I was going to publish this post on March 18, but better one month late than never! March 18 was the first anniversary of the day that I was going to be terminated from my full-time, tenured (i.e. life-time) faculty position in early 2022 for not complying with my university’s COVID-19 Vaccination Policy.
In the fall of 2021, most post-secondary classes in Ontario were still taught online because the virus-frightened faculty and students were the loudest voices torpedoing the planned return to in-person instruction, despite last-minute preparations in the form of campus vaccination policies. Those attending campus had a transition period ending in October to get vaccinated. Many non-compliant sessional instructors at this province’s colleges and universities were let go over fall study week, and non-compliant students were de-enrolled from courses by December.
In the meantime, I went through the … let’s say, interesting … process of applying for an exemption and appealing the denial. That was, of course, unsuccessful, just like hundreds of other student, staff, and faculty exemption requests summarily dismissed at the vast majority of post-secondary institutions across the province. After “training” and an additional meeting with management, HR, and the union, I received a letter on 22 December 2021 explaining that I had “made [myself] unavailable for work” and would be placed on unpaid leave as of 7 January 2022. More worrisome was the threat of dismissal effective 10 weeks later, on 18 March 2022.
Between 22 December 2021 and 7 February 2022, I did not receive any formal communications from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) — once awarded a “Greater Toronto’s Top [100] Employer” and “one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers” listings. Rejecting one of your more productive and engaged employees, and leaving him hanging like this, does not strike me as laudable corporate governance or human resource management. In addition, the university’s “Equity & Community Inclusion Pledge” asks all community members to agree to the following three (out of a total of six) commitments:
Treat all people with dignity and respect.
Speak up against prejudice in all its forms and strive for mutual respect and understanding.
Value the richness that diversity brings to the human experience.
Did our deans, human resource consultants, and human rights staff not take this pledge? Did they internalize the political and medial discrimination and dehumanization of unvaccinated Canadians and assorted others so well that they did not think “those” people were worthy of dignity and respect? Why did they not speak up for me, given that “mandatory vaccination amounts to discrimination against healthy, innate biological characteristics” (Kowalik 2022)? Diversity apparently does not include diversity of thought or diversity of medical status, and the long weeks of November, December, and January of 2021/22 made me think hard about whether TMU, and academia more broadly, is an intellectually and physically safe space for me.
On 12 January 2022, my union rep notified me that my unpaid leave had been deferred until the end of January, because there was a general delay in the new attempt to make a substantial return to campus. In the letter dated 7 February, my Dean finally accepted one of several reasonable alternative solutions I had proposed since November, i.e. the use of a legacy graduate supervision points system for teaching release. The other alternatives included teaching remotely, as I had done successfully for the same course in the winter 2020 and winter 2021 semesters, or attend campus based on negative antigen tests.
It was with mixed feelings but only mild surprise that I heard Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Kieran Moore, state recently that the province never mandated vaccination. In an event named “COVID at 1000 days” at Queen’s University, Moore said (with my emphases): “From the government’s vantage point, we asked for a vaccine policy. That policy should have been to the point that, when you don’t get vaccinated, they offer … an alternat[iv]e to the individual. So, if the school didn’t want you to come to the classroom at a university or college, then you would be allowed virtual. So in our vantage point, we wanted it to be a policy framework rather than a mandate, and we did not have a mandate in Ontario, from this government’s vantage point. But clearly, organizations were able to adopt or modify that policy to their … belief system or need at that time.”
Moore is mostly correct and I certainly knew about it and argued accordingly, although I have documented that there was a bit more to the emergence of campus vaccination policies in Ontario’s post-secondary sector.
Either way, I used my time wisely, teaching a pilot course on citizen research and publishing “The Coronoia Perpetua” in April 2022, the fourth book(let) in my Coronoia series. It is now high time for the fifth Coronoia volume, and I am in fact planning to use this post in lieu of an introduction to that book.
“The Coronoia Perfecta” refers to two meanings of the latin word “perfectus”, carried out. On the one hand, maybe the coronavirus paranoia is indeed finally coming to an end. On the other hand, how well was the pandemic “carried out”? I do not believe in an intentional “plandemic” but even with limited intent driven by corporate and personal greed and professional hubris among decision-makers, the way things played out for “them” can only be admired.
