Previously I wrote about the admitted violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights by the government and their health officials. I briefly touched on the Oakes test, which is an interpretation by the Supreme Court of Canada that outlines the conditions required for the government to violate rights. While I did not take a deep dive into the subject, I considered the case of mask mandates; however, I left a lot to the imagination because I do not see a case where a judge, lacking bias, would actually rule in favor of mask use. Indeed, before the pandemic, nurses unions were actively fighting against vaccine-or-mask policies and they were winning on merit. Frankly, the data for mask use is lousy, and needs a heavy propaganda campaign relying on phrases like science-based or evidence-based in order to get any traction. Evidence, of course, is never presented in these campaigns, but they are effective on the general public. There is little on can do against the relentless torrent of deceptive messaging except to hope you get an unbiased judge.
Vaccinations are a more interesting question because surface-level evidence for their effectiveness is presented, unlike in the case of masks. The evidence, as presented, is even compelling! Public health officials go so far as to claim that it is overwhelming. Of course, that is not truly the case. The data is rarely disaggregated, using lacking key details and controls, and often presented in a misleading, deceptive, or incomplete manner. If the data is difficult to understand, even for well-educated people with a strong background in statistics, then one can almost be forgiven for jumping to conclusions on vaccine effectiveness. But anyone that looks at the data for long enough cannot help but feel that something is off.
I keep track of Alberta data on a day by day basis; however, I have not been doing so long enough to get a convincing picture of what is truly happening. Nor is the data transparent enough to ever answer that question. It is only transparent enough to see that the numbers do not add up. Not even close.
What do we know?
We know that there is a persistent negative Vaccine Efficiency (VE) in the first 14 days after the first dose. This is occurring even now when one might expect the effect to be less prominent. Earlier in the vaccination program, one would have expected this effected to be multiplied. The reasoning is simple: if the vaccine damages the immune system and makes people more susceptible to be infected with the virus, vaccinating people in cohorts mixes a lot of people with lowered immune system together. Thus, the effect of negative VE would multiply and cause large waves of cases because many people with lowered immune systems are interacting with each other and spreading the virus at an increased rate. Essentially, they are stacking immuno-suppression by vaccinating in cohorts. This is both a consequence and feature of the vaccine.
As a feature of the vaccine, it allows more vaccinated individuals to acquire natural immunity quickly after taking the vaccine by getting infected with the virus. As cases do not count against the vaccine until a 14 day period has passed, this natural immunity ensures that a large portion of the vaccinated population will not likely not be infected at a later date. A rational observer would call that cheating. Ignoring the first 14 days, and worse, counting them as not being vaccinated at all is clearly data manipulation because the odds of getting the virus shortly after being vaccinated are higher. One can even see this with the eye test as it takes several days after the vaccine for this effect to peak.
If the odds of getting the virus with no vaccine or directly after the first dose were the same, one would expect cases to be relatively constant with no peak, and decline over time. Public health officials know this. They do not openly talk about it for fear of creating “vaccine hesitancy”, so they openly deceive people about the risks and actually expose people to a higher level of risk.
In the case of Alberta, yesterday there were 21 cases of the virus in people that received their first dose in the previous 14 days. That might not seem like many, but only 40,000 or so people had been dosed — meaning there was a -73% VE. If you consider the partially vaccinated group as a whole when adding in this number, the VE for partially vaccinated was 15%. Even 15% is misleading since people receiving the first dose are consistently more likely to get the virus in the first 14 days than those with a vaccine, so one would expect them to have a higher level of acquired immunity. Today, things actually look better as the VE in the first 14 days was only -11%, 38% for partially vaccinated overall. Well below the numbers reported by the province.
I do not want to mislead people. Using a single day or even two days as evidence is subject to random fluctuations. There are days when it VE in the first 14 days is positive, but when measured over a long enough timeline, those random fluctuations even out leaving a negative number.
The problem is that the public health officials are misleading people. As stated in my previous posts, there are good reasons to believe that the people who have had the virus previously are more likely to get vaccinated. There are also reasons to believe that unhealthy individuals are less likely to be vaccinated, at least on the tails. Just as one example, people with cancer or that have just undergone chemotherapy are often told not to get vaccinated. A recent CDC study, though poorly modeled and leading to strange conclusions, even alludes to the fact that unhealthier people are less likely to be vaccinated. In Alberta, those without vaccine are also required to get tested more often for work reasons, and those with the vaccine are told not to get tested even if they’ve been exposed to the virus, so long as they show no symptoms.
Do they control for these things when claiming VE? We know the answer to that. They ignore these things just as they ignore the first 14 days after being vaccinated. What this all means is there are direct risks from the vaccine that have nothing to do with adverse events. The vaccines cause real deaths due to the virus.
