This post is something of an origin story for “Recontextualizing Covid.” Near the beginning of the Lockdown in March 2020 (what I call the worst policy decision in human history) my university sent out a call for quick response COVID grants. Up until that point I had been attempting to situate the COVID moment in historical terms. I could not rationalize how any “expert” or politician or health organization could even contemplate a shut down of society and culture as a means to slow the spread of a virus that had an extraordinarily high survival rate (with the caveat that you were not old and have a body riddled with comorbidities). A policy was proposed that had no prior analogs, and so the outcomes of these policies would be entirely unknown. We now know the outcomes. Lockdowns did not save anyone’s life and they decimated people’s livelihoods.
For those of us who are experts in the study of various cultures and societies we understand that civilization is fragile. Our civilization more than any other civilization in human history is disturbingly fragile, in part because the vast swaths of humanity have moved away from subsistence farming (up until the industrial revolution nearly 90-95 percent of all humans practiced subsistence farming) and have become dependent on the extraordinary miracle of energy capture through fossil fuels and alternative forms of energy.
It is one thing for a civilization like Rome to collapse. Sure, it caused cultural and social change, but for the vast majority of people throughout the empire they did what they always did, and what their ancestors always did….farm their little plot of land, just growing enough to survive year in and year out. It is an entirely different scenario if our global structure collapses (the current state of the world is the greatest argument against Globalization). We will witness horrors beyond our comprehension precisely because we fail to see that cascading institutional collapse of such a complex system of interdependence would be cataclysmic beyond our wildest dystopia. It is the height of hubristic irresponsibility to fuck around with such a complex and fragile system because of a cough. As political leaders and “experts” (on “experts” see caveat 10 here) proposed the shut down of society and culture in order to slow the spread of an aerosolized virus so we don’t overwhelm the hospital system (but it is OK to destroy or stress every other social and cultural system), I became profoundly disturbed by the irrationality and cognitive dissonance of such a policy. The decision was akin to saving one’s thumbs by cutting off one’s arms (might as well add legs, ears, eyes, and nose). Society runs on kinetic friction. You just don’t stop it. The moment it is made static, as we willfully grind the whole thing to a halt, the ramifications will be catastrophic. We are witnessing the catastrophe in real time nearly everywhere, and in a myriad of ways.
Just look around. Pay attention.
That these same politicians and “experts” are still in positions of power and decision making is emphatically dangerous. I cannot stress this enough.
Like most academics I drew on my training and filtered COVID through prior pandemics and plagues. Plagues in Greece and Rome were devastating. Death rates were high (in part because death rates were already high, with an average life-expectancy of somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 years of age). Plagues and pestilence could kill upwards of 20, 30, or 40 percent of the population. These deaths did not accumulate around the very old or the very comorbid, like with COVID. They resulted in massive population decreases across all ages, not INCREASES in human population like with COVID (1.7% population increase, similar to pre-pandemic numbers).
In addition, these ancient cultures had an entirely different relationship with death and dying. Ancient cultures took care of their aged parents and grandparents. They didn’t shut them in elder care facilities for someone else to take care of.
They took care of them. It was built so deeply into every aspect of their culture and belief system. You owe your parents. They took care of you as a child. You are in their debt. You must repay that debt in their old age (if they were lucky enough to make it that far).
And when they died families buried them. Sons and daughters washed and purified their father’s corpse. They did this in their house. They clothed and dressed their parent. They lamented and sang songs around the body. They would carry the body to the funeral pyre and burn it. They then gathered the ashes and bones in an urn and placed it in a cemetery. They would return to the urn and mourn their father or mother or son or daughter. They mourned the spirit. In the psychosocial syntax of the ancient world you were connected to your long dead parents, and they would greet you one day, after your children buried you.
Literature, art, philosophy, and religion engaged with death and dying in deep and profound levels. These cultures understood that aging and death were a vital part of life. They were not something to be hidden away and ignored. They did not medicalize the human experience. They sought to understand the human experience.
Modern progress, invention, and innovation have ameliorated people’s lives in so many ways (grab a coffee, smoke a joint, watch some porn, go to sleep), but when it comes to aging and death we have regressed, and regressed to a point where we are on the verge of losing our humanity. The people who are the MOST afraid of COVID also happen to be the most shallow people to have ever walked the Earth. They have lost their humanity as they mandate how humanity must behave.
