Ezra Levant critiques the Toronto Star’s December 21 editorial demonizing unvaccinated individuals, despite Toronto’s 90% vaccination rate and natural immunity. He disputes herd immunity claims, questions COVID-19 test accuracy, and highlights Ontario’s vaccine exemptions while comparing Quebec’s draconian lockdowns—now targeting vaccinated people—to other regions’ open schools. Dr. Jordan Peterson’s regret over compliance underscores the psychological trap of mandates, yet institutions persist in enforcing them, eroding freedoms under the guise of public health. The episode reveals a disturbing pattern of collusion to exploit pandemic fatigue for control, leaving society at risk of further authoritarian overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take you through an editorial in the Toronto Star.
That's not normally something I'd spend my time on, but just line after line.
It's just incredible.
The demonization of the unvaccinated, the command that they be forcibly vaccinated, even though that's de facto happened.
I mean, you're talking about nearly 90% vaccination in Toronto.
They have to become more and more hysterical because their plan, which is, you must say, is a great success.
It hasn't worked yet.
I mean, when 90% of the people are being vaccinated and you're still getting outbreaks of the disease, it's not working, is it?
I'll take you through that today.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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Alright, here's today's show.
Tonight, I'm sorry to tell you, but the Toronto Star is at it again.
It's December 21st, and this is the Azure Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
Why Mandatory Vaccination?00:16:06
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government will walk just because it's my bloody right to do so.
It's the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice.
From now on, the days get longer and the nights get shorter and hopefully a little warmer.
Hopefully the long night of the civil liberties winter will start to thaw.
That's a wish, not a prediction.
Even though the Omicron variant of the virus is spreading like wildfire, at least according to headlines.
And I'm sorry, but you can't trust the public health deep state anymore without proof.
So really, how do we know it's the Omicron variant?
The tests that people are taking themselves.
I've seen those tests.
They don't distinguish.
The tests themselves are often unreliable.
Frankly, most of them are made in China.
I'd like to joke that maybe they're just pregnancy tests.
They certainly look like pregnancy tests.
That's a joke, by the way.
I'm kidding about that part, but seriously, how do they know it's Omicron?
Remember what Ontario's public health bureaucrats said before she was forbidden from doing any more press conferences for being too honest.
And in fact, if you're testing in a population that doesn't have very much COVID, you'll get false positives almost half the time.
That is, the person actually doesn't have COVID.
They have something else.
They may have nothing.
So yeah, it's like a cold, I think.
I don't think a single person in Canada has died from the Omicron variant, but what an excuse to lock down hard.
And Quebec is the worst.
They had curfews for months before, actually treating adults like children, innocent people like criminals, healthy people like sick people.
What a wonderful excuse to bring that back.
Looks like that's happening.
Doug Ford now says he's thinking of closing schools again.
Schools are open around the world.
Pretty much every U.S. state, including the Democrat ones, such as Florida now.
But Ontario, for some reason, just loves to shut down schools.
And Doug Ford is as dumb as he looks.
Bad times again.
What does Canada's largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, have to say?
They love it.
The media loves wars.
You can tell.
They love crime.
They love conflict.
They love this pandemic too, too much.
They get to use fancy words like Omicron and Delta.
And they get to talk to people in white lab coats sounding very science-y.
And all that, you know, all their dreams of climate lockdowns and government power come true just over about a pandemic.
They'll take it.
You know, the saying, if it bleeds, it leads.
And even if it doesn't actually bleed, then just fake it.
I mean, the CBC is the worst of that.
Remember, they actually did a story a few months ago where they implied that an intensive care unit was full, but in fact, it was actually mannequins.
It was a training facility.
Remember the star, though.
They're the worst.
Here's their front page from a few weeks ago where they just had a bunch of personal insults demonizing citizens who aren't vaccinated.
There are a lot of reasons not to be vaccinated.
The most obvious is if you have a medical reason not to get vaccinated, if the medicine itself might kill you, such as an extreme allergic reaction or myocarditis.
Another reason is if you are naturally immune, having contracted the disease and then recovered from it.
That's the main reason.
