Let the hysteria begin!
It was the week of omicron. That's the latest of 5,768,724 or so computer generated sequences designated 'variants' of the SARS CoV-2 virus to be singled out and assigned a cool sounding Greek letter and announced to the world.
Other than the continent from where it supposedly originated and the sci-fi sounding name there was almost nothing known about it. The closest thing to relevant data came from South African doctors who said it seemed to cause mild if any illness and that no one had been hospitalized or had died from it.
So of course Canadian journalists took a calm, measured and responsible approach in response to this announcement.
Just kidding! Of course they didn't.
The Canadian media establishment saw it as the opportunity they were waiting for to reinvigorate the waning fear narrative. So they jumped on it.
Take Rosie DiManno for example. Rosie is a long-time journalist in Canada who writes for the biggest daily newspaper in the country The Toronto Star. Her response to omicron was to pen a column with the headline ‘At this point in the pandemic there's no more time for nonsense.’
Now by ‘nonsense’ Rosie doesn’t mean things like using PCR tests that don't work for diagnosing disease or making people wear masks that don't work to stop the transmission of viruses. And she doesn't mean nonsense like forcing people to take drugs against their will or firing thousands of people across multiple professions due to the presence of a seasonal respiratory virus.
She definitely isn't talking about nonsense like wrecking people's businesses, creating a second class of citizens based on vaccination status or destroying the mental health of children.
Nope. She doesn't mean any of that nonsense. If anything she wants more of that sort of thing. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, if there's a single complaint Canadian journalists have made in the last two years it's been that the authoritarianism hasn't been sufficiently oppressive.
Here are the concluding paragraphs of Rosie's column:
Herd immunity, achieved by protecting people via vaccines, not exposing them to the pathogen that causes COVID-19, may ultimately save us all, although it’s uncertain what percentage of the population must be vaccinated to induce it.
Putting aside the absurdly hyperbolic "may ultimately save us all" rhetoric, notice our Canadian journalist dutifully parroting the recently updated official narrative. The bit where they've changed ‘herd immunity’ from a natural biological phenomenon into a marketing campaign for the pharmaceutical industry.
For pretty much the entire history of the human race herd immunity came from exactly what Rosie insists it doesn’t come from: exposure to pathogens to which the human body develops immunity. If our species had to wait the several millennia that preceded the invention of modern pharmacology for the phenomenon of herd immunity to pop into existence we wouldn't have survived long enough to benefit from it.
But now the powers that be have erased that well established concept from history. And as far as Rosie DiManno is concerned it's the job of Canadian journalists to repeat and reinforce the new 'right think' as if it's always been this way.
It's from the Orwellian Ministry of Truth school of journalism: We’ve always been at war with East Asia. That sort of thing.
She continues:
Allowing COVID-19 to radiate unchecked would continue to cost lives unnecessarily.
Which is why dopey vaccine heretics such as Krista Ford Haynes should shut the frig up.
To clarify, Krista Ford Haynes is the daughter of Doug Ford, the hapless Premier of the Province of Ontario. Her outspoken opposition to vaccine and mask mandates on social media has been a bit of an embarrassment for a Premier who has admitted that unelected health bureaucrats are essentially running the country now. "There's no politician in this country that's going to disagree with their Chief Medical Officer... They might as well throw a rope around their neck and jump off a bridge. They're done."
But it's not Rosie obnoxiously barking 'shut the frig up' at someone for daring to share views that don't conform to her own that caught my attention. It's the phrase 'vaccine heretics'.
Many observers have been saying for months that at some point this shifted from an issue of objective science for people and turned into something akin to a religious belief system or cult.
Well now we have a member of the Canadian media establishment overtly confirming this assessment in the country's biggest newspaper.
This isn't a matter of dissenting points of view for journalists like Rosie DiManno. It's heresy. It's about orthodoxy to which all are obligated to unquestioningly adhere. If you fail to do so the righteous are entitled to denounce you as a heretic and demand you be silenced.
This is a Canadian journalist in the county's biggest daily newspaper!
Lorrie Goldstein, editor and columnist at the Toronto Sun contributed to the overall Orwellian vibe of omicron coverage by sharing this outstanding demonstration of 'doublethink':
Did you catch that? There is "no clear and present danger" from the thing we're telling you to perceive as a "new threat".
But when it comes to pure, undisguised giddiness about omicron you just can't beat Toronto Star sports writer and biological hazard authority Bruce Arthur. It was clear how excited Bruce was by his breathless, blow by blow tweetstorm on the subject. He could barely contain himself.
It's already in Belgium!
*pant* *puff*!
They closed the borders to several African countries yesterday. The virus moves faster than we do!
*pant* *pant*!
The EU proposed a travel ban yesterday too!
*puff* *pant* *puff*!
This was all a lead up to his own column on the subject. And as you can see he approached it with a dispassionate, restrained and professional tone one would expect from a journalist reporting on an issue about which so little is known. Yeah, right!:
