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Omicron's toll in schools—and WTF is going on in La Crete?
150 Plays3 years ago
Bridget Stirling rejoins us to break down the toll Omicron is taking on our schools and to figure out what exactly is going in the least vaccinated, most anti-public health measure part of Alberta, La Crete.
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Transcript
Introduction and New Podcasts
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here to remind you that the Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. And three new awesome podcasts have just joined Harbinger, and the one I want to highlight is called Pullback, featuring Kyla Houston and Kristen Pugh. Their first episode with Harbinger is a fun and zesty look at one of the biggest causes of today's problems, monopolies. They discuss the history of monopolies, why antitrust law isn't working, and how monopolies hurt democracy. Now, with that out of the way, let's get on to the show.
00:00:41
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiscuachua Skygun, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory on the banks of the Cassis-Cassau, Mississippi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is returning champion, Bridget Sterling. Bridget is a former school trustee with the Edmonton Public School Board and a PhD candidate on educational policy studies at the University of Alberta. Bridget, welcome back. How are you doing?
Bridget Sterling's Journey and COVID-19 Impact
00:01:09
Speaker
I'm doing okay, as well as it can be expected in the middle of COVID and a climate crisis, but personally, my life's pretty good. Yes, yeah, that's good to hear. I mean, how are you personally fending off the doom?
00:01:22
Speaker
Uh, you know, I am just, I'm, I'm working from home. I've recently, I'm late to the game, but I recently started watching drag race and that is definitely lifting my spirits. Uh, you know, I hang out with my cat. Uh, yeah, no, I mean, it's, um, it's gone. Okay. All right. Well, and also big congrats on being an ex politician. I imagine that, uh, it does a lot for your mental health as well.
00:01:48
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's, um, I described it to someone yesterday is feeling like I, before, like all of the issues around education were kind of constantly punching me in the face. And now like, I'm still super involved in them. My research is in education, but now I can kind of have that space to, to look at things, to do my work. And like, I spent like a few months now since somebody called me and like gave me a threatening phone call or sent me a furious email. So it's really taken a lot of stress off.
00:02:19
Speaker
That's good to hear.
COVID-19's Effects on Alberta Schools
00:02:20
Speaker
So the reason we've got you on today is, you know, the issue that is of course on everyone's mind, you know, COVID-19, the Omicron variant, and specifically what it is doing to our schools now that schools are back and in-person learning is taking place again after the extended winter break. You know, Jason Kenney and Adriana Lagrange looked around at the information at the
00:02:46
Speaker
rising case counts at Omicron sweeping through the province and they gave that extra week off and they used that extra week off to do what exactly to make school safer.
00:02:57
Speaker
Uh, they, they sent out some really iffy masks. Uh, if you, if you see pictures of them that people have been posting online, people are getting, uh, Ziploc bags of masks, uh, of, of these, you know, the blue medical masks. Everyone knows what those look like now, but, and apparently some schools with elementary kids are, have been shipped only adult size masks, which is great. If you're familiar with six year olds, you know, adult size masks are,
00:03:24
Speaker
Great for six-year-olds. And actually the rapid antigen tests, the rapid tests are only starting to show up. AHS has said that they'll be shipping the rest of them to schools this week, but you know, they get to the school division and then they've got to go out on the truck mail or whatever to the schools. So I think a lot of parents aren't going to be seeing those tests coming home with their kids until next week sometime.
00:03:49
Speaker
Lots of thoughts and prayers and exciting enthusiastic statements from our education minister that kids are going to get back to school and it's going to be great. So far it's looking pretty rough.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yes, not only are they getting a few masks, some rapid antigen chests that are going to show up at some point but haven't showed up yet, thoughts and prayers, but also the school system is blessed with no more PCR testing, essentially that's only reserved for medical workers or people with high-risk medical problems. Essentially, contact tracing is done. I don't even know if they're trying anymore or if there are people who are employed as contract tracers who are still doing that job.
00:04:30
Speaker
It's that that seems to have kind of utterly collapsed, you know, again, you know, notification of parents of whether there was like COVID positive people or students in the classroom doesn't seem to be taking any more, doesn't seem to be taking place anymore. You know, there used to be rules around shutting down classrooms and moving to online learning. If there was a massive outbreak, that rule has essentially been revoked and
00:04:55
Speaker
whether a school goes to online learning or not is kind of purely discretionary now. Am I missing anything else that is not happening in regards to keeping kids safe in schools? Yeah, I mean, families aren't getting that notification. And the other piece of that, of course, is that those AHS investigations in schools won't be happening anymore. So there's going to be no AHS coming in to do any sort of looking at what's happening with an outbreak, anything like that. Like, it's just school divisions are now
00:05:25
Speaker
flying on their own, basically. Except for, of course, it's still going to be the same situation where if a school division wants to move classes online, they still have to get permission from the minister to do that, which is a serious issue. There's still no local autonomy for school divisions to make those choices for themselves. And that
00:05:46
Speaker
problem with not having PCR tests anymore is that now it's schools only know if there's a COVID case if parents self report and we're in this situation where those rapid tests haven't come home yet from schools and you know I think most people know that in the last few weeks the rapid tests that were available through pharmacies for people to pick up have been
Staff Absences and Challenges for Students
00:06:10
Speaker
It's been like finding gold to get a box of rapid tests a lot of the time. And so a lot of families don't have those rapid tests at home. So children are showing symptoms, but often the family doesn't even have the ability to test.