One thing that ancient narratives of plague shared with each other was the focus on cascading institutional collapse. While these texts were certainly interested in the disease per se they were much more focused on the social and cultural collapse which followed. It was this shared feature of the narratives which caused me concern in March 2020. I took it as a working axiom that COVID too would result in cascading institutional failure.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think that this cascading institutional failure would be the product of our leaders’ policy decisions. In antiquity, the sheer number of dead caused the foundations of society and culture to buckle.
During the COVID pandemic we did it to ourselves.
And so when I saw that my home institution sent out a call for research proposals in April 2020 I spent a day working up this short proposal.
A number of ancient Greek and Roman authors describe the spread of viral infection in texts which span 700BCE-10CE. Homer (Iliad 1.33-124), Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47-55), Sophocles (Philoctetes and Oedipus Rex), Lucretius (de rerum natura 6.1138-1286), Vergil (Georgics 3.440-566 and 4.251-558), and Ovid (Metamorphoses 7.523-613) offer detailed accounts of infectious disease and its impact on society. The central question this project asks is; what can these narratives of the past tell us about our own future in the aftermath of COVID-19? Each of these narratives address two aspects of viral infection. (1) They each describe in exact detail the impact of the disease on animal and human bodies (in most of the narratives animals contract the virus first, then they give it to humans). (2) Each narrative focuses on the aftermath of infection on society and culture. Our current state of assessment of COVID-19 is centered on data accumulation on the spread of the virus, morbidity rates, social distancing, therapeutic treatments and potential vaccines. In essence, we are focused almost wholly on part 1 of viral infection. Part 2 from the ancient literature comes as a warning for us. Each of these narratives of viral infection offer far more force and valence to the aftermath of the infection. For example, Homer’s plague in Iliad 1 is followed by 23 books, all of which address social fragmentation and disintegration. Sophocles’ Oedipus begins with a plague and then focuses on the disintegration of the family and suicide. Thucydides’ Plague of Athens highlights the mirage and fiction of political discourse and social institutions in the face of a natural disaster. Generally, scholarship falls in two distinct camps. Scholars attempt to diagnose the virus described in the texts or they view these narratives in terms of literary allusion and intertextuality, so Ovid is alluding to Vergil who is alluding to Lucretius, who is alluding to Thucydides, who then alludes to Homer. Plague here simply becomes a literary game. But the evidence in these documents ought to cause us pause. They should be taken as data which will define our futures. Each of these narratives is clear in this vital point: after the virus has moved through human bodies en masse there follows a cascading failure of fundamental social, political, and cultural institutions. The aftermath of the virus is far worse than the virus itself. There are important limitations to using the ancient material to assess COVID-19. All ancient societies were largely agricultural (upwards of 95% of all people were subsistence farmers). This means that even with the complete breakdown in social, political, and cultural institutions most individuals were able to continue to farm and continue their very low standard of living (by today’s standards). Current society is much more fragile. Cascading failure of modern institutions (which would be catalyzed, first, by the first global depression in human history) would result in the breakdown of supply chains, followed by a fracturing of energy systems and the attendant consequences. Unlike ancient societies almost no one in North America is a subsistence farmer. The ancient evidence is a striking warning that while we are focused on phase 1 of the viral pandemic, the consequences of phase 2 could result in the total and complete collapse of society as we know it. It has happened in the past and it will happen in the future, unless we can think clearly through policy decisions now to avoid these potential crises.
I admit I was astonished when I was awarded funding for the grant. But I was more astonished at how I saw our societies change and alter in the months following. I was astonished at the rate at which government, media and pharmaceutical companies colluded in the construction of the COVID regime-narrative. I was disturbed by the demonization of those who called into question the COVID lockdown policy or other aspects of the pandemic response. I saw reputable scientists undergo social evisceration for pointing out problems with the policy. I saw my own colleagues become blubbering and banal proponents of the regime-narrative. I saw neighbours, friends and family believe that their children were going to die of COVID (in spite of the evidence that this was simply not the case). I witnessed the greatest propaganda campaign in my lifetime (the build up to the Iraq war paled in comparison). I witnessed the rise of authoritarian regimes in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Medical apartheid and discrimination were accepted (and continue to be).
