Evan Solomon Spreads Misinformation by Asserting that COVID-19 is worse than Polio

CTV News’ Evan Solomon got into a small tiff with Sarnia-Lambton MP Marlyn Gladu on his show over vaccine mandates, seemingly in an attempt to try and discredit her and the various other Conservative MPs and Senators joining the newly forming civil liberties caucus.

Solomon argues to Gladu that she somehow must be in favour of COVID-19 vaccines being made mandatory for school children because she would have likely been in favour of polio vaccines being mandatory for schools back in the 1950s.

Gladu rightfully counters this argument by stating that:

In terms of the risk people who got polio, many of them died and many of them were crippled, and that is not the same frequency of risk that we see with COVID-19, although COVID-19 has killed people as you rightly pointed out. 

This is when Solomon starts spinning misinformation to try and push back on Gladu, as if CTV mandate that any politician against vaccine mandates had to be destroyed.

Solomon went on to argue that because the raw number of people who have died of COVID-19 is greater than the number of people who have died of polio that means COVID-19 is the worse disease and justifies children being vaccinated.

This broken line of logic can be seen in the video clip below.

Yes, in raw numbers COVID-19 has killed more people in Canada than polio did but that is only marginally true due to Canada having a population around only ⅓ of what it is today when polio was a public health issue.

Solomon is also ignoring that polio primarily affected only young people, whereas COVID-19 can be contracted easily by people of any age demographic, so the effect is widespread which causes an increased amount of deaths despite having a low death rate.

It is also fairly obvious that polio had a far more significant effect on children than COVID-19 does so the targeted mandates on children attending public school could actually be scientifically justified. The average age of a COVID-19 death in Canada is also 83.3 years old (typically with significant comorbidities) which is older than the average Canadian life expectancy.

Almost no children have actually died of COVID-19 in Canada, and although all deaths are a tragedy, it seems more of an issue when a disease is killing and dramatically crippling those under the age of 18 than those over the age of 83. 

Between just 1949 and 1954 over 11,000 Canadians (mostly children) were left paralyzed by polio, so only comparing deaths and not the far more dramatic long-term effects polio has compared to COVID is yet another dishonest aspect of Solomon’s argument.

Solomon probably does not care about whether or not his points against Gladu were even historically accurate as his purpose on CTV News seems to be to pretend to be a conservative while attacking any conservatives who actually have the audacity of taking conservative positions. 

Evan Solomon will likely not be called out by major news networks for his ridiculous reasoning that COVID is worse than polio because he is part of the elite media world where he gets to pretend that he is an objective truth-tellers, despite his often laughable perspectives.