IN REVIEW
- Dec 11, 2025
- 18 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Last summer I was writing about my continuing confusion around pandemic-related matters and my feeling that there remains a serious lack of dialogue around any of it. No one liked that. So, let’s try this again.
A TIMELINE
- 2020 -
January 22 - The WHO convened an emergency meeting about an outbreak of a novel coronavirus called 2019-nCoV. The committee could not reach consensus on declaring a global emergency.
January 25 - Ontario confirmed Canada’s first case. British Columbia recorded its first within a few days.
January 30 - The WHO Director-General declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — the highest level of alarm under international health law.
March 11 - The World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. Canada had 115 reported cases.
Mid March - States of emergency were declared within provinces, with movement and gathering restrictions imposed along with the shutdown of businesses deemed non-essential. Canada restricted entrance of foreign nationals and non-essential travel to and from the US. Mandatory quarantine for travellers came into effect at the end of the month.
Mid April - The first wave of infections peaked in Canada with about 35,000 cases and 1,600 deaths documented. Transport Canada announced a mask mandate for all air travellers and related workers.
June 8 - Two senior physicians (one of whom, Dr Paul Offit, is and FDA advisor, Director of the Vaccine Education Center, and attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) wrote an op-ed in The New York Times warning that the US president and his team were prone to debut an ineffective and unsafe vaccine that did not meet high scientific standards and do so prior to the election only for the purpose of boosting his political chances. The authors drew a comparison between the mRNA vaccines to previously approved vaccines which enrolled more than 60,000 and took more than years to establish safety, efficacy, and obtain approval. The COVID-19 vaccines in the works by contrast were expected to enroll just a fraction of the participants and given to them and the wider the public not in years but in mere months.
June 12 - Ontario began indoor mask mandates in select areas and on transit (along with gifting millions of users ineffective masks), with major cities and other provinces following suit in the following weeks and months.
August 5 - The British Medical Journal published “The rush to create a COVID-19 vaccine may do more harm than good.” The article — by Dr Els Toreele, a fellow at University College London and biomedical expert with two decades at the interface of pharmaceutical research and development, global health, and human rights — cited Phil Krause, deputy director of vaccines at the US FDA, who said, “A weakly effective vaccine can do more harm than good” and quoted Ken Frazier, CEO of pharma giant Merck, who said those “raising hopes for a vaccine before year-end are doing ‘a grave disservice to the public.’”
Sept 10 - Writing for CNN, Dr Kent Sepkowitz (an expert in medical analysis and infection control at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York) noted that Russia and China already recklessly approved their own vaccines in July and warned that “the history of vaccines is full of alarming missteps.” The author details examples of the famous mistakes with a tuberculosis vaccine, an unapproved polio vaccine, the 1976 swine flu vaccine debacle, and a failed Lyme disease vaccine in 1998. The author highlights cases where vaccine recipients who claimed injury did not receive any compensation.
Sept 22 - The Washington Post published “Beware of covid-19 vaccine trials designed to succeed from the start.” In it, Dr William Haseltine (senior Harvard Medical School researcher, author of hundreds of peer-reviewed manuscripts and a dozen books, founder of a dozen medical companies, and president of the global health think tank ACCESS Health International) warned that the vaccines being developed could have dangerous unknown side effects that only emerge years after approval. He warned the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine testing "protocols should heighten anxiety rather than alleviate it" as they are structured to ensure success and bias toward overstating their effectiveness by setting low thresholds for preventing mild symptoms rather than focusing on severe outcomes or high-risk populations. He warned that severe illness is what kills people, not mild symptoms.
December 4 - As Canada surpassed 400,000 cases, the chief public health officer suggested we needed as many people vaccinated as possible and as quickly as possible when a vaccine eventually arrives. She explained how we needed to achieve herd immunity to escape the pandemic and that, though the threshold for herd immunity was unknown, we "probably need 60 to 70 per cent of people to be vaccinated." The same day, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said everyone who wants a COVID-19 vaccine in BC should be able to get one by September of 2021.
