The Winter of Severe Illness and Death
And the Stories that Saved Us
Published February 14 2023, last revised March 14 2025.
In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.
- Orwell. 1984
In February 2020 the World Health Organization announced the arrival of a deadly ‘pandemic’. Mass house arrest was pitched as our only solution.
I remember the press conference vividly. Our premiere in Ontario took to the podium flanked by his ministers and top doctor. They were sweating and visibly nervous. Their bodies betrayed a gravity that was missing in their words. They stated without reservation that it would take ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’. In the same breath they reassured us that ‘no expense would be spared’ to lessen the impact of this ‘temporary’ shut down.
They buried the lede. The bureaucratic mobilization was clearly bracing for something larger than the story. As their plan unfolded in the following weeks, it was apparent that their pitch was no match for reality. Two weeks became three, then four, then, ‘we don’t know’. ‘Lock downs’ as they would come to be known, quickly ballooned into a Pavlovian nightmare. We dutifully locked ourselves indoors awaiting the next announcement.
Our politicians opened every press conference with the solemn assurance they were doing everything they could, then provided exactly no answers to the flurry of questions. They painted a perfect picture of uncertainty then insisted we listen to their experts who were doubly sure of the same uncertainty. Somehow, after every exchange there were always more restrictions.
In time our politicians found their swagger. Seemingly intoxicated on their new found powers, the niceties gave way to indignation as the questions always outweighed answers. Our prime minister seemed especially pleased with his new role. He moved the job of running government from parliament to the Rideau Cottage. He grew out his hair. He stopped shaving. He rarely spoke without a furrowed brow. Canadians would need to see the sacrifices we had to make.
The press gallery followed him of course, setting up shop on his front lawn. They huddled on his doorstep for days on end waiting for a glimpse of leadership. This was his moment. He traded in the mounting scandals that had come to define his government for a brand new perch and a fawning press that would hang off his every word. He told us in the most banal terms that Canada would spare no expense to make safety his top priority.
Press conference after press conference our leaders slowly broke the news. Our right to work, and walk and talk in the street would become a rare commodity. It would be managed centrally and for our own good. The days of self determination were behind us. In time it would return they promised, in limited quantity, in exchange for absolute compliance. We were in this together.
The Rise of One Health
One day, seemingly out of nowhere a well funded PR campaign descended, trading in the void of answers for a flood of information, far more than we could process. The solution was naturally more government. Only now our government had drafted corporations to assist us in the war on covid. They framed the ‘public-private partnership’ as a foregone conclusion, born of necessity in an unprecedented emergency. Government, the media and corporations seemed to merge into one entity. Together they started pushing fickle and transgressive policies that left more questions than answers.
It’s hard not to described this transformation in religious terms. To anyone untethered to the mainline fear campaign, it appeared like a frenetic mass hysteria. Our news media became singularly obsessed with impending devastation. Public health was cloaked with a peculiar peity. Our leaders began to circle around vaccines, masks and lock-downs with a fervor that sliced through the very fabric of our culture. It stunned our senses, paralyzed our institutions and re-ordered our society overnight.
A priestly class arose, taking the podiums around the world. Without a flinch, they assumed positions of power above our laws and constitution. Fauci, Birx, Bonnie Henry, Kieren Moore, people we had never heard of, became fixtures in our lives, anointed with the power to declare us ‘non essential’.
They claimed their authority in the name of Public Health, dispensing their policies as articles of faith. They decided who could leave their house, when and for what reasons; who would shop, where and how. In person was ok, but only at certain stores, at certainly times, for certain things. Always single isle and always according to the directional stickers plastered to the floor. The message was clear. Human rights, common sense and even science would be subservient to the fears and whims of the expert class.
There were other themes as well. Privation became necessary, even heroic. Human disconnection even more so. There would be no hugging, or touching, or expressions of mercy to anyone less than 6 feet apart. That distance had some special powers to prevent infection. Masks were important, then useless, then vital, then mandatory. People were barred from eating indoors at restaurants. They made exceptions to eat outdoors. But as weeks dragged into months Public Health blessed fancy tents on restaurant patios. Patrons could not eat indoors, still, but they could eat indoors, as long as indoors was outdoors and so prevent the spread of the deadly virus.
Nothing added up to anything coherent but the assumptions remained. We were led to believe the complexities of ‘pandemic preparedness’ were piped in from a laboratory carefully fine tuned by experts with special knowledge.
Then came the great classification of everything. You could access only what was deemed essential ‘according to your need’. Shopping was a maze of contradiction. On one isle glass bowls were OK and available to purchase, on the next isle plastic bowls were ‘non-essential’ and beyond reach. People were not spared the granular control of central planning either. The sick and aging were categorized together with plastic bowls and children’s toys; sealed away with traffic tape behind plexiglass windows. Governors and premieres around the world deferred their reason to ‘the experts’ and banished the infected to old age homes - effectively choosing the time and place where thousands would die alone.
These tectonic changes never felt right of course, but dissent was terminal and raising questions inflicted a cost most found too much to bare. The priestly class framed curiosity as contagious and the curious as unacceptable and fringe; guilty of endangering the young and killing the infirm. The lines were clear. You could not question the origin of the virus. You could not question to safety of the vaccine. You could not promote early treatment for Covid-19 and you could not challenge or ignore any part of public health advice - no matter how unreasonable.
