The National Post and Theresa Tam are Lying through their Teeth
Canada’s Chief Medical Officer Theresa Tam just co-authored a paper “proving” that without lockdowns and vaccines Canada would have suffered 800,000 COVID deaths. According to the paper about ½ were saved by lockdowns and the other ½ were saved by the vaccines. So how exactly do you “prove” what would have happened if some other event did not happen? How could you prove what the GDP in Germany would be right now if Adolph Hitler was never born? To prove this unprovable negative Dr. Tam and her crack team of propagandists turned to the scourge of 21st century science; computer modelling.
I have discussed computer modeling in previous climate change posts. Computer models are not proof of anything. The only way to “model” what would happen by removing restrictions is to prove the effectiveness of restrictions and vaccines before using them in the model and I can guarantee you they did not do that.
The news article did point out a couple of countries that had more COVID deaths than Canada but that means nothing. These countries also used lockdowns and COVID deaths are a completely fictional number. COVID deaths were always manipulated by governments. When they wanted to scare people the COVID deaths went up. When they wanted to show restrictions were working, COVID deaths went down.
You can print anything you want on a death certificate. Gunshot victims were even counted as COVID deaths. The real number is excess deaths; did more people die than you normally expect or not? When the excess deaths for 2020 were published I tried to correlate excess deaths to COVID deaths and found no correlation. Sweden reported far higher COVID deaths than Canada but on a % basis Canada had 4 times as many excess deaths as Sweden.
So to prove effectiveness of lockdowns we must use excess deaths not COVID deaths and since most countries, including Sweden, instituted restrictions we must also somehow rank the severity of and duration of restrictions. Thankfully this was done for me so I was able to plot 2020 lockdown severity with 2020 excess deaths for 31 countries I could find data for. The plot below is the result.
Clearly as restrictions went up deaths went up. If Lockdowns worked that line should have sloped the opposite direction. Canada was also not anomalous. They fall right on the trend with every other country. It is pretty clear from the data that lockdowns increased rather than decreased the number of people who died. Theresa Tam wants me to believe that lockdowns saved nearly 400,000 people from dying of COVID. The only way that can be true is if they also killed more than 400,000 people.
So there is no evidence that lockdowns saved a single life; what about vaccines? Canada was slow to start vaccinating. Some people were vaccinated in January 2021 but the program really did not kick in gear until March 2021. 20% of the COVID cases occurred in the 12 months prior to vaccine rollout. 80% have happened in the 19 months since. The virus spread 2.5 times faster after the vaccines. Vaccines facilitated infection without changing the infection fatality ratio. More people getting infected with the same number of people dying per infection means vaccines increased the number of deaths.
Theresa Tam’s model says both lockdowns and vaccines saved lives. The empirical data says lockdowns and vaccines both increased the death toll. Will you believe a career Bureaucrat, part of the most incompetent and dishonest administration in Canadian history? Or, will you believe your own lying eyes?