December 9 - The first COVID-19 vaccine was approved (Pfizer). CBC ran a story about USFDA analysis of the vaccine trial titled "Pfizer's vaccine strongly protects against COVID-19, U.S. regulator confirms." Though they explain that the "shots appear 95 per cent effective at preventing mild to severe COVID-19 disease" and that this was only based on 170 cases, a later note spells out that "FDA staff also said that the trial, which was designed to look at effectiveness against COVID-19, did not produce data to answer the question of if it also stopped infection."
December 10 - The first Pfizer COVID vaccine trial study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Only two-months out from initial injection, the study reported just two deaths in the vaccine group and four in the placebo. (Curiously though, two fatalities in the placebo group were said to be from “unknown causes”, which is a little odd for a unique medical trial being watched by the world. Maybe go find out how they died?) This finding helped demonstrate the shot’s usefulness at saving lives and, thus, enable its approval.
December 14 - Mass vaccination begins a week later for populations deemed at-risk, namely the elderly and Indigenous.
December 23 - The second pandemic vaccine (Moderna) was approved in Canada.
- 2021 -
January 7 - Canada imposed mandatory COVID-19 testing for travellers.
February 10 - CBC offered a story about unpublished, non-peer-reviewed, non-randomized research. Titled "Study offers 'promising' evidence that at least 1 COVID-19 vaccine may curb virus transmission", it offered that the Pfizer vaccine lowers viral load in post-vaccine infections. The article cites Canada Research Chair in Molecular Pathogenesis of Emerging Viruses, Dr Jason Kindrachuk, from the University of Manitoba who explained "there actually might be some added benefit to these vaccines beyond just reducing severe disease." Infectious disease specialist and member of Ontario's vaccine task force, Dr Isaac Bogoch added his expert opinion that "This would point in the direction that people who have been vaccinated, who are still infected, may be less likely to transmit..."
February 25 - CTV News ran with an article titled "COVID-19 vaccines block disease, but do they stop infection?" They told the public that reports from around the globe "confirm that vaccines largely prevent people from getting sick..."
February 26 - The third vaccine was approved (AstraZeneca). The Globe and Mail ran an article titled "Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine reduces transmission after one dose, U.K. study finds" and explaining to the public that the shot didn't just prevent illness but that vaccinated individuals showed a four-fold decrease in asymptomatic infection risk after 12 days.
March 5 - The fourth vaccine was approved (Janssen).
April - Federal modelling suggested movement, travel, gathering, and business restrictions could ease if 75% of the population had one vaccine dose and 20% were fully vaccinated with two doses. Canada's the deputy chief public health officer explained that the number of new cases will be "brought under control" if the public continues to adhere to lockdown rules for the foreseeable future.
July 26 - Restrictions did not ease. Herd immunity targets shifted to 90% fully vaccinated.
August - Canada announced 70% of the population were fully vaccinated and more than 80% had one shot. No one appears to have documented, qualified, or accepted those who achieved immunity through prior infection.
September - Despite a broad variety of concerns formally expressed by local, national, and international medicine, bioethics, human rights, and legal experts, most provinces imposed vaccine passports and a proof of vaccination requirement for domestic and international travel as well as to access many of those indoor settings still open to the public. Prior infection was not accepted as a valid form of immunity.
September 15 - A six-month follow-up on the initial Pfizer vaccine safety and efficacy trial, published again in The New England Journal of Medicine, arrived after Canada administered more than 54.6 million doses COVID vaccines. Their study showed 15 deaths in the vaccine group versus 14 in the placebo group, effectively the opposite of their prior study and only with slightly more time elapsed.
October 6 - The federal government announced 82% of Canadians over age 12 were fully vaccinated. They also announced that, as of Oct 30th, they vaccination mandates and other vaccine policies would be enforced for regulated transport sectors and public servants (including RCMP, Crown agencies, and core public admin) with non-compliance resulting in unpaid leave or termination. Many provinces imposed similar vaccine mandates on government, healthcare, education sectors with most private employers adopting similar policies. Even judges required jurors to be vaccinated.
