tin foil hat – mackaycartoons

Tuesday June 14, 2022

June 14, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 14, 2022

It’s time for Pierre Poilievre to get serious

May 13, 2022

Does Pierre Poilievre believe in vaccinating kids against measles and mumps and chickenpox? How about polio?

The question may sound ridiculous. After all, mass vaccination, compulsory in some provinces as a condition of attending school, has succeeded in all but eliminating these and other childhood diseases.

But to read Poilievre’s recent comments is to come away wondering whether the Ottawa MP and front-runner for the Conservative leadership might well roll all that back if he had the power to do so.

He introduced a private members’ bill in the House of Commons this month that would prevent the federal government from imposing vaccine mandates on travellers and federal workers. But in his tweets he goes further, saying the point is to “scrap all vaccine mandates and ban any and all future vaccine mandates” in the name of upholding “medical freedom.”

So what about that polio vaccine? It’s a provincial medical matter, of course, but in principle does he find requiring parents to get their kids vaccinated before they go to school (as Ontario, New Brunswick and to a lesser extent Manitoba do) an outrage against his concept of “medical freedom?”

May 18, 2022

Who knows? It’s all rather vague and perhaps that’s the point. In his quest for the national Conservative leadership it seems there are no limits on what Poilievre is prepared to say to curry favour with the angry anti-vax constituency in his party, the same people prone to disappear down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about globalist plots to run the world.

This matters more than ever now that Poilievre is heading to almost certain victory in the leadership race. His campaign says it’s signed up almost 312,000 new members — considerably more than the total enlisted by all candidates in the party’s last leadership contest two years ago.

Those new members have to actually vote, of course, and much depends on which ridings they come from. But it’s an enormous number and it means the leadership is now Poilievre’s to lose.

That would put him at the head of one of the country’s great national political parties. And with political pendulums swinging as they do, he’ll have a good shot at winning power once the public grows tired of the Liberals and Justin Trudeau. Anyone tempted to write Poilievre off because he sounds so extreme right now should think again.

February 2, 2022

Which is why his views on things like vaccine mandates and those conspiracy theories actually matter. How much of what he’s saying now is based on sincere belief, and how much is just a cynical bid for votes among the Conservatives’ furious fringe?

It’s hard to believe, for example, that he actually believes those conspiracy theories about how the World Economic Forum, the annual elite talk-shop in Davos, Switzerland, is actually ground zero for a quasi-socialist attempt to remake western economies.

In its wackier variations, conspiracists suggest Davos is behind a plot to invent COVID-19 just to sell vaccines, or even to use vaccinations as a way to inject 5G-enabled surveillance chips into unsuspecting citizens. Poilievre, we assume, sees this as the nonsense that it is. But he’s still happy to give the conspiracy-mongers political comfort.

February 8, 2022

The point is not that a Poilievre government would push all this on the public. But at the moment he is riding a tiger. It looks like it’s carrying him to the Conservative leadership, but he’s feeding forces that he may not be able to control down the road.

It’s time for Poilievre to get serious and make clear where he stands on all this. Becoming leader of one of the country’s national parties carries with it great responsibility. Fuelling fringe theories and casting doubt on whether he would fight a future pandemic fails that test spectacularly. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

Wednesday December 29, 2021

December 29, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday December 29, 2021

As Omicron Spreads and Cases Soar, the Unvaccinated Remain Defiant

As a fast-spreading new strain of the coronavirus swarms across the country, hospitals in Ohio running low on beds and staff recently took out a full-page newspaper advertisement pleading with unvaccinated Americans to finally get the shot. It read, simply: “Help.”

December 2, 2021

But in a suburban Ohio café, Jackie Rogers, 58, an accountant, offered an equally succinct response on behalf of unvaccinated America: “Never.”

In the year since the first shots began going into arms, opposition to vaccines has hardened from skepticism and wariness into something approaching an article of faith for the approximately 39 million American adults who have yet to get a single dose.

Now, health experts say the roughly 15 percent of the adult population that remains stubbornly unvaccinated is at the greatest risk of severe illness and death from the Omicron variant, and could overwhelm hospitals that are already brimming with Covid patients. In Cleveland, where Omicron cases are soaring, a hospital unit at the Cleveland Clinic that provides life support to the sickest patients is already completely full.

