Canada’s Public Health Agency Claims Dubious Credit for Saving Almost 1 Million Canadians from Succumbing to COVID?
Is it a flawless COVID response or flawed worst-case scenario analysis?
If anyone was wondering if there will ever be a public inquiry into the Canadian government’s response to the COVID crisis, there may be some signs one might be in the offing. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which had primary responsibility for guiding Canada’s COVID response, appears to be laying the groundwork to ensure that, should there be an inquiry, it will be seen as the unequivocal COVID hero, given a new report asserting that its response measures saved almost one million lives.
The paper was published in the Canada Communicable Disease Report, which is PHAC’s own peer reviewed medical journal back in August. It had several authors including the Liberal government’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam. They studied a number of counterfactual modeling scenarios ranging from, where public health measures were imposed and lifted too early — to the worst case scenario — where no public health measures or restrictions were imposed at all. In this scenario the authors maintain that 34 million Canadians (90 percent of Canada’s population of 39 million) could have been infected with the virus, and of those 34 million, 800,000 would have died. That is an astronomical fatality rate of 2100 per 100,000.
The Paper is Titled: Counterfactuals* of Effects of Vaccination and Public Health Measures on COVID-19 cases in Canada: What could have happened?
These are Health Canada’s conclusions, taken directly from the report.
“Comparisons against outcomes in other countries and counterfactual modeling illustrate the relative success of control of the epidemic in Canada.
Together, these observations show that without the use of restrictive measures and without high levels of vaccination, Canada could have experienced substantially higher numbers of infections and hospitalizations and almost a million deaths.” *meaning - what has not happened or is not the case.
“While non-pharmaceutical public health measures (restrictions and mandates) and the vaccination roll out individually contributed to minimizing severe outcomes, counterfactual modelling suggests that it was the combination of the two that limited morbidity and mortality in the Canadian population.
Failure to have implemented restrictions early in the pandemic, and lifting of these public health measures (restrictions and mandates) too early (before a sufficient proportion of the population became immune* due to vaccinations**), may have resulted in catastrophic outcomes in terms of deaths.”
*It should be noted that the paper makes absolutely no mention of the natural immunity people acquire having been infected with the virus. **Nor does the paper acknowledge that the vaccines didn’t create immunity or stop the spread of the virus, as many, many vaccinated and boosted people have been infected , and are still being infected with the virus, often more than once.
At the time of the report’s publishing, PHAC had recorded a total of 45,000 COVID related deaths, that is 118* per 100,000. Given that, we Canadians should be hailing Dr. Tam and the Liberal government, who faithfully followed her scientific advice, as true heroes and thank them for the two years of lock downs, school closures, closure of places of worship, recreational park closures, gym closures, travel restrictions, quarantines, postponed and/cancelled medical treatments, the curtailment of holiday celebrations, social distancing measures, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates and passports, that apparently saved our lives. *all COVID mortality rates in this articles are taken from the Worldometer website
But before we start applauding them, one must remember that this claim is based on modelling by Tam and her PHAC team, whose previous modelling predictions on the spread of the virus often came up short in their accuracy. The modelling in this report included making comparisons against outcomes in other countries to illustrate PHAC’s success in controlling the virus in Canada. One country they used in this comparison was the United States, which had an overall death rate of 298 per 100,000, considerably higher than Canada’s.
What they didn’t take into account was that, unlike Canada, where the provinces were relatively uniform in their COVID response measures, each state acted quite autonomously in how they responded to COVID, and their responses varied considerably. For example the state of New York, imposed prolonged lock downs, school closures, masking mandates and other heavy restrictions and recorded a COVID mortality rate of 372 per 100,000. Meanwhile, Florida which did not lock down, did not close schools, and did not issue mask or vaccine mandates,* recorded a COVID mortality rate of 380 per 100,000 and it should be noted that Florida has a considerably high senior populations, as many retirees relocate there. This is not a modelled scenario, but is a real life ‘experiment’, if you like, with polar opposite COVID response approaches that arrived at similar outcomes in terms of mortality rates. New York’s approach was very similar to Canada’s while Florida's, it would seem, runs pretty close to PHAC’s ‘worst case’ scenario, but the state saw nowhere near a death rate of 2100 per 100,000, as asserted by PHAC’s modelling. *Florida did make vaccines available to anyone who wanted them, but did not encourage COVID vaccines for children.
Even if you bring the introduction of vaccines into the equation, only 68 percent of eligible Floridians are fully vaccinated (two doses) and a mere 29 percent have received boosters. In New York, 78 percent of the eligible population are fully vaccinated and 37 percent have received boosters. The other factor to consider, with respect to vaccines, which is not noted in the PHAC report at all, is that the vaccines did little to stop people from getting and/or spreading the virus, particularly when the Omicron variant emerged. There is also little, if any, documented evidence or studies, to support claims that the vaccines did anything to lessen the severity of the disease in individuals. (In Canada 83 percent fully vaccinate and 50 boosted)
Now, one might look at this and say, but Canada still did much better than either Florida or New York, and that’s true. But the point of the argument here is that Florida, pretty well matched the conditions of the paper’s worst-case scenario, as it did not shut down businesses or restaurants or schools or churches, and it did not dictate gathering sizes for weddings or funerals nor did it mandate masks or vaccines. Yet its COVID mortality rate of 380 per 100,00 is nowhere near the 2100 per 100,000 forecast by PHAC, nor is any country’s in the entire world, for that matter, regardless of what they did or didn’t do.
