Mid-March marks the fifth anniversary of lockdowns being imposed across Canada and around the world. Many are searching for the lessons that should be learned from the global experiment — the first of its kind in recorded history — of locking down billions of healthy people.
It seems that now, more than ever before, people are willing to explore and analyze the very real harms that lockdowns inflicted on so many people. If my impression is correct, then this is a welcome departure from the fanatical and fear-based arrogance of politicians, media, academics, and judges who refused to consider the death, destruction, poverty, and massive human suffering that lockdowns caused.
Still, much of the fifth-anniversary commentary merely repeats the false media narrative that was first presented to us in March 2020. Covid was not just a bad annual flu, we were told, but an unusually deadly killer. We were told that Covid would harm large numbers of young people, not just the elderly; even children should live in continual fear. Covid would be like the Spanish Flu of 1918 and kill tens of millions of people, claimed politicians like Jason Kenney. Covid was “unprecedented” and “the worst global pandemic in a century,” wrote the judge in Gateway v. Manitoba, even though neither claim was supported by evidence placed before the court.
The sad truth is that we really don’t know how many Canadians had already had Covid when lockdowns were imposed in March 2020, because our governments refused to conduct the antibody testing that would have provided this information. In March 2020, many Canadians — perhaps the majority — had likely already had Covid, and had survived it without suffering harm.
Another sad truth is that we don’t know how many people actually died of Covid. The federal government claims that more than 60,000 Canadians died of Covid as of September 2024. This claim is based on PCR testing, which does not (and cannot) diagnose the disease. Health Canada states that the PCR test cannot determine whether someone is infectious (contagious). Likewise, Public Health Ontario notes that PCR testing merely detects the presence of Covid, not whether someone is sick. PCR testing can produce a “positive” result for someone who has fully recovered from Covid — up to 100 days after infection.
Whether a person tests “positive” for Covid depends on how many cycles of amplification (doubling) were used in the test. When the viral remnant is doubled 40 times, close to 100% of people test positive for Covid. When the viral remnant is doubled only 20 times, very few people test positive. Contrary to the truth-loving spirit of science, throughout lockdowns and vaccine passports, governments refused to disclose the number of cycles at which they ran their PCR tests, even while this information could have been (and still can be) provided easily.
In the Gateway v. Manitoba constitutional challenge to lockdowns, government officials admitted under oath that every time the Manitoba government and media proclaimed another 1,000 new Covid “cases,” the government knew that at least 400 of them were not sick with Covid. The judge didn’t care about how the Manitoba government deceived the public and engaged in baseless fearmongering.
In addition to using PCR testing to generate high numbers of Covid deaths, governments further inflated Covid death numbers by using the new cause-of-death classification protocol created by the World Health Organization (WHO.) In April 2020, the WHO released new and very broad guidelines for classifying Covid as cause of death unless it was clear that other causes, such as trauma, were the cause of death.
Previously, if terminally ill cancer patients had caught a bad flu that contributed to hasten their death, government data would have listed “cancer” — not the flu — as the cause of death. From April 2020 onwards, those who died of cancer were listed as “Covid deaths” if a PCR test detected a Covid viral remnant in their body, either before or after death. Even if the cancer patient had no Covid symptoms, they would still be listed as a “Covid death.” This is why many jurisdictions show fewer cancer deaths in 2020 than in 2019: cancer patients were deemed to have died of Covid.
From April 2020 onwards, governments at all levels across the world accepted and used this new WHO protocol. This resulted in the number of “Covid deaths” being much higher than flu deaths in 2019 and prior years, which promoted unwarranted fear amongst the public. Our supposedly unbiased and trustworthy media made no mention of the WHO changing its protocol in April 2020 to promote Covid as cause of death.
In stark contrast to the excessively broad criteria for listing Covid as cause of death, the WHO’s guidelines for recognizing vaccines as cause of death are extremely limiting. To classify a death as caused by the mRNA vaccine, all other causes of deaths must be ruled out first. In other words, when someone drops dead shortly after getting injected, this does not constitute “definitive” evidence of the mRNA vaccine having caused the death. If this approach to determining vaccine-caused deaths is the scientifically correct standard that ought to be used, then the methods used by governments to determine “Covid deaths” were nakedly political.
Health authorities have bent over backwards to generate as many “Covid deaths” as possible. Now they bend over backwards to keep the number of mRNA “vaccine deaths” as small as possible. This glaring double standard, and the resulting shortage of reliable data, make it hard to have an honest discussion about lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
In the absence of an honest discussion based on reliable data, it’s very hard to learn lessons.
John Carpay – Western Standard
