Sometimes, it feels like I’m living in a separate universe from many others who make their living in the media.
It’s certainly been the case with regard to COVID-19. Last week, we saw two high-profile members of the B.C. legislature press gallery take pot-shots at the B.C Green Party for issuing a sensible statement about the disease.
The Greens’ deputy leader, Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi, pointed out that the concept of “hybrid immunity” has largely been debunked. Yet he maintained that this still forms the basis of the provincial strategy.
It triggered outrage among Dr. Bonnie Henry’s most ardent admirers.
Are you interested in hearing a dispassionate response from someone who has not lived in B.C. for decades and who has not witnessed Henry’s many news briefings? My sister is a retired nursing professor in the United States. Here’s what she stated in an email to me after reading Dr. Gandhi’s statement on my Substack account:
“I looked up hybrid immunity—not something I’d been following. Aware of the concept, but not the term. I found both JAMA and Lancet have published systematic reviews on the topic in 2023, a rung below a meta analysis (because not enough studies to meet criteria), but still rigorous. I was surprised to hear that hybrid immunity was actually policy.”
Those reviews supported the notion that hybrid immunity offers greater protection against severe illness from COVID-19. Hybrid immunity refers to immune protection in individuals who’ve had one or more doses of a COVID-19 vaccine and experienced at least one SARS-CoV-2 infection before or after the initiation of vaccination, according to the World Health Organization.
However, a paper published in Nature Medicine last year, which involved a large sample size, showed that a second or third infection is associated with worse acute COVID and Long Covid to a far greater degree than not being reinfected.
“You don’t want to get Covid or reinfections,” health researcher Dr. Eric Topol wrote on his Substack account. “The risk of Long Covid is real, along with potential adverse outcomes across all organ systems, and it is largely unpredictable. There are 3 ways to avoid getting Long Covid: (1) never getting Covid, 100% effective; (2) getting vaccinated and fully boosted, which provides ~30-50% protection against Long Covid in most studies; and (3) Paxlovid, which reduced Long Covid by 26% in another large VA study by these same researchers after breakthrough infections, and I recently reviewed it here.”
I posted Dr. Gandhi’s statement in full. That’s because I was concerned that journalists who live in a different universe than me might twist his words. One of them, Keith Baldrey, actually suggested that the Greens had bought into the ruthless and draconian policies employed by the world’s largest dictatorship. He later deleted this tweet.
Let’s talk about China
Here’s another topic upon which I feel like I’m living in a different universe than the media: the influence of that same dictatorship, China, on the Canadian political landscape.
It’s grossly exaggerated. And I fear that it’s going to trigger a new wave of hatred against immigrants from China when they apply for jobs or are going about their day-to-day business.
This is notwithstanding the need to ensure that Chinese consulates are not paying the difference between tax credits for political contributions and the donations themselves. It’s also necessary to ensure that these same consulates are not using buses to bring in international students from outside ridings to nomination meetings. And any Chinese officials should be immediately expelled if they or their intermediaries harass or threaten immigrants from China or Hong Kong with prosecution at home.
It’s hard to tell how many of the allegations in the media are accurate because they’re so often based on unnamed sources, including intelligence agents. And there’s no information supplied in media reports to assess these agents’ intellect, biases, or credibility, let alone their Chinese-language proficiency.
It’s true that China wants to arrest Victor Ho, the former editor of Sing Tao in Vancouver, for his advocacy for democracy in Hong Kong. I know Victor. He deserves all the protection that Canada can provide.
But I still remember how the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and RCMP badly bungled the investigation of the 1985 Air India bombing, due to infighting and a lack of Punjabi language expertise. One journalist, Richard Cleroux, disclosed that officers with the two organizations refused to even ride the same elevator.
Keep in mind that China has always been a ham-handed political player, unlike governments of India, France, the U.K., the United States, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and others. Diplomats from democratic countries actually understand how to influence discourse in Canada to benefit their political masters because they know how our type of government functions.
Chinese consulates, on the other hand, prefer bullying tactics, even when dealing with organizations that might be more sympathetic to China. For instance, they’ll loudly complain about where a representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office might be sitting at a gathering, sometimes eliciting seething rage from the organizers.
