In the summer of 2020, Bonnie Henry stated that, that fall, when schools reopened, we could expect to see “a little bit of spread” of SARS-CoV-2.
“A little bit of spread”
“A little bit of spread” has always, always meant “A little bit of dead”. But most people choose to ignore that inconvenient truth.
When the first official British Columbian child death happened, in an infant, only a few months later (though it wasn’t announced until many months after it had occurred, when it couldn’t be hidden anymore), Bonnie Henry stated: “This was a child who was not in care, they had a number of health issues”.
“…they had a number of health issues“.
Underlying conditions. Comorbidities.
A little bit of spread has always meant a little bit of dead, and a little bit of dead has almost entirely existed in the category of those who were vulnerable to COVID: the elderly, and those with underlying conditions of any age – including children. Babies.
Two years later, on September 6, 2022, when asked if we would ever see necessary protections brought back in British Columbia to mitigate the out of control spread of SARS-CoV-2, the same Bonnie Henry stated:
“…the pool of people who are susceptible is different now… So I don’t see us getting there unless we have the emergence of something very new and different where we had that susceptibility again.”
The same people who have been susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 all along are still just as susceptible: the people who are immunocompromised, and can’t mount a response from vaccination; the people who are in chemotherapy; the people who are disabled, including those who are developmentally disabled; the people with rare diseases; the people who are marginalized due to their race; the people who are marginalized due to poverty; pregnant people and their babies; the people who are over the age of 70, many in Long Term Care; facilities which have proven time and again to be poorly equipped to protect their residents during a pandemic. And especially so for the people who intersect at many of these identities.
We also have a new pool of susceptibles. The people who have been infected, some multiple times, by SARS-CoV-2, which is a NOVEL, NEUROTROPIC, VASCULAR VIRUS, and carries with it not only the risk of Long COVID, but also the risk of loss of grey matter, cardiac and vascular issues, T1 and T2 diabetes, and what appears to be the weakening of the immune system via T-Cell depletion, making those unlucky patients more susceptible not only to repeat infections with SARS-CoV-2, but also other viruses and illnesses.
What is different now, or perhaps not so different, because the illusion that society had changed for the better has been gullibly accepted by the masses but was indeed just an illusion, is that people just don’t care about other people anymore, and our provincial and public health leadership have given them permission to not care, by leading the way.
Because they’ve been convinced that it won’t be them dying. It will be “the other”.
We are the other.
When Bonnie Henry says: “So I don’t see us getting there unless we have the emergence of something very new and different where we had that susceptibility again.”
She means when it’s no longer just the: old; disabled; immunocompromised; those with rare diseases; poor; People of Colour; or any combination thereof, dying, then they’ll consider putting back in place the protections that we know work.
In other words, when it’s privileged, able bodied, mostly white people being affected, then they’ll care again. People who are like them. People who are probably like some of you reading this right now.
We are less safe than at any other point in the pandemic, and collectively, as a society, we have turned our backs on the ‘Pool of Susceptibles’.
So, when Bonnie Henry says that there will be a little bit of spread, meaning there will be a little bit of dead, and, in the case of susceptible children, it’ll only be kids with underlying conditions who will die, and when society nods and says “yeah, just kids with underlying conditions; not my kids, so who cares!”, I want you to remember that those are kids like mine.
And, when you, reader, friends, eat in restaurants, attend concerts and fairs and movies and stage shows and sports events, travel via air, take transit, all without a mask or a care in the world – yes, we are bombarded with all of your selfies, every single day -, send your kids to school without masks? What you are saying is that you believe that “other” people don’t matter as much as the things you want to do, or don’t want to do in the case of masking. That their deaths would be acceptable. That the death of any susceptible person is a worthy price to pay for you to get to do those things. You are actively endorsing and contributing to ‘a little bit of spread’ and ‘a little bit of dead’.
The pool of susceptibles hasn’t changed, the pool of ignorant, selfish, uncaring people in our province has just grown or revealed themselves, drowning out the voices and lives of those who are very much still paying the price for letting a novel virus rip.
Those voices, those lives? They matter.
I can’t ask you not to go to the restaurant, pub, bar, concerts, sports events, fairs, movies, stage shows, or not to travel; I can’t ask you to mask up (unless you come to our house, then I can, and will, and you won’t be welcome if you don’t, you might not be welcome, anyway, given your COVID-risky choices). But then you also have to understand that I don’t have to socialize with you or keep in touch with you in any way, anymore.
Because what you are saying to me with your direct actions is that, if someone in my family is further disabled or dies, our disabilities and deaths were acceptable, because you got to do the questionable things that raise community risk, but that were more important to you than our being alive, safe, and thriving.
Said again, but another way: that doing things that kept SARS-CoV-2 spreading were more important than the people in your lives you purport to care about.
And here’s the thing, these words shouldn’t only matter because you know me, know my kids, and I’ve written them. These words, these things, should matter because you should care about the people in your community and beyond who you don’t know, too. You should care that your actions might kill someone else’s also-at-risk kids down the road. Someone else’s grandma. Even if you don’t know them. They matter, too.
I don’t know how we come back from this.
Originally published September 25, 2022 Edited: 1807PT 09/27/2022 to add study links relating to diabetes risks, and vascular risks Edited: 1124PT 09/28/2022 to add study link relating to cardiac risks Edited: 1248PT 11/11/2022 to add Tyee article link regarding T cell depletion
Originally, this was written as a thread in response to CHEK News’ Jody Vance’s unblock-reblock attempt to sic her vitriolic Twitter followers on me today (Nov 17/2023), and an opening she’d left for me to finally respond directly to a statement she sent me in March 2021 in a sneak DM before blocking me, so that I couldn’t answer her at that time.
Alas, she has re-blocked me, so I can’t respond directly to her DM.
Reminder for the Twitter newbs: Jody couldn’t have DM’d me in March 2021 if I’d blocked her before she blocked me, but why would common sense about how blocking works on Twitter matter in a place like BC, where everything is based on lies by omission, vanity, and clout – and a rush to bully people who stand against incorrect-though-popular narratives, amirite?
Anyway it seemed like a billion tweets might be overwhelming to anyone who follows me, and who might not want to see any more Jody-and-BCMedia-related discourse in their feeds, so I’ve turned it into a blog, to exist all in one place, for anyone to read as they choose.
