#50: Catching Up - Developments Up North, More Admissions on Masks, and Good News for Kids and COVID
Escalations in Canada, and other ongoing developments...
Hello All,
As the world turns, we have more developments. We’ll get right into them.
1.) Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada has invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the ongoing Freedom Convoy:
The Emergencies Act (a replacement of the War Measures Act, which was used only three times in Canada’s history including WWI and WWII) grants additional powers to the government without the requirement of prior approval from the Canadian Parliament.
Ezra Levant, journalist and publisher of Rebel News, wrote that most of Canada’s premiers felt the move was unnecessary - and pointed to a potential motivating factor behind the announcement:
As Mr. Levant and others suggest, this development seems to focus on limiting financial resources and crowdfunding efforts aimed at providing support to the Freedom Convoy. True North covers the story here:
According to Trudeau, using the Act is necessary to give the federal government and law enforcement more powers to break up the protests including by securing airports and border crossings.
It will also allow the government to seize essential services like towing trucks to remove trucks in Ottawa and elsewhere…
Several premiers have spoken out against using the Emergencies Act including Quebec Premier Francois Legault and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.
According to deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland, the Act will also allow financial institutions to freeze bank accounts of truckers involved in the protest and for their insurance to be canceled.
Again, such measures have only been seen three times in the history of the Country - and two of them were during world wars. Freezing bank accounts, seizing assets, and granting additional powers to break up peaceful protests are all significant escalations in the standoff. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association addressed the move by Trudeau in a three-part tweet, included below:
Monday’s developments followed reports from the day prior that the crowdsourcing platform GiveSendGo, which had surged to prominence after GoFundMe’s freezing/refunding of funds intended for the Freedon Convoy, had been hacked, taken offline and redirected. Names of donors were reportedly shared online, as well. More on that story from Becker News in the link below.
Surely there will be more to come on this alarming escalation in Canada. It boggles the mind that politicians would prefer resorting to extraordinary emergency powers to crack down on their own people, rather than simply ending vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions (which in turn, would end the Freedom Convoy). Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin offers a simple way out, in alignment with this thinking.
2.) In others news, we can add another two items to our “formerly misinformation, now accepted reality” pile from Saturday’s post - starting with the acknowledge that “mask mandates didn’t make much of a difference anyway”… A pretty stunning turn of events, especially for those of us currently stuck in slow-moving blue states that have yet to relinquish mask mandates. And yet, I heard Illinois’ Governor, JB Pritzker, say “masks work” at least twice in his most recent address on the matter.
As Clay Travis of Outkick.com points out, this was once ban-worthy information in our not-to-distant past.
And for readers of this blog to share (and say we told you so to friends, family and coworkers) - even WebMD now acknowledges the link between Vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 severity. Think of how many lives could’ve been saved had this information been widely communicated earlier. And consider this - how many people STILL don’t know this, even today! Ignoring Vitamin D’s impact on COVID-19 severity will not doubt be considered a massive public health failure down the road - especially given the damage caused by lockdowns, restrictions, vaccine mandates and masks.
3.) And ending on a high note, a study out the Journal of Infection offered promising results on the risk of severe COVID-19 posed to immunocompromised children and young people.
Immunocompromised children and young people are at no increased risk of severe COVID-19 (Chappell et al., 2022)
Subjects included immunocompromised pediatric patients in the UK from March 2020 to 2021, across 46 hospitals. The study’s highlight: “UK immunocompromised paediatric patients were at no increased risk of severe COVID-19.”
More from the study’s conclusion:
Though cases of COVID-19 occurred in UK immunocompromised children and young people following the cessation of shield-ing measures, there was no increased risk of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection in this large prospective national cohort. The serology results suggest that asymptomatic or unproven infection is quite common. Increasing age and immunodeficiency increased hazard of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Worsening of fever, cough, and sore throat were predictive of positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR.
Good news for kids is always worth sharing in today’s world - especially with many parents of children with medical conditions worried about mask mandates being lifted and potential normalcy in schools on the horizon.
Monday was a busy day - we’ll see what the rest of the week has in store for us! And hey - we hit 50 posts for the blog!
Thanks for reading. More to come.
-G