How far can we Go?

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

Recently, a friend of mine said he wished Canada was more like Germany in opening up its economy. Soon after that,  Germany became the centre of Covid in Europe if not the world. Chancellor Angela Merkel widely hailed as the best leader in Europe in the last half century or longer, said she favored imposing mandatory vaccines on the unvaccinated in Germany. Promptly thereafter the incoming Chancellor echoed her comments. Austria has already imposed vaccine mandates. I have not heard the details, but they are treating the issue seriously. I don’t think my friend will advocate we follow Germany and Austria down that path.

The German Minister of Health made an astonishing remark. He said, “before the end of the winter everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, recovered, or dead!’ Pretty strong views.

Dr. Hans Kluge, the Regional Director of the World Health Organization for Europe said that Europe had to take matters relating to Covid seriously because it was now having more than half of the new Covid cases in Europe.

Meanwhile, in places like Austria where the government is trying to impose a vaccine mandate tens of thousands of people have taken to the street in protest.  The debate there make is likely to be very heated.

Dr. Kluge asked a very pertinent questions” Does anyone have the right to make someone sick avoidably?” Many people say no and want to impose vaccines on people who don’t want to take.  Others think that is too extreme.

I say all of this by way of introduction to the issue I want to discuss.  Recently a friend asked “is it legally permissible to impose a vaccine mandate on people who don’t want to take the vaccine?”   I answered immediately without thinking, “no.!”  It took me about 15 seconds to say, “I change my mind, it is legally permissible to impose vaccines.” That was one of my fastest flip flops ever.  But was my second view correct? What about our constitutional rights? Is it morally permissible in Canada to compel people to take vaccines? Even if it is moral and legal to impose vaccines, is it wise?  I think these are very interesting and very important questions and I would like to tackle them. This will take a number of posts for there are many issues to meander through.

I hope you join me on this journey.

A Covid Wave

Epidemics/Pandemics

We have lived in a world of Covid for nearly 2 years.  That seems hard to believe.  Many of us want our lives back. I am one of those people. Yet, it doesn’t seem I will get it back anytime soon. That makes many people mad. Some people want all restrictions removed. They feel the restrictions penalize the young and healthy  and believe we should concentrate on protecting the vulnerable and letting the rest live. Others think the restrictions are not harsh enough.

Recently a friend of my was very angry with how Canada was dealing with the pandemic. We should learn from Germany he said. They don’t imposed restrictions like we do and they are doing better than we are.  Then–just a couple of days later–I heard Germany was the new hotspot for Covid, the worst place in Europe if not the world for Covid.

One thing I have learned during the pandemic is that it actually does move like a wave.  People see it coming at them, and then as soon as the wave passes they think they are done. It’s over and they are quick to declare. Then the next wave comes over us again and then another. Each wave often seems worse than the one that preceded it.

As Dr. Hans Kluge , the WHO Regional Director for Europe said, said, “too often countries have declared the pandemic over when it was just a wave waiting for the next wave.” Manitoba certainly made this mistake, as ddi Saskatchewan and Alberta,  but so did almost all jurisdictions.

Recently Europe has been hard hit.  Now before we point wagging fingers at Europe we must remember this virus travels in waves throughout the world. We could be next. Manitoba is not yet out of the 4th wave!

We look at one state or one province or one country who is doing poorly in dealing with the virus and we are quick to wag our fingers and often we do it with deep feelings of superiority. Then it becomes our turn as the wave faces us.

Things change quickly. The only constant in the world of Covid is change. We should be used to that by now.

Perry Mason

Television Shows, Truth Seeking

A lot of people are complaining about things like critical race theory or bleeding heart liberals always worried about getting to the facts and in the process criticizing their country.  Why can’t they just accept and love their country? In the US the conservatives say that the liberals hate their country. The liberals say they are looking for the truth—even uncomfortable truths. What does that have to do with this TV series?

 

When I was young I was a big fan of Perry Mason–both the novels and the TV series. I watched an interesting limited series on HBO. Called Perry Mason, based very loosely–no extremely loosely–on the old Perry Mason books by Earle Stanley Gardner. Don’t watch this expecting Raymond Burr. Or the Perry Mason of the novels. The series is really nothing like the books, or the old TV series,  except for the character of the characters. That rung true. But as this series shows, truth is not always simple or obvious. Perhaps it’s not even true.

