Monthly Archives: October 2009

H1N1 vaccination dogma

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I must admit when I see every major newspaper carrying full-page advertisements exhorting me to do something, a sense of inner rebellion wells up making me not want to do it. In the ad, Dr. Arlene King, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health implores:

I hear it all the time – various reasons for people not getting their H1N1 flu shot. The fact is H1N1 flu is now circulating in our communities and resulting in illness, even among young healthy people. It’s new, it’s different and it spreads quickly.

Here is something else that is new and different: the H1N1 vaccine:

The federal government insists that the new H1N1 swine flu vaccine is perfectly safe. But it has agreed to cover the cost of any lawsuits launched against manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline should something go wrong.

And it admits that it approved the vaccine, known as Arepanrix, before Glaxo finished conducting any clinical trials on it.

The problem, it seems, is that Ottawa ran out of time to test the vaccine properly.

With the flu season starting and no clinical results from the Canadian vaccine yet in, the government decided to rely instead on tests of what Health Canada’s website calls “a closely similar” H1N1 vaccine manufactured for the European market by Glaxo and known as Pandemrix.

The European Medicines Agency approved Pandemrix a month ago following clinical trials involving 129 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 60.

But so far, according to the Health Canada website, there have been no tests on children or those over 60 – for either vaccine.

Instead, the federal government is relying largely on results from what Health Canada calls a “mock” vaccine based on an entirely different strain of flu.

Yet even there, according to information posted on the Health Canada website, testing is spotty.

In particular, there are no clinical data available on how any kind of flu vaccine using so-called adjuvants (materials mixed in to make a dose go farther) affects children from ages 3 to 6 and 10 to 17.

For weeks, the federal government has refused to say whether it would follow Washington’s lead and somehow shield Canada’s sole H1N1 vaccine maker from lawsuits.

“Subject to some restrictions, Canada has agreed to indemnify GSK (Glaxo) for the H1N1 vaccine,” a company spokeswoman said in an email.

Strange that the same government that is beseeching us to receive an injection of something that is so safe was initially unwilling to shield the drug company that is producing it.

Altogether I’m rather glad about the ads, even though I helped pay for them: I now have a few extra reasons for not getting the H1N1 flu shot:

The redoubtable Dr. King sounds as if she is protesting too much;

When someone insists that they know what’s good for me, I am immediately suspicious;

There is every likelihood that those who refuse the H1N1 shot will be demoted to the rank of social pariah – a category in which I feel quite at home.

And – I almost forgot – the last flu shot I had gave me the flu.

Larry David is PC

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Larry David, in urinating on a picture of Jesus to gain a laugh, is PC in two ways:

He is Politically Correct because mocking Christianity is Hollywood-cool and he knows no reprisals are likely from Christians. Just imagine if it had been a Koran.

And he is a Pee Comedian; toilet jokes are the last refuge of a comic who has run out of ways to be funny.

A group of climate experts call for……

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Well, actually, make that a group of ecclesiastical political correctness apparatchiks who know nothing whatsoever about science, climate or normal life, led and hosted by the Anglican Ken Dodd impersonator:

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At a meeting hosting by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, leaders from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i, Jain and Zoroastrian faiths called on the UK and G20 governments to fight for an ambitious deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions at UN-led talks in Copenhagen in December.

A statement issued by the groups meeting at Lambeth Palace, London, said catastrophic climate change posed a ”very real threat to the world’s poor and to our fragile creation”.

Every time a bell rings an Angel inhales CO2

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According to ZuZu Bailey in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”

Not exactly biblical, but everyone enjoys a sentimental film at Christmas and no-one takes it very seriously – although these days, perhaps some do.

Here is the contemporary equivalent from the Green Team at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Uxbridge; as is the case with much that is modern, twice as silly and four times as superstitious as the original.

The Green Team at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Uxbridge, Ont. rang their church bell 350 times as part of the 350.org climate change campaign on Oct. 24. The team was part of an international demonstration involving 182 nations. The goal: send a message to world leaders about the need for action on global warming. “CO2 in the atmosphere has to be reduced to less than 350 parts per million and quickly, if we are to save many life forms on this planet, including ourselves,” said the team in a press release issued today. “The holy spirit was working throughout the world this past weekend, we won’t fail.”

Dawkins Delirium

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h/t Damian Thompson

Richard Dawkins, has made buckets of money saying things like “The universe we observe has … no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”. Yet, when it suits him,  this champion of reason has no qualms in using the concepts – good and evil – that he claims don’t exist:

What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world? In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders. The Anglican church has at least a few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity with which Jesus himself might have connected, however tenuously: a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate. The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV. Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity. How does Pope Ratzinger measure up? The comparison is almost embarrassing.

In a bleak Dawkins universe of “blind pitiless indifference” the above ravings don’t have to make sense: they are merely the random firing of neurons in Dawkins’ fevered – I was going to say imagination, but in a materialist universe, that doesn’t exist – brain. In the real universe where good and evil do exist, a brief search of Catholic charities is all that is needed to see what a fool Dawkins makes of himself when he pontificates outside of his field.

