Under one of the many pop-up canopy tents on the streets of Ottawa you might find an unusual cook pouring pancake batter onto a steaming griddle and serving the warm flapjacks to hungry truckers of the Freedom Convoy 2022. Out of the many amateur chefs who are keeping medical freedom protestors fed in their country’s capitol, this one attracts special attention, as you would normally expect him to be advising Capitol Hill officials regarding pandemic response.
Dr. Paul Alexander’s curriculum vitae boasts such impressive credentials as former COVID advisor to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Pan American Health Organization, and former senior advisor on COVID pandemic policy for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump. His work as an epidemiologist includes 12 years of service to the Canadian government, and teaching evidence-based medicine at McMaster University, a public-research institute outside Toronto. He is now an “independent academic scientist” and COVID consultant to “some members of the U.S. Congress,” according to his website.
But on Sunday he served up “freedom pancakes” at the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) tent near the Terry Fox statue across from Parliament Hill. PPC bills itself as a party founded on “common sense, populism, classical conservatism and libertarianism.” Those principles fit Alexander in his attempts to expose what he calls the failure of government’s compulsory COVID interventions. He published meta-research in December outlining more than 400 studies proving that worldwide, “no government can claim success” in their “compulsory measures to control the virus,” from mask and vaccine mandates to lockdowns and school closures.
Now he serves on the Board of Advisors to Taking Back Our Freedoms (TBOF), an organization that appeals to both vaccinated and unvaccinated Canadians to “stand together for freedom & choice.” The group’s website states that TBOF “stands shoulder to shoulder” with the truckers to immediately end all COVID-19 mandates in Canada. Alexander and other TBOF advisors and directors have appeared with convoy organizers at several press conferences in Ottawa over the past few weeks.
“The most important issue that we need to consider today as to why the mandates are moot is because these vaccines do not cut the chain of transmission,” Alexander stated at one gathering. He claimed no justification for mandating a vaccine that cannot stop transmission, and that the latest viral variant does not warrant alarm. “Omicron is mild. It can be treated like seasonal influenza…. We cannot remain in a posture of fear, where we are in fear of a hypothetical emergence of some virus in the future at some uncertain, unknown time.” Defending the convoy’s appeal to withdraw the U.S./Canada cross-border vax mandate, he said, “You cannot tell a trucker coming to the border because they are unvaccinated, willing to exercise their natural immunity, that they cannot come into Canada and earn a living.” He challenged all public health officials to debate the issue with the TBOF medical team and ended his presentation with: “Long live the truckers!”
Other TBOF representatives voiced their support. “Truckers can cross from PEI to Vancouver without vaccination. American truckers can truck from New York to Seattle without vaccination. And yet to go north south, they need a vaccination? This is absolute madness!” said TBOF advisor and pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a medical specialist to figure that one out.” A fellow of the College of American Pathologists and of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada, Hodkinson earned the accolade of Edmonton, Alberta’s Citizen of the Year in 1994 for his public health advocacy. Now he advocates for the trucker’s convoy.
About COVID vaccine mandates, he said, “No, we’ve reached the end of the line. It really is a catastrophic intervention that has to stop.” He warned against injections with “an experimental agent for which we have no data,” recalling the thalidomide catastrophe of the 1950s and 1960s, when doctors discovered that the popular treatment they had prescribed for nausea in pregnant women caused severe birth defects. “That could happen all over again,” he cautioned, noting that children have already suffered more than anyone else from lockdowns and mask mandates throughout the pandemic. Now they face vaccines that could kill them. “Is child sacrifice what we’re all about in this country to appease the new gods? I don’t think so.” Continuing his plea for children, he pointed out, “Beyond that they’re going to suffer for the rest of their lives because they’ll be paying off the national debt, with the net result being a loss of standard of living. That’s what this government has done to this population, and it has to stop now.”
