Amazon pull-out from protected wetlands construction reflects badly on everyone involved

This is not the way it's supposed to work.

Both embattled Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Pickering Mayor Steve Ryan have been desperately courting the construction of a huge Amazon "fulfillment centre" (i.e. warehouse and distribution centre) on a provincially-significant protected wetland. At the 11th hour, it was the online behemoth itself that pulled out of the deal, leaving Ford and Ryan commiserating and whining about what might have been.

The 4 million square foot warehouse would have been the largest in Canada, and the Ford government had bent over backwards to attract Amazon to the Duffins Creek site, fast-tracking a special ministerial zoning order despite the area's protected status, reducing the power of local conservation authorities to block development, introducing a bill to retroactively remove a law that disallowed construction on a protected wetland, and pressuring the TRCA conservation authority to issue a construction permit with unheard-of haste. 

Ford's Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Steve Clarke, who was instrumental in this whole process, is fast earning a reputation for employing obscure and suspect legal means to expedite development project at any cost, and there are some claims that he is doing so in order to reward major Conservative donors.

For their part, Amazon issued a terse statement: "We were already considering multiple sites for our expansion and we take environmental issues very seriously". 

Now, I don't for one minute believe that Amazon pulled out because it thought it was doing the right thing for the environment - that's just the expedient and politically correct response - but it's certainly left Ford with egg on his face. 

Not that he cares about such things. Ford will continue to choose business over the environment every time, such as his plan to open up the existing southern Ontario Green Belt to more development. 

So, this was neither "brave government opposing rapacious big business", nor was it "environmentally-woke company overcoming the blandishments of lax laissez-faire government".  It was not as commendable as either of those narratives suggest.

Toronto's long lockdown in numbers

If it feels like we have been in lockdown forever, then clearly that cannot possibly be the case. But Toronto has suffered one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in North America, and the figures in a recent article put some solid numbers behind that feeling.

In the city of Toronto, non-essential businesses have been restricted to curbside pickup and online sales for over 150 straight days, hair and nail salons have been closed for over 190 days, gyms have been closed for 260 days, and indoor dining at restaurants has been verboten for more than 270 days.

So, that's why it feels like we've been stuck under a rock for nearly a year. It's because we have!

I'm not sure that YIMBY is the way to go

The Globe and Mail ran a long article this weekend devoted to the concept of YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), as opposed to NIMBY. This is the idea that we should welcome new developments in old neighbourhoods, so that we can democratize the property market and avoid the establishment of unattainable upper class ghettos.

No doubt, this is entirely laudable and politically correct, but I find myself unable to get fully behind it. And not because I live in an unattainable upper class ghetto (although the way prices are still pushing ever upwards, it's probably only a matter of time). 

I just have this feeling that nice old districts should be protected and preserved, not so much for the wealthy that live there (and bear in mind that not all of the residents of nice areas are rich and famous, there are still legacy family homes, although admittedly fewer and fewer), but for everyone else, and for the future. 

I visit nice areas to walk around the interesting old architecture, in much the same way as I visit parks. If we mix new (and often architecturally boring, especially if we are looking to provide affordable housing) buildings in among the old, then I'm sorry but we are spoiling the charm of the old, a charm that we will never get back. 

Yes, I know we need more affordable housing. I just think we need to be careful what we destroy in our pursuit of it. And neither am I saying that we need to relegate new developments solely to existing poor (and probably impractical and over-stressed) areas. I would just like to see heritage areas protected. And by that, by the way, I don't mean perching a new high-rise awkwardly atop an old building. That is not protesting anything, in my view.

Call me an old reactionary fuddy-duddy - although I maintain that is not the position I am coming from - but please think twice about going full YIMBY.

Toronto has the world's fourth best hospital

Maybe it shouldn't surprise me, but I was nevertheless surprised to see that Toronto General Hospital was voted the fourth best in the world in Newsweek/Statista's 2020 list of the World's Best Hospitals.

Based on the recommendations of medical professionals, patient surveys, analysis of top researchers and surgeons, and several other key medical performance indicators, Toronto's humble (and often much maligned) downtown hospital comes in after only the prestigious American hospitals Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General as the best in the world, ahead of Johns Hopkins Hospital,  Zurich University Hospital, and many another famous institution.