Jody sent this message to me, after I had pointed out to her that Dr. Henry isn’t a hero, and that her (Jody’s) experience of the pandemic was vastly different from what other people were experiencing. I then relayed to her examples of what parents and their children in VCH/Vancouver schools were facing during March break of that year (isolation from each other, for example), to which she replied she hadn’t heard anyone was experiencing those things.
Perhaps it is not me who isn’t open to discussion? Hmmm?
My response:
First of all, I don’t believe that public officials should be deified, placed on pedestals, called ‘heroes’; it’s a dangerous thing to do, as (like we’ve seen playing out since spring 2020) it makes them untouchable in the public discourse. It’s especially dangerous for media representatives to be the ones deifying and protecting said public officials – their jobs are to critically examine what public officials are doing and saying, and to report on their work/statements, and also flag any inconsistencies they find, and most importantly, to hold them to account. The Fourth Estate. There are very, very few journalists in British Columbia holding Dr. Bonnie Henry (or her Assistant PHOs, or their Health Authority MHO counterparts, or Minister of Health Adrian Dix) to account for their pandemic mismanagement.
We are NOT in this together.
I am on the side that believes in the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle as observed during a pandemic, in short, dictates that a society should put in place the strictest precautions to prevent the spread of disease, and loosen them only AFTER there is strong evidence that they are unwarranted, either because they have little effect, or the pathogen proves to be benign or its threat has diminished or disappeared due to a driving down of the rate of transmission, as we saw with SARS1 for example (it is not done because we want people to spend money). An important note: as we’ve discovered in recent years, most pathogens are not benign, but it takes us many years to uncover their long-term harms (the association between EBV and MS is only one very recent example). We are still, four years later, learning that protections that have been dropped in BC for at least two years, are STILL warranted… and yet those protections remain abandoned.
I believe that every life is worth trying to save, that the economy is not more important than the lives of the people who drive it. I also believe that if you kill and disable a lot of people, the economy will in turn suffer, which we see happening now, because of our shortsighted need to satiate our desires and vanity, instead of recognizing our need to protect each other.
I believe in the physics of N95 respirators; that they are effective at protecting those who wear them, and also protecting the people around those who wear them.
I believe that wearing respirators is more important than looking pretty for the camera, or eating in a restaurant.
I believe in showing solidarity with marginalized groups, and I believe it is more important than being a part of the “in group”.
I also believe that everyone who can wear a mask should wear the best mask that they can access, because even though respirators are the best (elastomerics are best of the best of course), every layer used helps, and costs of PPE can be a real barrier.
I believe that the government should cover the costs of PPE, because the prevention of illnesses will save the healthcare system (and thus the government) a lot of money and stress from overwhelm, and equity matters; not only those with the financial resources to access protection should be afforded said protection.
I believe that disabled children belong safely in their schools and activities, not excluded from them because our policy makers refuse to protect them with masking, ventilated AND filtered air, and good sick day policies (including support to stay home/proper quarantine length) that keep ill people out of educational institutions.
I believe that disabled children killed by this virus shouldn’t be described as ‘a child with underlying conditions’ as an excusal for not protecting them in the first place, as if their preventable deaths were unavoidable and are acceptable because they were/are considered less-than.
I believe that if we always work toward protecting the most vulnerable, with all layers of protection, then everyone else is inherently better protected, and if we do that work, we will drop prevalence levels of viral illness in general, thus creating a positive self-fulfilling prophecy of lower incidence of illness across the board.
I believe that if we know better, we should do better. For close to 100 years, we accepted, societally, the spread of Influenza viruses, and thousands of annual deaths that we were lead to believe weren’t preventable. And then, in winter 2020/21, with, I suspect, a heavy amount of lifting from our counterparts in the Southern Hemisphere who actually did their best to follow the Precautionary Principle at the beginning of the SARS2 pandemic/during their winter, we worked (a little loosely, but still worked) to mitigate the spread of SARS2, and appear to have to eliminated a whole strain of the Influenza virus globally.
I believe journalists who believe they are the bees knees should be learning about these things, and asking our representatives why we are going back to accepting thousands of annual Influenza deaths, when we’ve proven we don’t have to, and also compounding them with thousands of preventable SARS2 deaths, to boot.
I believe that because the pandemic inquiries in Australia and the UK have shown that almost all of their respective SARS2 deaths were preventable, and that in many ways, our response was worse (our schools have been open longer, with no layers of protection in place, for example) that almost all of our SARS2 deaths were also preventable (SARS2 deaths, by the way, that continue, we just ignore them).
I don’t believe that restaurants are safer than peoples’ houses, and would never dare use a media platform to spread such dangerous misinformation ahead of a holiday season, knowing that viral transmission was sure to increase based on people (who have never been taught or given the tools to adequately protect themselves) socializing in less safe situations/environments.
I don’t believe that when marginalized people, or their spox, reach out about how they are experiencing the negative impacts of pandemic mismanagement more acutely, that an appropriate response from a representative of the media should be: “there is no place on the planet that I would rather be than in BC.” And yet, that’s what we’ve heard from Jody, and her peers, time and again.
Qwhite.
Jody:
You appear to be on the side that believes the government without question.
You appear to refuse to critically interrogate anything that I’ve written above, as well as ongoing issues and/or government statements such as:
Why schools in BC are pandemic-safe, when they have fewer layers of protection than schools in other jurisdictions, and yet schools in those other jurisdictions still see high rates of SARS2 spread within them – how is this even scientifically possible?;
(You ARE the child of a scientist, as you like to remind the world at every available opportunity – what does your inherited science-brain make of such a juxtaposition?)
When Dr. Bonnie Henry says “we are not seeing COVID in schools,” do you not make the connection that that’s because it’s always been harder to access testing for children, and now we’re essentially not even testing them, let alone doing any contact tracing…;
(When was the last time your child received a PCR that was publicly reported/recorded? When was the last time you could report the results of a rapid test for public tracing?)
