A key witness in a constitutional challenge against COVID-19 measures in Manitoba says Canadian provinces should end lockdowns, change how they run PCR tests, and avoid vaccinating teenagers..Last October, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya and two other PhD epidemiologists penned the Great Barrington Declaration. It called on policy makers to avoid lockdowns in response to the pandemic and rely on herd immunity, vaccines, and protection of the vulnerable instead..“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health… leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden,” the authors wrote..“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”.“I don’t know why governments don’t want to make decisions based on the evidence I and others like me have put forward…There are tens of thousands of doctors who see this the way that I do,” Bhattacharya said in an interview with the Western Standard, adding most countries have adopted the plans..The professor believes governments make bad decisions based on bad evidence. He said PCR tests for COVID are usually run at too many cycles, resulting in false positives which inflate numbers..“The CDC recommends 28 cycles if people have received the vaccine because they believe at that level of viral load people will not transmit the virus if they have been vaccinated. Their recommended level for those who have not been vaccinated is higher for reasons that I do not think make sense,” Bhattacharya said..In a constitutional challenge against Manitoba’s lockdown measures, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) cross-examined Dr. Jared Bullard, Chief Microbiologist and Laboratory Specialist at the Cadham Provincial Laboratory in Winnipeg..According to a JCCF press release, Bullard said the most accurate way to determine if a person was infectious was to try to grow a cell culture from a patient sample. If the cell culture could not grow, the person was probably not infectious..Bullard’s own studies showed that among those tested COVID-19-positive from a PCR test run at 18 cycles, only 44% could actually have a cell culture grown in a lab, leaving 56% non-infectious. Not once could Bullard’s team grow a cell culture when more than 25 cycles were required to get a positive result..A study published in the Journal of Clinical Virology last June found that Canadian labs use 30 to 45 cycles for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) PCR tests. Bullard’s own lab uses 36.5..“If you need to run PCR tests at 40 or more cycles for the viral load to register in the test, they do not have enough of the virus to be contagious,” Bhattacharya said..The professor said the threat of losing one’s job has silenced many from objecting to the governments’ prevailing approach..“I have received many, many, many letters from experts who say they agree with me but they are too afraid to speak out…I have the benefit of being a tenured professor, though people tried to get me fired as well.”.The COVID-19 vaccine webpage of the Alberta government says: “Every Albertan who can get vaccinated, should get vaccinated…It is much safer and more effective to get immunized than it is to get infected.”.Bhattacharya says that is not true for the young..“I don’t think children should be given the vaccine because on net it does not benefit them. Their risk of side effects is very small. In the trials, roughly 5 in 1000 children 12 to 15 years old had a serious adverse event. However, the risk of a child dying from COVID infection is much less than 1 in 1000. With teenagers, the risk is a bit more, but not substantially so. .“If they or parents feel less afraid by having them get the vaccine, I would not argue against it, but really you are picking one very low risk vs another very low risk, with the balance favoring not vaccinating children.”.The Saskatchewan government aims for vaccines to be made available to everyone aged 12 and up by July 31..Harding is a Western Standard correspondent based in Saskatchewan
