Updated on 2022/06/09

Our strategy had not changed, but whereas yesterday it had obviously failed, today it seemed triumphant. Indeed, one’s chief impression was that the epidemic had called a retreat after reaching all its objectives; it had, so to speak, achieved its purpose.

But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.

Mais qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, la peste ? C’est la vie, et voilà tout. 

– Albert Camus, The Plague

Has the Gabor Maté show jumped the shark? It had a good long run, but like many good things, it seems its creator didn’t know when to quit and instead turned down a cul-de-sac where the show got stuck in its own contradictions and complacency. As an Urban Dictionary entry defines the term applied to fictional television series, “jumping the shark” is “… the moment in which it becomes clear the writers are out of good ideas and the show has begun its descent downhill. It’s usually some … huge fundamental shift in the premise of the show.”

I’ve admired Gabor Maté’s work for a long time. It was rare to discover a medical practitioner who could combine his medical knowledge with a Marxist analysis of global capitalism and illustrate how our economic system was the ultimate cause of the chronic diseases that plague the world. I listened to podcast interviews with Dr. Maté. I listened to his lectures. I read his book When the Body Says No. I admired his defense of Palestinians and the work he did with his son, journalist Aaron Maté, on the mass psychic disturbance that followed the election of Donald Trump.[1] When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, he gave a very incisive analysis of it in an interview with Russell Brand in March 2020. At that time, he emphasized that the corona virus should be put in perspective with the much greater health problems that have existed for decades in the neglected parts of the world: hunger, air pollution, tuberculosis, poor sanitation and so on, not to mention the extent of similar problems of the developed world. He emphasized that anxiety would make the pandemic worse, and there would be collateral damage from all the social disruption that was being enacted by government policies.[2]

However, when the vaccines arrived, his perception of the pandemic changed considerably. Suddenly, he was in line with the policies of government and pharmaceutical companies. He supported vaccination mandates for travel, university attendance, and certain occupations. When he took this stance in mid-2021, I thought he would change his views when he caught up with the new understandings about the shortcomings of the mRNA treatments. Yet on January 15th, 2022, he gave an interview in which he reiterated these views and even seemed to be taking a harsher stance on mandates, and this was in spite of the growing numbers of research papers, government policy changes, and declarations even by the WHO that show that the vaccines have not stopped the pandemic whatsoever and that vaccinated and unvaccinated people spread the virus to others. Those who think there is a rationale for still doing mass vaccination stake their claim on a hope that the vaccinated are less likely to spread the virus by having lower viral loads for shorter durations. That is a thin, speculative argument for asking young, healthy individuals, who face extremely low risk from the virus, to take on the risk of suffering adverse events from the vaccine. Professor Didier Raoult, director of a university hospital in Marseille, found that it was actually the vaccinated who had higher viral loads. He stated on January 11, 2022:

“… with the data we gathered [at IHU Méditerranée] during the Delta wave for the people who tested positive, the people who had been vaccinated had a higher viral load than people who had not been vaccinated… so you can’t say, if you really want to prevent contagion, that it’s the vaccine that stops you from being a spreader of the disease, so we have to stop fantasizing about these vaccines… we must think of vaccines as a part of scientific knowledge and not as a religion… when you say you are pro-vaccine, you’re already engaged in religious thinking… you can’t be in favor of all vaccines… there are some that have no harmful effects and some that do… and there are some that have no utility in the place where you are.”[3]

These “religious” hopes about mass vaccination are based on a false and simplistic understanding of vaccines that was allowed to flourish in early 2020. People were led to believe that SARS-Cov-2 could be eradicated just like smallpox was eradicated. No health officials wanted to explain that unlike smallpox, corona viruses mutate rapidly and live in other animals after human vaccination programs. Few listened at the time, but this fact was explained well in June 2021 by the very pro-vaccine doctor Larry Brilliant, famous for being the leader of the UN smallpox eradication program in the 1970s.[4] The experts who allowed the misunderstanding to take hold knew better, but they cynically let the belief persist, and it was never fact-checked or removed from media platforms when it was definitively proven wrong when the Delta and Omicron waves hit later in the year. Even long after it was proven wrong, the public and the governments setting policies continued to be guided by this fatal misunderstanding that is the rationale for mandates. It is a stunning, willful blindness in the public at large, but it is even more alarming to see it still embraced by governments and still in the mind of an influential medical professional like Gabor Maté. These facts about the nature of the virus and the vaccine obliterate the argument that the unvaccinated are selfish free-riders who are going to benefit from vaccine-generated herd immunity. There will be no such thing. In contrast, one could choose to see them as the unselfish volunteer control group that will be needed by plaintiffs in future vaccine injury trials.

These points have been made in numerous research papers and interviews with experts that any curious layman with basic reading abilities can follow. One example is the recent paper, “The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good” from which the chart below is taken.[5]

But are they unintended or so difficult to foresee?

