“China eats weird animals disease”

Christine Enns said she was shocked when a rapid test showed she had tested positive for COVID-19.

Enns, who received two doses of COVID-19 vaccine and a booster shot, already had the virus in early February and thought reinfection was rare.

“I started feeling sick three to four days ago thinking, ‘This feels like COVID.’ I took five tests and … today it came back positive,” the bakery owner said Friday from her home in Warren, Mba., about 45 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

It took 5 tests to get the desired positive???

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the new BA.2 variant of COVID will cause an “uptick” of cases which might cause a return to requirements for wearing masks indoors.

Just when we thought the pandemic was behind us, COVID hysteria is back with a vengeance in Canada, with Ontario standing out once again as uniquely fearful, where the science apparently works differently than everywhere else on the planet. With most Western countries now ditching the last of their COVID-19 restrictions, there is chatter that Ontario ought to reimpose restrictions that were recently lifted, in particular the mask mandate.

The chatter is not merely from those who never saw a government rule or restriction they didn’t like, but from the self-appointed experts who hold forth in the media and social media on the need to tighten restrictions yet again in the face of a sub-variant, in an apparently never ending battle with the virus.

Take the jab or the boy gets it. That’s essentially the message the Cleveland Clinic is sending to the parents of 9-year-old Tanner Donaldson, who will soon need a kidney transplant. He was born with a rare birth defect, posterior urethral valves (PUV), a condition that caused irreversible kidney damage in utero and resulted in stage 4 chronic kidney disease (CKD).

A newly released memo from the U.S. State Department reveals that government officials knew early on that the COVID pandemic likely originated at a lab in Wuhan, China.

That memo, dated April 2020, states that out of five possible origins for COVID, a lab leak was by far the most likely. The memo also suggests that alternative theories had been introduced to prevent a lab leak from being investigated. The memo, which focuses almost entirely on the likelihood of a lab leak, contains a large amount of information that wasn’t known publicly at the time it was written.

“Mask up. We are not through this yet. This wave will go high. It doesn’t mean we will see the same amount of hospitalizations necessarily, at least not if we have the same level of infection but remember we are still going up and we are already at the peak we were at last time,” Jüni warned on Wednesday.

UHN infectious diseases specialist Dr. Abdu Sharkawy said masking should be reinstated in the province.

“I think that removing the mask mandate was a mistake to begin with, because really, not only was it a very visible symbol for everybody to recognize and remind themselves that we were still in the throes of a pandemic. But it really was the simplest tool that was widely accessible to everyone really, regardless of their means or privilege to help protect themselves and those around them from transmitting this virus,” he said.

Various health problems reported by people after receiving one of the COVID-19 vaccine shots are more likely caused by the vaccines than being merely coincidental, according to an analysis of data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

VAERS has been flooded with more than a million reports of various health problems and more than 21,000 death reports since the introduction of the vaccines in late 2020. Some experts and public officials have downplayed the significance of the reports, noting that just because a health problem occurs after getting the shot, it doesn’t mean it was caused by it.

Toronto’s top doctor is urging residents to return to wearing masks in public indoor settings amid a rise in COVID-19 transmission in the city.

The Ford government lifted the mask mandate for most settings last month but with wastewater surveillance now pointing to a significant uptick in the level of COVID-19 activity in Ontario, some epidemiologists are calling for its revival.

During a press conference on Monday, Toronto Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa said that she doesn’t believe mandates are appropriate at this point in the pandemic, given that they were always intended to be a “temporary tool” for a time when few other protections existed.