It's why kids in the 70s and 80s had chickenpox parties where their parents would knowingly infect them with other kids because it was better to have that disease early than later in life.
But there was a whiff of fascism to that front page.
And the star hates the unvaxed because they call them the alt-right.
They're not.
They're on the right and on the left and people who don't think in terms of right and left people and non-political people.
Many are formerly Green Party or NDP voters concerned about what they put in their bodies, especially when a government is extorting them to do so.
They're skeptical of big pharma.
In other words, they're individuals who care about freedom.
So of course the Toronto Star hates them.
But look at this.
This is from yesterday.
It just takes the cake.
It's a headline.
Is it time for governments to make COVID vaccines the law?
It's a stupid question.
I mean, it is already tantamount to the law.
You will be fired.
You'll be banned from restaurants.
You'll be banned from flying or from taking the train.
You'll be shunned and demonized.
And you actually will be jailed, at least for a while, if you happen to be caught in the government's pop-up quarantine jails at airports, which come and go.
I mean, seriously, 85% of eligible Torontonians, the city of the star, 85% are vaccinated, if you believe the government.
That's almost 90%.
I bet half of the rest have had the virus naturally already.
So real immunity is close to 100%.
If the vaccines give immunity, 90%.
There's pretty much nothing in society that 90% of people agree on.
I mean, the whole thing is done.
If these vaxes worked, they'd have reached herd immunity a long time ago, but they're not quite working, are they?
I'm not allowed to say it, but maybe Bill Gates can get away with saying it.
The deaths, it's been completely horrific.
And I would expect that will lead the R ⁇ D budgets to be focused on things we didn't have today.
You know, we didn't have vaccines that block transmission.
We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmissions.
We need a new way of doing the vaccine.
But the Toronto Star doesn't want to let the crisis go to waste.
They need this crisis to sell papers and to promote their ideology.
It is time for the spreading of hearsay and fear on both sides of the COVID-19 vaccination debate to end.
The facts are irrefutable.
Okay, this is going to be good.
The Toronto Star will tell us what the truth and only the truth is.
I got to get some popcorn for this.
The government of Canada has declared COVID vaccines safe.
Right.
I don't know what that means because the FDA, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has ordered Pfizer to continue clinical tests for five more years.
We know that thousands of people in Canada have had serious reactions to the vaccine, including serious heart conditions and even death.
That's facts from the government too.
Deaths, heart attacks.
So safe or sometimes safe or safe for now.
The very first sentence in their editorial isn't quite true, is it?
I'll keep reading.
Vaccines reduce the risk of death from COVID and lower the burden on doctors and nurses holding our healthcare system together.
Maybe.
I don't know how you would even know, given they really are eliminating the control group, aren't they?
If everyone is vaxed, you really don't know how people would be doing if they weren't vaxed.
I know this for a fact.
More people who are catching the disease, most people who are catching the disease these days, are actually vaxed.
I'll read more.
If you are not vaccinated, you put yourself at risk and intentionally burden the healthcare system supporting your family, friends, and colleagues.
Intentionally burden the healthcare system, really?
So it's a moral crime, is it?
You're hurting the world on purpose, are you?
You wicked liars at the star.
Imagine using a personal health choice to attack someone's morality.
They don't do that for drug users or fat people, do they?
Just people who are healthy enough and young enough and maybe recovered enough.
They don't want the vax.
They would never talk that way about fat people or drug users.
I'll read more.
When our hospital critical care units become overwhelmed with COVID care, they can no longer function to treat other diseases, injuries, and accidents.
Yeah, but that actually hasn't happened yet.
In two years, they have never been overflowing.
And frankly, after two years, if a government can't build or buy new hospital beds, that's sort of on the government, isn't it?
I'll read more.
With hospitals overwhelmed, our government will mandate forced lockdowns, resulting in social isolation that has been shown to contribute to increased drug overdoses, suicides, and spousal abuse.
Again, hospitals haven't been overwhelmed.
I can tell by all the hospital TikTok videos that the nurses and doctors make.
But it's a non-sequitur.
If you don't get vaxxed, there will be a terrible lockdown.
