During the initial COVID outbreak, did Canada allocate huge sums of money ostensibly to shore up the medical system like we did here in the U.S.? Where did all of it go? Certainly none to nurse's salaries.
No. In general, Canadians just lost access to the medical system. Surgeries delayed, family doctors switching to only telehealth. Even now, in Vancouver — for my family doctor it would be a two week wait for a 10 minute phone call, followed by another two week wait to be seen in person (if he decided that was needed). Any type of non emergency walk in clinic is generally full within the first few minutes, due to line ups before opening. So for many, the only chance of seeing a doctor within a month your best option is waiting 7-12 hours in an emergency room.
This is generally not my experience in Ontario. I've been to my family doctor and the ER multiple times during COVID and after and although the ER can be a multiple hour wait for minor things like a fever it's still pretty speedy for serious injuries. I haven't needed any elective surgery but checkups like heart ultrasounds were still only a week or two wait.
If anything, my dentist has been the most impacted by COVID. They're booked solid for at least a month to six weeks.
It's sort of the equivalent of when Noam Chomsky says, "sure, JFK and 9/11 may have been carried out by organized conspirators within the U.S. government, but it doesn't matter and there's no point interrogating it because it makes no difference from a policy perspective." In the cases where it's not outright disinfo it's a psychological defense mechanism, a way of ceding the bare minimum of ground to the conspiracy theorists which is demanded by the mountains of evidence, while still hiving it off from the rest of one's worldview.
> The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country, personally reviewed the footage surrounding Epstein's prison block to confirm this for himself.
The Attorney General whose father got Epstein his start in life by hiring him to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School with zero qualifications? The Attorney General who spearheaded much of the coverup and spiking of investigations surrounding Iran Contra? That attorney general?
At this point the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024 is Donald Trump, a man with extensive ties to Epstein going back decades, and who is on record issuing vague compliments about his sexual predation.
At this point, it's pretty silly that it is still considered "conspiracy theory" to aver that intelligence agencies have placed agents in major corporations throughout the world. Even mainstream limited hangout-type sources have started to acknowledge this. They discuss it on that Wind of Change podcast about the theory that the CIA wrote the Scorpions' song.
Or, to be more precise, it's silly that it is considered "conspiracy theory" in the way most people use the concept, as coterminous with "a false idea."
> I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022.
I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about this distinction when they've all proven to be completely ineffective can-kicking at best, enormously costly interventions whose scope was extended well beyond their initial "15 days to slow the spread" mandate for precious little (if any) benefit and an accumulating roster of harms.
This is what happens when you "can-kick" infections after vaccination (actually, not even after vaccination but after offering vaccines to the population - and a lot of them stupidly refusing them).
As I said:
>Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with ... nuanced information
After these pediatric hepatitis cases popped up, there was a vocal contingent of MDs and Zero COVID types on Twitter arguing that it showed the urgent necessity to do whatever it takes to protect children from SARS-CoV-2 infections. It's sad to think that this fearmongering is probably causing a lot of children not to get the pathogen exposure they need in early childhood.
> Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.
Funny, that's how I would describe the widespread insistence that we can indefinitely conceal half of everyone's faces in public (when the only effective masks are ones which create a large amount of plastics pollution), or assiduously suppress the spread of pathogens, without having some as-yet unknown knock-on effects. It's bizarre that so many treat these things as unalloyed goods with zero downside whatsoever.
I don't view them as unalloyed goods, for sure - it's just that most of the hostility came pre-anyone having great arguments against them and struck me as fundamentally tribal - went into an ice cream shop with my girlfriend in Ocala, Florida, got glared down as the only people wearing masks. This wasn't well considered social pressure, it was most assuredly "we don't cotton to them types around here."
I do think the arguments against wearing masks when interacting with children/making children mask have been quite strong, post ace-2.
