Category Archives: Epidemics/Pandemics

Is it unreasonable to compel Health Care workers to take the Covid-19 vaccines?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Human rights

 

Many health care workers and others are objecting to provide medical information to their employers.  They think they have the right to keep such information private.  Do they have a point?

As Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Free Press said, when medical students were in University,

“They have to sign an immune status consent form that allows the university to access their immunization records and agree that “maintaining an accurate and up-to-date immune status record is an important responsibility of being a student, to protect my own health, as well as the health of the patients with whose care I will be involved.”

I don’t know if other health care students were required to sign such a consent form but to me it seems reasonable to ask for it.

In the past, students at the university were told, that if they did not get immunized that failure “may result in the student being barred from clinical activities involving patients, and may mean the student cannot complete the program.” The students were not given the right to make a personal choice, such as taking tests instead. If they did not do as compelled, they could not continue their studies.

Why is it that now they expect to have the right to refuse? Really what the students learned is that they were expected to follow evidence-based science and get vaccinated or lose their positions. Was that unfair?

If health care workers do not accept evidence based science are they competent to continue in their profession? According to Brodbeck,

“Frankly, I question the medical competency of any health-care worker who chooses not to get immunized, including against COVID-19. I’m not sure I want someone looking after patients who has trouble understanding the basics of vaccine science. If they can’t grasp that, what other medical facts do they struggle with?”

 

I think Brodbeck has a point.  I don’t think health care workers who refuse to get vaccinated or get tested without a very good reason are worthy of working in our health care system. What do you think?

Health Care workers say they love Jesus, vote Conservative, and abandon their patients

Conservative, Epidemics/Pandemics, religion, The Sleep of Reason

 

The number of Manitoba’s front line health care workers has been rising since Monday when they were required to show they had been vaccinated or agree to undergo test before working in the health care system. Here is the latest according to the Winnipeg Free Press:

“The number of front-line health-care workers who are on unpaid leave because they refuse to provide proof of vaccination or take a COVID-19 test has grown to 158 — more than half of whom work in the Southern Health region.

Management has had to redeploy staff from other programs in the region to Eastview Place in Altona and Salem Home in Winkler “to ensure ongoing quality care and services,” a Shared Health spokesman said Wednesday.”

 

In other words, even though the Southern Health region includes only about 1/5th  of the population in Manitoba, it still has more than half of the health care workers who refuse to get vaccinated and also refuse to take the Covid-19 tests to prove they are not carrying the disease. In fact, only 17 of the 158 of the workers who declined to get vaccinated and declined to get tested,  were employed by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and 83 in Southern Health. That means per capita the Southern Health region has 10 times as many health care workers refusing to come to work than Winnipeg had.  We should also remember that the Southern Health Region has a lot of Christians and Conservative voters.

So, they abandoned their patients instead, letting already badly over run fellow employees do their work for them so they could protest what they felt were unreasonable requirements. What is the reason for opposing tests? Many jurisdictions, unlike Manitoba, don’t give them an option. Manitoba is trying to accommodate them by giving them a reasonable option. I really am not sure what their objections to taking tests are.

As the Free Press reported,

“Last week, Salem Home and Tabor Home in Morden sent letters to residents’ families advising them of possible staffing shortages Monday when vaccination or COVID-19 testing became a requirement for direct-support workers, and they could be asked to help care for their loved ones.”

 

Once more this establishes that where there are Conservatives and Christians there are more likely to be people who don’t trust the science and are more likely to abandon their patients. In Winnipeg they just go about their jobs of helping vulnerable people. If Jesus were around here today he might ask, ‘which of these loved their neighbours?’ I think the answer is obvious.

 

Covid-19 and Air Pollution

Environmental Apocalypse, Epidemics/Pandemics, Pollution

As I mentioned earlier, in the past couple of years of the pandemic, air pollution has killed a lot more people than Covid-19.  Yet one is treated like an emergency while the other is more or less ignored. I think that is a big mistake.

