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Cheryl: Hello, and welcome to A Pandemic Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are talking about some pretty big issues. There have been a number of folks working on finding new information that is new to the public but that is not new to the government and is not new to public health. This information has not been passed on to so many people that need to know this, and it’s around Long COVID. This episode, we’re going to be talking about Long COVID and the lasting symptoms that can occur from a COVID infection or the ones that can also come up after someone has recovered from an infection and then experience ongoing symptoms as well, and what we have found out through filing Right to Information requests of what the government has known about it and has not passed on. My name is Cheryl, and today we are joined by Chris — Chris: Hey. Cheryl: — and Kay, and let’s dive right in. Chris, what have we learned? [laughs] Chris: [laughs] Yeah, we’ve learned a lot, and it’s a little disturbing. Maybe, as a preface, I can mention a bit of what we were looking for. Like we all have experienced in the beginning of the pandemic, the province — our province, New Brunswick, but most provinces — had held the narrative that COVID was serious enough to cause hospitalization and death, and once vaccines were available, and they were shown to dramatically reduce the incidence of hospitalization and death, it seems like most of them patted themselves on the back and ceased pursuit of any other mitigative measures. We refer to this as the vaccines-only approach. This has happened right across the country, every place in the world. But death is not the only serious outcome of a COVID infection. The overwhelming scientific and medical consensus shows that COVID triggers this enormous inflammatory process in the body which can cause injury, it can cause scarring, it can cause clotting everywhere in the body, pretty much every organ in the body. It can lead to strokes, heart attacks, liver failure, restricted blood flow to different organs, and we’ve seen this in a lot of the recent studies where they’ve actually measured the incidence of increased risk for all of these different problems. None of these risks have been explicitly communicated to the public. And COVID, of course, because of all these things, can cause long-term illness, what we call Long COVID. It’s been called Post-COVID Condition, Post-Acute COVID Sequelae. It can occur weeks, months after infection. It hits adults, it hits kids. It hits people who’ve had severe, acute infections, and it hits people who’ve had mild or even asymptomatic infections. While it’s been shown it can improve over time, it also causes people to lose their lifestyle, it causes people to lose their livelihoods, and, in some cases, it causes them to lose their life. I think there’s a common understanding that Long COVID’s a thing — people understand, they’ve heard the term Long COVID, they know it’s out there, they know it happens — but common public knowledge is piecemeal, I think. It usually doesn’t include a sense of prevalence or severity of the problem. And Public Health Agency of Canada has determined, and has published this, that about 15% of all confirmed or suspected infections result in long-term symptoms. Kay: Ohhh. Chris: Yeah. So, 20% of those are severe enough to limit people’s daily activities, and half of them are situations where the sufferer’s experienced those symptoms for longer than a year. Kay: [gasps] Chris: Yeah. That’s quite — I don’t think that’s really present in the public consciousness. That is frightening, right? So, our recent RTI has shown that New Brunswick Public Health — and all provinces and terrorizes in the country — had in their possession, and continue to receive, high-quality information, from federal agencies primarily, detailing the mechanism and the severity and the prevalence of the long-term impact of COVID, basically saying Long COVID is a thing and is serious and is not rare. New Brunswick Public Health has been receiving this information since July 2020, but it has never been mentioned in the press releases, it has never been mentioned in the press conferences. To this day, up until and including today, there is no mention of long-term complications from COVID infection on the New Brunswick COVID web page, the primary source of information for people who would be looking for this kind of thing. The fact that the government has had this information and has hidden it from the public is pretty disturbing. That’s, I think, my understanding of the public perception of COVID, Long COVID, and what’s out there in the public discourse for Long COVID. I think it would be really interesting for us to talk about why we think this information might be kept from the public. That’s a big question I have: why, and what that means for the public in terms of understanding what Public Health is there for. Cheryl: I’ll just say a brief mention, and then I’ll see what Kay’s thoughts are. In New Brunswick, we’ve been told that we assess our own risk, but where we have received no communication on lasting symptoms of COVID, no one can assess their own risk going by government information or Public Health information because that information isn’t there. We can’t accurately assess our own risk without the accurate information. Finding out that they know this and are withholding this but then are expecting us to quote-unquote “assess our risk”, it makes it impossible. I know, in some other provinces across the country, they do mention Long COVID and there are Long COVID clinics. There are doctors, I know, across the country — as well as in New Brunswick — who do recognize Long COVID as a significant illness, but there’s also doctors that don’t. That’s an issue as