Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Génie’s COVID-19: The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic traces Canada’s lockdowns to Wuhan’s 2019 exodus, ignored by WHO despite skepticism. They blame Justin Trudeau’s authoritarian admiration and health bureaucrats’ fear-driven power grabs, citing Neil Ferguson’s wildly inaccurate modeling as justification. Sweden’s proactive, consultative approach contrasts sharply with Canada’s reactive chaos, fueling a "snitch culture" like Calgary’s 311 violations line. Lockdowns won’t end the virus, vaccines won’t stop transmission fast, and public backlash may shift power—if mainstream media ignores their footnoted critique, complicity in the narrative deepens. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
However, this is the internet, so you can listen whenever you feel like and also watch whenever you feel like.
Tonight, my guests, that's right, guests as in two, are Marco Navarrogini and Barry Cooper.
They're both political scientists who have co-written a new book titled COVID-19, The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic.
And it examines Canada's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and it traces the roots of the moral panic all the way back to the early days of the emerging virus in China.
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Is it better to be overly cautious than not cautious enough?
Now, what if being too cautious ruined the economy, stripped you of your civil liberties, and caused catastrophic psychological fallout in your friends and neighbors?
Yes, friends, tonight I'm discussing Canada's response to the COVID-19 pandemic with two political scientists who've written a brand new book on the topic.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
There's a brand new book out.
It's called COVID-19, The Politics of Pandemic Moral Panic, and it is out on Amazon as we speak.
It's written by two of my fellow Albertans, Marco Navarro Gini and Barry Cooper, in conjunction with the Frontier Center for Public Policy.
Now, Navarro Gini is the president and CEO of the Haltane Research Institute, and Barry Cooper is a longtime professor at the University of Calgary.
And as I mentioned earlier, both men are political scientists, and they joined together to write their new book that examines Canada's pandemic response from the very beginning, from the early days of a strange unknown virus emerging in Wuhan, China in late 2019 to today, to the economic and social fallout of increased lockdowns and lockdowns after lockdowns driven by early federal inaction,
moral panic, flawed modeling, and health bureaucrats with a taste for power.
The gentlemen joined me in an interview via Zoom to discuss the book, what inspired the book, and their predictions for the future.
it out.
So joining me now are two political scientists.
We've got Marco Navarrogini.
I didn't put any emphasis on any of the syllables there that are probably right.
That's okay.
And Barry Cooper.
Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and coming on to talk about your new book.
It's called COVID-19: The Politics of Pandemic Moral Panic.
And I think this is truly the first real analysis of Canada's COVID response, both at the federal level, but also you've analyzed some of the responses at the provincial level.
Why did you want to do this?
And whichever one of you wants to answer, go ahead.
Marco, you go first.
Thank you.
We had independently sort of commented on issues related to the pandemic, Barry and I.
And then we noticed that we had some overlaps.
And so we decided to do this little project together.
But the main thing, really, the broad question that prompted the work is that we both had noticed that we have had pandemics before, in five in the last 100 and so years since the so-called Spanish flu.
But nowhere ever had there been any full lockdown of entire societies.
And so we started wondering, you know, why is this and why now?
So the response really is what is new here, and not so much the fact that there are pandemics because we have had pandemics, many.
Barry, do you have anything to add?
I would add only that this is kind of a preliminary report and that there'll be later iterations as we sort of come to, let's say, more questionable policies by these various governments.
And we also refine our understanding of what, at least from my point of view, Marco may see things somewhat differently, but the way the bureaucrats have taken control over politics and are attempting to terrify every Canadian so that they do exactly what these, I mean, to be kind, these academic mediocrities want us to do.
And I think that that, I think that's eventually where we're heading.
That's the novel political part of what I think we've discovered by looking at the government response to this medical problem.
You know, and that's one of the questions I have on my list of things to discuss with you guys.
And we'll get to that in a second.
But I mean, you really do a historical analysis of how the pandemic began and the early handling of it, say in December and January.
For example, there are things that I think I'm a pretty close pandemic follower, but somehow this escaped me that January 4th, 2020, the New York Times had reported that 175,000 people had left Wuhan in one day.
I mean, there was an outpouring of people from Wuhan in those early days.
I think further on in your analysis, You say that there had been millions of people who had left Wuhan for the Lunar New Year.
