(0:00 - 2:10) A straw man argument is a fallacy where someone misrepresents or oversimplifies an opponent's position to make it easier to attack or refute. Instead of engaging with the actual argument, the person constructs a weaker, distorted version, the straw man, and critiques that instead. We've seen this throughout the COVID narrative. Ethical doctors and scientists who revealed truths about the vaccines had their character and credentials attacked, rather than engaging them in scientific debates that would have been open to the presentation of data from both sides. Anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers, science deniers, all manner of straw man labels have been applied, but the end result was the same. Question the narrative, and you will be attacked, and every effort will be made to silence you. Because of this, while individual doctors and nurses have spoken out against the COVID mandates, no one has yet conducted a wide-spectrum survey of healthcare workers in Canada on the impacts of those same mandates on the workers themselves and on our healthcare system. Until now. Professor Claudia Chaufan is both a medical doctor and holds a doctorate in sociology. She's an associate professor of health policy and global health at York University in Toronto, and recently she published the results of large-scale surveys she has done of healthcare workers in both Ontario and BC. Even for those of us who have been aware for years of the negative impacts of the mandates, Professor Chaufan's findings are shocking. In her data is the answer to how Canada's healthcare system has so swiftly moved from being one of the best in the world to being one of the worst. Claudia, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Will. It's an honour and a pleasure and grateful to be here. (2:10 - 12:35) Well, and I'm really looking forward to this because I looked at your study. What you've done is you've done a study of healthcare workers and regards the vaccine mandates and how this has impacted our healthcare and our healthcare workers. So before we get too deep into the data, would you please just give us a brief summary of the methodology that you used and what you found? Sure. Well, this is just one of the surveys we've done, meaning, you know, myself and my small team of enthusiastic research assistants, and I want to give a shout out to them because the work wouldn't have been possible without, you know, would not have been possible without them. So, I think of it as a mixed methods study because it actually started without healthcare workers, but rather looking into the literature about healthcare workers and vaccine mandates and the responses to it. And because I think of myself as taking a sort of a critical perspective on policy studies, and by critical I simply mean that I do not take the framing of problems for granted as they appear in public discourse and the official narrative. I question those problem framings. I started by looking at that literature and I concluded that that literature very sort of, I don't want to say intentionally, but it sort of misrepresented the nature of the problem, misrepresented it. And what do I mean by that? Well, it took a very sort of a priori bias perspective on what the problem was without looking, really looking at the roots. So, after I did that and, you know, looked at the literature, the expert literature, if you will, on what the problem is with these healthcare workers recalcitrant who don't want to take the COVID shots, right, I decided, well, we need the voice of healthcare workers themselves. And so that's launched a series of interviews. And I, perhaps I will give you a more polished version of what it actually was. The process was a bit of a mess, but kind of looking back, this is what it was. So I started with Ontario and I was blown away by what we found. And it was way more than I expected the voices of healthcare workers who replied to our invitation to complete a very lengthy survey, by the way. So you have to really be very sort of, you know, involved in the issue to really want to spend that time, right? I, myself, I'm, you know, I get requests for participating in service all the time and I can't bother, right? I'm just too busy. Well, these people took time off their daily lives that weren't easy to begin with. So when Ontario went so well, I thought, why not BC? And when BC went so well, then I thought, why not Alberta? I have not published on Alberta yet because we are in the course of processing the data. So methodologically, the methods were varied. It in called, the beginning was a critical policy analysis. That was the one without the voices of workers themselves. Then came a series of surveys, but because of the wealth of information we collected, it had both quantitative data. So that was a quantitative analysis of the survey data, right? Carefully crafted with input from workers themselves in the two different provinces. But then because we allowed for open-ended answer to one single question and received an enormous amount of very valuable data, these were the voices themselves without pre-structured questions. And I decided to split each study in each provincial study in two and conducted a qualitative analysis. And that was a, just a qualitative analysis of the themes, the main themes that the workers talked about. So it's a long answer to a question. Well, no, that's exactly what I was looking for, because I think something's really