We are at the beginning. It will get worse.
It was clear that my academic freedom had limits during the COVID era. While I continued to read and research COVID, analyzing data, reading scholarship (both on COVID as well as ancient plagues and disease narratives), it felt safer to wait for the COVID hysteria to die down so a rational assessment of the pandemic response could be met with open minds. Academic institutions had been wholly captured by Covid hysteria (and they still are).
I witnessed the failure of academia to allow for a free exchange of ideas, especially ideas which call into question the prevailing policy, even as that policy was showing itself to be an unmitigated failure. We pretend it wasn’t, but it was. A lot of useless this and that.
Then the vaxxines began to fail. They then said another shot was needed, and another, and another. You will need a yearly shot. You need a vaxxine passport. Only medical discrimination can stop the virus. The vaxxines never were meant to grant immunity! They just offer protection. And I saw my vaxxed friends begin to question the narrative….
One of the reasons I chose not to take the vaxxine is I did not trust our health experts who were stating that these inoculations would neutralize the virus (the experts had been caught in numerous lies throughout the pandemic). That there had never been a vaccine for any corona virus was one thing. I assumed it likely that these vaxxines too would not grant immunity. Past is prologue. I thought it prudent to wait and see what happened to the vaxxed first (most of whom I considered to be incredibly imprudent when they lined up for their shots). That leaders like Justin Trudeau were buying 11 shots for every man, woman, and child in Canada (while they were claiming 95 percent effectiveness) suggested that our health authorities were not being honest about the vaxxines. In addition, it had been reported that the low mortality rate from COVID-19 in Japan was due to residual T-cell immunity from the 2003 SARS pandemic. Given my relative health and age I decided against the vaxxination, assuming that 1) I would contract COVID, 2) that my natural immunity would be 100 percent effective against COVID (which it was), and 3) that I would prefer to have natural T-Cell immunity for the future, just in case another virus makes its rounds in a few decades when my aged body will be more at risk. I found it bizarre that Big Pharma (with the help of governments) had successfully marketed the idea that our own immune system cannot mitigate this virus. Mass global inoculation during a pandemic with a relatively untested vaxxine did not seem prudent (and yet that was the final and only solution).
This perspective was not allowed. The vaxxines are the best thing ever!
And then my vaxxed friends began to question the narrative as they all contracted COVID (every single one) during November and December 2021—as politicians were stating that the unvaxxed were all going to get sick and die. Dark Winter (that politicians are still in positions of power after stating something so disturbing and harmful…). Then governmental officials began to say the vaxxine would not be efficient enough to stop COVID…
then everything changed.
Lockdowns were reimposed. Businesses Shut. Curfews recommenced. NYE cancelled. Police roaming the streets, breaking up protests and arresting people. More Masks (if you think masks are effective at this point I can only question your intelligence). Then the hatred commenced against those who practiced prudence and informed consent. Demonization, marginalization, hate speech, blame, unvax tax, travel restrictions on the unvaxxed, discussion of prohibiting the unvaxxed from purchasing food at the grocery. More hatred. Accusations of racism and misogyny. The media echoed the hatred. The more maniacal of the vaxxed talked openly about quarantine camps and forced vaxxination.
And the vaxxed became rabid, and they lined up for their booster(s), and they blamed the unvaxxed for the lack of vaxxine effectiveness. Never once did they blame the lies of their government. And they took their shots and still caught COVID, and they thanked their shots on Twitter.
The government ratcheted up a new campaign of fear, hate and misinformation in order to keep the vaxxed from finally waking up. For a moment they saw the reality, and then they sunk back into the fog of the miasmatic state.
It was at this point that I decided academics and intellectuals cannot sit this one out.
The covid regime will not stop. It needs to be made to stop.
So I wrote a series of posts (here, here, and here) at the beginning of January based off the initial argument in my grant proposal.
And so I will continue.
Take a few minutes and read Boccaccio’s description of Florence during the Plague. While COVID at no point ever rose to the level of death as the Plague, note that whatever protocol was followed in Florence…they all failed.
Sound familiar?
In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert the Plague, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; despite also humble supplications addressed to God, and often repeated both in public procession and otherwise, by the devout; towards the beginning of the spring of the said year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that shewed as if miraculous.