December - By the end of the year there were more than two million total test-confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 30,000 total fatalities in Canada. Roughly another million unconfirmed cases were estimated.
- 2022 -
February - The fifth and sixth vaccines (Novavax and Medicago) were approved in Canada. By this time, 10 vaccines had been approved by authorities recognized by the WHO and at least 40 more distinct COVID vaccines received full approval worldwide. Eventually more than 50 vaccines were so approved. (Over 370 vaccine candidates were developed using 11 different platforms globally; approximately 240 of those reached clinical development stages, with 92 reaching final Phase III testing. You might recall we were told one safe and effective vaccine ever would be a miracle and totally unprecedented for a number of reasons and that anything else required the violation of either physics or basic medical ethics.)
April - Most provinces lifted the bulk of their mandates and restrictions (closures of non-essential businesses, capacity and gathering limits, indoor and transportation masking requirements).
June 20 - Federal vaccine mandates were suspended for domestic travellers, transportation workers, and federal employees due to ~99% compliance among workers and declining numbers of severe cases.
October 1 - Federal travel requirements and restrictions were lifted, including proof of vaccination, testing requirements, quarantine, and masking on planes.
December - By the end of 2022, total confirmed and unconfirmed COVID cases were estimated at roughly 70% of the population. Canada’s auditor general reported millions of unused and undonated COVID vaccine doses, costing taxpayers approximately $1 billion, expired without being administered. The auditor general also explained of the federal pandemic benefits plan that "overpayments of $4.6 billion were made to ineligible individuals, and we estimated that at least $27.4 billion of payments to individuals and employers should be investigated further."
- 2023 -
March - Federal data showed Canada committed more than $9 billion to COVID vaccine doses, therapeutics, and related assets across the pandemic. More than $3.5 billion was spent on international assistance and vaccine development projects. With that, Canada procured more than 110 million doses of vaccine for its own population and another 201 million doses for other nations. 80% of Canadians (not just eligible adults) reported “fully vaccinated” status, including more than 90% of those over 60 years of age. Total COVID fatalities in Canada were estimated at between 50,000 and 60,000.
May 5 - The World Health Organization declared an end to its “public health emergency of international concern”, the highest alert level for COVID-19.
By the end of 2023, the WHO said 13.6 billion vaccine doses had been administered, with almost 70% of the world's population getting at least two doses.
OBSERVATIONS, STUDIES, AND OTHER REALITIES
I don’t find serious disputes of the above details.
COVID-19 killed around 55,000 Canadians across the pandemic. Leading causes of death in Canada over a similar three year period include: accidents 60,000, heart disease 180,000, and cancer 270,000.
Total annual fatalities in Canada number roughly 300,000, with almost a million, all-cause, across the pandemic. Interestingly, 2024, a year after the end of the global health emergency, saw significantly more fatalities of all sorts, 10,000-20,000 more, than what folks think of as the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
By far the largest COVID-19-related fatality peak, with the highest daily death figures, up to 310, occurred between Jan-Feb of 2022, resulting in roughly 7,000 total deaths (25% more than anticipated). That was the Omicron-driven Fifth Wave. There were three other significant peak fatality waves but only about half the size.
None of the above fatality figures count excess mortality, just test-verified and reported COVID deaths. The last and worst COVID fatality peak, the fifth, came after everyone who was going to get vaccinated had done so, when everyone knew what was going on and how to behave, and after herd immunity was as thoroughly achieved as conceivable. Even the second and third waves each killed more than the first, back prior to the availability of a vaccine, when few had prior infection, and while we were still trying to understand what was happening (which I would argue still hasn’t happened).
More than 90% of all fatalities were among those over age 65 and roughly 75% of those seniors who died from COVID were over age 80 and mostly in long-term care homes (while in Australia and the US care home fatalities were less than half the rate). Many independent evaluations of Canadian hospital and long-term care home infections and deaths came early on in the pandemic, in the winter of 2020-21 and spring of 2021. Along with the military reporting widespread elder abuse and other horrors in long-term care homes, almost all of the most serious outcomes occurred in these highly controlled health- and safety-focused settings aimed, at minimum, at non-maleficence.
