Ezra Levant examines Ontario’s COVID-19 vaccine adverse event data—6 deaths reported provincially vs. 167 federally, with 9,698 events after 19M doses—highlighting AstraZeneca’s higher risks (488 serious cases, including myocarditis in young males and blood clots) and gender disparities (women three times more likely to react). He questions why vaccine-related harms aren’t tracked transparently like virus deaths, criticizes mandates forcing vaccination on those with natural immunity (e.g., Todd Zawicki’s case), and notes Pfizer’s efficacy drop to 42%. Comparing Israel’s third-dose push and New York’s exclusionary policies to Soviet-era bureaucratic abuses, Levant warns mandates disproportionately harm minorities while ignoring societal harms, framing them as an unethical experiment over civil liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take you through Ontario's official adverse event report.
That's a fancy way of saying people who get sick from the vaccines.
What's different, what's interesting, is the number that Ontario says have died from vaccines is different from what the federal government says has died from vaccines.
Why might there be a disagreement?
I wonder if politics is involved.
The number is in the triple digits, by the way.
I'll go through that using government sources and show you.
That's ahead.
But before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, do you know how many Canadians have died from the COVID vaccine?
It's public info, so why hasn't it been widely reported?
It's August 11th, 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 is government.
But why publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I'm going to show you some statistics about how many Canadians have been injured by vaccines, particularly the COVID vaccines, and how many have died from them.
Vaccine Risks Compared00:15:08
But first, I want you to know I support vaccines in general, although the conduct of the vaccine industry and the public health industry this past year has deeply eroded my trust in them.
I see that they are just as corruptible and partisan as any other institution in society.
But still, I believe in basic vaccines, tried and true ones, the ones I myself have taken, I suppose.
I'm aware that they don't always work, but over time, in some cases, over decades, we know enough about the risks of the original diseases and about the risks of the vaccines themselves and whether it seems worthwhile to take them.
I'm old enough, I'm 49, to vaguely remember that when we were kids, parents sometimes had things like chickenpox parties where healthy kids would deliberately be taken to play with other kids who were sick, so they'd catch the disease when they were young, and you'd get over it easily, the thinking being catching some of those diseases when you're a teenager or a grown-up is much, much worse.
I know there are risks each way.
There are risks in life.
No matter what you do, there are risks to doing nothing.
Here's a 20-second clip in French.
I'll translate it afterwards.
Oh, it's true enough, isn't it?
It's super true, actually.
Being old is not really a risk factor in itself.
It is, but being old and fat is the risk.
But really being old and fat and having two or three or four severe underlying conditions like heart disease or stroke or kidney, that's the risk.
And if you want to know what the riskiest thing is for a pandemic virus, coronavirus, according to the Globe of Mail and a public inquiry in Quebec, the biggest risk factor in Canada for coronavirus is if you're in the Quebec long-term care home where they believe in euthanasia.
Just hundreds and hundreds of people killed when you prescribe morphine and basically pull the plug.
I'm not quite sure why that's not called a sort of homicide, but that is actually the number one determinant of whether or not you lived or died in the past 18 months.
Are you not curious why Quebec, with less than a quarter of the population of Canada, had so many deaths, especially in the first year?
That's why, according to the doctors and the nurses who testified before the inquiry, it's because it's because they were killed.
So yeah, we don't have all the info yet about the coronavirus or the vaccines.
The virus itself, that goes to one side of the equation.
How risky or deadly is the problem we're trying to solve with vaccines?
In Canada, the death rate for the virus right now is currently zero per 100,000 population.
This is Teresa Tam's chart.
It's not quite zero, but it's so close to zero that her official website rounds it down to zero.
That's the threat here, her Public Health Canada page.
So that's what you're balancing any possible risk from a vaccine against.
How scared are you of the virus?
I put it to you that without the media, you probably wouldn't be scared at all.
If you don't know anyone who's in a Quebec nursing home, you probably don't know anyone who died from the virus this past year, statistically speaking.
You just probably don't.
But I bet you know someone who's had their life ruined, whether it's a business shutdown, a school year wrecked, a life cycle event like a wedding or a funeral just destroyed, a vacation scuppered, or even just daily life turned into a prison routine, always under rules and limits and watchful eyes of masked police.
So the vaccines are the other side of that equation.
I'm going to show you images right now that are not for the faint of hearts, so look away now if you must.
We believe in testing medicines and not just for a little while, testing for years because when a drug called thalidomide was tested insufficiently, moms had babies without limbs, terrible tragedy, a medicine that hurt people.