important for the viewers to understand here is you actually talked to, asked these people, had them fill out surveys. And this is something that the healthcare authorities, so to speak, didn't do. They just gave out these mandates and never bothered to ask any of the healthcare workers how they felt about them. So it's quite possible. Right. Well, if I may kind of qualify this, I think they asked, or at least they valorized, or they valued the voices of those who supported policies to begin with. So you have the policy, and then you go out and look for the data that supports the policy. Now, because that doesn't always work in a clean way, and there are people who don't like it, well, you either don't ask them too much, or you assume things about them, or you demonize them or suppress them. Right. So there's a variety of things that you can do. And I'm talking as, you know, I'm a bureaucrat and that's what I do. Right. So I'm not, you know, saying anything about their intentions, but that's in fact what they did, because otherwise, they should not have been able to ignore the voices of healthcare workers themselves, whether vaccinated or not, by the way, because the very few, unfortunately, few vaccinated workers that we were able to recruit, vast majority of them express some degree of coercion. So, you know, it's like, you know, you're stopped in the street by a burglar and he's, you know, gun against your head, you know, your wallet or your life. Well, here you have my wallet, right? So here I, you know, I'll do what you tell me because I can't afford to lose my job and my professional identity and all the things that come along with it. Right. And this is that a priori bias that you were talking about earlier. Exactly. So it's built into the very nature of whatever research has been done on healthcare workers themselves, in my opinion. And now, though, I think we have to, I have to ask a question in terms of scientific integrity, because you went out and you asked all of these people and I, because I look at your study, the majority of the respondents were vaccinated. A lot of them had lost their positions, sorry, unvaccinated. A lot of them had lost their positions because of that. And you, you know, fewer of them were vaccinated. So do you think that there might have been not an intentional in any way bias in your results, but just in terms of the respondents that you got? That's a very good question. And I have it, let me try to put it in simple terms for your audience. My contacts were already a priori, you know, primarily contacts of people who had been, in my opinion, abused by the system. Right. So that was an a priori bias, if you will. Now, having said that, I made, you know, a very good faith effort to advertise on social media as much as I could. But of course, you know, there's millions of people out there. People are busy. And perhaps the people who are employed, happily employed and happy with the mandates are not going to take the time to reply to my study. Now, that being said, that is also true of the body of research that has investigated the perspectives of workers who are, you know, who have kept their job or are new to that, or perhaps they're very young and they don't, you know, when they were vaccinated, because otherwise they would be thrown out and they believe, well, this is the way the world works. And in fact, we found evidence to that effect in the literature of many, you know, surveys of health care workers looking at vaccine hesitancy, because for them, that's a problem to be fixed. So they go out and have a predetermined conception of the goodness or badness of vaccine mandates, because how would you reject something that is so good, like a mandate, like a vaccine? So they actually say some, not all, but they say, well, our results may be biased because we are investigating mostly vaccinated health care workers. So while it is true that in that sense, our study has what's called limitations, all of them do, one way or the other. So what is important in policy research or in any type of research for that matter, is that you put your process, your methodology, very, you know, very transparently and very clear. Now, there's another thing of those whom we, voices we collected and perspective we collected who were vaccinated. And those in the mainstream literature are taken to mean, well, you're vaccinated, you've accepted the vaccine. Well, really? And did you ask me whether I accepted the vaccine or not? As it turns out, they don't. The vast majority of times, they kind of assume that uptake means acceptance. But as I said, it's acceptance under, in my opinion, just to put it very bluntly, point a gun, right? You know, you lose your job, if you can't afford it, you can't afford to lose your job, you just don't give up, whatever it is. Now, there's also an interesting data, piece of data, Will, that I'm beginning to observe now, particularly with Alberta, because to my surprise, and counter my expectations, Alberta had a higher number of vaccinated healthcare workers and supporters of the mandate, who thought that, you know, sort of by implication, if you don't support a mandate, you're not fit to be a healthcare worker. They, these are healthcare workers. So we, thankfully, we managed to capture their voices. But what I found that was very interesting, and they were, you know, so there you could say, well, and many vaccinated healthcare workers we found in Ontario, perhaps because our recruitment