Air pollution no doubt contributed to the effects of Covid-19.  How could it not?  Covid-19 usually effects the respiratory system. So does air pollution.  As Beth Gardner reported in the National Geographic,

“When Covid-19 began tearing around the globe, Francesca Dominici suspected air pollution was increasing the death toll. It was the logical conclusion of everything scientists knew about dirty air and everything they were learning about the novel coronavirus. People in polluted places are more likely to have chronic illnesses, and such patients are the most vulnerable to COVID-19. What’s more, air pollution can weaken the immune system and inflame the airways, leaving the body less able to fight off a respiratory virus.”

 

Dominici is a professor of biostatistics at Harvard and she has created a data platform that aligns information on the death of millions of Americans with a day-by-day summary of the air those people who died were breathing. What a great idea! But the results of her investigation were disturbing. Her data goes back for 20 years.

How she got the data is an interesting story in itself, but I will leave you to read the article in the Geographic. She was collecting the information for years before any one had ever heard of Covid-19.

First of all, she and her researchers noticed that even in places where air quality standards were met, pollution was linked to higher death rates. This meant the air quality  standards were too lax! The air that will meet the standard won’t be safe enough. Of course, death is not the only result of bad air.  Other health conditions are also concerning if you care at all about quality of life. I know I do.

The research team discovered that a host of ailments that required hospitalizations had gone up wherever there was air pollution. Her research showed that things like kidney failure and septicemia also went up where air quality was poor. They learned that air quality with particulate matter, even very small matter, had a big effect.

For example, as Beth Gardner explained her findings,

“added to a mountain of evidence demonstrating the dangers of PM2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, about a 30th the width of a human hair. Some of those particles—of soot, for example—can cross into the bloodstream. Scientists have found them, including even tinier “ultrafine” particles, in the heart, brain, and placenta.”

 

The researchers found there was a very close connection between Covid-19 deaths and poor air quality. As she said,

“the places where decades of exposure to bad air had primed people’s bodies to be susceptible to the coronavirus. Worldwide, the team reported in December, particle pollution accounted for 15 percent of COVID-19 deaths. In badly polluted countries in East Asia, it was 27 percent.”

 

This surprised many ordinary people, but most scientists were not so surprised. Dominici said, “It made perfect sense.” She already knew what much of the public doesn’t—that dirty air ends far more lives, and with far greater regularity, than the novel coronavirus.”

Its time we started to realize that. This is also an environmental problem is not something in our future; it is with us here and now.

Health Care Workers that don’t  care

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

I read something startling. Really startling. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, 2 days before health care workers were required to confirm that they had been vaccinated and to declare their immunization status,

“Nearly one quarter of Manitoba’s health-care staff who deal directly with the public had not disclosed their Covid-19 immunization status…Roughly 10,000 of 42,000—physicians, residents, nurses, and aides—have refused to reveal their status despite being mandated to advise their employers.”

 

These workers did more than abandon their patients. They were prepared to keep their supervisors guessing about whether or not they would be able to work. They made it as difficult as possible for health care supervisors and administrators to get sufficient help to care for patients. In other words—these health care workers did not care at all about their patients. And those patients are among the most vulnerable in our society. As the striking path of the pandemic through personal care homes and health care facilities showed, those people were indeed extremely vulnerable.

I take comfort from the fact that on the first day of the new health orders most health care workers, by a vast majority, did show up for work. I heard it was about 95%. But why didn’t more people advise the health care facilities where they worked that they would be working? Added to that, what about the other 5% who did not show up?

Is this not reckless endangerment? Are these recalcitrant health care workers worthy of being kept on? Is this not scandalous dereliction of duty? I don’t know about you, but I find this shocking!  What kind of health care workers are these people? They are health care workers who don’t care.

Statistics are not always Lies

Epidemics/Pandemics, The Sleep of Reason

Mark Twain famously disparaged statistics. He said, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” Maybe (OK probably) I am not sophisticated enough to understand them but sometimes those stats tell a powerful story. Sometimes stats are important.

