The People’s Party of Canada Platform on COVID Tyranny
Issue
The unprecedented government response to the covid-19 pandemic has had massively negative repercussions on Canadians’ physical and mental health, economic well-being, as well as their rights and freedoms.
The standard approach to pandemic management had always been to protect the vulnerable and allow the rest of the healthy population to go about their regular lives while building herd immunity. Lockdowns of entire populations were never part of any pre-covid pandemic planning.
This experiment was largely ineffective in reducing the spread of the virus, but caused significant collateral damage. The vast majority of covid victims were elderly patients with comorbidities in nursing homes that governments failed to protect. Lockdown measures will cause even more deaths in the longer term due to stress-related illnesses, depression, postponement of surgeries, drug overdose, suicide, domestic violence, etc.
Governments don’t want to admit that they were wrong and are imposing increasingly authoritarian measures on the population, including vaccine passports. Both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated will suffer under a regime of segregation, constant control, and surveillance. It is illusory to believe that the virus can be eradicated. We have to learn to live with it, without destroying our way of life in the process.
FACTS
Lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and other authoritarian sanitary measures have not had any noticeable effect on the course of the pandemic. Regions or countries that implemented strict measures have been as impacted as those that did not.
Both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated can get infected and transmit the virus, which negates the rationale for segregation and vaccine passports.
Section 1 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that reasonable limits to our rights and freedoms can only be imposed if it has been demonstrated that they are justified in a free and democratic society. Such a demonstration has not been made for covid restrictions, most of which are arguably unconstitutional.
PLAN
Although most of the measures in response to the covid pandemic have been implemented by provincial governments, Ottawa has an important coordinating role to play at the national level and can influence provincial policies. The federal public health agency coordinates policies with provincial agencies. Ottawa also encouraged and supported lockdown policies through the transfer of tens of billions of dollars in financial aid to provinces and territories.
A People’s Party government will:
Promote a rational and scientifically based approach to the pandemic that focuses on the protection of the most vulnerable, guarantees the freedom of Canadians to make decisions based on informed consent, and rejects coercion and discrimination.
Fire the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Theresa Tam and replace her with someone who will work with provincial agencies to implement a rational approach to the pandemic, instead of following the recommendations of the World Health Organization.
Repeal vaccine mandates and regular testing for federal civil servants and workers in federally regulated industries.
Repeal vaccine passports for travellers.
Oppose vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and other authoritarian measures imposed by provincial governments, and support individuals and groups that challenge such measures in court.
Support emergency provincial measures to protect the most vulnerable, but stop bailing out provinces that impose economically destructive lockdowns.
Support medical research and development of therapies to treat covid-19 and other viral diseases.
The Free Market Foundation has presented its very first award to PANDA co-founder Nick Hudson for freedom of expression, decentralisation, and an evolutionary approach. Alec Hogg caught up with Hudson to unpack what the award means to him and the rest of the PANDA team. “It’s been a long, hard struggle and a lot of the people at PANDA have put up with enormous risks and challenges to their livelihoods and careers,” Hudson explains. “So to have this recognition for them I think is particularly welcome and important.” – Claire Badenhorst
It was a delightful surprise, yes, and we had a wonderful evening last night with a fairly lengthy presentation and [I] thoroughly enjoyed it. I think true to their colours, they were looking at the work that PANDA had done and our fight against dogma and a very bigoted version of science, and I think they saw in that something that was consistent with the values of their organisation, and I think it was on that basis that the citation reads as it does and they decided that the members of PANDA deserved the recognition and it was very welcome. You know, it’s been a long, hard struggle and a lot of the people at PANDA have put up with enormous risks and challenges to their livelihoods and careers. So to have this recognition for them I think is particularly welcome and important.
On why people at PANDA are under pressure:
There’s a very strange authoritarian aspect that has infiltrated our academic institutions and public health institutions and this notion of science as an authoritarian concept, as there being such a thing as settled science, as science is something that you should follow, almost a trademarked ‘the science’ kind of concept. And it’s very antithetical to what science is actually about, which is conjecture and criticism, dissent and debate, driving the formation of new knowledge, the creation of new knowledge. It’s in that authoritarian environment where somebody who looks at the data has a different interpretation and sees the world differently from the average person. You know, they’re at risk of being cancelled and censured and bullied, really, by these people who are doing something that couldn’t, in any normal world, be described as scientific.