[ 010 ] Not such were they as in the East, where an issue of blood from the nose was a manifest sign of inevitable death; but in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli. [ 011 ] From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. [ 012 ] And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they shewed themselves. [ 013 ] Which maladies seemed to set entirely at naught both the art of the physician and the virtues of physic; indeed, whether it was that the disorder was of a nature to defy such treatment, or that the physicians were at fault--besides the qualified there was now a multitude both of men and of women who practised without having received the slightest tincture of medical science--and, being in ignorance of its source, failed to apply the proper remedies; in either case, not merely were those that recovered few, but almost all within three days from the appearance of the said symptoms, sooner or later, died, and in most cases without any fever or other attendant malady.
[ 014 ] Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole, just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it. [ 015 ] Nay, the evil went yet further, for not merely by speech or association with the sick was the malady communicated to the healthy with consequent peril of common death; but any that touched the clothes of the sick or aught else that had been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to contract the disease.
[ 016 ] So marvellous sounds that which I have now to relate, that, had not many, and I among them, observed it with their own eyes, I had hardly dared to credit it, much less to set it down in writing, though I had had it from the lips of a credible witness.
[ 017 ] I say, then, that such was the energy of the contagion of the said pestilence, that it was not merely propagated from man to man, but, what is much more startling, it was frequently observed, that things which had belonged to one sick or dead of the disease, if touched by some other living creature, not of the human species, were the occasion, not merely of sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death. [ 018 ] Whereof my own eyes (as I said a little before) had cognisance, one day among others, by the following experience. The rags of a poor man who had died of the disease being strewn about the open street, two hogs came thither, and after, as is their wont, no little trifling with their snouts, took the rags between their teeth and tossed them to and fro about their chaps; whereupon, almost immediately, they gave a few turns, and fell down dead, as if by poison, upon the rags which in an evil hour they had disturbed.
[ 019 ] In which circumstances, not to speak of many others of a similar or even graver complexion, divers apprehensions and imaginations were engendered in the minds of such as were left alive, inclining almost all of them to the same harsh resolution, to wit, to shun and abhor all contact with the sick and all that belonged to them, thinking thereby to make each his own health secure. [ 020 ] Among whom there were those who thought that to live temperately and avoid all excess would count for much as a preservative against seizures of this kind. Wherefore they banded together, and, dissociating themselves from all others, formed communities in houses where there were no sick, and lived a separate and secluded life, which they regulated with the utmost care, avoiding every kind of luxury, but eating and drinking very moderately of the most delicate viands and the finest wines, holding converse with none but one another, lest tidings of sickness or death should reach them, and diverting their minds with music and such other delights as they could devise. [ 021 ] Others, the bias of whose minds was in the opposite direction, maintained, that to drink freely, frequent places of public resort, and take their pleasure with song and revel, sparing to satisfy no appetite, and to laugh and mock at no event, was the sovereign remedy for so great an evil: and that which they affirmed they also put in practice, so far as they were able, resorting day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking with an entire disregard of rule or measure, and by preference making the houses of others, as it were, their inns, if they but saw in them aught that was particularly to their taste or liking; [ 022 ] which they were readily able to do, because the owners, seeing death imminent, had become as reckless of their property as of their lives; so that most of the houses were open to all comers, and no distinction was observed between the stranger who presented himself and the rightful lord. Thus, adhering ever to their inhuman determination to shun the sick, as far as possible, they ordered their life. [ 023 ] In this extremity of our city's suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved, for lack of those who should have administered and enforced them, most of whom, like the rest of the citizens, were either dead or sick, or so hard bested for servants that they were unable to execute any office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.
[ 024 ] Not a few there were who belonged to neither of the two said parties, but kept a middle course between them, neither laying the same restraint upon their diet as the former, nor allowing themselves the same license in drinking and other dissipations as the latter, but living with a degree of freedom sufficient to satisfy their appetites, and not as recluses. They therefore walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses, deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the brain with such perfumes, because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and the dying, and the odours of drugs.