Why contact tracers, when they actually existed in BC, only contacted people who spent 15 minutes or more in a space, unmasked, within a couple of feet of an index case, and not all of the people who spent time together in a room with a positive case? (Remember: SARS2 is airborne – that means it can float in the air on particles, and more than a few feet from its source);
Remember: fewer faces, bigger spaces? That still holds true, why was that slogan abandoned?;
Why, if masking isn’t a part of our culture, didn’t Dr. Henry lead the way by example to work to make it so? She had a lot of clout, still has a lot of devout followers, she could wear respirators like her federal counterpart Dr. Tam, why not use this influence to do something more meaningful than worry about restaurants, travel, and the opera;
Why it is so difficult to access Paxlovid in our province when in other provinces (and countries) citizens can do so very easily – including directly from pharmacists;
Why physicians in BC have been so severely restricted from giving the COVID vaccines until this year (and even this year it hasn’t been easy for them to access), when they have always been a primary vaccination source, and they were fighting to be given the right to do so for almost two years;
Why Dr. Henry waived ethics review on studies upon which she herself was a listed author;
Why, when data scientists outside of BC say “hey, there’s a problem with the data in British Columbia (cases, hospitalizations, deaths), it doesn’t make sense”, you don’t press government representatives for an explanation;
As Dr. Fisman, an epidemiologist in Toronto, states: “COVID behaves the same everywhere” – so why is the data in BC so different (setting BC in a far more positive light) from data collected everywhere else, when we are doing categorically less to prevent the spread of SARS2 here (if you find this blog and are reading it, Jody, you’re going to have to look in incognito for that link, sorry-not-sorry for not unblocking you.);
Why the federal government has sent millions of dollars to spend on making schools pandemic-safe, and there’s no accounting for where that money was spent, while some school districts state that some of that funding goes to pandemic safety including changing MERV-13 filters during breaks… which was something that they already did pre-pandemic;
Why the public can’t access public PCR testing, unless we meet very strict criteria;
Why Dr. Henry’s role in the mismanagement of the SARS1 pandemic in 2003 isn’t a big red flag to you, when she’s doing the same things again with SARS2;
Why every time Dr. Henry receives any valid criticism about her mishandling of the SARS2 pandemic, the most prevalent talking point in the media in the days that follow is the fact that she received (unproven) death threats, presumably from convoy supporters, in years past, or how she requires enhanced security; like clockwork;
Why SARS2 rates are increasing everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere right now including in Canada, but according to the BC government, they aren’t in BC;
Why the directions for pandemic protections given by BC public health don’t match (are less than) what the national public health agency is advising Canadians to do;
Why our CEV list doesn’t match the federal CEV list (BC’s is more restricted), pertaining not only to more severe outcomes, but also access to vaccination and Paxlovid or other treatments;
Why our hospitals are always overwhelmed, but it’s never because of the ongoing pandemic, nor the sequelae from a brain damaging, vasculature-destroying novel virus putting additional pressure on a system that was already at breaking point in 2019, and why the government isn’t telling us about those sequelae;
Aside: if Long COVID was only associated with ICU stays, then either we have thousands of ICU stays unaccounted for in what little pandemic data are available… or Dr. Henry is misleading when she makes statements like this, and thousands of British Columbians suffer without adequate care for their long-term illness, while thousands of doctors in BC are left without appropriate information with which to treat their patients.
Seriously, it’s been almost four years of this; of you and your peers uncritically calling Dr. Henry a hero, and giving her and every BCNDP politician a pass on your content creation platforms, by accepting their spun PR statements at face value without any push back, I could go on and on with more questions.
You appear to believe in the side of willful ignorance, living on a wish and a prayer, in a bubble of privilege, appearing to be unaffected by the decisions our government has made which place value in some lives over others, leaving unnecessary death and disability in the wake of their choices, because from the outside, it seems like living in that world grants you access to those same people (and access is clout), instead of having to deal with the discomfort of questioning their actions and motives (and your discomfort at having supported them without question), and losing access. But please, I’m open to seeing proof that you’ve actually, meaningfully, critically-with-evidence pushed back on any of the issues I’ve listed above.
You should look up the SARS1 Commission Report. You should learn about how doctors in Vancouver actually prevented a pandemic from spreading in BC in 2003, and how Toronto, guided in part by Dr. Henry, failed to contain it, AND oversaw the only SARS1 second wave in the world.
You should compare Dr. Henry’s track record and actions there and then, with her track record and actions here and now.
I leave you with this quote from journalist Ed Yong (click here for the article on pandemic misinformation in which it was printed), and encourage you to read his pandemic writing, and watch his pandemic presentations: “I cannot stress enough that simply writing down what officials say is not journalism; you have to analyze, critique, and contextualize those comments, or you’re nothing more than an RSS feed with hands.”
I encourage you to research colonial exceptionalism, and interrogate the positions you hold in relation to it.
Because you have the luck of an amazing opportunity: a platform that you could use to inform and protect people; spread actual good, crucial scientific information and data, and good in the world; you could actually amplify and help marginalized communities, you could punch up; instead you appear to squander that privilege, don’t appear to uphold journalistic ethics and integrity, make a mockery of the Fourth Estate, and use your platform punch down and bully people, while upholding the status quo for power (your perceived power, and institutional power).
To reiterate, in closing: we are NOT in this together.
Edited: November 20, 2023; 10:40am: to add links to data/sources for some references; fix grammar, spelling, layout for clarity November 20, 2023: 16:15: to add links, fix a spelling mistake November 20, 2023: 16:49: to add link to, and image of, January 2021 Isabella Eckerle tweet regarding forcing viral evolution via vaccination program run without mitigations in place November 20, 2023: 17:10: to add image of Tanya Fletcher (CBC) tweet showing restaurants as the workplace with the most COVID-19 outbreaks and cases in VCH November 20, 2023: 19:37: to add link to chart showing effectiveness of various types of masks c/o @ppetoheros November 21, 2023: 11:20: to add context
We’ve seen many COVID-aware people lay out their plans about how they’re going to travel and eat in restaurants safely, to minimize THEIR risk (which, yes, might also minimize risk to the communities they visit/return to).
They do it in such a way/with a tone so as to sound like they’re justifying why they’re making the decision to travel during a pandemic; to defend in advance a choice that they know risks harm.
Often, they mention respirators and testing, and how they can isolate if they do unfortunately end up positive/sick.
(Which, aside: massive privilege! To travel AND to access these tools!)
But let’s pause to consider the potential ripples for a moment, if they DO happen to get sick:
They’ve done their own PERSONAL risk assessment – but before they tested positive, did they expose people at restaurants while unmasked/asymptomatic?
While travelling, was their mask always perfectly sealed? If not, did they expose anyone while asymptomatic – or worse travelling while ill? (Say, to get home, instead of paying to isolate where they find themselves in that moment of travel.)
Perhaps a wild, but still valid, question: If staying at hotels, did they remain masked in their rooms? If not, how did they ensure that their viral particles weren’t shared with other hotel guests/travellers via, for example, a ‘chimney effect’, etc?