00:06:27
Speaker
And some families may not be testing and then whether or not they even choose to report or if they just call their child in sick and they don't say what's going on. So it's really hard to even get a picture of it. You know, it's a real mess for school divisions, but Edmonton Public actually, and I hope more school divisions are going to do this across the province, Edmonton Public decided to proactively start posting their numbers online.
00:06:54
Speaker
They've got a couple days worth of data up already and it's already looking really messy. So if you look at it. I mean, we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon. What effects on the school system have we seen so far? What is the data that we just from the two days back, the two and a half days back, what have we seen already?
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, so so on Monday you saw about 3% of kids in Edmonton public out for other illness and then 1.5% of those reporting as COVID. And again, how many of those kids who are just off sick and have COVID but don't have access to testing or haven't tested positive because
00:07:31
Speaker
rapid tests don't always pick things up right away and you can get false negatives so there's about one and a half percent on Monday. Now yesterday you saw 3.5% of kids so up off with other illness and 1.8% or so off with COVID and that sounds small but in a division the size of Edmonton Public what you're talking about is you know
00:07:56
Speaker
On Monday, you saw about 4,700 kids off sick. And then Tuesday, 5,600 kids off sick. That's the equivalent of a couple of big high schools off sick just from the first two days of school. And those kids are now, they've just come back. They're all mingling in the classroom. So I think we're going to start to see those numbers climbing pretty quickly through the week and into next week. So that's for the kids. And it's actually even worse when you start to look at staff.
00:08:26
Speaker
So you look at the staffing like yesterday, Tuesday, you had in Edmonton Public, they had 494 teachers out and 36 of those, they couldn't fill the substitute teachers. And they've moved to something that they did, Edmonton Public did last year too, which was hiring supply teachers on basically on temporary contracts. So they're still sort of working in supply teachers, but they get hired on full time to guarantee their availability. So they've hired on 29.
00:08:56
Speaker
basically like full-time subs. So they're paid like a full-time teacher and they're available basically every day to go and sub because otherwise people are on the sub list and they just get called and they get to choose whether or not they take the job. So it's to ensure it's available. And what gets even worse is when you look at educational assistance. So yesterday Edmonton Public had 262 EAs out sick and 125
00:09:22
Speaker
of those absences were unfilled. So you think about that disproportionate impact on kids with disabilities, right? Those students who need those, you know, various reasons have those additional support needs in schools. And, you know, almost half of those kids whose EAs were away yesterday didn't have somebody else come in to offer them that support in the classroom.
Consequences and Long-term Effects of COVID-19
00:09:45
Speaker
So that's a, again, we're seeing this disproportionate impact on kids with disabilities in schools.
00:09:51
Speaker
And yes, just to remind everyone, we are two days in, two kids being back in school. It is now the third day. And yeah, like we are, they're struggling to staff the schools. The massive amount of students simply are sick. And like if Dina Hinshaw says, you know, is doing press conferences where she says, if you're sick right now, it's probably COVID. Like anyone staying home sick right now probably has COVID, you know what I mean?
00:10:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there are some other things floating around out there, but again, because of COVID measures, there's been very few influenza cases. I do know a few people who've had a different cold that isn't COVID, but most people who are getting sick right now, it's COVID. And so when you can think about that with those kids who are out sick, probably most of those kids are COVID too. Yeah. And so let's think this through. What are the consequences, the possible consequences of letting
00:10:50
Speaker
COVID just run wild through schools with like very little mitigation efforts, essentially like what we're seeing now. So there's short term consequences, right? And the short term consequences are that once again, schools are going to be back on this COVID roller coaster because eventually you get to a point in a school where you have enough staff members out sick or enough percentage of the population of students out sick. You can't run the school, right? Especially if you, if you lose enough staff in a school.
