Marseille’s 1720 plague outbreak, triggered by the Grand Saint-Antoine—a ship carrying $100M worth of fabrics that docked despite clear contamination—killed 50,000 locals and 50,000 nearby, exposing how political interference undermined centuries-old quarantine protocols. Canada’s COVID-19 response mirrored this failure: Dr. Teresa Tam ignored PHAC warnings (Jan 14–15, 2020) about Wuhan’s person-to-person transmission, aligning with WHO/China claims instead of evidence like Ontario’s early cases, while a 2010 NFB clip revealed her Orwellian support for mandatory detention and police checkpoints. Like Marseille’s leaders, modern officials prioritized messaging over science, raising doubts about whether today’s crises are managed competently—or at all. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I do my best to give an amateur history lesson and forgive me for all the history experts out there who will point out my errors.
I apologize in advance.
But I started reading about the black plague in Marseille, France in 1720, which for those of you who know something about the plague, that will strike you as a very late date.
I mean wasn't the plague much earlier?
I mean the 1350s and then there was another outbreak in the 1600s.
1720?
The Black Death in Marseille?
Oh yes.
And there's so many things we can learn about what went wrong that day that I think we can apply to our thinking today.
At least I'll try and make that point and along the way maybe I'll show you a few things and tell you a few things you didn't know.
I want to show you some pictures.
I want to show you pictures of the ship that brought the plague in.
But mainly I want to show you the gorgeous, gorgeous city of Marseille, France.
I've never been there, but I want to go.
You can get the video version of this podcast at RebelNews.com.
It's $8 a month.
Get the videos of this podcast and all our other shows.
But in the meantime, please enjoy this podcast of the Plague of Marseille.
Tonight, how are quarantines supposed to work?
Well, let me tell you the story about the Black Plague in Marseille, France in 1720.
It's more interesting than it sounds.
It's April 28th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm hoping is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Yesterday I showed you some artifacts from the Spanish flu of 1918-1919, how everyone was wearing masks, how doctors found that sunlight was actually an important way to treat patients.
I never knew that the phrase, sunlight is the best disinfectant, was literally true medically.
I always thought that was just a metaphor for talking about political and journalistic transparency, shining a light on bad behavior.
But no, it's how you fight a flu virus.
It was interesting to see the knowledge that was gathered 100 years ago as the era of modern medicine was just getting underway.
Remember, penicillin still hadn't been invented for another decade.
So it was just the basics.
Wear a mask, get the patients sunlight, isolate them, quinine water, the medicine for malaria.
It's like we unlearned those lessons and replaced them with, I don't know, telling people they're racist or something for asking questions.
Imagine if Prime Minister Robert Borden shut down any questions about the Spanish flu by calling anyone an anti-Spanish racist if they mentioned it.
We've seen a spike in anti-Asian violence in different parts of our country.
In BC, an elderly man with dementia was shoved out of a store by an assailant that brought up remarks about COVID-19.
We now have a conservative leadership candidate that is asking for Dr. Tam to be fired and is accusing her, the WHO in China, of being in cahoots.
What is your message to Canadians as they see this?
Intolerance and racism have no place in our country.
Yeah.
Anyway, my point was that I think there was a lot of common sense back then.
We've lost some of that.
Some of the know-it-alls today who are banning people from going to the beach or the park should read up about sunlight treatment.
It's interesting to learn from the past, or at least to know about the past before discarding it.
So I want to follow up in that vein for one more day, and maybe one more day also.
I came across the story of the plague of Marseille.
I've never been to Marseille.
It looks incredible.
It's on the Mediterranean coast of France, not far from Cannes or Monaco.
It's a port city.
It's so, so unbelievably pretty, isn't it?
You can see some little islands out at sea a little bit, the Friul islands.
People live there now.
It's got a great view of Marseille.
And everyone in Marseille looks at them.
And those islands are where ships were quarantined when they arrived in Marseille from exotic places.
But they did it wrong in 1720.
The plague had been to Marseille before, the great black death of the 1340s and 50s that killed half of Europe.