Anyway, the posts to be included as chapters are many and diverse in contents and tone. If you are a new subscriber to this blog, you may be interested in reading up on some of my takes from the last nine months, listed below. Otherwise, that’s it for this post :-)
Twitter rules ... for thee but not for them (17 June 2022), about the only social-media ban I experienced during the last three years of writing against the prevailing madness. It was for using the #SuddenAdultDeathSyndrom hashtag on a retweet and I make a point of illustrating that Twitter actually suggested the hashtag for which they then banned me (ever so briefly).
Share Your Views | Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) (31 Oct 2022), in which I share my input to the inquiry “into the circumstances that led to the declaration of emergency ... from February 14-23, 2022, and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency.” I do not have the impression that the Commission considered my input in any substantial way.
Danielle Smith, populist-to-be (5 Nov 2022), a recount of Alberta’s new Premier’s impressive first few weeks, triggered by a radio interview request from Germany/Switzerland about the topic. Premier Smith characterized the treatment of unvaccinated Canadians as “discrimination” (see my experience above) and apologized to “anyone who was inappropriately subjected to discrimination as a result of their vaccine status” — something I am still waiting for from my Premier Ford.
In Canadians continue to be tricked, not treated (10 Nov 2022), I pick up from a Halloween-themed commentaries published one year earlier, “Mandatory experimental shots – Canadians are being tricked, not treated“ and reference a new op-ed written for the Western Standard, “Remembering the 2021 Fall of Shame”. The post/chapter goes through a number of issues with the data on vaccine efficacy and questions the “legal or ethical basis for mandating the injections”.
In Just a minor glitch in the narrative... (17 Nov 2022), I discuss a Pfizer representative’s admission in the European Parliament that the pharma giant did not know whether their product would stop infection (provide immunity). As Dutch MEP Rob Roos put it, getting the shots to protect others was a lie. I have to wonder why “This unsuspecting geographer wrote about it on his faculty blog on 13 December 2020”, i.e. two years earlier, while public health officials, medical doctors, and science journalists were not interested in this publicly available information.
In another take on a current event, The day that "mask" became just another four-letter word (19 Nov 2022), I wrote about Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore’s appearance at a packed party venue without wearing a mask. Admittedly, this was a relatively small #RulesForThee moment for us here in Ontario, compared to certain breaches e.g. in the UK in the earlier phase of the pandemic. I used the opportunity to hit on the ridiculous “community of care approach” used to renew mask mandates in some indoor spaces, although I was lucky that I did not have to teach in masks in the fall 2022 or the current winter term.
Adverse-event reporting in Ontario is broken (21 Nov 2022) denounces the conspiracy between government and medical professionals that makes a mockery of vaccine adverse event reporting.
In a new episode of Pfizerleaks: Concerning patterns in the fertility and developmental study RN9391R58? (22 Nov 2022), I express my surprise that the Pfizer mRNA product was approved for use in pregnant women based on rather inconsistent safety outcomes in rats.
A new film came out in late November 2022, focusing on the growing reports of sudden and unexpected deaths of vaccinated individuals. There’s a bit too much fluff around the core message of the documentary, thus my post title “Died Suddenly”? Not so fast. (25 Nov 2022) However, just recently I heard another credible testimony about fibrous clots found in the bodies of many deceased people in 2021-2022, so this core aspect of the film appears to warrant further investigation.
In the next round of Pfizerleaks: What regulators knew about the mRNA shots and journalists ought to have investigated (27 Nov 2022), I peruse documents from the Australian governments freedom of information disclosure. The tenor of the post/chapter is that under any reasonable scenario of free and informed choice/consent, there could never have been any COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
The mother of all vaccine injury explanations (7 Dec 2022) is Marc Girardot’s “bolus theory”, a simple yet compelling explanation for the incidence and variety of harms generated by the COVID-19 mRNA shots. It puts the blame for adverse events squarely on the injection process and specifically the speed of injection. Although deceptively simple, this hypothesis makes a lot of (common) sense.
I have already referred to Human rights and the discrimination of the unvaccinated (13 Dec 2022) above. Here, I want to add what I believe is an extremely important point for the future of humanity. I believe that human rights are widely and wildly misunderstood resulting in an overly limited view. The UN stipulates that “Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings” and “Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination”. The crux of the matter is that “grounds” such as race, sex, or religion (“or any other status”!) are then added as examples, by which we must not discriminate. While these are clearly given as examples by the UN, many a human rights code actually pegs its non-discrimination rules to a limited list of named grounds. This is illogical and critically wrong — why does nobody else see this??
