If you are an adult Canadian who has not received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, you are barred from virtually all forms of government employment. By federal mandate, hundreds of unvaccinated police officers, health-care workers, bus drivers and firefighters were placed onto unpaid leave just before Christmas and are explicitly barred from collecting Employment Insurance.
One of the largest hospital systems in the country is dropping its policy that counted race as a more important factor in determining COVID-19 treatment options than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined.
This silliness was allowed at SSM Health, a nominally Catholic health system that operates 23 hospitals across Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. All hospital patients are “scored” as a means of triage in order to give those most in need priority treatment. SSM Health ignored the severity of a patient’s conditions in order to make race a weightier determining factor.
Customer in an Etobicoke Costco is arrested and hauled away by cops for not wearing a mask despite having a medical exemption.
Allegedly one of the managers of the store is detaining the man alongside police.
It's for your health. pic.twitter.com/dvI3jo2oeU
— Efron Monsanto 🇨🇦 (@realmonsanto) January 15, 2022
Ontario reports 43 new COVID-19 deaths; record 3,957 hospitalizations
Ontario reported 43 new COVID-19 deaths as the province hit another record number of hospitalizations due to the Omicron variant.
The Ministry of Health says there are 3,957 patients in hospitals across the province due to the virus, breaking yesterday’s record of 3,814 and up from 2,594 a week ago.
Individuals who are fully vaccinated represent 78.3% of Ontario’s total population.
There are 10,732 new cases of #COVID19.
Today’s numbers will be available at 10:30 a.m. at https://t.co/ypmgZbVRvn.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) January 15, 2022
Canadian COVID-19 vaccine study seized on by anti-vaxxers — highlighting dangers of early research in pandemic
A Canadian study that vastly underestimated the protection COVID-19 vaccines provide against the Omicron variant is being revised — but not before it spread widely on social media by anti-vaxxers, academics and even the creators of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.
The Ontario preprint study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, suggested that any three doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were just 37 per cent effective against Omicron infection, while two doses actually showed negative protection.
The preprint has been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times in the two weeks since it’s been published, according to Altmetric, a company that tracks where published research is posted online. That’s in the top five per cent of all research it’s ever tracked.
“This government overreach is the direct result of Trudeau’s hateful demagoguery, targeting a minority to divide and distract from his own failures,” Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre said in a tweet on Thursday.
Canada plans to start turning away unvaccinated U.S. truckers at the border this weekend, a move that threatens to upend the flow of everything from food to auto parts to building supplies between two of the world’s largest trading partners.
Utah is facing legal action over its move to include race as a determining factor in treatment decisions
Health authorities in Utah and Minnesota have come under pressure after claims emerged that non-whites were given two extra points on a risk-based scorecard for deciding whether patients would receive Covid antibody treatment.
On Wednesday, Fox News reported that America First Legal, a conservative law group founded by former Donald Trump ally Stephen Miller, was threatening the states of Utah and Minnesota with legal action.
B.C., or Before COVID, if you were searching for pure rhapsody in political circles, then you had little to explore. Head to any high-toned Liberal gathering, one of their festal summits where the glories and landmarks of Liberal tenure were, almost liturgically, being celebrated, and inevitably some chosen hero of the Liberal moment would expatiate on the monumental achievements of 1982.
The Department of National Defence says formal proceedings have been launched against more than 900 members of the Canadian Armed Forces for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Chief of the defence staff Gen. Wayne Eyre ordered all military personnel to attest to having been fully vaccinated by mid-October. The deadline was later extended to mid-December.
Even as the Omicron variant sweeps around the world, public health officials have noted that, in most cases, the number of Covid patients in hospitals remains significantly lower than during previous pandemic surges.
That’s not the case in the US, however, where the number of patients with the coronavirus currently in hospital has reached record numbers.
According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, 145,982 people were in hospital with the virus on 11 January, surpassing a previous record set in January 2021.
Similarly, hospitals in large parts of neighbouring Canada have also seen surges, with Quebec reporting a pandemic high last weekend.
The search is on for a 7-year-old Canadian girl whose mom says the child’s father absconded with the child to keep her from being vaccinated against COVID-19.
Educational assistant Mariecar Jackson tells the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that her ex-husband, Michael Jackson, is keeping their unvaccinated daughter in an undisclosed location so she can’t be inoculated.
h/t Ayn Galt
Top U.S. health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, scrambled in early 2020 to respond to public reporting of a potential connection between COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
This response, which included a secret Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference, was loosely detailed in previously released and heavily redacted emails. Those emails strongly suggested that Fauci and a small group of top scientists sought to promote the natural origin theory, despite having evidence and internal expert opinions that pointed to the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab.
New modelling released today by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) suggests the highly transmissible Omicron variant will push hospital admissions to “extremely high levels” in the coming weeks as case counts reach levels never before seen in this country.
While there is a lot of uncertainty about how many new infections are being reported each day due to ongoing COVID-19 testing restraints, PHAC said the current test positivity rate suggests the variant is running rampant and there will be “several weeks of very intense activity expected to come.”
Nationally, the positivity rate is a stunning 28 per cent. That means more than one in four tests for the virus are coming back positive — nearly five times higher than the rate at any other point in the pandemic.
Novak Djokovic is set to be detained on Saturday after Australia cancelled his visa for a second time, in a row over his right to remain in the country unvaccinated.
The decision on “health and good order” grounds means he faces deportation and a three-year visa ban.
Djokovic’s lawyers called the decision “patently irrational” and will appeal.
The men’s tennis number one is still scheduled to play in the Australian Open in Melbourne on Monday.
Health officials in Vancouver say they’re aware of cases of people trying to pay vulnerable people in the city’s Downtown Eastside to get vaccinated for them so they can fraudulently obtain a COVID-19 vaccine passport.
The Vancouver Coastal Health authority would not confirm how many cases were involved, but confirmed that at least a handful of reports people did obtain bogus BC Vaccine Cards through what it called “deplorable” behaviour.