Well, it’s symptomatic of the really weird thinking of a lot of our critics because none of what we have to say is anything to deny the existence of Coronavirus. Our perspective from the beginning has been that the response has been disproportionate and later on the response has actually worsened the situation. So it’s rather strange to attack people who take this perspective and support it with data and quality scientific perspectives and somehow refute it by things getting very bad in a country that has had amongst the most insane policy responses on the planet.
On why he says our policy responses were insane:
We have adopted policies which were already evidently not working in the rest of the world. It didn’t take a lot to look at the emergent data. We did it a year ago. And since then, around 50 papers have been published showing that the stringent restrictions that have been imposed have done nothing. They, of course, have lots of collateral damage involved and they worsen the public health outcomes in that regard but it’s been quite patently clear for more than a year now that lockdowns, which were ruled out by all prior policy guidelines for respiratory virus policies, have indeed been a bad idea and that those guidelines ruled them out for good reason. It’s not a very contentious thing to be saying. The contentious thing to say is that lockdowns are good and that they should continue. That is the novel and unusual thing to be saying and it’s been proven wrong systematically through the entire course of this pandemic. There isn’t a single country’s curve where we can see the beneficial impact or the imposition of restrictions or mask mandates or the detrimental effect of the release of those restrictions or mask mandates. And it’s just been astonishing to me.
You know, when Texas opened up and said, that’s it, no more mask mandates, no more lockdowns, these guys on the other side of the debate called them Neanderthals, predicted disaster and it’s been months now and absolutely nothing has happened. You would think that at some point these pro-lockdown people would start to eat some humble pie and stop encouraging policymakers to enact these restrictions.
On the third wave in Gauteng:
Yeah, it’s a terrible situation. It just wouldn’t be made any better by continuing with mask mandates or going to Level 5 or whatever. I mean, there’s just no evidence for that claim being valid. And, you know, your heart goes out to anybody who’s in that kind of position of having to make these life and death decisions, but I believe very firmly that we’re in this situation precisely because we locked down so hard at the beginning. It would have been much better for us to have pursued the effective strategy of countries like Sweden.
The other thing that’s relevant here and not being talked about enough is that there appears to be a quite high representation among the sick people who are recently vaccinated. And that is not being analysed and discussed enough because that’s another area that is profoundly censored but it’s a conversation that has to be had. We see all around the world resurgences in Coronavirus deaths that coincide with the inception of mass vaccination plans. We have our theories as to what may be causing that and those theories may be wrong but the discussion should be had. Instead, what we get is this blanket silence with no debate happening and everything that we learn has leaked out of official forums and that kind of thing.
On what PANDA stands for:
So we stand for proportionality in response and the importance of conducting cost-benefit analysis before conducting massively impactful restrictions, number one. Number two, we have since the very beginning pointed out that these non-pharmaceutical interventions by and large just haven’t shown any benefit in the data and that the one that held a lot of promise, which was to concentrate on ventilation, especially in hospital and nursing home settings, to reduce the viral titers in the air in their settings was one thing that was really worth paying attention to. That’s only been belatedly acknowledged by the World Health Organisation in the last few weeks. Both the World Health Organisation and the CDC have quietly slipped onto their websites paragraphs saying that, yes, airborne aerosol transmission is an important component of transmission of Coronavirus, and the World Health Organisation for the first time made a nod in the direction of the importance of maintaining good infection control by use of improved ventilation. We’ve been saying that since May last year. Now it gets recognised. Instead, people continue running around doing all the things that they did when WHO initially emphasised fomites and droplet transmission – all the sanitising, all the social distancing stickers, the weird little bits of Plexiglass and so on are still what you see when you walk around. Those are, in our minds, just a completely poor effort in light of the scientific evidence that’s emerged.
