I started stockpiling food, clothing, toothpaste, batteries, bleach, various types of emergency radios, sanitary supplies, water purification tablets and filters, you name it in early January of 2020.
I was scared of the mysterious pneumonia.
All of this was done in secret without my wife knowing. She rarely ventured down into our basement crawl space where I hid everything.
Part of me didn’t want to alarm her (maybe this would be nothing). Part of me was embarrassed I was acting irrationally. I spent thousands of $.
In later learned I had PTSD from a combination of my job + my wife’s cancer diagnosis in 2017. She is currently in remission. 🙏
I wasn’t afraid of a virus. I was most afraid of mass civil unrest and the collapse of society due to government overreaction.
Boy was I wrong… 🙄
I knew the videos “leaking” out of China of people collapsing unconvincingly in the streets of COVID-19 was propaganda.
But when panic set in in Italy and lockdowns became I thing in the West I started to feel physically ill from anxiety.
I feebly obsessed Google searching for any good news related to C19. This is how I came across a Facebook post from an infectious diseases expert in Toronto by the name of Abdu Sharkawy dated March 5th, 2020.
He urged calm and rationality ahead of a pandemic.
He was more scared of panic, travel restrictions, how trade would be effected, how multiple sectors would be disrupted which would culminate in a global recession.
@sharkawy feared that masses of people showing no symptoms would flood the hospitals demanding to be checked out.
As of today this Facebook post has 815,000 ❤️.
If I knew who Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff were, at the time, I would have believed Abdu Sharkawy was positioning himself to be the Canadian equivalent.
Boy would I have been wrong… 🙄
The first case detected in Hamilton, Ontario was on March 11th. It was an oncologist at the Juravinski Cancer Centre.
My wife was scheduled for a cancer screening on March 12th. It was cancelled.
On March 13th I was in my supervisor’s office openly crying. I was sent home.
Off work for the foreseeable future, my wife told me to delete Facebook, IG, and Twitter off my phone. She said she would only tell me the news that was important.
She agreed I was only allowed to read the daily epidemiological reports on the Ontario dashboard.
I spent two months away from work, frequently talking to a counsellor over the phone, and reading @sharkawy’s post which I screen captured.
“Thank God”, I would think to myself, “For rational minds like Dr. Sharkawy.”
My wife didn’t know who he was when I asked.
I returned to work on May 10th, 2020. The peak of the initial outbreak had past even though the CFR in Ontario wouldn’t peak until a few days later at 8.4%.
Nobody saw the bodies pile up, or the refrigerator trucks as makeshift morgues. Everything seemed normal.
To skip a few months ahead although there was a mask mandate in Ontario as of July 2020 we were not wearing masks at work until late November.
In December when @fordnation ordered the 2nd lockdown on Boxing Day I returned to Twitter, hoping I would find rational voices.
Yourself and your colleagues were not making sacrifices for MY freedom. You get compensated handsomely to work hard in MY emergency room with MY tax money.
There is some speculation out there as to how much he charges per event, needless to say it appears to be totally okay with the @CPSO.
I do find it very interesting that @sharkawyMD is described as a "world-renowned medicine and infectious diseases specialist" and "was one of the key authorities speaking on and educating the public about the Covid-19 pandemic on a global stage".
Oh really? 🤔
I would expect that a world-renowned expert would have an extensive history of medical research to prove such a credential.
One was an article dated August 2020 and the other was an article dated August 2021, about COVID (it appears to be 3 but there is just a duplicate version in french).
I read both of those articles and I find them not to be particularly ground-breaking, especially considering how late they were both written compared to the initially outbreak in January of 2020 for the first article and the well over 18 months later date of the second article.
There were only two other articles authored by @sharkawyMD on PubMed, both were pretty dated.
At least fellow #COVIDGrifter@DFisman was formerly an actual scientist with a substantial amount of research to his credit.
If you were to look at his profile you’ll notice he immediately mentions he is an ER MD yet he still has time to host a CBC podcast and write books, and have his own website.
Judging by his tweets you would assume he’s run off his feet in an Ontario ER.
Bonus pronoun pts.
Well let’s check out @NightShiftMD’s website to see where he is an MD.
Oh look at that right on the homepage he is an “ER DOCTOR” first and foremost. But where?
It should be noted this cartoon is also on his webpage which I guess narcissists think is endearing.