was more, even more intentionally, I wanted to understand how are these people thinking, right? So I reached kind of a broader, wider and waited longer, etc. But as you could see, when you look at the charts of these vaccinated status of the workers in Alberta, it's only unders. So many of those who count them sort of vaccinated, I are the partially, which in if you remember in the prehistory of this thing, it was only one shot, then you were fully with two shots, but then that did wasn't enough. (12:35 - 16:29) And then when they lost count of the number of shots, then it was up to date and up to date meant however many shots they were recommended at the time. So we have a lot of people in that category that at some point, what I suspect is they said, well, enough is enough. Or I did it through here to get my job, but I'm not doing it anymore. And only a fraction of these workers vaccinated in some amount continued to this day, as far as we know. So the last, not the last, but one of the stages in this mega project that started as an afterthought will be to do in-depth interviews of workers of all vaccination statuses that we can possibly recruit from within the surveys, because a lot of people in the surveys also agreed to be interviewed by me and my team. Just as a sample, because as I said, we've surveyed three provinces and I would love to survey every single Canadian province, but lack of resources, time. And the point is not to know about every single province, but to provide a model. If people are interested in investigating this, they can go and apply this model. I'm happy to share all these survey instruments, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I frankly think that we don't need any more research. We just need a policy change or a political change, but that aside. So the purpose was to understand the purpose of our studies, all our studies, not just Ontario. I'm using this as an example, the perspectives of workers, healthcare workers on the front lines in their own terms, right? Not construed as vaccine hesitancy as a problem to be fixed, but what do you think? What was your experience? And we gathered firsthand accounts, right? So we conducted this particular survey, first one a year ago, February, March, a little over a year ago, close to 500. We were able to recruit and I was overwhelmed by that response, which helped me keep on going. Snowball sampling, lots of limitations, but of course that's the limitation of most research in this field. And it was very comprehensive and long, took about an hour to complete, and it was a descriptive analysis that we performed. So as I said, 77 were unvaccinated, right? 77% were unvaccinated, majority. But I'd like to point out, as I said, that only a fraction of the vaccinated were boosted twice or more because they did the minimum that I'm assuming, there's an assumption, minimum that they can to hang on to their jobs. And at some point they said enough, what is most disturbing of those people? Some of them did answer, so I can actually, I have the data to back it up. They said, well, you know, now I got vaccinated, now I'm injured and I don't have a job, right? Because they were trying to hang on to the job. They thought, okay, two undone, but then they get the third, the booster, and then the increasing number of boosters, right? So let me see, I'm because I have my own image. So due to mandate, about a third experienced moderate to severe adverse effects. 72 of the non-compliant were terminated. So it was really a disaster, terminated, losing employment, over 80% reported worsening mental health, about fifth and even higher numbers in BC reported suicidal thoughts, felt unfairly treated, damaged the personal relationships, family, friends, community, you name it. And over 40% intended to leave their jobs. I just have to jump in with a question because those numbers are horrible, it's horrific. Have you ever... I'm sorry? Those numbers are horrific and this is... Yes. (16:31 - 17:44) You know, you almost don't know what to say about this when you start seeing numbers like that. Have you ever in your career seen anything like this? Well, I haven't, but it wasn't doing this kind of research. So I don't know. It could have happened in other things with other, I don't know, vaccination initiatives, mandates, changes in the workplace. I wouldn't know. The scope and reach of this policy, I think that anybody would agree is unprecedented. So whatever happens at a smaller scale, if you want to... My personal, just anecdotal evidence would be, when I was in medical practice back in Argentina in my former life, I never experienced anything of the sort. Nobody ever came into my office and said, you have to prescribe this or you cannot prescribe that even against your best clinical judgment, because otherwise you're out of here. I never had that experience. Now, perhaps I was naive. You know, there's a lot of things, but I never thought I would do something that, you know, in my clinical judgment harmed my patients, and I didn't. So I've never seen anything like that. (17:44 - 17:48) As I said, I have nothing to compare it with. Okay. Please continue with the data. (17:49 - 18:47) So these are some of the key findings. You see the vaccination status overwhelmingly, and I have things to... I can speculate about this. Employment, you know, massive terminated healthcare workers. We're trying to get some data to actually document how many healthcare workers were