It was well-established early on, and then confirmed by meta-analyses of more than 200 studies of around 10 million cases, that with COVID-19 there was a far higher risk of severe illness, hospitalization, intensive care unit admission, and mortality for males despite similar or in some settings lower case rates. This strong sex bias was shown to persist even after adjusting for age and comorbidities, suggesting immutable biological factors were predominant predictors of outcomes. The many reasons for the disparity were always well-understood from the start of the pandemic as these same factors exist with other illnesses. Like with most illnesses, generally females mount a stronger innate and adaptive immune responses due to their X chromosomes, resulting in twice the antibody response. Accompanying that they also tend to have have lower testosterone, shown to hamper the immune response, and the aid of greater estrogen. By contrast, and specific to COVID, males also appear to have more ACE2 enzyme, which this virus uses to enter one's cells, and results in them having higher rates of multi-organ failure. Males are also consistently more likely to have underlying health conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes and tend to have social circumstances that increase their risk, such as being the primary breadwinner and experiencing far greater chronic homelessness. In addition to all that, on average, males are also more likely to smoke and drink, less likely to seek testing or healthcare generally, less likely to adhere to preventative measures, and more likely to take risks (such as taking on more hazardous forms of employment, being overrepresented in work deemed essential during a pandemic, or doing the shopping for the household in the middle of a pandemic). All of this strong bias existed with in past outbreaks of SARS and MERS.
Despite being known in 2020 that males were ~180% more likely to wind up in intensive care and ~40% more likely to die, governments, medical researchers, doctors, and reporters burned a lot of time and resources pretending that none of the above sex discrepancy was at play or that, in fact, females experienced worse burdens and outcomes (than, of all things, far more severe illness and death — even though women are strongly over-represented in education, care, and medical settings where exposure was highest). They even went so far as arguing that females suffered far more during the pandemic on every front including due to their being more likely to live alone or find themselves over-represented in long-term care homes. They did this without acknowledging that both scenarios exist because women live significantly longer than men, while also neglecting to mention who was spreading illness and killing these women in their long-term living situations: their overwhelmingly female caregivers, nurses, and co-habitants.
Despite the focus on sex and female-to-female harm being overwhelming, this fact was rarely noticed. While pushing out a contrary and often speculative or evidence-free framing, folks also liked to tells us males were harmed and dying after seeking medical attention due to their prior bad behaviour. Folks even reported such things despite knowing these gendered behaviour patterns are effectively universal and therefore perfectly understood and anticipated in populations around the globe. The problem was not, they insisted, elderly men being unaided or gifted ineffective or even harmful medical tests, devices, therapies, and practices (most of which "were never robustly tested") and by a hospital staff that was 70-90% female. It was insisted that this just wasn't part of the relevant gendered picture of this pandemic. Worse, the better outcomes for females was, of course, commonly said to be not due to and abundance of biological advantages but instead their engaging in more responsible behaviour (that is: enthusiastically adhering to policies likely and then proven to be ineffective, such as staying indoors, remaining six feet apart, washing hands and foods, wearing ineffective masks, or getting vaccines that didn't perform as suggested).
Even after adjusting for chronic conditions, age, and sex, peer-reviewed studies, official reports, policy briefings, and public health data in Canada showed elders were more than 115 times more likely to die if they lived in a long-term care facility versus those living in the community. Meaning that nurses and care home aides were largely responsible for introducing and spreading the pandemic virus and, thus, harming and killing those under their care. This was identical to the findings for SARS in Toronto in 2003, which was the worst performing district in the world and found to have exacerbated the epidemic by poor nursing practices.
