Ignoring the thousands who no longer find being caged in their homes tolerable or the absurd "vaccine passports" practical, Quebec Premier Fracois Legault promises to tax those refuse the flu shot:
#BREAKING Quebec Premier Francois Legault announces "healthcare charge" for unvaccinated people.
— Laura McQuillan (@mcquillanator) January 11, 2022
The $ amount is yet to be determined, but will be "significant".
"There are consequences on our healthcare network and it's not up to all Quebeckers to pay for this."
Would this be the single-payer system the government claims is better than the American system?
That one?
The long line of desperate yet vile invective and calls to repeat the horrifying example of Nazi Germany aside, the truth of the matter is that each province and territory in the country is broke and would be forcing any tax to line the nearly-empty government coffers.
It wouldn't surprise me if Quebec argued its special status and forced other provinces to pay the burden it won't.
We shall see.
**
Now, various COVID/government over-reach/paranoid idiot/random article bits and bytes:
The independent media outlet quoted a report titled “Continuous Qualitative Data Collection of Canadians’ Views,” which was produced for the Privy Council Office (PCO), the body advising the prime minister.
“There was not a great desire among the Canadian public to implement such a program for Canadians,” says Blacklock’s, quoting the report dated Oct. 29.
“There was a concern about potential discrimination based on vaccination status,” says the report, drawing on focus groups across the country and prepared by The Strategic Counsel.
“Many mentioned the impact of implementing vaccine passports on civil liberties, viewing it as an infringement on the ability of unvaccinated people to travel,” says the report, adding that even Canadians who support the vaccination for international travellers do not support the measure for daily life within the country.
The report also says some individuals surveyed expressed a concern that “the implementation of vaccine passports was the first step towards a mandatory vaccination policy.”
**
Hospital officials in the northern Chinese city of Xi’an have been punished after a pregnant woman miscarried after being refused entry, reportedly for not having current COVID-19 test results.
The city government announced Thursday that Gaoxin Hospital General Manager Fan Yuhui has been suspended and the heads of the outpatient department and medical department sacked.
A government statement said the incident had “caused widespread concern in society and caused a severe social impact.”
The woman waited outside the hospital on a pink plastic stool on New Year’s Day until she started bleeding. In a video taken by her husband that was circulated widely, a pool of blood was visible by her feet.
**
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to produce, at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, the documents it relied on to license the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The rate of 55,000 pages a month would mean the FDA has just over eight months to fully produce all of Pfizer’s pre-licensure safety data. That is much faster than the 500 pages-per-month rate the FDA proposed in December 2021. That rate would have effectively given the agency roughly 75 years to fully produce the data, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on the case, previously observed.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ordered the FDA to produce more than 12,000 pages on or before Jan. 31, which was what the FDA had proposed in part. Pittman then ordered the agency to “produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.”
“Here, the court recognizes the ‘unduly burdensome’ challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA … But, as expressed at the scheduling conference, there may not be a ‘more important issue at the Food and Drug Administration … than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, [and] making sure that the American public is assured that this was not rush[ed] on behalf of the United States.
“Accordingly, the court concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance,” Pittman wrote in the order (pdf).
**
The flu and other common viruses pose more of a risk to children to date than COVID-19, says the chief of pediatrics at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, noting that few children have been admitted to hospital due to the coronavirus.
Dr. Andrew Lynk told CBC News that he remains far more concerned about the flu and other common viruses in children compared to COVID-19, even with the more transmissible Omicron variant now spreading in Nova Scotia.
He said the IWK and other regional hospitals have seen “very few” child admissions due to COVID-19, and the two recent cases admitted during his shift at the children’s hospital in Halifax were discharged after a few days.
“The ones that we have admitted have been mild and brief for the most part. It’s not to say that a child with certain high-risk factors couldn’t get quite sick from it, but we’re certainly not seeing that,” said Lynk, who is also the chair of the pediatrics department at Dalhousie University.
There are some children who were infected with COVID-19 in the community and later tested positive while visiting the hospital for unrelated issues, he said, but there has been no spread of infection.
**
Dr. Peter McCullough believes that healthy children should not be given the COVID-19 vaccine because the percentage of those children that die from the virus is minuscule, but the adverse effects of the vaccine in the same group are of great concern.
McCullough, a leading cardiologist and epidemiologist, told The Epoch Times that in 2021, 600 children died after infection from the COVID-19 virus (the previous year about 600 died from other respiratory viruses like respiratory syncytial virus or influenza), but were also known to have other severe illnesses like cystic fibrosis, lung disease, congenital heart-lung disease, or cancer.
