Tuesday, February 01, 2022

On The Canadian Trucker Protest

In case you didn't know, and the MSM is doing their damnedest to make sure you don't.  For example, both the Detroit News and Free Press fail to mention what is going on with our neighbors to the South (and north - Michigan is funny that way) on the front pages of their websites, nor in the news section at all. You'd think news of this nature would be important to a main border state with Canada with close trade ties and dependence on Canadian parts for the automotive industry, but nary a peep.  Interesting, that.

The storythousands of truckers - 50,000 truckers or more - and trucks are descending on Ottawa to protest the Canadian government's mandate that  thy must be vaccinated in order to ship goods across the border and come back to Canada.  The US has announced a similar mandate. 

Both mandates are rather inane. 

The Canadian government under Justin Trudeau is in essence is busily shouting "Respect my authoritay" and the truckers are shouting back:  "No."

Justin Trudeau then bravely ran away from Ottawa tand fled to a secret location avoid the protesters. This is what happens when you make a substitute teacher a prime minister based solely on name recognition because of who his father was.

After all what do truckers do?  

They're driving their trucks in their cabs alone for hours, drop off their loads and come back, not exactly hotbeds of exposure or spread.

As much as they claim to be "following the science": in passing these inane regs that will further snarl the supply chain in both countries, the science actually indicates:

1. You can still catch Covid and variants if you're vacinated

2. You can still spread Covid and variants if you're vaccinated

3.  At best Vaccination does seem to offer some protection from Covid and variants, and you'll likely get having less severe symptoms as a result. 

4.  Unless you're over 70 (and much worse if you're over 80). As an aside, the average life expectancy in Canada is 79.9 for men and 84 for women, and US is 77 for men and 81 for Women pre-covid.  So unless youre of advanced age  close to your life expectancy average, and/or have serious comorbidities, the chance of death form Covid is darn low.

As such, there's really no longer a public health argument to be made for mandatory vaccination to stop the disease from spreading as works with other vaccinations.

The only remaining public health argument is that allegedly being vaccinated means with less severe symptoms you're less likely to need to go to a hospital and use public health resources - but we're seeing vaccinated people also having to be hospitalized so the data is rather unclear.

In short its a personal choice to have the shot and thus a shot at less severe symptomsor not, especially if you're in a low risk group.

Making truckers, who tend to be pretty active and in  lower risk groups in terms of age and comorbidity be required to get the shot is rather inane.

After all, this mandate only happened in January 2022 - truckers have been delivering goods across the border unvaccinated throughout this pandemic now for years with no reported mass outbreaks due to truckers, or any other outbreaks by them for that matter.

This more and more seems to be governments  being desperate to be seen to be "doing something" and flexing their authority without any real scientific basis for doing so - and with a further worsening of shipment delays be damned.

In short, they've had enough with government over-reaction and control over the past few years. You know its bad when you've managed to get Canadians of all people ticked off enough to get up and mount a serious protest:


 

 

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