It took 200 years for the continent to repopulate.
And then the plague came back again to Marseille, finally ending in 1580.
So bear with me.
So Marseille was this great port city, like Venice was.
That's how the plague traveled on ships from the east, because ships carry rats and rats carry fleas, and that's where the plague bacteria lives.
So when a ship would arrive in any of these ports, it would anchor offshore for 40 days.
That's where the word quarantine comes from, from the Italian, quarantagiorni, 40 days.
Doctors from the city would go to check on the health of the ship's crew.
I mean, in 40 days, that's a long enough time to wait to see who's sick.
With the city so, so close after journeys like that.
So these ships were at sea for months or even years.
They were so close, but they had to wait because the alternative, if they got it wrong, was death.
So that's how Venice did it, where they invented the phrase quarantine in the 1340s.
And so after Marseille had the last Black Death in 1580, they set up a whole system.
They set up a city hospital.
They set up a list of reputable doctors, accredited them.
They had a sanitation board.
They set up a lazare, which in Italian is lazaretto.
You can see it comes from the word lazarus.
It was basically a quarantine hospital island where the ships would say, this is a lazaretto in Venice that's about 400 years old.
So they set up these lazarees in Marseille too, on those little islands.
So here's how they would do it.
A ship would come in, and a delegation from the city's sanitation committee, politicians and doctors, would go to meet it and give it one of three different bills of health, depending how they were doing it.
Isn't that interesting?
That's where that phrase came from, bill of health, clean bill of health.
So they would check where the ship had been.
That's very important.
Where did you come from?
And cross-reference that to what they had heard about different cities around the Mediterranean.
They'd inspect the cargo, inspect the crew, inspect the passengers, looking for disease.
And if anyone looked sick, well, the ship would not be allowed to dock in Marseille itself.
So if everything was fine, you would get a clean bill of health.
But there were two other kinds of bills of health.
If the ship had been somewhere risky, even if no one seemed sick at first, the ship would be sent to these islands, the Lazare.
Very, very pretty.
But I can imagine very, very frustrating, but better than killing half of Marseille with the plague.
I found it hard to get all the details in English, but there evidently had a pretty complicated system.
You'd go to a different lazare depending on how bad or how good you seemed in the eyes of the sanitation board.
So you could be quarantined for up to two months and away from other ships and other crews if you were really bad, if you had the plague, if you had leprosy.
They were just going to really, really wait to make sure you weren't sick before letting you in the city.
So a ship like this, called the Grand Saint-Antoine, well, it left Marseille in July of 1719 for Syria to pick up precious fabrics and cloths apparently worth 100,000 écous.
That's what they call these golden coins.
I hope I'm pronouncing it right.
Ecus, just to give you an idea of how valuable that ship's cargo was at the time.
The average monthly pay for a laborer, for a sailor, would be one écoup.
So it's hard to compare, but in terms of purchasing power, in today's dollars, that ship's cargo would be worth $100 million.
So it started sailing back from Syria, very exotic.
But along with these precious fabrics, it had the plague on the boat.
On April 3rd, a Turkish passenger died.
Seven sailors and the ship's doctor died of the plague on the return voyage.
So the captain stopped at Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean, where he got a bill of health.
He was quarantined.
Not a clean bill of health.
Ability was quarantined.
And the ship sailed on to Livorno, Italy.
And the Italian doctors said to the ship, keep going on, move on.
And the captain wanted to move on quickly too.
He had such valuable cargo and he wanted to arrive at Marseille before the annual Beaucare Faire, a medieval festival that actually continues on to this day.
Huge party, dancing, drinking, commerce, the running of the bulls, believe it or not, like in Pamplona.
So this ship's captain wanted to get back to Marseille quickly because he had 100,000 écoups, let's call it $100 million worth of stuff he wanted to sell.
So this captain, Jean-Baptiste Chateau, he pulls into Marseille and he tells the owners of the ship and the goods within it what's really going on.
