The Winter of Severe Illness and Death
And the stories that saved us
A Pandemic of Fear & Loathing
It’s hard to imagine what the mood was like in Canada in the first weeks of 2022. We were entering the third year of the ‘pandemic’ and a creeping despotism had reshaped most aspects of daily life.
Civil rights were suspended under emergency powers. The public health policies that had upended our lives were failing spectacularly, yet somehow new restrictions were on their way. Our elected officials had singled out ‘unvaccinated Canadians’ to explain away the tsunami of ‘breakthrough’ cases. Only a handful of our leaders had the guts to point out the absurdity of scapegoating their policy failures. And when they did, they were vilified.
Within days of the World Health Organization announcing a ‘pandemic’ in February of 2020 mass house arrest was pitched as a temporary measure to ‘slow the spread of Covid-19’. I remember the press conference vividly. Our premiere in Ontario took to the podium flanked by his cabinet ministers and top doctor. They were sweating and visibly nervous. Their bodies betrayed a gravity that was missing in their words and we believed them. As their plan unfolded in the weeks head, the reality was quite different from the pitch. And ‘lock downs’ as they would come to be known, quickly ballooned into a Pavlovian nightmare.
Our politicians and administrators seemed intoxicated on their new found powers. Our prime minister seemed especially pleased with his new role ‘isolating’ at his country home with the press corps hanging off his every word. As our ‘leaders’ were busy tending to matters of global ‘safety’, our right to work, walk or talk in the street became as illusory as the predicted doom that blasted like air sirens from the lips of every television news reader.
The Rise of One Health
A well funded PR campaign descended overnight, blanketing every corner of our lives. It framed the ‘public-private partnership’ as a foregone conclusion, born of necessity in an unprecedented emergency. Government, corporations and the media seemed to merge into one entity. Together they promoted fickle and transgressive policies that left more questions than answers.
It’s hard not to described this transformation in religious terms. News was singularly obsessed with impending devastation and public health was re-dressed with a peculiar peity. Our leaders circled around vaccines, masks and lock-downs with a fervor that sliced through the very fabric of our culture, stunning our senses, paralyzing our institutions and re-ordering our society overnight.
From behind the veil of COVID a priestly class arose to assume 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. And only at certainly times. For certain things. In certain patterns. Always single isle and always according to the neon colored directional stickers on the floor. The message was clear. Going along with the crowd is safe. Going against the crowd is certain death that you were inflicting on others.
There were other themes aswell. Privation was necessary, even heoric. 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. Nothing added up to anything coherent but the assumptions remained. We were led to believe the complexities of ‘pandemic preparedness’ were piped in from somewhere else by those with special knowledge. There was a great classification of everything by these ‘experts’. You could access only what was deemed necessary ‘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. Anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves both 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 these experts who banished the infected to old age homes - effectively chosing the time and place where thousands would die alone.
There were questions about these tectonic changes of course, but curiosity was terminal and raising questions inflicted a cost most found too much to bare. The priestly class framed the curious as unacceptable blasphemers. For those who rejected the narrative - 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 was akin to a capital offense. It was social excommunication, reputational assassination. The lines were clear. You could not question the vaccine. You could not promote early treatment. And you could not alter or ignore any part of public health advice - no matter how unreasonable. The worst treatment was reserved for the dissidents who inspired the cardinal sin of ‘vaccine hesitancy’.
Professionals casting doubt on perfect ‘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 afterall. Apostates could confess their sins publicly, accept the reigning dogma on vaccines and keep their license. The unrepentant, however, would face an excruciating public ‘defrocking’. Rebuke was swift.
Accusations of unprofessional conduct were leveled right away. Never substantive, just wild hyperbolic claims of ‘endangering patients’ and bringing ‘disrepute to the profession’. Never a clear underlying crime. Always the inverse of reality. No matter, the media would run with the claims like a town cryer at dawn on judgement day.
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 idea that one public health policy could possibly be the best standard of care for 8 billion people without exception. Instead of practicing 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.
In the real world this was presumed to be his sworn duty. But under the spell of COVID, any deviations from ‘The One’ prescription was an assault on ‘Public Health’.
Dr Phillips was labelled ‘disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional’; a heretic that put the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario risk. They took issue with his disobedience, but the greater sacrilege was disclosing their accusations against him and exposing their hypocracy. He lost his license for what amounted to a public disagreement where he sided with his patients and his conscience.
The investigation was a farce. There were no victims, only grateful patients. And faceless bureaucrats of course who he exposed for taking his patient’s health care hostage.
Dr Phillips story removed more scales from my eyes. Who’s interests’ were being served in name of public health? What happened to the hypocratic oath? Doctor patient priviledge? 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.
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 walls had been erected on all sides 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 channeling 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 disagree with his lock-down and vaccine 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 neighborhoods.
The main stream media, plumb with $600,000,000 dollars in “assistance” from the government, piled on, stoking the flames.
We were numb.
Read Part II
The Stories that Saved Us: from the Winter of Severe Illness and Death
Thanks for this. Great recap.