Wednesday December 9, 2020

December 16, 2020 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday December 9, 2020

Fauci Calls Coronavirus Vaccine a Game Changer, Decries Misinformation

Anthony Fauci said a vaccine could diminish coronavirus as successfully as the polio vaccine did for polio, enabling workers to return to offices and restaurants in the second half of 2021.

December 1, 2020

But hurdles exist, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert said. They include people’s hesitancy to get vaccinated, a successful and swift vaccination program, and getting through a rise in Covid-19 cases that is now being fueled in part by misinformation about the virus, Dr. Fauci said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit on Tuesday.

“There are a substantial proportion of people who do think this is not real, that it’s fake news, or it’s a hoax. This is extraordinary. I’ve never seen this before,” he said. Dr. Fauci added that he will convey the following to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration: “We have all got to be on the same page telling the American public we have to pull together. That, to me, is the most important thing.”

Dr. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus-response coordinator, who also spoke Tuesday at the summit, both reiterated their calls for people to adopt public-health measures to combat the spread of the virus.

August 7, 2020

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said the virus infected people in the U.S. in mid-December 2019, a few weeks before it was officially identified in China and about a month earlier than public-health authorities found the first U.S. case. It has since caused almost 15 million diagnosed cases and more than 283,000 deaths. Cases have surged since the fall, with more than 2,000 daily deaths being reported. It is too early to know whether the Thanksgiving holiday will add an additional spurt of cases.

The death toll could surpass 430,000 by March 1, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The Trump administration is aiming to have enough coronavirus vaccine for everyone in the U.S. who wants to take it by the second quarter of 2021.

“We have to go head-to-head with the misunderstandings people have with this virus,” said Dr. Birx, who added that she doesn’t know what role she will have in the president-elect’s administration but will remain in federal government.

Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was upbeat about the promise of a vaccine to bring coronavirus to heel.

June 17, 2020

Health-care workers and people in nursing homes and extended-care facilities will get the vaccine first, he said, followed by various prioritization levels that are likely to include seniors, people with underlying health conditions and workers with critical jobs, such as teachers.

Dr. Birx also said vaccines need to be prioritized for communities of color that have been hit hard by Covid-19.

Younger people and people with no underlying conditions will likely be able to get the vaccine by the end of March or beginning of April if the vaccination program runs efficiently and the majority of people take the vaccine, Dr. Fauci said. With about 75% of the public inoculated, there should be low levels of circulating virus and a return to workplaces.

The stringency of public-health measures will gradually diminish, he said, and chief executives should use surveillance testing once workers return to quickly identify any potential outbreaks.

“I don’t think we’re going to eradicate [Covid-19] the way we did with smallpox, but I think we can do what we did with polio,” Dr. Fauci said. (Wall Street Journal)

Thursday December 22, 2016

December 21, 2016 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday December 22, 2016

Conscientious objection to vaccines has doubled in 20 years

The number of parents opting out of measles vaccines for their kids because of conscientious or religious beliefs has doubled in 20 years, leaving Ontario’s public health system struggling to stop a trend of “increasing concern.”

February 6, 2015

“It’s a massive challenge because the numbers are going up,” said Paul Bramadat, an editor and writer of a book coming out in 2017 on vaccine hesitancy in Canada. “There has always been this kind of faith that if I just give you the right study or if I just give you the right pamphlet, you’ll see the jury is in and the case is closed and vaccines are actually safe and effective and the best way for us to prevent really terrible pandemics … It turns out all those anxieties can be addressed by science, but even when they are addressed that is not sufficient.”

December 6, 2013

Facts and evidence are battling a formidable foe, a “hip and cool” campaign that uses social media to spread its message, taps into a desire to live more naturally and takes advantage of a growing distrust of science and public institutions.

“The anti-vaccine movement is very sophisticated,” said Ellen Amster, chair in the history of medicine at McMaster University who studies vaccine hesitancy. “It’s definitely a movement. There are people who are co-ordinated, who raise money, who buy billboards and publish children’s books. They are very smart. They have celebrities. They have all these strategies to make it approachable, understandable and to make you feel you’re being empowered with this information.”

April 29, 2016

Public health has had to turn its messaging on its head to combat hesitancy.

“Immunization is now a topic we all discuss,” said Dr. Julie Emili, a Hamilton associate medical officer of health. “I’d say 10 years ago we didn’t do many interviews about immunizations. It was assumed people just get their shots. There wasn’t this whole discussion about, ‘Should I get my shots or shouldn’t I?’” (Continued: Hamilton Spectator)