CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY: DESPITE CONSEQUENCES, STILL DOING COVID PROPAGANDA
Why are they still doing this?
Concordia University in Montreal, despite reaping the “rewards” (i.e., none) of contributing to pandemicism and reinforcing lockdowns, is at this late stage still promoting Covidian lockdown propaganda.
First, the lockdowns played a major role in damaging the University’s finances, as attested to in a recent public statement by Concordia president Graham Carr:
“Last May, we presented a budget to the Board of Governors that aimed to close this fiscal year with a deficit of $19.4 million. That deficit is essentially the result of three convergent factors: an unprecedented year-over-year decline in registrations coupled with a significant loss in tuition revenue and in the associated government grants linked to enrolment; lingering financial impacts of the pandemic and sharp growth in new types of expenses, such as digital transformation and cybersecurity [online classes, remote administration]; and a lack of major reinvestment by the government in the higher education sector [austerity]. At the same time, inflation — as we know all too well — has driven up the costs of goods, services and borrowing for the university”.
Concordia now has a massive, unprecedented deficit that has led to immediate budget cuts of nearly 8% per department. Now it also faces further declines in enrolment by students from other provinces, other countries, and local English-language colleges, which will all make matters much, much worse. Lockdowns should be the last thing on the administrators’ minds. It should be in full survival mode, and not indulging the forces that brought the University to its current state.
Instead the administration is touting a study by Concordia PhD student James Peters and assistant professor Mohsen Farhadloo: “The Effects of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions on COVID-19 Cases, Hospitalizations, and Mortality: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis”. For an overview of the article, designed as promotional propaganda by the University, see this on Concordia’s website: Nonpharmaceutical interventions saved lives and eased burdens during COVID’s first wave, new study shows.
How do we know that this study and its promotion are propaganda? Here are some of my initial observations:
🔘 The authors are pontificating on subjects beyond their expertise (one is a PhD student and the other is an Assistant Prof., neither having a background in epidemiology, medicine, or biology, both working in a business school in the Department of Supply Chain and Business Technology Management).
🔘 While the authors mention the term “lockdown,” the University prefers to tranquilize this by instead using “shelter-in-place,” which is much cozier.
🔘 They complain about studies based on snapshots—while their own is only about early 2020...and even then they admit diminishing benefits after a few weeks. However, lockdowns were repeated after early 2020, and in some countries lasted a year or more, well into 2022—thus any recommendation that suggests a repeat of these measures requires a complete picture.
🔘 They speak of “Covid mortality,” but not about how deaths were assigned to Covid. There is no discussion of the reliability of PCR testing, which generated the numbers upon which the entire enterprise of locking down was built.
🔘 They do not mention, not even in passing, how most of the early deaths occurred in nursing homes, in Quebec, for example, but also in New York State and the UK—and those deaths declined once all who could die, died. In many instances, they did not just die, and did not die from Covid, but were neglected, dehydrated, starved, and sedated to death. For Quebec, where the authors are based, these details were published by a formal Quebec inquiry.
🔘 They do not remind people that mask-wearing was spotty in North America, and the mandates came late in the spring—so the effect of masks was by definition limited, even if you think masks work perfectly.
🔘 While they focus on masks, they never mention the monumental study published last year in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Their review of the relevant literature is thus questionable, and yet their research method is presented as “a systematic literature review”. How careful can the review have been when it excludes one of the most talked-about publications of 2023, in this field, which happens to be a systematic review itself? Also, when conducting a literature review on these topics using publications from specialists, one has to also discuss the nature of funded “science” that is pushed by governments.
🔘 They do not consider seasonality—the lockdown and masking came in the spring, and just weeks later as summer came infections went down as they normally do every summer. To attribute a decline to “measures,” while ignoring seasonality would lead any critical observer to ask if this is a case of incompetence or dishonesty.
🔘 There is no acknowledgement and thus no assessment of the lives that were diminished, damaged, ruined, and even ended thanks to the lockdowns—due to learning loss, job losses, bankruptcies, indebtedness, loneliness, delayed medical treatments, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicides, among others. Not even Statistics Canada and regime media are guilty of such oversights, as limited and selective as their attention has been. Assessing the benefits of any measure demands this discussion—which is totally absent in both the study and the University’s cheerful promotion.
🔘 They deflect any criticisms in advance, by declaring all differing views as “misinformation” and “disinformation”.
Of course they argue that all of these measures should be repeated for the next “pandemic”—that was indeed the very point in writing their support for pandemicism (the intersection of authoritarianism and catastrophism).
Meanwhile, the University’s financial back has been broken by lockdown costs, and these two authors could face a bleak future in Canadian academia—and a large debt is owing to the very lockdowns which they defend.
And then there is this, the icing on the cake—the photo that accompanies the University’s promotion of the study:
Two Concordians practicing “social distancing” by measuring the space between them. Keep in mind that this was published after Dr. Anthony Fauci himself admitted that the six-foot rule was completely made up, testimony which was echoed by Fauci’s boss at the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins.
This is what officially approved Covid propaganda looks like. Why it continues to exist, that is the real question.
I had a few experiences this week that reminded me how totally the pandemicist mode of consciousness blocks any possibility of recognizing absurdity. Publishing that photo of happy social distancers the same week Fauci testified that the practice is make believe…wow.
As a propaganda-marketing campaign Covid pandemicism is like WMD — but worse, because but after WMD everyone could “see” there was no there, there. Yet this mindset just marches on!
Regime media appreciate this "study". Indeed, it's almost as if it was written for them:
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/montreal-study-describes-covid-19-health-measures-as-generally-effective-1.6735602
The exact same piece, from the Canadian Press, only this version allows comments (the first one is already critical):
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/covid-19-health-measures-were-generally-effective-montreal-study-finds