And that's why we test and test and you can't rush tests because how do you know how it affects babies in the long term or breastfeeding or a young man or a young woman's fertility later?
You don't know until time passes.
You can't rush those kind of tests.
So as we learn more and more about the virus itself and more and more people get the disease naturally and recover from it, the urgency of the vaccine becomes a little less important, doesn't it?
Which I think is why the pressure is being ratcheted up to take them.
If people were dropping like flies, if this disease were like Ebola or the black plague, you would not have to be giving away free lottery tickets or free donuts to encourage people to take a vaccine.
They would be clamoring for it.
When you have to force someone to take a vaccine, this is happening more and more, that violates the very notion of medical consent, personal bodily integrity.
Where's the pro-choice people now, I wonder?
Because here come the vaccine mandates, the vaccine passports, the vaccine police, the vaccine checkpoints, the vaccine laws, forced vaccines.
Oh, none of them will say it's truly forced.
You can always opt out.
If you just agree, you can't go to school or go to work or go to travel or go to a restaurant or I'm sure soon custody of your children in a divorce.
So yeah, you have the choice.
You just, if you make the wrong choice, you can't work or have a life.
By the way, Pfizer itself is not mandating that its own vaccine be used on its own staff.
Why?
Why is that?
That's sort of odd, isn't it?
Later in the show, we'll interview a lawyer suing a university for forcing a vaccine on a professor who is already immune to the virus.
So why should he take a vaccine that's not as effective and gives him risk?
Every day the CBC and the CTV and the rest of the fear mongers and Canadian media publish how many cases there are, especially the dangerous Delta variant.
They use such dramatic words.
They talk mainly about cases now since hospitals are empty.
And I mean that literally there are fewer than one COVID patient per hospital in Canada, as in most don't have a single patient, let alone full intensive care units.
So you can't talk about deaths from the virus or ICU patients or hospitalizations without giving away the fact that it's pretty much over.
It's just not a thing anymore.
It's what Alberta now says, it's endemic, is in the virus will always be there, like the annual flu is always there, but the crisis is passed.
Well, tell that to the media and tell it to Big Pharma.
Tell that to Justin Trudeau, who apparently bought 400 million vaccine doses, which I find very odd given that there's only 38 million people in Canada, including children and babies.
400 million, is he suggesting that we each need to take 10 doses, even babies?
Why would he buy so many?
There are so many Toronto shootings these days, by the way, and the police tweet about them all, that it's plain to me that more Torontonians are getting shot than are dying from COVID.
And most of those getting shot are not 90-year-olds, but being euthanized by long-term care homes.
They're young men.
So lots of statistics.
I've shown you some.
The fear mongers show you others.
But why don't we hear stats on a daily basis in the same way about people who are injured or killed from the vaccines themselves?
Is that not an interesting question?
I think it's interesting.
Is a death from the vaccine somehow less painful or tragic than a death from the virus itself?
Or is it more tragic or painful?
I'd say it's the same, but perhaps it's more avoidable, or at least something we should talk about and warn people about to make informed decisions.
And maybe we should figure it out a bit before pushing vaccines on children.
Just a thought.
It's not hard to report vaccine deaths or injuries.
Ontario, for example, publishes up-to-date details.
I suspect that will be stopped soon enough.
Here's the website.
You could find it pretty quickly yourself.
Google the words adverse events following immunization.
That's what they call them, AEFIs.
So it's a public health publication for the last seven months for Ontario only that we're looking at here.
So I think we can extrapolate that the national numbers about triple since Ontario has about triple, sorry, about one-third of the population of Canada.
Now, this document notes these incidents are not necessarily proven to be from the vaccine.
Let me read.
It is important to know that the adverse events described in this report are defined as any untoward medical occurrences that followed immunization and do not necessarily have a causal relationship with the vaccine.
So they're saying just because these health problems happened right after someone took the vaccine doesn't mean the vaccine caused it.
And that's technically true.
Of course, that's theoretically true.
But I think it's much more likely that you, if you have an adverse event right after a vaccine, it's much more likely to be true than the test for reporting deaths from COVID, which is actually reporting deaths with COVID typically 30-day.
And so you died, maybe from a heart attack or a stroke, but that death was blamed on COVID because you also happened to be tested positive for COVID within 30 days of the death.
I'm serious.
That is the definition of so many death stats for COVID.
That's why a person falling off a ladder was counted as a COVID death.
I'm not even kidding.
So, yeah, I think getting an allergic reaction a minute after getting the injection is likely caused by the injection, although not necessarily.
But let's go through it.
Let's look at the highlights here.
