The Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently held a symposium reviewing and important new book CANARY in a COVID WORLD: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed our (my) World, edited by C. H. Klotz (Canary House Publishing, 2023).
The COVID pandemic hit North America with disastrous consequences for both the health care systems and the civil liberties of individuals. The book focuses on these issues in the U.S., but there are several chapters written by Canadians showing that the Canadian situation was very similar to that in the U.S.. Public policy fellows and writers at the Frontier Centre, Leighton Grey, Marco Navarro-Genie, and Rodney Clifton and Sophia Leis, share their thoughts here on CANARY in a COVID WORLD.
These reviewers recognize the book’s importance in exposing the transgressions that occurred in both the U.S. and Canada, from forced masking, restricted travel, and virtually forced vaccinations. This book was written to ensure that these damaging policies never happen again. The authors are hopeful, but there is no assurance the transgressions will not be repeated.
CANARY in a COVID WORLD will be of interest to Canadians who are concerned about the dysfunctional way our country dealt with the COVID pandemic. Canadians may want to buy the book after reading these reviews.
Read:
Read: Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And The Better Future Coming by Robert W. Malone
Read: The Courage to Face COVID-19: by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough
There Was Not One, But Three Pandemics
“The first causality of war is truth,” as a popular aphorism says.
Unfortunately, this claim is true not only for physical wars, like the recent Israeli/Hamas conflict, but also for medical and political wars, like the COVID-19 pandemic people have been quarreling over since March of 2020. The dispute about the pandemic goes deeper and has now disrupted the very social fabric of Western societies.
CANARY in a COVID WORLD clearly shows that there was not one war, but three wars: the pandemic suffered by the populace, the vaccine war that is now gaining more attention and apprehension, and the information war that hardly anyone recognizes, even now.
The 37 authors writing in this volume are intellectual mavericks, M.D.s, researchers, politicians, and public intellectuals. At great personal cost, they critically examined various aspects of the three pandemics, putting most of their effort into the second and third wars. Most of the authors have been persecuted because of their outspoken and controversial views, taking a position that is contrary to the mainstream. In short, these authors have been trying to help others understand both the COVID-19 and the vaccine pandemics, but they have been stimmed by the information war. Thankfully, that they spoke out on this extremely important public health policy issue.
First, there is little doubt that there was a genuine COVID-19 pandemic, but it was different from those before it because the COVID-19 virus was no worse than a common flu for most people, while being particularly deadly for older people and those, both young and old, with serious comorbidities. Thus, the average person who died from the COVID-19 virus was significantly older than the life expectancy of the surrounding population.
Peer-reviewed medical literature has many articles showing the efficiency of inexpensive medicines, vitamins, and elements like zinc. But strangely, the legacy media, governments, and professional certifying bodies censored MDs for promoting and recommending these effective alternative treatments. Many M.D.s were threatened or lost their licenses to practice medicine even though they saved the lives of many patients.
A good example is Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, a pediatric allergist in Toronto, who was issued three formal warnings from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, simply for criticizing the COVID-19 rules that the College supported. Another example is Dr. George Fareed, a family physician who successfully treated over 20,000 COVID-19 patients with a combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and antibiotics. When he tried to publish his protocol and its success, the information was censored. He also reported that not only were the vaccines ineffective, but they were only approved by Emergency Use Authorization, which is only granted if there were no adequate alternative treatment. To all the M.D.s writing in this volume, there were cheap and effective options, but this information was wholeheartedly and even viciously suppressed.
In March 2021, Rochelle Walensky, who was the Director of the U.S. Centre for Disease Control said that vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus” and they “don’t get sick.” (143) Within a few weeks, increasingly more people discovered the falsehood in this claim. Yet no one corrected her, and this was the beginning of the second and third pandemic wars: the ware over the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and that over information about the virus and the vaccines.
In the late spring of 2021, several authors in this collection stated their realization that the vaccines were unsafe for human use. These researchers noted, for example, that children were very safe from the COVID-19 virus, but Big Pharma and governments still insisted that very young children should be inoculated with the new and untested mRNA vaccines. Consequentially, many were vaccinated despite their negligible risk.
One of the critics was Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s Surgeon General, who noted that “serious adverse events of special interest” were seen in about 1 out of every 550 vaccinations that were administered. If, for example, members of a population had 5 or 6 vaccinations and boosters, there would be serious adverse events in about 1 percent of the vaccinated population.
A few authors say that this rate is unacceptably high, and, under normal circumstances, the vaccination program would have been stopped. But these were not normal times because Big Pharma and governments had colluded in telling people that the only treatment for the virus was mRNA vaccines. As a result, many people continued receiving inoculations and multiple “boosters,” even after it was acknowledged that the risks of serious adverse events were unusually high.
In response to this situation, Sir Christopher Chope, a conservative member of the UK parliament and the chair of the COVID-19 Vaccine Damage Group, stated that his goal “was to pressure the government into recognizing that COVID-19 vaccinations have caused harm to a significant number of people, including in a small number of excess deaths.”
Finally, over the course of the pandemic, citizens were told that the disease could not be treated in the early stage, but only in later stages and only in hospitals, which became overrun with patients, many of whom needed respirators. When patients reached that stage, treatment was often too late, and people died as a result.
Dr. George Fareed pointed out (Chapter 3) that: “Never in the history of medicine has it been advised that the best course is not to treat a disease in the early stages…. This is unconscionable.” (45) He and other MDs have shown that prompt treatment is “exceptionally” effective.
Brianne Dressen, a vaccine injured mother of two young children and a teacher tells her story in Chapter 2. She ends by saying: “Science must be the final frontier for truth, regardless of how inconvenient that truth is. My participation in the scientific process was twisted into nothing more than propaganda….”
The foundation of our democracy is the unwillingness to suppress truth, and that claims, once revealed to be untrue, will not be spread. Good science and good health care policies depend on robust and uncensored debate among citizens, M.D.s, politicians, and intellectuals. All people, not just a chosen few, should have access to information and should be encouraged to engage in the debate.
In Canada, it was the alternative media; True North, Rebel News, and The Epoch Times, for example, who poked their heads above the parapet and yelled: “Hey! The emperor has no clothes on!” Just as in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, only then did people see that their eyes may have been open while their minds had been closed.
It is time for Canadians to open both their eyes and minds, and this book will undoubtedly help them understand what has happened so they can avoid the same pandemic responses in the future.
A democracy cannot function without a commitment to truth by both governments and the media. Independent and critical journalism is, in fact, necessary to keep corporations and governments honest. Truth, and its verification, needs to be re-established as a foundational value of our country. Without truth, Canadians will be unable to understand the pandemic and learn ways to protect themselves and their loved ones from the unanticipated effects of these three wars we have not yet won. Truth should not be a causality of another pandemic war.
Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg. His most recent book with Mark DeWolf is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report.
Sophia N. Leis is the associate editor at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and a student at the University of Ottawa, studying international affairs and political science.
Read: Review 1 of 3: A Canary In A Coal Mine Is A Warning Sign by Leighton Grey here.
Read: Review 2 of 3: COVID-19 Policies Undermined Trust in Key Institutions by Marco Navarro-Genie here.
