Who decided the nearly uniform messages we hear on the pandemic and what to do about it? Our politicians defer to doctors who, in turn, look to the World Health Organization (WHO). When we realize who pays the WHO, the senselessness makes sense.
Leave it to the Ontario premier to state plainly what we all knew to be true.
“I’ll be very frank, there’s no politician in this country who’s going to disagree with their chief medical officer. They just aren’t going to do it. They might as well throw a rope around their neck and jump off a bridge. They’re done. I’m telling you the facts,” he said on March 21.
All right, so doctors have usurped democracy. At least they’re thinking independently and using their best judgment, right? OK, maybe not.
Last December, Ontario’s associate medical officer of health made some people question otherwise. Her mic was on when she told her colleague before a press conference, “I don’t know why I bring all these papers. I never look at them. I just say whatever they write down for me.”
Ontario’s associate medical officer of health later told CTV she does “speak freely” but her communications team gives her “researched and vetted remarks” that include stats such as new cases and pandemic deaths.
Although she might “speak freely,” most doctors cannot. The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons issued three cautions to Dr. Kulvinder Gill for what they called “unprofessional” and “inappropriate” tweets. The Brampton doctor said there was “absolutely no medical or scientific reason for this prolonged, harmful and illogical lockdown,” that “we don’t need a vaccine” and that contact tracing, testing and isolation were “ineffective, naïve & counter-productive against COVID-19.”
Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former chief medical officer of health in the 1990s, agrees with Gill, at least somewhat. Schabas wrote on January 18 to say, “Outside of Long Term Care the risk of dying if you are infected with Covid is probably less than 0.2% overall and deaths are concentrated in the frail elderly.”
Schabas added, “lockdown was never part of our planned pandemic response nor is it supported by strong science…there are significant costs to lockdowns—lost education, unemployment, social isolation, deteriorating mental health and compromised access to health care…We will be paying for lockdown—in lives and dollars for decades to come…Our well-intentioned but misguided efforts to control Covid are only compounding the tragedy. We need to change course.”
Months later, little has changed. The illusory medical consensus still holds, supported by the censorship of regulatory bodies, social media companies and mainstream media outlets afraid to present contrary views.
Most of the world has looked to WHO for guidance. Canada’s chief public health officer seems to always be in sync with United Nations wisdom. This should surprise no one, given how often she has been part of WHO committees and deployments over the past 20 years.
Global financial institutions also help form global opinion. Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus since 1994, claimed his country was offered $940 million of “Covid Relief Aid” from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) if they agreed to impose masks, lockdowns, quarantines and curfews. Lukashenko refused, but how many others agreed?
Money, global institutions and prevailing medical opinion converge in one influential man: Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives 9.8 per cent of the WHO’s funds, second only to the United States. The foundation is also a major donor to the GAVI Alliance, a vaccination initiative that is itself the fifth-highest donor to the WHO.
On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held Event 201. As the event’s web page explains, “the scenario illuminated the need for cooperation among industry, national governments, key international institutions, and civil society, to avoid the catastrophic consequences that could arise from a large-scale pandemic.”
As 15 leaders played out the coronavirus outbreak scenario, they emphasized “flooding the zone” with their desired message, apparently to drown out all others. This strategy has since been employed to great effect. Science has become dogma, democracy has become dictatorship and speech has become proscribed.
Politico called Bill Gates “the world’s most powerful doctor” in 2017. In these days when democracy is dormant, that also makes him the world’s most powerful politician. Unfortunately, Gates is not qualified to be either. And that, more than anything else, makes sense of the pandemic’s senselessness.
Lee Harding is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Photo by CDC on Unsplash.