On the effectiveness of mask-wearing:
I mean the intuition is, yes, that some percentage of the droplets, the larger droplets would be stopped by a mask – but that’s only a one-stage analysis. The next stage is, once large droplets have been stopped by your mask and you exhale over those droplets, you cause them to turn into aerosols which stay suspended in the air. That’s also not a very difficult intuition to grasp and it’s a better one because it’s consistent with the data, which, as I say and have repeatedly said, is consistent with there being no benefit to a slight harm from the imposition of mask mandates.
I don’t think you should wear a mask. It’s a kind of fantastical idea that viral transmission of respiratory viruses will be stopped by cloth masks. Even the idea that surgical masks are effective is extremely contentious and seems only to be valid to a small degree in the highly controlled settings where the masks are fitted and worn by qualified professionals. There’s modest evidence in favour of those but there’s absolutely nothing to support the effectiveness of cloth masks. The experiments that have supposedly been done to support them are all highly contrived and the European CDC, which did an analysis of the studies that had been conducted, came to the conclusion that all the evidence in favour of mask-wearing was of no evidentiary quality and most of it reflected strong bias. And, you know, you can’t really argue with an analysis like that.
On Covid censorship and the oppression of free speech:
From the start, this whole response to Coronavirus has adopted a decidedly technocratic securicrat surveillance-type tone with oppression of free speech, with all sorts of impositions on liberties and rights that are considered the norm in democratic societies. We’ve been promised time and time again that it was just temporary and that it was two weeks or three weeks or until the vulnerable had been vaccinated or until whatever. The goalposts just keep moving. It should be clear to any thinking person that what we are seeing is an assault on liberal values and it’s not done in the interest of public health. It’s not about a virus.
I think the thing that’s not entering the public discourse nearly enough is the extent to which our institutions of media and public health have been captured by a handful of entities, with the effect that neither the journalists nor the scientists could even speak out if they disagreed with the policies or conventional narratives of the times. And that is just becoming more and more evident by the day. Editorial policy is not free and scientific opinion is not free. So we are entering, I think, very dark times. And this is one of the the hushed-up stories.
There are elements of ideology and culture that I think are the easiest ones to describe. Our universities for decades now have been teaching the completely bogus narrative of postmodernism, of critical theory. This is where wokeness comes from in all its manifestations. This is where safety culture and cancel culture come from. They are fundamentally illiberal ideas. They are fundamentally unscientific ideas. And we can’t get too surprised when we see that our culture is full of people who behave in this fashion. So that’s my starting point, is to talk about ideology. But we also need to look at, as I say, at the influence of some of these super national organisations and the degree to which they have captured our institutions. You cannot find a single mainstream scientist who is not subject to that kind of pressure and who could actually speak out even if they decided that they disagreed with what is being done.
The central question is, why is there no discussion? Why is there no debate? Why are critics of public policy not being engaged with openly and in the public eye? And there are several reasons for this. First of all, there’s this stranglehold that these supernational organisations have, which we’ve already spoken about and secondly, there’s a problem in the culture – an ideological problem – that is antithetical to normal scientific discourse. But thirdly, a lot of these scientists are in very conflicted positions and one of the main reasons they will not entertain debate is they are fully aware that those conflicts will be exposed. So I see it as a three-fold problem that’s very serious and very costly to our society.
On what happens to PANDA next:
We carry on fighting. With every passing day, people come around to our view and begin challenging the narrative that they’ve been fed. They begin seeing that what public health officials all around the world have done is to promote a narrative of fear – fear that causes people to possess a completely distorted perception of risk. The fear is always going in one direction, which is towards overestimating risk and, you know, in those circumstances, it’s terminal to critical thinking and to the ability to make wise decisions and evaluate risk appropriately. So what we see is with every passing day, people wake up one by one and once they’ve woken up, once they come in the direction of open science, in the direction of facts, data and evidence over this very false narrative, it’s an absorptive state. They never turn around and go back into the fear mindset. We don’t see people who have sat down with us and gone through the information in the cold light of day, looking at our perspectives, you know, from a calm and considered perspective, we don’t see those people suddenly waking up the next morning and and wetting the bed. So we believe that that will just continue, that it’s a slow and gradual process of bringing people back to sanity, back to a sense of proportionality and perspective.