A young boy, Charlie Dodson was killed. His mother stands charged. Did she do it? Behind the Judge in the murder trial there is a sign. This is how it read: “Find Truth. Seek Justice.” That is it. As Mason says in his brilliant summation, “Find truth and seek justice, in that order. You cannot seek justice without first knowing the truth. And if the truth is hidden by distraction or lies, you will never get justice. And therefore you will never fix what happened to Charley Dodson.” That is the purpose of everything in this series. Amidst the corruption of Los Angeles between the first and second World War, we are led to believe there was one brave and fearless but tarnished knight in the search of  truth, and then, after finding that, also found justice.  Is this possible? The jury tried that. One of them was bought and paid for. But amazingly, 2 others reached the same conclusion, and found the way to justice through truth. Can that possibly be true? I guess that depends on what truth is.  I don’t have Pilate to tell me what that is, so how can I know?

Sister Alice is a star who performs miracles for the Church of the Radiant Way. (I hope I got the name right. It might not be true) Or does she actually perform miracles? She says she thought she did. Is that enough?  Perry Mason, in this series at least at the beginning, is a corrupt private investigator who later miraculously turns into a righteous lawyer.  Now that is a miracle. In more ways than one.

 

Can the two get together? In the end they talk as they look into the vastness of the Pacific ocean:

Mason:            Pretty long way from the choir.

Alice:              Not so far. There is an old mission up the road, I go there sometimes and I pray.

Mason:            Get any answers?

Alice:              Not lately.

Mason tries to interest Alice in a Church of the Reborn. “Miracle Mother. Miracle Child. Come one. Come All. What was True in the Bible is true again.” But Alice is not interested.

Mason:            I know how Charlie died.

Mason gives details of how the child was killed. But he can’t prove it.

Mason:            There is one thing I want to know.

Alice:              Whether or not I am fraud?

Mason:            Somebody took that boy’s body out of the ground. That’s quite a trick to pull with everybody watching. Even for God.

Alice:              You really want to believe in Him don’t you? No matter how hard you try, you still hope that he’s there.

Mason:            A baby was killed to prop up your church. So you’re telling me that you can look at this and you can still believe?

Alice:              You want to know things Mr. Mason. You want to find things out and prove things. What comfort has that ever given you? What peace? When I saw you there out of the blue, I thought, maybe you were tired of being alone.

Mason:            Maybe I am.

Alice:              I am too. But we will be won’t we? Alone. Why is that?

She smiles softly at him. Sadly.

Alice:              Bye Perry

She leaves, but Perry calls her to stop.

Mason:            Did you really think you could bring Charlie back?

Alice:              I did. Didn’t I?

She smiles and leaves again.

She really did ask the most important question. Why is that they remain lone? Yes that is much more important. If you get a truthful answer.

 

The Chair

art, Television Shows

 

 

Netflix had an interesting television series this year called The Chair

The incomparable Sandra Oh stars as Professor Ji-Yoon Kim a recently appointed chair of the English department at Pembroke University. The department is filled mainly with aging academics spinning their wheels in a fruitless attempt to educate their students. as Chair Kim  tries to get a young black female colleague on the tenure track as she also tries to navigate a tricky relationship with a popular and rebellious fellow professor Bill Dobson  and a young adopted daughter who also largely ignores her motherly advice, as daughters and sons tend to do.

The series grew on me slowly.  At first, I thought this can’t possibly be interesting. The students were typically “woke” and belligerent. The professors were absurd. How could this end well?

Well, I was wrong. In the final episode of the first and perhaps last season I thought things got very interesting. By goose stepping in one of his classes, Dobson got in trouble with the woke rabble and also the staunch and largely vegetative older faculty. The  Dean and the University lawyers as lawyers tend to do, crush her crush on Dobson and insisted she abandon him to the circling university sharks of cancel culture. The Chair agrees to do as instructed.

The Dean tells her that for the good of the department, she must be the intellectual executioner of her young rebellious professor with whom she has a complicated relationship. With no defenders and no obvious good reason to defend the hapless professor. Kim nonetheless embarks on a spirited defence of the recalcitrant academic after her  young daughter wakes her up from her slumber: “Why are you a doctor? When is the last time you helped someone?”

Kim makes a bold attempt at rescuing his caree with a vigorous speech to ancient faculty:

“To be an English teacher you have to fall in love with stories. With literature. What you do when you do that is you’re always trying to see things from someone else’s point of view. You’re trying to occupy a different space.  When you’re in the middle of the story you’re in a state of possibility as opposed to the state of oppressiveness you’re in, in real life. The text is kind of a living thing. And it’s a dance. An on-going conversation that you have with it. Sometimes you love a poem so much, every time you reach it you learn something new. You feel transformed by it. It’s a very complicated but faithful relationship.”