The most disturbing part of this incoherence is the fact that Dawkins thinks Rowan is saintly. It’s hard to know what Dawkins means by that since a saint is a Christian – a person whom Dawkins enjoys hurling inane schoolboy insults at; whatever he means, Rowan Williams doesn’t need a friend like Richard Dawkins.

Beware of the Anglo-Catholics

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In Brideshead Revisited, when Charles’s cousin Jasper advises him to “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics—they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm.”, I thought Evelyn Waugh was exercising poetic license, or at least exaggerating.

But perhaps not:

But property matters and theology are not the only stumbling blocks on the road to Rome. There is another elephant in the vestry. It is one that is not spoken about openly; it is suppressed by a potent mixture of political correctness and traditional church hypocrisy. But it’s high time it was aired. It is this: a very significant proportion, perhaps even a majority in some dioceses, of Anglo-Catholic clergy are homosexual men. Everyone with a ministry in the Church of England knows this.

Just what the Roman Catholic Church needs: more homosexual priests.

Nutty Roman Catholic Nuns

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Whenever I find myself mildly enticed by the Roman Catholic Church, I read something like this:

Dominican Sister Donna Quinn is serving as an escort at the ACU Health Center, a prominent abortion business in Hinsdale, Ill.

A recent photo in the Chicago Tribune pictured two older women, one of which was Sister Donna, wearing “Clinic Escort” vests outside the center, which proclaims on its website it “now offers the RU486 abortion pill.”

A check on Loyola University Chicago’s Women and Leadership Archives, Center for Women and Leadership and the National Coalition of American Nuns (NCAN) website, a group that opposes Church teachings on moral issues, finds Sister Donna helped to either co-found or organize different groups with feminist radical causes, actively advocating such causes as reproductive “choice,” specific rights for homosexual persons, and women’s ordination.

And I’m reassured that there is a flourishing barmy faction in the RC Church, much as Anglicanism – the difference in Anglicanism is that its Western expression is the barmy faction.

Northridge long-term care home and its lack of care

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I have chronicled the tribulations experienced by my father-in-law in an Oakville nursing home in an earlier post.

After the episodes I described there and numerous complaints, things seemed to improve – until last week when he was diagnosed with pneumonia.

The nursing supervisor – I’ll call her “Angela”, mainly because that’s her real name – informed us that John had not been taking his Tylenol to reduce his fever or his antibiotics to heal the pneumonia. The question and answer session then went something like this:

Us: Can you find some other way to give John his medicine – how about a suppository?

Angela: No we don’t do that – you would have to hire a private nurse. (when I asked if that was really the answer, Angela said “no” she was just “messing with our heads”).

Us: He has mouth sores – that is why he won’t drink. Can you wash his mouth with a salt solution?

Angela: we don’t do that.

Us: He looks dehydrated; can you put him on a drip to re-hydrate him?

Angela: we don’t have the staff to do that.

Us: This is a nursing home, isn’t it? What do you advise, should we call an ambulance and have him taken to hospital?

Angela: He’s a level 3: you have to decide.

Us: well can you phone the doctor on call so we can ask him?

Angela: No, I can only call the doctor if John is injured or if he falls out of bed [!]. He is quite comfortable; you can leave him until Monday if you like and the doctor can look at him then.

After a lot more arguing the doctor was called and he advised us to call an ambulance at once. The immediate reaction of the paramedics was disbelief that the nursing home hadn’t found some way to administer the medicine that John needed.

John has been in the hospital for a day and a night now and the doctor told us that he was severely dehydrated; I have a suspicion that, had we left him in the nursing home overnight, he would have been neglected and could have died from dehydration – which makes me wonder how many others have suffered this fate.

This is a photo of John taken before the ambulance arrived; he used to be fairly rotund  – here he looks more like a concentration camp survivor:

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Northridge is a Revera company which has as its banner headline, ‘Enhancing Lives’. Whose other than the shareholders, I wonder?

A church does euthanasia

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The Unitarian Church of Vancouver proudly proclaims that it is a community of diverse beliefs and shared values. I’m not sure exactly what this means, although I toyed with: we all believe something different and all beliefs are of the same value even when they contradict each other; thus they are all rendered equal but meaningless – relatively speaking; or We value the fact that everyone in our church believes something different because…. well, we’re daft or Our shared value is that we don’t care that no-one believes the same thing; we are a church with no duplicate beliefs!

Whatever the real meaning, a value that is not shared is the sanctity of human life:

A Vancouver church is stepping in to host a workshop by an Australian right-to-die doctor after the city’s public library cancelled the event over legal concerns.

Rev. Steven Epperson of the Unitarian Church of Vancouver said he believes Dr. Philip Nitschke, director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International, has the right to free speech, even if he’s telling people how to kill themselves.