Well, first of all, nearly 90% of people are vaxed, and they're doing that lockdown anyways.
But look at the admission there.
Lockdowns are devastating, but it's going to happen.
So now it's not a prescription for saving us.
It's a punishment for us being bad.
Get vaxed or we'll lock you down.
I'll read more.
Ontario has enforced mandatory immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, polio, mumps, rubella, and other diseases in schools.
Why is COVID any different?
Well, again, it's not quite true.
And you've got to take the star with a grain of salt.
In fact, it's not true at all.
You can find that in about 30 seconds in Googling.
Here's a page that refers to Ontario law.
In fact, all Ontario schools must allow exemptions, even for reasons of conscience and creed.
You have to sit through a presentation on why vaccines are good for you.
You have to say it genuinely offends your conscience.
But you are not forced to take vaccines, never have been.
The Toronto Star is lying again.
I'll read more.
We have heard too much talk about being on a wartime footing to fight COVID without taking the obvious real wartime measure to fight this disease, mandatory vaccination.
There's that war thing again.
They love war in the newspaper business, except for now they're declaring war against Canadians.
That's a bit of a difference, isn't it?
When Canada really took a wartime stance in the past, we required mandatory conscription.
That wartime measures put a generation of our beloved young people into battle to face certain injury and death.
Really?
You know, most governments have changed how they report COVID stats now to make it really hard to find answers to key questions they don't want to talk about.
Like, did anyone die today?
And in Ontario, the answer is usually no.
And I'm talking about Ontario.
It's the biggest province.
It's a province of the Toronto Star.
I found this tweet on the Toronto Public Health Twitter feed, and I'll just read it to you.
As of December 20th, 8.30 a.m., there have been 191,000 cases, yada, yada, yada.
21 people are in hospital, four new.
3,722 deaths in total.
One new death.
There's a lot of stats there, but here's the thing.
One person passed away in the last three days, most likely in their 80s with severe underlying conditions.
So it's not even as bad as the flu.
It's a cold.
One person in three days.
I'm not happy anyone's dying, but you're locking down the province for one person in three days?
I'll read more.
Here and now in the battle against COVID, we are not asking for the sacrifice of life for a greater societal cause, quite the opposite.
We are asking all participating members of our society to take a simple, safe vaccine.
Safe.
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Maybe it is safe.
Or maybe you will get injured by the vaccine, as thousands are.
But isn't that a balance that everyone can choose for themselves?
If you're 75 years old and fat and maybe have kidney disease and diabetes or whatever, maybe the vaccine really does make sense for you.
Balance the risk of the vaccine with the risk of the virus.
And if you're fat and 75 and sick, maybe it's a good idea to take it.
But why would say a healthy athlete aged 20, nearly zero risk from the virus itself, take a vaccine that is especially punishing the young men and their hearts.
Seriously, type the words dies suddenly into Google and then click the button that says news and you will see the inexplicable trend of young athletes having heart attacks on the field of play.
We all want the same thing for COVID to end and for life to return to normal.
The only clear path to normalcy is vaccination.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Toronto Star does not want a return to normal because we are actually at normal, normal for flu season.
In a regular flu season, one person dies every three days from the flu for sure.
This is normal.
They love the authoritarian rule.
They love the hatred.
They love the enemies list.
They showed it with their absurd front page the other day.
Refusing to get vaccinated other than religious or health reasons is a willful, selfish, anti-social act that can no longer be condoned.
It's time for our political leaders to make vaccination against COVID-19 the law.
Of course.
Good luck getting those exemptions, by the way.
The government is suspending doctors who dare to give medical exemptions, and government-friendly clergy have all said they don't approve of religious exemptions.
There are no exemptions.
The Toronto Star would fit in with any authoritarian regime.
It would fit in in Turkey and Venezuela and Russia.
Never believe the Toronto Star when they say they care about civil liberties or the Charter of Rights.
They don't.
And they told you that.
As if we ever had any doubt.
Stay with us for more.
Well, there's not a lot of people I can ask for help to figure things out because most journalists in Canada are either ideologically in lockstep with a lockdown, or frankly, they're right on the dole, the government dole.
