Dear Editor,
Some letter writers in your newspaper claim there is a conspiracy by Premier Jason Kenny, Erin O’Toole, Conservative Party of Canada, and Prime Minister Trudeau, the media, and the medical health experts all combining to take our freedoms away.
It also claims that lockdowns don’t work, yet the writer fails to mention that over 23,000 Canadians (over 2,100 in Alberta), 590,533 Americans and 3,473,534 million people worldwide have died due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I guess those figures don’t mean anything to some.
The leader of Brazil claimed the pandemic was a hoax; consequently, over 4,000 people in that country were dying per day because that government failed to protect its people.
The death rate in Brazil will soon surpass the U.S. death rate from this pandemic.
Yup! Some folks will either be deniers, some folks will bury their heads in the sand and pretend the problem doesn’t exist, or they will see the world through ‘rose-coloured glasses’.
The situation has become so critical in Manitoba that the premier of that province has requested medical assistance from Ottawa and from the U.S.
These deniers need to study the history of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920. There were individuals (politicians, religious leaders, and deniers) who tried to ignore the problem, or they attempted to cover-up the seriousness of that plague that killed over 100 million people worldwide.
Fortunately for us, modern medical science, vaccines and lockdowns have prevented a similar outcome.
The world has become more aware through legitimate media outlets that we have a serious war on our hands, yet some folks, still cling to conspiracy theories.
I view such folks as the ‘trumpets’, those folks who deny everything except what is spread by QAnon and its followers.
There is an old saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”.
We’ve always had deniers (the Holocaust deniers; the sun is not the centre of our universe; humans have not walked on the moon; the earth is not round; the virus is a hoax created by liberals and commies, etc).
There are plenty of “legitimate” sources of information (FactCheck.org. Snopes, CBC, CBS, BBC, CTV, The Canadian Press, Global News, US News and World Report, the Associated Press, CDC (Center of Disease Control), major academic institutions (Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cal Tech, University of Toronto, University of Alberta, etc) .
Be careful about accepting information passed along by friends and relatives. Do some research. Consider the source (where did the person get the information?).
Check to see who wrote the article or the letter (are they recognized experts?).
Are there supporting pieces of evidence presented by “experts”, or are they opinions presented by individuals who may have “an agenda”?
George Thatcher
Trochu, Alta.