Two other Canadian hospitals feature in the top 30, Sunnybrook at No. 24 and Mt. Sinai at No. 29, both ahead of anything in the UK, Australia or Italy. Ah, how we undersell our health system!

"Buttergate" - just a storm in a butter dish?

For weeks now, articles have been telling me that the Canadian dairy industry has been stiffing me, messing with my sacred butter. I didn't get too upset: I don't use much butter, certainly not spread on bread, and only occasionally in cooking, such as for making a sauce, in which case what I am using is melted butter.

So, should I care that butter is not as soft as it used to be? Most of the complaints are coming from chefs and foodies, anecdotal nit-picking from people with whom I have little in common. There is not a groundswell of outrage from scientists. Indeed, it is not even proven definitively that butter has in fact changed substantially. But, since the pandemic, we are all foodies now, no?

So, it's interesting that the first article I have read on the subject by people you might describe as scientists pours a good dose of cold water on the foodies' complaints. For one thing, there have been no actual scientific studies done to show that Canadian dairy farmers are in fact using more palm oil or palmitic acid (two quite different things that are often conflated in the non-scientific literature) in cattle feed recently. One or the other has been used for many years, if not decades.

Also, the hardness of butter can be affected by a whole host of other factors in addition to feed. Plus, anyway, an old study showed that butter hardness can differ by a factor of two depending merely on the normal seasonal variation in cow's feed.

Another good article explains that palm oil supplements have been used in dairy farming for at least twenty years in Canada, the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. Palm oil is rich in palmitic acid, which provides cows with energy during lactation, thus helping to increase milk production without negatively affecting the cows' health. And unfortunately there do not seem to be any obvious alternatives (other vegetable oils like soy and canola tend to inhibit the cows' ability to digest fibre).

As for the whole issue of the use of palm oil in commercial dairy farming, there are probably more fertile areas for protest from the anti-palm oil lobby. Palm oil is in any number of ingredients we use every day (WWF estimates half of all packaged products on supermarket shelves, from shampoos and soaps to pizzas and cookies, although that metric sounds a little excessive); it would be perverse to complain about butter in particular. I'm not trying to condone the rape and pillage of pristine rainforest for palm oil plantations (this IS a problem, although it does have some redeeming features, such as its land use efficiency, its relatively low need for fertilizers, and of course its job production in developing countries with few economic prospects ). I'm just looking for a little perspective.

The moral compromise of modern vaccines

Well, this is just what we need. If there wasn't already enough vaccine hesitancy, some US Catholic churches are warning their congregations that they might want to avoid the recently-approved Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine because aborted fetuses were used in its development.

This might sound like yet another conspiracy theory, but there is at least some truth in it, although the whole truth is somewhat more nuanced. It turns out that the J&J vaccine did use "cell lines" developed over decades from what were originally voluntarily-aborted fetuses. Furthermore, both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines used such cell lines during their confirmation or testing phase of their vaccines (although not in the development or production phases).

Cell lines are laboratory-grown cells, literally thousands of generations removed from the original aborted fetal tissue (in J&J's case, from a 1985 Dutch elective abortion). Such cell lines are used in all kinds of medical research around the world, in order to avoid using actual fetal tissue. They are well-studied industry standards for safe and reliable vaccine production, and have been for years.

To be fair, the Vatican has issued clear guidance on the subject, indicating that Catholics CAN in good faith accept COVID-19 vaccines created using cell line technology, at least while alternative vaccines are not available, although it adds the pseudo-legal rider that this "does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses".

The St. Louis Archdiocese suggests that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are less "morally compromised" than the Johnson & Johnson one, as does the New Orleans Archdiocese, although in doing so they are treading a VERY fine line of theological and moral argument.

So, it kind of depends on your definition of an aborted fetus, and just where on the continuum your particular moral values lie. 

How do we know the vaccines are actually working?

I have been gamely trying to understand just how we know that the COVID-19 vaccines are actually working. I read reports and articles assuring me that that is the case, but how do we actually know?

Surprisingly, it's not easy to ascertain. Perhaps the best overall article I have found about how efficacious and effective the new vaccines are is this one, produced for the UK Parliament. The first thing to note, then, is the difference between vaccine efficacy and effectiveness.

Vaccine efficacy is what is measured during randomized controlled clinical tests, before a vaccine is licensed and released, which compare the rates of infection between vaccinated people and those receiving a placebo. This I understand, and this is where figures like 94% for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine come from. It is a kind of theoretical measure, based as it is on mainly healthy younger volunteers and only over a relatively short timespan.

Vaccine effectiveness, on the other hand, is a more real-world measure, evaluated during post-license observational studies of the whole population of vaccinated people of all different ages, health profiles, etc, over an extended period. This may be quite different from the theoretical efficacy rate, and this really is the one that counts. But it is notoriously hard to pin down. How do you measure it in practice? Is it just the proportion of vaccinated people who catch the virus compared to the proportion of those unvaccinated people who test positive?

The only published study I have seen so far comes from Israel, and concludes that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is around 50% effective in preventing transmission, and just 33% effective for adults over 65 years of age. Scientists seem pleased with this, but it is light years away from the 94% theoretical efficacy. Britain, which also started vaccinating quite early, says it will not be able to produce any useful effectiveness figures until late February at the earliest, although an early analysis suggests that just the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine reduces the risk of infection by around 70% (57% on those over 80). A Scottish study has shown an 81% reduction is hospitalizations among vaccinated seniors over 80. These are, however, not very exhaustive or conclusive results. 

So, what are the (mainly non-scientific, political) claims that "the vaccines are working" based on? Just the fact that new cases have been falling in recent weeks? (I had hoped this was due to public health measures and the lockdowns we are all putting up with.) The recent fall in hospitalizations and deaths? (Is that not because we are getting better at treating the infections that do occur?) 

What is the so-called "real world" data that many of the more cavalier scientists are touting? Merely comparing the hospitalization rates of those who have had the vaccine with a completely different group of unvaccinated people, who may have different health, age and socioeconomic profiles. This is hardly controlled, double-blind testing.

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of whether the vaccines are "sterilizing vaccines" (ones that actually prevent infections and transmission completely) or "disease modifying vaccines" (that just reduce the severity of the disease when it is contracted). There is the issue of the duration of the immune response. There is the whole issue of what we are looking for in a vaccine: a cessation of transmission and carriage of the virus, or just a reduction in the numbers of hospitalizations, or of deaths? The whole field is rife with gradations and definitions and assumptions and what have you.

Everyone claims to be "following the science" and "basing decisions on the data", and yet we have widely different policies arising, e.g. some countries and provinces are happy to give AstraZeneca to seniors, while some are not; some are waiting the manufacturer-prescribed three or four weeks (or up to six weeks) between doses, while some are waiting three months, even four months, in between. All still claim to be "following the science". At this point, "the science" becomes a very murky and imprecise concept indeed.

The bottom line, though, is that any functional vaccines are better than none, and I'm certainly not going to turn any down. Some people will, though, and there have already been differences in what some countries are willing to accept in a vaccine (e.g. South Africa has rejected the AstraZeneca vaccine because it has not been shown to be effective enough against the South African variant, and France and Germany are not using it on over 65s because of a lack of testing on that age group, despite some evidence from the UK that it is effective on seniors). It's a real scientific minefield. 

Public health officials are starting to unravel in battle against variants

Like in a bad Hollywood movie, the variants are coming! Nay, they're here already, they're everywhere!

First there was the British variant, then the South African variant, and the Brazilian variant. Then the original British variant had to be renamed as the Kentish variant (in Britain at least), because there was now  a Liverpool variant and a Bristol variant as well. In the US, there was a nasty California variant and a mid West variant.

And now, following that bad Hollywood script, there is a new variant of concern first identified in New York City, a particularly nasty one that can apparently protect itself against antibodies and vaccines. And people are getting well and truly fed up with the whole variant thing. One New York public health advisor referred to it as "pathogen porn", and cautioned researchers to "please review high impact studies w/govt health depts before marketing it to [the] media".

Ouch, tetchy! Maybe it makes for a good soundbite, but those researchers are pedalling as fast as they can, and it is, after all, their job to alert public health authorities to anything that might conceivably help them, and in as timely a manner as possible. The New York variant now makes up over 12% of positive tests in New York and surrounding areas (as of mid-February), so it is not insignificant, and people need to know about it. 

I get it that public health officials are tired and approaching the end of their tether after a year of battling against this virus. But, hey, don't shoot the messenger. That's not going to help anybody.