Another relevant paper is “Transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 among fully vaccinated individuals.”[6] The title speaks for itself. Another source is The Great Barrington Declaration, issued in 2020, which has advocated for focused protection of the vulnerable and vaccination programs that focus not on mass vaccination but on targeted delivery of vaccines to the people most at risk, as the large majority of hospitalizations and deaths have been among people with serious chronic health conditions (cardiovascular disease, high glycemic index, obesity, cancer, immune system disorders, being close to the average life expectancy). All of this is explained in detail by the principal authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in their interview with Jimmy Dore published on January 31, 2022.[7]

Professor Didier Raoult (already cited above) has patiently explained the pandemic to a general audience in weekly interviews as the director of IHU Méditerranée-Infection. He stated the following on February 1, 2022:

You’ll see this site that I recommend you visit often, Johns Hopkins, where you’ll see that we’re at almost 10 billion vaccinations [worldwide] and there have never been so many cases. In the United States, the situation is exploding. In France, which holds the record just after the United States, the situation is exactly the same. And what is extremely strange and interesting is the level of tension now, the demand for an increase in vaccine coverage with a vaccine for which we have the proof before our eyes that it does not work at all [to diminish the pandemic]. And so, it is extremely interesting. The best they can say is, “Alright, people who are vulnerable should be vaccinated,” which is true. It is possible that even with this new variant, it is useful, but there is no reason, none at all, to vaccinate a population that is not at risk because the epidemic flares up more and more as vaccination increases. And the more vaccines are given, the more cases there are. So we are in a complicated situation…

… we have departed from science. It is no longer science. It is belief and religion. This was very, very well defined by Karl Popper. Karl Popper was the first historian of science, the first analyst of the science of the 20th century. He said if you can’t show how your scientific theory could be proven false, it is not a scientific theory. It’s religion. Nobody really questions this way of thinking… If you can’t accept that your theory could be wrong, you’ve lost your credibility when you believe it no matter what. And so you start to exhibit religious behaviors that demand obedience. And I can describe two very large studies which show how when one has left the scientific world to enter the world of non-scientific conviction, one can make people do anything. [8]

A tweet that demonstrates the harm done by the false notions that the Covid-19 vaccines benefit children and have a sterilizing effect that could have altered the course of the pandemic: “Up all night with my baby. She has intense reactions to vaccines, and still she keeps taking them because she’s brave and knows it’s not just for her, but to keep us all safe.” February 4, 2022 #GetVaccinatedNow. Name deleted because mockery is not the point here.

So what did Gabor Maté say in his interview of January 15th, 2022 that was so terribly wrong?[9] Below I comment on twenty statements he made.

(1) “The vast majority of people being hospitalized in intensive care units and dying of the Covid virus are people who are not vaccinated. That’s just how it is. And I believe my fellow public health colleagues who were telling me these figures.”

Dr. Maté claims that mandates lower the rate of hospitalizations. What evidence is there that vaccination rates would not have continued to rise without mandates, using instead a campaign of building vaccine trust among the most at-risk populations? There is, in fact, evidence that mandates push the hesitant in the other direction and reduce trust in other, voluntary vaccinations. The use of mandates is not medical science, but sociology and psychology, and there have been no studies of note from these fields supporting mandatory Covid vaccinations. However, I stress that I am arguing here that increasing the voluntary acceptance of vaccines is not necessary. The young and the healthy don’t need them, for the reasons already stated.

As for the data on unvaccinated versus unvaccinated people dying of Covid, there is so much variation in figures cited from place to place that I will refrain from referring to a specific source. However, let’s take a hypothetical typical example. The split may be something like 40% vaccinated and 60% unvaccinated, which does seem to be a problem if 90% of adults are vaccinated. Because the vaccines are said to reduce the risk of hospitalization by about 90%, it is natural that some vaccinated people will be hospitalized, which explains the 40% figure in this hypothetical example. Then it is said that since 90% of all adults are vaccinated, it should not be acceptable to have that 60% figure of hospitalized people who are unvaccinated. It should be proportional to the vaccinated-unvaccinated ratio. Ideally, some believe, everyone should be vaccinated, then 100% of all the hospitalized people would be in the vaccinated category—as if that would be something for the pro-mandate people to celebrate. It is a good thing when the raw numbers show a decrease in mortality, but no one seems to care about raw data and absolute risk, or what other possible reasons for the decline may be. Officials only want to get more vaccines into arms by frightening and misleading the public with relative risk figures that distort perceptions of the problem.

What this discussion about hospitalization rates obscures is that it would be better to feel satisfied when the raw data show fewer people becoming seriously ill and dying thanks to improved treatment (i.e. early treatment, effective drugs, and patients not being killed by malpractice and dangerous new costly drugs like Remdesivir), vaccines, and the arrival of less virulent variants of the virus.

This last factor may be the most significant factor, but people prefer to believe that they are alive because they wore a mask, stood behind plastic barriers, stayed home, stayed away from people, and got vaccinated. Post hoc rationalizations (or the appeal-to-ignorance logical fallacy—related to the reference above to Karl Popper) are very comforting.[10] New studies now tell us that even though there were more deaths in the second year of the pandemic—after vaccines were available—even more people would have died without the vaccines! It may be true, but how could we ever prove that?[11] Oh, right. We could use computer modelling, like the brilliant work done by Imperial College in early 2020 that caused an unnecessary global panic. For evidence pointing in the opposite direction, see the review by Steve Kirsch: “New big data study of 145 countries shows COVID vaccines make things worse (cases and deaths).”[12] As for non-pharmaceutical interventions, a new Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis shows that the interventions did not lower Covid-19 mortality.[13]

I will for a moment accept the premise of Dr. Mate’s argument about rates of hospitalization for the unvaccinated. Before I go into the numbers, though, notice that the discussion of hospitalization rates obscures the fact that more than 99% of unvaccinated people never have to be hospitalized. Most of the people choosing to be unvaccinated do so because they are not at high risk, or they know they have already survived the infection and acquired immunity that recent research says is stronger than vaccination.[14]

If the public and governments could take note of this difference, they would see that those unvaccinated hospitalized people represent a failure of public health officials to directly reach the people most at risk of severe infections and to advise them on why they should get vaccinated. It may also indicate a failure to provide early treatment for them. Instead, energies have been wasted on harsh mandates on university students and other groups who have far less need of the vaccines.