well. Kay, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Kay: I’ve just been silently listening and reflecting and enjoying your assessments of this situation, because I don’t know if people are maybe so shocked by our Right to Information request that they don’t know what to do with it. I know, for myself, it has been a long and painful journey towards accepting that the people who are legally responsible for responding to this ongoing disaster have continued to make serious errors and aren’t being held accountable and aren’t seeming to be striving for better at all, right? It’s been a difficult progression of going from, “Oh my gosh, they couldn’t really be letting us get infected on purpose, could they?” to now, when you see in black and white the emails that we have uncovered in this Right to Information request, where the malfeasance is just nakedly on display, right? When you look at this, and you see, without a shadow of a doubt, that they have been regularly receiving incredibly detailed, thorough, well-summarized, useful information from the highest possible bodies in the nation that you could receive this information from, right? They’re getting this information from CADTH, and healthcare professionals know the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health. As an information professional, as a healthcare worker, CADTH is extremely trustworthy. The information resources that they produce are unparalleled. This is an agency that strives for producing the most trustworthy, evidence-based information that they then disseminate to people so that you can change your practice. The work that CADTH does — they have gone and looked, by doing evidence scans and systematic reviews; that’s one of the big things that CADTH produces, systematic reviews. They’ll go through and look at an intervention, like a drug, and they’ll do the literature search, and they’ll come and they’ll see, “Oh, wow, this particular drug that people have been prescribing very broadly under these circumstances ends up causing these unintended harms, and so, here we go: here’s our revised guidance on when this intervention should be used, because it’s causing these problems and it’s not causing the benefits that you’d like to see for that harm.” That’s the kind of thing that CADTH does. So, CADTH is really important to practitioners and health administrators, right? And PHAC is obviously important to administrators and healthcare professionals. Both of these bodies, CADTH and PHAC, provided, to members of government and the Department of Health in New Brunswick, really high-quality, excellent overviews of all kinds of evidence, and they did so fairly regularly. And then we look in these emails that came back for our Right to Information request, and we see that none of this has been passed along. In the discussion so far, we’ve been talking about the public, which is of course the most important thing, but the other group that has not received these summaries of evidence is the healthcare practitioners. And so, when you had initially started publicizing, posting the results from this Right to Information request, we heard from a number of healthcare practitioners who said, “Whoa! I’m a nurse practitioner, and I’ve been told nothing about Long COVID, and I’ve had to scramble for everything that I use to try to treat my patients.” We’ve heard from physicians, we’ve heard from a few different healthcare professionals in New Brunswick that they truly have not had this information passed along to them. When you look and you see that people within our government have been receiving this information since, like you say, the summer of 2020 — we’re almost at the end of 2022. This is not anything that’s been done in good faith. This is not good behaviour. People are suffering needlessly. And, like Cheryl said, when you’re not told about the not-rare, ongoing, long-term consequences of an infection, you truly cannot assess your risk. The other population would be people like minor children. We make decisions, as adults, for minor children all the time, because they are not in a position to be able to assess lifelong risk to themselves, right? This calls into question just how dangerous schools have been allowed to continue to function as an environment for the children. Of course kids are so excited and happy to have a Christmas concert again, right, to have a Remembrance Day ceremony, but children cannot assess these lifelong, ongoing risks to themselves from a COVID infection. It’s adults that are supposed to keep kids safe. They have the most to lose — they have, hopefully, the longest lives left ahead of them — and here we are literally promoting disease because teachers are not allowed to encourage mask-wearing, parents are not allowed to donate filtration devices, nobody is allowed to do anything better, and people are suffering needlessly. Healthcare practitioners are not being provided this information, and so, they also fail to understand how common this is, the scope of it, how serious it is, and the fact that it can happen to anybody. One of the documents that was referenced in one of the PHAC presentation from this summer that was circulating was talking about how, in the United States, they found that 30% of people with Long COVID do not have any underlying condition. And yet, among some healthcare practitioners, there’s this sense of, “Well, the people that are getting Long COVID had comorbidities, had underlying health concerns.” That’s not what the data is saying. Cheryl: And, even if that was true, that’s layers of problematic as well [laughs] — Chris, Kay: Yes. Cheryl: — to think, for all of the listeners, and myself included, who have pre-existing comorbidities. Just wanted to put that out there for all of us. Kay: Yes, thank you. Cheryl: Thinking about the kids in schools — because, for people listening, I was a teacher, before the pandemic, in schools, and I was also receiving emails for teachers during the first two years of the pandemic, and there was never any mentions of Long COVID or risks to children or anything like that. Teachers are also completely in the dark, because I think it’s safe to say that they are, considering that physicians and the general population are also in the dark. Kay: Can I pick up on that for a moment, too? Cheryl: Yes, please. Kay: Before we started our chat today, I was about how all of these sources of evidence that are highlighted in this Right to Information request — the information from the United States, the information from Canada — consistently shows that women are more susceptible to Long COVID than men. So, we have these female-dominated professions — the education system is a predominantly female-dominated profession, healthcare is a female-dominated industry, and things like personal support workers, long-term care, people providing in-home care — a lot of very vulnerable work where people are face-to-face, indoors, and sharing air with people who are either already ill or may be ill and be at the location, right, people in hospital, people in long-term care, and people in school. Many of the workers who are in those environments where they are exposed to a lot of COVID are women, and we’re finding that women are more susceptible to Long COVID than men, and yet, there’s no warning out there. This is an occupational hazard that exists at a higher degree for women than men, and women are in riskier professions regarding COVID, and this hasn’t been a part of the discussion in the common — this isn’t a household fact, and it should be, because it’s quite a big risk. Chris: Yeah. It’s quite a skew, too. I think it’s like 10% skew against women in those outcomes. Cheryl: And I know — I’m thinking, just recently, I’ve seen prominent men post online that they are now taking less precautions and risk in conducting themselves in this pandemic climate, but if there’s women in their life and this is an airborne, contagious disease, men conducting themselves with less risk disproportionately affects the women in their life. Chris: Yeah. It’s interesting because we talk about all these things, and it’s circulating around this concept of individualized risk assessment, this downloading of community-based protections onto the individual. It’s largely sold as giving people power to make their own risk assessments and power to live within their own comfort zone, but it’s more than that. Acceptance of individualized responsibility for protecting oneself from a global pandemic really equates to acceptance of individualized responsibility for whatever happens as a consequence of those choices, right? If a person contracts Long COVID, individualization imbues in them a sense of responsibility for their own disabling. If they’re assessing their own risk and they make their own decisions, then ultimately they’re responsible for what happens. I think there's a good chance that the government understands that communication of the magnitude of risk — if they were to admit that openly, especially in the context of them having actively sought to remove all mitigations — would be an admission of guilt, an acceptance of liability on their part for the inevitable outcomes that we’re seeing around us now. That framework of individualized responsibility's so troublesome, and it goes further than that. If you think about those people accepting their own responsibility — even in our own circles, we see people who’ve worked really hard to avoid contracting COVID get it and then beat themselves up — feeling like they’ve failed, this individualization framework works to diminish people who are suffering. It puts them in a position where they not only view their lives as diminished, in the case of experiencing Long COVID, but maybe even coming into a financially precarious position if they are out of work or unable to work. It puts them in a psychological frame of having actively chosen that for themselves and lets the government off the hook, and that’s such a sickening prospect for somebody who’s suffering already, to have that added to their psyche. It’s terrible. And what it says for me — because, again, I always go back to, “Why? Why would they do this? There’s got to be a reason; it can’t just be an accident, that every government in the country accidentally forgot to tell people, right?” Cheryl: [laughs] “Whoops!” Kay: [laughs] “Oops!” Chris: It really strongly suggests this very immoral direction. When you think about how terrible it is to gaslight someone into believing that they are the author of their own misfortune when the province, the country, the state could’ve prevented it, right? We, as people, are not exposed to COVID due to any failing of our own. We’re not exposed to Long COVID, or contract Long COVID, due to any failing of our own. We are exposed to COVID downstream of government policy failure and state abandonment. Cheryl: It sounds like it’s the encouragement of helplessness. If people blame themselves, they’re not going to be looking for supports, or they’re not going to be looking for aid. Chris: Absolutely, absolutely. Cheryl: They’re not going to be looking for additional, maybe, assistance from a workplace exposure. Chris: Absolutely. If you successfully create a culture of doubt around Long COVID, you’re simultaneously incentivizing people to ignore or downplay their own issues after infection. It’s been something that cuts across the entire pandemic. We see it with people who downplay deaths because, like we were talking about a minute ago, comorbidities, right? It places blame on individuals for having some kind of moral or ethical failure, and that’s why they’re in a position. The feedback is, because