As in, there's no way they're going to allow that ship into Marseille without the maximum quarantine, 40 days, maybe more.
Well, the owners, they got a fortune on this boat.
So the owners, they go to work on their friends on the sanitation board.
Tell them, oh, the plague is a thing of the past.
What are you worried about?
So the sanitation board simply tells the captain to go back to Livorno, Italy, another beautiful port city, to get a clean bill of health from there.
Go back to Livorno and have them give you a clean bill of health, not just a bill of health.
Have them say you're clean.
Now, had they checked the captain's log, they would see he was in Syria where there was the plague.
Had they made inquiries, they would find that a bunch of sailors and the ship's doctor had died.
But instead, they just sent the ship to get someone else's paperwork in another town.
Now, Livorno is about 500 kilometers away, approximately.
So several days each way.
But that's better than a 40, 60 day quarantine in Marseille that you might never be allowed in.
And the Livorno authorities in Italy, for whatever reason, they just issue him a clean bill of health, which he sails right back to Marseille, arriving back at the island of Pomigue on May 25th.
So after a short quarantine, he's let in on June 4th.
And there it went.
The plague was back in Marseille in 1720.
That is very recent when you think about it.
That's 100 years after Shakespeare's time.
That's 50 years after the Hudson's Bay Company is founded in Canada.
So it's not medieval times.
Within weeks, it was obvious what had happened.
They quarantined the ship, then they burned the ship.
Yeah, a bit late for that, fellas.
There were about 90,000 people living in Marseille then.
50,000 of them died.
Of course, even in those days, people traveled.
Another 50,000 died in neighboring areas of France.
The plague raged on for two and a half years until January 1723.
The authorities literally built a wall, a plague wall, to seal off Marseille from the rest of France.
That wall is still there today.
So what's my point of this horrible, horrible story?
I suppose like the Spanish flu details I shared with you yesterday, it's just a reminder that in the sweep of history, this coronavirus will likely not be remembered for its death toll, but rather the fumbling of the issue in the first place by our political leaders, the making it into an economic crisis, the restricted civil liberties.
We've had, thankfully, fewer than 3,000 deaths in Canada compared to the 50,000 deaths from the Spanish flu, and that was when our country had one quarter of the population.
Much less than the countless millions dead from the plague.
It's interesting.
I was reading that throughout the 18th century, there were more than 20,000 ships that arrived in Marseille from Syria or Turkey or North Africa, places where the plague was rampant.
Out of those 140 ships or less than 1% were contaminated.
Plague ships continued to arrive in Marseille for decades, but they were stopped and quarantined.
One in 100 had the plague, one in 1,000 contaminated Marseille at all, and then that one, that one ship killed 100,000 souls.
Boy, I'm glad I live now and here rather than then and there, aren't you?
But let me tell you what I have learned besides a horrific historical chapter of which there were countless instances around Europe and around the world.
The flu, remember the plague came from Asia originally.
Well, number one thing I learned is that quarantines, they work, or at least they work well.
They've worked for nearly a millennium.
You check out new arrivals, you see where they're from, you ask them questions, you observe them, you check their paperwork, then you give them a bill of health.
You don't just let them walk right through from a danger zone in the middle of a pandemic as Trudeau did.
This picture of a touchscreen that I took on my last international flight back in March, that's all there was.
One button, one sentence.
It wasn't even clear.
It was like giving a clean bill of health from Livorno.
No one really checked.
Border Pandemic Quandary00:02:26
People are in a rush.
They have a festival to go to.
Come on, I got to do a deal.
It was meaningless.
So you need to check.
And you need to treat different people differently.
If you're coming in from Syria in 1720 and there's a plague and your crew are dying daily, yeah, that's a few red flags.
If you're coming in from somewhere safe and your crew and your passengers look fine, you can have a quicker quarantine.
But the point is you quarantine the sick people so you don't have to lock down all the healthy people.
Taiwan did this.
You'll recall my guests the other day saying they only quarantined 50,000 people in the whole country.
They didn't quarantine the whole country at 23 million in Taiwan.
