On Feb. 2 Canada’s National Post reported the results of a Johns Hopkins study which stated that government mandated Covid lock downs had reduced the death rate among those populations upon which they had been imposed by a mere .2%. It was a statistic no doubt amenable to the truckers of Canada’s Freedom Convoy. While certainly not presuming this to be true, it may also have been welcomed by some of the paper’s staunchly “conservative” writers, Rex Murphy, Conrad Black, Barbara Kay, etc.
But on Feb. 4 the Post published another article by the same writer, Tristin Hopper, highlighting the contents of a Tweet sanctioned by the U.K.s’ Science Media Center which took exception to just about everything in the Johns Hopkins study. Among the 4 scientists who repudiated the latter was Oxford’s Seth Flaxman who had reported in 2020 that lock downs would likely save up to 3 million European lives. Naturally he was not amused by the charge that he had been absolutely wrong. At the same time he and his confreres claimed the Johns Hopkins study had been deceitfully selective in its use of statistics because its writers were of a “free-market” bias with a not very subtle agenda clearly motivating them.
I don’t pretend to have in any way exhausted the content of Tristin Hopper’s 2 articles. My objective, rather, was to celebrate the integrity of a newspaper which chose to highlight both sides of a very contentious issue. Clearly the editorial board at the Post sees energetic debate amongst an informed public as essential to the Democratic process. When was the last time CNN or NBC or the CBC or N.Y. Times or Toronto Star chose to give expression to a point of view not in keeping with its own abject political bias?