John Carpay, B.A., LL.B, is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca)Shortly before lockdowns were imposed in March 2020, Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London predicted 510,000 Covid deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million deaths in the United States by mid-April, and 40 million COVID-19 deaths globally over the next 12 months. He compared COVID-19 to the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed between 20 and 100 million people world-wide from 1918 to 1920. Unlike COVID-19, the Spanish Flu killed tens of millions of healthy young adults and significantly impacted global mortality during a time when the world’s population was a quarter of today’s.Indeed, the Spanish Flu would kill between 1% and 5% of the entire population of the world. For COVID to be proportionately deadly, it would have needed to kill 80 to 400 million people worldwide, including large numbers of young and middle-aged adults. Contrary to the Ferguson fearmongering however, the COVID-19 death toll has been a tiny fraction of the death toll of the Spanish Flu of 1918. Comparing it to the Spanish Flu, as Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenney and other politicians have done, is misleading and intellectually dishonest.Dr. Ferguson’s track record of inaccurate claims has been glaringly evident for decades. For example, in 2005, he warned that bird flu was… (you guessed it!) like the Spanish Flu of 1918, and that it would probably kill 200 million people globally. It turned out that 43 people died of the bird flu in 2005, with an additional 384 deaths over the next 20 years. Compare the death numbers 43 and 384 with Dr. Ferguson’s prediction of 200,000,000 (two hundred million!) deaths, and decide for yourself if this is someone who should be taken seriously.Already by April and May 2020, there were no facts to support any continued confidence in Dr. Ferguson’s wild exaggerations about COVID-19.And yet, most Canadian politicians, doctors, lawyers, judges, journalists, and academics continued to believe Dr. Ferguson’s far-fetched and easily debunked claims, throughout the lockdown years. Fear of COVID-19 was the pretext, rationale and basis for violating our Charter freedoms of association, expression, conscience, religion, peaceful assembly, mobility and bodily autonomy. These lockdowns (and later vaccine passports) inflicted untold and not-yet-fully-measured harms on our economy, society, and our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being. But, critics of Ferguson’s fearmongering predictions were quickly dismissed as ill-informed, anti-science, evil — or all three.Exaggeration is a form of lying. Lies should never form the foundation of any government law, policy or health order. Why did this Ferguson fearmongering grip so many minds so powerfully, for so long?The fear took root in the minds and hearts of Canadians through repeated exposure by media, to scary visual images. People are visual and emotional. Photos of suffering and death evoke much stronger reactions than textual descriptions. Thus, photos of starving children raise more money for aid-giving charities than words printed on a page, regardless of the eloquence of those words. A video of a baby seal being clubbed to death impacts individuals far more than any description of the seal hunt possibly could. The same goes for gory car accident imagery. Imagine the impact if media showcased daily car accident casualties as extensively as COVID-related visual images; this would generate fear of driving.And so, constant exposure to alarming visual images instilled fear in many Canadians, which helped to generate public support for the prolonged and harmful lockdowns. Facts, hard data, and truth cannot compete against scary-looking photos and videos of sick, dying, and dead people, presented around-the-clock by media. With lots of repetition, extended over months and then years, videos and photos very effectively maintained wide-spread fear.In addition to being moved emotionally by visual images, people tend to believe messages they hear repeatedly. This principle of propaganda has been applied by politicians to win elections, and by corporations to sell their products. For good or for evil, it works.Once fear has taken root in the minds and hearts of people, critical thinking largely disappears and rational discourse becomes difficult, if not impossible. Frightened people simply do not think clearly, reason logically, or debate honestly. And so the fear that was started in 2020 — and then sustained for the next three years by politicians and establishment media — goes a long way toward explaining why so many intelligent people would embrace Dr. Ferguson’s obviously false claims.This Ferguson fearmongering was reinforced by the World Health Organization (WHO,) which claimed in March and April of 2020 that COVID-19 killed 3.4% of infected individuals.This figure was soon discredited. Yet, fear stuck in the hearts and minds of people and created a vicious cycle of fear and lockdown policies reinforcing each other. Lockdown policies such as mask-wearing, school closures, social distancing and the forced closure of supposedly “non-essential” businesses served to sustain and perpetuate the fear, which in turn reinforced such policies. Despite being based on wildly exaggerated claims that were discredited by hard data by April or May of 2020, the fear of COVID-19 was very real, and facilitated lockdowns and then vaccine passports. Corrupted by fear, governments across the globe violated citizens’ freedoms to associate, assemble, move, travel, work, express their opinions or even worship. Governments inflicted massive harm on economies, thereby inflicting tremendous suffering and hardship on billions of people, especially the vulnerable in third-world countries, who were already living hand-to-mouth even at the best of times. After the repeated imposition and removal of various lockdown policies in 2020 and 2021, governments then started to pressure and coerce hundreds of millions of people to get injected with a brand new vaccine for which no long-term safety data existed. Such was the power of fear, despite being based on exaggerated claims that had already been discredited in early 2020. In short, the “COVID apocalypse” was marked by a triumph of fear over facts. Wildly exaggerated projections stoked fear in people’s hearts, drove lockdown policies that violated Canadians' rights and freedoms, and created disastrous consequences for the economy and society at large. Canada’s lockdown experience reveals just how easily our rights and freedoms are trampled in a time of widespread fear and highlights the critical need for policies based on accurate data and tempered by rational public discourse.John Carpay, B.A., LL.B, is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