Just those coming in from China.
Why treat everyone as if they're a carrier?
Why send everyone to the Lazareto?
Just send the people who came in from China.
Marseille didn't make everyone live like a criminal in a prison, just arriving ships just for a few weeks until one guy lied, and with the cooperation of the Marseille Government Sanitation Board and the Livorno Government Sanitation Board, he lied his way through.
One last thing, that plague wall, that's a kind of border, isn't it?
It's a border within a country, but it's a border nonetheless.
It's a fence, a six-foot-high fence.
It's what you do no matter how painful it is when the plague is mowing down half your people.
You enforce a real physical border, not like we're doing at Wroxham Road.
But, oh, here's Patty Haidu on that.
Canadians think that we can stop this at the border, but what we see is a global pandemic, meaning that border measures actually are highly ineffective and in some cases can create harm.
Yeah, no, walls work.
Quarantines work.
The Marseille Plague of 1720 is the exception that proves the rule.
It only didn't work because lying politicians foiled it.
I got to ask you, though, Marseille that made its money out of global trade, trade from the Far East, trade actually from China that made its way slowly to Marseille.
How rich did you have to get for it to be worth wiping out 50% of the city, half of your family?
For hundreds of years, Marseille made a bet that it could vet the plague because the money was so good.
Was it worth it when half of your children and grandchildren are killed?
Why Quarantines Work00:03:10
I don't know.
Well, thank God the coronavirus is not as deadly as the plague.
Or Patty Haidu, like the Livorno Sanitation Board, would have got us all killed.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, every day at around 11 a.m. Eastern Time, the media party lines up outside Justin Trudeau's 22-room cottage.
That's what they call a 22-room mansion.
And like Groundhog Day, he comes out and they ask him the softest of softballs.
Let me just show you a snippet of that.
Today they asked the most pressing question, and they asked it again and again, different reporters, I should say.
How come some hand sanitizer being imported from the United States doesn't have French and English labeling?
I'm not even kidding.
That's the kind of tough accountability journalism that Trudeau gets for about half an hour a day before going back into his 20-room, 22-room cottage.
Take a look.
Good morning, Mr. Trudeau.
Health Canada yesterday decided to lift certain restrictions with respect to cleaning products.
The Official Languages Committee says that this is about people's safety.
Why was that decision made?
And why should there not be proper information on products coming in from the United States?
That's a very good question.
We need to protect the safety of consumers and products must be labeled in both official languages.
But in an extreme situation such as the one we're in now, we also recognize that there needs to be a proper balance between some vulnerabilities.
And in some situations, we are ready to permit unilingual information on packaging.
But as I say, companies are working hard to try and rectify that.
This is not something that should be accepted in Canada.
And it's really just because of the extreme situation in which we find ourselves.
We decided to authorize this, but we would certainly prefer that this not happen because our linguistic duality is not just a question of our Canadian identity.
It's also a question of safety for consumers.
Well, rebel news journalists are not allowed to ask questions of Justin Trudeau.
So to kill the time, we actually have to do real journalism instead of softballs about why won't you be mad about this emergency equipment not being bilingual?
We've done that journalism in various forms, including, for example, our FightTheFines.com campaign, where we're actually going to Canadians whose civil liberties have been violated.
Teresa Tam's Warning00:14:10
But one of the things I'm so proud of in our journalism this past month has been the investigative journalism about the misconduct on the part of the government.
You might recall, about a week or two ago, Sheila Gunnreid blew the whistle on an $838,000 gift that Justin Trudeau made of our tax dollars, giving it to the Wuhan Virology Institute.
Yes, the selfsame virus lab from which this virus emerged.
Trudeau gave them money after the pandemic.
This wasn't years ago.
This was last month.
Sheila Gunnreid had that national scupa.
Other newspapers followed, even if they didn't always give credit.
Well, Sheila has another doozy today.
Without further ado, let me bring in our chief reporter, Sheila Gunread.
Viascape Sheila, how you doing today?
Hey, I'm great.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Well, you're so welcome.
