The Statement

“The bottom line is simply this:  There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians.  It’s outrageous.  This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.  There is absolutely nothing that can be done to contain this virus, other than protecting older more vulnerable people.  It should be thought of as nothing more than a bad flu season.    This is not Ebola.  It’s not SARS.  It’s politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game.  There is no action of any kind needed, other than what happened last year, when we felt unwell: we stayed home, we took chicken noodle soup, we didn’t visit Granny, and we decided when we would return to work.  We didn’t need anyone to tell us.

Masks are utterly useless.  There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever. Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue-signalling.  They are not even worn effectively most of the time.  It’s utterly ridiculous seeing these unfortunate uneducated people – I am not saying that in a pejorative sense – seeing these people walking around like lemmings obeying without any knowledge base to put the mask on their face.

Social distancing is also useless because Covid is spread by aerosols, which travel 30 metres or so before landing.

And closures have had such terrible unintended consequences.  Everywhere should be open tomorrow, as was stated in the Great Barrington Declaration that I circulated prior to this meeting.

And a word on testing. I do want to emphasise – I am in the business of testing for Covid – I do want to emphasise that positive test results do not – underlined in neon – mean a clinical infection.  It’s simply driving public hysteria, and all testing should stop, unless you’re presenting to hospital with some respiratory problem.

All that should be done is to protect the vulnerable and to give them all in the nursing homes that are under your control – give them all three to five thousand international units of Vitamin D every day, which has been shown to radically reduce the likelihood of infection.

And I would remind you all that using the Province’s own statistics the risk of death under 65 in this Province is one in 300,000. One in 300,000.  You’ve got to get a grip on this.  The scale of the response that you are undertaking, with no evidence for it, is utterly ridiculous, given the consequences of acting in the way that you are proposing.  All kinds of suicides, business closures, funerals, weddings etc etc.  It’s simply outrageous. It’s just another bad flu, and you’ve got to get your minds around that.  Let people make their own decisions.  You should be totally out of the business of medicine. You have been led down the garden path by the Chief Medical Officer of Health of this Province. I am absolutely outraged that this has reached this level.  It should all stop tomorrow.”

The source:

Dr Roger Hodkinson, former President of the Alberta Society of Laboratory Physicians, and current Executive Chairman of Bio-ID Diagnostic Inc, a private company commercializing patented technologies in DNA diagnostics, including the Covid test;  addressing the Community and Public Services committee of Edmonton City Council on 13 November 2020 on the amendment to extend the temporary mandatory face coverings by-law.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LbD1rWkF-Q )

My take on it:

The genius is in the pretext. 

On the pretext of a sufficiently large ‘near and present danger’, communicated consistently by those in authority, most of us will fall into line and do what we’re told, without thinking it through for ourselves.   Fear kicks in, and the brain locks up.  Survival mode.

Most of us.

But not all.

And of course fear is not the only motivation to comply with the mainstream narrative.  Add ignorance, blind trust, social ostracism, relational conflict, economic loss (or gain), …

What gets in the way of our compliance?

One thing is our assessment of the message itself:  Does it make sense, given what we know? We know more about some things than about others;  so our competence to assess, and our confidence in that assessment, vary.

Another thing is our assessment of the information source, ie the messenger, or messengers.  Are they competent?  Are they credible?  Are they trustworthy?  What is their life philosophy?  Does what they say, align with what we know ourselves?  Does it align with our life philosophy?

Covid has spawned a plethora of claimed subject matter experts, in virology, immunology, epidemiology, nutrition, mathematics, economics, health policy, ethics and other fields.  As always, the experts may agree or disagree, within a discipline or across disciplines, about most things or about a few.

In support of the credibility of his message, Dr Hodgkinson introduced himself as having relevant subject matter expertise.

Dr Hodgkinson also prefaced his remarks to the Edmonton City Council by describing them as ‘counter-narrative’.   This says to the audience that he and they both know that a mainstream narrative exists;  and that his views run contrary to that formed narrative.  In other words he rejects what is being told to him by those in authority.  But more than that:  he sees the need to speak out against the damage being done by the reigning paradigm, and to present a better alternative.

At this point, many in the audience will switch off.

For a few there will be the silent, impassive acknowledgement that this ‘counter-narrative’ is true.

For a few it will be food for thought.  They are still taking it in, still processing the information, mulling over the credentials, thinking it through.

For a few it will resonate, and encourage.  They too are counter-narrative.

I was already persuaded, before ever I heard of Dr Hodgkinson, and before the Great Barrington Declaration was published, and before Andrew Mather explained the overlap between exponential curves and normal ones. So you can put me in the ‘resonating and encouraged’ category.