[ 025 ] Some again, the most sound, perhaps, in judgment, as they were also the most harsh in temper, of all, affirmed that there was no medicine for the disease superior or equal in efficacy to flight; following which prescription a multitude of men and women, negligent of all but themselves, deserted their city, their houses, their estates, their kinsfolk, their goods, and went into voluntary exile, or migrated to the country parts, as if God in visiting men with this pestilence in requital of their iniquities would not pursue them with His wrath wherever they might be, but intended the destruction of such alone as remained within the circuit of the walls of the city; or deeming, perchance, that it was now time for all to flee from it, and that its last hour was come.
[ 026 ] Of the adherents of these divers opinions not all died, neither did all escape; but rather there were, of each sort and in every place, many that sickened, and by those who retained their health were treated after the example which they themselves, while whole, had set, being everywhere left to languish in almost total neglect. [ 027 ] Tedious were it to recount, how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers. [ 028 ] Wherefore the sick of both sexes, whose number could not be estimated, were left without resource but in the charity of friends (and few such there were), or the interest of servants, who were hardly to be had at high rates and on unseemly terms, and being, moreover, one and all, men and women of gross understanding, and for the most part unused to such offices, concerned themselves no further than to supply the immediate and expressed wants of the sick, and to watch them die; in which service they themselves not seldom perished with their gains. [ 029 ] In consequence of which dearth of servants and dereliction of the sick by neighbours, kinsfolk and friends, it came to pass--a thing, perhaps, never before heard of--that no woman, however dainty, fair or well-born she might be, shrank, when stricken with the disease, from the ministrations of a man, no matter whether he were young or no, or scrupled to expose to him every part of her body, with no more shame than if he had been a woman, submitting of necessity to that which her malady required; wherefrom, perchance, there resulted in after time some loss of modesty in such as recovered. [ 030 ] Besides which many succumbed, who with proper attendance, would, perhaps, have escaped death; so that, what with the virulence of the plague and the lack of due tendance of the sick, the multitude of the deaths, that daily and nightly took place in the city, was such that those who heard the tale--not to say witnessed the fact--were struck dumb with amazement. [ 031 ] Whereby, practices contrary to the former habits of the citizens could hardly fail to grow up among the survivors.
[ 032 ] It had been, as to-day it still is, the custom for the women that were neighbours and of kin to the deceased to gather in his house with the women that were most closely connected with him, to wail with them in common, while on the other hand his male kinsfolk and neighbours, with not a few of the other citizens, and a due proportion of the clergy according to his quality, assembled without, in front of the house, to receive the corpse; and so the dead man was borne on the shoulders of his peers, with funeral pomp of taper and dirge, to the church selected by him before his death. [ 033 ] Which rites, as the pestilence waxed in fury, were either in whole or in great part disused, and gave way to others of a novel order. [ 034 ] For not only did no crowd of women surround the bed of the dying, but many passed from this life unregarded, and few indeed were they to whom were accorded the lamentations and bitter tears of sorrowing relations; nay, for the most part, their place was taken by the laugh, the jest, the festal gathering; observances which the women, domestic piety in large measure set aside, had adopted with very great advantage to their health. [ 035 ] Few also there were whose bodies were attended to the church by more than ten or twelve of their neighbours, and those not the honourable and respected citizens; but a sort of corpse-carriers drawn from the baser ranks, who called themselves becchini and performed such offices for hire, would shoulder the bier, and with hurried steps carry it, not to the church of the dead man's choice, but to that which was nearest at hand, with four or six priests in front and a candle or two, or, perhaps, none; nor did the priests distress themselves with too long and solemn an office, but with the aid of the becchini hastily consigned the corpse to the first tomb which they found untenanted. [ 036 ] The condition of the lower, and, perhaps, in great measure of the middle ranks, of the people shewed even worse and more deplorable; for, deluded by hope or constrained by poverty, they stayed in their quarters, in their houses, where they sickened by thousands a day, and, being without service or help of any kind, were, so to speak, irredeemably devoted to the death which overtook them. [ 037 ] Many died daily or nightly in the public streets; of many others, who died at home, the departure was hardly observed by their neighbours, until the stench of their putrefying bodies carried the tidings; and what with their corpses and the corpses of others who died on every hand the whole place was a sepulchre.
