In the good old days, the CBC employed a phalanx of journalists who loved nothing better than to dig deep to find information which would embarrass the government. That was before the CBC became the Canadian Government's propaganda arm; Pravda East, if you will.
One of the things Big Brother Governments have learned in the 21st Century is that it is not necessary to actively suppress inconvenient facts. It is sufficient to place embarrassing data in out-of-the-way places. It's not as if there are any journalists left who will ferret out what the government would prefer that you not know.
How many times have you heard some talking head in the media tell you that vaccination may not prevent you from catching Omicron, but it will prevent you from getting sick enough to go to hospital?
Now here's a slightly different question: How often did those 'experts' present evidence to support that assertion?
Consider this table from "SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England,Technical briefing 33" available at the UK Government Publications website:
More than two-third of the people in hospital with Omicron in the UK were fully vaccinated. Heck, 12% had even had their booster shots.
After months of hearing about a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," I found that to be surprising information. It does suggest that the immune advantage conferred by vaccination is somewhat limited, not quite the slam-dunk protection the vaccine cheering squad would have you believe.
Sometimes Government Reports tell you more than they intend to. Later in that same report it tells you that: "A total of 14 people have been reported to have died within 28 days of an Omicron COVID-19 diagnosis. The median time from Omicron specimen date to death was 4 days (range 1 to 10). The age of those dying ranged from 52 to 96 years."
What does that tell you? Everyone who has died of Omicron so far was over the age of 50, and they all died relatively quickly. That tells me that, so far, Omicron is taking out the old and the frail - the same people who would die of influenza in a normal year.
We can also be reasonably certain that if most of those who died were unvaccinated, that information would have been in bold text in the report's opening paragraph. In its absence, I think we can safely assume that many or most of those who have died thus far with Omicron in the UK were fully-vaccinated.
I suspect, come January, there will be a strident campaign to close the schools. There will also be a huge push to guilt-trip every parent into vaccinating their young children. I'm guessing there will be a great deal of evidence-free fear-mongering around both issues.
Which is why, as a parent, I was pleased to see the following table in that same document:
It tells us that children and teens make up a much smaller proportion of Omicron infections than was the case with Delta. There's considerable evidence at this point that Omicron is milder than Delta. If Delta didn't necessitate the closing of schools, then there's no justification for closing schools for Omicron either, given that Omicron seems to favour those between the ages of 20 and 50, not young kids.
For the same reasons, I think parents should be allowed to weigh the risks and benefits of vaccination given their particular children’s needs, without being bullied by the nanny state.