Canada's Vaccine Passport Policy Backed by Misinformation and Fraudulent Study

Apr 16, 2024

Towards the end of the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, Canadians were beginning to tire of the rolling lockdowns, forced closure of schools and businesses, and daily dire news reports of covid cases and imminent death. The daily covid death reports were bad enough, but then we were also subjected to headlines such as this one from the Winnipeg Free Press:

Strangely, I haven't been able to find this article anywhere now, but thankfully I thought to take a screenshot at the time. I recall I wasn't able to read it because of a pay wall, but the headline was enough. Like, is this kind of headline really beneficial to anyone? Especially when you consider that these are not actual facts, but simply predictions and projections based on a computer model.

In a province the size of Manitoba (about 1.37 million as of 2019), what are we expected to do with this information? 2,600 extra deaths in a few months is a huge death toll for a population this size. Thankfully, it was nowhere near that. As of March 9, 2024, our official covid death toll (for whatever these numbers are worth) stands at about 2,571. So, very likely we’ve reached that 2600 by now, but it looks like it took three and a half years, rather than three months.

Two and a half months before this stupid headline in the Free Press, on August 13, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made this announcement:

Canadians know that the way to get through this pandemic is for everyone to get vaccinated. So unless people have a medical exception, they will not be able to board a plane or a train in Canada if they are unvaccinated.

Two days after the announcement, on August 15, 2021, assuming that the majority of Canadians would be onside with these draconian measures, and in honour of following The Science™, Trudeau called a snap election.

At the beginning of October, he hammered home this point and made sure that everyone knew that all public servants would need to be vaccinated by month’s end.

These travel measures, along with mandatory vaccination for federal employees, are some of the strongest in the world because when it comes to keeping you and your family safe, when it comes to avoiding lockdowns for everyone, this is no time for half measures, If you've done the right thing and gotten vaccinated, you deserve the freedom to be safe from COVID. To have your kids be safe from COVID. To get back to the things you love.

All well and good, Mr. Prime Minister, but here's what millions of Canadians heard you say:

If you have not done the right thing and refuse to get vaccinated, you don’t deserve the freedom to be safe from COVID, or to have your kids be safe from COVID, or to get back to the things you love.

This mandate was to take effect on October 30.

On September 17, 2021, in an interview with Quebec talk show host Julie Snyder, Prime Minister Trudeau made this statement in French, speaking of the unvaccinated:

They are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists. It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people?

The fall of 2021 (indeed, most of the next two years) was basically one huge infomercial about how bad and irresponsible the unvaccinated were and what we needed to do to either make them comply or keep them away from the good vaccinated citizens, who were valiantly “doing their part.”

And people wonder why thousands of Canadian citizens drove halfway across this vast nation to gather at Trudeau’s front door to protest this bullshit.

It wasn’t until the spring of the following year, when two business owners decided to take the government to court over these ridiculous vaccine mandates that we found out the back story to the whole vaccine passport chapter.

What came out in the courtroom is that even though the premise was always “we're following The Science™,” the real reason for the mandates had nothing to do with real science, and everything to do with politics. In fact, just weeks before the vaccine mandates were to come into effect, the government was still blindly groping for some sort of justification for the mandates - mandates that by Trudeau's own admission nine months earlier would have “divisive impacts on community and country.”

Aaron McCrorie, the Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Safety and Security at Transport Canada, was busily emailing Health Canada at the end of October saying:

To the extent that updated data exist or that there is clearer evidence of the safety benefit of vaccination on the users or other stakeholders of the transportation system, it would be helpful to assist Transport Canada supporting its measures.

A few days later, apparently growing impatient, he sent another email:

need something fairly soon.

All he was able to obtain for all his efforts was a list of talking points extolling the virtues of vaccination in general.

Then, by some miracle of provenance, less than two months after the vaccine mandates came into force, David Fisman, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Toronto published a pre-print called Impact of Population Mixing Between a Vaccinated Majority and Unvaccinated Minority on Disease Dynamics. Implications for SARS-CoV-2

How wonderful that a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research was there to enable such a timely study.

Here’s what the study concluded, in case you haven’t already guessed (emphasis mine):

Many vaccine opponents have framed vaccine adoption as a matter of individual choice. However, we demonstrate here that the choices made by individuals who forgo vaccination contribute to risk among those who do. Indeed, when adjusted for share of the population vaccinated, we find that the contribution of risk by unvaccinated individuals to vaccinated individuals is disproportionate. Increased mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups increases final epidemic size among vaccinated individuals; conversely, more assortative mixing decreases final epidemic size, but results in enhancement of the degree to which risk among vaccinated individuals can be attributed to unvaccinated individuals. The fact that this excess contribution to risk cannot be mitigated by separating groups undermines the assertion that vaccine choice is best left to the individual, and supports strong public actions aimed at enhancing vaccine uptake and limiting access to public spaces for unvaccinated individuals, as risk cannot be considered “self-regarding”. . .
Interpretation: While risk associated with avoiding vaccination during a virulent pandemic accrues chiefly to the unvaccinated, the choices of these individuals are likely to impact the health and safety of vaccinated individuals in the population.

This pre-print was published and available in December of 2021, but it didn't actually hit the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) until April of 2022. Once it did, it was unsurprisingly picked up by most major news outlets in the country almost immediately.

This study appeared to be precisely what the government was searching so diligently for in October as the vaccine passport system was rolling out. Not only that, but Dr. Fisman was already known to the House of Commons as an expert in epidemiology and had testified at least twice previously at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health regarding the Covid-19 pandemic (here, and here). The biggest takeaways were:

It was the unvaccinated who were perpetuating the pandemic,
It was ethically necessary to restrict the freedoms of the unvaccinated to protect the vaccinated, and
Personal choice was not in the best interests of society.

Wow, looks ideal. I mean, it basically says everything our Prime Minister had been saying for the last four months. What are the chances? Oh, and did I mention that the Canadian Institutes of Health funded that study?

The only problem is that it was complete bullshit.

According to Regina Watteel, a statistician from Ottawa, this study was completely fraudulent and “hate science.” She says the data was fabricated and basically the opposite of the real data that was readily available at the time. Watteel wasn't the only scientist that had a problem with the study. Dozens of others made a stink about it as well and called for a retraction, to no avail. The University of Toronto continues to defend their professor.

Watteel’s takedown of this study (one of many) can be found here, and her book on the subject, called Fisman's Fraud: the Rise of Canadian Hate Science is (at the time of this writing) solidly on the Amazon bestseller list.

So, that's a whole other story which is a little beyond my ken to comment on (pun intended), but there is more than enough commentary on it already by people who really do know what they're talking about - one need only to look at the responses to the study on the CMAJ website itself. Anyway, the moral of this story is that it was this study that was waved around in the House of Commons to justify the segregation of the unvaxxed as the proper, ethical way to keep us all safe.

In summary

While millions of Canadians struggled with the impositions of draconian government interventions, the message from government and news media was a constant stream of case counts, death reports, and fantastic mortality predictions.

These restrictions, while having no actual science on their side, were bolstered by a fraudulent study meant to further divide the populace. To make matters worse, even with calls from many experts in the relevant fields to retract the study, the University of Toronto and the CMAJ have ignored these calls, and it currently remains on the CMAJ’s website.

This is just another chapter in this sordid affair where there is far too much to lose for those involved, and the only option they have is to double-down on their initial falsehoods. As I've said often, the opportunity to claim ignorance has long since passed.