I'm talking about the $600 million year Trudeau Media bailout.
One of the few exceptions to that rule is our friend Spencer Fernando from the eponymous spencerfernando.com.
Great to see you, my friend.
Thanks for taking the time.
It's like we're heading into the worst of all worlds, but there's no reason for it.
Omicron is the mildest form of this virus.
Yeah, like it, it's like a cold.
Yeah, it's interesting how when a new variant emerges, they go with the scariest possible story, right?
And they actually use those words.
They'll say how scary it is.
And then when more information comes out, and in many cases, you have doctors in South Africa, you know, where it was first noticed saying that it's relatively mild.
That just doesn't get talked about anymore, right?
They just stick with the initial scary story at the beginning and they use that to, you know, quote unquote justify more lockdowns and restrictions.
So it's interesting.
It only moves in one direction, which is more fear, you know, scaring people more and more.
Things are terrible.
Things are going to be awful.
And it never goes the other way.
There's never any reassurance or any balance or any kind of responsible rhetoric from politicians and officials.
It's just it's all as bad as possible.
I saw a tweet from one of our Fight the Finds lawyers, David Anber.
He said, anytime a politician or a public health politician says Omicron is spreading like wildfire, which may be true, he said they ought to have a duty to immediately say, and there's almost no hospitalizations or deaths from it.
I mean, if you're hyping up the fact that it moves quickly, and I'm willing to concede that, what do I know?
Rhetoric of Fear00:03:51
But I just checked the Toronto stats.
For the last three days, a grand total of one person has passed away in the city of 6.5 million.
And I'm not glad anyone has died, but we are all going to die of something.
One death in three days with over 100,000 cases.
I'm sorry, I just don't think it's responsible.
I think it's almost disinformation to talk about how virulent this thing is without saying, yeah, and it's like the sniffles.
And that South African doctor, frankly, our own Drea Humphrey reporter, who she'll talk to anyone, should say, guys, it's nothing here in South Africa.
It really feels like an end to the pandemic, not the beginning to it.
Well, yeah, it's interesting.
At one point, Christine Elliott in Ontario had said, you know, over time, cases are not going to mean what they used to mean, right?
Kind of saying, okay, well, at some point, there's going to be a lot of cases, but not a lot of death and, you know, problems with that.
And so, but that's funny how now they justify the possibility of increased cases as the reason for restrictions, right?
They focus on whatever number they feel will be the scariest.
So when there's deaths, they say, oh, this is causing a lot of death.
When there's not many deaths, they say, oh, well, it's going to cause a lot of people to go to the hospital.
It's going to cause a lot of cases.
So they just focus on whatever number seems to keep people in a state of fear.
And I think people really need to wake up to that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's, I don't know how many people are still trusting of everything that the public health bureaucrats say.
I think the number is actually pretty high.
And I think the reason for that is people have gone along with it.
They wore the mask.
They got the first shot.
They got the second shot.
They got the booster.
So it's, you've bought in psychologically to it.
And you say, well, I'm in this far.
I guess I'll get a fourth shot.
Oh, okay.
I guess, I mean, the thing is, if once you commit to a certain remedy, I don't want to compare everyone this way, but there's sort of a psychological, you don't want to repudiate everything you've thought and done for a year and a half.
You know, I saw some documentaries about these Nigerian email scams and how they get people donating a little and then a little more and a little more.
And they were talking to a woman who had sent tens of thousands of dollars.
And she knew it was funny, but she just kept saying, well, I think there's an explanation.
And the documentary was basically saying, woman, you're being ripped off.
And she couldn't bring herself to admit it.
because that would repudiate everything she had done so far.
And she didn't want to be, she didn't want to look like an idiot.
So she would rather say, no, It's all going to make sense soon.
I'm not comparing every detail of that analogy, but there's something to it when you're in this deep to later say, you know, this whole didn't stop me from getting sick.
Omicron breaks through the vaccines.
I thought I would be free, but I'm not.
And they want me to take a fourth jab.
I think it's a similar psychology of play.
