Tidings of War among Men of ill Will

Darth Vader stalking Covid among the well-vaxxed (image source) while the Toronto Star stalks the unvaxxed.

No one with any sense expects sense from The Toronto Star. But increasingly one must expect from it vitriolic agitprop. Its editorial board has determined to stir up hatred and division, directed to the end of isolating the unvaccinated, depriving them of their rights, and justifying bodily assault against them. That is the shabby stable over which the The Star hovers, proclaiming its tidings of war to people of ill will. 

The Star knows the right response to the prime minister's question, Can we tolerate these people?  The answer is No.  The unvaxxed won't do as they are told. Despite "pleading, begging, scolding and shaming," they won't join the dominant tribe of the vaxxed. They must therefore be stripped of their rights and coerced. That this would strip all citizens of their rights, especially their right to informed consent, either hasn't occurred to the editors of The Star or they don't actually believe in such rights. That it would tear off the now dangerously thin veneer of Western civilization and leave the country exposed to a lust for violence doesn't seem to bother them.

One may certainly agree with their opening claim that reason hasn't done its work, and that attention to statistics is sorely lacking. Where reason hasn't done its work is in their own argument, which, briefly put, reduces to this:  If everyone were vaxxed there would be no need for the restrictions under which all are labouring. We are tired of these restrictions. Therefore everyone must be vaxxed whether they want to be vaxxed or not.

It doesn't take much effort to expose the faulty logic here. The first premise, which commits the syllogistic sin of containing several others, is false. The second premise is true, but even if both were true the conclusion would not follow. To reach such a conclusion one would need to show at least two things: that relieving editors or readers of The Star of their weariness is paramount; and that this can be done in no less damaging a fashion than to sacrifice the principle of free and informed consent and, with it, peaceful coexistence among people of good will.

Even people of good will, however, may be somewhat confused about the first premise; so perhaps it is worth one more attempt to speak to it, unpacking a few of its problems. We can begin with the underlying assumption that the vaccines, or the injections masquerading as vaccines, are effective in eliminating whatever it is that requires the restrictions. And what is it that requires the restrictions?  Over and over again we have been told that it is the threat of overwhelmed hospitals. So we must touch on that before asking how non-sterilizing vaccines can help, since evidently they do not help by reducing transmission of the virus itself.

I say "threat" because the hospitals, as B.C.'s health minister, Adrian Dix, more or less admitted last week, have not in fact been overwhelmed in any very remarkable way, except by the spate of staff either unwilling to come to work or being barred from work. For nearly two years, this threat—based on models that are never realized and supporting measures that fail and fail again—has been held over our heads. It can no longer be regarded as credible in the least. The fact that it is has been used, not merely to frighten the populace, but also to deprive it of constitutional rights and freedoms, points very clearly to the real threat being something else altogether: the threat of tyranny.

If this tyranny has been propped up by fear-mongering about an actual enemy, the virus, it has also been maintained by inventing a fictitious enemy, the Unvaccinated. The latter is said to be working in league with the evil Covid—selfishly refusing, from some unknown and unknowable motive, to take the step that will defeat him. Instead, the Unvaccinated is sooner or later defeated by him, thus "taking up space" in the supposedly overrun hospitals and provoking the authorities into yet more draconian restrictions. The meme by which this traitorous foe is fought is “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.”

Now, since the editors of The Star provide no competently arranged statistics in support of this meme, I will not take up the task of attempting to do that for them or even against them. I will, however, provide one illustration suggesting that in the present Omicron moment the meme has things backwards.

The illustration comes from one of the most vaccinated populations on earth, namely, Icelanders. The source of the following chart observes that a strange star has appeared in their country as of 20 December. In triple-vaxxed adults there has has been a 1039% increase in the infection rate; in double-vaxxed, 608%; in those not yet "fully" vaxxed, only 139%.

How, under such circumstances, can non-sterilizing vaccines help reduce the load on the hospitals? There is only one possible line of defence for that thesis: showing that a high infection rate among the jabbed nonetheless produces only mild illness, rarely requiring hospitalization; while a lower infection rate among the unjabbed tends to produce severe illness, frequently requiring hospitalization.

