On March 22, 2020, CBC News Network interviewed Dr. Richard Schabas. Schabas had been Ontario’s chief medical officer of health between 1987 and 1997 and had appeared, or been heard, on the CBC, by his estimate, “literally hundreds” of times before. For more than 30 years, he had been a regular and trusted source on public health matters, and he had fully justified the CBC’s confidence in him. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, for example, Schabas was the chief of staff at one of the affected hospitals, York Central. At a time when there was widespread panic and some models were predicting 120 million deaths worldwide, he determined that the disease was not sufficiently infectious to spread in community settings and predicted that it would die out as soon as proper infection control measures were adopted in hospitals. He was proved right.