lost to the, you know, in Canada, were lost to this policy. And not just terminated, but for instance, you know, early retirements, changes in profession, all kinds of things. The mental health impact. And again, this is a bit... I don't quite like this because this is sort of medicalizing something that I think is simply unethical, immoral, right? But people like to talk about the mental health impact, suicidal thoughts. This is completely preventable, right? Mental health problems. Then of course, personal life, professional consequences, you know, disruption of your identity as a health professional, et cetera. (18:47 - 19:36) Some of the most concerning things that we collected in terms of information were their observations about increased patient harms, right? For instance, differential treatment of patients who were unvaccinated for whatever reason, right? It's their right, informed consent. However, they're treated very poorly, even in an insulting way. So some of the descriptions were, you know, really harrowing. And then these changes after the vaccine rollout and many of the protocols that, you know, you have protocols, you don't take them as, you know, sort of biblical commands, but use some guidelines to proper behavior in the health professions. And those were kind of thrown out the window. Like you have to obtain informed consent from your patients. (19:36 - 23:34) You cannot force them to do something that they are in principle, you know, variables to doing, right? You can't ram over them, et cetera. So all those things, as these workers reported, were thrown out the window and there were a fair number. So even if it's a minority, you know, it doesn't matter. It's like an ethical issue, right? It's not a battle of, you know, who's the majority, right? You know, the mob rule. So that's another one. Then I said, okay, am I really seeing this or is it my own bias, right? Against forcing people against a medical intervention that they don't want. And in my opinion, they don't need. And I said, okay, well, there are standards, independent standards, right? Of both evidence and ethics. Of course, the ethics as everybody knows is the Nuremberg Code, you know, that you don't violate informed consent, et cetera, et cetera. But let's look at very official OECD Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, right? All the, you know, so-called democracies or capitalists or whatever you want to call them, right? Got together and this is, you know, quality framework to evaluate policy. Is the policy relevant? So I measured my results against this framework and the policy failed, you know, on all fronts. Does the policy address a well-defined problem? No, it doesn't, right? It misrepresents vaccine hesitancy as ignorant and ignores the structural roots and vaccine hesitancy as ignorance. Well, I looked at the medical data. These people weren't ignorant at all. They were actually excellently well informed, right? Effectiveness, does it achieve the stated goals of protecting patient care? No, it doesn't, quite the opposite. It undermined patient care, right? Not only for, because of the impact on the system, but also the impact on the patients themselves. Efficiency, are they investing a reasonable amount of resources for the outcomes alleged or desired? Well, no, it triggered mass layoffs, health losses and mental health crisis. Now, by the way, if you go to the official authorities, they will deny this. They say, no, no, no, we didn't lose too many workers, right? But then you look at these people and say, you know, can I in Peterborough, you know, afford to lose, you know, 10 nurses? No, not really, right? Not a single service in Canada, right? We can't even get a, you know, a family doctor in our region, right? It's a foreign community. Our medical system was already disastrously understaffed. Right, understaffed. And the truth is in independent, you know, discussions, people talk about that equity, the benefits and burdens fairly distributed. Well, really, no. Penalizing stressed healthcare workers, denying accommodations. You know, we are, accommodations, equity. No, these people are treated like dirt, even after decades of service in their profession. And then it's just not coherent because other policies and values, presumably that, you know, I haven't lived in Canada for that long. We moved here in, you know, for good in 2018. So it violates principles of informed consent, transparency, patient care, centered care. So we do have limitations. As I said, a convenient sample, we just counted on whoever wanted to take the time to answer our survey. But that's true of all surveys, by the way. I mean, it just doesn't, you know, there's only one poll that I was able to identify by Ipsos done across Canada of health workers. It's a very interesting one. And by the way, they also relied on a convenient sample, whoever bothered to answer. They just have more a greater power arsenal to recruit, about 5,000 and some, right? Self-selection bias, maybe. (23:34 - 30:40) People who responded to a survey, it actually asks them about their views, rather than why they're vaccine hesitant. You know, it may be a self-selection, but we could say that of the opposing view that only recruits people who are, you know, sort of kind of, right, you know, supportive of the policy or misconstrues their responses as being hesitant for some kind of psychological quirk, rather than some valid reason. Predominantly unvaccinated sample, we