Step out of line and rebuke was swift. Punishment vacillated between the obscene and the absurd. For the layperson it could mean ridicule and cancellation, but for the professional class, applying expertise in defiance of the reigning dogma exploded into spectacle. Professionals who cast doubt on ‘safety and efficacy’ would face the prospect of losing their license and torching their careers.
The priestly class were not without some mercy - it was about compliance after all. Apostates could confess their sins and accept the reigning dogma on vaccines. For penance they would have to say the thing: ‘pardon me, my fault, it was after all, ‘safe and effective.’
The unrepentant faced humiliation, stiff fines and what amounted to a public ‘defrocking’. Accusations of unprofessional conduct were levelled right away. Heavy breathing and hyperbolic claims of ‘endangering patients’ and bringing ‘disrepute to the profession’ were the common charges. Never a clear underlying crime. Always the inverse of reality. No matter, the media would run the headlines. ‘It was judgment day for the apostates’.
A License to Heal?
In our part of rural Ontario where family doctors are a privileged resource, a beloved physician, Dr Patrick Phillips, had his practice crushed by these tectonic forces.
His sin was publicly rejecting the claim that one public health policy could possibly be the best standard of care for 8 billion people without exception. Instead of practising from the pharmaceutical brochure he followed his conscience and medical training. He provided mask and vaccine exemptions where his patients had contraindications or needed relief. He offered effective early treatments and health advice that was tailored to his patients needs.
In the real world this was presumed to be his duty. But under the spell of COVID, any deviations from ‘The One’ prescription was an attack on ‘Public Health’.
Dr Phillips was labelled ‘disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional’; a heretic that put the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario at risk. They took issue with his disobedience, but the greater sacrilege was his defence. He disclosed their accusations against him, exposing their hypocrisy. He lost his license for what amounted to a public disagreement where despite their threats he followed his conscience and cared for his patients.
The OCSP investigation was a farce. There were no victims, only grateful patients. And faceless bureaucrats of course who were exposed for taking health care hostage.
Dr Phillips story removed more scales from my eyes. Who’s interests’ were being served in the name of public health? What happened to the Hippocratic oath? Doctor patient privilege? Medical freedom? Privacy? Decency? Mercy? Weren’t our institutions designed to help us?
Maybe that was true at one time. But everyday we looked more and more like captives to a system we did not know or understand.
Witnessing the inhumanity of our institutions was shocking. The long term consequences of punishing our doctors and their patients would pile up. It appeared like a ritual self immolation. The notion that maybe, just maybe ‘the science’ had some special knowledge that had yet to be revealed faded into the recesses of my mind.
As our world shrank into isolated six foot bubbles, so did our hope. We grasped in bewilderment at the edges of our ratcheting cage. Canadians were stunned, then crushed, then silenced; ever so incrementally pushing us past the brink.
Tale of Two Syndromes
During Covid there were two worlds. There was the world narrated on TV where everything was fine and this was simply our ‘new normal’. And there was the one we lived in.
As we reached out to each other looking for a dose of reality and some human connection, we found that walls had been erected all around us preventing meaningful discussion.
Indoors, social media platforms were deleting our private messages. Outdoors police officers were arresting parents for walking and playing with their children.
Churches were being shuttered and fined for performing drive by services. Parishioners were evacuated from parking lots as they attempted to commune with each other from their cars.
Neighbors were turning each other ‘in’ with strange satisfaction for having spotted ‘extra’ vehicles parked in the driveway.
Familiar language we had only read about in history books curiously flooded the headlines. Opinion polls for jailing the unvaccinated became TV news fodder as though it were the most normal thing.
Politicians took to podiums around the world with apostolic conviction. They began to describe a new class system - as though they were channelling a divine revelation - where access to work and basic necessities would be tied to vaccine status.
South of the border President Biden had announced a “dark winter” of “severe illness and death” and hung it around the necks of every lock-down and mRNA skeptic with his chilling final verdict, ‘it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated’.
Cable news recycled his bleak prophecy in endless iterations. Every kind of doom and gloom specialist was featured on daytime television and evening news hours, giving not so veiled permission to despise your neighbor.
The message was clear. ‘The Unvaccinated’ were morally defective. They were selfish. They were preventing you from getting back to ‘normal’. In the exact same breath they pushed the expectation of ‘normal’ further and further into obscurity.
That Christmas, a video of our prime minister on a french language talk show resurfaced. He betrayed a bottomless well of contempt for the every day Canadians who had the strength to question the mandates. He followed up his disparaging remarks by posing the horrifying question to the host:
He used his sacred office to bless a new kind of ‘ism’ tacitly offering a dispensation to unload your anger and your anguish on this class. The language of ‘othering’ descended like a plague across the country emboldening the petty tyrants and crushing any pretense of civility in public life.
Communities and families started to crack under pressure. For millions of Canadians daily life appeared like a fever dream from the highest office to our neighbourhoods.
The main stream media, plumb with $600,000,000 dollars in “assistance” from the government, piled on, stoking the flames.
Our world was crumbling. Reason and mercy had completely abandoned public life. We were numb.
Read Part II
The Stories that Saved Us:
Thanks for this. Great recap.
I swear I have PTSD reading this. Especially since I see it happening again with the “Team Canada” hivemind going on now. Yesterday on fb, after disagreeing with someone who insisted that it was my “moral obligation” to not travel to and boycott the USA, he replied: “friendly reminder, historically it is the traitors that are first against the walls”. He has since deleted that post, but I have the screenshots for the “historical” record.