I read some stunning stats yesterday. Of all the provinces in Canada Saskatchewan has the lowest rate of vaccination uptake in the country. At the same time, Saskatchewan has the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases in the past 14 days as it gears up to send Covid-19 patients out of the province for help because its health care system is on the brink. Yesterday, Saskatchewan had 510 new Covid-19 cases  per 100,000 people in the past 14 days. Prince Edward Island on the other hand had the highest rate of vaccine uptake among all the provinces and the lowest rate of new Covid-19 cases in the past 14 days per 1000,000 people  at 6.  Remember this is per 100,000! 510 to 9! Does that not tell us a lot about the effectiveness of the vaccines? Frankly that is a stunning statistic.

The people who are not taking up the vaccines in my opinion are significantly responsible for this. The Vaccines are free and widely available.  The reasons for not taking them have been largely discredited. Yet many people are not taking them, to the point where health care systems are on the brink of disaster.

Yet we are expected not to openly criticize the people who resist vaccines because criticism will not be effective. I disagree with that. We should criticize. We should do it with kindness (as I was reminded recently), but we should do it. A friend has a duty to advise a friend when we see them going on a dangerous path.

 

 

 

A stealth Enemy: Air Quality

Climate change, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Pollution

 

In early 2020 the world changed–we experienced Covid-19. This was something new an international pandemic that hit home to everyone except the most obtuse virus deniers, religious fanatics, anti-science cranks, and conservatives and their fellow travelers.

Covid-19 was big. It changed the world. In many respects the world changed including massive economic slow-downs or even lockdowns. For more than a year we were required to wear masks in most social settings. Many of us were not able to work. An international Marshall plan was established to work on vaccines. Millions of people died while millions of people denied the reality of their illness or the efficacy of the vaccines created to stem the tide. Yes, the world was different.

In the midst of this pandemic and the international response it was difficult to see anything else. As a result, we missed some pretty important things. For example, few paid attention to air quality. That was a mistake.

Rebecca Solnit was the first to draw my attention to this disturbing fact. As she reported in The Guardian,

“While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.”

  

I was shocked to read that. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

After all at the time she wrote, 2.8 million people had died as a result of Covid-19 and it captured our entire attention. Whether we believed it or not, clearly covid-19 was the issue. Since then of course, millions more have died, and we are nowhere need done with this pandemic.

What most of us did not know is that during the first 15 months of the pandemic that Solnit was writing about “3 times as many people died from air pollution.”

While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.

 

According to a recent scientific study, 8.7 million people per year die of the effects of air pollution. And part of the problem is that most of us are unaware of this disturbing fact. Air pollution is a largely invisible enemy unless you visit some place like Phoenix Arizona as I did for nearly 10 years in a row. You can see it there. Air pollution usually arrives by stealth. As a result, unlike Covid-19 the world has not rallied to defeat it. There have been no lockdowns or mask requirements because of air pollution. Largely this stealth attack has gone unnoticed and unquestioned.  We have normalized the havoc by treating it as what Solnit called “moral background noise.” Instead Covid-19 gets all the attention. Solnit says we should treat air pollution like an emergency, like we have done with Covid-19. She does not say attention to Covid-19 was misplaced.

The first thing we must realize is that there is more than one serious consequence to burning fossil fuels.  We must also recognize that  climate change is not the only serious effect of our determination to burn fossil fuels. Climate change is a serious problem, perhaps the most serious in the world right now, notwithstanding Covid-19, but so is air quality.  The problem is that burning fossils fuels is to deep a part of the status quo that we don’t really see it. We are blind to it and have come to believe there is no reasonable alternative.

As Solnit said,

“We are designed to respond with alarm to something that just happened, that breaches norms, but not to things that have been going on for decades or centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is to make the invisible visible and to make what has long been accepted unacceptable. This has of course been done to some extent, with coal-burning power plants and with fracking in some places, but not with the overall causes of climate chaos.”

 

We cannot let this stealth bomber slip under the radar.  Climate change creates similar problems as until we experience dramatic effects as when wild fires consume British Columbia and California forests, or ice bergs break off continents, birds disappear, or in my case, beautiful flowers come earlier in spring, we often fail to take note of the serious changes. It is also difficult to notice when some of the richest and most predatory corporations in the world pay huge sums of money to pundits for hire to confuse the science and persuade these problems are not real.