00:11:16
Speaker
you can't operate the school, even if you've got supply teachers who can come in. So that's a short-term effect and kids go back into that same cycle that we've seen since, you know, 2020, which is this, you know, online home isolating back in schools, back and forth, you know, shifting that is really disruptive to kids' learning, right? It really destabilizes. So short-term we have that, like,
00:11:39
Speaker
back on the COVID roller coaster, the impact on students learning. The other piece of this that's really concerning is we still don't understand how many kids are getting long COVID and how long that will last, right? So some of those kids who get long COVID, you know, who have continuing symptoms, they might recover eventually, but we may be looking at who knows how many of the kids are getting long COVID experiencing permanent disability, right? And so
00:12:06
Speaker
We think back to polio, for example, it was actually a very, very small percentage of children who got polio who ended up with permanent paralysis. But we took that really seriously, right? And they closed schools, they closed swimming pools, they did all kinds of things. But we're now in the situation where, you know, instead of doing those things that we did historically to protect kids, instead, we're just going to
00:12:30
Speaker
It's it would have been like people in the 50s
Government's Duty of Care and Safety Measures
00:12:32
Speaker
shrugging and letting polio just run rampant through the schools because most kids are fine. Like that's what it feels like right now. We just we don't know what the permanent impacts on children are going to be from from COVID infection. And the problem with long COVID is
00:12:46
Speaker
people are getting it even from relatively mild infections. I know a few people who are living with it now. And some of those people didn't get that sick initially, but they're now dealing with consequences months or in one case that I know, you know, they got sick quite early in the pandemic, and they're still dealing with long COVID now. So yeah, like, I don't think we have really grokked the fact that like, oh, it's like,
00:13:11
Speaker
1% of the population has some type of long-term disability from COVID. That's really fucking bad, actually, for society. Well, you think about the lifelong impact on a child. You've got a kid who gets infected at eight years old, ends up with long COVID. That's a lifetime of impact on that child. Yeah, and we just don't know. We don't know what we don't know about
00:13:37
Speaker
how long COVID works and what its long-term effects are. This infection is literally from 2019. You know what I mean? We just don't know. And then I think the other big thing is that this is going to drive infection to other places. The fact that the schools are such a soup for COVID just means that they're going to get their parents sick, they're going to get their friends sick, they're going to get the kids they play soccer or go to gymnastics with sick. You know what I mean? It's going to drive further infection throughout the people
00:14:07
Speaker
Schools are just going to be like the nexus point for infections.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, and when you look at the AHS claims around COVID in schools, so what Hinshaw has said is that one case in a school, if there's been school transmission, they've seen two cases result from it. But what she doesn't say, and that was when we were still dealing with wild-type COVID. This is before we started dealing with Omicron, which is just off the charts for how quickly it spreads.
00:14:38
Speaker
If you're looking at those two cases, the thing that she doesn't say in that is as soon as that child takes the case home and makes someone else in their household sick, they don't call that related to schools, right? They don't relate that case back to the school. That's no household transmission. It's tracked totally separately in the data.
00:14:56
Speaker
It's not revealed to people. Now I've heard rumors that there is some internal data that actually does show more of these connections. But whatever's what's reported out to the public, like the school based cases are only the cases that took place in the school that were detected at the time. So it doesn't count, you know, that child went home. They made their parents sick. Maybe their parent went to work while they, you know, before they started showing symptoms, they made people at work sick and none of that like web
00:15:24
Speaker
out from the school, that transmission out to the community is being tracked. And there's no way it's not happening. Kids are not magically separate from their communities. Yeah. And we just don't know anymore because contact tracing has pretty much collapsed. And it's also worth pointing out that because going to school is mandatory in this province, you have to send your kids to school. There is a duty of care that the government has to ensure that it is a safe place. And do you think that the government is doing everything possible to make school safe?
00:15:54
Speaker
Oh, they're absolutely not. Right. So so what we know now, I mean, when we were in the spring of 2020, right, we were still thinking that this was, you know,
00:16:03
Speaker
Based on touch, we were talking about fomite transmission, we were talking about droplets. So the social distancing and the cleaning lots of high touch surfaces was the thing that was generally being the kind of guidance that people were being given. But we're now well into this pandemic where we know and we've got pretty clear data that COVID is airborne, that is spreading through airborne transmission.
00:16:27
Speaker
But most of the guidance for schools is still based on this idea that we need to be cleaning surfaces. And as long as kids are six feet apart, there's no issues. And this is just not how it actually is working. So code is getting spread through ventilation systems. The longer that people are breathing in a room together,
00:16:46
Speaker
You know they're now saying think of it like cigarette smoke right it floats through the air. And so, you know, if you were in a room with somebody who's smoking, and the windows were all closed you didn't have ventilation. It's just going to build up in the room right and it's going to spread throughout the room so.
00:17:01
Speaker
We start seeing this in schools, but we haven't seen any action, any meaningful action from this government on ventilation systems. We haven't seen any meaningful action on providing better quality masks, right? So, medical masks are great for stopping droplets, but if you actually look at what most of the experts on, you know, airborne viruses sort of talk about is that you need to
00:17:25
Speaker
You know, the things that stop droplet transmission aren't enough that you need to be upgrading masks. And we're not providing, you know, kids and teachers with upgraded masks. We're not providing, you know, can 95s or N95s or the KF 94s like these different high grade masks. None of that's happening. We're just sending out some medical masks and keeping our fingers crossed.
