7.5.1 Pandemic Preparedness Plan

Introduction

Pandemics are nothing new, and depending on the definition, there have been about five since the devastating Spanish flu of 1918.

There are historical records of other major pandemics; perhaps none are more notable than the Black Death (the Plague) of the late Middle-Ages that decimated a large portion of the European population. These major health crises usually happen in civilizations that have significant international commercial exchanges, when the overall health of the populations are under huge stresses like famine or war.

These pandemics have left a profound imprint on the human psyche and a warranted fear of disease and death that, historically, were mitigated by reasonable public control measures such as quarantining the sick. However, these troubled times have also been accompanied by irrational measures like “othering” and “scapegoating.”

After millions of years of natural evolution and culture, basic principles of immunity and hygiene were developed to ensure that we live in harmony with the biodiversity that surrounds us in the environment and in our own individual ecosystem made up of our microbiota.

Because of the high levels of human interaction across the world, there is a growing awareness that local epidemics can spread to larger geographic regions and become pandemics of global concern. At the international level, there are agreements in place to harmonize the management of pandemics, using the best practices from the international community.

Although human beings have an instinctual fear of sick people who could transmit diseases, contact with other healthy human beings is far from being dangerous, despite what some germaphobes obsessively espouse. Unless someone is afflicted by a permanent genetic immunosuppression or transient epigenetic immunosuppression due to poor life habits and comorbidities, the risk is negligible.

In fact, contact with other humans, animals, and plants enriches the biodiversity of the microbiota, which in turn educates the immune system—the ultimate foundation of health.

Recklessly isolating and cutting people off from interacting with society results in disease. And when people are sick, one essential condition for their healing is human care and a reassuring human presence; this reduces a sick person‘s stress level, which is otherwise immunosuppressive.

The threat level of a pandemic ought to be gauged by the excess number of severe cases requiring medical treatments and excess deaths when the treatments failed. It‘s not enough that a new pathogen erupts and produces a local outbreak, which then spreads to more than one country over the span of a few months.

If the levels of morbidity and mortality are not significantly manifested above the usual baseline population, it should not constitute a pandemic of international concern. It has to be managed locally with an appropriate epidemic management plan.

For respiratory diseases, which affect a significant proportion of the population, it could be challenging to accurately detect cases of a new respiratory virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, as many symptoms can be confused with symptoms triggered by other viruses such as influenza or other coronaviruses. Thus, the counting of excess sick people, above the baseline of other respiratory infections, can be inflated by erroneous attribution resulting from poor diagnostics.

The only objective way to monitor a pandemic on the local or global stage is to carry on in-depth analysis of all-cause mortality, as presented by Prof. Denis Rancourt and Pierre Chaillot.

The analysis of all-cause mortality, which cannot be biased by subjective attribution factors, leads to the conclusion that there was no COVID-19 pandemic caused by a particularly dangerous respiratory virus.

There were excess death peaks in various locations, but these excess deaths were better explained by the health measures deployed for example: the absence of early treatments; the use of ventilators; the use of end-of-life comfort medications like midazolam or Rivotril; the significant reduction in antibiotic use essential for the treatment of respiratory bacterial infection; and by the deaths of despair due to drug abuse and business closures in some sectors of the economy.

Interestingly, the analysis of all-cause mortality during the past century cannot detect significant excess deaths during all of the previous declared pandemics with the exception of the Spanish flu. This pandemic happened on the heels of WW1 on stressed populations that were weakened by fear, famines, and countless injuries, including respiratory airway damage due to the massive use of toxic gas.

And as we now know that the bulk of the influenza deaths during the Spanish flu pandemic were likely the result of opportunistic bacterial infections, treatable by antibiotics, the likelihood that a new respiratory viral pandemic will manifest a death toll similar to the Spanish flu is fairly unlikely.

This begs the question: Why were antibiotic prescriptions so drastically reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for populations that historically suffered from bacterial pneumonia?

World Health Organization Guidelines

For better or worse, over the past decades we have put in place pandemic plans at the supranational level, under the hospice of the WHO. We can now marshal the best scientific and risk management intelligence in case of a worldwide pandemic that threatens the entire human population. This appears, at first glance, a very noble and desirable objective.

Although this approach seems reasonable in theory, there are in practice two major issues with the centralization of pandemic management by a supranational organization of unelected bureaucrats.

The first one is the potential lack of accountability inherent in an organization staffed by unelected bureaucrats who may be perceived as are likely to be more loyal to the financial contributors of the organization, rather than to the member states. Since some contributors have major interests in the vaccine industry, this conflict of interest may be perceived to influence the agenda of the WHO, without firewalls to mitigate his unrestrained influence.