And at the same time, World Health Organizations were the World Health Organization and their bureaucrats, and to some extent, Canadians who are involved in that process, were praising China for their handling of the pandemic.
Yeah, that's where you get into the very strange kind of international politics of it.
I bet you that there are people in the intelligence organizations in this country as well as in the UK and the United States that have a pretty clear idea of what was going on.
And they probably have their own theories about what ties all this stuff together.
But it's certainly clear, it was certainly clear by, say, late February or March that the relationship between the PRC and the WHO was, let's say, not healthy.
It was acting, the World Health Organization was acting basically as a mouthpiece for communist China.
And I mean, there's just absolutely no question of that because you can document their twists and turns.
But as to what was actually happening in China, we're still pretty much in the dark about that.
I figure it'll eventually come out.
There'll be some deep state guy will blab, and of course, the Chinese will deny it.
But the circumstantial evidence is pretty compelling.
Marco, what role do you think this appeasement of communist China?
And let's just set aside the World Health Organization for a moment, because I think we pretty know that they, we pretty well know that they are infected with the virus of China sycophancy at the World Health Organization.
But what role do you think this Chinese appeasement played in the early decision making of Trudeau's liberal government when it came to such things as closing the border, limiting incoming travelers, or for that matter, calling anybody who questioned the fact that the border was left wide open racist?
What role do you think that played in all of this?
Well, we have known for quite a while that our prime minister is an admirer of the People's Republic and their, as he put it, their basic style of dictatorship.
They get things done, and he's a great admirer of that.
I think at the very beginning, there is a kind of what we call a moral panic or aspects of it related to pointing the finger at China.
And we see it coming out of the WHO, that they're tied into this in many ways.
But we also see it out of the communications of the Canadian government and Canadian officials that they don't want to say that this is coming from China.
I mean, everybody knows, but they don't want to say the words China.
And every time somebody suggests it, then they would say that somebody's racist.
It's basically the woke kind of mentality that wants to protect things that need not be protected in many ways.
We see it also from the Minister of Health challenging journalists for asking difficult questions about Chinese data and that sort of stuff.
And so it's in a sense perhaps the admiration of the Prime Minister and of course the minions paying attention to what the Prime Minister admires.
But there is also a kind of a wokeness about not being able to mention China because immediately people think, and people think this stuff, that Canadians are going to be attacking Chinese people or people of Chinese origin and that sort of stuff.
So it's a kind of panic in some respects as well.
You know, and it's true that that is the bigotry of low expectations to think that normal Canadians cannot separate the Chinese communist government from regular Chinese people.
In fact, in my experience, especially in the lower mainland of BC, some of the largest critics of the communist state are new Canadians from China who are finally able to speak their mind about the issue.
I wanted, Barry, you mentioned the moral entrepreneurs in all of this.
And that's how you describe these unelected health bureaucrats who seem to be making all these extra parliamentary rules and regulations for controlling our lives.
How did they, I guess they sort of seized power using health regulations, and now we are seeing, you know, people's lives being stomped on?
Yeah, it's without diminishing the importance that this has for the actual individuals, where it can, you know, be genuine existential threats to their well-being.
If you look at it from a social science point of view, which is, you know, that's what we do, and it tends to be somewhat impersonal, it's a kind of novel appearance on the political scene of people who otherwise, a year ago, we didn't know the names of the chief medical officer of health of Canada or of Alberta or of her colleague out in BC.
Now they're celebrities.
It doesn't change what they are.
You know, there were bureaucrats a year ago.
They're still bureaucrats.
What's interesting from our way of looking at politics is how they came to this position of prominence.
And that's actually a pretty big question.
A lot of it has to do with the sense that not just Canadians, but modern people around the world have with respect to science.
In this case, it happens to be medical science or so-called medical science.
In fact, the medical science is a lot more ambiguous than if you listen to these three bureaucrats, you'd ever imagine.
You see the same thing in climate change.
The science there is just as ambiguous as the official spokesman for, say, Environment Canada say it is.
Even in Environment Canada, there are debates, but you'd never know it if you listen to the government.
So it becomes part of a pattern where commonsensical Canadians are willing to give up what they see before their very eyes to listen to a bunch of people who claim that they have access to a magical world of science, which is largely imaginary.
Models Gone Wrong00:04:42
And that's a very interesting problem where we give up our sense of reality that we can see right in front of our noses.
Marco, I want to ask you about some of these predictions and modeling.