A rare study that shows the low absolute risk for the unvaccinated is the January 2022 Public Health Scotland report.[15] It shows both the absolute-risk and relative-risk data for hospitalization and death in both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

We can calculate the relative risk from the data. It shows that the unvaccinated are eighteen times more likely to die, a statistic that shocks the public and is used to promote vaccine mandates. But in absolute terms, all the differences discussed in the report are between 0 and 1%.

The data clearly show that the vaccinations given months earlier were no longer effective in the second week of 2022, but the recent booster shots had been effective for individuals at high risk. The absolute risk figures, however, show that the rate of death for unvaccinated people was 21.46 per 100,000 for the four weeks listed in the chart (hospitalization was 164.65/100,000) and for boosted people it was 1.20 per 100,000 (hospitalization was 37.74/100,000).

From these ratios we can calculate that the death rate for the unvaccinated is 0.021%, and the rate of hospitalization is 0.164% in absolute terms. For the recently boosted, the rates are 0.001% for death and 0.038% for hospitalization. This is for the darkest, coldest month of the year when viral pneumonia cases peak. Certainly, if these numbers continue for many months, the tolls are not negligible, but regardless, we are talking about a disease that does not seriously afflict the large majority of the population. The risks for both vaccinated and unvaccinated are comparable to the risks people face from other diseases, or risks they accept eagerly just to travel by modern transportation or to enjoy unhealthy food, tobacco, and alcohol. In 2014, American life insurance actuarial tables listed the possibility of death within a year for a sixty-year-old as 1.15%.[16] Somehow, before 2020, people over sixty still managed to go out and enjoy their remaining time on earth.

If public health goals were focused on finding at-risk individuals (a “precision bombing” approach, if you prefer war analogies) and on counseling them about the benefits of vaccination for them personally, the large low-risk segment of the population could be left alone. The 0.021% figure for unvaccinated deaths could be decreased significantly without the extreme social discord that has been caused by governments hellbent on imposing a “carpet-bombing” approach just to close the difference between 0.021% and 0.001%. This twenty-one-fold difference can easily be employed to frighten people by focusing on the relative difference between those figures.

And note that if this were data on a promising off-patent, inexpensive treatment for Covid-19, the emphasis would be placed on the tiny reduction of absolute risk, and differences of less than 1% would be dismissed as statistically insignificant, interference from the placebo effect, or an insufficient signal of efficacy.

(2) “What you seem to see as dictatorial vaccine mandates, I see as necessary public health measures.”

For the reasons explained above, the mandates are not necessary health measures.

(3) “I’m listening to my colleagues in medicine who I don’t think are all propagandized tools of the establishment.”

Dr. Maté’s limited circle of colleagues seems to have not caught up to the literature cited here, or the latest announcements by the WHO. I don’t understand why he would not read some of the dissenting literature and look beyond his social circle for diverse opinions—especially the opinions of specialists in the most relevant fields—epidemiology, microbiology, sociology, law.

(4) “Should a nurse who is not vaccinated and therefore carries the risk of catching the virus be allowed to work near vulnerable old people with reduced immunity?”

This argument doesn’t apply because of points made above. Vaccinated people catch and spread the disease. A nurse with no symptoms, wearing a mask (do the masks work or not?), and taking precautions, poses the same low risk to patients as his vaccinated colleague. Aside from contact with nurses, the vulnerable old people with reduced immunity are going to be exposed to the virus in other circumstances.

(5) “When it comes to traveling, you’re enclosed in a small airspace, so you’re breathing the same recycled air.”

Refer to the points made above. With air travel restricted to the vaccinated and the PCR-tested, the omicron variant went global within days because those people spread the virus. Or perhaps it “went viral” so quickly because it had been out of Africa for a while already.

(6) “… nobody is forced to get a vaccine.”

This and number (7) were the most shocking statements made by Dr. Maté. As a survivor of the Holocaust, he would have been, I thought, keenly aware of how easily nudges become coercion, and coercion becomes the murderous deprivation of fundamental freedoms and rights. The Nazis started off slowly in 1933 with a purge of public servants. Jews didn’t have to hold government jobs. They were free to do something else with their lives.

Dr. Maté suggested the restrictions were alright because they are limited to travel in “small air spaces” (planes and trains supposedly), which is enough of a deprivation of the right to travel. However, Dr. Maté here shows no awareness of the much harsher controls that are being imposed in many countries, and notably in his home country Canada in the province of Quebec. Once again, if it were a matter of smallpox, with a mortality rate of 30%, and a sterilizing, safe smallpox vaccine, the public health necessity would be clearer, but the Covid vaccines have caused injuries and they offer no benefit to low-risk groups.

(7) “That’s not being forced. He doesn’t have to go to university. He can choose not to. He’s not being forced to take a vaccine.”

Dr. Maté became shockingly callous at this point in the interview. Several days after hearing it, I am still dismayed that he said this. He was referring to the case of a 20-year-old who got vaccinated in order to attend university, then died shortly thereafter. He downplayed the possibility that there was a connection to the vaccine, but then argued that if there were, it was an unfortunate result that had to be accepted because overall fewer people would die if everyone got vaccinated. Again, this logic may apply to a smallpox outbreak, but not to this pandemic or this vaccine. Mass vaccination serves no purpose and causes harm. Even for the young people who suffer no ill effects from the vaccine, it is unconscionable to coerce them into it with the threat of deprivation of essential opportunities.

