...In January, for example, leading Canadian federal politicians and health officials told us cases of coronavirus would be rare in Canada, that border closures were wrong-headed and unnecessary, and that there was generally no need for private citizens to wear face masks in public.
By April, with the disease swamping parts of Canada and pushing our country hundreds of billions of dollars into debt, the federal government abruptly reversed itself on every one of these critical policies.
Given how often the federal government has had it wrong, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, should be the last person in Canada to complain about heated debate around the pandemic, yet that’s how I take her latest comments.
On Monday, Tam issued a statement reminding us we all need to be careful before we accept any information about COVID-19 that we read online. That is excellent advice.
But Tam’s main point was at best tone deaf, at worst harmful: “While Canadians and public health authorities alike are rapidly responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to be mindful that we are doing so in the midst of an ‘infodemic.’ That is an overabundance of information about COVID-19, including rumours and misinformation, sometimes deliberately spread … False or misleading information can spread as fast as a virus.”
Does Tam not recognize her own fallibility on this count?
As coronavirus spread fast through Wuhan and the Hubei province in China, leading to a complete quarantine of that region on Jan. 23, and pushing Asian nations and regions to shut down travel from China and eventually from other infected countries,
Tam told Canadians there was no reason to panic or even to be overly concerned. “Right now, the cases are in China. Very few are exported.”
On Jan. 31, she added: “Canada’s risk is much, much lower than that of many countries. It’s going to be rare.”
That was a brutal miscalculation, instrumental to Canada’s slow and complacent initial response.
Tam made other mistakes, in part because like every other public health official in the world she was still learning about the mysterious disease. She downplayed the threat of asymptomatic spread. She spoke out against the use of thermometers for screening at public places. She failed to recommend mask wearing for the general public. And she continued to fight against travel bans and automatic quarantine from infected countries, even as outbreaks exploded in Iran, Italy and finally the United States.
At the end of February, 23 Chinese-Canadian doctors insisted such bans and quarantines were sound public health policy.
“This is about containing the virus, this is about isolation of the virus, not isolation of people,” Dr. Stanley Zheng of Toronto told the National Post. “It has nothing to do with discrimination whatsoever. It’s a global fight against this virus. Let’s contain it if we can.”
Zheng’s critique was unwelcome news to some. Would it be the kind of statement now classified as misinformation? It’s worth noting that one week later
on March 5, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strongly affirmed Canada’s open borders approach, telling reporters it was based on science, not unsound rumour. “There is a lot of misinformation out there, there is a lot of knee-jerk reaction that isn’t keeping people safe,” Trudeau said.
I asked Tam’s media officials for examples of current misinformation in this so-called “infodemic.”
The best they could do was point to a paper by medical researchers that described just one specific concern, a poll question from April by Leger asking if having a COVID-19 vaccine should be mandatory. It was the opinion of the researchers that this question implied to the public that the government was pushing for a mandatory vaccination policy, even when it wasn’t doing so.
The Leger poll question is indeed speculative but it’s hardly damning evidence that we’re in the grip of a dangerous “infodemic.”
There are now heated public and scientific debates boiling along on everything from the nature and efficacy of herd immunity to the exact origin of the virus, from the accuracy of standard COVID-19 tests to the triggers that might initiate more lockdown measures.
To find our best way forward we’re going to need more vigorous debate and rational skepticism, not less.
Might Tam’s invocation of a dreaded “infodemic” put a chill on such dissent? Indeed, is her intent to stifle criticism of government policy?
https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion...should-complain-about-covid-19-misinformation