And it’s not only fellow travellers to consider – what about the people who work in the service and travel industries, who are exposed constantly by privileged travellers in order to make ends meet? And what of the families to whom many of them return at day’s end?
Perhaps most importantly: some of these people making their personal risk assessments WILL end up sick, and some with a more severe than expected case.
Many say they’re comfortable that they’ve done their due diligence and are willing to deal with the consequences of that.
It reads like a lot of them are saying that they’re making said risk assessment based on some kind of low-key perceived immunosupremacy, or the idea that they won’t really be the ‘other’ who ends up with a severe case.
But what if they are? And they need to seek medical care? Let’s go there:
Then they are ALSO risking exposing other patients -many who have to seek medical care for non-COVID health issues- and healthcare workers.
And those patients and HCWs? They have families – who are then in turn put at risk.
It’s all fine and good to say that you’re making a personal risk assessment, and that you’ve done your best, and that you’re comfortable with your OWN risk, and any potential bad outcome – because you think it’s only going to affect you.
But NONE of us lives in a bubble – we ARE all connected, and your personal risk taking, based on your privilege and perceived health status, can still foist risk onto your wider bubble/community.
It would be COMPLETELY different if we’d worked collectively, globally, to mitigate the spread of SARS2, and if ALL travellers took the same precautions – but we don’t live in that world; we live in a world where the COVID aware are in a minority, and we CAN’T ignore that fact.
Perhaps the chances of a COVID-aware person becoming infected under these circumstances, and ending up with a severe case, are small; but they aren’t zero. Especially when worldwide we still see so much COVID spreading.
So, these aren’t personal risks they’re taking, they are collective.
And perhaps that’s how we should be reframing these things?
“This is a communal risk I’m taking, and I’m willing to take this risk on behalf of my community because: XYZ“
At least it would be more open and honest.
Often, in rebuttal to points like the above, we are told “well COVID is everywhere, and most people aren’t taking precautions, so it doesn’t really matter if we take these “small” risks”.
That is tantamount to saying “we can’t stop all chains of transmission, so we shouldn’t stop any”.
It’s also a form of apologism. Another layer of justification for actions that we know are potentially harmful.
Lastly:
Every time anyone travels for pleasure (NOT for necessity);
Every time anyone eats in a restaurant (especially indoors) for pleasure;
They help move the Overton window a little bit more – they help justify the removal of protections, and where we are right now.
Because the lobbyists in the travel and tourism, and service industries — and those industries themselves — are one of the main reasons we have continued spread of COVID variants globally.
And when we give them our money for a little bit of “beforetimes normal”, we tell them that their lobbying for less safety DURING A GLOBAL EMERGENCY was ok – we are voting with our dollars – we are voting to continue the cycle of harm.
And no.
This is not an ask for perfection.
Perfection is impossible.
Nor is it a purity test.
Nor is it an ask/demand that people stop travelling or eating in/at restaurants.
What it IS, is an ask for some introspection and reflection.
And at the very least, an ask for acknowledgement that anyone doing personal risk assessments to justify travelling and eating out for pleasure during a pandemic, is ok taking part in helping to move the Overton window, and that THAT means that people (especially vulnerable and marginalized) will continue to become (more) disabled and die.
ETA: After writing this blog, I came across the following tweet and wanted to share it here, because as the Overton window has moved, this is the path we’ve diverged from “no one gets left behind”; COVID aware allies in the more immunosupreme category used to show more solidarity, but slowly that’s waning.
Hello Attorney General Sharma, Minister Singh, Minister Ma;
Today, I am sending the three of you more information on the continued discoveries of potential health harms – many specifically in children – due to allowing COVID to continue to spread unchecked.
Please note that none of you need to reply to this email; I do not require nor desire yet another devoid-of-humanity reply from any of you with the boilerplate declaration of the BCNDP’s undying devotion to Dr. Bonnie Henry and her faulty guidance. That message has been delivered abundantly throughout the pandemic; we all know that you have tied your raft and destiny to hers, and the evidence continues to pile up that she, the BC Government, and BC Public Health leadership have led our province astray in our COVID response.
Once I send this email, I expect that I should receive at least three auto replies, indicating that this email has been received by each of your respective accounts/offices, and that will be enough.
I am doing this, so that none of you can declare plausible deniability surrounding any of the topics below, should the inevitable pandemic-related lawsuits start. And I suspect that they will sooner than later, and when they do, some will surround the topic of disability in children (specific to today’s email: T1 Diabetes, cardiac issues, brain function/deterioration, Long COVID).
You have each chosen to remain silent for the past three years (two and a half years for you, AG Sharma).
Each of you has a responsibility to your constituents, but also to all the children of this province – our future.
AG Sharma, you are, of course, our MLA, and are supposed to be the representative for my children, who remain unprotected and discriminated against in their school due to their susceptibility to COVID, and also unsupported (including three years without speech therapy, in part because the speech therapist refuses to provide services while masking); Minister Singh, you are the representative charged with making sure BC’s children are safe and supported in their schools and daycares (see above re: no COVID accommodations in schools or speech therapy/other supports); and Minister Ma, you are a registered P.Eng, with your licence tied directly to the Legislature, as an engineer, you took an oath to speak up for the protection of the public above all else when you know that safety standards aren’t being met, this oath is supposed to supersede any job you have, and you appear to steadfastly refuse to uphold it. (And you know that safety standards aren’t being met; and you know that there are many people in BC who know that you know that they aren’t being met. I am not the first British Columbian – nor Canadian – to reach out to you, and I know of several of your constituents who have done so, as well.)
So, AG, Ministers, I urge you to read the following studies/investigate the following data:
I urge you to read the data coming out of Sweden, Norway, the United States, and Germany showing that children, especially young children, may be prone to having a higher incidence of T1 Diabetes post-COVID infection, a permanent, life-long, autoimmune disability (note that some of those links go to Norwegian sources, you can use embedded tools in browsers such as Chrome to translate the text to English). Even scientists in BC have found increasing rates of diabetes in patients, post-COVID infections“In this cohort study, SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a higher risk of diabetes and may have contributed to a 3% to 5% excess burden of diabetes at a population level.”.