Am I going too far there, Spencer?
Well, I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
And also, I think there's a status issue as well, right?
Which is a lot of people, you know, they got vaccinated and they said, well, I mean, I'm not one of those anti-vaxxers now.
I'm in the category.
I'm the good guy, right?
I did what the government said.
I'm not one of those people.
And then they're going to be told, well, actually, sorry, you need a third or maybe fourth to be considered actually fully vaccinated.
And so then they get thrown back into the category with all the unvaccinated people.
They say, oh, no, no, I'm not one of those people, right?
So they go around and do it.
I also saw a good comparison where someone said it's kind of, it's like marketing, right?
It's far easier to sell to someone you've already sold to than to sell to a new customer, right?
It's easier to get a keep a repeat customer than find a new one.
Puzzling Compliance00:08:36
So once you've already gotten someone who, yeah, they've done what the government's told them, well, they're probably going to do that again.
Whereas if you keep focusing on people who have been resisting what the government says, well, they're probably going to keep resisting, right?
So I think that's part of what's happening too, is they say, well, look, we can just got a bunch of people who've already done what we told them to do.
And, you know, they'll probably keep doing it.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, who I look up to generally, I think he's very thoughtful.
He went along with the vaccination and he was actually pretty positive about it until he flew back to Canada and he had to go through all this testing and quarantining.
And he did a tweet where he said, I did what you wanted.
I gave you what you wanted and you won't let me go.
You said I would be free.
I regret it.
So it's like he made a bargain with the devil.
He didn't really want to get vax, but he did it to be a compliant, good citizen.
And he felt like he was hoodwinked.
He felt like, well, you said I would be free now.
I thought that was very interesting.
I was a little surprised with how compliant he was to begin with, but I think that his good faith was thrown back in his face.
It's an interesting question.
I want to ask you about the enforcement, though, because I'm looking at Quebec in particular.
Looks like they're going back to the darkest days.
Like they're talking about curfews again and crazy laws.
And I don't know if they're going to cancel Christmas.
I read your latest article on spencerfernando.com and you were talking about this.
Can you give us, can you give us a bit of news of what they're doing there?
Of course, we got our great reporters on the ground, Alexa Lavois and team, but what are the statements so far that Quebec's going to do?
Well, basically, they're going back, you know, almost to the start, right?
As if nothing had happened in the preceding, I guess, what, year and nine months, 10 months at this point.
And so I think it's bars closing, restaurant capacity, the limits, theaters closing, gyms closing, schools closing.
So basically, most of the closures that happened at the very beginning of the pandemic are happening again.
And then, you know, I read a report and they're musing about, well, we're not going to restrict private home gatherings any more than we already have, but everything remains on the table.
So, I mean, again, this changes day to day.
And it seems what one province, every province tries to follow the harshest province, right?
So Quebec will do something, then Ontario will do the same thing, and then all the other provinces will follow, right?
So it's, are they following the science or are they just following whichever politician seems the harshest on cracking down on people?
And so I think, you know, it's this whole issue is with making things mandatory and taking away people's choices, is it's really.
It's really made the debate a lot more aggressive than it should be.
Look, i've gotten two vaccinations but I haven't gotten the vaccine card because, just philosophically, I feel I shouldn't have more freedom than someone else who choose not to get vaccinated, right?
And so I think there's going to be a lot of people who are going to start saying, you know maybe, as Jordan Peterson did look, I did what I was told, and now they, they.
You know, they move the goalposts again right, and you know, if that happens enough, I think you've got to see people start saying, you know, this only ends when people stop listening to what the politicians tell them.
There's no other way.
It really ends.
You know, that's very principled of you to take the jab yourself, personal health decision, for whatever your reasons are, they're your reasons, and it's not for anyone else to to question, but for you to stand in solidarity with those who don't.
I'm i'm deeply impressed by that.
You know.
It's funny because you I was listening as you listed the things in Quebec that are being shut down again, gyms restaurants, things like that those are things that unvaxed people were generally barred from because they didn't have that vaccine passport.
So ironically, the people that these new lockdowns are targeting are not the unvaxed, who are already marginalized in society, already segregated.