On this point, Dr. Maté is also equating the death of a twenty-year-old with the death of someone much older, in most cases near the age of average life expectancy—someone who, in many cases, chose a life of drinking, smoking, and overeating, and someone who is probably alive because of previous medical interventions. What kind of civilization sacrifices the young in this way to extend the life of the elderly? And, to make the point again, it’s all the worse when we know it’s a false notion that mass vaccination is necessary to pursue this perverse priority.

(8) “People who are vaccinated have demonstrably better protection.”

This is true only of the vulnerable people who have poor natural immunity, but the protection lasts only a few months. Other people who have healthy immune systems probably have better protection without the vaccine. There is mounting concern—even in mainstream media—about what repeated boosters will do to the body’s natural defense mechanisms. Another issue is the evolutionary pressure put on the virus by vaccines that target one specific protein of the virus.

(9) “It’s about the people he’s going to be coming into contact with, and potentially spreading the virus to.”

Dr. Maté is referring here to firemen in New York who are opposed to mandates. The point made in (4) about nurses applies here.

(10) “I just see this is a scientific question.”

If that’s true, he should read the science cited here and not rely so much on a small circle of colleagues. Doctors are busy treating patients most days and few have the time or inclination to investigate minority reports that are outside their circle of consensus. Dr. Maté’s work is based on going against groupthink and scientific consensus, so it is odd that in this case he is content to go along with it.

(11) “Nobody’s got the right to drive on the wrong side of the road.”

This is an absurdly irrelevant analogy. I’m not at risk of developing blood clotting disorders after obeying traffic rules. The government does not track adverse events that arise from people obeying traffic rules that have emergency use authorization. No one wants to drive on the wrong side of the road because all drivers have a mutual interest in not colliding with oncoming traffic. This shared interest doesn’t exist with the vaccines. For some they are an unnecessary inconvenience and risk. For others they are lifesavers. Again, the altruistic argument was never correct because this isn’t a matter of a disease that can be eradicated through vaccination. It is not comparable to smallpox and the smallpox vaccine.

(12) “Public health measures are not ever based on certainties, so when you ask me how I know that this vaccine is safe, in the long term, I don’t have a clue.”

The counter argument to this is found in sayings such as “first do no harm, “follow the precautionary principle,” “fools rush in…” Considering the long list of mistakes in public health policies over the last two years, and many others before that, perhaps it is time to proceed more cautiously and wait for a little more certainty. As far as we know, the pandemic toll might have been the same without the lockdowns, masks, and all other behavioral interventions. Each variant runs through a given population for three months then goes extinct, perhaps because of its evolved genetic instability and not so much because of human immunity and social interventions.[17]

(13) “I don’t see any disasters ever having risen from any vaccine in the past.”

Did he misspeak? This is a shocking demonstration of ignorance coming from an influential health professional. The numerous disasters are well documented, but I will mention just four here. One example in 1955 involved a batch of polio vaccine that was rushed to market too quickly by Cutter Laboratories and ended up infecting hundreds of children with polio and killing some of them.[18] Another was the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine recalled in 1992, four years after first use.[19] It was found to be causing convulsions and meningitis. Polio vaccination disasters have occurred in this century as well under Bill Gates’ polio eradication program in India.[20] Finally, a recent example is the TEDx talk given by Dr. Christine Stabell Benn on the deleterious effects of non-live vaccines that she discovered during her research in Africa.[21] These are just a few examples of vaccine disasters that have occurred, many in Africa and Asia where pharmaceutical companies prefer to do risky trials or to advocate that governments should take the vaccine “carpet bombing” shortcut to public health rather than the difficult road that involves building access to basic health care, clean water, and good nutrition.

(14) “… as a physician who’s very skeptical of the medical system and whose writings… I’ve just written a new book about how blind and how narrow-minded the medical ideology is.”

Considering everything said in this interview, it is hard to take this comment seriously. By failing to maintain his skepticism, Dr. Maté has tarnished his reputation as a dissident critic of orthodox beliefs. Why has he been so unaware of and incurious about the scientists who have become the dissidents on this issue?

(15) “I’m glad I got the vaccine.”

The issue being discussed was mandates and the questionable value of the vaccine for healthy people. Almost no one is questioning the value that the vaccines have had for people over the age of seventy like Dr. Maté. It would be better if people refrained from using their vaccination to coerce others through virtue signaling and instead regarded it as private medical information.

(16) “And what is more likely, that people will die of the vaccine or a lack of the vaccine?”

See (6) and (7) above. I see a huge ethical difference in the two elements of this question. If a doctor injects a healthy person with a vaccine that provides no benefit to that person, and that person dies from the vaccine, then the doctor or the promoters of the vaccine are responsible for at least the crime of negligent death. The death was caused by a deliberate act. If an unhealthy, vulnerable person spends some time in a room with people infected with a respiratory virus, and later dies from catching that infection, no crime has been committed. He has died of natural causes—poor general health, a weakened immune system. Perhaps third parties are responsible for the damage to that person’s health over the long term, but strangers in a crowd are not responsible for the infection. If we do criminalize infection this way, we end up in a situation in which everyone is Typhoid Mary. Everyone is responsible and thus no one is responsible, and social life will be paralyzed.

(17) “I’m much more interested actually in the venom and rage and suspicion and sometimes paranoia around this issue than I am in the actual content.”