That’s sort of what I said about classics earlier in the year. After that she explains to the faculty what they’re jobs actually are, for they have no clue:

“What are we doing here?  Firing him is not going to change the culture here. (Looking at the Dean) When is the last time you were in a classroom?  Or had a personal interaction with a student? I don’t need you to save my reputation.  Those people (pointing to the protesting students outside) there are our students. Our job is not to trick them, or manage them, or make them fall in line. Our job is to offer them refuge from the bullshit.   To level with them. Why should they trust us?  The world is burning and we are sitting here worried about our endowment. Our latest ranking on World Report.  If you think Bill is a Nazi, by all means fire him. But if you think by getting rid of him you’re going to stop what is going on outside they’re going to see right through that.  What do you think is going to happen when he’s fired and nothing else changes?”

 

After that, by amazingly crude academic warfare she loses her position as Chair and is replaced by the most unlikely of candidates. She returns to the classroom where she belongs.  She gives the new Chair an appropriate name plate for her desk: “Fucker-in-Charge.”  Kim was a lousy Chair anyway, but we can quickly see she was a great teacher. As she teaches a great poem by Emily Dickinson, we see that she is able to really wake up these “woke” students.  Here is the poem

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

But if you really want to see how a great teacher can wake up a class and a poem at the same time watch this final episode. It’s worth the trip.

 

No time to Die

Movies

It’s time to make a confession.  I have been a  James Bond fan forever.  Ever since I was a young lad ordering books from the University of Manitoba Extension Library and one day received a novel by Ian Fleming called Dr. No as a substitute for a book I had ordered,  I was hooked. The Library sent books for free from the University to us poor urchins in the cultural hinterland in places like Steinbach without a library.  If the book one ordered was not available they sent something they thought the reader might like instead. I had never heard of James Bond or Ian Fleming. He was not yet a world wide phenomenon. But the library sent me Dr. No.

I have no idea what book I ordered but I received Dr. No and I was transported into young boys Fantasy land. I found a spy who was licenced to kill. I still remember the opening scene.  3 blind black men in Jamaica walking in line and opening fire on an unsuspecting hapless victim. They were not blind at all. They were assassins. It seems absurd now.  It was absurd, but it was unlike anything I had ever read before. This was exciting stuff!

Amazingly, perhaps, I have been a fan ever since.  When they started making movies out of the Bond books, I loved them too. Guns, girls, and mayhem. What’s not to like.

Of course, the films make no sense. They aren’t meant to make sense. The books didn’t either. Except to young boys and girls living a fantastic dream. Of course, even some heavy intellectuals like Bond.  Peter Bradshaw the long-time Guardian film critic, said movie was “ridiculously watchable.” No matter how absurd it is, my love of Bond endures. Forget about logic.

As a result, it comes as no surprised that I liked the latest Bond film, “No Time to Die.”  They are no longer based on books. They ran out of books decades ago. No matter. I have been a fan of those too. I have come to appreciate the films ever more since Danial Craig took over the role of Bond. Apparently, this is Danial Criag’s  last film as Bond. What a pity.

What happens next? Who knows?

Kimmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy

Movies, Substance Abuse

 

The film Kimmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy is film currently showing at Cinematheque and it should be widely viewed. It was produced by filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. It tells an important story. It is a story about life on an Indian Reserve in southern Alberta. I  drove by a couple of years ago on my way to Waterton Lakes National Park. (That also should be widely viewed).

The film tells the story of how that community has been ravaged by substance abuse and addictions and attempts to deal with that ugly fact by a new approach.  Instead of abstinence they are tying a new approach labeled as ‘Harm reduction.’ That just means they  abandon techniques that have failed over and over again and are  trying something new. It may be uncomfortable but can it possibly be worse than the robust failures of the old approach?

 

The significance of this film is not limited to Indian reserves; this issue is relevant around Canada. It affects poor people, the middle class and the rich. It is not the approach of Nancy Regan. Not Just ‘say No’. It would be nice if serous social problems could be solved by reciting a simple formula.

 

The substances include fentanyl, meth, Carfentanil or carfentanyl, heroin, and solvents. Interestingly carfentanyl has a quantitative potency approximately 10,000 times that of morphine and 100 times that of fentanyl. It seems like every couple of years something is invented that is worse than the drug of existing drug choice. No wonder we have such problems.