We must be alert to these problems and the consequences they foist on us. We must dissent from the normal. We must resist the fake reality that predatory capitalist firms try to impose upon us.  As Solnit said,

“According to CNBC, at the outset of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60% fall of PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul registered a 54% drop, while the fall in China’s Wuhan came in at 44%.” Returning to normal means drowning out the birds and blurring out the mountains and accepting 8.7 million air pollution deaths a year. Those deaths have been normalized; they need to be denormalized.”

Solnit also reminded us that,

 

“A lot of attention was paid to whatever actions might have caused Covid-19 to cross from animals to humans, but the actions that take fossil fuel out of the ground to produce that pollution that kills 8.7 million annually, along with acidifying oceans and climate chaos, should be considered far more outrageous a transgression against public health and safety.”

 

One of the excuses these corporations have tried to get us to believe is that we can’t afford to change. One thing Covid-19 has showed us is that we can afford to spend the money that it takes to fight off disaster. Hugely impactful changes require huge responses. We can do it. We must. We must not tolerate a “normal” that costs the lives of 8.7 million people every year (in addition to all the other horrific effects of fossil fuel consumption.

Rebecca Solnit left us with some hope in her important essay:

“My hope for a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about climate – that it is impossible to change the status quo and too expensive to do so – have been stripped away. In response to the pandemic, we in the US have spent trillions of dollars and changed how we live and work. We need the will to do the same for the climate crisis… With a drawdown on carbon emissions and a move toward cleaner power, we could have a world with more birdsong and views of mountains and fewer pollution deaths. But first we have to recognize both the problem and the possibilities.”

 

We need to get serious about climate change and air pollution and stop ignoring the problem or paying lip service to them as we have been doing in Canada. It is time for change. It is time to realize that this is not a future problem—this is happening now. This is apocalypse now.

Nearing the End?

Epidemics/Pandemics

Are we nearing the end of the pandemic?  It is too early to tell, but there are some encouraging signs.

Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, a woman of quiet wisdom I have found, as well as a conservative person not given to making radical statements (unlike some impetuous bloggers) said,

“cases have started levelling off as more people get vaccinated and after public health measures were reintroduced in August and September to slow transmission. It’s the first time since July where the pandemic does not appear to be in a growth pattern for the country.”

 

We must remember she did not go any further than that. After all she is a careful, prudent scientist. Not some blathering blogger. But you can’t blame us for getting excited after 18 months of pandemic.

Dr. Tam also mentioned that Saskatchewan and Alberta had the highest rates of Covid among the provinces. She also mentioned that according to Public Health Agency data areas of the country that were hardest hit recently were those who eliminated rules on mask wearing and gathering sizes too early while not enough people had been vaccinated against Covid-19.

I wish more people in Canada understood this and trusted our top health officials instead of getting their public health advice from personal research on the Internet. Too many people think medicine is easy and that 7 years or more of medical education is not needed to evaluate the science of vaccines.

 

 

Co-parenting with the Government

Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, The Sleep of Reason

 

Jordan Klepper was sent by the The Daily Show with Trevor Noah show to Johnston County North Carolina to visit with people protesting masks and vaccines. Kleeper has a knack for getting people to say strange things on camera.

Parents there were desperate to get their children back into schools. Nothing wrong with that agenda, but it was interesting how they went about accomplishing that. North Carolina, of course, is part of the American bible belt. Sort of like North Carolina’s version of Manitoba’sSouthern Health district .

Just like Manitoba hospitals there have Intensive Care Units that are filled and they faced mandates to wear masks. The parents that protested did not like those restrictions. And some of their arguments in favor of their positions were deeply fascinating. The protest rally reminded me a lot of the one I saw in Steinbach at about the same time. As Jordan Klepper said, “putting on a piece of cloth was just too much,” for the protesters. It was a terrible encroachment on their freedom.

The most common T-shirt or sign the protesters displayed was telling: “I don’t co-parent with the government.” Others included: “Stop muzzling our children.”   “My rights don’t end where your feelings begin!!!” “Say No to critical race theory.” “Educate not indoctrinate.”  Or “Unmasked, unmuzzled, unvaccinated, unafraid.” One  sign painted on an image of the American flag said, “that mask is as useless as our governor.”

