Alberta is in the "shred and burn the documents" stage of the pandemic

Standard operating procedure when diplomats are expelled and embassies close in hostile territory is the shredding and burning of documents. The ritual represents a final, desperate act to prevent state secrets from getting into the wrong hands. But the procedure serves the alternative purpose of preventing information emblazoned with the government’s letterhead from getting into the wrong hands. In a sense, the story of government has always been one of legitimacy whether we are talking about the dominion of kings or access to information.

Information sourced directly from the government is deemed as legitimate by proxy (even when it’s not). The release of information from the government, then, can have a wonderfully dystopian effect on the discourse and perceptions within a country; when coupled with the careful curation of said information, propaganda emerges.

The information released by the government for the last year and change has been primarily to achieve the goal of influencing vaccination behavior. Alberta is no exception, but they made a crucial error when dealing with dynamic information: they released too much. For a long time, I have been critical of the manipulations in the Alberta data while admitting that it is/was the best data available in Canada. If only for a brief period, the Alberta data gave us a glance through the looking glass on things that we did not see anywhere else. One such example was the negative effectiveness of the vaccine in the first few weeks. This feature was available for a long time before it got serious attention from alternative media and was removed in January of this year.

Alberta and the BIG LIE

But the more interesting part of that data, in my mind, is the negative effectiveness in the first few weeks post-omicron disappeared. Instead, the negative effectiveness became persistent. We notably showed this in the case of vaccinations for 5-11 year olds which did not follow the same trend of other age groups. Considering this was for the age group at perhaps the lowest risk from developing complications from the virus and the highest risk for developing complications from the vaccine, the removal of this information was disturbing and criminal (in a fair court). At the very least, the government began to understand that they made a fatal error in the information they made available to the public.

What Alex Berenson is missing in the Alberta data.

They have now taken further steps to correct their error. Almost all of the information which the government has provided since the beginning of the vaccination campaign has been removed from their vaccine outcomes page. The information, even though manipulated to make the vaccines look significantly better, still could not justify vaccination, and, in fact, ran the risk of deterring vaccination in true believers. Much as the Ontario data, the fully vaccinated in Alberta were more likely to be infected with the virus than the unvaccinated (since the vaccination campaign began). That means that even though the vaccine offered medium term protection for awhile in the middle of last year (and the scale of that is likely overstated by testing requirements among the unvaccinated), the vaccines have had negative effectiveness to a degree to wipe out any medium term gains in the course of a couple months. We can only assume this will get worse over time.

That may be why Alberta has been openly manipulating the daily new case numbers that appear on their page. In fact, these manipulations have been occurring at least since last summer, but the government has been getting more brazen since February when the booster failure could no longer be hidden in technicalities (ie., the first two weeks “doesn’t count”).

This persistent booster failure may have been the final straw for Alberta in a long list of propaganda failures as they have now removed most of the data available to us. There is a little information on hospitalizations and deaths in the last 120 days, which as I noted in my last post “edge cases” is a questionable, if not awful, metric for understanding vaccine outcomes. And since we have recently caught Alberta red handed manipulating the data (see link below), even this information is questionable.

The trick

The information left to us has been curated to the point of uselessness at this point. Alberta has killed what little transparency they provided in an effort to get a few more uninformed people boosted. One final, desperate act.