On the other hand, this part I applaud

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 4:14 PM - 90 Comments

No lifejacket, because none is necessary. God bless the prime minister for setting a good example to the nation’s kids. Minimal risks do not require maximal protection.

Latest swine flu screwup!

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 7:12 PM - 109 Comments

Vaccine shortage? That was last week’s phoney crisis. Now it’s the millions of unused H1N1 vaccines:

The federal government will make a decision in the next couple of weeks about what to do with what is expected to be tens of millions of unused doses of H1N1 vaccine, a spokesperson said Friday.

The admission came after Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq revealed the Public Health Agency of Canada will provide 5.7 million doses of pandemic vaccine to the provinces next week — a shipment which could in all likelihood fulfil the country’s H1N1 vaccine needs.

When that shipment is in place, more than 21.5 million doses of vaccine will have been made available across the country.

That’s enough to vaccinate nearly 64 per cent of Canadians — considerably more than have indicated a willingness to be immunized up until now.

“That would be well above anything we’ve ever achieved,” said Dr. Ross Upshur, director of the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics…

The virus was first identified in April. From zero to two-thirds of the population in less than eight months. What a fiasco.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Public Health Agency of Canada is reporting the virus may already have peaked:

The data refer to the week ending Nov. 21, the last for which the agency has published nationwide numbers.The surveillance site noted pandemic activity was “still high.”

There were more than 1,500 hospitalizations across the country for H1N1 that week, with 243 of those patients ill enough to be admitted to intensive care. Sixty-one deaths were reported Nov. 15-21.

There have been 30 more deaths since then, taking the total death toll to 309. Between 4,000 and 8,000 people die of flu-related pneumonia every year. PHAC says “many others” die from other flu complications.

UPPERDATE: By way of comparison, as of Nov. 25 the US Center for Disease Control estimates the number of doses “allocated” — “those that are at the distribution depots and ready for project areas to order” — at 61.2 million, of which 51.9 million have been “shipped.” Using the upper number, and assuming an additional 11 million more doses next week, that means the US, with a population more than nine times has large, will have produced and made available about three-and-a-third times as many doses. Meaning Canada is delivering doses at more than two-and-a-half times the rate per capita.

UPPESTDATE: Britain, with nearly twice the population, has delivered 16.3 million doses to date.

When first we practiced to deceive

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:58 AM - 75 Comments

The Star’s Rosie DiManno reminds us of a rather salient point:

… Few of those clawing at their faces today in angst and shame over who-knew-what-when-generated hysteria with regard to mistreatment of Afghan detainees have paused to recall how this mess originated.

It’s because Canada picked Afghans over Americans as front-line allies…

Given the toxic view of American forces – no matter that the horrific mistreatment of Iraqi detainees was, at least in terms of supporting evidence, limited to specific rogue units in one notorious facility – it was clearly decided, by who knows whom, Canada could not put detainees in such soiled hands, despite the U.S. being this country’s closest nation-friend.

Someone bought into the dubious premise that the entire American military was not to be trusted and that Afghan wardens, Afghan guards, Afghan officials, were preferable partners in the disposition of detainees, although the only remotely up-to-Western-par prison facility was at the American base in Bagram.

And who was that someone? A Globe editorial reminds us:

In hindsight, the Liberal government of Paul Martin may have been naive in taking the initiative to press for the transfer of detainees to the Afghan authorities, rather than continuing to hand them over to the armed forces of the United States. At the time, Canada was worried by the prospect that Afghans captured by Canadian soldiers might end up in the limbo – or worse – of Guantanamo, Cuba. The government of Afghanistan, having been recently democratically elected, appeared to be a more promising and appropriate recipient for Afghan citizens.

Oops. But can you blame them? Remember the brouhaha over that photo, splashed across the front page of the Globe and Mail, of Canadian JTF2 commandoes shepherding Afghan prisoners for transfer to the Americans? That was in early 2002, when Jean Chretien was prime minister and Art Eggleton was the minister in charge of offering up confused, misleading answers to Parliament — a post later occupied by Gordon O’Connor and now by Peter MacKay.

So the tangled web goes back a ways. As A. Columnist wrote at the time:

But let’s remember why this was an issue in the first place. Mr. Eggleton’s startling revelation, that members of the Joint Task Force 2 commando unit had captured several enemy fighters nearly two weeks ago, was only newsworthy because it contradicted the Prime Minister, who had been saying publicly that no prisoners had as yet been taken. The Prime Minister had said this in order to make the point that the question of what should be done with any prisoners our forces might happen to come across — whether they should be handed over to the American forces, or to some other body — was “hypothetical,” and that as such he was not obliged to take a position on it.

And the reason the Prime Minister took refuge in this non-answer was because he did not wish to confront critics within his own party, who have worked themselves up into a state over the Terrible Wrong that would be committed if Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were to be delivered into the hands of the Americans…

Compared to what?

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:28 PM - 71 Comments

H1N1 overplayed by media, public health: MDs

Public health officials and journalists have overstated the importance of the swine flu, a former Ontario chief medical officer of health says.

Dr. Richard Schabas, chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in eastern Ontario, said the H1N1 influenza outbreak needs to be put into proper perspective.

About 200,000 people die in Canada every year from all causes combined, including about 4,000 from seasonal flu.

“By the time all the dust has settled on H1N1, somewhere between 200 and 300 people will have died in this country,” Schabas said Thursday during a panel on media coverage of H1N1 on CBC-TV’s The National.

The panel also looked at the front-page coverage given to the death of Evan Frustaglio, a 13-year-old hockey player from Toronto. Evan died on the eve of the H1N1 vaccine becoming available, and demand for the vaccine jumped overnight, catching health officials by surprise.

A healthy child in Canada is about 20 times more likely to be killed by a car than by the H1N1 virus, Schabas said, but that isn’t going to make the national news…

So, a wildly over-played “crisis” to begin with. What of the other main media story-line, the allegedly incompetent handling of the crisis by public health authorities, notably the feds?

A great many commenters on this site seem quite certain they know how fast authorities “should have” responded, when vaccinations “should have” begun, etc. They are, of course, talking through their hats: they have no idea how long it takes to develop a vaccine, what sorts of consultations governments are obliged to engage in before deploying them, what sort of testing they have to undergo, etc.

Neither do I. But it seems to me the only sensible way to measure these things is in relative terms. Is 200 deaths a lot, or a little? Set beside the 4,000 who die every year of ordinary flu, it looks less terrifying. LIkewise, a plausible benchmark for how long something “should have” taken is how long it took in other countries. That’s not giving anybody a “pass.” You can still fail even if you’re graded on a bell curve.
Continue…