remember coming across this phenomenon was at a conference at Arizona State University which Christiane and I attended.  It was a conference organized by SCETL, their School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. It was our first of many annual conferences we attended there. Attending their annual spring conference was a highlight of our trip down south each year. And they also served us lunch. That year they even gave us wine. All of this for free. They had professors from universities around the country and even Europe and Canada speaking. It was fantastic. And they opened it for members of the public. Christiane and I were a bit nervous the first time we attended, thinking, naturally we did not belong. These were top academics and journalists and thinkers from around the world. But we enjoyed it immensely.

 

For lunch that first year we sat at a round table and were joined by a real estate salesperson. She was also an ordinary citizen like us but enjoyed exploring new ideas, like us.  But she shocked me. She countered a statement that one of the professors had made about autism not being caused by vaccines. She said she had done a lot of research and it was now very clear that vaccines were dangerous and did actually cause autism. “We should never take them,” she said. We should never allow our family members to take them either.

 

I had never heard of this idea before. It surprised me because I had always been a staunch advocate of vaccines since as a young lad terrified of polio during the polio pandemic of the 1950s.  I remember hearing that some people who had polio would have to live most of their entire lives inside an iron lung. Even children my age could be subjected to that. How awful was that? We had a polio victim down the street from us. He was not in an iron lung but I feared for him. Even more I feared for me. It was very scary. The disease affected many young children like me and they were kept alive by these iron lungs.

 

Then like a miracle from God a polio vaccine was discovered.  It could protect us from such a fate. Later I realized this was not a miracle from God, it was a miracle of science. Scientists were so smart they figured out how to save us from these dreadful iron lungs.

 

Then years later as a pretty old man in Arizona State University, I was told that  these vaccines were not safe. How could that be? This was before Covid-19 when I learned many people distrusted the Covid-19 vaccines. I, again, was overjoyed when these vaccines were made available.  Who was I to believe? The real estate agent or scientists I heard on TV or read about in respected journals?  I did a little research too. And it indicated there was a crazy conspiracy theory going around that vaccines caused autism.

 

To me the issue was clear. I would not believe the real estate agent even though she had seemed intelligent and sincere. She knew a lot about vaccines. At least compared to me.  I doubted that she learned more on the Internet than these respected scientists. It just seemed highly unlikely. But I was determined to learn more.

 

Dying of Stubbornness and Ignorance

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trump, Trust and Distrust

 

North Americans are repeating what they did during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are not heeding good science in favour of more attractive positions self-learned on the Internet.  Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times this during the Covid pandemic and it sounds ominously familiar:

“So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.”

 

We must remember how during the Covid pandemic people in hospitals diagnosed with Covid-19 refused to believe their physicians even as they lay dying.  We see something similar now with regard to measles. Physicians have made it clear how important the measles vaccine has been in safely reducing the consequences of measles and saving thousands of lives and yet many continue to disbelieve the scientific evidence or the advice of medical advisors in favor of Internet quacks. As Blow said this about those times:

“All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.”

 

 

Blow called this “anti-vax insanity.” That is what it was during Covid. And that is what it is again in the case of Measles. The Covid-19 vaccines were incredibly safe and so are the measles vaccines, yet too many people refuse to take them.

 

Blow said this about the reaction of conservatives to scientific evidence relating to Covid-19:

“Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.”

 

Once again conservative leaders are leading their faithful adherents to their doom. Blow also said during the Covid-19 pandemic  “They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.” Again, the vaccine deniers are showing their over commitment to “lies and conspiracies” about the measles vaccines.

 

Note as well the words, “too devoted to rebellion.” I will come back to that in a future post.

 

Dying Planet Report

Anthropocene, Bio-Diversity, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Extinction, New Attitude to Nature

 

The London Zoological Society produced a sensational report called the Living Planet Report. As one pundit said, “It really should have been called the Dying Planet Report.” It’s claims are actually a bit tricky, but anyway you look at it, deeply disturbing.