Chinese consular representatives rarely, if ever, respond to inquiries from the English-speaking media, unlike representatives of democratic countries. I’ve never had a single conversation with a consul-general from China, which stands in sharp contrast to my many dealings with diplomats from other countries.
Furthermore, the behaviour of Chinese diplomats and their obnoxious former foreign minister generates greater sympathy for advocates of democracy in Hong Kong, as well as more media coverage.
If China is actually changing the course of Canadian politics, why would the federal government be sending more warships through the Taiwan Strait? And why would Ottawa basically be renaming the Asia-Pacific as the Indo-Pacific and rolling out an Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain China?
Yet our media outlets are in a frenzy to suggest that Chinese president Xi Jinping is a monumental menace to Canadian democracy. CBC continues citing other networks’ reports that wouldn’t even pass its own journalistic policy standard, then offers the weaselly caveat that these stories could not be independently verified.
While it’s true that Xi, an authentic Sinofascist, has ruined life for many Hong Kong residents and poses a genuine threat to Taiwan, he’s not going to elect the next Canadian government. Nor did he elect the current one.
And I don’t believe for a minute that Xi is responsible for the defeat of four socially conservative incumbents in Metro Vancouver—Kenny Chiu, Alice Wong, Nelly Shin, and Tamara Jansen—in the 2021 federal election.
All four of these former Conservative MPs were in swing ridings and all four enraged members of the LGBTQ+ community by voting against a federal ban on conversion therapy. For some voters, this was a litmus test on their commitment to building a more equal society. And they failed. They didn’t deserve a seat in Parliament.
Nevertheless, former Steveston–Richmond East MP Kenny Chiu continues to blame the government of China for his loss. And most reporters demonstrate very little skepticism.
Human rights commissioner must blow the whistle
The current media hysteria prompted one Vancouver journalist, Ng Weng Hoong, to demand that Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender investigate the Canadian media’s role in Chinese scapegoating and anti-Asian hate.
Ng issued the call after I wrote two articles in Pancouver about how Govender had given the media free pass in her recent 478-page report on hate in the pandemic.
I don’t know why Govender chose not to focus attention on the role of the media in whipping up mistrust of our neighbours of Asian ancestry from 2015 to 2020. When I was editor of the Georgia Straight in those years, I gave this topic a great deal of coverage. I’ve had conversations about this with several people of Asian ancestry—and not just Chinese—who also believe it’s a major issue.
To me, Govender’s failure to address this was a missed opportunity. What else could explain Vancouver becoming the Anti-Asian Hate Crime Capital of North America?
I was actually thrilled when the B.C. NDP government under John Horgan reinstated the B.C. Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. I credit activists in the South Asian community, including my friend Gurpreet Singh and legislature speaker Raj Chouhan, for making this happen.
Moreover, I was pleased when a special committee of the legislature, chaired by Chouhan, recommended Govender for the position. I felt she was eminently qualified, given her previous experience with West Coast LEAF.
I was also impressed with her report to a legislature committee on policing. You can read my article here.
However, Govender’s reluctance to ruffle media feathers on the topic of anti-Asian hate has been a major disappointment. She laid most of the blame on social media. She never mentioned how antiracist activists, including Ng, have actually used Twitter effectively to counter and reduce anti-Asian racism in the mainstream media.
I actually think that Ng and others, including Victor Wong and Hua Foundation executive director Kevin Huang, have done far more to counter anti-Asian hatred in the media than B.C.’s human rights commissioner.
Because I occasionally retweet Ng’s messages, there’s a growing list of journalists who are now blocking me on Twitter.
Final thoughts…
Coincidentally, others have big problems with the way I’ve covered COVID-19. One of Dr. Henry’s biggest fans, CHEK-TV commentator Rob Shaw, had this to say to his followers on social media: “Twitter tip 183: Just ignore Charlie Smith completely.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, this was Shaw’s response to Dr. Gandhi’s public statement.
Yes, I certainly do feel like I live in a different universe.
Maybe that’s because like Dr. Gandhi, I read articles about COVID-19 in medical journals and don’t just look at this disease through a political lens.
Note: I added more information about hybrid immunity and links to different studies after this article was originally posted.