I suspect the organisation will remain involved in science rather than gravitate towards politics because it’s not only public health that is subject to this kind of very almost Stalinist approach and culture. I think as we go the frame of reference will expand. The very important thing is that for a lot of the scientists who are involved, many of whom have to be cryptically involved, PANDA represents an absolute lifeline. It connects them back to the science that they first fell in love with and it seems to me that in many ways, PANDA presents the only place to them where they are able to have open debate and discussion with their colleagues, where they’re allowed to be wrong without being shouted at and allowed to learn and change their minds. The scientists appear really to enjoy that. Our weekly open science meetings are now so well attended that we’re thinking of having to break them up into channels. And it’s really a joy to be involved in that because the rest of the week we confronted by this shouty, woke kind of attitude that seems so disconnected from the real world and from the data. So it’s almost as if PANDA has become an oasis for people who love science as opposed to, you know, loving dogma.
On the team at PANDA:
I guess it would be much more depressing if I didn’t have access to such wonderful people and if I wasn’t able to tap the brains of these guys to understand what’s going on. And I mean, the last week was a case to point, again, something not mentioned anywhere in the mainstream media because it runs in the face of the narrative but very big news.
A scientist has managed to uncover the deleted sequences from the database of genetic variants of Covid, which has been a source of great suspicion and head-scratching for us. There was in this database a move taken by a Chinese scientist to delete sequences which he had uploaded. Now, this guy managed to track those sequences back, they were originally up in the cloud and they turned out not to have been entirely deleted. And so he managed to discover these sequences and what they reveal is fascinating because it shines a light on the much larger diversity of the cluster of viruses that you would describe as the SARS viruses. It raises the question that we’ve been saying is suggested by the epidemiological data of whether this virus wasn’t actually around much earlier than the December 2019 Wuhan outbreak. It could quite possibly, based on these phylogenetic trees, have been around for years before and that highlights the craziness of the policies we’ve been pursuing. If it wasn’t even noticed, if there was no epidemic being spoken about, when the cluster of viruses was in broad circulation, then that would really draw the line under efforts to speak of lockdown appropriateness or effectivenes
Roman Babar MPP “Says Lift All Public Health Restrictions!”|
The imposition of continuing public health measures on all Ontario Regions has no rhyme or reason. If Ontario remained in the coloured framework, then almost every Ontario region would be in Green or Yellow.
Despite that, Ontario maintains the longest and harshest lockdown in the world. Although our neighbours to the south are almost fully open with tens of thousands packing large stadiums, Ontarians are still precluded from dining indoors or getting a haircut. Despite meeting its own arbitrary targets for Phase 2, Doug Ford is unwilling to move up the re-opening.
Even more upsetting is that Ontario’s Reopening Framework does not include a full re-opening. Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan include the lifting of all public health restrictions in their final opening phases. But Ontario has no plans to lift all public health restrictions.
This, I submit to you, is the next frontier in our fight and advocacy against the lockdowns. We must have confidence to insist not only on a full reopening but also on the lifting of all public health restrictions.
Keep talking to your friends and neighbours, engage on social media and pressure your MPP to Open Ontario. I am concerned by the erosion of Constitutional Rights in Canada and Ontario.
Over the course of a few weeks we have witnessed the Federal Government proceed with a vaccine passport, thereby creating two tiers of Canadians; proceed with Bill-C10 at Committee, by which the Federal Government will regulate online content; the extension of Ontario’s Emergency Orders to December; and, the use of the Notwithstanding Clause for the first time in Ontario’s history, on legislation that could potentially benefit the Provincial Government.
As difficult as times appear to be, we must continue to organize and mount an effective opposition and peaceful resistance against government and public health overreach. Fellow Canadians are counting on us to advocate for their freedoms and defend against the erosion of Canada’s democracy.