talked about that. Descriptive statistics, I'm not planning to do some causal analysis. And I don't really think it is important to the conclusion anyway. And then, you know, self-reported data, that's a problem of every survey. So I just have to state them in a, you know, professional way when I publish my work. So the policy implications, while it failed, in my opinion, I measured it. So I, you know, I would challenge someone to come with the same instrument. It's an external instrument, OECD, and measure the results of the policy. Is it a failure or is it a success? I think it's a failure. And also, I think that we are challenging with all the body of work, the dominant portrayal of hesitant healthcare workers as irrational, misinformed, conspiratorial, and right-wing. So in my youth, it was being left-wing that was the issue to be attacked. So, you know, I, my group, my friends, but of course I lived under a military dictatorship back in Argentina when I was growing up. So, you know, so whatever construed you as, so, you know, it never occurred to me that you could do exactly the opposite with every single, you know, of these, you know, persecution strategies, right? So, but that's how they're portrayed in the literature. And it's very unprofessional. And of course it's ideological. It has nothing to do with science and it's false. It's essentially false, right? These people weren't irrational, were not misinformed, and were raising very, very valid concerns about informed consent, workplace sustainability, under-reporting of harms among patients. So for instance, misattributions after a vaccine of an adverse reaction as being caused by something else. Those are some of the descriptions. Or for instance, the age of the person, because after all, if you're 60 years old, well, you can have all these things, right? So why bother look at the most immediate potential cause of concern, right? And then major strategies of suppression of dissent in medical science and medical practice. And this is not a new topic. It's an old, you know, topic in the literature, very well investigated by a scholar by the name of Brian Martin, who lives in Australia. He's an emeritus professor now, and I follow his work. So all of these things, and this is kind of a little, you know, what I think our work contributes, which is really not rocket science, right? Ethics inform public health, grounded in public health policy, grounded in autonomy and transparency. So this is like saying, you have to be, you know, you have to be transparent about your research, right? It's really not rocket science, but if it's not happening, you have to say it, right? And then very importantly, you have to, you know, we, I mean, the authorities won't do it, but at least the critics, we have to really, really scrutinize the suppression of dissent tactics, particularly when there's conflicts of interest, money and policymaking, you know, a priori involved. And I think that I owe, you know, my work also to the tremendous amount of information that I have received from, you know, the people who resist these policies throughout Canada, yourself included. So, you know, I've learned, I learned an enormous amount from following these folks and not doing anything new. And that's about it just in terms of the actual data, but I think we can stop there. And unless you want to go over something in particular. Well, now I have some questions for you, of course, when you were talking about the impacts on patient care and you made reference to protocols that had been thrown out the window. Can you give us some examples? Well, yes, I can give you an example, but it doesn't actually come from this data set. Well, I mean, let me backtrack a little bit. One would be, well, you have to inform a patient, you know, grant, you know, they have to grant you permission to implement a practice that's like across the board, right? ABC. That wasn't happening. It just wasn't happening. Right. So you don't, you know, vaccinate a patient who comes in like very sick or likely to, you know, close to death or something else, you know, those kinds of, they just don't do them. Those are the most egregious violations that some people talked about. Another one was oddly enough, I collected from a healthcare worker, one of these healthcare workers whom I met independently through contacts in, you know, neighborhood. And, and perhaps I think I watched her in somebody's podcast. I can't remember which one. And perhaps I can, well, I'm not going to say the names of people because I don't know if they feel comfortable, but so she mentioned this, this person mentioned that they had seen, you know, changes in the treatment of certain conditions that they would find in emergency care. For instance, a child with group and you have certain measures to implement when you find particular cases, but workers were saying, no, we won't approach this patient or we won't do this because it involves contact and, and reacting as if the patient were some, somehow, you know, touched by the black plague or something like that. I mean, ridiculous. Even after they had gone through, you know, you know, we've been through, you know, no, no vaccines, no COVID, no injections throughout 2020, you know, people in the street are doing a lot of interventions and, you know, emergency medical settings, et cetera, et cetera. But all of a sudden you have a protocol that has been followed to even save people's lives when not to at least, you