Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s recent criticism of Canada’s top physician, Dr. Theresa Tam, was a much-needed dose of reality during this COVID-19 pandemic.
On Monday, during an interview with CBC’s Vassy Kapelos, Kenney was asked about his plan to further ramp up Alberta’s testing for the novel coronavirus. Alberta already has the highest rate of testing in the world, recently surpassing Australia.
“The direction I’ve given our officials is that if we see a highly credible regulator of medications in a peer jurisdiction like the European Union, Australia or the United States that has approved a test or a vaccine or medication, we should pursue that. We should not wait for Health Canada to catch up,” said Kenney.
Kapelos then asked: “Dr. Tam today in response to your tweets said that they do have significant concerns about the quality of some of those tests. So if you instead defer to speed and you end up with tests that aren’t accurate — that becomes a health risk in and of itself, does it not?”
Kenney responded by questioning whether Tam was suggesting that the EU’s regulator of medications and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approve things that are dangerous for public use.
“You know,” said Kenney, “this is the same Dr. Tam who was telling us that we shouldn’t close our borders to countries with high levels of infection and who in January was repeating talking points out of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) about no evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
For those of us who have done a considerable amount of reading about the timeline of this pandemic, Kenney’s comments come as a dose of good medicine.
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See Also:
(1) Anxiety among ranchers ‘higher than BSE’ as COVID-19 slows work at meat-packing plants
(2) Kenney’s policies are driving environmentalists from the Alberta herd
(3) U.S. judge cancels permit for Keystone XL pipeline from Canada
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