The second cardinal aspect is that proper management of pandemics cannot be effective if the management is not based on a localized approach. Indeed, many factors like the climate, the population density, age distribution, and cultural differences, to name a few, make the propagation of a disease very different from one country to the other. This cannot be managed centrally by distant bureaucrats that fail to consider the impact of local factors better appreciated by people closer to the terrain.

Furthermore, as people are fallible and corruptible, large unaccountable bureaucratic organizations are prone to foster abusive, self-serving policies that are exacerbated by incompetence and corruption. Nevertheless, individuals from these unelected groups, possessing varying degrees of expertise, are appointed to positions of authority without being held accountable to the public.

This conundrum cannot be corrected by the tax payer, who ends up financing these programs without real representation. As a result, the populations have little power to implement corrective measures when these programs are not delivering the best public health outcomes.

For every developed country, the healthcare system is the most significant budget item paid for by tax payers. As such, autonomy to manage healthcare services and public health measures should be the responsibility of elected officials who are accountable to their electors, not subjugated to supranational bureaucracies.

Provincial Pandemic Plans

Every province had an alternative pandemic plan available as of 2019 that was quite different than what was actually implemented. The national plan had been updated in 2016 based on sound public health practices that were developed from the hard lessons learned through previous pandemics. These plans were written together with all public health agencies and many other stakeholders, and they warned about the dangers of NPIs (for example, lockdowns).

By only considering the details of the mismanaged implementation plan, we are missing the real questions: Was the so-called “pandemic of international concern” properly defined? What was the real magnitude of the threat?

According to expert witness Lt. Col. David Redman, we failed miserably because there was no need to deploy these health measures in the first place, and on top of everything, the measures were were not directed at the correct public health outcome.

In other words, before crafting, let alone deploying, a grandiose plan of social engineering on a massive scale, we need to ask in simple terms: To what problem is this plan the solution?

And if the problem is ill-defined, the solution is most certainly going to do more harm that good, especially in a fake emergency situation that granted permission to authorities to suspend our normal way of living and disregard personal responsibility. We were treated as a hazard, in and of itself, instead of an asset that would be part of the solution.

If the plan was to create havoc to destabilize the fabric of society, to produce significant morbidity and mortality while creating massive wealth transfer and concomitant impoverishment of the middle class through inflation and public debt, cynically, it was a success.

Strangely, what was actually implemented goes totally against the wisdom of the established pandemic plans that acknowledge that disrupting normal life is very costly both financially and from a public health perspective.

Therefore, from the perspective of public health and population autonomy, which are an essential need for the prosperity of a society, the management of the COVID-19 crisis was a total failure.

The “All Hazards“ Approach

We all live in an environment filled with potential hazards, both short and long term. We need to respond to those many hazards with targeted mitigation strategies framed with risk–benefit analysis for each of these measures, be they passive or active. Obsessively focusing on one hazard is ill-advised and a recipe for collateral damage concomitant with neglecting other hazards or essential needs.

By neglecting to present a more balanced perspective of the emergence of a new respiratory virus, the WHO‘s successive announcements, starting early 2020, revealed their intention to act as merchants of fear.

On January 20, 2020, based on 1,076 cases, of which only 83 confirmed cases were outside China, (on a population of 6.4B excluding China), the WHO, declared that the window was closing on a health emergency of global reach. This has to be put in perspective with poor case assessment based on confusing symptoms and RT-PCR testing not clinically validated.

A RT-PCR (Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction) test is a diagnostic tool used to detect the genetic material (RNA).

On March 11, 2020 based on 44,274 cumulative cases, out of a global population of approximately 8.1B people, obfuscating a likely high proportion of recovered people that would have dampened the danger signal, the COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared. This announcement, of a pandemic, precipitated the worst financial market collapse since 1929. It has been alleged that many people took advantage of the initial market crash through insider trading.

And based on the WHO‘s fear-mongering, gradually most of the 190 members states of the WHO initiated the ritual of lockdowns for two weeks, which extended to two years, to allegedly flatten the curve.

But what curve? In Canada, on March 9, 2020—two days before the pandemic declarations—there were 125 cases in a population of 38.5 million. The way these cases were determined may be suspect, and no information on the severity of the cases was provided. It is not known how or if these reported cases were clinically validated to be caused by the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Presumably this information could not be determined as the virus had not been identified at the time. Without this critical information, the public was led to believe that the virus was potentially mortal for everyone. This fear was magnified by media reports of people dropping dead in the street in China: fear-mongering on steroids.

In February of 2020, public health already knew that 95 per cent of people dying from what was later named COVID-19 were over 60 years old and had multiple comorbidities. This means that they should have been focussing on targeted protection.

