The Justice Centre has released a new report, Covid versus the Spanish Flu of 1918: Does the virus merit the government’s response? 

The report compares the historical data of past influenza outbreaks throughout the world and in Canada with the current data on Covid, and analyzes the extreme government response to Covid. Contrary to the grossly inflated predictions of Imperial College London’s Dr. Neil Ferguson in March 2020 which led to worldwide lockdowns, the government’s own numbers reveal that the current pandemic is far closer to the flu outbreaks of 1957 and 1968 in Canada than to the devastating 1918 Spanish flu which killed an estimated 55,000 Canadians, at a time when the population of Canada was less than a quarter of what it is now. 

Based on Dr. Ferguson’s wildly inaccurate estimation that without Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (masks, lockdowns, ‘social distancing,’ businesses and school closures, etc.) fatalities could reach 326,000 in Canada and 40 million worldwide, Canada’s federal and provincial governments (and most other governments around the world) hastily imposed severe restrictions on society and on the economy, with little if any serious analysis of lockdown harms and costs.