Vaccination Clinics Debate
00:17:46
Speaker
And so what are the odds? What do you think the odds are that we will see another broad scale school shutdown like we've seen, I guess, twice now?
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, actually, it's it's been more than that. Just thinking about because we've also had like wide scale shutdowns of, you know, high school and junior high. I think I don't think it's far off. I think we're looking at probably in the next week or two, you're going to start seeing schools moving online. I don't know when we're going to see the whole system move online. I don't know if this government will do that again, but you are going to start to see schools moving online pretty quickly here if we continue to see the levels of absence among staff that are happening.
00:18:26
Speaker
there's no way it's not going to start closing schools. Yeah. And I guess one of the big questions that I have too is like, why aren't there vaccination clinics in schools? This government seems to have decided for whatever reason to simply decide not to have vaccination clinics in schools. This is despite the fact that
00:18:51
Speaker
AHS regularly vaccinates students in grades one, six, and three for a variety of things. But for COVID, it's a non-starter for some reason. What are your thoughts on that?
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with this pressure from their base right around the fear around, oh, they're going to vaccinate my child without my consent. Well, no, schools are really, really careful about that. They check the consent forms, all of those things. But the other piece, there's some reasonable argument in having a parent present for the younger kids. There could be a lot of anxieties, for example, for kindergartners without a parent present.
00:19:33
Speaker
But there are still ways you could have done that using schools that would have supported people accessing vaccines much more easily, especially for people who don't drive. So in other provinces, they've done things like they've done the vaccinations at the end of the school day. So when parents come for pickup time, they can stay, they can do the vaccine clinic, and then they can go home.
00:19:54
Speaker
So it really reduces the barriers. A lot of families come at the end of the day. They're used to coming into the school. It's comfortable. There's kind of a social aspect to it then, too. You create this sort of pro-social thinking, right? Oh, look, everyone in my community is getting this done. I'm going to participate, too. They're familiar with the staff in the school. There's a lot of reasons that it reduces barriers. And for people who
00:20:18
Speaker
don't drive or, you know, may not be able to get to one of these central clinics, it makes it a lot easier for people to get their child vaccinated because they're already going to the school. So it wouldn't hit every kid, but it would certainly reduce a lot of the barriers for families. And we just haven't done that here. You know, instead, we're expecting people to
00:20:37
Speaker
go to central AHS sites where they have to book an appointment and the booking system's been messy. There's been some problems. And so it's just, it's like Alberta decided to make it as hard as we could for people to get kids vaccinated for COVID. Yes. The vaccination rates for kids five to 11 are not great. And they've been available since they've been available to the kids nine to 11 or sorry, five to 11 since the end of November, beginning of December, right?
00:21:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's less than 5% of kids still have a second dose. And it's only about 40% of them that even have their first dose. So it's really a problem.
Lecrete's COVID-19 Response and Misinformation
00:21:16
Speaker
And there's probably some hesitancy factor in there. But so much of that, I think, is about just it being really hard for families. Yeah, access. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:21:28
Speaker
And, you know, speaking of Kenny pandering to the worst parts of his anti-vax base, let us go to the epicenter, the fucking like the gleaming hot red hot eye of Jason Kenney's anti-vax base. And that is, of course, Lecrete Alberta. There was a story that came out this weekend from CBC, frankly, an incredible story. And I would argue
00:21:56
Speaker
Pretty irresponsible journalism from CBC. The headline is health expert urges caution after blood testing firm claims, quote, pandemic is over unquote in Alberta Hamlet.
00:22:10
Speaker
And I know you had a lot of thoughts about this online. I read it and my eyes widened. Before we get into the specifics, what jumped out at you from just purely from the media criticism angle on this piece? Well, I mean, the first thing that just blew my mind is how little
00:22:37
Speaker
checking into this guy's background anyone seems to have done. I gave his name a quick Google and he came up as appearing on anti-vax podcasts.
00:22:47
Speaker
you know, mention of that in the story at all, you know, and we look at like, also the headlines that we saw initially on the story, right. And we know on social media, a lot of people just read the headline and the initial headlines that were put out there were really, really slanted it to make it sound like, you know, it was originally just, oh, this guy says that the pandemic's over in this hamlet, and didn't say anything about, you know, the commentary from health experts who are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is a bad idea, right. So it's just,
00:23:17
Speaker
So many aspects in which the story was reported irresponsibly and then pushed out onto social media just blew my mind Yeah, so let's get into the details because the details again
00:23:28
Speaker
We'll blow your hair back. I'm going to start reading it here. A private blood testing company's claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is over, that's in quote marks, in a Northern Alberta community could lull residents into a false sense of security, says an infectious diseases expert.
