“China eats weird animals disease”

To competently manage any situation, accurate information is a requirement. Americans require precise data about the COVID pandemic to analyze the performance of our leaders and assess personal risk. Unfortunately, it is becoming more apparent that the corporate media and public health officials have subjected us to inaccurate data and word games for the last two years. We all remember the CNN death ticker that ran until Joe Biden’s inauguration, and Americans are still subjected to regular hysteria about hospitalizations and cases. One new statistic from New York is just the tip of the iceberg on how the “experts” have manipulated some Americans into mass hysteria.

I’m very fond of vaccines, very fond. But I must say, these COVID-19 vaccines have been a bit of a letdown.

A year ago, the vaccines offered hope, a light at the end of the long tunnel of plague. Yet here we are, one year later, after the vast majority of Canadians dutifully rolled up their sleeves to get the jab, and the light seems even further afield.

Last week, a friend phoned to tell me that her child would be unable to make a playdate with my 8-year-old scheduled for the following day. Her son had tested negative for COVID that evening, yet she planned to take him for another PCR test the next morning “out of an abundance of caution.” Days earlier, a neighborhood mom was so distraught that her daughter had shared the same bus with a classmate who was later discovered to have had COVID that she insisted on stocking up on at-home testing kits for use every day that week. Despite displaying no symptoms and being fully vaccinated, the child and her siblings were subjected to daily nasal swabs.

The liberal justices of the Supreme Court made repeated false claims during oral arguments on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate Friday.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer in particular made a number of false statements, ranging from claims about the nature of the Omicron variant to basic facts and statistics about the state of the pandemic in the United States.

Ambulances in Kansas speed toward hospitals then suddenly change direction because hospitals are full. Employee shortages in New York City cause delays in trash and subway services and diminish the ranks of firefighters and emergency workers. Airport officials shut down security checkpoints at the biggest terminal in Phoenix and schools across the nation struggle to find teachers for their classrooms.

The current explosion of omicron-fueled coronavirus infections in the U.S. is causing a breakdown in basic functions and services — the latest illustration of how COVID-19 keeps upending life more than two years into the pandemic.

As omicron sweeps through North America, the U.S. and Canadian responses couldn’t be more different. U.S. states are largely open for business, while Canada’s biggest provinces are shutting down.

The difference partly comes down to arithmetic: The U.S. health care system, which prioritizes free markets, provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated Canadian system does.

“I’m not advocating for that American market-driven system,” said Bob Bell, a physician who ran Ontario’s health bureaucracy from 2014 to 2018 and oversaw Toronto’s University Health Network before that. “But I am saying that in Canada, we have restricted hospital capacity excessively.”

There is no way to make vaccination against COVID-19 truly mandatory, unless those refusing the shot are thrown in jail or physically restrained and forcibly injected. Lesser forms of coercion, such as regular fines for the unvaccinated, or existing government mandates that require vaccination in order to gain entry to, say, a restaurant, are also flagrant intrusions into Canadian’s basic rights.

Flying anywhere right now is difficult, but for those of us who are jabbed, it is at least possible. So just after Christmas I set off for America to see my family in Connecticut, armed with the NHS app technology which we were once assured would never be used as a vaccine passport. It’s now precisely that.

I tapped my phone to summon my travel credentials en route to Heathrow, but to my astonishment my vaccination status wasn’t there: ‘No Covid-19 records found.’ My ‘passport’ had been suspended.