 

Ed Yong of The Atlantic clarified the findings of this new Living Planet Report that have been widely mischaracterized but they are still very important and unsettling and grim. Yong put it this way: “they found that from 1970 to 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is absolutely not the same as saying that humans have culled 60 percent of animals” as some commentators have alleged. The word populations here really means “pockets of individuals from a given species that live in distinct geographical areas.”  I won’t go into the distinction further but suffice it to say humans have caused a lot of death. It would be kind to call it death on a massive scale. To call us “the aids virus of the earth” as Professor John Moriarty did is not really an exaggeration.

Professor Johan Rockström, a global sustainability expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany put it this way:

“We are rapidly running out of time… Only by addressing both ecosystems and climate do we stand a chance of safeguarding a stable planet for humanity’s future on Earth.”

 

Damian Carrington of The Guardian reported as follows:

 

 

Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species – Homo sapiens. Other recent analyses have revealed that humankind has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of civilisation and that, even if the destruction were to end now, it would take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover.

 I believe he should have said “populations” which is not as drastic, but it is certainly drastic.

The Living Planet Report  produced by the London Zoological Society  for the World Wildlife Fund using data from 16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians and found that

“Between 1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of 60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%. The “shocking truth”, said Barrett [of the WWF] is that the wildlife crash is continuing unabated.”

 

In other words, previous reports of huge deaths has not turned around human attitudes to nature enough to have a profound effect for the better. The deaths are “continuing unabated.”

Professor Bob Watson one of the world’s most respected environmental scientists and at the time the chair of an intergovernmental panel on biodiversity  said this, “Wildlife and the ecosystems are vital to human life …the destruction of nature is as dangerous as climate change.”

We all know that nature contributes to human well being, physically, culturally, and spiritually. The food it contributes to us and facilitates  as well as the clean water, fertile soil, and energy it provides is of vital significance to everyone on the planet. As Watson said, “The Living Planet report clearly demonstrates that human activities are destroying nature at an unacceptable rate, threatening the wellbeing of current and future generations.”

Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF said this as a result of the continued assault on life on the planet by humans:

“We need a new global deal for nature and people and we have this narrow window of less than two years to get it…This really is the last chance. We have to get it right this time.”

Tanya Steele, the CEO of the WWF summed it up very well: “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”

It is abundantly clear: We need a new attitude to nature. No tricky statistics alter that.

Have we arrived at Coronavirus Lite?

Epidemics/Pandemics

A lot of us—almost everyone actually—is sick of Covid. That’s OK but we don’t want to be sick from Covid.  Is that not true? Actually it seems to me that more and more of us don’t really care anymore. I am wondering if I belong to this camp?

Yesterday I went in a bus with a bunch of senior citizens from Steinbach to Winnipeg and back and the bus was jammed full. Yet hardly anyone, including me, wore a mask. Two old men wore a mask that did not cover their mouthes or noses.  What was the point of that?  Interestingly on the way back they wore mask as intended. What was up with that? I have no idea. There were a couple of women who wore masks properly in both directions. Were they smart? Were the rest of us stupid? Remember these were all old people who are among  the most vulnerable people to this virus?

Our provincial government has decided to stop giving Manitobans any information about Covid in any manner that makes it easy to get the information. Are they trying to hide something from us? Do they want to ensure we do nothing to interfere with our economic recovery because they think that is now more important than covid?

A couple of days ago Paul Samyn, the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press,  who is almost the only one reporting to use in Manitoba about the state of Covid reported on what is happening to Manitoba. Even that was not in the paper but in a briefing that he regularly offers by way of subscribed email.

Samyn pointed out some interesting facts that most Manitobans, I am sure are not aware of. This is one of the things he said in that email:

“Even though health orders have long faded, even though we are months into learning to live with COVID, 2022 is shaping up to be the deadliest year yet for SARS-CoV-2.”