00:23:48
Speaker
More than 1,200 people in the hamlet of Lecrete, 700 kilometers northwest of Edmonton, paid $100 each in mid-December to have their blood tested for antibodies by iCore Blood Services, a private lab specimen collection company based in Calgary. The tests found antibodies in most of the 90991 unvaccinated individuals who were tested.
00:24:11
Speaker
ICORE CEO Mike Kuzmikis said he believes the results show the Crete is relatively safe from COVID-19. Here's the money quote here that they put this quote in both the headline and the opening paragraph. Quote, the pandemic is over in the Crete. They have reached herd immunity, Kuzmikis told CBC News in an email last month.
00:24:33
Speaker
Okay, let's stop it right there. There is no need to just uncritically repeat that three times. Yeah. And let's remember, the one you're reading from now is the updated stories. The original version didn't even preface, didn't even start with that statement about an expert's comment on it. It just started off with this guy's claims, right?
00:24:57
Speaker
We all know anyone who's worked in communications, right? Repetition is the thing that sticks with people. You know, repetition is the thing that stays in people's heads. So continually repeating this unsubstantiated claim. And by the way, people who have gotten COVID get COVID again, right? Like people have gotten reinfected, especially with some of the variants.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah. Like your Bolsonaro has had COVID like eight times. Like, come on. Yeah. You are not immune from COVID if you get COVID. It just blows my mind. And there's so little that we know about antibody testing right now and what it really means for long-term immunity. Like this is just this wild claim based on this guy who's a former oil and gas engineer, right?
00:25:44
Speaker
He is a mechanical engineer without training or expertise in epidemiology, virology, or vaccines, or in fact, really seemingly absent of any medical, formal medical training at all. The quote here, okay, I got to read this quote. Kuzmikis is a mechanical engineer without training or expertise in epidemiology, virology, or vaccines. He said he is interpreting the data the best he can.
00:26:10
Speaker
Okay, how, how did anyone think like, oh, let's just do a story. You know, there was like, I actually think this story should have been covered, but it should have been covered from the angle of, you know, unqualified man scams, scientifically uninformed Hamlet.
00:26:26
Speaker
Or like, and Hamlet that has been like hammered by COVID, like there's a, there's a, the paragraph where I just, after I stopped reading, there was like, oh yeah, 89% of the unvaccinated population test positive for so, for the, for the COVID-19 antibody. I mean, and the, the numbers we have seen from the other reporting, cause there's been lots of reporting on the creed because it is this like.
00:26:45
Speaker
Skofla place when it comes to like health regulations, like almost everyone in Lecrete has gotten COVID. And that's because they don't believe in vaccines or masking or distancing or any type of public health measures because they don't believe that like COVID is real.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yeah, or they believe that God's going to save them. Like, it's just a weird belief that, you know, and my perspective on that is always like, yeah, well, you know, that's why, you know, if you believe in God, maybe you might also believe that that's why we have vaccine technology and why we have this scientific knowledge, but
00:27:18
Speaker
You know, it just people there have been so hard hit and then to give people on top of it kind of a false sense of security that now they're all going to be safe, which means that even any precautions that people might have been taking, they might be dropping now. And they also got all of these people to pay 100 bucks each to get this test. So, you know, however many people in the Hamlet
00:27:45
Speaker
He walked away with a pretty good profit off this little venture. 991 times 100 is $99,000. I'm pretty sure it didn't cost him $99,000 too.
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah, we don't know what percentage he's making on that, but I don't imagine his test came to $99,000. The confidence to one, just say out loud to the public as a mechanical engineer, quote, they've developed underlying T cell memory and they don't have to worry about it. What the fuck are you talking about? One, how do you say that out loud? And then two, as a reporter, how do you just repeat that?
00:28:27
Speaker
Uh, like that's the, it's, it's like all of his stuff is up high in the story. All of his quotes are just like presented. And then it's like, okay, then we go to, you know, infectious disease experts, Dr. Lenora Saksinger, right?
00:28:39
Speaker
Yeah, Dr. Saxon has been really involved with the Alberta COVID response. She's the co-chair of the AHS Scientific Advisory, right? So they do go to her and that's really important, but they go to her after first all these claims are made. And we know, you went to journalism school, you know how far a lot of people ever read into an article.
00:29:05
Speaker
By the time you get a few paragraphs in, a lot of people have just absorbed the first part and they're not going to finish this thing. So they're not even, a lot of people aren't even going to get to Dr. Saxonier's comments. Yeah. And then we get a couple of quotes from Dr. Lenore Saxonier saying the things you would expect, this is not equivalent to being vaccinated, infection. Early on, every infection seemed rare, but now it is common.