And I think it was fascinating that Barry pointed out the overlays between the climate change debate and then COVID, the COVID debate.
The modeling has been absolutely wrong from the very beginning.
And from the outside looking in, it feels like some of the modeling was produced to create fear so that the populace would be open to heavy lockdowns and heavy restrictions on our civil liberties.
How did they get the modeling so wrong?
There are several issues with the modeling, and this is a really good question.
On the one hand, part of what happens, of course, is that the modeling is simply a representation of something, a snapshot, a picture.
And this picture is constructed largely from a whole set of assumptions, bits and pieces, if you will, from actual reality.
And those bits and pieces are chosen.
So they're driven by assumptions.
They're driven by a certain type of belief in the people who are putting it, who are putting it together.
And so the first problem really is that the models are not able to handle the complexity of reality and the complexity of all the human interactions and all the different things that must be taken into account in order to be able to have a glimpse of what could happen with the expansion of a viral contagion.
like this one.
That's the first issue that these kinds of statisticians, often enough, they tend to marry the reality that they have painted as though it was the real thing.
But the second problem is, of course, that there are competing models and that we seem to have honed in on one and one alone, happens to be the scariest one.
So you were asking me about whether they are designed to create fear.
Maybe they are, but certainly some are more prone to drive fear than others.
And those are the ones that had the largest prognosticated numbers of deaths.
They happen to have been made by this guy named Ferguson.
And the thing about Ferguson and his model is, of course, that not only was it wrong, but it was wrong by several orders of magnitude.
And this was not the first time that his models were wrong.
He has a long string, a long record of wrong models and modeling going back decades.
And so for the life of me, I don't understand how, A, we picked that model.
And B, then we shut down anyone else who had any kind of competing model that was perhaps less alarmist and maybe to some extent more reliable.
So those issues, and this, of course, connects to what Barry was saying, that the people who picked these models are the medical officers that are advising the policymakers.
And so if there is something to be said here, is that the medical bureaucrats honed in on the alarmist or the most alarmist models, and those are the ones or seem to have been the ones that they put in front of the policymakers.
Just like climate change.
Just like climate change.
Just like climate change, right?
And dismiss anything else, dismiss any other possibility, dismiss solar flares, dismiss any kind of other actual reality.
Yeah.
It's interesting how it quickly turns into a doomsday scenario.
You pick the scariest thing.
That's the one we'll build policy around that and just discard everything else.
And it happens across the board, but there is a strong overlay between climate change modeling and COVID modeling.
And now we're connecting them.
This morning, one of the headlines I read said that the cost of food this coming year is going to go up 17, 20% because of COVID-19 and climate change.
Comparing Canadian and Swedish Pandemic Responses00:04:01
So there you have the two boogeymen coming together.
And I read that article too, and it didn't mention carbon taxes adding anything to the cost of food.
Isn't that fascinating?
We all know that if we pay more taxes, the weather will improve.
That's right.
And if we pay more taxes to Justin Trudeau, we'll have more money in our pockets.
Apparently, that's also how that works.
And the budget will balance itself.
Barry, I wanted to ask you about some of the comparisons to the Swedish approach versus the Canadian response here, because we are almost a year out from both countries handling their pandemic response.
And we're seeing drastically different results and consequences in both countries.
Yeah, since Marco wrote that part.
Sure.
And he has family members in Sweden.
He can tell you a much better answer than I can.
Everything I know about Sweden, I learned from Marco.
Okay.
Barry's in trouble already, if that is true.
The comparison with Sweden, we sort of decided, we originally started comparing what was happening here with a lot of different places.
You know, we started looking at Japan, we looked at Taiwan, we looked at different countries.
But what became actually clear is that Taiwan isn't really like Canada.
And, you know, South Korea isn't really like Canada.
Or there are less points of comparison, shall we say.
So Sweden seemed to be a better model.
And of course, Sweden is also run by a social democratic party.
One would argue that the current party in power is not really a liberal party in the full sense of the term.
And so there's a great many points of comparison between Sweden and Canada.
What is interesting about Sweden is how they came to their decision-making power.
And it's an interesting story, actually, because the Swedes several years ago decided that they didn't really need emergency contingencies or anything like that because they were at the time being governed by a kind of pie-in-the-sky government who thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Sweden was no longer in any kind of danger from being invaded,
overrun, and needing emergency plans.
