“Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe”: A Marketing Slogan for Ill-Advised Harm Measures

Let us consider, for a moment, a central component of British Columbia’s public health messaging, a pithy and reassuring bit of guidance wrapped up into a nice, neat market-savvy slogan
“Be kind, be calm, be safe”

The sentence strikes a proud balance between compassion and pragmatism. Looking back, however, at two years and more of disastrously poor public policy… looking back, and considering that thousands of our healthcare workers, here in BC, were terminated for insisting upon their right to informed consent, these words ring hollow. The public health policies imposed upon the people of BC during the declared pandemic have been anything but kind, calm, and safe. As an answer to the catastrophe that coercive policies have wrought upon British Columbians, we have taken this empty phrase and filled it with lessons learned. We think you’d do well to listen, take note, and consider the full implications of your actions.

Be kind:

Don’t impose discriminatory policies that punish those who refuse COVID-19 genetic vaccines by excluding them from public spaces and activities. Don’t forbid those who refuse COVID-19 genetic vaccines from attending family gatherings. Don’t isolate the elderly in long term care and prevent them from visiting with their families. Don’t deprive people of life-saving surgeries based on COVID-19 vaccination status. Don’t deprive sick people of life-saving alternative and generic pharmaceutical treatment options. Don’t prevent physicians from applying their expertise in the therapeutic treatment of disease.

Be calm:

Don’t cultivate fear in the general population with daily PCR-identified case numbers. Don’t heighten the perceived threat of COVID-19 by setting PCR cycle thresholds so high that the number of cases is consistently and grossly inflated. Don’t exaggerate the lethality of COVID-19 by reporting deaths “with” COVID-19 as deaths “from” COVID-19. Don’t scare children with the threat of COVID-19 by imposing totally ineffective and harmful mask mandates.

Be safe:

Don’t call a pharmaceutical product “safe and effective” if it has no long-term safety data. Don’t approve or administer a pharmaceutical product that has an unprecedented number of serious safety signals. Don’t ignore reports of deaths and adverse events subsequent to treatment with any new pharmaceutical product. Don’t prevent doctors from prescribing off-label drugs that may serve as life-saving alternative treatments. Don’t undermine the doctor-patient relationship. Don’t create a climate of marginalization and intimidation in which healthcare workers cannot advocate for patients out of fear of institutional reprisal. Don’t deny healthcare workers the right to informed consent.

Marketing Slogans:

When you said, “Be kind, be calm, be safe”, we thought there was real fellow feeling, real compassion behind your words. When you said these treatments are “safe and effective”, we thought there was real due diligence, rigorous testing and conscientious data analysis backing up your claim. Now, we see clearly, the words you were mouthing, the phrases you trumpeted over and over and over again… they were marketing slogans. How foolish we now find ourselves, those of us who imagined you were truly concerned with the health and well-being of your fellow Canadians.

Not to be trusted:

So, is it true that our public health officer, Bonnie Henry, our health minister, Adrian Dix, and our premiers John Horgan and David Eby, have been willfully, intentionally misleading us about the safety and efficacy of the mRNA COVID-19 genetic vaccines from the beginning? It’s hard to say with certainty, but it reminds me of the passage in Homer’s Iliad, when Achilles responds to Odysseus, that “shifty hearted butcher’s knife”, as Euripides calls him, that man of twists and turns, that master of deceit and dark strategy:

“I hate that man

like the very Gates of Death

who says one thing

but hides another in his heart.”

(transl. R. Fagles)