The trouble with old blowhards like Charlie Angus is that they never let the truth get in the way of a good slag. So, now that NDP MP and serial bletherer has seen fit to dismiss the Western Standard as a purveyor of right-wing disinformation over the death of Sheila Annette Lewis, it becomes necessary to deal with what is disinformation, and what is not..Two things about the death of Ms. Lewis need to be brought out..First, whether the decision that doomed her was reasonable..Second, the total lack of accountability of any of the people who made it.. Woman asks Supreme Court of Canada to DecideSheila Annette Lewis is dying of a terminal illness. .Context: Sheila Annette Lewis, who died last week at the age of 58, required major transplant surgery. At the time, nobody was allowed to know what organ she needed, where she lived or the name of the physician attending her. Apparently, we still can’t, by order of the Alberta Court of King's Bench. In my view, this can only be because the physicians concerned are afraid of the public..Who are they? They are members of “the Canadian Society of Transplantation, [Organ] Section, comprised of professionals and medical transplantation experts from across Canada.” (Thus, cited by the Court of Appeal of Alberta in its judgment last year against Sheila Lewis.) And, in the Appeal Court hearing, they are the defendants and listed as Dr. A, Dr. B etc, A through F. So, it is the decision of these six un-named people over the life and death of Ms. Lewis that we are talking about. Following the refusal by the court to order her reinstatement to the high priority waiting list, Ms. Lewis launched a GoFundMe account to pay for treatment in the US, where no such comfortable unanimity on not treating the unvaxxed exists. She died when she had raised approximately a quarter of the $500,000 she needed..So to the first point, was this committee’s decision reasonable?.In my view not, but you be the judge..The issue was that in the first place, Ms. Lewis distrusted the vaccines offered against COVID-19. Strictly speaking, it required a redefinition of what constitutes a vaccine to qualify the mRNA treatment as a vaccine, anyway. The COVID-19 vaccines were also still in the experimental clinical trial phase at the time she was told she had to get these vaccines. This is not disinformation as Mr. Angus would have you believe, but simply a matter of fact..Second, as she had already had COVID twice, Ms. Lewis believed that natural immunity removed the need for further ‘vaccination.’ This perspective had and continues to have widespread support in the research community..Therefore, although Ms. Lewis had accepted full vaccination all her life against all the usual diseases, she believed it was unreasonable for the Committee to make mRNA treatment a condition of surgery for her, hence the court challenges..It is not that the Committee selecting patients for surgery doesn’t have valid concerns. Organs are undersupplied and those most likely to benefit are those who cooperate with the physicians by following their guidance. If two smokers need a lung and one is prepared to quit and the other one won’t, the available lung goes to the one who’s ready to quit..So (they reason) why would you do a transplant on somebody who’s not prepared to take the protection offered by this so-called ‘vaccine?’.The comparison is spurious, however..The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine is not a vaccine like a smallpox vaccine is a vaccine. It does not prevent transmission of COVID-19. There is also plenty of provincial data that revealed that the majority of COVID-19 hospital admissions were in the vaccinated. And by November last year, its limitations were becoming increasingly well-known. Meanwhile the Committee chose to ignore the natural immunity offered by Ms. Lewis’s two prior COVID infections, and insist instead on their rules..It is indeed one of the nasty ironies of Ms. Lewis’s case, that having twice beaten COVID, she was denied life-saving treatment because she declined protection against COVID..One would like to believe that the Committee wrestled with this… that as the Committee considered Ms. Lewis’s plight, she had at least one fierce defender — someone like the Henry Fonda character in 12 Angry Men, who talked a bored and disengaged jury out of what looked like a slam-dunk murder conviction that would have led to a mandatory execution..Perhaps there was. I hope so..We have no way of knowing, however. All we know is that in the opinion of the Court of Appeal of Alberta, the Committee applied its process correctly and that less than a year later, Ms. Lewis died..Which brings us to the second point..As citizens, we choose to think we live in a community of mutual accountability..But we do not..We cannot assume that we shall always be allowed to face those who hold in their hands the power to extend or shorten our lives. Indeed, we may not even know their names or see their faces. When it comes to our health, our fates may be decided behind closed doors and clothed in opacity and anonymity, rendered to us in a one-way conversation. One can see and even sympathize with why Dr. C or Dr. F doesn’t want their face or their phone number to be public. People denied, can be hostile..Yet in the court rooms of the nation, judges daily look the guilty in the face and condemn them. What they say there is publicly reported. Justice is done and must be seen to be done..Doctors, like lawyers and engineers, are members of a profession of personal responsibility. Should we therefore not expect that if you, Dr. B, or Dr. D, are going to deny a person life-saving surgery that you do as does the judge in the courtroom and the engineer who signs off on a blueprint, and own your decision? To the next of kin, at least?.Confound them, hidden behind their tight little barricade of bureaucratic secrecy. What happened to Ms. Lewis could happen to any of us. And until somebody in the Government of Alberta does something about it, there is nothing you can do about it..For the edification of Mr. Angus, this is not right-wing disinformation. It is the sad and simple truth..The real disinformation comes when Members of Parliament such as Charlie Angus hang on to the tired, and generally disproven COVID talking points of the last three years because they can’t afford to admit first that they were wrong and second that in their error they caused enormous harm to this country..Confound them, too.