[ 042 ] As consecrated ground there was not in extent sufficient to provide tombs for the vast multitude of corpses which day and night, and almost every hour, were brought in eager haste to the churches for interment, least of all, if ancient custom were to be observed and a separate resting-place assigned to each, they dug, for each graveyard, as soon as it was full, a huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a time, piling them up as merchandise is stowed in the hold of a ship, tier upon tier, each covered with a little earth, until the trench would hold no more. [ 043 ] But I spare to rehearse with minute particularity each of the woes that came upon our city, and say in brief, that, harsh as was the tenor of her fortunes, the surrounding country knew no mitigation; for there--not to speak of the castles, each, as it were, a little city in itself--in sequestered village, or on the open champaign, by the wayside, on the farm, in the homestead, the poor hapless husbandmen and their families, forlorn of physicians' care or servants' tendance, perished day and night alike, not as men, but rather as beasts. [ 044 ] Wherefore, they too, like the citizens, abandoned all rule of life, all habit of industry, all counsel of prudence; nay, one and all, as if expecting each day to be their last, not merely ceased to aid Nature to yield her fruit in due season of their beasts and their lands and their past labours, but left no means unused, which ingenuity could devise, to waste their accumulated store; [ 045 ] denying shelter to their oxen, asses, sheep, goats, pigs, fowls, nay, even to their dogs, man's most faithful companions, and driving them out into the fields to roam at large amid the unsheaved, nay, unreaped corn. [ 046 ]Many of which, as if endowed with reason, took their fill during the day, and returned home at night without any guidance of herdsman. [ 047 ] But enough of the country! What need we add, but (reverting to the city) that such and so grievous was the harshness of heaven, and perhaps in some degree of man, that, what with the fury of the pestilence, the panic of those whom it spared, and their consequent neglect or desertion of not a few of the stricken in their need, it is believed without any manner of doubt, that between March and the ensuing July upwards of a hundred thousand human beings lost their lives within the walls of the city of Florence, which before the deadly visitation would not have been supposed to contain so many people! [ 048 ] How many grand palaces, how many stately homes, how many splendid residences, once full of retainers, of lords, of ladies, were now left desolate of all, even to the meanest servant! How many families of historic fame, of vast ancestral domains, and wealth proverbial, found now no scion to continue the succession! How many brave men, how many fair ladies, how many gallant youths, whom any physician, were he Galen, Hippocrates, or Æsculapius himself, would have pronounced in the soundest of health, broke fast with their kinsfolk, comrades and friends in the morning, and when evening came, supped with their forefathers in the other world!
@MC - I read some of your posts on Bryam Bridles substack. Glad to see that all Canadian professors aren't brain washed state cultists! Regarding McGill, I have had debates with Joe Schwartz who is clearly in bed with and an apologist for agrichem companies, notably Bayer, and has written a number of 'fantacy' articles claiming gyphosate is perfectly "safe and effective." He clearly stays away from the shikimate debate (which exists in plants, fungi and bacteria and which is disrupted by glyphosate) and who ignores the more than $10 billion in bonds posted by the company to handle current and (some) future liability claims now in US courts.
I am heartened by the fact that McGill still has professors that actually follow the science and are not coporate captured. Sad that you are leaving but fully undestandable!
My area of focus is the microbiome (human and soil). I refused to get jabbed until we had more than 2 months data when the vaccines were first forced on people and the longer I wait, the more data piles up showing just how harmful they are, especially on the essential innate immune system which is home to NK cells and a host of other mechanisms that have evolved to kill pathogenic bacteria and viruses. And based on growing evidence, these vaccines appear to disable these first line defenders which is why the jabbed get covid repeatedly. On a personal note, I got covid from a quadruple vaxxed physician friend and his wife (3x jabbed). I nebulized with a normalized mixture of hydrogen peroxide and povalone iodine hourly for the first 2 days, had mild symptom and would never have know I had anything other than a mild cold if I had not been informed of a positive test by my infector. He and his wife on the other hand, got quite sick. So much for "safe and effective" parroted by our health dictators!
Too bad more folks didn't make the effort to understand their immune systems and undertand the work of people like Dr Bryam Bridle, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough etc. better. If they had they wouldn't have been so glib about injecting themselves and their children with highly inflammatory and toxic spike proteins that as we have learned the hard way are worse than useless in fighting viral variants!
I read most of the books mentioned here including the Decameron. It should be required reading. But people can't be bothered to even read up on masks. We're absurdly shallow and our mettle astonishingly weak.
How do you think 'it will get worse' manifest itself?