There are a total of 9,698 adverse event reports received following 19 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in Ontario to date, with a reporting rate of 49.8 per 100,000 doses administered, 0.05% of all doses administered.
Now, I appreciate them pointing out that these adverse events are rare.
I think that's true.
I don't see the same emphasis on deaths from the virus, which are rare and even more rare amongst certain age groups, like people under 40.
As I've shown you before, it's literally one in a million chance that a minor child in Ontario dies from the virus.
One in a million.
You never hear that.
But boy, do they want you to know that only 50 per 100,000 people have had adverse reactions to the vaccine.
That would be 500 per million.
Now, I think that's smallish, but minors dying from the virus is one in a million.
Let's read.
Of the total 9,698 adverse effect reports received to date, 9,210 adverse effect reports are non-serious.
488 adverse effects reports meet the serious definition, 5% of total reports.
The most commonly reported adverse events are allergic skin reactions and pain, redness, swelling of the injection site reported in 25.9% and 21.6% of the total adverse effect reports, respectively.
Okay, that's good to know.
Just an allergic reaction, and most aren't serious.
I'll read some more.
348 reports of events managed as anaphylaxis are reported, in which 25 reports also meet the serious definition.
Anaphylaxis, that's when you go into shock from an allergy.
That's pretty bad.
Let me read a bit more.
This is just a bit of jargon here.
20 reports of Guillain-Barre syndrome, if I'm saying that right.
572 reports include a COVID-19 vaccine-specific adverse event of special interest, in which 286 reports also meet the serious definition.
21 reports of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after receiving AstraZeneca vaccine, of which 16 are vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia.
That's some big words there.
You don't want to have any of those things.
215 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis after receipt of mRNA vaccines.
That's when your heart or the lining of your heart is inflamed.
That ain't good.
So those are the Ontario numbers, so roughly triple that for the country.
Say, do we have a nice clickable chart for this info province by province updated daily, like we do for the virus?
Oh, right, we don't.
Let's look at table one in Ontario.
There is a federal chart, I'll show you in a minute.
But for Ontario, table one, 488 serious reports in Ontario in six months.
You can see the rate by vaccine, Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca.
AstraZeneca is twice as likely to have adverse effects in Moderna, three times as likely as Pfizer.
Isn't that interesting?
AstraZeneca, that's the one Trudeau bought us a lot of.
And then he changed the dosage schedule, you might remember.
And then he said you can mix and match vaccines, remember?
The drug companies didn't say that.
They didn't test for that.
That was Trudeau's big idea.
So table two is interesting.
Look at the top.
Women are more than three times as likely as men to get an adverse event from a vaccine.
Did you know that?
And look by age.
Middle-aged women, age 40 to 49, are the most likely of all to get an adverse reaction.
Did you know that?
I should tell you that 40-year-old women are at an extremely low risk from the virus itself.
If you're healthy, not fat.
If you're a 40-year-old woman, you are at an extremely low risk from the virus itself, but you are the highest risk cohort for the vaccines.
Do you know that?
Do you think Canadian women know that?
Do you think Canadian women in their 40s know that?
Do you think they're being told that before they get the vaccine?
If not, do you think they're making an informed decision?
Now, maybe 68 adverse events out of 100,000 isn't a big deal, but 68 virus cases out of 100,000 certainly makes the news.
Shouldn't this?
Like I say, like I showed you, the death count in Canada is single digits per day these days.
Sometimes not a single death in a major province like Ontario and Quebec on any given day.
Usually not a single death in smaller provinces, sometimes for weeks at a time.
So compare that to vaccine serious events, medically important events.
Some selected adverse events are defined as medically important based on the World Health Organization's guidance, regardless of whether they meet the serious adverse event definition.
These types of events may jeopardize the patient or may require intervention to prevent an outcome described in the serious definition.
The list of medically important events are listed in the technical notes.
So there were 417 of these reported that were classified as medically important events, representing 4.3% of all reports.
The 417 reports that were classified as medically important events include 342 reports of events managed as anaphylaxis.
That's allergic shock.
And 75 reports of other medically important events.
Now, I showed you that AstraZeneca was the worst of the three.
Read this.
On May 11th, 2021, Ontario announced a pause on the administration of the first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine out of an abundance of caution due to an observed increase in reports of thrombosis.
I'm not going to try and remember what those acronyms stand for.
However, based on the lag period from vaccination to subsequent symptom onset, clinical recognition, and reporting to the vaccine safety surveillance system, there may be additional reports reported in the coming weeks.
So, do you see what's happening?
Ordinary Canadians were the guinea pigs in a giant experiment.
It started going really bad, so they paused it.
But then they unpaused it because Trudeau bought so much of that vaccine.