I urge you to listen here to cardiologist Dr. Rae Duncan’s plea to not let COVID continue to ravage children, because of the cardiac signals she and her colleagues are seeing (she’s a physician who lives in a jurisdiction, unlike BC, where doctors aren’t gagged from speaking up – but rest assured, doctors here ARE seeing the same signals, they just can’t say it publicly, because your government won’t let them) – this is a moment where the precautionary principle should hold sway. We shouldn’t wait for kids to be harmed to act, and if these signals prove true, it will be too late. Better to protect their hearts NOW, than wait and damage them for the collective hubris of the BCNDP caucus and government bureaucrats. (I have linked the YouTube video to a section where she is speaking about children specifically, however, I also urge you to go back to the beginning and watch the video it its entirety, as Dr. Duncan also discusses her other concerns surrounding long-term sequelae she’s seeing in her cardiac clinic, especially in younger people.)
“My worry is what is that going to do to the organs of our children cumulatively over time, because this isn’t a cold virus this is a SARS2 virus, and my concern is how many infections can a child’s body take repeatedly before they go on to become disabled adults? Now I don’t know the answer to that, I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that, I don’t know if that will happen or not but I don’t think we should be sitting back and playing roulette and waiting to find out. I think really we need to have a serious think about how we reduce the reinfection rates how we try and protect our kids.” -Dr. Rae Duncan
I urge you to pay attention to the FOIs coming out of other jurisdictions in Canada, in this example New Brunswick, that show that the Federal government has been informing not only BC’s PHObut also BC government representatives and MoH health officials FOR THREE YEARS, on the real harms of Long COVID, and COVID in general. You can’t hide that your government has been in receipt of these communications. Consider that children are estimated to have the same rates of Long COVID as adults, somewhere in the 10-16% range. And the chances of getting Long COVID are 1 in every 10 infections — not 1 in every 10 people — our children are being repeatedly exposed and reinfected, so that’s a pretty big gamble on their behalves that your government is taking if even a fraction of these estimates prove true. And not a peep from anyone in your government nor Public Health, about these findings, urging caution, and communicating what data and information the Federal government has been providing.
I urge you to look at this paper, showing brain imaging changes in people after MILD COVID infections, these signals, pre-COVID, were seen to precede grey matter atrophy, as seen in Alzheimer’s disease, and there is some cause for concern that dementia is hastened by COVID infections.
I urge you to look at this paper, showing the post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, and think of the THOUSANDS of children harmed by ignoring these early findings; harm that is happening directly because of your collective silence. Not only the three of you, but your entire cowardly party.
You have a choice. You have wasted THOUSANDS of days (roughly 1163), and let THOUSANDS of people die, and THOUSANDS more become disabled.
You can choose to continue to remain silent, or you can choose to be courageous and speak up.
How many more British Columbians have to die or or become disabled before any of you care and have the integrity to say something?
While the tone of this email may sound angry, it’s not nearly angry enough.
You each were community leaders. Before you ran to be government lackeys, you claimed to care about inclusion, about justice for marginalized communities, you each ran on making things better, and now you are each of you refusing to speak up in protection of those same marginalized communities you purported to fight for.
So, I also urge you to reflect and ask yourselves why you even ran for government? What’s in it for you? What is the price of your silence? What is the cost to the public?
What purpose are you serving in government, if you’re toeing a line drawn by white, privileged, able-bodied, health-supreme men at one of the most pivotal points in history? Because that’s what each of you is choosing to do.
What’s in it for you to let thousands of kids face potential life-long harm?
Another question for you to ask yourselves: what if it’s YOUR children or grandchildren next? Then will you care? Because they won’t be protected, either, and may the odds be ever in their favour that your failure to protect every other British Columbian child doesn’t impact them (that’s not how COVID works, unfortunately; kids in BC, including yours, are no different than the kids in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the USA, etc – only parents in BC seem believe their children are supreme beings, don’t fall into this trap; reality says otherwise, and may yours never find out – but with the rate of continued spread, that’s incredibly unlikely).
And remember, as much as your party will try to deflect, it won’t be the fault of the BC Liberals or BC Greens, not any other non-NDP party, that might form the next government, and your children face long-term COVID injury. Responsibility for these failures lays squarely at the feet of your party; at YOUR feet. Due to your silence.
Anyway, as I said above. I don’t need another boilerplate reply from any of you. The delivery receipts will be enough.
I hope that something, some last shred of humanity, finally clicks and causes at least one of you to stop wasting your privilege and position in government at this pivotal moment. I only hope it isn’t the death or disability of one of your loved ones that causes that to happen, something your party has already wrought upon thousands of the citizens of our province, and which would be needless, when we have an abundance of actual evidence and tools that we could use to prevent it, if you would only choose to speak up and say enough.
Enough,
Jaclyn Ferreira Hastings Sunrise Constituent Former longtime, but now never again, NDP voter
P.S. I ask, also, that you please DO NOT add me to your mailing list because I have sent you this email. Communications from the BCNDP are a waste of my time.
~~~ “Equity means giving opportunity to those who have the most barriers. In [the case of the pandemic], those who have the most barriers are those who have the most vulnerability to COVID-19.” -Isabel Jordan
Below: images of the expected delivery receipts (4), showing that each person, the BC AG, the Education Minister, P.Eng and MLA Ma, and the BCNDP party proper, received my email containing the studies and links within, urging caution and protection for our children. There should be no plausible deniability.
Attempting to re-post an image of the auto-reply from the Education Minister’s office below, as that block continues to corrupt when being posted:
Nothing meaningful has been done to protect at-risk kids since I was given the opportunity to present this speech at the Safe Schools Rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery on the afternoon of August 14, 2021. Instead of dying away in the bowels of my computer, I present it here, as part of the documentation of how high risk kids have been failed, harmed, continuously throughout the SARS2/COVID pandemic, both by governments, and by school districts.
All four articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child listed below (6, 23, 24, 28) are still being disregarded.
(And yes, we heard from an administrator in our school district that high risk families asking for accommodations *during an airborne pandemic* should not expect to be “catered to”. This language is horrific, and it needs to be documented. If school administrators feel empowered to use this kind of language, in what other ways are they looking down upon disabled kids within their midst? How else are they refusing to accommodate and include them?)
~~~~~~~~
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to speak here today.
In 1990, Canada signed on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Article 6 of the Convention states that every child has the inherent right to life. Article 23 states that disabled children should enjoy a full and decent life, with active participation in their community. Article 24 states that every child has the right to the highest attainable standard of health. And Article 28 states that every child has the right to an education.
