The chief medical officer for the province of Ontario says he was blacklisted from commentary on CBC after expressing a lack of confidence in the efficacy of measures against the pandemic.Dr. Richard Schabas was Chief Medical Officer of Health in Ontario between 1987 and 1997 and the Chief of Staff for York Central Hospital during the SARS outbreak in 2003.Shabas said that Asian countries quarantined for SARS, then Canada followed in a “monkey see, monkey do,” approach. He believes Canada played the imitation game with COVID-19 as well and has similarly failed to publicly reflect on the successes and failures of its response.“We made no serious effort as a profession, as a country, public health as a group … to examine what had happened and to learn any lessons,” Shabas told the National Citizens Inquiry in Regina.“They took the attitude that SARS had come and gone away therefore, we have done a great job. Let's move on.”Shabas said case isolation helps end pandemics, but general quaratines were abandoned by public health many decades ago.“COVID was an immensely wasteful, a wastage of human potential. The wastage of people's lives, the time that was spent uselessly in quarantine was enormous, and I think to a large measure because we didn't take the time to learn the lessons from SARS,” Shabas said.“Professional public health is an area where we must have the humility to learn the proper lessons from COVID, because otherwise, there is every chance that come along a similar situation we will make exactly the same mistakes again.”Shabas did his best to dispel a “great” and “imminent panic” during the bird flu around 2004.“I was the one who said this is not based on good science, we have no idea if there's a threat, we should take it a little bit more cautiously.”He had a similar message during the swine flu pandemic in 2009.“It was the most benign on the record and the actual public health impact was very, very much smaller than people had expected or that people were making them to be.”The CBC did not want this cooler head to prevail on its COVID-19 commentary. During a live interview on March 22, 2020, Schabas said the drastic measures lacked evidence.“I thought it was important that there be some pushback…that we don't know what we're talking about with COVID and … there's so much uncertainty and we're busy doing things that make very little sense, and we're not sure why we're doing them.”A few hours later, Schabas was informed by his physician daughter in B.C. that all hell was breaking loose on Twitter.According to Schabas, a former CBC journalist who became a physician’s assistant told her former colleagues to cut him out of coverage. He said Dr. Neil Rao, a Halton Health Care Services medical microbiologist who had been a CTV infectious diseases expert, received a similar ban.“I don’t know whether this was based on ideology or whether this was political cover, because what we were saying was highly critical of what government was doing,” Schabas said.Schabas appealed to the CBC ombudsman, but the ombudsman lacked the power to force any changes.“If the Globe and Mail chooses to publish nonsense and chooses to publish or throw op ed pieces by people don't know what they're talking about, nothing that I could do about that,... but cancel my subscription. But the CBC and the professional colleges are publicly accountable.”Schabas said it was “shocking” that the position paper of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario mandated doctors to refrain from communicating anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-distancing, or anti-lockdown statements, and other provinces took a similar approach.Schabas’ 90-minute testimony can be watched here.
The chief medical officer for the province of Ontario says he was blacklisted from commentary on CBC after expressing a lack of confidence in the efficacy of measures against the pandemic.Dr. Richard Schabas was Chief Medical Officer of Health in Ontario between 1987 and 1997 and the Chief of Staff for York Central Hospital during the SARS outbreak in 2003.Shabas said that Asian countries quarantined for SARS, then Canada followed in a “monkey see, monkey do,” approach. He believes Canada played the imitation game with COVID-19 as well and has similarly failed to publicly reflect on the successes and failures of its response.“We made no serious effort as a profession, as a country, public health as a group … to examine what had happened and to learn any lessons,” Shabas told the National Citizens Inquiry in Regina.“They took the attitude that SARS had come and gone away therefore, we have done a great job. Let's move on.”Shabas said case isolation helps end pandemics, but general quaratines were abandoned by public health many decades ago.“COVID was an immensely wasteful, a wastage of human potential. The wastage of people's lives, the time that was spent uselessly in quarantine was enormous, and I think to a large measure because we didn't take the time to learn the lessons from SARS,” Shabas said.“Professional public health is an area where we must have the humility to learn the proper lessons from COVID, because otherwise, there is every chance that come along a similar situation we will make exactly the same mistakes again.”Shabas did his best to dispel a “great” and “imminent panic” during the bird flu around 2004.“I was the one who said this is not based on good science, we have no idea if there's a threat, we should take it a little bit more cautiously.”He had a similar message during the swine flu pandemic in 2009.“It was the most benign on the record and the actual public health impact was very, very much smaller than people had expected or that people were making them to be.”The CBC did not want this cooler head to prevail on its COVID-19 commentary. During a live interview on March 22, 2020, Schabas said the drastic measures lacked evidence.“I thought it was important that there be some pushback…that we don't know what we're talking about with COVID and … there's so much uncertainty and we're busy doing things that make very little sense, and we're not sure why we're doing them.”A few hours later, Schabas was informed by his physician daughter in B.C. that all hell was breaking loose on Twitter.According to Schabas, a former CBC journalist who became a physician’s assistant told her former colleagues to cut him out of coverage. He said Dr. Neil Rao, a Halton Health Care Services medical microbiologist who had been a CTV infectious diseases expert, received a similar ban.“I don’t know whether this was based on ideology or whether this was political cover, because what we were saying was highly critical of what government was doing,” Schabas said.Schabas appealed to the CBC ombudsman, but the ombudsman lacked the power to force any changes.“If the Globe and Mail chooses to publish nonsense and chooses to publish or throw op ed pieces by people don't know what they're talking about, nothing that I could do about that,... but cancel my subscription. But the CBC and the professional colleges are publicly accountable.”Schabas said it was “shocking” that the position paper of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario mandated doctors to refrain from communicating anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-distancing, or anti-lockdown statements, and other provinces took a similar approach.Schabas’ 90-minute testimony can be watched here.