Hey, no problem.
Did you know that this was still an experiment?
Maybe you did, but did they tell people that this wasn't fully tested yet?
How do you feel about the fact that healthy people were promised protection by the government, and they in fact got ill at such a rate that the government panicked and paused things?
And then restarted things.
I'm not sure which is worse.
It's a big report, and I'm not going to read all of it.
You can find it online in a minute yourself, and I encourage you to do so.
But look at this.
Myocarditis pericarditis, that's what I talked about.
That's the heart inflammation.
There have been international reports, including from the United States and Israel, of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, inflammation of the lining around the heart, following vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Information to date indicates that these events occur more commonly after the second dose within the week following vaccination, typically within four to five days, mainly in adolescents, young adults, and more often in males and females.
Public Health and Health Canada are closely monitoring these events in passive and active Canadian vaccine safety surveillance systems.
As of July 31st, there have been 215 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis following receipt of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in Ontario.
So this looks like it's a side effect of the mRNA vaccines only, Pfizer Moderna, inflamed hearts.
Oh, just that.
No big deal, guys.
And look at the gender there.
70% of these cases are young men, average age 24.
Why are 24-year-old young men taking the vaccine at all?
They're the healthiest people in the world.
Why are we doing this to them?
The report says that six people have died from the vaccines in Ontario altogether.
But is that true?
Here's the federal version of this Ontario report.
They say nationally there's 11,471 adverse effects events.
2,849 that were serious.
But read this.
Deaths.
Up to and including July 30th, 2021, a total of 167 deaths were reported after the administration of the vaccine.
But hang on, Ontario says they only had six deaths.
They only had six deaths in Ontario, but the Fed say there have been 167 nationwide.
So how could there only be six in Ontario?
Doesn't make sense.
Well, look at this.
This is what the Ontario report says.
As of July 31, there are 29 reports of deaths temporally, that means close in time, associated with receipt of COVID-19 vaccine that are currently classified as persons under investigation, as they do not currently meet the provincial surveillance definition.
These investigations are ongoing, and additional information, including a cause of death, e.g., autopsy, of coronavirus report, is expected.
Preliminary information suggests that these events occurred in individuals with multiple comorbidities, which may be related to the cause of death.
Got it.
So 29 people died after taking the vaccine, but the province of Ontario politically is deciding not to attribute those to the vaccine because there was some underlying comorbidity, which means you're sick with something else too.
So if they were also really fat or really old or had a heart issue, they wouldn't be blamed, they wouldn't blame their death on the vaccine.
Deceptive Vaccine Trials00:03:07
That's what they're saying.
But if they were really fat and really old and had a heart attack, that absolutely would count as a death from the virus if they had tested positive within 30 days.
Why the different reporting standard for public health?
Well, you might ask, why the different reporting standard for journalists?
I don't yet know what to make of the vaccines in the end because we don't have all the information.
I don't believe they're proven yet.
That's not actually an opinion.
It's what the FDA says.
They're not approved yet.
They're only authorized for emergency use.
I say let's have an honest conversation about the injuries and deaths from vaccines.
It's in the hundreds now.
Let's tell young men about myocarditis and the risk to them.
Let's tell 40-year-old women about their risk profile.
Why wouldn't we?
Why wouldn't doctors?
Why wouldn't journalists?
I mean, I know why drug salesmen might not.
And until then, until this experiment is over, in years to come, I'd appreciate not being forced by law to be part of a giant unethical scheme that maybe Bill Gates sure is enjoying and the new pharma billionaires are enjoying, but the rest of us might have some legitimate qualms about.
Stay with us for more.
Hey, welcome back.
I saw this unusual story from Germany.
A vaccine skeptical nurse apparently gave thousands of doses of saline solution, just salt water, instead of vaccines because she was worried about people being poisoned by them.
And so she, well, I guess she deceived them.
She tricked them by giving them a, you know, a placebo instead and telling them they were vaccinated.
Now, that's obviously wrong to do, even if you are vaccine skeptical or vaccine hesitant to trick someone into injecting something else, to switch their medical prescription on them because you think you know better than them, that violates their consent, that violates their personal and bodily integrity.
And so surely any outrage against this woman for taking thousands of people's lives in her own hands, surely we should feel the same when it's the reverse, when it's someone forcing a vaccine on someone who doesn't want the vaccine, who doesn't want their privacy or bodily integrity violated under duress.
If you want the vaccine, then take it.
But it's not free and informed consent if you're forced at gunpoint to take it, tricked into taking it, or told you'll be fired from your livelihood if you don't take it, which brings us to the case today.