(18) “But it’s the rage on both sides that to me speaks to a social crisis—to not just a decision that people make but to the emotions that are generated around it. That, to me, is a trauma response.”

(19) “When I look at the viral videos of somebody going into a store and the security guard says you have to wear a mask here and somebody gets really upset and outraged, what are they outraged about?”

Statements (17) to (19) refer to the core theme of Dr. Maté’s work on trauma and addiction. He expressed an interest in discussing “the rage on both sides,” but the example he discussed was of a person who flew into a rage over being asked to wear a mask. One can always find the worst examples while ignoring the opponents of masks who have been rational and ignoring the research that supports their position.[22] What is more noticeable is Dr. Maté’s selective bias here. He could have mentioned the viral video of a woman having a tantrum over being seated on an airplane beside an unvaccinated passenger, but that wouldn’t fit with his overall objective. Dr. Maté is basically in agreement with that enraged passenger. He is just expressing himself differently.

(20) “When somebody says that the Covid vaccine is an attempt on the part of Bill Gates and the communist US government to introduce a microchip into your circulation to control your mind, that’s not skepticism, that’s paranoia. And paranoia comes from trauma.”

This is another example of a very selective bias. It is easy to focus attention on the most irrational reactions. It’s the old trick of dismissing any inconvenient criticism of power as unsubstantiated, looney “conspiracy theory.” The most outlandish and unsubstantiated theories are chosen to discredit the very idea of questioning the established version of history or the established narrative of what is happening. No serious critic of the Covid-19 response literally believes that the vaccines are planting a nanoparticle microchip in the blood, but in fact the idea works as a metaphor for the change that is occurring in the world.

With the panic generated over the virus and the vaccines, enormous wealth has been transferred upward (as Dr. Maté acknowledges in the interview), and the large majority of the public has passively accepted the necessity of owning an electronic device that tracks their movements, social relations, and speech, that can conditionally grant them access to all facets of social life—and for now it is just vaccination status. Your smartphone might as well be locked into an ankle bracelet that you have to wear. We are all on parole now, checked constantly by our digital probation officers. The metaphorical microchip is not in the blood, but it is in our lives, and minds are being hypnotized and controlled, as was so effectively explained by Professor Mattias Desmet in the latter half of 2021 in his talks about mass formation.[23]

Conclusion

Gabor Maté became a respected and famous author because of his work with the most destitute people in the city of Vancouver, though I notice that nowadays he speaks mostly to more affluent audiences. He became famous when he wrote about his work in the city’s notorious East End, helping the most dejected and marginalized people in Canada—people who had suffered unimaginable deprivation in their childhood. He was one of the early advocates for harm-reduction programs when they were a hard thing to sell to the public. He was advocating for the protection and non-prosecution of the criminal element who were also victims and vectors of serious public health problems—they were drug addicts, drug dealers, prostitutes and thieves, and tuberculosis, hepatitis, and sexually transmitted diseases were endemic in this population. If anyone suggested that this social problem should be solved with drastic solutions such as institutionalization and enforced treatment for their addictions and infections, Gabor Maté would have objected strongly to any such war-on-crime approach. He would have said that their humanity and their freedoms must be respected. They must be treated in the community with a humane, proportionate, harm-reduction approach—counseling, needle exchange and supervised injection sites. The citizens of Vancouver were advised to accept that the situation is not ideal and to avoid the temptation to reach for authoritarian and cruel solutions.

I would also add here that Dr. Maté has often remarked that traumatized people are not able to trust their gut reactions or intuitions, so I’m taking his advice here and trying to heal. In addition to the logical argument I have put forward here, I would like to say that my critique is also based on my instant, intuitive response to the self-appointed authorities in public health such as Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci and numerous public officials and political leaders. Their entire pandemic response reeks on high. Don’t ask me to explain. If you don’t get the same gut reaction, I can’t help you with that.

Perhaps the harm-reduction approach prevailed because no one outside those few blocks of Vancouver really felt threatened. Few were at risk of infection from the above-mentioned diseases, and few were at risk of falling into homelessness. But then a respiratory disease pandemic came and changed the risk calculation for those living in the better neighborhoods. Proportionate response and cautious “first-do-no-harm” principles were abandoned in the panic.

Now a generation of young people will grow up angry and traumatized by what has been unjustly inflicted on them. They are unlikely to have much interest in the lessons given by older generations who traumatized them and demanded sacrifices from them. The best I could hope for is that Dr. Maté starts to listen to medical peers such as Drs. Raoult, Malone, Zelenko, McCullough, Kory, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff (and thousands of others) and he considers revising his understanding of the Covid-19 vaccines and vaccination policies. For the young generation, the therapy for this tragedy is going to involve much more than flying to the tropics for Dr. Maté’s ayahuasca trauma therapy.

This has been a harsh critique of someone who I know to be gracious and respectful in his critiques of peers, so I would like to finish in the same spirit. I would ask Dr. Maté to read this or similar reactions to his statements and think of them as a therapeutic intervention from concerned friends. I hope he will make the effort engage with the arguments and sources presented here.

(Endnotes follow the transcript)

Updated on 2022/07/05

EXCERPT TRANSCRIPT

Daniel Cleland interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, 2022/01/15

(Excerpt starts at 10:00 in the video)

Dr. Gabor Maté on Vaccine Mandates, Ayahuasca, and a Culture in Crisis

Daniel Cleland (DC): [There has been an] invasive approach from government which we’ve also seen from vaccine mandates which also have just come out this week in Costa Rica and in the USA and also in Canada—not being able to fly. So I’m curious if you have any perspective on how far this goes before it kicks over into the upward trend of that cycle, or if you if you don’t have a perspective on that?

