Author: Blazingcatfur

Attitudes are no longer about red states or blue states — it’s all down to class

In the US, the divide over Covid-19 restrictions is often cast as a matter of red versus blue states. Republican states like Florida have banned vaccine passports and school mask mandates, and have heavily restricted the ability of employers to mandate vaccination for their employees. In blue states, and especially in deep-blue cities like New York and Washington, D.C., mask mandates are the norm and patrons are required to show proof of vaccination to enter a bar, eat indoors at a restaurant, or go to a movie theatre or gym.  

Protests are a dime a dozen. Heck they’re a dime a hundred. There’s a subset of people who go to protests more often than ordinary folks go to Tim Hortons. They’re an occupation for people who don’t have jobs. “Is it Tuesday, already?” (Checks calendar.) “Bay and Bloor blockade, 1 p.m. till media leave.”

It’s hard to imagine any government in Canada — the feds or any of the provinces — putting out a series of tips to help people get over their COVID-19 fears. After all, most of them seem to want to keep ramping up the fears.

As of Monday, big-box stores in Quebec require customers to show a vaccine passport, as the provincial government’s latest COVID-19 measure comes into effect.

In an attempt to convince holdouts to get vaccinated, the government has extended the vaccine passport to all all stores with surface areas of 1,500 square metres or more, with the exception of groceries and pharmacies.

Conservative MPs fiercely opposed to the federal government’s new vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers have slammed what they call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “vaccine vendetta,” saying that the policy will disrupt the country’s supply chains.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, the party’s finance critic, claimed the government’s vaccine policy is “emptying grocery shelves and ballooning food prices,” leaving some Canadians to “go hungry.”

Garnett Genuis, a Conservative MP from Alberta, said he stands with unvaccinated truckers who plan on protesting the mandate. “Time to end Justin Trudeau’s nonsensical vaccine vendetta,” he said in a recent social media post.

Wet noodle https://t.co/F8Y6PLK0HH

— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) January 24, 2022

Newly released emails make more plausible the contention that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins presided over the suppression of the lab-leak theory for political reasons.

From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.