Then, of course, Russia invades Crimea and they suddenly panic and they go to the garbage can and pick out their last iteration of an emergency plan and they decide to revamp it by essentially involving the entire population.
They had hearings, they had consultations.
So the short of the longest story is that by the time they are done, every Swedish household has some kind of a pamphlet from the government about what's to be done in situations of emergency.
They've all participated.
By great coincidence, the plan was finished last December.
And this summer, they were supposed to hold kind of war games or exercises to test it out.
Well, they didn't need to do that because COVID-19 arrived and they were all ready to go.
But the point of all that story is to say that because they had contingencies, because they had thought about it, because most of the population had been involved in the process, they were less prone to panic.
I'm not saying that there were no Swedish people who panicked.
There were, of course, and there were many who wanted the government to go into full lockdown.
There are still many Swedes who are wanting to lock down and they're panicking now, and the government is pushing them in that direction.
Effects On Culture00:02:52
But Sweden stands out from all the other countries because they had undergone this kind of progress, excuse me, process, and they were less prone to panic.
Now, Barry, maybe I'll ask you this question then.
I want to ask you about the effects on the culture because of the COVID regulations.
You're a social scientist, so maybe you can help me with this.
I'm concerned that there is this direction towards a snitch culture that we've really never had in this country, and it's being reinforced with the crackdown on civil liberties.
Is that a threat to us?
Is that becoming ingrained in our culture?
And a second part of that question is: is this whole thing becoming normalized?
Are people sort of accepting that this is the way we're going to live from now on?
That's a very interesting observation, particularly with respect to the snitches.
I mean, it kind of reminds you of the Stasi in East Germany.
And I mean, in Calgary, we had the 311 line repurposed as a snitch line.
And I thought, what is the matter with our mayor?
I mean, he would be one of the first victims of the Stasi way of looking at things.
On the other hand, there's a lot of resistance to that.
And that should give us all a great deal of confidence that we're simply not listening to our betters for very good reason, mostly, I think, because they're lying through their teeth and they know it.
But the snitch calls or the snitch lines should be a concern to everybody.
And one of the reasons for that is that most people still have an ability to make commonsensical judgments on the basis of their own experiences.
And they're not going to snitch on their neighbors.
And they find it offensive that, say, I mentioned the city of Calgary repurposing one of its emergency lines as a snitch line.
And on the other hand, there is a lot of more or less organized.
I don't know that there's some sort of mastermind behind it, but with social media, you can create demonstrations pretty quickly against this kind of government, what, kind of tyrannical imposition of normalcy.
Continued Movements Amid Fear00:05:54
And I think that's going to continue.
I think there's going to be a real crisis of legitimacy for all of these politicians who have given up their role as political leaders and turned over the responsibilities to people who have no capacity to act politically, namely these bureaucrats who are concerned about one tiny little part of a current political crisis.
So it's going to be very interesting in the next six or eight months to see what happens to these characters.
Now, I guess this next question I'll throw to Marco.
So what do you predict will happen in the next six months or a year?
Are we going to see an end to the pandemic?
Are we going to see some of these civil liberties impositions rolled back?
And what's going to become of our politicians, particularly the conservative ones that I think we all kind of expected to take a less heavy-handed approach to the pandemic?
What are your predictions for, I guess, the short term?
For the very short term, I think it is pretty safe to say that the virus is not going to go away.
We've created this fantasy that if we all lock ourselves in our houses, the virus will disappear.
You know, let's remember that at the very beginning, they managed to get an enormous amount of consent about the lockdown by saying, all we need to do is hide for a couple of weeks and we're going to bend the curve, make sure that the health system isn't overwhelmed.
And, you know, this arrived, they claimed, suddenly, and so they needed to get ready.
The reality is, it's a virus.
Viruses have been around for tens of thousands of years.
They're not going to go away.
And their job, really, is to move around and get passed around.
That's how they live.
It's fantasy that they're going to end, and it's fantasy that they're going to end with a lockdown.
So we already, and the evidence is clear, right?
This is not opinion.
We had lockdowns in several countries.
And when we barely started to reopening, the virus A had not gone away, and then it resumed its rapid pace of advancement.
So unless we shut down absolutely everything, and we're not going to do that, even from Ottawa, the virus will continue to move at a certain pace.