00:29:31
Speaker
Infection alone is not good protection. And then we get to some more fun Lecrete facts, which I am here for. Only 35% of the eligible population in the surrounding county or health region.
00:29:44
Speaker
uh, have been immunized with two doses, again, like the lowest in the province, probably one of the lowest in the country. Uh, the, uh, the ICORE blood services was engaged to do the testing by the Lecrete Chamber of Commerce. Um, and the testing, you know, where you had to pay a hundred dollars each, that was advertised by the chamber to the residents of Lecrete. Residents were asked to sign up and bring a hundred dollars cash to their appointments, according to the chamber's social media posts. Like again,
00:30:14
Speaker
incredible. This didn't just happen. This happened with the town's Chamber of Commerce blessing and by using their platform and their infrastructure to get more people to take the test. Yeah. So you've got all these people who are in this position of authority now, community leadership saying, oh yeah, this is a good idea. You should go do this. I'm just going to say, we don't know what antibody testing means. We don't actually know
00:30:41
Speaker
how much immunity people have from antibodies and the testing. Like I'm a participant in a research study on antibodies and they're super, super clear with us as participants. So I go every few months to get my blood taken. They check it for antibodies. Now that we're vaccinated, they also check for vaccine antibodies because those are separate. So I know that I have vaccine antibodies and not COVID antibodies from like infection.
00:31:08
Speaker
But they're really, really careful to caution people that just because you have antibodies doesn't mean that you're safe from COVID, right? It just blows me away that people are, you know, that you've got leadership in a community fueling this kind of misrepresentation of what antibody testing even tells you. And it's not just that, but like, okay, I'm just doing some scrolling and some clicking, but you have to get
00:31:38
Speaker
far down into the story to get the quote that says, Saxinger said it's unclear what can be learned from the results provided by ICOR Blood Services. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's these fancy looking graphs that got included, I think with this story.
00:31:59
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's these charts. Yeah. Yeah. They don't tell you anything. They don't, you know, in this presumption that people who have, you know, test, especially there's some people who test to very, very low levels of antibodies, like what that even means, you know, it just, it looks great, right? It looks very sciency, but what it means?
00:32:22
Speaker
You have to get 1,500 words into the story. You have to scroll by these official-looking chart things to get to the experts saying, it's unclear what any of this means. It should have been led. The thing is, when I think about how this story should have been structured,
00:32:41
Speaker
Every single claim that they might have printed that this guy made, the counterpoint should have been printed alongside it. I get that CBC has this sort of, we got to be balanced, whatever perspective on things, but you can include the counterpoints closely so that people can understand the debunking as they read through the story, rather than this sort of chunked up thing that doesn't get you to the actual scientific commentary until most people have probably tuned out.
00:33:13
Speaker
1500 words in, a lot of people are done reading by then. It's like a long story. It's probably closer to 2500 words. They're getting his thoughts on public health restrictions, and it's like, what the fuck? Again, you are under no obligation to provide this person a platform.
00:33:34
Speaker
You can report on it, sure. I mean, I think it's news that this fucking weird ass community that hates following public health restrictions paid $100,000 to get a bunch of people tested. But you do not have to repeat his claims that he thinks it's been two years. There needs to be a different approach to how to get out of this pandemic. It's like, what the fuck would you know about it, buddy?
00:34:01
Speaker
Yeah, like how is this guy in any way, qualified to comment on where we should be at with public health restrictions? I mean, you might as well print my opinion in the story for all that it matters. In fact, maybe more, because I've actually presented peer-reviewed work on COVID-19 policy. But even then, I'm a policy nerd. I'm not a medical expert. I'm not a health expert. I don't do public health.
00:34:31
Speaker
He's no more qualified than I am to comment on this stuff and yet it's being printed like he's an authority somehow on whether we should be opening up.
00:34:41
Speaker
A fun fact I discovered while doing the research for this story is that a conservative activist, who some of you might know, he hasn't been in the headlines recently. I don't know how connected he is to the ECP, but Peter Polarsky was doing PR work for iCore. Really, I also just want to take a minute to talk about Lecrete, because again, Lecrete is the white-hot glowing orb
00:35:03
Speaker
of like everything that is fucked up about this province's response to the pandemic and like literally all you all I'm going to be doing is like going over headlines and stories that that show up when you
00:35:15
Speaker
when you put the words Lecrete Alberta into like a Google news search, but it is, it's bad. Okay. So like last month, like literally 30 days ago, CBC national had like a four minute piece, you know, inside the community with Alberta's lowest vaccination rate. And it's by Paige Parsons, the same person who wrote this story. And it's honestly, it's quite good. They interview a person, a member of the community, a Mennonite who, uh, and a lot of the people who live in Lecrete and area are Mennonites.