people don’t think of themselves as disabled or having any moral failings, that it can’t happen to them, and it just goes on and on and on. Kay: Right. So, the people in power and the people with privilege perceive of themselves as superior somehow, whether that’s in superior health status because they perceive of themselves as being superior because they do some of the quote-unquote “right things,” right? Like, “Oh, I’m fit, so it’s not going to happen to me,” or, “I eat well, so it’s not going to happen to me,” or, “I’m a young, able- bodied person, so it’s not going to happen to me.” Is that the kind of thing that’s feeding into this? People are very incorrectly perceiving of themselves as invincible from this? Chris: I think so. I think, at least at first, in the dialog — before somebody gets hit with Long COVID and you hear that terrible story, “Oh, they were a future athlete, and now their life’s been destroyed — before those kind of things happened to those individuals, they move through their life with a feeling of invulnerability. They portray that outward and, either actively or passively, diminish the issues that people who have comorbidities or are predisposed to disease or have existing health issues or, even, who didn’t and now do because of COVID — they are othering that whole population, right? And it creates this psychological divide where, in believing you’re invulnerable, you downplay and diminish the whole risk, and you create false narratives around the outcomes of people who have been exposed which aren’t correct. This thing comes for everybody. All of us are equally at risk of catching it, and we are all at risk — of varying degrees and our varying frailties — of having long-term problems because of it. Cheryl: I’m thinking of people in a workplace, government setting, and I think another aspect here is that, when people are unable to work, they drop out of the workplace for either short term or long term periods of time. So, as people, even in these positions, become infected or become unable to work, they will no longer be in decision-making positions, because they will be unable to be in those job placements anymore. So, those workplaces only have able-bodied people making those decisions, and, as people become less able, they’re just replaced with more able people. Kay: Wow. So, it’s like a self-selecting pool of people who haven’t experienced this. Cheryl: And I say that as someone — I have experienced being replaced by more able people in workplaces, and I can see it as the person living with disability, but the person who replaced me has no idea. They have a new job! Wow! It’s great! A new opportunity! [laughs] Chris: And you can see that — you put it much more eloquently than I did — that kind of mechanism is the same mechanism that’s occurring in the public discourse around COVID. Cheryl: Yeah. And that’s where, I think [laughs], to take some time to figure out the words to put to this unimaginable scenario is very fair. This is mind-boggling, what we’re even talking about [laughs], let alone living through, right? Kay: It is, it is. Cheryl: And, of course, for people listening, too: if you are experiencing ongoing symptoms, it is not your fault. I just want to say that 100,000%. It is not your fault. It is not your fault. Kay: And isn’t it horrifying to see, in black and white, through these emails, that numerous people — and this isn’t even the highest-level people, right? These aren’t emails between just the Chief Medical Officer of Health and one other person. These emails loop in departments. These emails loop in entire departments. There are dozens of people in every province who’ve received, regularly, this information about how prevalent Long COVID was and is, and nothing was communicated. That is so horrific. We see the outcome of that when we published this Right to Information request. We’ve seen responses from people all across Canada saying, “Oh my goodness. This is the time frame in which I was attempting to seek medical help for my Long COVID. My practitioner said to me that they didn’t have enough information or data. And look at that same time period, what was being discussed over emails between these officials was all this information. They knew, and yet they didn’t inform the healthcare practitioners, and they didn’t inform the public.” I guess I wanted to talk about the fact that one of the main excuses that people give is, “Oh, we don’t have enough information on Long COVID.” This shows that they did, right? That’s what a lot of the officials end up saying: “Oh, well, there’s no official definition yet,” or, “Oh, we don’t know enough.” And yet, through these emails, we see that they were getting tons of information. The problem is not lack of information. Chris: And, not only is that not the case, but the Public Health Agency of Canada ethical framework for COVID literally and explicitly states that “...scientific uncertainty should not prevent decision-makers from taking action to reduce risks associated with COVID-19.” Kay: Hearing that makes me want to just cry. The other thing that’s upsetting is: you made public our work on Wednesday, November 16th, right? It’s been over a week since you made this Right to Information request public. We did the work of reading — many of us read the hundreds and hundreds of pages that we got back. We synthesized the information. We pulled out — and especially you — pulled out some of the most relevant parts of it. It’s been over a week, and this Right to Information request, and everything that it demonstrates, has yet to be covered by print media, right? I’m shocked, I guess, because — and I know that I’m close to this, so I’m biased, and I’m naive — to me, what we uncovered is really shocking, and it should be changing behaviours, and it should be changing a lot of things. There’s