He cited a study by Dr. Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins University who carried out an analysis. “They think, maybe they can find one child who actually died of COVID-19 who was previously healthy,” said McCullough.
Makary wrote in MedPage Today: “My research team at Johns Hopkins partnered with FAIR health to study pediatric COVID-19 deaths using approximately half of the nation’s health insurance data. We found that 100% of pediatric COVID-19 deaths were in children with a pre-existing condition.”
“And so, for those reasons, good doctors would never, ever consider vaccination of a child,” McCullough said.
He believes it makes sense to vaccinate for “horrible” diseases like polio, or widely contagious ones like chickenpox or mumps and measles, but not for a virus like SARS-CoV2 that does little to no harm to children. “We would never vaccinate against the common cold,” he said. But he does recommend vaccinating children against COVID-19 who have other severe illnesses.
McCullough said we don’t have enough data on the long-term and adverse effects of the vaccines on healthy children, and the data that is available show more harm than good comes from giving the vaccines to young people.
**
Importantly, the up-regulation of these immunological pathways is widely considered to be at the basis of several immune-mediated diseases, especially in genetically predisposed subjects who have an impaired clearance of nucleic acids [8]. This could particularly hold true in young female individuals, due to the over-expression of X-linked genes presiding over the antiviral response and the stimulatory effect played by estrogens on the immune system. The X chromosome hosts several genes involved in the immune response, including TLR7 and TLR8 genes, and about 10% of microRNAs indirectly controlling the activation of the immune system [9].
Therefore, young and female patients who are already affected or predisposed (e.g. immunological and serological abnormalities in absence of clinical symptoms, familiarity for immune-mediated diseases) to autoimmune or autoinflammatory disorders should be carefully evaluated for the benefits and risks of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. According to epidemiological data, these subjects may develop the infection asymptomatically or pauci-symptomatically and it is worth noting that, in line with the article of Vojdani et al. [1], the presence of autoreactive cells and autoantibodies cross-reacting against SARS-CoV-2 epitopes may even turn naturally protective towards the infection. Until proven otherwise, the administration of a nucleic acid vaccine may instead put these individuals at risk of unwanted immunological side effects by either sensitizing the PRRs or generating cross-reactive cell clones and antibodies. Moreover, COVID-19 mRNA vaccine might differently stimulate myeloid or plasmacytoid dendritic cells (DCs), generating an unbalance in the downstream cytokine pathways that play a crucial role in autoimmunity and autoinflammation ...
**
On January 6, CTV News changed its article and headline after journalists accidentally admitted that the recent spike in cases in Canada is mainly in the vaccinated population, which suggests a pandemic of the vaccinated.
Initially, the headline read, "WATCH: Vaccinated now outnumber the unvaccinated in Calgary hospitals..."
Apparently, somebody up top didn't like that, though, and it was quickly changed to "Vaccinated hospital patients outpace the unvaccinated, but it doesn't mean the shots don't work: experts."
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pushing ahead with a vaccine mandate for international truckers despite increasing pressure from critics who say it will exacerbate driver shortages and drive up the price of goods imported from the United States.
Canada will require all truckers entering from the United States to show proof of vaccination starting on Saturday as part of its fight against COVID-19.
That could force some 16,000, or 10%, of cross-border drivers off the roads, the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) estimates. The government estimates 5% of drivers will be impacted, according to a government source.
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The Quebec coroner’s inquest into deaths at long-term care homes during the pandemic’s first wave resumed Monday after a month-long pause, and the long-awaited testimony of Seniors Minister Marguerite Blais was delayed until Friday.
Coroner Géhane Kamel told the inquiry that Blais’s testimony would be delayed by one day because of a lack of courtroom availability.
Opposition parties have said her testimony is essential for the families of those who lost loved ones in the province’s long-term care network.
Almost 4,000 people died in Quebec’s long-term care homes, known as CHSLDs, between February and June 2020, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the deaths reported in the province during the pandemic’s first wave.
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The California Department of Public Health issued guidance that allows health care networks to enable COVID-19-positive employees to keep working if they don’t show any symptoms.
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Ontario students will return to school classrooms on Jan. 17, Premier Doug Ford's office told The Canadian Press.
The government had previously said schools would move to online learning until "at least" that date amid widespread transmission of the Omicron variant, but the premier's office now says they will reopen Monday.