The protesters, like those in Steinbach, were against it all. They didn’t like compulsory vaccines or masks or social distancing rules.  All the things the scientists said were needed to keep schools open were opposed by the protesters. One protester said, “Masks will never protect Americans.” Another said masks don’t work. Her child was suffering after wearing a mask for so long. She told Kleeper the problems he had as a result were acne on his face. But he didn’t have covid.  She admitted that. But he had acne. Klepper asked her if she had to choose between acne or Covid-19 fro her son what would she choose? She made it clear she would consider Acne as being worse.

Another mother protester said the problem with wearing masks was that children were forced to breath in air that the body was trying to get rid of. Klepper asked her how surgeons did it? They had been wearing masks for years. Her answer was this: “That’s a good question.” Yeah that is a good question.

Klepper pointed out that a recent study from the CDC and Duke University, one of North Carolina’s world class colleges, said  that wearing masks would be helpful for school children. She challenged people to smell the toxins going into the body as a result of masks. According to Klepper “There’s science and there’s the smell test so you’re going with the smell test?”  She nodded assent.

Klepper asked another woman what were the problems with masks.  She answered, “I think breathing. I’ve done a little bit of research about carbon dioxide that people are saying is an issue now with the masks.” When Klepper pointed out that scientific research had established that wearing masks in settings like schools was an advisable thing she just said, “Nah. Oh no. I mean I don’t think so.” She just threw up her hands and said  “oh I just don’t know.”  She had not even a hint of an answer to a very simple question from Klepper. She preferred “a little bit of research” and “what some people are saying” to the world’s best scientific and health evidence.

A male protester when asked where was the harm in having kids wear masks replied that “For kids the harm is they can’t gauge emotional awareness. They don’t see the facial expressions.” Klepper asked, “You think not being able to see the lower half of a facial expression outweighs the dangers of Covid might pose to kids in the community?” The man replied, “Well the dangers are what you think they are.”  In other words, (I think) something is dangerous only if I think they are dangerous. The man also suggested that most of the people in the hospitals were not really sick. Even those in ICUs.

Another man asked if the diagnoses were true. He had walked through the hospitals and he said they are not filled with covid patients. I know from personal experience that this is a common claim. I have heard it too. This man said he had walked through a hospital taking videos and guess what, “they’re not covid patients.” He did not explain how he could tell by looking at them whether or not they were covid patients. He did not explain how hospital security had let him in ( a frightening possibility).

 

Klepper asked one of the women wearing a sign that said she did not co-parent with the government, if her kids went to private or public school. She said public school and Klepper asked, “isn’t that sort of co-parenting with the government?” She said no because “we get to vote our school board so we have a voice.”  Klepper, “So you work with the government?” Mother, “Yeah.” She detected no incongruity.

 

Klepper asked another parent similar questions because he too sent his child to public schools. “So you are kind of co-parenting with the government?” “Well in that regard if you say my taxes pay for that then yeah.”  Klepper asked him if he gave back his child tax credit?” The man looked dumbfounded and said, “No.”

Klepper said “ they saw this as a fight against something much more disturbing than face coverings.” One replied, “Terrible. Wearing a mask is slavery. Also, I discovered in my research that Satanists wear a mask during the rituals.  6 feet apart and wear a mask during their rituals.” She also said “we are in a war with Satan…I have no fears.”  Klepper replied, “You have no fears just a healthy belief in Satan and his affect on Covid?” Her reply:” Absolutely.”

Words Matter

Epidemics/Pandemics, politics

 

When I was a lad in High School we had a course called “Words are important.” A lot of heat has been generated without a lot of light, by people on both sides of the dispute about vaccines. I have been as guilty of using improper language as anyone else. It is time for me to do better. It is important to choose the right words if we want to communicate effectively with others.