The second thing is that the vaccine may change that dynamic, but there is an expectation that the vaccine is kind of a little wand, that we're going to wave around and the virus is going to stop.
Well, for starters, the plan to have the vaccine roll out in Canada is months long.
As far as I can tell, there is no plan, but the glimpses that we've managed to get is that this could be June, maybe, maybe even further before we vaccinate everybody who wants to be vaccinated.
So in the meantime, the virus will continue, will continue to move.
There'll be renewed calls for locking down until everybody is vaccinated.
And that's going to pose problems.
Now, the second part of the question is, you know, what's going to happen to all these politicians?
Well, the public is always fickle.
And for as long as you can peddle this idea that you can come on camera, all theory-eyed, and say, I'm going to shut down your Christmas, but I'm the guy you need.
And, you know, all of a sudden, the gringe comes disguised as a savior.
For as long as there is that, they might be able to convince people that that's what they need because what drives this thing is fear.
But you may have noticed that looking at the eyes, because that's more or less the only thing you can see in people at Costco or whatever, the fear in their eyes is not the same fear that there was in March.
In other words, this kind of stuff is kind of wearing thin to a certain extent.
And so there is only so far you can push it.
I doubt that a third lockdown will be as easy as the one pushing for a second one.
And there could be a third one because the natural logic of this is that there'd be more and more calls for another lockdown and all lockdown until the people who claim that they want zero transmission become zero transmission.
That's not going to happen.
There will never be zero transmission either.
The virus that caused SARS is still around.
The virus that caused the swine flu a few years ago is still around and now it's part of the cycle of the common flu every year.
So this particular virus, as new as we claim it is, isn't going away.
I would also predict to some extent that the people who have fared badly for presumably not wanting to lock everything down and not wanting to bankrupt everybody, their fortunes will probably change once the fear starts to wane and dissipate.
So there could be a kind of a flip.
And the people who continue to advocate for lockdowns may not know when to stop.
Flip Side Insights00:03:45
And that will be their demise.
Oh, from your lips to God's ears, Marco.
Barry, I want to give you a chance to let people know where they can find your book and see some of the other work that both of you are doing.
Well, probably the easiest place to get it's on Amazon.
Marco told me that yesterday it was trending in a very positive direction, which is always, you know, that's always good news.
I mean, not, you know, we're not going to be able to retire on our royalties, but to have this kind of information out there among Canadian, and there's some American interest in it as well, is, you know, that's always a good thing.
So for anybody who's watching that, you know, you might not agree with what we have to say, but that's partly because it contradicts everything you read in the mainstream media.
So, you know, go get it.
And it's called COVID-19.
Just go to Amazon, do COVID-19, it'll come up right away.
And then you can, you know, you'll learn about moral panics and all kinds of other stuff.
You'll even learn about Hobbes.
Yeah, and it's impeccably footnoted, by the way.
Marco, I know that you do some work with the Western Standard from time to time.
They publish some of your op-eds.
Where else can they find you?
I wear many hats.
Of course, one of them is I do write columns that often appear in the Western Standard.
This book has been a collaborative effort between Barry and I as individuals, but it's also been a collaborative effort between the Frontier Center for Public Policy, which is the sort of the official publisher, and the Haltane Research Institute, which is sort of a new research institute based here in Alberta, designed, if you will, to look at problems for landlocked territories.
And as you probably know, there are only two landlocked provinces in Canada.
So it's pretty much Western-based.
Yes, I would renew Barry's call.
It's a semi-interesting book at the very least, and it fits very nicely in Christmas stockings.
That's a great way to close the show.
Thank you so much, gentlemen, for taking the time to talk with me today.
And best of luck in the book sales, because I think this is valuable information that everybody needs to have.
It's a comprehensive look from all the aspects of the pandemic, both the economic, the medical, and the social side.
Thanks again.
Thanks very much.
It's a pleasure.
I've read Marco and Barry's new book from cover to cover.
It's fact-filled, remarkably well-foot-noted, and easy to digest even for non-experts like me.
And more importantly, it tells the other side of the story, beyond the official narrative of our benevolent, unelected overlord health bureaucrats and the politicians who empower them and the media who continue to enable them.
Which means, of course, you probably won't hear much about Marco and Barry's book in the mainstream media.
Again, the title of their new book is COVID-19, The Politics of Pandemic, Moral Panic, and it's available today on Amazon.
Well, everyone, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here at the same time in the same place next week.