 

We should let that one sink it. Are things worse than ever when it comes to Covid?  Note this statistic refers to deaths. Not cases! The conventional wisdom is that cases may be on the rise but this latest version of Covid is not so bad. Most people in Manitoba think we have arrived at Covid lite.

Samyn went even farther in his report:

“In the first seven months of 2022, Manitoba has already recorded 663 deaths from the virus — nearly a third of the total body count since the start of the pandemic. At the pace we are on (another seven deaths were announced today), we will easily surpass the previous death toll high water mark of 704 registered when 2021 was said and done… But the death toll is not the only warning bell tolling this summer. Hospitalizations are also up this week, part of a trend that already made 2022 the busiest year for COVID cases in hospitals. The 5,140 hospital admissions recorded in the first seven months of the year already represent more than half of all caseloads in the province since the pandemic began in March of 2020.”

 

I don’t know about you, but these stats make me uneasy.

Samyn came to this uncomfortable conclusion:

“I would never have guessed we would have normalized so many hospitalizations and so much death. But that is exactly what we have done.”

 

You bet that is what we have done. None of the seniors on our bus looked at all concerned. I know I was uneasy, but did absolutely nothing about it. I must be stupid. or have we arrived at thinking lite?

Trust and Mistrust

Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, Trust and Distrust

 

One of the things that is so interesting about this pandemic is the astonishing fact that so many people mistrust so many so deeply. The distrust is virtually unshakeable. I am trying to understand why that happens. And it happens a lot where I live, in Southern Manitoba.

This has caught me by surprise. Or at least it once did. After nearly 2 years of this pandemic, it no longer surprises. I expect it. I am surprised when someone demonstrates trust.  I think it has something to do with the deeply felt religious beliefs in our community, but that still does not explain it.

Here is what Winnipeg Free Press reporter Dylan Robertson said about exactly this issue:

“Manitoba children could qualify for COVID-19 vaccines within weeks, but evangelical parents might not let their kids roll up their sleeves.

In a recent Probe Research survey shared with the Free Press, two-thirds of evangelical Manitobans said they “worry about the long-term effects of COVID-19 vaccinations in children,” compared with 41 per cent of overall respondents.

In addition, 49 per cent of those identifying as evangelical said COVID-19 as an issue was “overblown,” compared with 28 per cent of the overall population.”

 

What would lead Manitoba parents to distrust government or the authorities so much that they would put the lives of their children in danger when the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, and by now, real life experiences, make it so clear that not taking vaccines is a dangerous choice?

The newspaper interviewed Rick Hiemstra, research director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and this is what he said, “A lack of trust and polarization have come home to roost.” So many of these evangelicals now identify with their group—Christians who don’t trust vaccines. They don’t trust scientists. No matter how many of them. They don’t trust the government. Instead, they trust what other members of their tribe have told them or trust what they have “learned” from their own “research” on the Internet. And they do so while they put the lives of their children in danger.

Here is what a local theologian said as reported by the Winnipeg Free Press,

“Evangelical scholar Nicholas Greco said numerous factors cause that gap, from a desire to rely on God for healing, to science clashing with creationism, to general skepticism of media and government.

“Evangelicals often are reflective of a social and political conservatism, which calls for smaller governments (and) personal autonomy, but also tends to lead to a mistrust of government,” said Greco, who is provost of Providence University College in Otterburne.

Greco, a long-time communications professor, said there’s a perception the government wants to control everyone, and that the media is overhyping the virus as part of some sort of conspiracy.

“The rhetoric I hear from many of my colleagues… is that we don’t want the government to have further control, because if they do, we will lose our freedoms,” he said.”

 

The evangelicals believe conspiracy theories rather than scientists and they believe them so strongly they put the lives of their children in danger. It is like an article of their faith that vaccines are untrustworthy, and no reasoning, no data, or no actual experiences will shake them from their convictions.