First of all, I must learn not to refer to people by one of their characteristics. People are complex. None of us are defined by one issue and none of us like to be defined by one issue. For example, we should not refer to a person as “a diabetic.”  Rather such a person should be referred to as “a person who has diabetes.”  That might seem like a minor change. It is not minor. It is significant. There have been recent studies that show by using the proper expression, which recognizes the other as a person who happens to have an illness like diabetes, that will be appreciated by the person being referred to. Such communication is much more effective because it is more respectful. In fact, according to Dr. Garfinkel, a frequent CBC radio commentator on the pandemic,  the difference can be striking. The data suggests that reducing a person to one issue can have a powerful impact on that person. It can reinforce bias or stereotypes that ought to be avoided because it amplifies resistance. If we want to help, we should do it right. No one likes to be reduced.  We should be smart if we want to make a difference.

Similarly, one should not refer to someone as a schizophrenic, or criminal, or anti-vaxxer.  A person should be referred to as a person who has schizophrenia, or a person who has committed a crime, or a person who is reluctant to take a vaccine.

Calling a person an anti-vaxxer or schizophrenic or criminal reduces a person to that one issue. It does not respect that the person is complex and cannot be reduced to one issue. If you want to communicate successfully with such a person you respect them first and foremost as a person. Labels can be damaging and are rarely helpful.

My bad. I have been guilty of this mistake. Words are important because respect is important. Words matter. I will try to do better Starting now.

 

Absolute or Conditional Freedoms

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom, Human rights

 

When I attended the recent Steinbach rally against health restrictions and vaccine mandates, there was a lot of talk about freedom. Many of the protesters made it obvious that they think that in a free society they should be allowed to choose whether or not to wear mask or get vaccinated and risk the lives or freedoms of others as they see fit.

I am a freedom loving person. I would hate living in a country like Afghanistan where freedom is now largely absent. I cherish freedom.

I also cherish the right to dissent from authority. We should have the right to choose for ourselves and oppose decisions of the authorities or majorities in a peaceful manner. We should not be slaves to authority. We are free and have the right to be free.

However, dissent to be worthy of the name must be rational. We need to weigh the alternatives, and the evidence in favour of any proposition, and base our conclusions on our own powerful instruments of critical thinking. Irrational dissent (not based on valid reasoning or evidence) amounts to paranoia which can cripple us as much as tyranny can.

The people at the rally in Steinbach claimed to cherish freedom absolutely. Here I disagree. No rights are absolute. Freedom does not mean we have the right to do anything we want to do. Freedoms are always conditional.

Here are a few examples of what I mean.  All of us must abide by speed limits on public roads whether we like them or not. If we don’t, we can justifiably be punished, even in a free and democratic society.  We are not allowed to build a factory or hog barn in a residential district of a small city like Steinbach. We must abide by zoning laws. We are not free to enter into someone else’s home without their consent, except in unusual circumstances. We are not free to do that because they are free to keep us out.  We are not free to dump our garbage into the street, because that violates the right of others to enjoy community life free from garbage of others. We have to pay taxes whether we like it or not, even if the government spends some of our money on goals with which we don’t agree. We are not (at least in Canada) allowed to promulgate hate speech against other groups even if we hate them. We can hate them, but we are not allowed to encourage hatred or violence against them by others. We are not free to shout fire in a crowded dark theatre when there is no fire present, because that might lead to a stampede of panicking patrons that could cause serious injury to others. A person with a communicable illness like HIV/AIDs is not free to have sex with other individuals without warning them of the danger and if we do we can be charged with an assault. We are not free to hit other people just because we don’t like them. We are not allowed to build dangerous structures on which the public have access, because that would endanger their lives. We must always remember and take into consideration the rights of others. Their rights are not absolute either. Sometimes our rights must bend to allow rights of others to work out.

These are all reasonable restrictions on freedoms which we all must accept if we want to live in a free and democratic society with others.

Similarly, and for similar reasons, when Health authorities demand that we wear a mask to protect others, or get vaccinated if we perform certain functions or want to attend certain public events, we must abide by those requirements, because we are not allowed to endanger the lives of others even though such restrictions do in fact restrict our rights to some extent. In a free and democratic society restrictions can be placed on our freedoms for the protection of others. The restrictions must be effective, tailored to the remedy the harm to be avoided, and as limited as possible in the circumstances so that the freedom of others is curtailed as little as necessary to avoid the harm and no more.

Freedom is great, but it is not absolute. We should be happy that it is not absolute. That would be anarchy. None of us would like it.