A group of 13 doctors wrote a letter to Premier Ford supporting the MP Roman Baber, whom Ford expelled from caucus for questioning his gov’ts response to covid with lockdowns.

Roman Baber

5h  · I’m thankful to a group of 13 Doctors who wrote a letter in my support to Doug Ford yesterday. They wrote that Lockdown is having a horrific effect on the physical & mental health of Ontarians. They cite research that Lockdowns don’t reduce ICUs or deaths. The Doctors also wrote that Ontario’s hospitals are at or below capacity for this time of year and that there is no scientific/medical basis for Lockdowns.

It’s great to see more healthcare professionals speaking out. The Lockdown is ruining millions of lives. I ask Doug Ford to LIFT THE LOCKDOWN!

Click here to read doctor’s letter (1) Facebook

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FUREY: ‘People are really spiralling’ — mental health experts sound off on lockdown harms

Author of the article:Anthony FureyPublishing date:Jan 25, 2021 

Experts have mental health concerns due to COVID-19 lockdowns. Getty Images

The pandemic and its lockdowns are causing an unprecedented mental health crisis that is having serious ramifications that will be felt for years to come, according to experts on the ground who are speaking out about their concerns.

“I have never seen anything like it in my 20 years,” says Michelle Sorenson, a clinical psychologist who sees patients in Ottawa. “People are really spiralling after almost a year of traumatic stress.

Sorenson points out that the small things that kept her patients going in the summer and fall — going to yoga or the gym, meeting a friend for coffee, seeing parents at school drop-off — have now been taken away from them. “Without a sense of community, mental health is at an all-time crisis point,” she says.

Other professionals in Ontario are seeing similar societal problems unfold.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the severity of a broad range of symptoms experienced by my patients,” says Dr. Mark Berber, a psychiatrist at Markham Stouffville Hospital and professor at University of Toronto and Queen’s University.

“Students struggle with online learning and many have dropped out of school completely.Depressed and anxious patients grieve over the loss of their businesses … Many patients have contemplated suicide,” he says.

Berber points to one example of an older patient whose despair led him to request medically assisted dying despite suffering from no serious health challenges. Berber refers to that case as “the canary in the coal mine” and “a predictor of things to come.

Dr. Tess Clifford, who is the director of the Psychology Clinic at Queen’s University, describes what’s happening as a shadow mental health pandemic.

“I haven’t seen many people who are extremely anxious about getting sick, especially since the summer,” says Clifford, who sees patients in the Kingston area, which has a relatively low rate of COVID-19 cases. “Most of the people I’m seeing are more significantly impacted by the lockdowns, and especially this most recent one was a bit of a shock for some people here.”

Clifford says she is particularly concerned with the impacts of chronic stress on children and youth. “We’ve seen higher rates of referrals, and many children and youth with no history of mental health concerns who have developed significant concerns,” Clifford notes.

The issues she’s seen arising in children and youth include separation anxiety, panic attacks and more aggressive behaviour as well as physiological symptoms such as stomach aches, headaches, tics and sleep disruption.

When it comes to solutions, Clifford is calling for government and experts to adopt a “child-centred framework” when making decisions about restrictions and reopenings.

“If we’re living in an environment that is causing us harm, no amount of therapy or strategies will be sufficient to thrive,” says Clifford. “The most effective way to prevent further mental health impacts is to not implement policies and restrictions that cause harm (even if unintended).”

Sorenson likewise thinks policymakers need to focus more on these harms. “I am astonished at how I will see an excellent letter from a group of doctors imploring the government to send children back to school, founded in reason and data, and hardly anyone even publishes it,” she says.

For Berber, the closing off of places like gyms and outdoor recreation — as well as the closure of playgrounds last spring — make it difficult for patients to get the mental health benefits of exercising.

“My patients accepted the initial lockdown, appreciating the need to learn about the novel virus,” he says. “This acceptance of the early lockdown has been replaced with skepticism, with many believing that the ongoing lockdown measures are unreasonable and draconian.”

It’s become a common refrain to “listen to the experts,” but to date, Canadian officials have done a poor job of including the voices of the many experts speaking out on the serious harms being caused by the restrictions and closures across the country.

afurey@postmedia.com

Mental health experts sound off on lockdown harms | Toronto Sun

Joe Biden’s war on women

On his first day in office, the president signed away women’s sex-based rights.

JO BARTOSCH25th January 2021ShareTopicsFEMINISMPOLITICSUSA

I love the can-do optimism of our American cousins. Last week it was hard not to get swept up by their enthusiasm in welcoming a senile hair-sniffer to the White House. But as a Brit, not only do I feel privileged to enjoy free healthcare and cynicism but also the right to name women as ‘adult human females.’ On 20 January, on his first day in office, one of President Biden’s first actions was to sign off an executive order entitled ‘Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation’, which effectively removed the rights of the four million women who work in the federal government, and more who rely on statutory services.