Here is what the Free Press reported, “

 

“At a recent panel, one congregant said everyone who got the vaccine is going to die within a few years, and that they’ll all go to hell.”

As an aside, think for a moment about what a monstrous God this person believed in—a god who would punish someone for eternity for doing what our scientists have strongly recommended.

It is as if denial of vaccine efficacy has become part of their religious faith.

 

Anti-Intellectualism and Anti-Science

Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

A lot of people think they are know just as much as scientists. That really is dumb! We see this all around us. Everyone thinks they or their uncle Ernie who spends endless hours on the Internet watching social media thinks that it is not necessary to have an education to know what it takes to navigate a pandemic with a novel virus.   Ian Hanomansing, in his book Pandemic Spotlight quotes a front line physician Dr. Sain Chagla of Hamilton who said,

“I can say it bewilders me when all of us—10 plus years trained, 10 plus years in clinical practice, constantly looking at the evolving evidence every day—that someone dismisses us, saying, ‘you’re completely wrong because I saw this YouTube video.’ It’s almost funny.”

 

But it’s not funny; it’s crazy.

 

Personal Choice

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom

 

We have been hearing a lot about personal choice lately. People say they want the personal choice to decide for themselves whether or not they take the vaccine.  To some extent that makes sense, but not much.

Rob Davidson is a country doctor from western Michigan and he had a different point of view. In his hospital in a small town the health care professionals saw many patients dying from Covid-19. It was heart breaking to see he said, particularly because most of those deaths were from people who refused to get vaccinated.  They would have had a good chance to avoid that just by taking the vaccine since he said, the hospitalizations  and deaths were overwhelmingly from the unvaccinated. He said some nurses cried every day on their trip back to their homes.  As well, they are frustrated by the attitude of people who just refuse the vaccines saying it is a matter of personal choice. This was Dr. Davidson’s response to that:

“With every shift, I see the strain people sick with Covid-19 put on my hospital. Their choice to not get vaccinated is not personal. It forces patients with ruptured appendixes and broken bones to wait for hours in my emergency department; it postpones surgeries for countless other people and burns out doctors and nurses…Personal choice cannot be an acceptable reason to endanger other people.”

How many nurses and other health care professionals have quit their jobs because they can’t take it anymore?

I wish people who worried about personal choice thought about the effects their choice have on other people. Is that not important too?

 

Standing up for what’s right takes courage

Epidemics/Pandemics, Hate, Rebel, Social Justice

 

The Freedom Convoy in support of truckers went through Winnipeg on the way to Ottawa. I wish I had gone to see it, but Christiane and I are staying close to home in support of our health care workers and Manitobans who have not been able to get vital health care procedures or surgeries because our hospitals are filled up with Covid-19 patients and the staff are being relentlessly overworked. We are triple vaxxed so we think we are safe, but don’t want to take a chance right now partly for their sake.

Canada’s truckers don’t support such thinking. They want their freedom. And to them that basically means they don’t want to give in to health restrictions even if that increases danger for others. It’s all about them.

The truckers have also been joined by some unsavoury characters that they are not able to denounce. For example, in Winnipeg Niigaan Sinclair a professor at the University of Manitoba and columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press went to see their “freedom rally” when the convoy stopped in Winnipeg. He took his young daughter with him. She got an education.  This is what he reported seeing:

 

“We saw swastikas. We also saw dozens of signs chanting homophobic and Islamophobic slurs, threats against politicians, and near-endless messages about “freedom.”

I saw lots of sign-less people alongside children and elders.

I hope everyone I saw realizes that there’s no point chanting “freedom” when you stand beside someone calling for violence.

No one credits someone with a “differing opinion” while watching violence. The watcher is as complicit as the doer. Ask the German people if you want to know what I mean.

So, two days after International Holocaust Memorial Day (Jan. 27), Nazi symbols were brandished openly in downtown Winnipeg — and nobody stopped it.”