The return to in-person learning was also dependent on public health trends and operational considerations.
**
In his resignation letter addressed to Premier François Legault, Dr. Horacio Arruda said there have been recent public comments that cast doubt on “the credibility of our recommendations and our scientific rigour.” He said that has led to an “erosion in public cooperation.”
(Sidebar: I'm sure.)
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With Canada’s rising COVID-19 cases, the U.S. government is warning its citizens to avoid travelling north of the border.
On Jan. 10, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Level 4 Travel Notice that put Canada at the highest risk in its alert system.
“Avoid travel to Canada,” the notice says, citing a “very high level of COVID-19″ in the country.
**
Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.
An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.
The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.
But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.
**
Ontarians have been told that the reason they have been plunged into lockdown once again is that COVID-19 is overwhelming the hospital system. While it is true that more people struggling with Omicron are now being admitted to hospital, that doesn’t tell the full story.
A lot of the problems, say people on the frontlines, are being worsened and even created by antiquated policies and poor management on the part of administrators.
One major challenge is that a number of ICU beds are being occupied by people who no longer need to be in them, but there is nowhere to send them. When a patient is sent from a long-term care or retirement facility into the ICU, their home facilities can be reluctant to take them back and some flat-out refuse.
The number of ALCs — patients who don’t need to be in hospital but are awaiting placement elsewhere — has grown, both among COVID and non-COVID patients. These transfer problems are creating a “logjam,” according to one ICU staffer, and are “gumming up the wards,” according to another source.
One measure currently being undertaken is calling on doctors in the academic stream to move to the frontlines. There are many hospital doctors who focus more on research than on treating patients, but they’re now being asked to do rounds and help look after low-risk patients. There are many of them who are open to this but some who are resistant.
By and large, staffing was cited as the key problem by everyone interviewed by the Toronto Sun . “It’s a staffing issue and nothing more than that,” one doctor said. “It’s not a COVID issue. And I don’t think people see that.”
**
An officer with the Canadian military is calling for an investigation into what he believes was “ground zero” of COVID — two months before the global outbreak.
The officer was one of many athletes participating in the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
He described the city at the time as “a ghost town,” with schools shut down and hardly any people around or cars in the road – odd since Wuhan is home to 11 million people.
“I’m 100% convinced the virus was present in Wuhan when we were there,” the Canadian officer, who is still suffering from the effects of the illness, told the Daily Mail
A new poll suggests a slim majority of Canadians support the latest round of lockdowns and other government-imposed restrictions as the Omicron variant continue to fuel an explosion in new COVID-19 infections.Fifty-six per cent of respondents in the poll conducted by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies agreed governments are making the right decisions to limit the spread of Omicron and keep the health system from being overrun.
Another 31 per cent said they did not believe Omicron poses a serious health risk to most of those who are infected, and that governments should leave things open and let Canadians live with the risk.
**
- Canadians (83%) are more likely than Americans (67%) to believe that COVID-19 vaccines are effective at ensuring that if a person gets COVID-19, they will not get sick enough to require hospitalization or suffer major complications.
- More than six-in-ten Canadians support implementing measures specifically related to vaccination status, including:
- Only allowing those who have proof of vaccination to shop in person at malls and retail outlets (excluding grocery stores), government-run liquor and cannabis stores and use public transit
- Creating separate areas in hospitals and clinics specifically for unvaccinated patients
**Something to look at for Ontario - Case Fatality rates for the past 3 1/2 Months have PLUMMETED. Keep in mind Ontario is at our annual peak time for all cause Mortality - yet the CFR is at an all time low for COVID.
— Andrei Manko (@AndreiManko) January 11, 2022
Data Source: https://t.co/PZQNFjndZm pic.twitter.com/nyg9LPrcG5
Elections Ontario will not be requesting people show vaccine passports when they cast their ballots, despite the claim of an Ontario People’s Party of Canada (PPC) candidate.
Former Windsor West PPC candidate Matt Giancola made the claim on Friday.
“Elections Ontario now has a vaccine passport policy for entry to all locations, including field locations (i.e. polling stations),” said Giancola in a tweet. “People without a vaccine passport will not be able to vote in person at the 2022 Ontario provincial election.”
Elections Ontario said in a since-deleted webpage that it had implemented a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy to stop the spread of the virus. Vendors, consultants and visitors would have to show vaccine passports and identification when they entered Elections Ontario locations.
People who could not prove they were fully vaccinated would be denied entry.
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