00:35:41
Speaker
Uh, he's a person who like wears a mask and got vaccinated and takes the public health restrictions seriously. And he is like, essentially like shunned in his community. Um, you know, one thing that actually came up in the CBC reporting on it is that the $100 payment that Jason Kenney introduced to ostensibly try and get people to take the shot actually made people actually made people more leery of getting the shot in this community.
00:36:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, when you've got people who have a distrust of government, right, which it seems like a lot of people in this community do. And then you introduce, oh, we'll give you money to get these things and people think this thing and people are already suspicious and they're like, well, why are you trying to bribe me to take this shot now, like that's
00:36:26
Speaker
That's how people from that kind of perspective are going to interpret being offered $100 for it. Exactly. Exactly. Right. There's another story, December 13th, again, published by CBC, how neighbors and communities are divided over COVID-19 in this rural Alberta County, again, focused on Lecrete. And of course, then you see the consequences of this stuff. There's an AHS press release from October 21st, 2021, hours temporarily reduced at Lecrete Ambulatory Care Center, which is terrible.
00:36:55
Speaker
you know, which we saw a lot of that happening in a lot of different places across the province, but unsurprising that it would also happen in Lecrete. Uh, something in your wheelhouse, uh, Bridgett, Lecrete schools exempt from learning order. Do you remember when this story came out? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It just, so essentially like the, almost the entire province went, uh, like shut down schools and went to online learning and Lecrete was like, nah. Yeah, no. And, and the thing that like,
00:37:25
Speaker
I mean, first of all, being exempted from it somehow because people in your community are more COVID denialist than elsewhere in the province just seems absurd to me, right? Like you've got, you know, oh, good. So you've got people who don't even believe this disease is real and now we're going to exempt them from the public health order that's supposed to protect people. Also, like to go back to their ambulatory care center, and it's a thing that we saw in a few communities across the province, but Lacrete was one of them is
00:37:51
Speaker
One of the things that happened is with the vaccine mandates through AHS for healthcare workers is facilities in some of these communities couldn't get enough staff because vaccine denialism in the community meant that they didn't actually have enough vaccinated workers to keep facilities open. But rather than figure out a different solution to it, the response was to
00:38:17
Speaker
pull back on some of the vaccine mandates. So again, it's like the decision to exempt the schools. Rather than continuing to use the policy levers to maintain public safety, you see a rejection
00:38:32
Speaker
of public health orders being caused to, oh, we're going to drop this part of the order then. We're just, OK, people here don't like this rule. We're just going to get rid of the rule. It's a completely absurd approach to how you manage the society.
Misinformation in Isolated Communities
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah. Published October 30th, 2021. Headline, bakeries, diners, and bars serve up defiance to Alberta's vaccine passport program. CBC writes another story where Lucrete makes an appearance.
00:39:01
Speaker
Some guy who runs a coffee house is like, no, I won't be doing it. This is an interesting one. Canada Post Corporation shuffles vaccinated workers to cover staff shortages. This is from December 20th. It's published in the local paper, The Record Gazette. I'm going to quote it here. Fairview, Wanam, and Falher have all had Canada Post assicities. I don't know what this acronym means. Something something Canada Post members.
00:39:25
Speaker
covering in the Lecrete Post Office for the past month in order to keep the office open, she said. Because many of Lecrete's employees have chosen to quit or retire due to the vaccine issue. The shortages in staff have also resulted in counter services being reduced.
00:39:40
Speaker
Yeah, so this is the same problem that they had with health facilities there, right? Because Canada Post brought in a vaccine mandate for postal workers, and now you're seeing the same thing happening in that community again, right? So it's just this deeply entrenched refusal to do the bare minimum to take care of other people.
00:40:03
Speaker
And finally, April 10th, 2021, this is published on CTV news, Alberta health services vehicles pelted with eggs. Again, this is four vehicles owned by AHS and marked as such were pelted with eggs. They were up there to set up the launch of some like random healthcare thing that I've never heard of. And apparently there was like some rumors circulating in the community that they were there to like forcibly vaccinate everyone or something.
00:40:30
Speaker
Um, yeah, there you go. Oh, the creep.
00:40:35
Speaker
Oh, Lucrete. And it's a really absurd situation. And part of what makes it absurd is Lucrete is a predominantly Mennonite community. And there's this weird resistance there. And it reflects the resistance we've seen in some other very conservative, predominantly Mennonite communities in southern Manitoba. But the thing is,
00:41:03
Speaker
The Mennonites Central Committee, now Mennonites are not like Catholics, they don't have a pope, right? But there is the Mennonites Central Committee, which kind of is an organizing body for Mennonites and other Mennonite scholars and stuff who've said there is no religious justification.