Early desperation in the medical community resulted in tests and interventions for COVID that provided no benefit and unnecessarily consumed limited critical resources. Paired with this, doctors and nurses actually spread illness and harmed patients, both physically and psychologically, while increasing mortality — in violation of everything the medical profession is about. Some of those violations included needless CT scans and x-rays, aggressive ventilation and intubation, unwarranted supplemental oxygen, over-prescription of antibiotics, misuse of hydroxychloroquine and corticosteroids, unjustified isolation, and disease-spreading aerosol boxes. By these methods the medical community gifted already-sick patients with an extremely broad spectrum of additional ills, including: ventilator-induced lung and brain dysfunction and injury (including delirium and coma), barotrauma (physical tissue damage), venous thromboembolism (deep-vein blood clotting that travels to the lungs), opportunistic and resistant infections (only ~5% of COVID hospital patients came in with bacterial infections but 70% were given antibiotics!), severe microbiome disruption and heightened risk of sepsis, along with complications from heavy sedation and immobility, including physical weakening and fractures. "Primum non nocere."
Retrospective studies from around the globe demonstrated that individuals with vaccine-induced immunity were at far higher risk for reinfection and hospitalization than those with infection-induced immunity even just a few months out from being fully vaccinated. Even when the aim of a study was to show “the risks associated with acquiring immunity through COVID-19 infection”, those investigations still showed that “90 to 300 days after COVID-19 infection, the post-COVID-19 infection cohort had a lower risk of COVID-19 infection compared with those fully vaccinated”; and significantly so, as roughly “half as many new COVID-19 infections occurred in the post-COVID-19 cohort compared with the vaccinated cohort…”
A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis arrived post-pandemic, published in The Lancet in 2023. It looked at 65 studies from 19 countries. There, Stein et al found prior infection provided strong protection against severe disease, hospitalization or death, for at least 10 months, with effectiveness of almost 90% or greater across variants, including Omicron. In 2024, Hu et al, conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on the protective effectiveness of previous infection against new COVID infections, published in Frontiers in Public Health. They concluded that infection-acquired immunity offered significant protection against reinfection and severe outcomes. A similar study published in Nature in 2025, looking at protection against SARS-CoV-2 reinfection pre- and post-Omicron, reported infection-induced immunity showed 98-100% effectiveness against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 upon reinfection, with no observed waning over the studied period.
ADDITIONAL HILARITY
My favourite part of the first Pfizer trial is the demographics section about the trial participants. Even if I round down to keep the number as low as possible, the vaccine group was composed, they tell us, of 82% White, 27% Hispanic, 9% Black, 4% Asian, 2% Mixed, and 1% Other/Not available. Now, I’m not very good at math but 82+27 looks to me like 109. And then you have to add another 16 to that, so 125. You might expect a rounding error of 1-2% but not anywhere near the 25% range. What am I missing? This can’t be common (or even possible) in any medical trial. To compare, none of the above happened in the Moderna, AstraZeneca, or Johnson & Johnson trials I reviewed and I've never seen such a huge rounding error anywhere in the sciences. (Though I have seen it in marketing, real estate advertising, and the like...)
Just to absolutely beat this to death, the most obvious and intuitive principle with rounding is that an acceptable error is one in which the difference is insignificant and misleading to no one. From there you get into the specific choices you’re forced to make with numbers. Common practice to neutralize any bias when dealing with fractions and decimals, in instances when the figure is half way between two numbers, say, is to round up or down to the nearest even number; so, 0.5 rounds to 0 and 1.5 rounds to 2. As above, I almost never do this but instead I tend to explicitly lean into bias. I like to bias against the point I’m trying to make or in favour of the argument I’m trying to refute. Just seems to make sense. And when I go look for other domain specific standards and something more narrow and quantifiable I also find that typical guidelines suggest a maximum rounding error should be in the 1% range, certainly not exceeding 1.5%. Right. So, is any of that happening here? A cohort of 25% would be bigger than most of the represented cohorts... Bonkers.
Still, all of this is without getting into why the breakdown wasn’t representative of the population it was intended for OR that of the populations in the nations it was tested on. What is that about, especially in the current cultural and political moment? To be specific, Asia and Africa are home to about 75-80% of us. And what does this combined cohort look like in the Pfizer trial? 13%. Wacky. As you'll recall, the world's entire medical community was certain that having a single possible vaccine candidate prior to the end of the pandemic was unlikely, which was why much of the world went all-in on many different attempts. So, every one of the WHO-endorsed contenders — only one of which seemed likely to run the whole development, testing, and trial gauntlet and then turn out to be both safe and effective — was intended for the world community and not aimed at a predefined recipient continent, nation, or racial community. Too, Pfizer wound up producing five billion doses and delivered those to nearly all countries.