know, decrease their suffering that were simply not followed due to the new COVID, I don't know, prescriptions and policies. So she described some of these cases to my, you know, health policy students. They're not necessarily future healthcare workers, but they will involve, most likely involved in policy. So they're young people, second year, fourth year. So she described, you know, these changes of protocol, for instance, how to treat, how to treat a child in a distressed situation, completely different from what her 20 years of career had indicated so far. Yes. Now that raises another question and I have to frame this one. (30:41 - 35:16) We know that there was a great deal of neglect that happened in extended care centers because the workers were afraid to go near the patients. And we know, for example, that there were many hospitals that were in fact empty when media was telling people that they were full. And we've got the video evidence of that to prove it. But what we don't have, and possibly nobody but you has, because nobody but you has asked the healthcare workers, was there at least initially a level of fear there where they were afraid to approach the patients? Because you mentioned, you know, a child recruit with cough and they don't want to go near the kid because, well, maybe they're going to get COVID and die. Was that something that you perceived was happening early on in the narrative that healthcare workers were afraid to treat patients? If you ask me about the actual data I have observed so far in the three provinces, I have not seen that. I have seen more sort of generic accounts of, you know, people were afraid or there was a necessary fear. So people were so afraid they were reacting in fear. And fear is not a good advisor. So you react in fear, you do things that otherwise you wouldn't do, or you're given some time to think about it. So I did not find any healthcare worker who directly told us, either in writing or in person. But that actually raises a good point that I probably should include in the planned in-depth interviews that I plan to launch in the fall, once we wrap up the Alberta case, the Alberta survey, and we, you know, we put together our reports. Now, I can give yourself, you know, me as an example, I was afraid at the beginning, myself, but in an odd sort of way, because I'm not like a terribly fearful person. And, you know, fearful is physical at times, but I, you know, I don't know, but I was looking at all these people like dropping dead. It was all very bizarre. It took me a while to figure things out, to be very frank with you, Will, because I was looking at some of the geopolitical issues around COVID and how it is used to drag and drive warfare and, you know, animosity between countries and, you know, sentiments against, you know, the West, you know, kind of the global imperial West against others who act differently, etc. So I was looking at that and I was simply relying on, you know, major public health agencies that I had relied on throughout my medical career, although I should have known better, but a certain number of things happened. So I was kind of afraid, but I wasn't like freaking out. Moreover, during that time, we moved on to a farmhouse that we had recently bought because we moved to Canada, as I said, 2018, a little before that, but it was the transition. We were renting, etc, etc. When we finally decided to buy, my single son, adult son, is a farmer. So we thought, let's put it all together. We bought a farmhouse. So there's nobody around here, right? What am I going to be afraid of? Right. There's cows and there's horses and we have, you know, the chickens and the dogs and the cats. So, right. So there's lots of fresh air and, you know, reasonably healthy person. I mean, I have a lot of issues, but I wasn't afraid, but I kind of, I was in theory afraid, if that makes any sense. I did see a lot of fear, though. I did see it around me and people triple masking, etc. I did not see that. It makes me think about it. I'd have to go back and look at the data again, but I will make it an intentional point of exploration when I survey the next group of healthier workers. All right. Now, Claudia, you have a unique perspective that many of us do not have. And in this case, I'm referring to, as you said, you grew up in Argentina under a military dictatorship where it was the left that was the enemy. And now we saw this shift in recent years in Canada. And that used to be kind of the case here. I mean, sir, we were sure we were never a military dictatorship, but Canada was, when I was young, at least pretty much a right-wing country. And if you were a leftist, people would kind of look at you funny. (35:17 - 43:28) Now we have this shift in these recent years where the right became the enemy, not just, you know, the enemy of society. And when I say the right, I'm speaking specifically of things like in favor of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, bodily autonomy, individual rights. So you have this perspective of having lived under that one sort of, you know, very dictatorial system and having moved to a country that's supposed to be at least democratic. Maybe it's just not in practice, but it was supposed to be. How do you think that shift happened? And why is it that people jumped on board with it so easily? Well, wow, that is a really big million dollar question. I've been scratching my head since, because here's the thing. When I was growing up, you