You know, Richard Nixon was once asked what it took to get through law school.
And he said, and I'm a perfect Nixon quote, it takes an iron ass.
And what he meant was you just have to sit down and read the books and read and read and read and read.
That was his takeaway from law school.
Sometimes that's what journalism looks like, reading through a 400-page haystack looking for that golden needle.
That's exactly what you did.
Yeah, that's what I do almost all the time.
I have just a PDF file on my computer or on my tablet, and I just sit there and just leaf through every single page.
Because these things, you can't even search them, you know, using keywords most of the time.
But that's really all journalism is, is being curious and being willing to do the work it takes to find that needle in a haystack.
And in this instance, it was, you know, two paragraphs, really, or three paragraphs in amongst 400 pages of briefing notes provided to Teresa Tam by officials in her own ministry who were trying their best to warn her and the health minister that the coronavirus was indeed spreading person to person in Wuhan, China.
And they were doing that as early as January 15th of 2020.
Now that's important because, of course, Taiwan knew something was fishy even in December.
They sent a crew right into China.
They rang the alarm.
They shut down the flights.
The rest of the world wasn't quite as alert.
But even as you mentioned, as early as mid-January, Canadian public health officials were ringing the bell.
Let's put up the first document that on January 14th here, the risk assessment, public health assessment of, what's PHAC stand for again, Sheila?
Public Health Agency of Canada.
Got it.
So their assessment of public health risk to Canada associated with the virus in Wuhan, China, was updated as of January 14th to consider the potential for exposure beyond the Huanan seafood market and limited human-to-human transmission.
So until January 14th, people were believing the World Health Organization, Chinese Communist Party cover-up, which is, oh, don't worry about it, guys.
There's nothing.
There's no human-to-human transmission.
It was just, you know, bats or something in the Huanan seafood market.
But on January 14th, the Public Health Agency of Canada said, no, that's not true anymore.
We're going to revise our thinking.
Teresa Tam had that info on Jan 14-15, but she didn't follow it, did she?
She chose to follow Beijing's guidance instead of Canada's guidance, didn't she?
Right.
So they updated the information on the 14th.
She's presented with like a situational report on the 15th with this new information that it is spreading person to person, that a husband who worked in the seafood market gave it to his wife who had never been to the seafood market.
She had that information.
But not only did she have that information, she also had other credible information, information coming from the American CDC, as well as UK researchers who were saying this is far worse than what China is letting on.
But Teresa Tam chose to disregard that information from credible sources and instead opted to go on information from the World Health Organization who was getting their information from China.
We know that as late as January 26th, so 11 full days later, after Teresa Tam's own officials were warning her about how the virus was being spread, she was still tweeting out that it wasn't spreading person to person at all.
Yeah, so it had been 10 days since her own staff said, Dr. Tam, no, no, no, you can get it spread.
And by the way, the reason she tweeted that out on January 26th, Sheila, is because the day before, Ontario's provincial government had a press conference saying, yikes, we've got our first Canadian patient.
And wouldn't you know it, his wife got sick too.
So obviously, it was being transmitted patient to patient because a man got it.
Then his wife got it.
The idea that on January 26th, she's still towing the World Health Organization line, despite the evidence in our own country and 11 days earlier, the advice from her own staff, she was ignoring independent Canadian science and substituting Chinese-backed WHO propaganda.
She doesn't work for Canada only.
She works for Canada and the WHO, and where they conflict, she chooses China as WHO instead of Canada.
Yeah, and it conflicted almost immediately, didn't it?
This is the first pandemic that we've really had to deal with since Teresa Tam became the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada.
This is the first time where she had an opportunity to show her allegiance to Canada as opposed to the World Health Organization.
And she didn't do what we are paying her to do.
She opted to side with the World Health Organization, an organization that refused early on to declare a pandemic when the world needed a pandemic to be declared.
And she herself is guilty of spreading the misinformation she now claims to be fighting.
