Editor's note: Ms.Smith is writing in response to the BayToday stories Over 100 join rally to protest COVID restrictions and No charges laid during COVID-19 protest.
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The Freedom Rallies held globally on March 20th garnered quite a bit of attention for the No More Lock-downs cause and I felt it was necessary to clarify some of the reasoning behind these protests.
Many people see these protestors gathering and they assume that they have a disregard for public safety and do not place value on human life. I am one of those protestors and I can tell you in fact it is just the contrary, we do value both of these things dearly and that is why we feel it is necessary to do this.
Right now as I type, millions of people are suffering terribly as a result of these lock-downs, restrictions, and distancing/masking protocols. The way we are being asked to live is, for many people, not sustainably livable. Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have decided that this does not matter. Nothing seems to matter to anyone really other than the central goal of "getting these numbers down". Getting the numbers down so we can be allowed to go about our lives, go back to normal.
What is it that these numbers represent exactly?
We are provided with case numbers, the result of the unprecedented practice of testing healthy people. People with no symptoms are not just encouraged, but in fact systematically coerced into being tested to be allowed access to travel, work, public education, psychological medical and social services, or even their own family members living in institutional settings.
Whether there is a problem with sensitivity regarding this test or not (and there is quite a debate on that topic, however, our own public health officials as well as the CDC and the WHO have admitted there are at least some false positives and it is not perfect) the practice of testing all these healthy people seems irrational and very unscientific. It would seem as though the practice was only in place to produce numbers, especially considering so many people are tested on a weekly or even bi-weekly basis. I learned recently that every time a person tests positive they are counted as a new case, so if you are tested weekly for work and you tested positive three weeks in a row, you have become three cases in the collected statistics.
The other number involved is the death count. Also the result of an unprecedented practice, the daily collection of statistics regarding this one particular "cause of death". I use quotes there because Covid 19 and its related symptoms leading to a person's death is not a requirement to be included in this statistic. Any person who has tested positive and then proceeds to die is automatically included, due to government policy.
Our public health officials deem this appropriate, they explain that it is better to overestimate than underestimate in a pandemic. However, when we are using these numbers as the reason to continue to damagingly lockdown and restrict an entire population I do not agree that this is appropriate. I think that it would make more sense to at least only include people who showed some Covid symptoms at their time of death. This is the reason people bring up the average all-cause mortality rates we see in 2020. Many of these deaths added to the daily statistics (not all) are entirely unrelated to Covid and were destined to happen pandemic or no. You could even go so far as to argue that it could not really be a year containing a pandemic with no extreme spike in mortalities.
So this practice of testing people with no symptoms which often leads to the attribution of a person's death "due to Covid" or "Covid related" despite them having never shown any symptoms would seem to be blatant inflation of numbers. You likely ask yourself, why would they do this? I would not have been able to answer that question a few months ago, now it seems abundantly clear.
I have always been the kind of person to avoid unnecessary medication, as such, I have always chosen not to get the flu shot.
I had noticed over the last few years that the push to get this shot to be taken was getting more and more excessive. I have seen articles shared from 2016 and 2018 calling for masses to receive the flu vaccine as soon as possible as they projected the hospitals would soon be overwhelmed. Did you know that in 2015 the Ontario Nurses Association won a battle against their employers abolishing the "Vaccinate or Mask" policy, which mandated that nurses who refused to get the flu shot would wear a mask and a special pin all day at work?
It seems to be fairly apparent that all of these lock-downs, restrictions, and masking laws are just forms of punishment, meant to drive our population toward mass vaccination. Perhaps not for any dark or sinister purpose as many speculate, but possibly for the purpose of monetary gain on the part of pharmaceutical companies and the politicians who lobby for them or maybe even for the assumed goal of doing what is best for our health.
No matter what the goal may be, this is an extremely inappropriate level of systemic coercion to be placed on our citizens. We are literally being told vaccines = freedom. To hold the very lives of every person in this country hostage until vaccination levels are reached is not acceptable. We live in a free and democratic country and our freedoms are guaranteed by our Charter, not our government.
We are dealing with the tyrannical takeover of our personal lives, and an attempt to take away our most sacred right, to hold autonomy over our own bodies and be allowed to make our own informed health decisions.
This is why people are protesting, and I assure you that none of us will stop. Not until we get our lives back.
Corrin Smith,
Sturgeon Falls
West Nipissing for our Rights Facebook Group