still a lot of media coverage of COVID; there’s still a lot of reporters working on COVID. I’m surprised that this hasn’t been covered in print media yet. I really am. And maybe some stories are coming, but what I think is quite remarkable about what we’ve shown here — it’s a straight line. It’s incredibly straightforward. Here is a mountain of information that every province was receiving about Long COVID, and here is the vacuum of information that many provinces have thus turned and made available to their public: nothing. Right? That is such a cut-and-dry, A-to-B story. Maybe some reporters are working on something bigger; maybe they’re taking this, and it’s more investigative, and maybe they’re waiting to hear back from people, but in the meantime, it’s been over a week. Why hasn’t there been something, in print or on the web, to say, “Wow! Look! Here is all this information that Public Health Agency of Canada and CADTH were sending to every single province and territory, and yet, you can see —” it’s so easy to prove. You just load up a number of province or territory’s websites, look for Long COVID. And what kills me is that they could’ve just put a hyperlink to PHAC, right? They don’t even. They don’t even direct you towards the Public Health Agency of Canada, the information that PHAC has on Long COVID. They won’t even direct you. They really are trying to keep this from people while we continue to infect thousands of people a day and generate hundreds of new Long COVID cases every day just in our tiny province of 800,000 people alone. This is an ongoing crime. Where’s the coverage? Cheryl: Two points I would add. One: we are volunteer advocates, and we have volunteered our time to find this data, and we’re releasing it, volunteering our time, because we care. There are countless reporters who are paid very well, and I have not seen any local reporters cover Long COVID at all to date. Yeah. Even though they haven’t recently covered our RTI, they shouldn’t need our RTI to cover this. They should’ve been covering this a year ago, two years ago. They are complicit. That’s my take, and I’m saying it. [laughs] Chris: And you would think that, if there were somebody actively working on a story, that one of us would’ve been reached out to, right? And I don’t believe that’s happened. Cheryl: No. We make ourselves available. We make ourselves available. We put ourselves in vulnerable positions, and media will not talk to us unless we put our first and last names and photos with those stories. I have volunteered to have my name in stories. I have been harassed, I have been threatened, I have received death threats, and I volunteer all of my time towards that. So, thanks. [laughs] Kay: It’s so shocking, yeah. The other avenue that I was thinking, as well — I know that we’ll be wrapping up soon — I just wanted to point out, as well, that, in our Right to Information request, one of the main things that gets brought up really early on is that there was a CADTH meeting June 1st that was arranged specifically to talk about models of care. The exact title of this was, “CADTH Virtual Roundtable on Post-COVID-19 Condition Models of Care.” June 1st, 2022. This meeting was all about actually providing care and treatment, and it was in June, and now we’re almost in December, and New Brunswick still has said nothing. You don’t see any evidence coming from New Brunswick — and some other provinces — about providing care for Long COVID patients, and I just wanted to make that point. There was actually a meeting, and New Brunswickers attended it — Susan Brien, vice-president at Medical, Academic and Research Affairs Horizon Health Network, and Stéphane Legacy, vice- president of Outpatient and Professional Services from Vitalité, as well as Eric Levesque, who is the acting assistant deputy minister for the Department of Health, for Health Services and Programs. Three people from New Brunswick attended that meeting on June 1st that was — it’s not just about the concept of Long COVID; it’s about models of care and providing treatment and care to the patients. And, even though that happened in June, there’s been nothing. It’s been six months; there’s been nothing. In April — Jennifer Elliot, who I think was the director of Public Health at the time; I don’t know if she still is — again, emailed a couple of people in the government and said, “Hey, we’ve got to meet and talk about what we’re going to do about Long COVID.” There’s just been no progress, and there’s been no communication. In the lead-up to this meeting, one of the emails from CADTH even said — I’ll quote from this too — “...if you have questions or specific evidence needs, please don’t hesitate to touch base at any time.” Here, you have this federal agency all about evidence and technology for health saying to the people in charge in New Brunswick, “If you have questions or evidence needs, get in touch any time.” They cannot claim that the holdup is evidence, because they’re being offered to be helped by the experts. It’s so — I just would love to know, what do we do? Where do we go from here? Where does this leave us? People all around us are becoming affected by this, in some cases significantly disabled, and in some cases, they’re not going to get better, and this is being allowed to continue every day without any notice, without any warning, without any help. Cheryl: Just where I said earlier that I feel like there is complicity through media and different organizations, but that’s where there is hope and potential for change. Today, people can change their minds. Today, someone can say, “I am going to cover this issue.” Today, someone can say, “Oh my goodness, my lack of knowing about this is a problem, and I need to start covering this. I need to start reporting this.” Or not just reporters or individuals. Joe down the