Ontario Lockdown 3? What Science are Doug Ford and his Experts Following?

Dr. Peter Jüni, scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, has been making the rounds in mainstream media to propagate his opinion that Ontario will need another lockdown, with stricter measures, in order to contain Ontario’s “third wave” which he believes will be largely led by the new variants.

According to the science advisory table, 42% of new COVID cases in Ontario are caused by variants of concern (VOC), the modeling presented by the advisory table shows that as the reproduction rate of variants is on the rise, that of the original COVID strains are dropping, being with a reproductive value (R-value) of 1.24 and 0.9 respectively.

The response to this modeling is to not only return the province into lockdown but in fact to even further restrict Ontarians during this next set of lockdowns. This despite the mountain of evidence suggesting that the lockdowns have numerous far-reaching consequences that can be far more frightening than this pandemic. 

From widespread economic destruction, which has lead to countless businesses shutting down and individuals losing their home, to an increase in all sorts of social ills which had already been plaguing our society such as, domestic abuse, addiction, mental and physical health issues of children and adolescents, their parents, and essentially anyone else. All the while drastically reducing the care and diagnosis for all other significant health crises facing our population today.

This at a time when even the revered World Health Organization (WHO) has spoken out against using lockdowns as a primary source of protection against the spread of COVID-19, Dr. David Nabarro CBE, Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization, stated:

We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources; protect your health workers who are exhausted. But by and large, we’d rather not do it.

Nabarro citing many of the same economic and social issues discussed above as the WHO’s major source for changing course on their recommendations surrounding lockdowns.

These lockdowns on the general population are egregious, and worse is to see that, despite all of the posturings we’ve seen coming out of the Ford government surrounding long-term care homes (LTC), they have not resolved the issues which lead to numerous deaths in the first wave and even more in the second wave of this pandemic; citing that the plan would have been too expensive.

Yet when it comes to the economic impacts of the lockdowns we are called selfish for citing concerns that our fellow men are losing their businesses, their homes, and are going hungry. All the while our government is sending billions to China, and other nations, while Ford is proposing to use more taxpayer dollars to pay politicians, deals with a company owned by the Ford family, as well as ridiculous gadgets no Ontarian would ask for, rather than helping the most vulnerable Canadians.

Regardless of any of this, our government officials do not seek any new strategies, rather simply double down on the same low-information plan that they developed in the early days of the pandemic. One can only imagine that introducing even stricter restrictions will only further aggravate the situation within Canadian communities.

At this time despite claims that we are “following the science”, it appears as though we reject certain experts that may break from the official narrative in some respects, ignoring much of the science behind lockdowns, and even rejecting certain proposals from our own government hand-picked experts when they are inconvenient to those in charge.  Ford may as well come out as New York Governor Cuomo has and admit that he simply doesn’t trust the “experts”.

Despite our government’s reluctance to listen to the experts on so many issues, there is one issue that seems to be an easy sell to all who seek power; more lockdowns. A growing number of Canadians are joining anti-lockdown movements across the country, showing that many are disgruntled and questioning the reasoning behind these measures.