I mean, how many times did she say that Canadians should not wear masks when eventually she had to flip-flop on the issue of wearing masks and gave an interview very recently to Rosie Barton saying the new normal in Canada is going to be wearing masks.
Teresa Tam isn't using scientific evidence to protect Canadians.
She is political in nature, obfuscating about masks because her boss, Justin Trudeau, gave them away, and telling Canadians that the virus wasn't spreading person to person because her other bosses at the World Health Organization were kowtowing to China.
Yeah.
You know, I'm skeptical of public health officers.
They are technically medical doctors most of the time, but they haven't had an actual patient in decades.
They are really healthcare bureaucrats with an MD, which is different.
They have a different worldview.
They look at the whole ant colony of society and say, well, it's too bad we got to smoosh those ants, as opposed to a patient that cares about every ant.
A patient, and I'm using the ant colony example because that's the thing.
They don't think of each of us as a patient to be cared about.
They just have their vast schemes.
And the reason I say that is this.
Donald Trump has his public health experts also.
Dr. Fauci is one of them, and Dr. Berks, I think, is her last name, is another.
But it's very clear that they are operating based on their own expertise and ideology.
Now, I think that they can be quite wrong, but no one for a second would credibly think that Trump's advisors, especially Dr. Fauci, who's a lifelong Democrat, is just giving an answer to paper over what Trump himself thinks.
You can even see some tension between them.
I think whatever you think about Fauci, I mean, I disagree with him more all the time.
He's actually speaking what he thinks is the right answer.
Teresa Tam cannot say the same thing because her answers are flip-flopping based on whatever political boss of the day leans on her.
So it's not, at least Dr. Fauci is going from what he in his heart of hearts believes.
He's not tailoring it to appease power, which is exactly what Teresa Tam is doing.
What's the point of a public health officer if it's simply a politician with an MD?
I find it very frustrating, and there's zero accountability for her.
Anyone who questions her is called a racist.
Derek Sloan, the conservative MP, proved that.
Yeah, and I mean, when you look at President Trump and Dr. Fauci, there's a check and a balance there.
I'm sure Dr. Fauci would like it to go one way, but Donald Trump is also taking all those other considerations into account, the economy, people's psychological health in a bad economy.
Trump is worried about those real things to balance, you know, the examination of the ant colony that his chief medical officer is doing.
In Canada, we don't have that.
We have a prime minister who has basically abdicated full control over our economy to someone who's completely unaccountable.
She's unelected, and she doesn't have any background to temper her medical observations that seem to be going back and forth all the time.
She doesn't care about the economy.
She doesn't care about getting people back to work.
Yet, she seems to be the executive in control of everything right now.
Yeah, it's so weird.
She's a servant of elected politicians, but you tell me who her master is.
It's like she has no one, she has no boss because Trudeau is hiding out every day.
I want to show you a clip of Dr. Tam that I came across yesterday, a national film board movie about 10 years ago called Outbreak.
I watched the whole thing last night.
It's about two hours.
I thought it was interesting.
Professor Michael Bliss, the Toronto historian, basically describes the 1885 smallpox epidemic in Montreal.
It was very interesting to learn about that.
About 5,000 people died of smallpox in Montreal 135 years ago, which was proportionally quite large.
And it was quite a troubling time, obviously.
So what this film board movie called Outbreak did is it told that story and it juxtaposed it with a hypothetical modern day story of what would happen if an epidemic broke out in Montreal, if someone flew in from London and infected Montreal.
And so they went back and forth between here's what happened in Montreal 135 years ago with here's what might happen now.
So they had this pretend scenario.
And one of the people who was interviewed in this documentary was Teresa Tam.
And I just want you to watch this 90-second clip from the movie where Teresa Tam in her trademark, unemotional, catatonic style, talks about licensing people, basically branding them.
Do you have the virus or not?
Do you have the vaccine or not?
We might put you in a detention center.
You have to comply.
Very Orwellian.
Take a look at this documentary from a few years ago.
I think the public has to know this is one of the worst case scenarios in terms of an infectious disease outbreak in that their cooperation is sought.