Forced Vaccination Controversy00:15:28
We told you that this lawsuit was looming, and indeed it was filed.
Todd Zawicki, a law professor in Virginia, has been told by his university that if he doesn't tell them his vaccine status and get vaxed, he'll lose out on merit pay and possibly even be sacked, even though Professor Todd Zawicki already has immunity to COVID because he got the disease and recovered from it naturally.
Well, he sued, and joining us now via Skype to talk about it is our friend Janine Eunice, who is the lawyer fighting this civil liberties case for him.
Janine, great to see you again.
So you did it.
You pulled the trigger on the lawsuit.
We talked about it before.
What made you decide to actually sue?
Well, the university sent a letter in response to our, we initially sent a letter demanding that they exempt Professor Zwicki based on his natural immunity.
So Professor Zwicky's specific argument is that he has very high antibody levels.
He had COVID in March of 2020.
He gets his antibody levels measured regularly.
And his doctor, Human Norchasm, says that because of those antibody levels and his natural immunity, the virus, sorry, the vaccine is not only medically unnecessary, which means he shouldn't be getting it, but it also poses a risk of harm to him.
So we asked the university to exempt him on that basis.
The university denied our request, and so we went ahead and filed a lawsuit.
Now, let me ask you: in many Canadian jurisdictions, there are exemptions under human rights law.
And I know the law is quite different in the United States.
In the province of Ontario, where I'm broadcasting from, the Human Rights Code includes something called CREAD, which has been held to include even things like vegetarianism or veganism.
And some universities that require vaccine mandates have an exemption for conscientious objectors who say it's against their creed.
I find that interesting, and it's something that's sort of tucked away.
The universities don't like to broadcast it because a lot of people would probably take that.
Is there anything similar in the U.S.?
Is there a medical exemption?
Is there a religious or conscientious or creed exemption, either under some sort of federal law or state law?
Well, I think all sorts of jurisdictions have different things.
There's no, to my knowledge, there's no federal law, although I would argue that the EUA statute currently, you know, prohibits forcing people to get the vaccine.
And that was one of the arguments we actually made in our complaint: that it's an emergency use authorization statute.
It mandates free and informed consent and the opportunity to refuse or take the medical product in question.
So, you know, it's my position that that flies in the face of any public or private entity mandating these vaccines.
It looks like the Pfizer is going to be approved soon.
So that argument probably will go away.
Now, states have different schemes, so I'm not sure.
But, you know, one interesting thing actually is that GMU, sorry, Virginia's code in mandating vaccines for school children actually says in place you can show proof that you've had the disease at issue before.
So if you've had chickenpox or rubella or measles or mumps, instead of getting the vaccine, you can show that you've had it and recovered.
So, you know, in the past, we've always recognized natural immunity as a substitute for vaccination.
But to my knowledge, that's not really happening in the U.S.
It does seem to be happening more in Europe.
You know, it's interesting to me.
I see you refer to that immunologist, Dr. Nurchasm, if I'm saying his name correctly.
To prescribe a drug that someone does not need seems to be a violation of medical ethics.
And to prescribe a drug that they don't need that has a risk of harm violates that essential Hippocratic oath: do no harm.
Has George Mason University, and I can't even believe this, and we talked about this last time.
Professor Zawicki is teaching at the Antonine Scalia School of Law.
I mean, surely of any law school in America, they would respect privacy and freedom, but I'm just shocked by that.
Have these said anything?
Have they parried your thrusts at all?
Have they responded substantively?
Because I just can't believe they would say, no, you're immune, you have better immunity than the vaccine gives you, but we want you to take a drug that won't help you and can harm you and will fire you if you, or we could fire you if you don't.
It just, that's such a hardline position.
Have they responded or moderated or shown any willingness to compromise at all?
I just find that startling.
We actually are having discussions with them.
They are not going to compromise on the natural immunity.
That was actually their response to me in the first place.
We don't recognize this.
They linked to a CDC webpage, which says we can't be sure about natural immunity.
This is a silly response in a number of ways.
First of all, it's just sort of this general statement.
As we know, as many scientists like Martin Kuhldorf and Jay Bhattacharya have said, it's a ridiculous thing to say, well, we don't know how long natural immunity lasts.
We don't know how long immunity from the vaccine lasts.
Nobody knows that either.
And in fact, we're making guesses about the vaccine based on what we know about natural immunity.
It's also silly because they're saying, well, you can't be sure you have the antibodies just because you had COVID, based on time, whatever.
But Professor's Wiki has actual proof in the form of these antibody tests they've been getting regularly, which should override any sort of general statements about this.