street can be listening to this and say, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea. I’m going to let my friend know,” or, “Whoa! That person who did tell me they have Long COVID, that’s a real thing! Oh my god, I feel awful that I’ve been telling them that that’s not real!” Today, people can change their behaviour, and that’s the hope that I see, that this is such a challenging, difficult conversation, and I’m applauding all of us here for being able to have such a level-headed conversation, because I know, right now, I’m kind of a mix of rage and crying [laughs] because this is so challenging. Kay: Me too! I’m feeling ill to think about it and talk about it. Cheryl: We’re all going to have some nice, chill self-care and love after this, but for now, for people listening: this is real, this is happening, and we are not helpless. It is not hopeless, and we can change. Everyone can change everyday. We all have power and autonomy. I guess that’s my final thoughts. [laughs] Chris: And, to facilitate that, if anybody is interested in reading our take on the RTI response, you can visit the website protectnb.ca — it’s right on the front page there, you can see a piece called “Omission is Negligence” that goes through the entire thing. If you want to read the entirety, the 730-odd pages of the response, it’s also on the website. If you’re just eager to see some information about Long COVID, we’ve also got those reports that are included in the response that were provided by federal agencies separated out and listed on the website as well. Once again, that’s protectnb.ca. The last thing I wanted to touch on, which was probably the most difficult thing for me, reading the response, was the inclusion of emails from people who were suffering from Long COVID sprinkled throughout the response for these emails. I’m going to read a couple here, these pleas from people who were lost. The grief that is in them is palpable. Very difficult to read. One reads, “i am dying to speak to someone who specializes in long term covid and can give me some answers. and at the very least, i have tests and blood tests spanning the full time of my illness and maybe that can help the research.” Another says, “I am writing you as a sufferer of what is now called “long covid”. My symptoms are often debilitating and my life has been put on hold even though I am no longer infected with covid. I am not alone as there are many others New Brunswickers suffering along with me. We need help...” That — sorry. Those are the pleas of people reaching out to the organization that was put in place to not only help them in this situation but prevent it, and it has fallen on deaf ears. That’s not okay. Kay: I want to thank you for all the work that you did to make this available and the way that you’ve organized it and made it available to the public, because anybody in the whole world stands to benefit from the work that PHAC and CADTH have done in these evidence, and organized it so well. I mean, they organized it really well, and then it was sent to people whose jobs it is to disseminate this information, and then those people didn’t disseminate the information, but you did [laughs]. So, thank you [laughs]. Cheryl: Yes. Kay: So many people can benefit from this, so I’m really glad that we had this change to kind of debrief and talk about the process and some of the things that we’ve found. Thank you for that highlight on the people who are suffering, who shouldn’t have to be suffering. It’s such a disservice to them that our government, our province, doesn’t have anything for them. That’s so wrong; it’s awful. But I look forward to talking with you all about this again and so much more. For anybody listening, don’t forget that COVID is airborne, the best thing you can do to stay safe is to wear the best mask that you can and wear it for the full duration of time that you’re sharing air with other people. We’ve just got to find each other. Feel welcome to reach out. This battle for what’s right and for indoor air quality and for proper information and evidence and communication from our government, obviously it’s going to take a lot of people to make it happen, so feel welcome to reach out and join in, right? Cheryl: Yeah, and thank you. Thank you so much to the folks that were here today to talk about this. It’s an incredibly challenging topic. And thank you for the folks who were able to listen to this. [outro music begins] We really appreciate you sharing your time with us. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Chris: Hi, everyone. Just popping in here with a postscript update. [outro music fades out] Between the time of recording and releasing this episode, Andrew Waugh of the Telegraph-Journal in Saint John wrote a piece on the RTI which largely exposes the government for their inaction. As part of that piece, he sent several questions to the province, which were ignored but which also served to alert them that this information was going to be made even more public. In response, the government has added a page of Long COVID information to its website. While we’re very happy that people suffering from long- term complications of COVID infection will now have access to some information explaining their situation, we nevertheless find it very troubling that the government’s interest in disseminating that data that they’ve been receiving for 28 months is not due to any sense of duty to protect New Brunswickers, but rather, it’s in response to this looming threat of liability. Let the record show: New Brunswick sat on its hands for over two years while people suffered, and only when a threat to themselves became apparent were they moved to act, and then only out of desperation to exculpate those responsible. [outro music begins again] Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time.