We are still awaiting a decision from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in our Application against the Attorney General in defence of our Assembly and Religious Rights outdoors. We will provide an update as soon as a decision is released. We are in process of conceiving additional litigation, as the Rule of Law sits at the core of our democracy. Wishing you and your loved ones a peaceful and restful weekend.
What’s behind the lockdowns, forced masking , compulsory vaccines, closing of churches and businesses, travel restrictions. There’s an end game here. https://www.bitchute.com/video/IsHZXjvNVVQb/
BREAKING: @hudsonsbay is taking the @fordnation government to court over their lockdown of retail in Toronto and Peel calling the government’s measures “unreasonable and unfair.” Company says they have been left with no choice but to go to court.
The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home. We
have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in
recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the
Wuhan bat flu. One type of protest, such as that which took place
in Steinbach on the 14th of November, expresses opposition to
the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of
association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional
civil rights. The other type of protest expressed the views of the
socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and
their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the
CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan
Thorpe. Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the
government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly
enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment
the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths
we have seen since September.
My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as
anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already
knows. I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters’ basic position. I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil
disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed
at those protests.
While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to
their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many
if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of
the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.
When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do
everything in its power to slow or stop the spread. Indeed, it has
a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread
of the virus. This is because the government has the power to do
tremendous evil as well as good.
Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is
in itself a good and worthy goal. Stopping and slowing the spread
of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a
good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable. Slowing the spread of
the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time
we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise
be the case. That can hardly be regarded as desirable in
itself. Quite the contrary in fact. Whether this is an
acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved,
depends upon a couple of considerations.
First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing
the spread of the virus in saving lives. If the method is not
effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic
is much less tolerable.
Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing
of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.
If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out
the pandemic.
Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of
support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a
good end, such as saving lives.
With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear
that any lives have been saved in this way at all. Indeed, at the
beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase
“flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that
it would not decrease the total lives lost but merely spread them out so
that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once. This, in my
opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not
one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.
This brings us to our second criteria. The means by
which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of
the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good. On the
contrary, they are positively evil. They inflict all sorts of unnecessary
misery upon people. Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain
that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save
lives. This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were
valid. The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely
that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.
Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other
people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that
if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat
to be “non-essential”. It forces people to act against their nature as
social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their
psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical
wellbeing. Mens sana in corpore sano. The longer people
are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation
will erode away at their mental health. Phone, e-mail, and even
video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.
All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is
that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being
imposed. The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second
lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same
year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair
on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation. The government has
kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of
alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for
self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among
other things, hope, to close. This is evil of truly monstrous
proportions. It can only lead to death – whether by suicide,
addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.
The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he
leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and
not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are
wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are
wrong-headed about everything. The government does not become
morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are
extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving
lives. Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into
the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes
one health complication too many.
Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with
regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill
others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply
give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent
Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.
Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures
of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just
numbers but people. This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he
hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he
knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he
admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by
manipulating their emotions.
Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?
What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had
decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been
exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you
cancelled his job as “non-essential”, took away his social
life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation? Do you
not realize that he is a person as well?
In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu. In which case all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood. Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 1:30 AM
From
what I can tell from the numbers William Briggs provides, this point
has already, several months since, been surpassed in the UK; and the
toll continues to mount.
Plus the severity of intense and
chronic human misery – perhaps especially nasty among children, teens
and young adults – is clearly appalling but the extent is only known to
the immediate circle of neighbours and family.
…As would be
expected from an illness with such a modest mortality rate – even
accepting all the inflated and false counting – such as including all
influenza deaths, and many other dishonest methods to numerous to list
the inflated-rate seems to be considerably less than 1 in a 1000 and
very concentrated among the old and already ill who would have a short
life expectancy anyway.
(The non-Christian’s terror of his own
death, and the desire to delay it a short while at any price, has a lot
to do with this.)
Here in the UK many of the most basic aspects
of medical care, such as actually meeting a doctor, diagnosing and
treating lethal cancers etc, have been almost abandoned.