Reality check: Researchers did NOT show that vaccine hesitancy is in any way related to driving behaviour (23 Dec 2022). This is another hot take, in this case on a scholarly publication that is embarrassingly based on Toronto. A researcher funded by Canada’s “Encouraging Vaccine Confidence in Canada” program draws a link between “COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Risk of a Traffic Crash”, surprise! I turned this into a (half-hearted) call to "#DefundTheScience.
In F(o)l(l)ow the pandemic money (29 Dec 2022), I wrote more about the capture of the academic and professional classes, a topic that many fellow skeptics and heterodox scientists have been aware of for much longer than I have.
My COVID-19 Pan(dem)ic reading list (2 Jan 2023) served as a backup of a scoop.it topic, “The COVID-19 Pan(dem)ic”, which I started some time in 2020 to collect some of the best readings I have come across. It’s not very systematic but one of my goals was to include examples from a variety of sources.
In another installment of the Pfizerleaks: Global and local (body-internal) distribution of COVID-19 vaccine harm (10 Jan 2023), I discuss patterns in the data on 4.5 million vaccine adverse events reported by Pfizer to the Australian government in April 2022. Notable findings include the very high proportion of vaccine injuries affecting the working-age population as well as children, two groups who were never at serious risk from the disease that the injections were supposed to protect them from; women reporting injuries more than twice as likely as men; and the nervous system being at the top of the “system organ classes” of adverse-event diagnoses (other than “general disorders”), making neurological damage far more frequent than e.g. the widely acknowledged cardiac and vascular disorders.
Elements of Propaganda in the Western World’s Political, Public Health, and Media Narratives of 2020-2022. This is the title of a book chapter co-authored with my colleague Oliver Hirsch in Germany. The edited volume “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Ethical Challenges and Considerations” published by aptly named Ethics Press International is a wild mix of pro- and anti-narrative chapters. As you might have guessed, we call out the pandemic propaganda machine using numerous examples in three pre-defined categories: simplification and faulty analogies; emotional appeals and scapegoating; and manipulating numbers.
It’s just three months ago today, but I had already forgotten about Do we need new Centres for Drug Control and Health Promotion? (16 Jan 2023) In that post, I examine safety signals in the vaccine adverse event reporting systems. The CDC themselves had published, and immediately “resolved”, a safety signal for ischemic stroke in older people from the bivalent booster. Earlier, the “proportional reporting ratios” (PPRs) from the CDC’s internal analyses had become available, uncovering literally hundreds of safety signals for the COVID-19 injections. I explained information from different sources and also provided an interactive spreadsheet for readers to calculate their own PPRs based on the leaked CDC data.
Is the Law really "failing to protect the public's health"? (17 Jan 2023) The quote is from an event at my own university that I had been meaning to assess. At the same time, I had started playing with the AI language model ChatGPT and used the opportunity to mimic a conversation about civil rights, bodily autonomy, and voluntary participation in public health measures. The bot played along nicely.
A significant event in my academic career led me to write Calling on the Academic Left to do what's right (25 Jan 2023). That week, a three-author peer-reviewed article titled “The academic left, human geography, and the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic” was published after a two-year delay including a full-on cancellation after acceptance. I summarize the article and added a comment with links to related news articles in the Financial Post and Edmonton Journal. The question of what constitutes the political left and right sure provides room for more debate.
Big pharma: From playing doctor to playing God? (27 Jan 2023) is a skeptical perspective on the Project Veritas video showing a Pfizer executive bragging about corporate capture of public agencies and more. I also use the opportunity to take another quick look at how fact-checkers work.
In Hygiene theatre, "for patrons who cannot remove their masks", I take a look at the continued politicization and moralization of mask-wearing. Special attention is given to the arts and entertainment industry that once was supposed to hold a mirror up to society, or so I thought.
Last but not least, The long shadow of the "common good" has really become a dark place. I write about “the principles of medical ethics, red lines in an ethical pandemic response, and the difficulty of having a healthy debate about responsible public health.” A critical issue is the prerogative of interpretation — German: Deutungshoheit — over what constitutes the common good.
March 18 is my reminder of adversity showing its ugly face, but moreso, it is a celebration of prevailing and persisting within “the system”. New blog posts are already in preparation, so I am afraid I’m not quite done here yet.