This unlikely defence is regularly trotted out by those paragons of integrity who market the jabs, but it is beset by a host of difficulties. One is factoring in the unconscionable practice of refusing early treatment to the symptomatic. How would things stand if the successful protocols developed in America and practiced elsewhere were not forbidden? If Canada were in that respect more like India, say, would we even be having this rancorous debate?

Another is acquiring accurate information about hospitalizations. Are they with Covid or from Covid? There's a world of difference between the two, but scurrilous games have been played by Public Health officials and by media organs such as The Star and the CBC. Ontario's CMOH, Kieran Moore, has now admitted that Covid is merely incidental in about 50% of the alleged hospitalizations. B.C.'s Bonnie Henry has also recently been to confession. But even that admission leaves out of account the many false positives produced by PCR testing. Moreover, it tells us nothing about whether those hospitalized because of Covid are predominately in one vaccination category or another.

The statistics we are provided in this country lack attention to the variables required to make good on the defence in question, though that doesn’t worry The Star or many other media outlets. Even in the U.K., where robust statistics are easier to come by, we find organs such as the once venerable BBC either grossly incompetent or simply cheating on the data to manipulate public sentiment. The Daily Sceptic noted this whopper a couple of days ago:

The 1800 News on Radio 4, Saturday January 8th 2022 began with this headline: “More than 150,000 people now have died of Covid in the UK since the start of the pandemic two years ago.” ... This is at best misleading, at worst a falsehood. The truth is stated on the BBC website, which said, correctly, “More than 150,000 people in the UK have now died within 28 days of a positive Covid test since the pandemic began.”

But where was I? Yet another difficulty is showing that the putatively higher hospitalization rate among the unjabbed is sufficiently higher to account for a serious drain on hospital resources.  In Iceland one is hard-pressed to find such people; not so in Germany, where nearly 30% remain unjabbed. Yet of Germans reported Omicron-positive only 5%, last I saw, were of the unjabbed variety. So just how many precious beds can the very sick among them be using?  

Please don't say "even one is too many," because that response, which is really an admission of defeat that reveals an ugly tribal bias—”Let them die!”— is going to rebound on you sooner or later.

"Heart attack, eh? Well let's have a look at your lifestyle to see whether you qualify for care here. Can you prove that you've been looking after yourself properly?"

"Oh, yes, I've been very careful with diet and exercise. I've got all the documentation right here. I've even done meditation to avoid lockdown stress. Actually, I think—well I've heard—that it might be a result of my booster shot. You know, the myocarditis thing..."

"What? You were frightened of a coronavirus with a 99+ percent survival rate in your age bracket and took one of those experimental RNA treatments? Whatever were you thinking? Get a cab and go home right now. We need this bed for someone else!"

"But doctor, didn't you tell me..."

"Enough! Can't you see it's flu season and we're busy here? Overwhelmed, in fact! Here’s your phone. Call a cab."

I’ll mention one further difficulty: If the restrictions have been all about saving the hospitals, why haven’t we just expanded the hospitals instead? We've had plenty of time to do that. Or if the proposed program of coercion is all about saving the hospitals while doing away with tiresome restrictions, again, why not rather solve the problem by increasing capacity? Why persist instead with policies that keep some wards all but empty and a great many people without routine medical care, while resorting to coercive mandates? That’s no sign of a springtime of liberty!

We are in fact building, but we’re not building hospitals. We’re building internment camps for those the The Star and the prime minister have been vilifying. "To date," according to a federal government news release in November, "the Safe Voluntary Isolation Sites Program has provided $99.7 million to establish sites in Ontario, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Nova Scotia."

Plainly we are headed down the path of Australia and Austria—and by recent reports, Israel—now brutally post-democratic states. The editorial chorus at The Star (to say nothing of certain other organs of both the English and the French press) is explicitly urging us down that path. But is that really where Canadians want to go? I'm with Jordan Peterson. Open up the country or lose the country. Put an end to emergency powers now, or we may as well haul down the Maple Leaf and run up the Red Star.