In April of 2020, when I started advocating for better COVID safety in BC schools, I never thought we’d be here, sixteen months later, still fighting for the same bare minimum of protections, in the face of a novel virus; still trying to convince our government that disabled and otherwise vulnerable children have value, and deserve the same chance at life as their abled or less vulnerable peers.
But here we are.
Our entire family is vulnerable. My husband and I have fortunately received two doses each of a COVID vaccine, but our three children are still too young to be vaccinated.
My children and I have a genetic disorder, that, among other things, causes premature deterioration of our lungs, early-onset COPD, aneurysms, and liver damage. Two of our children are disabled. All of them are still at risk.
In these past sixteen months, while the science and knowledge surrounding COVID has grown, so, too, has the science and data surrounding people with our risk factors.
We now know that people of ALL ages with developmental disabilities are anywhere from 3 to 6 times more likely to contract COVID. We also know that people of ALL ages with developmental disabilities are anywhere from 3 to 10 times more likely to suffer a severe outcome, depending on the severity of their disability, and compounded by any additional comorbidities. We also now know that people with our genetic disorder are definitely at higher risk, something that the scientists who study and treat it theorized was the case all that time ago, but which has since been proven.
And yet, here we are.
During the last [2020-2021] school year, we were forced to fight for more than hand washing as a protective layer in our schools. In Vancouver, we fought up until March Break to keep a remote option available for our children for the entirety of the school year – all while being told we were being catered to. (Side note: disabled and vulnerable people are never asking to be catered to when they are asking for life-saving accommodations.) Province-wide, we fought for masks until the end of March, and when our government finally relented, masks were still not mandated for the youngest children in our schools.
This year [2021-2022], our children face a school year with no restrictions. No masking; no guarantee of increased ventilation; no decreased density/physical distancing; no exposure notices; and no equitable remote options.
And all of this coupled with a new variant that has proven to be more transmissible, more severe, and which spreads even more readily amongst children, most of whom still can’t be vaccinated.
When I say equitable remote options, I mean options that don’t penalize at-risk children by removing them from their community schools, educational and disability supports, friends and, in some cases, choice programming, because they are at risk of severe disease. This is exclusion, it is illegal, and it is a problem that has run rampant in the BC education system for decades, and continues to do so now, even under the BC NDP.
And yet, this is exactly what children like ours face, and it is unjust.
And thus, we are forced to choose between health and education, in contravention of all four of the articles I listed at the start of this speech, and the BC Human Rights Code: either they are removed from their schools and community, and forced into subpar district-run distance learning programs, with few supports for disabled children, or they are forced into unsafe schools risking their health and wellbeing. And disabled or otherwise vulnerable children always bear the majority of the costs of these inequitable choices.
It doesn’t have to be this way, there is still time for the BC NDP and district leaders to change course.
If they plan keeping the protection and education of vulnerable learners at the core, schools become inherently safer for all learners and education workers. This is inclusion, it is achievable, and I call on the BC NDP to listen to their constituents, shift gears, and make this right.
How to thank you, John Horgan, on your retirement?
(Originally, I wrote this letter to you for your 2022 birthday, but I missed the submission deadline, because I was busy trying to figure out how to keep my kids safe at school during a pandemic… for a third [pandemic] year… I’ve adjusted it a little, but much of it still stands, so here you go.)
Thank you for letting thousands of people die preventable deaths during a pandemic by putting the economy before human lives, when most of those lives could have been saved. (And… those lives drive the economy…)
Thank you for letting thousands more become disabled, by putting business first instead of actual public health.
Thank you for forcing children to have to pay for their health with their education, or for their education with their health, during a global health emergency; to wit:
-Thank you for allowing potentially thousands of children to be disabled, by propagating lies about whether or not they could get or transmit a novel virus (when children have been getting and transmitting viruses since time immemorial), and about the ability of a virus to spread within educational institutions, when viruses love educational institutions. (You have still never apologized for saying kids don’t get or spread SARS2, by the way. Do you seriously believe that a virus can’t spread in schools? Honestly?)
-Thank you for excluding disabled and rare disease kids from school during COVID, by refusing to follow the best available scientific evidence and the precautionary principle; by not recognizing risks to them; by not recognizing that people can’t personal responsibility their way out of a pandemic, least of all children; by not improving air quality; by not mandating masking or lowering density in classrooms.
-Thank you for not providing equitable remote options for the highest risk kids during a global health emergency.
-Thank you for enabling the MLAs in the Vancouver area to elevate only the voices of privileged, mostly white people advocating for less safety in our schools during COVID, while disallowing the voices of racialized, disabled, and rare-disease people to be heard – people who would be more negatively impacted than those of greater privilege.
Further:
Thank you for continuing to exclude disabled kids from their schools prior to COVID, by continuing to underfund education, even though you promised to fix it. (This hasn’t changed. Your party has been in office for nearly six years now.)
Thank you for continuing to make it nearly impossible for kids to access psych-ed assessments in their schools, necessitating that families save up for years, while sitting on years-long waitlists, to access private diagnoses, delaying early interventions and supports (which costs the child, the family, and the system more money in the long run). Or foregoing the assessments altogether, and watching their kids fall through the cracks.
Thank you for continuing to make it nearly impossible to access supports in school, due to LSTs being in short supply, and being pulled to cover classroom instruction due to a dearth of teachers in our system, pre-COVID, but especially during.
Thank you, additionally, for there also being a continued dearth of SSAs within our schools, necessitating that disabled children stay home instead of receiving an equitable education.
Thank you for continuing to make it nearly impossible to access youth mental health supports in schools, even though mental health was the excuse you used for cramming them into unsafe schools during a pandemic.
Thank you for also continuing to make it nearly impossible to access youth mental health supports in the community.
Thank you for letting COVID rip through our youngest child’s daycare in January 2022, unfettered, and again in March 2022, so that more than half of the kids got it, and staff, too, who all then took it home to their families, creating new chains of transmission.
Thank you for letting Public Health tell parents they could send their kids to daycares and schools while still positive (and denying pre-symptomatic spread) so that COVID could continue to run through those spaces.
Thank you for threatening to take away the Autism (AFU) supports for our autistic child, after he spent more than half of his life working with the same team – tell me you don’t understand the support needs of, and transition issues for, autistic kids, John, without telling me you don’t understand the support needs of, and transition issues for, autistic kids, John.
Thank you for adding one more thing to our plate that we had to fight. We were already stretched thin, John, we were stretched thin fighting for our kids to have adequate supports in school before COVID, and COVID made it worse. And then you come along and so cavalierly make decisions with real world, harmful implications – and then ignore us when we tell you you’re harming our kids.
