This comment stems from the Canadian trucker convoy - Freedom Convoy 2022, aptly named BearHug - and the mainstream narrative and discussion I’m seeing online in regards to it - regardless of the numbers, whether it is high or low, whether there is a magnitude or two or not of Canadians quietly protesting but not traveling to Ottawa, this is a question of freedom and whether we’re okay with what’s going on - which includes suppression of conversation, of scientific method, in an attempt to reach the truth; all of which has to do with system design which I believe the HN community cares about. All 11 official, and unofficial, convoy routes will merge and arrive in Ottawa in roughly 24 hours from now.
I know there are people who have lost people close to them due to COVID. Believe it or not I know people who’s healthy family members have died soon after the vaccines, and I have other random close contact stories from people of adverse events: one woman, an Air Canada staff who was assisting me in a wheelchair to my gate - just started sharing with me without us talking about COVID or the pandemic at all, she seemed desperate and needing to share her and her son's pain/story with someone: her ~25 year old son still had severe myocarditis still even after 2 months from the vaccine. He’s not allowed to work for at least 1 year due to any activity could cause him to die, the doctors tell her that's very rare - yet the actual research and data shows young boys/men have rate of ~1:2000 for just myocarditis. What are the odds of a random woman telling me of her son’s condition, perhaps ~1:2000? What's the short-term and long-term cost on that family (and I don't just mean monetarily - that mother seemed very on edge, bursting enough to tell a total stranger a very personal story of suffering)? And I didn't bring this up at the time because there'd be no value, I didn't tell her that there's something like a 25% death rate within 5 years after myocarditis, so will her young son even be alive still in 5 years? I doubt their doctors told them that either, as in the media myocarditis is played off as mild which is insane that potential lifelong cardiac problem for young boys is somehow mild; the integrity of our language use has been appalling during this pandemic as well. I'm not being dramatic either, this is reality - but mainstream media isn't talking about it, so people aren't thinking about it much if at all, definitely not thoroughly; in part because people have been trained by people like Trudeau who's been hate mongering, so then if you question anything about the pandemic you're pejoratively called an "anti-vaxxer;" how useful is that in discourse, in developing a more educated, thoughtful population?
Most of our deaths in Canada were from long-term care homes, in 2018 (I believe it was but I don't remember the year now, might have been 2008), the government in power then decided to eliminate random spot checks to make sure the homes were being operated properly: death rate in for-profit long-term care homes was higher than the not-for-profit, but still the Federal government knowing they were facing a pandemic didn't initiate protocols to first protest the elderly. Why? Why aren't people furious with the current politicians and the politicians who stopped the policy of random spot checks? If you're told exactly when your room is going to be checked to make sure it's clean, you'll have it pretty clean for right beforehand. If it's random and you'll be punished increasingly with fines, or other, then you'll make sure it's as clean as possible at all times.
We also shouldn't blindly trust "doctors" or the health agencies. I am in fact slowly writing a whole book on the non-stop incompetence of the Ontario/OHIP system and doctors, their lack of protocol, their lack of diagnostics or data-driven decision making; based on my last 15+ years of being first hurt by the system, then abandoned by it, then primarily depending on treatments in the US - using diagnostic tools and treatments not even legal in Canada, and there's zero reason for that - but Canadians don't even know that they're not getting care and treatments that are possible. When you start sharing your story then others open up, and I've heard stories as a bad as someone in Canada being told they had 6 months to live because there was nothing they could do for this person's specific problem. Their wise friend hears the story and thinks that doesn't sound right, contacts a US hospital, and they say it's no problem - they can do surgery - and in a few weeks the guy's in the US getting surgery done. That's just one of countless experiences I've heard from people, and we don't hear about them because we don't have enough conversation - we don't build community - and news organizations/TV channels want to maximize for as many eyeballs as possible for higher advertising revenue, so these stories barely make it into the mainstream.
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