While the second dose data does seem more promising on the surface, I will leave that discussion for another time. Instead, I would like to reflect more on the Oakes test because whether vaccine mandates should stand depend on it. As a reminder from last time, the Oakes test requires two criteria to be met.
There must be a pressing and substantial objective; and,
The means must be proportional.
Governments, generally, are able to prove the first part of the Oakes test. Indeed, no judge would so much as question them if they said completely eliminating an endemic virus is pressing and substantial, despite the fact that any government action that purports to obtain an objective like that is ridiculous on its surface. The only place where the government may fail this part of the test is for those less than, say, 50 years old, and especially children who do not stand to gain from taking this vaccine even if the second dose numbers were to be accurate.
Proportionality is what usually causes problems for governments looking to violate rights. Again, as a reminder from my last post, proportionality requires three rules be satisfied:
The means must be rationally connected to the objective;
They must not be arbitrary, unfair or based on irrational considerations; and,
There must be a proportionality between the effects of the measures which are responsible for limiting the Charter right or freedom, and the objective which has been identified as of "sufficient importance".
Before even considering these aspects, we have to consider what the objective of the government and public health officials truly entails. They want to alleviate stress on the health care system. There is no public health objective for personal decisions. They either have to concede that the vaccine is not effective in preventing deaths in the vaccinated or they have to claim that you are causing deaths in people that also choose not to get vaccinated. Neither is an ideal solution for them as violating of the rights to protect the health of someone that does not want their health protected is a weak argument at best. Rather, they emphasize that by not getting vaccinated, a person is more likely to end up in the hospital, and the strain leads to widespread health problems.
Now, obviously that is silly reasoning as, by that metric, one would have to ban smoking, alcohol, high-calorie sugary foods, driving, sports, and other such activities that lead people to take up hospital beds. It is also insane to believe that someone that is simply using the health care system is causing a strain on the system. Might as well demonizing the elderly, disabled, and sick. Instead, they demonize people that do not have a vaccine, many of whom (those who either have natural immunity or are young) pose little risk of even using the health care system if they do get sick.
Yet, that is the metric used. Hospital beds.
First of all, assuming that someone who is healthy will get sick at a later date and end up using a hospital bed is not rationally connected to the objective of relieving the strain on the healthcare system. It is purely hypothetical.
Injecting something into a person that makes it more likely for them to get sick and use a hospital bed in the short term is also neither rational nor connected to the objective. In the longer term, the government could focus on increasing their health care capacity, which they have neglected for decades (and even during the previous two years of this pandemic), so even if the vaccine was effective after a waiting period, it would be a thin argument.
Edit: I should also mention that the fact that the chance of getting the virus increases after getting the first dose means that more people being vaccinated is actually causing the wave of hospitalizations that the public health officials claim they are seeking to prevent.
Second of all, the argument to get vaccinated is arbitrary as it does not consider any individual factors like current health, age, or previous infections. Demanding an individual give up their rights simply on that basis makes no sense, and the public health officials going so far as to threaten or revoke the license of doctors that give vaccine exemptions based on individual characteristics makes this unfair and irrational by definition.
Thirdly, in the case of strict proportionality, since the first dose directly increases the chance of dying from the virus for an individual, it can never be proportional. A persons rights being violated, which greatly increases their chance of dying, has no equal. Especially if the objective is to reduce hospital bed use. Whether or not the risk of dying from the virus later on is greater is not even a question. The Oakes test further points to this when it the SCC pointed out that the “severity of the deleterious effects of a measure” on an individual or groups truly limits the importance of reducing strain on the health care system.
Finally, the adverse events of vaccines which I have hitherto ignored must also be considered in the proportionality test. There are clear risks from these events including from myocarditis and blood clots but certainly not limited to them. The probability of these events occurring stacks with ever more doses and boosters are already being recommended across the country. If the vaccine essentially becomes useless after, say, six months, then the deleterious effects from having an increased chance of getting the virus in the short term and the probability of a vaccine injury from the two doses and subsequent boosters easily outweighs the benefits of a few months of VE in the medium term — even if the VE was as high as they claim. Again, this is another thing I have spoken about in the past, I think there is some compelling evidence that VE for the second dose is much lower than they claim.
Vaccine mandates should not now, nor ever, pass the Oakes test. There are, in my eyes, at least three clear points of failure, any one of which is enough for these mandates to fail if an argument is well constructed. Unfortunately, the facts of the matter are rarely as important as the bias of the judge these days, so I will not hold my breath for any fair hearing in court about these rights violations.
Some helpful analysis from Bartram:
https://bartram.substack.com/p/on-the-impact-of-the-vaccines-on
https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-the-delay-between
https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-the-delay-between-6e5