The updates from the WHO showed the same profile every single week starting in March 2020. In Canada, the average age of death with COVID-19 is 82 years old with severe multiple comorbidities. A common characteristic of those who reported died is obesity—83 per cent for the most severely ill—but they didn‘t report this information. Why was this risk stratification Not broadcast by any health authorities.

To make matters worse, the health measures discouraged physical exercise. And the stress led to overeating, often of processed food, and increased consumption of alcohol, which contributed to significant unhealthy weight gain of the population.

At the time of writing this Report, Theresa Tam was still broadcasting 52,000 deaths in Canada to keep on scaring people. Meanwhile, on the official Canadian government website, the number was 32,659, almost 40 per cent less. Importantly, Canada ranked last of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with 73 per cent of deaths occurring in long-term-care (LTC) homes. And of the deaths in Canada, 93 per cent were of people over 60 years old.

At the outset of the pandemic there was a good plan to address this declared public health emergency. It was based on controlling the spread of the disease—not cases—while reducing morbidity and mortality by providing access to appropriate prevention measures, care, and treatment. It also entailed mitigating social disruption through ensuring the continuity and recovery of critical services, minimizing adverse economic impact, and supporting an efficient and effective use of resources during response and recovery.

Yet instead of following established emergency plans, many countries followed the game plan elaborated in the Event 201 pandemic simulation, organized in the fall of 2019. Although well intended, the framework of this pandemic plan was misguided by business and military people, along with a few doctors and scientists that had a strong bias in favour of NPIs.

The result of their exercise made absolutely no sense to many experts in public health crisis management. Yet Canada followed it to the letter. Only a few states didn‘t: Sweden and Florida.

And in spite of the harsh criticism and claims that they would be responsible for unnecessary deaths from COVID-19, both Sweden and Florida were vindicated for not following the script as other states had. Their “all-cause excess mortality adjusted for age“ revealed death numbers much lower than many comparable states that had been more diligent on lockdowns and masks.

In Canada, we failed at all of the basic tasks of Emergency Management Plan (EMP). It does not appear that any of Canada‘s health agencies conducted a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature of potential treatments for similar coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-1 or MERS. Nor did they conduct in real time, a cost–benefit analysis of the health measures deployed, using the best independent experts who were free of conflicts of interest.

When the portrait of a public health crisis is not painted with solid data that is put in the right perspective, the fear instilled in the population by decision-makers broadcasting a distorted picture of events results in massive collateral damage, as we have seen.

But it‘s also possible that many fearful people were blinded by the feel-good ideology of “saving lives“ at all costs. The multi-faceted aspects that must have been considered, which included collateral damages both at the individual and collective levels, were ignored.

With a narrow mind-set excessively focussed on the alleged danger of COVID-19, the public was trapped in the perceived dilemma of exchanging economic damages for alleged life-saving procedures: the effectiveness of which were only hoped for and not demonstrated. Moreover, the fact that economic stress could lead to bankruptcy and become the gateway for future morbidity, due to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide, was also ignored. So whose lives were being saved in the end?

Government measures failed to protect our most vulnerable—as evidenced by the death toll in LTC homes—and sacrificed our younger generation‘s future. What can compensate for the precious years of socialization, language learning, and education lost by our children, who will also have to carry the burden of a national debt that ballooned from $750 billion to $1.3 trillion in one year?

To have deployed one-size-fits-all public health measures, as if everyone were equally vulnerable, is at best incompetent, if not malevolent. Why was there such a focus on the wrong NPIs? Many officials erroneously assumed it would protect the healthcare system.

The push to “protect“ the healthcare system was motivated by the fear that if the system collapsed under the pressure of caring for excess sick people, the ability to provide care for other medical needs would also suffer. Paradoxically, to prepare for the anticipated flood of COVID-19 patients, treatment of other medical concerns deemed not as urgent were postponed by administrative edicts.

On top of this, many people forfeited or avoided seeking medical care for other issues for fear of catching COVID-19 in the hospital. On what grounds did the administrative state know that the COVID-19 disease was a greater health threat than all of the other illnesses? Is it because they blindly believed so without proper assessment?

That irrational fear fuelled by the increasing number of RT-PCR positive COVID-19 cases, the majority of which were asymptomatic, led to a misplaced focus on future COVID-19 cases. Many of the COVID-19 deaths may have been generated in the first place by denying patients early outpatient treatment for the illness.

This was exacerbated by the continual perpetuation of fear and the disruption of normal social life, both of which contributed to the dampening of the immune system. For the most vulnerable, this no doubt led to increased susceptibility to diseases of all kinds, including COVID-19.

How Did That Happen?