They're actually targeting the good boys and girls who signed up for the vax passport and said i'm gonna be on teen public health, and those are the folks being punished again.
I just wonder how many will have that bias remorse that Jordan Peterson did.
Or how many will say, like the Nigerian scam victim well no no, you see, it's just two more weeks, it's just just till we get through this new variant.
What do you think?
Do you think the public patience is wearing out?
I mean I, I was alarmed to this very early, but you know I, i'm more politically skeptical.
I'm more of a dissonant, more of a contrarian.
Most people are normal.
They don't follow the news obsessively like you and I do.
They're not.
They don't have a hair trigger on freedom stuff.
They just want to live their lives.
Is this breaking out of the political box into normal people's lives?
And and what are they thinking?
What's your guess?
You know, I think it is starting to change with people.
You know, I think the one thing to look at is what people say in polls and then how they actually act.
Right, I think a lot of Canadians feel like oh, if I get, if I get called with a poll and they say, are you going to follow all the health rules?
Oh certainly yes, absolutely.
But in their own lives, will they actually do that?
Now, you know, i'm i'm not so sure.
I think there's a lot of people who are saying they're tired of it, they're done with it.
You know, you have people like Justin Trudeau literally recycling the same rhetoric from a year ago.
Right, just hold on a few more weeks, a few more months.
You know, you know Theresa Tam saying oh, we can't gather like we want to at christmas.
You know, at a certain point people are just going to say, look, you know, we're going to live our lives.
Obviously, you know people have the right to be, you know, worried about their health and everything.
But life isn't just about trying to avoid getting sick, right?
I mean, if we did that, then none of us would ever interact with each other, we would take no risks, we wouldn't go anywhere, you know, we wouldn't drive.
Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do on a day-to-day basis.
So life does involve a certain amount of risk and I think you're seeing, with all the the addiction problems and mental health problems, you're seeing that you can't just try to save and protect everybody and assume there's not going to be other consequences to that.
That's not what life is fully about.
Yeah, I mean, life is for living.
I mean, if you're living like if you're living in jail, if you're living in a psychological jail, a physical jail, even if you could open the door, I know that's not much of a living.
Spencer, it's great to catch up with you.
Thanks very much.
You're one of the few independent voices out there, folks.
If you haven't signed up yet, please go to spencerfernando.com.
And, you know, I really appreciate Spencer's point of view.
And it's great to see you joining us from time to time on TV.
All the best, my friend.
Yeah, take care.
All right, there you have it.
Stay with us.
More ahead, you know, there's so many puzzling things.
I got into some of them with Spencer Fernando.
But I mean, seriously, the Toronto Star article, it's just the anger and vaccinate, vaccinate.
Look, you're already at effectively 90% vaccination when you take into account that a lot of the unvaxed people have recovered naturally.
So the vaccines aren't working.
The majority of cases these days are vaxed people.
Makes sense.
Almost everyone's vaxed.
So at what point do we say, well, we did what you told us, government, vaxed, and you're still using policies that failed, lockdowns, and you're still commanding us to take more doses.
They're on the fourth jab now.
At what point do people wake up and say, your plans did not work, and yet we're doing them again?
I don't know.
I've just never seen such collusion between big government, big pharma, big media, big tech before.
There's so few institutions against it.
Listen, I have all my vaccinations until this one.
I even remember traveling to the Caribbean once and saw an ad: hey, you should get Twin Ricks if you're going to the Caribbean.
Who knows what's in the water?
And for some reason, that ad clicked with me and I signed up for this.
This was 20 years ago.
And, you know, I'm not anti-vax per se, but it's pretty clear to me now that this is not about treating a virus.
It's about a virus being an opportunistic moment for all these institutions I've referred to to make a grab at our rights, including the most essential right to our own body.
I'm just shocked that all the people who claimed over the years they were pro-choice, my body, my choice, have gone along with it.
I wonder if they ever meant it.
Anyways, we'll see.
I wonder if this holds up.
If they ban Christmas, which they're trying to do again, I wonder how many people will actually comply.
I think more than a few will.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.