So I don't understand.
I'm opposed to vaccine mandates at all, but they're particularly ridiculous when somebody has natural immunity.
There's just, there's no conceivable reason not to recognize it.
Yeah.
You mentioned that you think Pfizer might be approved by the FDA.
The first thing I tell people when they talk about these vaccines is that they are not yet approved.
None of them are approved.
They're only authorized for emergency use.
I think that stuns people because they assume they're approved.
They are not.
Now, that may or may not happen, and I'm worried that there will be corners cut for political reasons.
But I see the top story right now as we speak on Drudge Report is that Pfizer's vaccine, the efficacy, its ability, has fallen to 42%.
You know, we had been told that these vaccines were 80, 90% effective.
So I think this whole thing is still a giant experiment.
And I'm not saying that the experiment won't end well, but I'm saying it certainly hasn't ended yet.
We're learning new things all the time.
And I know that politicians make things up to get themselves out of a jam.
I mean, I don't know if you know this, but in Canada, our prime minister bought a ton of AstraZeneca, and then he switched gears.
And so they pronounced that you can mix and match vacces, no problem, when none of the companies had tested for that.
None of them said so.
I know.
But that was the official view of the Trudeau government, obviously, to get him out of a jam because he bought so much of this one vaccine.
I feel like everyone is guessing here.
And in the meantime, the death rate has fallen so low.
Why do we have to continue to participate in the experiment if the threat is so low?
I have no idea.
I have no idea what's going on.
And I think I say that every time I talk to you.
But everything changes every five minutes.
We're supposed to have this blind trust in these authorities who can't get their story straight.
You know, one day it's vaccinated.
People don't need masks.
Now they do.
It's just very strange.
I really don't understand what's going on.
When you look at the graph, for instance, I live in D.C.
I spent a lot of time in New York.
Everybody's panicking over this.
New York now has a new vaccine passport program, which is even worse than the one that they had this spring, where you basically can't go anywhere public without a vaccine passport.
Armina, you look at the deaths, the graph of deaths and hospitalizations, it's flat.
It's nothing.
Not to mention that these vaccines seem to be, at the moment, what the science seems to say is that they're not very good at stopping transmission.
They seem to be good at reducing severe symptoms.
So nobody should be concerned about anybody else getting the vaccine.
If you want the vaccine, get it.
If you don't want the vaccine, don't get it.
And sort of on a personal note, I've been very open about the fact I'm not vaccinated.
I had COVID in February, this past February, and I may have made a different decision if I hadn't.
But I'm feeling a lot of enormous pressure really to get it.
And I really don't want to.
I know I don't need it.
And I worry about some of these Effects, especially for vaccinated, or sorry, for people who have antibodies.
But I really think what society is doing to people is just horrendous.
Yeah.
You know, Israel, which is peculiar in that it vaxed hard and fast and first, and it's one of the most vaxed countries in the world in terms of percentage of people with one shot and two shots.
I saw this story in the Times of Israel that they're now on their third shot.
Like they've already given an enormous number of third shots, and yet the hospitals are filling up, no, not quite filling up, but there are many cases of hospitalizations with people with one, two, and even their third shot.
So it feels like there's so much we don't know.
The essential promise of vaccs, and you're back to normal, vax passport, you're back to normal.
I think Israel proves that that just isn't happening.
They're looking at a very harsh lockdown.
So I just feel like on the one hand, you're going to have people who felt they were tricked.
Get the vaccine, your life's back to normal.
On the other hand, people are on a treadmill now and they're used to, oh, just another two weeks, just another two weeks, just another shot, just one more season, just one more lockdown.
And I'm worried that while some people will be disillusioned, other people, you know, it's like dealing with a Nigerian scammer on email.
Oh, this time, no, I think they mean it.
I think if I just send them a little more money, they'll send me the payoff.
I think people are psychologically so destroyed by this that they're destroyed by this whole situation that they just have to believe in authority now or their whole world falls apart.
I think these are dark days, not because of a virus, but because of man's response to the virus.
I couldn't agree more with that.
And, you know, I've been saying from the beginning, once we allow the government into these, you know, most private aspects of our life, from beginning with the lockdowns, you know, whether you could associate with your family, you know, see your friends, run your business, send your kids to school, once you allow the government to start dictating those things, it never ends.
And we're seeing it now.
It's not ending.
And, you know, people who are vaccinated and who are, or these mandates should really think about what it's doing.
And another point, especially in New York, a lot of the unvaccinated people are actually minorities.
A lot of them don't want to get the vaccine for the same reason I don't want to and Professor Zawicki doesn't want to, which is that we have natural immunity.