According to the testimony of Lt. Col. Redman, it happened due to:

Incompetence: All of the premiers failed to do their own research to gain a deeper understanding of the pandemic‘s true threat. Then, many premiers put the wrong person in charge; premiers should have retained final control of the situation as elected representatives. The medical officers were incompetent by refusing to acknowledge they couldn‘t do it alone. Why did they, against the best practice recommendations garnered from previous pandemic management, use the wrong NPIs? When challenged in court, they could not produce a single cost–benefit analysis to justify it.

Hubris: Once you make a mistake, it‘s difficult to admit it. Governor DeSantis did it in Florida, but it‘s rare. After talking to the relevant experts, he admitted: “I got it wrong.“

Without acknowledging the mistake, course correction is very difficult and doubling down seems the only strategy until one is confronted by the evidence from censured documents, such as “The Lockdown Files” in the UK and the flurry of documents from the Twitter files. But these revelations were late coming, and the decision-makers felt they would be off the hook long enough to avoid confronting the consequence of their mistakes.

Self-gain: Politicians were on TV every night and the carefully crafted message, vetted by numerous polls, assured them to win their elections by not admitting their mistakes. The spin on the message was: “We did the best we could under the dire global circumstances; nobody could have done better, and now the crisis is behind us, let‘s move on.“

Emergency Management Plan (EMP) and Recommendations

And yet, massive collateral damage has been done; we will be experiencing the enduring effects for generations to come. Not acknowledging the damage only makes matters worse as it precludes the implementation of much needed corrective measures and raises the dark prospect of repeating the same mistakes, or even worse, next time.

The plan to protect public health in case of a severe threat like a pandemic was diverted and turned on its head to protect the healthcare system. Scared public health officials responded to the scared public by focusing the plan on protecting the healthcare system as a proxy of the public.

They failed to recognize that the best strategy to minimize the strain on the healthcare system, be it for physical or mental health conditions, would be to promote good life habits: healthy food, physical exercise, vibrant social life, and other stress reduction practices. That would have reduced the likelihood of people getting sick or progressing to more severe forms of illness.

What did they do instead? They failed to acknowledge that seasonal respiratory diseases are in part the result of low vitamin D levels due to lack of sun exposure. They also stopped providing vitamin D levels due to lack of sun exposure, they stopped providing vitamin D supplementation in many LTC homes and prevented people from going outside to get sun exposure and fresh air where the risk of contamination was non-existent. By contrast, these vulnerable people were locked in poorly ventilated indoor environments, denied social activities that included family and friend visits, and were scared non-stop by the media about the danger of the virus.

Is that really the best way to prevent progression to severe illness? When people got sick under these poor health conditions-not to mention the poor quality of food in many LTC homes-and because COVID-19 was deemed untreatable, the elderly were offered end-of-life comfort medication.Can that explain why in Canada 73 per cent of COVID-19 deaths were recorded in LTC homes?

We must question the wisdom of blindly following the marching orders of the WHO as if infallible, particularly since the WHO seemed to work in tandem with the mainstream media and government-controlled social media to expunge from public discourse any questions about the pandemic plan du jour.

As revealed by “The Lockdown Files,” the pandemic was managed by uninformed people, and the WHO became the justification for all of the other states to follow the “clowns in chief,“ as Dr. Didier Raoult put it.

From an epidemic perspective, efficient local measures are much more effective; there is not a one- size-fits all approach. This is a clear example of the tension between two opposing governance philosophies: top-down global control under the pretext of security versus subsidiarity manifested in bottom-up local measures that respect liberty and individual responsibility.

Recommendations

1. Rectifying the Mistake of Discarding the Emergency Management Plan: The decision to discard the Emergency Management Plan was a significant error that will require rectification.

2. Realigning the Purpose of Pandemic Measures: The objective of pandemic measures should have been to minimize the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on society, rather than solely focusing on safeguarding the healthcare system.

3. Utilizing Hazard Assessment for Targeted Responses: The Hazard Assessment, which continued to identify those most at risk, revealed that lockdowns did not effectively protect them. A more targeted response would have been more appropriate.

4. Learning from Past Pandemics: The lessons learned from previous pandemics were regrettably disregarded.

5. Reevaluating Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs): The use of non-pharmaceutical interventions did not significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19. Employing them during the initial wave could have been seen as, at best, a mistake. After the first wave, it became a matter of grave concern.

6. Recognizing the Unintended Consequences of NPIs: NPIs have resulted in substantial collateral harm and loss of life, often surpassing the impact of the virus itself. Public health was aware of this prior to COVID-19, and yet no cost–benefit analysis was conducted. This constituted a grave error.

7. Holding Leaders Accountable: Public authorities bear responsibility for the response to the pandemic and the perpetuation of fear. Accountability should be enforced.

8. Safeguarding Our Society and Democracy: Failure to revise our Emergency Management Plan and dispel false beliefs in non-pharmaceutical interventions places our society and democracy in jeopardy.