Thank you for pitting disabled kids against each other, and trying to drag down some disabled kids in the name of ‘equity’, instead of bringing ALL disabled children up to the same support and funding standards.
Thank you for ignoring real-world evidence, from our [sic] within own country, that shows the disability hub model fails all disabled children, increases wait times for supports, thus delaying more early intervention (which, as noted above, costs the child, the family, and the system more money in the long run).
Thank you for lying about listening to your constituents, and the people of British Columbia, when it is clear that you listen only to business, travel and tourism lobbyists, and the people who say the things you want to hear.
Thank you for ignoring reports from France on how to handle high temperature/heat dome-type events. Thank you for ignoring the lead that Washington and Oregon took, so that hundreds more British Columbians died preventable deaths in the summer of 2021.
Thank you for for admitting that you were too giddy – due to a premature announcement of the end of the pandemic… which is still ongoing almost two years later… because you and your political peers failed to act – to plan for the heat dome, which resulted the in the aforementioned hundreds of additional preventable deaths in 2021.
Thank you for making sure 1/5th of this province doesn’t have a family physician.
Thank you for underpaying family physicians so that they aren’t opening practices and are leaving the province.
Thank you for making sure there aren’t enough nurses or physicians in the system so that our hospitals are overwhelmed.
Thank you for making sure ERs are closed – sometimes every weekend – and our emergency responders are overwhelmed.
Thank you for making sure housing continues to be a hard to come by commodity.
Thank you for continuing to log our old growth forests.
Thank you for continuing to waste our money on an already-failed dam, and modelling such hypocrisy in doing so, after photo ops and promises before your election declaring you to be in supposed opposition of the same dam.
Thank you for continuing to ruin our province with another pipeline.
Thank you for crowning your replacement, instead of following a democratic process to elect your replacement; thank you for showing me and my daughters that a man’s more conservative voice means more than a woman’s more progressive voice when it comes to leadership of the BCNDP.
Thank you, John, for rendering your MLAs incapable of representing their constituents, by forcing them to toe the party line, and repeat NDP talking points back to those same constituents, even when they are presented with documentation showing that what they’re saying is untrue (like: budgets for school boards, break downs of funding for schools, scientific papers on how COVID spreads, who is most at-risk, and how we can protect them in reality, to name but a few).
Thanks, John, for being such a spectacular example to hold up to my children of how NOT to treat people, especially those most vulnerable.
I hope you have a wonderful retirement, and that these failures haunt you.
And, just in case it wasn’t very clear, all of the ‘thank yous’ above were sarcastic in nature; in all seriousness, John, thank you for showing me that the NDP is not a party that aligns with my values; I am ashamed that I ever voted for you, that I ever convinced other people to vote for you, but also, I am grateful to know sooner rather than later that I supported the wrong party for far too long, because I have time, now, to help my children understand why they should never vote for a party that is progressive in name only, but regressive in every other way.
Actions, after all, speak much louder than words.
Jaclyn -Former NDP voter, now BC Green Party member (because of you, John)
Note: this is being posted via this forum, due to the fact that I suspect that this letter won’t make it into John Horgan’s hands, as it doesn’t laud him or hold him on a pedestal, rather calls out his failures to act to protect the people of BC, and calls out his lies/broken election promises.
On the heels of the declaration of a ‘Code Orange’ in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at BC Children’s Hospital today, December 3, 2022 (which was reportedly hastily rescinded), it seems prudent to at least try to examine part of the reason the hospital might have arrived at this moment, aside from letting a novel, immune dysregulating virus spread out of control, while allowing other respiratory viruses to run rampant, through BC’s children.
Namely, the fact that the government and the BC Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) continue to obfuscate about the actual PICU capacity in the province.
The Teck Acute Care Centre, the new BC Children’s Hospital facility, opened its doors in late October 2017.
Since then, the PICU has reportedly never been fully staffed.
According to the downloadable resource Children’s Medical Services Part I: Setting the Stage; July 2021, which can be found as part of a larger source of reports and documentation at this link), there are 27 PICU beds in British Columbia* (five (5) at Victoria General Hospital on Vancouver Island, and 22 at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver).
Regardless of the official provincial number, 21 or 27, as concerned parents whose children frequent the PICU at BCCH have been pointing out since at least January 2022, almost half (10) of those beds located at BCCH are unstaffed, and haven’t been staffed since the Teck Acute Care Centre first opened its doors; those beds remain in an area intended to be used as a PICU ward, but which is used for storage and staff training, and have thus reportedly never been in operation.
That would mean that British Columbia only has either 11 or 17 PICU beds officially staffed and in operation.
(Note: in the image directly below, in a tweet from January 2022, it is stated that “at least 8 [PICU beds]” have never been staffed, however this information has since been updated, as mentioned in Laesa Kim’s first tweet above, that there are 10 PICU beds at BCCH that haven’t been opened due to staffing shortages.)
As Penny Daflos at CTV Vancouver pointed out on Twitter recently (image below), when posting about this article, when being given ED bed counts by Christy Hay (Executive Director, Clinical Operations, Emergency, Trauma & Access and Specialized Pediatrics, BCCH) we can’t rely on the information as officially reported, as officials tend to give the furniture count, but not a count of what capacity is officially in operation and available given staffing levels, and in the case of PICU capacity, this appears to be no different.
I reached out to the Ministry of Health for comment/confirmation on the full number of PICU beds listed as being available in BC, and the number that are actually staffed and in operation, and despite one Ministry of Health media contact receiving and reading my email request, received no reply.
The situation right now, for BC’s (and Yukon’s – see note at bottom) children is dire, and untenable. The knock-on effects of PICU beds not being in operation means that children who require cardiac surgeries and other cardiac care are having that care postponed, so that CICU beds can be used by kids who would otherwise be in the PICU.
Additionally, in not being transparent, our officials are essentially lying by omission to the parents of BC about the state of affairs in which we find ourselves.
Imagine being the parent of a child who is in an accident, and all of a sudden having the rude awakening there are no PICU beds available for your child, because the province has been lying about capacity? Parents with children who have complex care needs are well aware of what has been happening in the system, but most parents in the province appear to be willing to go along with what government has been reporting, instead of thinking critically about what’s happening here.