didn't need, you know, what is it to be a lefty? Defense of freedom of speech, of course. Democratic governance, of course. Right bodily autonomy, of course. That was presumed to be a left value that the right wingers would ram over. But then you didn't have to be like a lefty to be attacked. You just had to be branded as a lefty to be attacked. So going back to the question, what I think that rather than ideological issue, right, left or center, it's about who holds the power and who wants to abuse that power. Because if you're a right winger, a left winger, a center winger or whatever it is, but you have a certain amount of power and you want, don't want to be defied, you have to construct an enemy. Identify it by whatever hallmarks you have. This is sociology. I also have a, you know, my train, my doctoral training was in sociology. I did medical sociology, but I trained as a sociology. So we call that stigmatization. Right. So there are several stages to the process of stigma. So first of all, you just, you know, grab things from people. What are they saying? How are they speaking? What color is their skin or something? Right. What shape is their body? Like I'm short, five feet. Okay. How about being short? Right. So you grab a bunch of things, you put them together, you create, you could label them something, doesn't matter what. You attach negative features to that label, which gives you like a moral permission to attack anybody who falls under that label. So thanks to COVID, I think COVID opened my eyes that there was a world beyond the left that I had traditionally and always thought of myself as belonging and to think in terms of who has the power and who abuses that power. Because I reached, I met an enormous amount of numbers of people that I would have never come across. Right. And people that I was connected with who rejected me because they thought I was siding with the right, whatever that means. Right. So, and I thought, okay, I don't have time for this. I need to figure it out, but I won't try to spend more time because I try to argue and arguing doesn't seem to work here. It seems to be just the stigmatization and ideological drivers, like almost insane. Right. So my explanation is, again, to go back to what I think is probably the question that has kind of kept me awake is it's not about right, left, or center. It's about some fundamental values about how you think society should work and ethics, et cetera. And then to understand the workings of power, because that's how social power works through stigmatizing, creating, you know, you may have a real, but most of the time imagined enemy. If you don't have an enemy, power loses a lot of power to prevail. Enemies are very, very, you know, very, very useful to exert power over others. And so the conclusion is that those who were anti-vaxxers, whatever label you want to put on them, they were created to be an enemy, to be the problem. Absolutely. Now, and as strategies, you can really reach out to people that I wouldn't agree with. Right. I don't know. I'm sure there's some people within what we call, you and I, or like medical freedom, but it's more than medical freedom, really. So it's not just medical freedom, you know, democratic governance, but then democracy has been so bastardized that I don't know more what it means. So, you know, that, you know, there may be some crazy guy over there, gal, whatever. Right. I don't have to agree with that, but that's kind of the straw man that is usually taken to mean or stand for a whole group of people who are expressing some degree of dissent. Right. So it's really about power. And I think that power is better divided among, you know, the top 1% or however you want to distinguish people who really have power to implement policy change. Right. Like the so-called leaders or representatives, etc. And then the rest of us. And then some people who, like myself, are more privileged in between and who may choose to be like, you know, supporting the, you know, the folks above rather than, you know, siding with the people. Right. So when, you know, when I observed as a new Canadian, because I became a Canadian eventually, a Canadian citizen, when I saw that how working people were being treated, I thought, this is insane. And I don't care what they call themselves right, left or center. This is not something I will support. I definitely will oppose it. Not only not support it, but oppose it. Right. These are working people, whatever else they are, and they are being assaulted, right, by policies that they played no role in deciding about. Right. Now, Claudia, I've asked my questions. I read your study. But you're the expert. You're the one who did this study. So as a final question, what conclusions did you draw that you want to share with the viewers? I've thought about that many times. And I have a few sort of tentative ones. Well, first of all, I think that the only way to really democratize public policy, health policy being just one of them, but you could talk about any other number of things, you know, environment, housing, jobs, education, whatever. Right. This is how policy is to educate or inform as many young people you have a reach to inform. And I'm very happy to be a professor that way, because I get a chance to interact with a lot of young people, to give them the tools to feel confident that they can make independent judgments. And by independent, I mean, independent from authority, because we both teach