(0:00 - 0:52) 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. (0:53 - 1:19) 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. (1:19 - 2:10) 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 - 2:37) 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 to 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? Right. I decided, well, we need the voice of healthcare workers themselves. (2:38 - 6:13) 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 surveys all the time and I can't bother, right? I'm just too busy. Well, these people took time of 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. Now, there's another thing of those whom we, voices we collected and perspectives 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 just, 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. 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. Some of the most concerning things that I, 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. (6:13 - 7:22) 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. 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. (7:24 - 9:40) 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. 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, sure, 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. 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 dictatorial system and having then 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.