News
Featured Image
Theresa Tam, chief public health officer of Canada.CTV News / YouTube

OTTAWA, Ontario, May 14, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The strictest lockdown measures in North America were extended on Thursday as Ontario’s premier Doug Ford announced that “stay-at-home” rules will continue across the province until June 2.

Ontario schools, businesses, restaurants, and outdoor parks, including golf courses and tennis courts, have been closed, and citizens of the most populous province have been told not to leave their homes except for essential services since April 3.

Restrictions like these in various parts of Canada will only be lifted when 75% of Canadian adults have taken at least one dose of an experimental COVID vaccine and 20% have received two doses by mid-summer, said Theresa Tam, the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), though depression, anxiety, and unemployment have soared, and one in six businesses report that they are unlikely to survive these measures.

Restrictions will remain, even after vaccines

Even if 55% of adults get a first dose of the vaccine, that would result in the epidemic “resurging and overwhelming hospitals,” so lockdowns would remain in place, claimed Tam, presenting “modelling scenarios” of the future last month.

But even if three quarters of adults were vaccinated, Tam said she would still force Canadians to wear masks, practice social distancing, and isolate.

“At this point, restrictive measures could be gradually eased as long as adequate test, trace, isolate capacity and individual precautions are maintained,” she said.

U.S. dropping cases

The bar for freedom is extraordinarily high considering that in the United States, which has a surplus of vaccine and slumping demand, just 58.7% of adults over age 18 have received one COVID shot, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At this much lower threshold, new COVID-positive case counts have nonetheless plummeted south of the border, the CDC reports. Even states that have eased or abandoned COVID restrictions altogether — including Texas, Mississippi and Georgia — show COVID infection and death rates dropping week on week, despite open businesses and absence of mask mandates.

COVID surges in vaccinated nations

Tam’s ultimatum is not supported by data from countries with strong uptake that are seeing COVID cases soar. The most vaccinated country in the world, Seychelles, an island in the Indian Ocean off Africa, with 62% of its population fully vaccinated, nonetheless saw new cases more than double recently, with 37% of infections occurring among those who have received two doses of a COVID vaccine.

Maldives is another island country where high vaccination status has not translated into COVID protection. There, 35% of the population has received two doses of the vaccine, but reported cases per 100,000 people spiked in the past five, seven and 14 days, nearly doubling.

Call for inquiry

Independent MP Derek Sloan (Hastings-Lennox and Addington) said Tam’s 75% target is “absurd” and “just one of all the ways” her handling of the pandemic is flawed.

Sloan has been critical of Tam since the beginning of her work as Canada’s “top doctor,” pointing out that she was serving the global interests of the World Health Organization rather than Canada’s.

“There’s opacity in almost everything that’s going on,” Sloan told LifeSiteNews. He and Randy Hillier (MPP for Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston) held a press conference Thursday demanding a royal commission investigate the Liberal administration’s, including Tam’s, handling of the pandemic. “The federal government has, by virtue of PM Trudeau’s briefings and others, failed to properly explain available data to Canadians, putting them in a perpetual state of fear with no end in sight,” Sloan said.

“The new information we are learning from provinces, surrounding vaccine safety and testing issues, is simply the last straw and requires the convening of a royal commission of inquiry into Canada’s full pandemic response.”

Obscure bio

Tam, who’s biography for PHAC is identical to the one posted by the WHO where she works as a consultant, does not indicate any medical practice experience. Her enthusiasm for lockdowns and forced quarantine measures extends back at least a decade to a National Film Board 2010 documentary about a theoretical pandemic in which she said that public health authorities would employ powers to quarantine people in mandatory settings. “It’s potential you could track people, put bracelets on their arms, have police and other setups to ensure quarantine is undertaken,” she said.

A tax-funded public health servant, Tam’s income is nonetheless unpublicized — as is her personal life. No one seems to know if Tam has claimed Canadian citizenship, is married or has children, and details of her life except that she is Chinese, grew up in Hong Kong, and gained a medical degree in England, are scarce. Even the universities of Alberta and British Columbi, where her bio says she studied, do not boast of her alumni status.

Although there is a Facebook fan page for Tam with a few hundred following, the woman dictating the country’s COVID response for the past year appears to be extremely unpopular with Canadians. Nearly 65,000 citizens signed a petition to have her fired for her bungling in the early days of the pandemic when she refused to stop flights from China. Whenever videos are posted of her announcements to the public by the mainstream media — almost a daily occurrence since she first enforced emergency measures more than a year ago — “dislikes” outnumber “likes” by orders of magnitude, and comments are disabled.

Tam had attracted international attention for her public health advice to Canadians to wear a mask and to avoid kissing during sex. “The lowest risk sexual activity during COVID-19 involves yourself alone,” she said.

No answers

LifeSiteNews sent question’s to Canada’s public health agency asking what scientific evidence Tam relied on to choose 75% as a target vaccination quota, what evidence she had of long-term safety of the experimental vaccines she was demanding Canadians take to regain their freedom, and her response to the high vaccination/high COVID case count scenarios in places like the Seychelles. The tax-funded agency refused to reply.