The COVID consensus was arrived at falsely and deserves questioning, says a Concordia political science professor..Travis Smith made his comments to Western Standard after Laval professor Patrick Provost was suspended eight weeks without pay for saying vaccinating children for COVID-19 carried more risks than rewards..“The essence of the job of the scholar is to ask those questions and offer those alternative perspectives, conduct the investigations that seek to find new discoveries, and, as people say, speak truth to power. And if we're not doing that, then we're not doing our jobs,” Smith said..“I am concerned about this idea full-time permanent faculty might be sanctioned for doing their jobs… To forbid them or punish them for raising [questions] is unscientific, dogmatic and irresponsible.”.Even so, Smith says professors need courage to be contrarian..“Where there is consensus and where that means that reputation and funding might be on the line, academics are often [conflicted], everywhere from the humanities and the fine arts, all the way to the natural sciences,” Smith said..“Faculty will find themselves engaging in self-censorship. And knowing that there's a risk to be had by raising doubts and questions and offering alternative explanations and considerations — that's part of the business.”.In 2020, a committee on academic freedom formed by the Quebec government surveyed 1,079 professors. Responses indicated 60% had engaged in self-censorship and 82% wanted rules lifted on what they could say in class..Smith’s Concordia profile page lists the “intersection of politics, religion, and science” and “storytelling and education” among his interests. He expressed concerns the COVID consensus was arrived at too quickly, then adopted as dogma..“Consensus views … were reached and declared and made official and then imposed upon medical professionals and others long, long before it could be conceivably possible that due diligence had been done in a scientific fashion,” Smith said..“When a certain consensus is reached, we may hope that it's right. But hope and trust are domains that the scientists usually want to put in the category of religion… [and] separate from science.”.On June 22, Provost questioned the advisability of Quebec’s COVID response in an opinion editorial for Journal De Montreal. Later, the parent company Quebecor removed the article from its website..“This far into COVID times, we have lots of unanswered questions and we have what I would also call a lot of questionable answers,” Smith said..“Everything still must be open for interrogation, speculation, investigation … especially where that consensus was established quickly, and where there’s wealthy corporations and powerful governments voicing that consensus.”.Smith says government money and corporate ads have made media “independence … highly questionable” and aided the consensus..“[Many things] should remain open for critical reconsideration: the origins of the virus and its variants; the severity of the lockdowns and other policies on the economy, civil society, and mental health; in Quebec, these curfews; the harm that was done to the elderly by being forced into prolonged isolation for their protection,” Smith said..The professor said his recently departed grandmother found living in a care home during COVID-19 more difficult than the constant bombing of London during World War II. Then he resumed a lengthy list of COVID dogmas to deconstruct..“What else would we question? All of the models on which all of our public health measures were enacted their projections; the trials that they used to discount early treatments, the rigor of the approval processes for the vaccines; the accuracy of our data regarding cases, hospitalizations, deaths, adverse reactions; the integrity of our scientific journals; the morality or immorality of mandates and passports; the harm done by compromising the principle of informed voluntary consent; and the trustworthiness of medical professionals when they're under the threat of losing their licenses; the endless bending of the government; cell phone surveillance; censorship of the media; military psyops used against their own citizens; national media subsidized by the government speaking in one voice; secret contracts.”.But Smith wasn’t done..“Let's talk about emergency powers that are endlessly renewed toward being made permanent; freezing of financial assets; violence against protesters, the whole question of the legitimacy of the Emergencies Act implementation; the rhetoric of terror and panic and hatred and blaming and shaming and scapegoating and discrimination by public officials, by elected officials, doing damage to both compliant and non-compliant alike, although in different ways…”.“It's absolutely necessary for questioning the consensus on any of those points to be something that scholars remain free to do.”
