GUNTER: Theresa Tam’s self-serving claim about saving nearly 800,000 lives

I’m surprised Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, didn’t suffer a grade-four shoulder separation giving herself such a congratulatory pat on her own back.

Tam, with help from staff at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), has written a report giving her agency credit for saving nearly 800,000 Canadian lives and preventing nearly two million admissions to Canadian hospitals with the pandemic-fighting measures they have taken over the past two-and-a-half years – masks, social distancing, vaccine mandates.

Talk about self-serving.

The study was conducted by PHAC researchers using PHAC data, reviewed by Tam’s peers and included in the journal Canada Communicable Disease Report, which is published by PHAC.

Nope, no lack of objectivity there.

At some point, Canada will need a thorough, honest, independent, scientific review of which pandemic measures worked and which didn’t. This report ain’t it.

Of course PHAC found all its measures were roaring successes. After all, they firmly believe in their own “expert” infallibility. Like the way they first pooh-poohed the wearing of masks to prevent the spread, then seemingly one day became the mask police without so much as a hiccup or momentary hesitation.

The old advice was expunged down the memory hole whenever it became inconvenient, only to be replaced by new advice as if that had always been the only advice.

The PHAC study concludes that without any public health measures at all – no lockdowns, no social distancing, no masks mandates or vaccine passports, and no vaccines – nearly 34 million (out of 38 million) Canadians would have become infected, some two million would have been admitted to hospital and over 800,000 would have died.

That means absent the wise efforts of PHAC, PHAC believes the COVID-19 pandemic would have been more than three times as deadly as the Great Flu of 1918-1919, which is preposterous.

More than once during the pandemic, PHAC “modelling” of COVID’s spread predicted huge spikes in transmission if their dramatic advice on shutting down society wasn’t followed. Their advice was never followed to the letter, yet not even at the peaks of COVID’s waves did infections meet PHAC’s dire forecasts.

The recent study is merely a continuation of that same end-time hysteria.

Comparing the world’s poorest countries to Canada isn’t exact, but if you want some idea of how wildly out of whack the PHAC study is, consider the COVID experience of what the UN calls the world’s 63 “most vulnerable” countries.

Together, they have a population of over 1.5 billion of whom fewer than 22 per cent have had even one shot of vaccine. Most of these countries have had no lockdowns, no social distancing and no mask requirements, either.

Of the 6.5 million COVID deaths worldwide, 2.3 million (just over a third) have been in these 63 countries.

Some of these countries have lower hospitalization rates than Canada, but only because they have so few hospitals that most of their severe COVID cases don’t end up in care.

Still, even with almost none of the extreme measures Dr. Tam insists saved hundreds of thousands of lives here, these worst-of-the-worst countries have mortality rates only about twice that of Western countries such as Canada.

There could be lots of reasons for this, including that people in countries with lousy public hygiene infrastructure (few indoor toilets and unclean drinking water, for instance) have higher natural resistance to viruses.

However, since Tam thinks her agency’s measures prevented Canada’s death toll from being 18 times higher than it actually was, don’t you think the mortality rate from COVID in countries that took few precautions would be at least 10 times higher than in Canada, meaning Tam and PHAC are outrageously overblowing their own horns?

Vaccines did the heavy lifting in mitigating the pandemic’s worst outcomes, and vaccines came from drug companies, not PHAC.