Gabor Maté (GM): Well, look, first of all, you and I don’t see things eye-to-eye when you talk about vaccine mandates, and whether this government is intruding. Look, I’m just as suspicious. I’m no authoritarian, and I have absolutely no faith in governments or Big Pharma, or governments in general. If you talk about the American government, it murders people internationally, regularly. Three million in Vietnam. Half a million in Iraq.100,000 on Guatemala. I could go on. Big Pharma is quite ready to have a lot of people die because of overdoses in order to make a profit. We know that. On the other hand, there’s a genuine epidemic that has killed four million people internationally, and more people are dying all the time here. In Canada, the statistics are really clear. Either I believe them, or I don’t, and I have no reason not to. The vast majority of people being hospitalized in intensive care units and dying of the Covid virus are people who are not vaccinated. That’s just how it is. And I believe my fellow public health colleagues who were telling me these figures. What you seem to see as dictatorial vaccine mandates, I see as necessary public health measures.

Should a nurse who is not vaccinated and therefore carries the risk of catching the virus be allowed to work near vulnerable old people with reduced immunity? To me, it’s just a scientific question. So, on one hand, we need to be skeptical and vigilant when it comes to what big business is telling us and what governments are trying to pull off, but at the same time, I just see this is a scientific question, and I know it’s hard on people. People have the right not to get vaccinated. I’m not saying people should be forced to get vaccinated, but on the other hand, nobody’s got the right to drive on the wrong side of the road, do they? Nobody says that it’s a denial of civil liberties not to be able to drive on the wrong side of the highway. That’s just to protect the public.

When it comes to traveling, you’re enclosed in a small airspace, so you’re breathing the same recycled air. If you’re carrying the Covid virus or if you’re at risk of carrying it, should you be allowed to travel? For me that’s not a question of civil liberties. It’s a question of public health measures. Public health measures are not ever based on certainties, so when you ask me how I know that this vaccine is safe in the long term, I don’t have a clue. I can’t prove it to you, except I don’t see any disasters ever having risen from any vaccine in the past. What I do know is right now people are dying, so what are we going to go with, the knowledge that right now people are dying of the Covid virus, and that people who are vaccinated have demonstrably better protection, or do we go with the vague possibility that in the long term maybe the vaccine will do some harm? What do you want to go with? Public health is not about certainties. It’s about probabilities, and I’m saying right now the public health measures being taken are on the side of probability. Will they turn out to be right in the end? I have no idea, but what should we do right now? That’s the question, and so I don’t see this issue of vaccine mandates in the way you seem to. I don’t see it as a civil rights issue or human rights issue. I see it as a public health issue. And as a physician who’s very skeptical of the medical system and whose writings… I’ve just written a new book about how blind and how narrow-minded the medical ideology is. I’m not somebody who buys into it, but at the same time, I like to look at science, and from my perspective, it’s pretty straightforward. And I know it’s not without controversy, so that’s where I stand with it. So for me, I’m glad I got the vaccine, and I’m going to get a booster because at my age apparently that provides some extra protection. I’ve got no concerns about it personally.

DC: I actually agree with you. I did get vaccinated. Several of my staff have been vaccinated. I’ve got nothing against vaccinations. I think many people don’t actually have anything against vaccinations, and they support the science.

GM: So what are you questioning?

DC: The tactic of enforcing it.

GM: Actually, nobody is forced to get a vaccine. It’s just that people can’t travel in small air spaces, or they can’t go to work in hospitals. What is being what is being enforced here,

DC: For example, uh just a week or two ago the son of a couple of our healers who work at Soltara actually wanted to go to university. He was forced to take a vaccine. He had health problems, and he died three days later. So they lost their 20-year-old son because he was forced to take a vaccine. I know he was not allowed to go to university without getting a vaccine.

GM: That’s not being forced. He doesn’t have to go to university. He can choose not to. He’s not being forced to take a vaccine. All that is happening is if you want to come to the space with a lot of people, we need to protect everybody, so therefore you can’t come here. You said he had healthy issues. I’d have to know more about it but let me take your word for it. You seem to imply, and maybe it’s totally accurate, that this unfortunate young man tragically died because of the vaccine. It’s possible. It happens. What are the statistical odds, though?

DC: Lower, absolutely much, much, much lower.

GM: And what is more likely, that people will die of the vaccine or a lack of vaccine?

DC: That’s absolutely 100 percent correct. I’m not implying that the statistics are out of favor and I’m not actually dictating my own stance. I’m thinking more about what the percentage of the population who is strong… there is a percentage of the population who are strongly against vaccine mandates and not even vaccines, right. Like the New York Fire Department who’s on protest right now. A lot of them, most of them are vaccinated. They just don’t want to be mandated. What I’m saying is there’s really two kinds of philosophies or beliefs that go into it. So there’s a disease that’s circulating, and there’s a high survival rate for most people that are not at risk. Then there’s a vaccine which also has a certain risk profile which is maybe a little bit unknown. There’s a lot of unknowns in both scenarios. One is random and the other one is making a decision to take some risk… if I get the virus, then I’m taking my chances. The virus is kind of maybe not naturally originated, but it’s naturally circulating, and then the other one is…

GM: Look, Daniel, firefighters deal with vulnerable unhealthy people all the time. First responders are very often asked to come to aid them. Okay, maybe they are a little more risk tolerant. The question is not that of that firefighter. If he wants to take the risk of getting the virus and doing okay with it, statistically he’s probably going to be okay. If he’s a healthy young guy, probably, but having said that, it’s not about him. It’s about the people he’s going to be coming into contact with, and potentially spreading the virus to. That’s what we’re talking about, so he certainly has the right not to get vaccinated, but does he have the right to work at a job where he’s exposed to vulnerable people all the time? That’s a totally different question.