 

I know some of my friends were very depressed by what they saw. Who wouldn’t be?  Yet I would say things were not entirely hopeless. Grim but not hopeless. There was a hero in this story, physician Esther Tailfeathers, mother of the filmmaker, heroically I would say, without judgment is tackling the problems one person at a time. She tolerates the fact that her patients continue taking their drugs of choice. She has no magic. But she has quite diligence, energy, and most of all, empathy. She works daily on the front lines and offers help to addicts to kick their habits and prescribes suboxone as a substitute. Some criticize this approach by saying it merely substitutes one drug for another. Perhaps, but we have seen current techniques fail. I say, can this new approach be worse?

 

The harm reduction approach includes in some cases safe injection sites. Manitoba’s Department of Health when it was led by Steinbach’s own Kelvin Goertzen considered this new approach and rejected it. Alberta under the leadership of NDP premier Rachel Notely tried the new approach but it was rejected by the current United Conservative government led by Jason Kenney.

What I liked about the film was that by closely interviewing actual participants caught up in the epidemic of drug addictions on that reserve, I felt like I was there listening to the people. It was not an easy watch. How could it be?  But I felt like perhaps I could tell how they felt. Isn’t that what empathy is all about? Isn’t that important? Should we not consider their point of view?

 

Are Vaccines Useless?

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

Vaccines are not useless, by a long shot!  But the figures we get from the province of Manitoba could be presented more effectively. Their numbers are deceiving. Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Free Press described the problem well:

“If the province wants to show how effective COVID-19 vaccines are at reducing infections and hospitalizations, it should clarify the data it gives to the public. What it releases now in the regular infection and hospitalization reports is misleading.”

Here is the problems. The province displays the stats for Covid-19 cases by stating the total number of new cases and then dividing those into fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated.  The number of vaccinated people who get Covid-19 has been rising steadily in comparison to the unvaccinated people. Sometimes almost as many fully vaccinated people have caught the virus as unvaccinated. How can that be?  If you are not careful you might think that means the vaccines are not very ineffective.

What people forget is that the number of Manitobans who have been fully vaccinated has been increasing. I had a friend of mine ask me exactly the same question. It is easy to get fooled. The reason this is misleading is that the province doesn’t give us all the information we need.  Brodbeck explained the issue this way:

“The answer is that the proportion of fully vaccinated people who test positive, or require a hospital bed, is substantially lower than those who are not immunized.

For example, if the province reports 100 new infections and breaks it down between 60 unvaccinated and 40 vaccinated, it doesn’t appear there’s a big difference between the two. But when the proportion of those who are immunized and non-immunized is reported, a far more accurate picture emerges.

The 40 fully vaccinated people infected represent about four per 100,000 immunized people (there are 1.02 million fully vaccinated Manitobans). The 60 people who were not immunized represent about 17 per 100,000 unvaccinated people (approximately 360,000 Manitobans are not fully vaccinated) — just over four times higher than those with a double dose.”

 

Clearly your chances of getting Covid-19 are much higher for the unvaccinated people than the fully vaccinated people. That is because that 60% of new cases for unvaccinated people has a much smaller poor to draw from.

As Brodbeck added,

“It’s the same with hospitalizations. The province provides daily updates on the percentage of vaccinated and unvaccinated people who end up in hospital, including in intensive care wards. On Thursday, public health reported that 51 per cent of active hospitalizations were among the unvaccinated, three per cent were partially immunized and 45 per cent fully vaccinated. From those statistics, it doesn’t appear vaccines provide much protection. But as a percentage of those immunized, they do. The 39 fully vaccinated hospital cases represent four per 100,000 fully vaccinated people. The 44 who were not immunized represent 12 per 100,000 unvaccinated people, three times the rate of those fully vaxxed.”

 

The province is not trying to hide these figures; they are just not doing a very good job of presenting them. If they did a better job more people would understand that vaccines are very effective. Everyone should take them! This would be easy to do.  The Covid-19 team is doing a great job of protecting us. But they could do a much better job of selling themselves.

Brodbeck gave us another example:

“Instead of only reporting the 115 unvaccinated and 64 vaccinated COVID- 19 cases Thursday, public health officials could have added that 32 per 100,000 were unvaccinated and six per 100,000 were fully vaccinated. It would give the public a far more accurate picture of the effectiveness of vaccines.”

In other words, on a per capita basis unvaccinated people who caught Covid-19 on Thursday outnumbered fully vaccinated people who caught Covid-19 by more than 5 to 1!

Added to that, new Covid-19 cases are not the most important issue. Hospitalizations are much more important.  It does not matter so much if you get covid-19 but do not get seriously sick. That is really what vaccines are for. Most people who get seriously sick are unvaccinated and the number per 100,000 is much higher than for full-vaccinated people.

If the Covid-19 team could do a better job of communicating to us we would all benefit because more people would realize vaccines work.