The Government of BC seems happy to continue misleading the public about what’s happening, and until their children are the ones requiring care, most parents seem content to believe what they’re being told. If paediatric hospitals in Ontario, and Québec, and Alberta, and the UK, and Germany, and Italy, and Australia, and all over the USA are overflowing, and we have evidence of the same happening here, at what point do BC’s parents wake up and say enough?
This is an indictment mostly of government, to be sure, but also partially of a complacent public, and too many (save for a few shining examples) in media refusing to dig in, research, and ask hard questions.
No one is holding our government to account.
This parent is saying enough.
*Note: British Columbia shares its PICU capacity with Yukon.
COVID, just like HIV, appears to kill T-cells, causing Lymphocytopenia – IOW a depletion of white blood cells – needed to fight infection and cancers (MERCK notes in around 35 to 83% of patients).
Repeat infections are bad.
Letting it rip through our population is bad.
Letting kids get it over and over again, thinking they’ll be fine, is bad.
HIV causes AIDS Chickenpox causes Shingles EBV causes MS HPV causes Cervical Cancer SARS2 causes “Airborne AIDS”
And we’re just letting it happen.
Solutions to advocate for:
-An acknowledgement that COVID is indeed airborne
-Universal masking in KF94/N95 or better (source control, and protection of individuals)
-Monitor and clean the air in indoor spaces *properly*
-Reduce density in indoor spaces: this has the benefit of reducing the number of potentially infectious people in a space, which can help to reduce viral particle build-up, and it can also help to prevent near-field exposure/transmission
-Test, Trace, Isolate, Support, so that we aren’t constantly forcing infectious people into the world
-Better vaccines; we let the virus spread while trying to vaccinate, and virologists at the time stated that this would help force the virus to evolve, which it has done; we made the vaccines less effective with our actions, just like we bring on the next waves with our actions.
We can stop this, collectively, if we work together.
When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected.
At-risk kids in British Columbia’s schools, as well as those who live with family members who are at-risk, and their peers, deserve the following:
✅ Actual ventilation improvements (following ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force guidelines, including HEPA filtration) ✅ CO2 monitoring to know when air quality is declining, and teachers with the knowledge and tools, empowered to make adjustments on the fly ✅ Universal masking of all ages ✅ Decreased density ✅ Increased physical distancing ✅ Safe classroom layouts to prevent near-field aerosol transmission ✅ Equitable remote options ✅ Exposure notices ✅ Test Trace Isolate and Support policies
There are no downsides to providing any of these protections to our students, only upsides: fewer missed days due to illness, better cognitive function and learning abilities, and, most importantly, the potential for little to no transmission of a NOVEL neurotropic, vascular virus.
When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected. When we protect the most vulnerable people in a space, everyone else using that space is inherently better protected.
I urge you to read that date again – fall of 2020.
Because in this course, they detail the fact that COVID is airborne due to aerosolization, that it can remain in the air for extended periods of time, that it can build up in poorly ventilated rooms, and that masking is an effective measure to both reduce build up (source control) and prevent inhalation by susceptible people.
Here we are, facing our third Unsafe September in BC’s schools, with literally no protective measures in place, a continued denial of how COVID is spread, and no actual tools for at-risk CHILDREN and their families to do an informed risk assessment, and protect themselves.
And there you are, both MLAs, elected to represent and protect your constituents, and Minister Whiteside, BC’s school and daycare aged children, and neither of you are following through on these roles.
One of my children, who is disabled and has three rare diseases, attended school for ONE HOUR last year.
That’s right. One hour. This was due both to the lack of COVID safety, and also due to the lack of EA support. (The other attended for a total of nine afternoons, which is not much better.)
Minister Whiteside, both of these issues are a failure of you and your Ministry, and MLA Sharma, this is a failure of yours as our representative in government.
“As a Representative of their constituency, a Member may voice concerns on behalf of constituents, represent viewpoints or intercede and assist in problem solving.
An MLA is also a Member of an elected party caucus. In this function, they may be involved in planning and orchestrating strategy in the House, supporting the caucus and its decisions, and developing expertise in given subject areas.”
You are both excellent at the latter, specifically this part ‘supporting the caucus and its decisions’, as are all NDP MLAs, but you’re both horrid at the former, which is arguably your most important role.
So, as it’s clear that you’re going to continue to abdicate your roles as representatives of your communities, and BC’s children, I am going to ask you some frank questions:
After two years of denial about how COVID spreads – even when the evidence is overwhelming, and very easily accessible, especially to two well-paid and well-educated MLAs – and how we can protect the people of BC, I want you to consider how your descendants are going to look up on [sic] this time. When your future family members read that you were an MLA who refused to speak up and use your position and power to protect the most vulnerable people under your care, how will they think of you? Will they be proud that you didn’t speak up? Will they be proud to be your descendants? I would not be.
And, MLA Sharma, when you tuck your kids in at night, do you spare a thought for the parents of BC who are no longer able to do so, because you didn’t speak up to protect their children?
Maybe in the end you couldn’t have stopped all of those kids from dying, because the rest of the party membership would have overruled your voices, and possibly you would have been ejected from the party. But I would argue it would have been worth it, because at least then you’d know you’d tried, instead of rolling over and letting this continue – which is what appears to be happening – while trumpeting how great your party is. While more people die than in the earlier times of the pandemic, more kids get sick and become disabled, and, again, a THIRD!!! Unsafe September is on the horizon for BC’s kids.
What is the point of being an MLA and a representative if all you do is toe the party line, while people die needless deaths?
How many hours will my children be able to attend school this year, with no masking, no HEPA, poor ventilation, no notifications when COVID is in their school, and no equitable remote options that don’t remove them from their school without a guaranteed option of return?
How is it just to place 100% of the responsibility for his safety on the shoulders of an almost-nine year old disabled child?
We are not your acceptable collateral damage.
Remember this moment when you chose to stay silent. My children will. And so will history.
Jaclyn Ferreira Former NDP Voter Hastings Sunrise Constituent
An addendum for the BC NDP Vancouver Hastings Constituency Association – consider your complicity in this. Due to your drive to elect a voice of the NDP instead of a voice of our community, you have managed to prolong this unjust and inequitable situation; all NDP constituency associations have. This is why I email both of Minister Sharma’s email addresses, as the constituency offices that enable this are culpable, too, and they need to hear this fact.
~~~ “Equity means giving opportunity to those who have the most barriers. In [the case of the pandemic], those who have the most barriers are those who have the most vulnerability to COVID-19.” -Isabel Jordan
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