DC: So as a public health professional for the bulk of your life, would you do anything differently, or would you implement a similar kind of strategy for mitigating the pandemic response?

GM: I don’t know what I would do. I’m not a public health physician. What I do know is that I trust the public health physicians that I listen to. That’s what I can tell you. I listen to them. I weigh their words. I weigh the words of the people that argue with them, and on the whole, on a gut level, these are the people that I trust, not because I trust governments, not because I trust big pharma, simply because, on the gut level, that’s where my trust goes. That’s what I can tell you. Now it’s complex. I’m much more interested actually in the venom and rage and suspicion and sometimes paranoia around this issue than I am in the actual content. So nobody should force them to get vaccinated. Should they be allowed to go around other people, though, who they can infect? That’s a different question. But it’s the rage on both sides that to me speaks to a social crisis—to not just a decision that people make but to the emotions that are generated around it. That, to me, is a trauma response. I think whenever you get such venom on either side in a particular question we’re talking about trauma on a massive basis, on a massive social scale.

DC: So let’s dive into that. Why do you think that’s taking place?

GM: I think because there’s a lot of traumatized people in this society, and when something like this happens, it triggers their trauma responses. When I look at the viral videos of somebody going into a store and the security guard says you have to wear a mask here and somebody gets really upset and outraged, what are they outraged about? All they’re being told is if you want to be in this particular venue, you have to wear a mask because we want you to protect yourself and certainly others. And people go into a rage. That’s not about rationality. It’s not about civil rights. It’s about “you won’t control me.” Well, that means that at some time in your life you were controlled, and you suffered because of it, and now you bring that energy into this space by the rage, and the resistance, and that suspicion. You’re projecting it into this space. And that’s what you bring into it. So what I’m seeing is a lot of traumatized people are reacting in certain ways.

DC: What do you think is the relationship between…?

GM: And, by the way, I’m sorry to go back to your original question about climate change and government. Look, Naomi Klein has made the point about disaster capitalism. When there is a disaster, it’s a question of who is going to be responding to it. So Covid has made a lot of people rich. The billionaires in the world have become much richer. Bezos and people like him—their billions have increased exponentially while others have been totally ruined, so in any crisis, the people that get to manipulate the levers of power are going to benefit. This is the same with climate change. Now I don’t trust this conference. Why don’t I trust it? Because these same governments that are meeting now in Glasgow have been denying and delaying action on climate change for decades. Why? Because they’re in the hands of the corporations, and the corporations would rather have millions of people die than lose a penny of profit. We know that. You know we see that in the pharmaceutical industry. We see it in the tobacco industry. We see it in the food industry. These are the people in charge. I don’t trust them to do the right thing, so it’s the same when you raise the issue of technology. Technology in itself is neutral. Technology can be used beautifully for communication and contact and community, for intelligence, or it can be used to make people addicted, as it is being used largely. It can be used to spread wrong information. It can be used to control people. So it’s a question of who is the one that gets to make the decisions. And in a system run by an elite whose interest is profit and power, I don’t trust the decisions that are going to be made.

DC: So do you understand why there’s let’s say 10, 20, or 30 per cent of the population who also does not, and then fears that that any kind of mandates whatsoever, any kind of control, is a precedent and like a slippery slope?

GM: Of course, I understand it. When it comes to the skepticism and suspicion of authorities, I share it. I just don’t happen to extend it to this particular issue because I’m not listening to governments. I’m not listening to Big Pharma. I’m listening to my colleagues in medicine who I don’t think are all propagandized tools of the establishment. I think they’re just physicians trying to do the best job they can under very difficult circumstances. But I do understand why people are suspicious. I wish people were more skeptical, but skepticism is not the same as paranoia.

DC: Why do you think that that is? Why do you think so many people are skeptical and distrustful?

GM: For one thing because the skepticism is well deserved. As you know, I have just been agreeing, but I think that beyond skepticism there’s a lot of paranoia. When somebody says that the Covid vaccine is an attempt on the part of Bill Gates and the communist US government to introduce a microchip into your circulation to control your mind, that’s not skepticism, that’s paranoia. And paranoia comes from trauma.

Notes

[1] Aaron Maté and Gabor Maté, “America in denial: Gabor Maté on the psychology of Russiagate,” The Grayzone, May 7, 2019. At this time, the father and son both emphasized that dissidents were correct and hysteria over Trump and Russiagate was a mass delusion. Three years later, they have no interest in questioning the mainstream narrative about vaccine efficacy and safety. Aaron Maté has been critical only of the failure of wealthy nations to share the vaccines with the poorer nations. He no longer appears on the Jimmy Dore show (which has been highly critical of the mainstream narrative) where he used to be a frequent guest.

[2] Russell Brand, “Pandemics & Infodemics: Wisdom in The Time of Covid-19. Interview with Gabor Maté.” Under the Skin Podcast, March 21, 2020. 

[3] Didier Raoult, “Effets de la vaccination sur l’épidémie (The Effects of Vaccination on the Epidemic),” IHU Méditerranée Infection, January 11, 2022, 10:30~.