However,
nonetheless, there is a widespread passive acceptance and even embrace
of the response – and there is no doubt that poeple-as-a-whole deserve
what they are getting – since they keep asking for more of the same; and
most of those who don’t like it have ne better justification for their
objection than hedonism – which does not sustain courage, and offers no
motivating alternative.
This has been long coming, long
building (pervasive and worsening sub-fertility among the most
intelligent, wealthy and high status people being an index) – but we are
now seeing an accelerating process of civilizational suicide – caused,
obviously, by the denial of God (denial of any God – not only the true
God).
Even without our extraordinarily evil and psychopathic
global leadership our civilization would be doomed (as I wrote in
Thought Prison, 2011) – just more slowly than is happening now
Men
cannot live without God/s – even at the basic biological level; since
all human societies evolved with religions, and depend upon religion for
much that is basic to survival. ReplyReplies
Gerry T. NealNovember 27, 2020 at 6:37 AMBruce,
that we have long ago passed the point where the numbers dead from the
lockdowns exceeds those dead from the virus is my understanding as well.
I worded it more cautiously here because I was focusing on the local
situation in Manitoba where the statistics about deaths from causes such
as suicide for this year are suspiciously difficult to obtain.
We
have the same situation with regards to basic medical care here. My
father has had to come into Winnipeg annually to see specialists for
several years now, but both visits were cancelled this year. One of
the specialists was able to do a kind of online videochat examination
through the small rural hospital closest to him, but the other just
postponed the visit since it has to do with an eye condition that
requires an in-person examination. Someone I know who had been waiting
for important surgery for years which had finally been scheduled had it
postponed due to the virus. I could mention several other specific
examples of this sort.
German police barge into the house of anti-lockdown activist Dr Andreas Noack, arrest him during YouTube livestream: Watch video
A doctor in Germany, Dr. Andreas Noack, was arrested by the Police on Wednesday in what appears to be a gross violation of personal liberty. The reason for his arrest is not yet clear but he was arrested while live-streaming on YouTube from his own home. 20 November, 2020 OpIndia Staff
A doctor in Germany, Dr. Andreas Noack, was arrested by the Police on Wednesday in what appears to be a gross violation of personal liberty. The reason for his arrest is not yet clear but he was arrested while live-streaming on YouTube from his own home. The Police barged into his home when he was live on his YouTube channel.
The manner of his arrest presents some extremely disturbing scenes.
He appeared too shocked to respond while the Police continued to yell at
him until he lied down in the ground. The arrest of Dr. Andreas Noack
occurred after the passage of the ‘Infection Protection Law’ which was
protested heavily by vast sections of the German population. The
arrested doctor was supposedly providing medical assistance to
anti-lockdown protesters.
According to reports,
“The reasons for the police raid and arrest … have not yet been
officially revealed. However, there are rumors [unconfirmed reports]
that Dr. Andreas Noack provided medical assistance to hundreds of
protestors during lockdown protests against the German government.”
Reportedly, Dr. Andreas Noack was under investigation for “being
non-compliant with the COVID-19 lockdown laws enacted by the German
government.”
The ‘Infection Protection Law’ has drawn a lot of flak
and has been compared by some to the Nazi era Enabling Act. Like the
law that was passed in 1933, the recently passed law also confers
certain legislative powers to the government, which hitherto rested only
with the Legislature, that is, the Parliament. The Infection Protection
Law provides the government with a legal basis to restrict the
fundamental rights guaranteed by the German Constitution.
– article continues below –
The German government has until now relied on decrees to curb
the pandemic, a move that was criticised by all parties and deemed to be
unconstitutional by some. The newly passed law rectifies that problem
for the German government. Furthermore, as per provisions
of the law, an infected person or a person suspected to be suffering
from the infection can be ordered to refrain from practicing certain
professions. It also provides for quarantines and curfews.
Thus, the law would permit
the government to legally enforce lockdowns which could entail the
shutting down of shops and impose restrictions on social contact, rules
for mandatory masks, the stoppage of sporting events and other such
measures to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic. The passage
of the law was protested by numerous Germans and anti-lockdown
sentiments have been steadily rising over time.