00:41:20
Speaker
for vaccine refusal in Mennonite belief or tradition. And in fact, if you take a look at the language from the Mennonite Central Committee, not only are they encouraging people to participate in vaccination themselves, but also are major advocates for the trips waivers that would allow countries around the world
00:41:44
Speaker
you know, who don't have vaccine access right now, to have better vaccine access to wave the patents on the vaccines so they could be produced. And this is, you know, these are both coming from a Mennonite perspective. And that's where the behavior of people in communities like Lecrete is really kind of absurd. Because if you think about that idea of, you know, caring for your community, caring for your neighbors, which is a really strong Mennonite value,
00:42:12
Speaker
It's very confusing to then see people resisting the basic things that they might need to do to keep their neighbors safe. Yeah, I mean, I try to approach situations like this, you know, with empathy and an open mind. And like, I'm trying to understand where people are coming from. But it is really hard to just not look at what is happening in the community of Lecrete and not conclude that
00:42:35
Speaker
there is a huge majority of people there who are selfish assholes who are not interested in keeping each other safe and other people safe. Well, and I, I'm not sure about that. Um, you know, there, there probably are some, uh, but I think also what can happen, you've got a small, fairly isolated community. Um, likely a lot of people in that community because of conservative religious beliefs are, you know, maybe not,
00:43:04
Speaker
engaging as much with mainstream media. They may not be, you know, I don't know what people's internet use is like in that community or whatever, but what can happen when you have kind of a very insular community is if you get misinformation that starts to spread in a community like that, it can spread really quickly and it can become the predominant opinion, right? So,
00:43:26
Speaker
I don't doubt that there are a lot of people in that community who sincerely held belief is that the vaccine is dangerous and it will kill them, right? Who sincerely held beliefs are that COVID isn't real, right? And it's not because they're jerks. It's that they're living in a circumstance where they're not getting good information. And then the social context that they're in is reinforcing those beliefs and those behaviors, right? Like that's the social norm. That's what they're hearing from everyone around them.
00:43:56
Speaker
And then you see what happened to that guy who stepped outside that and you know the social pressure on him you know and actually the you know the being shunned by his community and then you can think even if you're somebody who isn't sure about it you're likely to go along just because you're looking at the rest of your community's behavior right so
00:44:18
Speaker
Yeah, there are people who are unvaccinated because they're jerks, but I think we also need to be really compassionate towards people who are in these really insulated communities and are getting so much misinformation that they're not getting access to what's really going on in the world.
Closing Remarks and Episode Summary
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I agree. We do need to approach this situation from one with empathy. It's just, it's really fucking hard. And also like, I agree that like these people have clearly had their brains like melted by the internet. Right. And like, and that this, this misinformation that is circulating is like, because the community is, you know, in 630 kilometers, Northwest of Edmonton, kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a huge population, fairly isolated. Uh, yeah.
00:45:01
Speaker
Like the misinformation spreads fast and that's when you get a situation where like a bunch of HS, like SUVs get pelted with eggs, you know? Well, and I feel terrible for those workers. Like how frightening to be going into set up, set up a, you know, what's actually a really good program for, for rural communities, right? The connect care program offers a lot of access for people and going in to do something that's going to really help and support that community and having people think you're there to forcibly vaccinate them.
00:45:30
Speaker
and throw eggs at you, what that must be like to be driving through a little town in your vehicle thinking you're just going to work and suddenly people are egging you. I'm going to guess that they probably had to leave town.
00:45:45
Speaker
Well, that is the happy note that we are ending it on. I would recommend maybe not visiting Lecrete until we have a little more of a handle on the COVID-19 pandemic. Bridget, let's leave it there. What's the best way for kind of people to follow you along on the internet?
00:46:04
Speaker
Uh, you know, probably the best way for people to find me is just on Twitter. Um, it's at Bridgette Sterling, B-R-I-D-G-E-T-S-D-I-R-L-A-N-G, cause nobody can spell my name. Um, and I'm, I'm on Twitter. I'm a loud mouth, uh, even more now that I'm not a politician and I can have all the opinions that I want. Uh, so that's probably the best place to follow me. Um, if you're looking for what I'm, what I'm doing out in the world. So.
00:46:27
Speaker
Awesome. Yes. Follow bridges Twitter account. It's very good. Also, uh, you should also be like Bridget in that you should also be one of the 500 or so supporters who financially kick in a little bit every month to help keep this little independent media project going. Uh, there is a link in the show notes. You can go to the progress report.ca slash patrons.
00:46:44
Speaker
you know, put in your credit card, five, 10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. Jim and I really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, I am very easy to get ahold of. I am also on Twitter far too much at Duncan Kinney. And you can reach me by email at DuncanKatprogressalberta.ca. Thanks to Jim's story or the edit. Thanks to Cosmic Famicomunist for our amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.