[4] Harry Siegel, “A Doc Who Helped End Smallpox Says COVID’s Here to Stay,” The Daily Beast, June 15, 2021.

[5] Kevin Bardosh, Alex de Figueiredo, Rachel Gur-Arie, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, James J. Doidge, Trudo Lemmens, Salmaan Keshavjee, Janice Graham, Stefan Baral, “The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good” Social Science Research Network (SSRN), February 1, 2022.

[6] Carlos Franco-Paredes, “Transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 among fully vaccinated individuals,” The Lancet, Volume 22, Issue 1, 16, January 1, 2022.

[7] Jimmy Dore, “Doctors Smeared by Fauci Speak Out Against Lockdowns & Mandates,” The Jimmy Dore Show, January 31, 2022. Interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Professor at Stanford School of Medicine) and Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Professor of Medicine Harvard University). Dr. Bhattacharya: “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this focused protection.”

[8] Didier Raoult, “Vaccin, Croyances et Réalité, (The Vaccine, Beliefs and Reality)” IHU Méditerranée Infection (Marseille University Hospital), 2022/02/01. Professor Raoult has been immensely popular and polarizing in France. These weekly videos quickly accumulate over a million views.

[9] Daniel Cleland, “Dr. Gabor Maté on Vaccine Mandates, Ayahuasca, and a Culture in Crisis,” Author’s YouTube Channel, January 15, (excerpt from 10:00~).

[10] Several logical fallacies are found in the mainstream arguments made about Covid-19. The appeal to ignorance is seen in the belief that masks, lockdowns, and social distancing significantly reduced mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic and were worthwhile in spite of the collateral damage they caused. Post hoc reasoning is used to maintain this belief. “It would/wouldn’t have been worse if we had done/had not done X.” But such past hypothetical speculations cannot be tested in a controlled experiment. The best we can do is compare what happened in two locations where different policies were followed, but those who cling to the appeal to ignorance could just say, “Yes, but the variables were different here.” The false dilemma fallacy is seen in the polarized options offered: vaccinate everyone or more people will die. This essay has argued that there is a reasonable middle ground between such extremes. The sunk cost fallacy is on display with so many failed and useless policies still in force. It is not only sunk costs but also fear of prosecution that could come if opponents gain political power or if certain officials fear getting “thrown under the bus” by leaders who will stay in power and pass the blame to underlings. Finally, the bandwagon fallacy is evident in the millions of people who have formed their opinions simply by following the crowd.

[11] Umair Irfan, “The extraordinary success of Covid-19 vaccines, in two charts,” Vox, January 27, 2022.

[12] Steve Kirsch, “New big data study of 145 countries shows COVID vaccines make things worse (cases and deaths),” January 9, 2022.

[13] Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke, “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on Covid-19 Mortality,” Studies in Applied Economics, Volume 200, January 2022.

[14] Sivan Gazit, Roei Shlezinger, Galit Perez, Roni Lotan, Asaf Peretz, Amir Ben-Tov, Dani Cohen, Khitam Muhsen, Gabriel Chodick, and Tal Patalon, “Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections,” MedRxiv Preprint Server for Health Sciences, August 25, 2021.

[15] “Public Health Scotland Covid-19 and Winter Statistical Report,” Public Health Scotland, January 19, 2022, 50.

[16] Life Insurance Finder, Finder.com. Data for the United States in 2014.

[17] “Covid-19, enfin le bout du tunnel ? Le Pr. Didier Raoult répond,” (Covid-19, at last the end of the tunnel? Professor Didier Raoult Responds). Sputnik France, October 1, 2021. Professor Didier Raoult explains this theory of virus extinction. English translation by the author here.

[18] Joe Palca, “The Race for a Polio Vaccine Differed from the Quest to Prevent Coronavirus,” National Public Radio (NPR), May 2021.

[19] E. Miller, N. Andrews, J. Stowe, A. Grant, P. Waight, and B. Taylor, “Risks of Convulsion and Aseptic Meningitis following Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination in the United Kingdom,” American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 165, Issue 6, 15 March 2007, pages 704–709.

[20] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Skyhorse, 2021), 713. Kennedy describes how Bill Gates’ polio eradication efforts in India ended up causing a large outbreak of Non-Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis: “Non-Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis (NPAFP) is ‘clinically indistinguishable from polio but twice as deadly,’ according to Keith Van Haren… ‘Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM) is a polite term for polio.’ It actually looks just like polio, but that term really freaks out the public-health people.”

[21] Christine Stabell Benn, “How vaccines train the immune system in ways no one expected,” TEDxAarhus, 2018. Since the arrival of the mRNA vaccines, Dr. Stabell Benn has been a vocal critic of the vaccines and the policies surrounding them. See Twitter: @StabellBenn.

[22] “Are Facemasks Effective? The Evidence,” Swiss Policy Research Group, January 2022.

[23] Mattias Desmet, “Mass Conversion, Mass Hypnosis,” YouTube Channel, August 2021. Professor Desmet’s work became popular after this talk went viral. Several other interviews with him can be found through Internet searches. When he was mentioned by Dr. Robert Malone on the Joe Rogan podcast, his explanation of mass formation caught the attention of the mass media. In an ironic demonstration of the theory, the legacy media dismissed, in unison, the “ridiculous notion” that the masses could be hypnotized and convinced to believe falsities. Social media platforms followed suit by suppressing information about Professor Desmet with their algorithms.