SO NOW?
What should have been learned from SARS 2003, all the research on coronaviruses over the generation prior to the pandemic, or at least in the opening months of the public health emergency was that:
COVID-19:
Is a respiratory illness that is airborne and transmits asymptomatically
Hospitalized fatality rate is nothing like the case fatality rate which is nothing at all like the infection fatality rate
Severe illness, hospitalization, ICU admission, and mortality is strongly age biased but also sex biased
Cannot be suppressed with long-term, population-wide quarantine (the downsides are far more substantial than appreciated, including terrorizing people while deranging children's lives and those of folks without six-figure salaries)
Vaccines that emerged could not prevent illness, transmission, hospitalization, or death
Effectively everyone in and adjacent to public health got every element of the pandemic wrong. Though not understandable, this could be and was forgiven in 2020. However, not only did these same folks fail to learn from new information and past mistakes but actively refused to do so, while censoring information and even people and confidently assuring the public of the efficacy of the exact wrong tools and methods for suppressing the virus and reducing loss of life.
The real trouble is that we are unlikely to have another coronavirus pandemic. And we also find ourselves with a public health and medical community unable to admit error or reform those systems necessary to prevent future catastrophes. Instead, they insistent upon continuing to abandon public faith by telling us not about their errors and fixes but of the difficulty of their job and the impossible uncertainties they were dealing with, all while pretending they didn't kill millions of people while squandering the current and future riches of entire nations. What have I missed?
REFERENCES
(and other terrifying artefacts from leading journals, government institutions, and the popular press):
Peckham, et al; 2020 - Male sex identified by global COVID-19 meta-analysis as a risk factor for death and ITU admission
de la Vega, et al; 2020 - Could attitudes toward COVID-19 in Spain render men more vulnerable than women?
CBC, 2021 - Canada paid a premium to get COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer earlier than planned
Badone, 2021 - From Cruddiness to Catastrophe: COVID-19 and Long-term Care in Ontario
Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, 2021 - COVID-19 and Ontario’s Long-Term Care Homes
Thomas, et al; 2021 - Six Month Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine
CBC, 2021 - Vaccine passports are a 'huge ethical minefield,' says bioethicist
BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, 2021 - A human rights approach to proof of vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bianchi, 2021 - My vaccine status? It’s private
Government of Canada, 2021 - COVID-19 vaccination in Canada
Pecho-Silva, et al; 2021 - Non-recommended medical interventions and their possible harm in patients with COVID-19
Martins-Filho, et al; 2021 - Efficacy and safety of hydroxychloroquine as pre-and post-exposure prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis of blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials
Bradosh, et al; 2022 - The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good
National Post, 2022 - Expired COVID-19 vaccines to cost Canada $1 billion: AG report
Uusküla, et al; 2023 - Risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization in individuals with natural, vaccine-induced and hybrid immunity: a retrospective population-based cohort study from Estonia
Stein, et al; 2023 - Past SARS-CoV-2 infection protection against re-infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Phillips & Carver, 2023 - Greatest Risk Factor for Death from COVID-19: Older Age, Chronic Disease Burden, or Place of Residence? Descriptive Analysis of Population-Level Canadian Data
Grignon & Hothi, 2023 - Life and Death in Long-Term Care: Are We Learning the Wrong Lessons from COVID-19?
Government of Canada, 2024 - Canada’s aid and development assistance in response to COVID 19
Hu, et al; 2024 - Protective effectiveness of previous infection against subsequent SARS-Cov-2 infection: systematic review and meta-analysis
Nguyen, et al; 2024 - Risk of COVID-19 reinfection and vaccine breakthrough infection, Madera County, California, 2021
Chemaitelly, et al; 2025 - Differential protection against SARS-CoV-2 reinfection pre- and post-Omicron
Statistics Canada, 2025 - Leading causes of death