Now the report did make comparisons with other countries as well. For instance they looked at France and Sweden. France’s COVID response measures were similar to Canada’s in terms of lock downs and mask mandates and proof of vaccine requirements to enter certain venues. Sweden on the other hand, which actually took quite a beating from COVID ‘science experts” and the legacy media for going against the grain, stayed relatively open, provided information on recommended public health measures, did not close schools, and did not impose mask or vaccine mandates*. France’s mortality rate per 100,000 is 214 while Sweden’s is 183, lower than that of France. (*Sweden now recommends against vaccinating individuals under the age of 65)
Another element that is not covered in this report, as PHAC gives itself this pat on the back, is the collateral damage the restrictive measures may have caused. We have yet to know anything about this because governments have not done much reporting or analysis of it. There is little information available, for example, on how many people may have died because of delayed or postponed surgeries or diagnostic medical tests.
There are actual stories, though, of people this did happen to. Jerry Dunham, age 46, of Medicine Hat, Alberta died of heart failure two months after his doctor canceled his pacemaker surgery due to COVID restrictions. Nineteen year-old Aaron Ogden died in hospital in Calgary due to a major blood clot forming around a stent had been placed in his aorta after he survived a highway accident last year, but his regularly scheduled CT scan to check on his stent, and which may have detected that clot, was canceled and never rebooked due to COVID-19 restrictions. Then there is the heartbreaking story of 19 year old Kai Matthews, who died because the EMTs and hospital authorities in Nova Scotia were so focused on COVID public health protocols they were blind to the fact that he was struggling with a deadly case of meningitis.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/kaimatthews?src=hashtag_click
These cases are anecdotal examples, but there are likely many, many more, but they don’t make headlines then a 13 year old dying of COVID would.
While public health officials and governments have repeatedly assured us that the COVID vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ there are an increasing number of reports that question the veracity of this statement. Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital and medical commentator, has also been ringing the alarm bells on this, with respect to giving COVID shots to teens and young people, particularly young men who may risk getting myocarditis.
Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Lapado, has just released a study and analysis of the myocarditis risk in young men, finding it to be much higher than initially thought.
Mainstream media and federal public health authorities have criticized Dr. Lapado’s research, but he is certainly not the first to be maligned because he goes against the accepted narrative that the vaccines are completely safe. It should be noted that countries such as Norway are not recommending booster doses of the vaccine to healthy individuals under the age of 65 and Denmark is following suit for those under the age of 50.
There is also scant information on how many drug overdoses may have occurred in Canada because of restrictions that stressed addicts’ faced in the shutting down of essential life saving Alcoholics and Narcotic Anonymous meetings. BC, however, did report that drug overdose deaths in the province from 2019 to 2020 doubled from 744 to 1516. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34908203/
We should also note that of the 45,000 people that succumbed to COVID during the course of the pandemic, only 2.8* percent of those deaths occurred in people younger than 50, and 15.1 percent were between the ages of 50 and 69. Many in those age cohorts also had underlying health conditions, in addition to COVID. So, essentially, the majority of Canada’s young and/or healthy population endured unwarranted COVID restrictions when the PHAC approach could have been a targeted protection of the vulnerable, i.e. the elderly and infirm. This would have let the rest of the population get on with their lives, while practicing public health measures such as hand hygiene, social distancing and masking in places such as medical and dental clinics and hospitals.
The fact of the matter is that PHAC failed miserably at protecting the most vulnerable even with the strict blanket measures it employed. By September of 2020, it was estimated that up to to 70 percent of those over the age of 80 who died of COVID, (which accounted for 89.2 percent of all COVID deaths at the time) were residents of Long Term Care Homes. As of October of 2022, with the vaccines and new treatment protocols in place etc., the percentage of overall COVID deaths in that age cohort had been reduced to 82.1, a reduction of just seven percent. *statistics from PHAC’s own web pages of COVID fatality tracking charts
So before Dr. Tam and her PHAC team starts expecting accolades for claims that their recommended COVID 19 public health measures saved a million lives, perhaps they should start examining some statistics around the harms their measures caused, together with what their own statistics bear out.
They have become like some vehicle manufacturers--they know a vehicle has defects that is causing accidents and killing some people--BUT--they do not recall and fix the problem so that more people are not injured or killed--it is cheaper for them to pay out law suits--So they do not inform the public---The government not only did not inform the public but purposely misinformed the public on the dangers of the shot---misconstruing true statistics once they became available and what they knew of the ineffectiveness of the "shot" based on information on the drug manufacturer's website and information with the drugs before beginning mass injections.
Just as we have witnessed many doctors have been coerced into "the shot". Note that the definition of Vaccine has been changed to facilitate this shot "for Covid 19"---it does not fit the previous criteria of a vaccine with extensive testing--when it was realized it was killing some people and or making them very ill--sometimes for life--they DID NOT STOP administering the shot!