Do BC Covid Cases Justify Cannabis Vaccine Passports?
Certain non-essential services in provinces such as Ontario and British Columbia now require customers to be vaccinated. But how does the skeptical process that provincial governments use to report Covid cases to justify vaccine passports in the cannabis sector work?
Cannabis – a medicine for many – was considered an indispensable service during the BC pandemic. This fate was short-lived in Ontario, however. Within two weeks, the province revoked the essential service status of cannabis. However, access to the liquor stores was maintained.
Manipulation of hospital scenarios
The justification for vaccination regulations in provinces like British Columbia is the number of unvaccinated patients in hospitals, some of which are associated with lack of beds.
Previously, on August 26th, 2021, this author started investigating the Covid testing process in hospitals in BC. Emails to several contacts at the Ministry of Health went unanswered. However, a call to the media department of the Public Health Service Authority (PHSA) was answered. This author’s questions were then synthesized and allegedly sent to the various health regions in BC – no one bothered to comment at the time of this writing.
Are Unvaccinated People Really Responsible? We’ll find out – soon
Then on September 22nd, CTV News reported an internal document containing information on less than Democratic Covid testing guidelines in BC hospitals. Given the new information, this author has followed up on previous emails. Vancouver Coastal Health responded to confirm that, contrary to the PHSA’s earlier instructions, the problem is provincial.
Finally, after strong public pressure, a BC Health Department press release on September 24, 2021 confirmed that only contagious Covid-19 patients are reported to the public. A second, secret number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients is kept in private records. These patients have Covid but their symptoms have improved in the past ten days so they are privately reported as Aborted Isolation.
As soon as the September 24 press release was released, I asked the Department of Health’s communications team about the number of people vaccinated in hospitals that are considered non-infectious (not publicly reported).
Marielle Tounsi, senior public affairs officer for the COVID-19 media division of the BC Department of Health, explained the information will soon be reported weekly. In other words, the private data withheld by the government is said to be public in the near future, but no date as to when it became known.
Shortly after that response, a daily report was sent out still revealing only infectious patients, which was tweeted by BC Health Secretary Adrian Dix. Dr. However, Bonnie Henry later gave another update on non-infectious patients in a media briefing.
PCR tests will tell you if there is * any * virus in your nasal passage.
Rapid tests will tell you if there is * enough * virus in your nasal passage to be infectious.
PCR testing gives you yesterday’s news.
Rapid tests provide you with real-time data.
Rapid tests are public health precision.
– Zoë McLaren, PhD (@ZoeMcLaren) September 26, 2021
How many vaccinated patients are there secretly in BC hospitals?
BC Public Health’s fragmented data means the public does NOT know if this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The publicly shared conclusion was formed through selectively changing statistics and BC is not the only culprit.
Alberta, Ontario, and the US CDC also follow this dual reporting protocol, according to the BC Department of Health. Symptom reduction over ten days is subjective without the use of rapid antigen tests and ultimately allows officials to selectively divide each patient into different groups. The result is a deliberate Simpsons paradox – a bias in statistics.
Finally, on October 1, a branch of the BC Department of Health answered the August 26 questions. This covered various testing strategies in BC to find out why the data seemed too good to be true.
Point-of-care tests, such as B. Rapid antigen tests can be used in diagnosing COVID-19 in situations where laboratory tests are not available. The type of test used will be determined by the clinical setting and circumstances, not an individual’s vaccination status. Even if the reporting processes for laboratory-based and point-of-care tests differ, the test type is documented in both cases.
Mariana Diacu, Executive Director, Pharmaceutical Laboratory and Blood Supply, BC Department of Health.
Yet social media is still full of scientists claiming the lack of rapid antigen tests on behalf of politicians is criminal. So can publicly reported Covid cases adequately justify vaccine passports in BC’s cannabis sector or any other industry?
Tests fuel Covid cases, especially PCR tests that are positive 90 days after infection. Genetic tests like PCR also take a long time to get results. Because of this, scientists are calling for the use of rapid antigen tests, a request that Canadian politicians are rejecting. But does political denial threaten public trust or justify global protests for civil liberties? – Photo courtesy Unsplash by Dimitri Karastelev.
A case for trust instead of mandates
As an example, Denmark has seen a stable situation in the transition to an endemic disease that recently lowered its mandate only slightly above Canada’s vaccination rate. The Danish policy is to build strong trust through honest adverse event reporting. The authenticity of this guideline can be demonstrated in scientific endeavors, including the Danmask-19 study of the effectiveness of face masks. (1, 2)
Dr. Louise Ivers, director of global health at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of global health at Havard Medical School, tweeted that mandates are not required as long as citizens can trust their government. This was in response to a study by Danish researcher Michael Bang Petersen. (1)
This author cited tweets from Professor Petersen – as well as from Dr. Tom Frieden – in the above emails with the BC Department of Health when asking for information about testing in hospitals.
Who is responsible and who is cleaning up the mess?
The government has created the need for mandates by creating an onslaught of suspicion through its reporting methods. Global Health experts suggest that the problem can be solved by turning its face to the government and choosing to be honest with the public. This means that according to the historical records now documented in a BMJ publication in Denmark’s success, permanent vaccination mandates should not be required.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash by Amin Moshrefi.
And science has been twisted by politics to demonize cannabis users even more in the US than in Canada for a century. Essentially, cannabis vaccine mandates would be the equivalent of your boss breaking something and then making you pay for it – and that’s trust.
Let us know in the comments if you think the BC Department of Health will start delivering better data to the public. And regardless of Covid, take a look at thisTory to learn more about how vaccine passports will affect the cannabis industry.
Show your work
- Denmark, Japan and Norway have decided to end the pandemic and the need for domestic vaccine passports. Japan’s Prime Minister also resigned for lack of approval and left office on September 30, 2021.
- There is a 14-day grace period between vaccination and official vaccine status to reflect the time it takes to elicit an immunogenic response. This grace period was checked to see whether it caused incorrect data presentations.
- Students out of town can increase local vaccination rates, according to the CBC. This could be unfair as selective mandates can be chosen based on local vaccination rates.
sources
- Lindholt, MF, Jørgensen, F., Bor, A., & Petersen, MB (2021). Public Acceptance of COVID-19 Vaccines: Cross-Country Evidence at the Level and Predictors at the Individual Level Using Observational Data. BMJ open, 11 (6), e048172.
- Bundgaard, H., Bundgaard, JS, Raaschou-Pedersen, D., von Buchwald, C., Todsen, T., Norsk, JB, Pries-Heje, MM, Vissing, CR, Nielsen, PB, Winsløw, UC, Fogh , K., Hasselbalch, R., Kristensen, JH, Ringgaard, A., Porsborg Andersen, M., Goecke, NB, Trebbien, R., Skovgaard, K., Benfield, T., Ullum, H.,… Iversen , K. (2021). Effectiveness of adding a mask recommendation to other public health measures for the prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Danish mask wearers: A randomized controlled trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, 174 (3), 335–343.
- Email response from BC Department of Health, Media Department, September 28, 2021.
- Email response from Department of Health, Pharmaceutical Laboratory and Blood Services, Executive Director, October 1, 2021.
Footnote (s)
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-048172
https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-6817
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001844
https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/british-columbia/2021/9/22/1_5596944.amp.html
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-vch-100-vaccine-18-29-1.6191747
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58405212
https://mobile.twitter.com/drtomfrieden/status/1439017591536762891
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