No leader - no prime minister, no president, can claim that they weren't warned. None, including our own, can say they weren't warned of the danger of a pandemic and that we weren't prepared for it.
They were warned, repeatedly. They ignored the warnings when they ought to have treated it as an opportunity to prepare, a chance to defend the people they're supposed to protect. That's their job and, instead, they ignored it.
Listen to Bill Gates TED Talk from 2015, a few months before Justin Trudeau became prime minister.
So what did our entirely decent prime minister do?
Sources close to the matter said the Auditor-General is planning to probe the government’s handling of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, which was a central part of the country’s advance surveillance, early detection and risk-assessment capacity for outbreaks.
The Globe and Mail reported on Saturday that a key part of GPHIN’s function was effectively shut down last spring, amid changing government priorities that shifted analysts to other work. According to 10 years of documents obtained by The Globe, the system went silent on May 24 last year, after issuing more than 1,500 alerts over the past decade about potential outbreaks including MERS, H1N1, avian flu and Ebola.Canada's pandemic early warning system went dark in the spring of 2019 because our government shut it down. It's too early to judge Justin Trudeau. We need to hear his side of this sad story but it had better be good because, unlike his previous controversies, this time people died - perhaps unnecessarily.
I would love that I saw Bill Gates as a progressive .
ReplyDeletehe is not and neither are his counterparts at Google or Amazon.
They dodge and evade taxation monies that could be spent on social projects that the TAXpayer feels important.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher
I have a tough time accepting that the billionaires of the world be those that decide how profit from the taxpayers be spent to better our lives.
I did not vote for Bill Gates, did you?
TB
TB, what does any of that have to do with Gates' pandemic warning? No, I didn't vote for Gates. I wasn't aware he was running for any office that I might be entitled to vote for. Please correct me if I'm wrong but in any case that has no bearing on his warnings or those of many other experts in the field that we have ignored at our peril. Try to stick even loosely to the topic of the post.
ReplyDeleteMy opinion of Gates is much like Trailblazer's but let's not shoot the messenger. The fact is that most, if not all, governments ignored plenty of warnings about renegade viruses. Just one example: "Coronavirus a ‘failure of early warning’ for Canada, intelligence expert says" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-coronavirus-a-failure-of-early-warning-for-canada-intelligence/
ReplyDeleteHumans of all stripes are inclined to procrastinate when faced with future threats. We only care about a leaky roof when it's raining. Most of us, including governments, do not have the resources for plan B until after the event.
Mound, how many of your neighbours have an emergency kit for the big quake that perpetually threatens the BC coast?