And a lot of those people have natural immunity because they were out and about, you know, cooking your takeout and delivering your meals and all the other things that essential workers do.
And now they're being shut out of society because they're not, you know, they don't want to get the vaccine for good reason.
You know, I'm so glad you raised that.
And I know that's the case in big cities like New York, which is a very multicultural, multiracial city.
I know that, statistically speaking, CNN and the New York Times like to say right-wing fox voters are the least likely to, Fox viewers are the least likely to get vaccinated.
Actually, in terms of sheer numbers, I think it's African Americans.
I think it's black Americans and other minorities for the reasons you say.
And also, let's not forget that there are political, there's a political history with vaccination.
I mean, I watched an interesting documentary about the smallpox epidemic in Montreal in the late 19th century when vaccines were rather new and they were really being pushed and there was a bad dose and it made so many people sick.
People remember things like that and I'm not saying that we should be anti-science and I'm not saying that we should be a mob, but the Tuskegee experiment where black men were injected by government with syphilis as part of an experiment and lied to for years, these things have a cultural memory.
And I think that people with their own senses, we don't see people dropping dead in the streets.
The deaths are statistically smaller than we feared at the beginning, and they're almost always people who are seniors, who have underlying conditions, and frankly, who are really fat.
And so, I just think that people, for whatever reason, are going to defy these.
And here's my question: I know I'm rambling here, Janine, but you have a restaurant in New York City that has a vax passport.
Okay, so you're going to send away wealthy young New Yorkers who like to go out for a night, but they're not allowed.
But you've also got in the back of that restaurant a lot of new Americans, immigrants, maybe some people who are illegal, frankly.
And are you really going to expect the restaurateur to enforce that vax rule against his own staff, against his own family, even?
Like, I just, it's turning restaurateurs and business people into secret biomedical security cops.
I think that's the hardest part of this.
That's the good way of putting it.
Yeah, it's really bizarre.
I mean, we've just allowed it we've all we were living in some kind of weird public health authoritarian regime where it's just constant, you know, and travel has become an absolute nightmare.
Um, the masks and the, you know, if you go abroad testing and whatever, vaccine passports is just not a good situation we're in.
Well, what's it like in America?
I mean, we're up here in Canada, and to fly domestically in Canada, you have to wear a mask.
If you don't wear a mask, you have to have a doctor's note, and that you have to be tested before you get on the plane.
But you don't need a vax passport yet to fly domestically.
Now, there's different rules for foreign travel.
What's it like in America?
Can you fly from New York to LA without a test, without a vax passport, just put a mask on?
Yeah, right now that's the current regime.
I know there are people pushing for vaccine passports for flights for domestic flights, so we'll see what happens.
Seems, you know, what I suspect might happen, and it's probably the best case scenario, is that I think there are going to be all sorts of problems with these regimes.
Vaccine Passports Debate00:04:42
People will start to see the disparate impact.
They're going to realize, what if your app doesn't work that day, or you know, whatever, all of a sudden you can't get on your flight?
Or it's just there's going to be too many problems with implementing it, I think.
And maybe they'll go away for that reason.
But that is the best case scenario, in my opinion.
I mean, for me, the idea that any clerk, any bouncer really, could demand that private information from me.
Because really, if you have a vax passport for every place, every service, you are effectively telling your private health situation to any, you know, officious intermeddler, any busybody.
I mean, it reminds me of, you know, you go to a nightclub and the bouncers who have so much power, so much capricious power over you just because you really want to get into this hot nightclub or hot restaurant.
And you have to bend the knee if you want to go in.
I'm not just talking about my sad teenage years here, Janine.
But imagine if you couldn't just walk away and say, yeah, no, thanks.
I don't need to go into this bar across the street.
What if every place you had to tell every scold, every snitch?
Like that really is what the Soviet lifestyle was like.
You had to show your papers to anyone with a badge who demanded them.
I find this very sad.
It is.
I mean, the West has just become maybe an extreme statement in some people's opinion.
I think it's safe to say the West has just fallen.
This is not a free society.
And I personally found the last couple of weeks very difficult.
I've been saying from the beginning that once we allow this to happen, it might not end.
We have to be very worried about that.
I did have some hope in May and June.
Things were really better in a lot of the blue cities.
The masks had gone away.
It didn't look like vaccine passports were happening.
New York actually did away with theirs.
And then over the last two weeks, mask mandates came back indoors all over the place.
We're seeing these vaccine mandates spring up in cities.
New York just suddenly re-implemented theirs.
I suspect DC, where I live, will follow suit.
And it's very depressing.
