The University of Western Ontario Ranks First as Canada's Worst Laughingstock

Not a laughing matter, however, is the fact that it doubles down on its policy of mandating boosters and masks, and cannot cite independent scientific support

Completely isolated in Canada, Western’s American leadership (president Alan Shepard is American) has resorted to “best practices” mode: imitating US Ivy League universities, because they are assumed to be the “best” and are always right. It is the kind of undignified mimesis, this copy-and-paste mentality, that has displaced critical thinking on most Canadian university and college campuses—but even on the Covid issue, Western exceeds all others. Fauci has resigned, and the CDC’s old guidelines have been reversed (both happening this month), yet they continue to prevail at Western. Western is apparently where bad ideas go to retire.

The Covid narrative has collapsed, even among the staunchest institutional pillars of the regime: Canadian universities. What Western hopes to achieve by distinguishing itself as an obdurate outlier is not public knowledge.

Florentine Strzelczyk, Western’s provost and vice-president, wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca that their decision to impose a booster mandate for incoming students this year was “informed by consultation with our medical experts and the Western community, and mirrors several of North America’s largest universities, including Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale per CDC recommendations”.

Note the falsehood: the CDC has not recommended that boosters be mandated for universities. This is either ignorance, and an unwillingness to read, or it is a deliberate lie—either of which should be a firing offense as academic misconduct. At the very least, it is an undignified posture of aping others and refusing to think for yourself—this is an example of following “best practices”.

Interesting as well is that the statement cites the CDC. The CDC has no jurisdiction in Canada. However, as an Ontario university, Western must at least acknowledge what comes from Ontario’s own Ministry of Health. That is where Western stands out as most out of place: Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, “has moved in the direction of a risk-rate based approach on questions such as who should get vaccinated. He also doesn’t see the need for mandatory masking in educational settings, and says that he wouldn’t bring such measures back unless the health system was overwhelmed due to a rise in COVID patients”.

In July, Moore warned of the risks that boosters, specifically, carried for young people—like Western’s students:

“If you’ve had your first two doses and your first booster, we would not – you may get your second booster dose, but it’s not a ‘should,’….There’s always a risk to having any therapeutic versus a benefit. You want to make sure there’s a very strong benefit versus the risk. If you’re an 18-year-old healthy individual, the risk of getting hospitalized if you have no underlying medical illness is very, very low. We know there is a risk, a very small risk, 1 in 5000 that may get myocarditis, for example, and you’d have to have that discussion on the risk-benefit of a complication from the vaccine versus the benefit of vaccination – for a young, healthy person”.

The question then is: Why would Western knowingly jeopardize the health and safety of its students?

South of the border, as one columnist remarked, “the Centers for Disease Control under the Biden administration released relaxed COVID guidance on vaccinations, quarantine and screening people with no symptoms”. Thus not even the CDC would agree with Western. Western is standing alone as a relic of the worst of the past 2.5 years.

Strzelczyk was also unable to cite one single expert outside of the institution to back up Western’s absurdly indefensible position. What she did do was claim that certain people on campus were satisfied with the policy, without mentioning how many. I am very familiar with this tactic on campus: claim unproven support, or, run a survey and never share the results with the campus community and then claim victory for the university’s position.

Infectious diseases experts in Canada contacted by CTV could not come up with any justification for mandating boosters, if the goal is prevention of transmission. One went further:

Dr. Martha Fulford, an infectious disease expert with McMaster University...doesn’t agree that booster shots should be mandated for public health. Instead, she told CTV National News, booster shots should be considered at the individual level. “It has become clear that COVID vaccines are not stopping onward transmission,” she said, referring to the spread of variants such as Omicron and sub-variants. When it comes to determining the need for booster shots, it would be easy for each person to have an individual risk assessment with their family physician, Fulford said. “But we’re not going to see a public health benefit in terms of a decrease in onward transmission,” she said. “If you’re going to mandate something, regardless of whether you agree with that person’s individual decision, there has to be a very compelling public health or medical rational for that. It’s just not there anymore for the COVID vaccines and certainly not for boosters.”

Another news outlet quoted infectious disease specialist Dr. Neil Rau, who questions the value of Western’s policy:

“To do it in a young, healthy population is really questionable. It’s the wrong intervention in the wrong place at the wrong time in the evolution of COVID”.

This is how you get stuck standing as the lone laughingstock in Canada, Western. Admit you were wrong, and admit failure—at least you can still pretend to have an ounce of integrity and intelligence left if you do something that is very rare in Canada: be honest.

Instead, it is likely that we will see Western’s administration follow this simplistic and illogical (but very familiar) formula: if Harvard has its students injected, and then Western does the same, well then Western must be a university just like Harvard!