Within hours of the executive order being passed, the hashtag #bidenerasedwomen was trending across social media. With a virtue-signalling flick of the pen, Democrat Biden had managed to do what no neocon Republican had ever managed before: he effectively took away women’s single-sex bathrooms, shelters and sports.

President Biden’s executive order is based on the Bostock vs Clayton County Supreme Court ruling from 2020. The case centred on a man, Aimee Stephens, who identified as a woman and therefore wanted to wear the women’s dress code at his place of work: a funeral home. This could have been an opportunity for the court to stop sex-specific dress codes. But instead it was ruled that Stephens had been fired for being transgender, and that this was equivalent to sex discrimination.

Freedom to live and work free from discrimination is obviously fair and just. The Bostock vs Clayton County case explicitly stated that the ruling ought not to apply to single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms under the same statute, nor to Title IX (education, including sports) or any other federal statute. This raises questions about Biden’s selective reading and application of the case.

The executive order will impact on workplace law, educational law and organisations that receive federal funding. Federal agencies are now required to interpret ‘sex’ as also including ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ in their own internal regulations and policies. This sounds dry, but the ramifications will be felt from prisons and domestic-violence shelters to school sports days. 

Natasha Chart, executive director of radical feminist organisation WoLF, explains:

‘It’s very frustrating that Biden has decided that the privacy, safety, and fair competition rights of women and girls were this expendable. Though for all we know, he hasn’t heard an opposing view on this. But he’s the president now, which means that every American is his constituent.

‘Federal employees will likely also be forced to use “preferred pronouns” (inaccurate pronouns) for men who identify as women. This should be seen as a major threat to freedom of speech and is part of a growing pattern of government bodies compelling speech from employees.’

There are parts of the executive order which are to be welcomed. In a country where religious fanatics still hold some political influence, it’s obviously a good thing that those who are same-sex attracted can’t be discriminated against because of who they fancy. But given that women in the US still lack many of the maternity protections we expect in Europe, let alone robust abortion rights, this executive order obliterating sex-based protections is little more than state-mandated misogyny.

Granted, things are different in the UK, but when I first raised this issue with my former MP in 2015 he looked at me like one of the nutters who marches into a constituency office to complain that the neighbour’s cat has been spying on them. At every point over the past few years when I have spoken about the problems of gender self-identification with people in positions of authority, I have been met with embarrassed silence and platitudes about it ‘all being rather complicated’.

But the truth is clear and simple. Men on average are bigger, stronger and more likely to be violent than women, and so to exercise full rights as citizens, women need some single-sex spaces and services. Despite this, to appease an apparently marginalised minority, the most powerful man in the world has just removed the rights of 52 per cent of the population. Gender identity is not a fringe issue, it is an ideological hydra that threatens to undermine everything from language to our most basic human rights.

American culture being what it is, the implications of the executive order on sport have received more media coverage than the plight of women in refuges, prisons and those needing medical attention. The Guardian’s headline read: ‘Joe Biden’s gender discrimination order offers hope for young trans athletes’, cheering on the right of second-rate male athletes to obliterate the achievements of first-rate women.

With more males identifying as the opposite sex, actual women and girls are being pushed off podia and are losing out. To combat this, last year 17 different US statehouses passed bills to ensure that athletes’ participation in sport was in accordance with their sex recorded at birth. Montana was the most recent state to consider doing so. In opposition, state representative Robert Farris-Olsen said that passing the bill would violate the right to privacy enshrined in the state constitution and could mean Montana would lose federal education funding, which amounted to $484million in the last fiscal year. It seems that, thanks to President Biden, few states will be able to afford women’s sport let alone any other women-only services.

Trump was an odious character and was clearly no friend to women. But at least his sexist ‘locker-room talk’ was firmly in the men’s. Self-righteous orthodox left-wingers in the UK have been gushing in their praise of Biden, not because of who he is but rather because of who he isn’t. It seems that to them, women’s rights are a fair trade for a new, less obviously obnoxious president. One wonders if the women in mixed-sex hospital wards, prisons and refuges agree.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.

Joe Biden’s war on women – spiked (spiked-online.com)

Arwen~ “Trump was an odious character and was clearly no friend to women.” I have a problem with this blanket statement. With all of the women he has employed over the years and who hold positions of power and authority, this generalized statement doesn’t hold water.

His crude ” locker room talk” that was blasted all over media was from many years ago, and which he has apologized for. It was unacceptable and he admitted that. People change, grow up and lessons are learned. Let us put things in perspective and not affix permanent labels.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
— William Pitt the Younger — Speech in the House of Commons (18 November, 1783).