 

Frankly, I never thought Swastikas would be brandished in downtown Winnipeg. Some of the truckers or their supporters were carrying yellow Star of David’s with wording that suggested vaccine mandates were equivalent to persecution by Nazis.

This “freedom convoy” has been planned for nearly a year. Sinclair believes the date chosen for the event was significant. It was the day set for Canada’s National Day of Remembrance of the brutal and hateful attack on a Quebec City Mosque. It should have been about that event, not some phony “freedom rally.” There was a hero 5 years ago during that attack. He was not a trucker. He was Azzedine Soufiane, a 57-year-old grocery store owner, who was killed while opposing the gunman for long enough for others to join him and stop the shooting. That took bravery.  Driving a big rig across the country does not take any courage. As Sinclair said, Saturday should have been about Soufiane.” It should have been about a real hero.

 Instead of supporting a cause that needs our support, this convoy stood up for racism and zeonphobia. As Sinclair said, “No, Saturday was about people who used frustration with the COVID-19 pandemic to spread hate, sow division, and try to intimidate people they disagree with.”

 

I am not saying all the participants in the convoy are scum. But there were plenty of them, and I did not hear many words of dissent from the truckers or the non-truckers that organized the event. They were too busy ‘shouting hooray for our side,” to quote Neil Young.  The denunciations should have come through loud and clear. My own Member of Parliament, Ted Falk, had gone to the Manitoba/US border to show his support for the truckers earlier in the week. I did not hear him denouncing the hate.

Sinclair said he had not seen anyone standing up at the Winnipeg Rally to denounce the racism and hate.  Sinclair summed it up well,

“Truth be told, I don’t know if anyone during Saturday’s rally in Winnipeg or Ottawa had the courage to speak up against those waving swastikas. I’d like to hope there were a few… It takes courage to stand up for what one believes in. It takes much more courage though to stand up for what’s right.”

 

I would like to see some more truckers and politicians standing up against hate. That’s what freedom is really about. Standing up against hate. That takes guts. Something notable by its absence at the Freedom Convoy.

Wisdom from Curlers and Nonsense from Truckers

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom

 

We have been hearing a lot of crap from truckers and their allies lately.  They want freedom. Don’t we all? They keep demanding the right to decide for themselves whether or not they will take vaccines for Covid-19.  Many of them drove in a “freedom convoy” all the way to Ottawa from all parts of the country to protest mandates, getting lavish praise along the way from all kinds of people including political leaders.  By mandates they mean all laws and health orders relating to Covid-19. Really they want to do whatever they want, saying it is a matter of “personal freedom”.

 

Yet they don’t demand the right to drive on whatever side of the road they choose. They don’t demand the right to drive without licensees. They don’t protest against the safety requirements to restrict the hours that they drive their trucks. They don’t drink and drive. The fact is that truckers, like each of us, are not allowed to do whatever we want. We all have to obey laws whether we like them or not. None of us can do whatever we want. That is not freedom. That is anarchy. Frankly they are full of nonsense.

 

Then there are curlers. Well at least there is one that impressed me greatly.  This was Jason Gunnlaugson the skip of one of Manitoba’s top curling  teams and a former provincial champion. He recently announced that he would not compete in the Manitoba championship this year that will be held next week in Selkirk.  That means he won’t have a chance to compete in the Canadian Briar either.

 

Gunnlaugson announced that several members of his family and others in his “immediate circle” had not been able to receive timely medical treatment during the pandemic as a result of a huge surge of hospitalizations in Manitoba as a result of Covid-19 cases.  This is what he said: “I personally cannot reconcile playing non-bubble and non-testing curling tournaments at this time.”

 

With that comment Gunnlaugson proved he was different from the truckers—he could think of someone other than himself! He believes in freedom for others, not just freedom for himself. After all, we all want freedom.