students to be, you know, what we tell them in academia, professors to, oh, you got to be a critical thinker. Well, what is that? Oh, you have to learn how to look at credible sources. Well, looking at credible sources is not being a critical thinker. Somebody told you already what source is supposed to be credible. Credible is a political label. It's not a scientific one. What you need to learn is how to scrutinize arguments. If the argument doesn't stand, it doesn't matter if a prime minister says or, you know, the Pope or whatever, right? It doesn't matter. You need to look at arguments. (43:28 - 48:30) You need to look at evidence. Of course, the evidence can be, you know, somebody can show you evidence and it's not evidence, it's false, but there is no easy recipe, but you have to muddle through things and learn how to do that independently. You know, Immanuel Kant, you know, philosopher of the 18th century, et cetera, et cetera. He said, you know, the key to the age of enlightenment is to do your own thinking, right? Think autonomously, right? You know, don't look for, you know, answers and important people because they're not going to tell you the answers to what matters. It's in you, right? Look inside you. You're a religious person, you look into whatever. I'm not. I mean, you just really, really put yourself in the mirror, take a deep look and think, you know, yourself. So I think that the most important lesson, if you will, that I turn away is that we need young people to be sort of liberated from, you know, the reliance on authority to make judgments about the world. And I'm not talking about math, one and one equals two, that we're not going to fight over that one, but everything else, right? And then I guess there's no alternative than getting involved. I wish I had a better answer. Well, so does everyone, Claudia. Now you are doing, collecting data in Alberta. Are you still collecting data in Alberta? No, we're done with that. I'm actually revising it now, reviewing it. So I have this, as I said, you know, small team on a shoestring. I've had them for different projects, but for this particular one, there's two gals, two young investigators, and we are now looking at the trends. And that's how I found out that we have more people, fewer unvaccinated and more vaccinated, but the vaccinated are divided in very interesting ways. Only a fraction of them have the two or more boosters. So there's a lot of in-between who stopped at the first booster, right? They thought, okay, and this is my impression, right? I came through here to keep my job, but I'm throwing it now. And the moment Alberta is no longer asking for them, I believe. So that's one thing that we're looking at. And I'm also looking at what they wrote. And some people wrote this survey is very biased because it wants us to say bad things about the vaccine. And I, actually, I respectfully disagree with those people because I'm asking them on a scale from very much to very little or nothing. You know, I give them options to say what they want all the time, all kinds of questions, supportive and negative. But you can say, I completely disagree with this. But they frame that, they frame my attempt to open up the dialogue about the downsides as being biased against them, if you know what I mean. And that's just, that's been the narrative the whole time. And you know about that. It's not enough to be completely on board with their narrative. If you put out any kind of question or survey or whatever that would allow the other side to have a voice. Well, now you're still the problem. Exactly. You ask a question, yeah, you ask a question and they have a label. You're either vaccine hesitant or an anti-vaxxer. So you don't need arguments. Who needs arguments, right? Who needs evidence? You can just label people and then assault them. So that's exactly the process of stigmatization that we've been studying, you know, in the field of sociology. When I became a sociologist, I learned about this is going on for years, right? It's over half a century long, you know, tradition of critical inquiry, the process of stigmatizing to create enemies and assault them, right? To make it legitimate to assault them. And there's a new study that I just launched. I'll tell you just a couple of words about it, looking at the critically at the, you know, again, you know, sort of evaluating the evidence, et cetera, the distribution of medical mandates across Ontario. So that'll take me about a year. When they were implemented, why they were implemented, what were the arguments for implementation? How were the workers who defied the mandates construed and by that meaning portrayed in the public discourse? So it's kind of a, I won't be as much talking to people as looking at documentation that, you know, media representations of things, how the media communicates these things to the public, because, you know, if the public is, you know, just only allowed to hear one voice, then we shouldn't be surprised that, you know, people say, well, you know, they, they are the experts, they may know what they're talking about. And so on. (48:31 - 48:50) Claudia, thank you so much for the excellent research that you've done. And I'll be looking forward that please keep me informed on what you're doing now. And when you find some conclusions from that, and thank you again for your time. Thank you so much for having me here. I hope I didn't overwhelm people and took something from it. I'm sure they did.