Well, I'm sorry you're depressed, and I'm depressed on these things too.
But I think that you, as a civil liberties lawyer and us here in Canada as a civil liberties-oriented news outlet, we have a special duty.
And by working on this problem, I find it a form of, I don't know, emotional therapy.
The fact that I feel like my work can help fix the problem.
The trouble is you can't separate your own work from the world.
And so there's no time off because everywhere you look.
But let's end on a more hopeful note.
And by the way, I salute you and I admire the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
As I said last time you were on, I'm glad we have a new Civil Liberties Alliance because the old Civil Liberties Alliance has gone into hiding on all this stuff.
But I saw a press release a couple weeks ago where tell me if I'm remembering wrong.
I think it was the American Postal Workers Union said that they're not interested in vaccine requirements.
I think I got that right of the Postal Workers Union.
And there are some like I hear Joe Biden's talking about making the entire federal workforce vaxed.
And I know that some of those unions are responsive to their members.
And some of those members, you know, maybe they have the courage of numbers.
I mean, that's really what a lot of unions were built on.
Maybe there will be some opposition in quarters that we didn't expect, not just, quote, right-wing quarters, but like if these big public sector unions say, yeah, no, our members don't want to be forcibly vaxed, maybe that's a twinkle of hope.
What do you think about that?
Could be.
We'll see what happens.
I mean, I think in blue cities, it's going to be tough.
Right.
Well, listen, it's great to catch up with you.
You're one of the good guys fighting this battle.
I know on the West Coast, Harmee Dylan is fighting it.
I wish there were 100 lawyers in America because so much is determined that way.
I do see little green shoots of hope.
I see some school boards being taken to task by parents about masks.
Of course, Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, seems to be holding the line.
I should report to you that north of the border, there's very little dissent on this.
There's one province called Alberta that so far has lifted all lockdown rules, including mask mandates, but there are some companies, for example, that insist on them.
I hope to keep in touch with you in the weeks and months ahead because, alas, we are going to be in this for a very long time.
Ignoring the Maverick Party00:03:17
Great to see you again, Jean.
We are indeed.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right, it's our pleasure.
There you have a Janine Eunice, a lawyer with the new Civil Liberties Alliance, who is taking George Mason University to court on behalf of a professor who's actually been threatened with firing because he won't take a vaccine, even though he's naturally immune.
Stay with us more.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Dawn writes, Hi, Ezra.
I just finished watching tonight's show, and I'm very disappointed that you mentioned the PPC and Derek Sloan's new True North Party, but ignored the Maverick Party.
I like Maxine Bernier and Derek Sloan.
However, a national party is never going to be able to advocate successfully for a better deal for Western Canada because they have no hammer to back it up.
The Reform Party learned that a long time ago when they made the mistake of voting to expand in eastern Canada, their 1991 Assembly in Saskatoon. was there and voted for it.
It is unlikely that Sloan will be able to get his new party organized in time to run candidates in this imminent election.
If you were paying closer attention to what is happening on the ground in Western Canada, you would know there is a far greater likelihood of some Maverick candidates getting elected than PPC.
I emailed you a week and a half ago and suggested you interview Jay Hill.
I got no response from you and no interview with Jay Hill has materialized.
As a longtime subscriber, you at least owe me a response.
Well, Don, thank you for writing, and I'm sorry I didn't write back to your earlier letter.
Forgive me, I don't have enough hours in the day to write back to every letter, and I apologize because I know you're a subscriber and supporter.
I accept your criticism, and we did do a video.
Sheila interviewed Jay Hill, and we did publish that a while back, but maybe we should talk to him again.
And I know what you say is true because I've seen some polling that shows the Maverick Party is further ahead in some writings in the West than the PPC and certainly than Derek Sloan's new party that I don't even know is registered, if it's registered yet.
So I think you're right.
I think that's a little bit of the Toronto centricity creeping in.
I'm out here in exile in Toronto and I suppose I don't hear the Maverick Party brought up in regular conversation because it's not a factor out here.
But I think you're right and I will encourage our Alberta team in particular, and we have some reporters in Vancouver, as you know, and we're going to grow in the West a little bit more.
I'm going to encourage them to keep an eye peeled on the Maverick Party and to give them the time of day too.
So I'm grateful for your letter and I think you're right.
There is a chance that the Maverick Party could poke through in a riding, let's say in rural Alberta, where people are just sort of fed up with both the federal liberals and the federal conservatives.
I have to say though, that I am depressed about this whole election and the fact that the Conservative Party of Canada is not very conservative anymore.
And I believe that the fights we're in are much larger than partisan disagreements.