Follow the Science(s)

“Follow The Science” has been revealed to be a highly subjective statement that bends according to interpretation and context. In serious, self-respecting quarters, the dictate is quoted mockingly. Even among Ontario universities alone, there is no agreement on what “the science” is. Most institutions have not mandated boosters, and continue to suspend mandatory injection of the primary series. The University of Toronto has mandated boosters, but only for students living on campus—and that has not gone without controversy, condemnation, and justified protests. Most institutions have made the wearing of “masks” optional. I also opt to wear masks, but only for Halloween. Western has chosen to be the ideological hard liner, recalling one of those stone faced, senile, drunken members of the politburo barely standing to oversee military parades in Moscow’s Red Square.

Human Rights Violations

Some of the student protesters who came out on Western’s main campus on Saturday, August 27, 2022, carried signs citing the Nuremberg Code. That was very appropriate. For the past two years, Canadian universities have—whether they admit it or not—been among the worst violators of human rights in Canada, particularly with reference to coerced injections, denial of the fundamental right of informed consent, denial of the right to personal medical privacy, as they violated the right to bodily autonomy. University administrators misinformed campuses that the non-vaccines were “safe and effective,” even as students (including one in a class I teach) were being hospitalized with dangerous heart inflammation. The non-vaccines were so “effective” that universities then ramped up “mask” mandates—which also worked, in terms of increasing the load of micro-plastics that users inhaled deep into their lungs (along with Covid).

Western was the first university to fire a professor in 2021 because she defended her right to informed consent and bodily autonomy, that person being the ethics and philosophy professor, Dr. Julie Ponesse—she also spoke at Saturday’s protest. In the process, Western put itself down as a leader in campus violations of human rights—and to this day it stands, almost totally alone, in continuing to violate fundamental human rights.

At Western, the Pandemic is a Lifestyle Choice

The “mask” has clearly come to symbolize what life means at Western:

Look at the billboard that “welcomes” students on that campus: it is meant as a vision of the future. One wonders if Western hired consultants who worked on the movie set for Bladerunner. The choice of symbolism cannot be accidental, not in an institution run by people who hire marketing consultants, guided by the mimetic policy called “best practices”.

At the so-called “University” of Western Ontario, “the pandemic” is a lifestyle choice. Like anorexia, it is a way of “living” that comes with harsh consequences. One has to make painful sacrifices to achieve purity. Without agreeing to be hazed by one’s own college administrators, you cannot be admitted to full membership. Having twisted, filtered, and reduced “The Science” to a mere fetish, this institution is now the only one in Canada that today mandates “vaccination” for everyone on campus (even visitors), plus wearing of “masks” virtually everywhere, and testing. In London, Ontario, natural immunity no longer exists. Even just conceptually, it’s absolutely impossible for “Western” scholars and administrators to grasp the idea of natural immunity. Not only is natural immunity non-existent, but so is the alleged effectiveness of the alleged vaccines—boosters are now required. The non-vaccines are so effective that masks need to be worn. All these measures combined are so effective that they need testing to check if they are working.

Testing Students’ Patience

On Saturday, August 27, 2022, the campus at Western came alive with protest. The reader can view coverage both at one of the platforms used by Students 4 Agency and their “Enough is Enough” campaign, and the news feed produced by journalist Andrew Lawton, replete with videos of the day’s events.

More than 400 people came out to take part in the protest, in a scene that we saw nowhere on any university campus in Canada a year ago. Canadian students have finally awakened, and they are having none of the Permanent Pandemic. They have decided that Permanent Emergency is not going to be their lifestyle choice. They have rejected the authoritarian, dictatorial, and neo-colonial Sanitary Regime that Western seeks to sustain. Western, led by Alan Shepard, is run by what is little more than a cell of the ruling federal Liberal Party, which mistakes intransigence for integrity.

Indeed, the administration at Western engaged in slanderous, preemptive criminalization of the protest, by suggesting that “dangerous” and “disruptive” types might insert themselves. The only thing missing was the declaration of a campus “emergency,” copying from Trudeau’s manual for stifling dissent. The protest was, of course, absolutely peaceful. Yet Western would like to reinforce the idea that those who oppose mandates are “dangerous,” unlike the good people in the administration who pressure young people to take unnecessary and even dangerous injections.

Regime media which covered the protest, did so without the usual hectoring and insults, and even showed the student protest leaders in a sympathetic light.

At Western, the thickest skulls are in the administration, while the brightest minds are in the line of protesters. When the latter can overtake the former, Western might even have a future. But for now, the term “university” is to be associated with Western as little more than a marketing and branding ploy. You’re not meant to fall for it.