If there are people who are non-compliant, there are definitely laws and public health powers that can quarantine people in mandatory settings.
It's potential.
You could track people, put bracelets on their arms, have police and other setups to ensure quarantine is undertaken.
It is better to be pre-emptive and precautionary and take the heat of people thinking you might be overreactionary, get ahead of the curve, and then think about whether you've overreacted later.
But it's such a serious situation that I think decisive early action is the key.
Police checkpoints are set up on all the bridges, and everyone leaving the city is required to show proof of vaccination.
Those who refuse to cooperate are taken away to temporary detention centers.
Yeah, so that's the woman who not only doesn't bat an eye when talking about imprisoning us for not following her advice.
Preemptive Measures00:03:21
Like I say, that's not a real doctor.
That's a public health officer.
She's running around now, not just in charge, but taking direction from the World Health Organization.
Last word to you, Sheila.
You know, it's funny that Teresa Tam would advocate for such things as stripping Canadians of their charter rights during the time of a pandemic, because that's just how you generally live in China.
And it seems as though she's beholden to the World Health Organization, who's taking all their advice from China.
China has always had imperialistic designs on the rest of the world, and it seems as though they're getting their way.
We're submitting to China's imperialism, and we're doing it to ourselves because We didn't listen to the people that Teresa Tam should have been listening to back on January 15th.
Yeah, that's so crazy.
Well, folks, I invite you to watch all of Sheila's report.
It's about a 10-minute report.
You can find it elsewhere on our website, including the documents that she refers to.
One of the things we like to do at Rebel News is when we have a source document, a primary document, we like to put that on the website so you can see for yourself the basis of our reports.
Sheila, congratulations.
I'm so proud of your journalism.
Scoop after scoop.
And not to diminish in any way what you do, but you're based at home on the farm in northern Alberta.
You're not in Ottawa, Toronto.
You're not in the center of the universe.
You're not asking those softball questions to Justin Trudeau, but you have managed to break more investigative scoops on this virus from your log cabin than all the fancy pants media party types in Toronto and Ottawa.
And I think it's sort of clear why.
Yeah, because I'm not paid off.
Is that why?
Well, because you're actually showing basic journalistic curiosity, follow the facts wherever they lead.
That's a phrase we have around here at Rebel News.
Follow the facts wherever they lead.
Just follow them and just tell the story as you go.
Ask basic questions, who, what, where, why, when.
And I guess if you're on the dole from Justin Trudeau, you're not allowed to ask anything other than that one Reuters reporter who the other day said, Mr. Trudeau, how are you holding up?
You sure you're not facing burnout from working so hard?
Oh, I can't even believe Trudeau didn't crack a smile at that.
I mean, it's just so funny.
Oh my God.
Well, Sheila, we're very proud of you, and we thank you for your work.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right, there you have it Sheila Gunrida, Chief Reporter, Breaking the Stories.
Can I recommend that you watch her full video?
Because we just showed a couple of documents from it, but she really makes the case.
And I encourage you to find it elsewhere on our site.
Stay with us.
more head on.
Hey, welcome back.
What do you think about my amateur study into the history of the plague in Marseille, France?
I've never been to Marseille, but I certainly want to go.
And if I go, I think I'm going to try and go to those quarantine hospital prisons.
It's a strange combination of things, wasn't it?
They were called Lazzarettos in Italy.
Like Lazarus, you go there and you rise again.
Plague Lessons Learned00:00:57
I don't know.
It kept the health and it kept an order to things for centuries until it didn't.
I guess the plague would have come to those cities no matter what.
Thankfully, the coronavirus has not killed half of us as it killed, as the Black Death killed half of Marseille.
But I think again, as when yesterday I went through the common sense of our great-grandparents in the Spanish flu, maybe the common sense of the sanitation board in Marseille 300 years ago, other than their one error, maybe that saved the city for centuries.
I think we can learn from them.
I tell you, I would trust the wisdom of Marseille 300 years ago more than I would trust the wisdom of our own leadership today.
What do you think?
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.