We are over three years into the COVID pandemic, is anyone even paying attention anymore? As we see health officials start to wear masks again, it seems a good time to talk about the COVID conscious community who has never stopped taking precautions.

Host Jessa McLean sits down with Kim Crawley, a cyber security expert who has gone through great lengths to prevent exposure to the virus that has not only claimed immeasurable numbers of people worldwide, but has been labelled the single most debilitating event in history. As noted throughout the episode, it takes incredible privilege and acquired knowledge to effectively avoid COVID. However, even with all the resources available, many folks who should do and know better, haven't.

From a class analysis, this episode looks at individual human behavior, the response of our governments and how the greed of our 'capitalist overlords' plays into it all.

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Resources:

• Crutches and Spice – Disabled. Loud. Proud
• COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission - evidence! | It's Airborne!
• WHO Video "Airborne / Droplets"
• COVID-19 Tracker (Canada)
• Kim Crawley's Link Tree

Greetings, friends. My name is Jess McLean, and I'm here to provide you with some blueprints

of disruption. This weekly podcast is dedicated to amplifying the work of activists, examining

power structures, and sharing the success stories from the grassroots. Through these discussions,

we hope to provide folks with the tools and the inspiration they need to start to dismantle

capitalism, decolonize our spaces, and bring about the political revolution that we know

we need. Welcome to Blueprints, Kim. Can you introduce yourself to everybody? Yeah, my name

is Kim Crawley. I, as far as my profession is concerned, I'm a cybersecurity researcher and

writer, which isn't official credentials for understanding the topic at hand, which is COVID,

but there are parallels between cyber threats and this biological threat that we're now facing.

Tell me more about that, because I saw you tweet one time and... I don't know if you really

got into it that if somebody wasn't taking COVID seriously, that they couldn't really be a good

cybersecurity expert. What do you mean? Understanding cybersecurity is more about understanding human

nature and understanding the nature of dangers and risks and threats than it is about the

technicalities of computing. Understanding the technicalities of computing is very important.

But it's not the only important thing. I would say having a sense for threats and how they

impact people in general, not just when they use computers, is more important when it comes

to being good at cybersecurity than being a master computer programmer, for instance. Well,

and I guess we've seen with all of the science that has developed around COVID, it's really

people's behavior that all of it hinges on. We could have the best masks, the best vaccines,

and distribution systems. But if people aren't taking these threats seriously, or we can't

predict on how they will behave, we obviously were not able to contain it. Yeah. And I think

anyone who ever had any faith in capitalism and trust in our government beforehand, if

they are thinking critically at all right now, they should have no trust for any of those

institutions left because we have basically been left to die. Yeah, basically you're right.

What are we, we're at over 50,000 deaths in Canada? I would look at all the official figures

and I would multiply that by at least five or 10 times because there are multiple issues

involved in all of the official figures being undercounts. One is the criteria for declaring

a death, a COVID-related death is very, very narrow. and probably more than half of COVID

deaths aren't even in hospital. And there's usually a main issue that kills someone and

that isn't considered to be COVID even if it is. So for instance, heart attacks. If someone

had a COVID infection six months ago and they thought that they were fine afterward and then

they just collapsed and had a heart attack and died six months later, that probably won't

be counted as a COVID death officially. Kind of worse, you're going to see on social media

that folks are going to attribute that to a vaccine, right? All of these unexplained sudden

deaths has almost become a meme for anti-vaxxers. That is a big problem. And then of course,

we have long COVID. So I mean, just you correcting me there on the figures that I was able to

pull up kind of speaks to the overall lack of information, misinformation. conflicting information,

especially now, since hardly anyone is reporting on the numbers, the cases, what vaccine you

should be taking, when it'll be available, what masks work best, and if you're even allowed

to wear them to work. So what has happened here, Kim, that we have all these other major events

happen, other scientific advances happen, and we are given the information a lot more clearly,

a lot more succinctly. until we understand it, but COVID has been a real mismatch of sources

and reliability. Has that been one of the major downfalls in adjusting human behavior? To continue

to resist, like I now am probably one of less than 1% of the general population who has never

had COVID. And although a lot of COVID infections are asymptomatic and a lot of transmission

is asymptomatic. I can be pretty confident that I've never had COVID because A, and I know

this is a privilege that most workers don't have, I work from home. I don't have children.

I don't live with any other human beings. When I'm away from home, even when I'm in the hallway

of my apartment building and I'm taking the garbage down the chute, I have a respirator

on. not a baggy surgical mask, but a good solid elastomeric respirator. In other words, you've

had to go through incredible and isolating means to avoid exposure. I don't, the last time I

dined inside a restaurant was late, you know, probably December 2019. Rat tests aren't the

most accurate, especially if you're not symptomatic. But if you take two or three rat tests every

week and you're taking them properly and they're always negative all the time, you can be pretty

certain that you haven't had COVID. But yeah, my situation is a rare combination of privilege

and knowledge because a lot of Ontarians do not have the privileges that I have. But at

the same time, I'm going to be completely honest with you, I live in a kind of upscale apartment

building. Like it's on, it's one of those new condos on the Toronto Lake shore. And although

most people, there are factors in their lives they can't control. They have children bringing

COVID home from school. They have to go to Tim Hortons to do their Tim Hortons job. They can't

afford proper protective gear, or if they do, their employers penalize them for it or threaten

their jobs or their livelihood. And people have to take public transit. There are a lot of

factors in people's lives that they can't control, but my neighbors are better off than the average

Torontonian, right? And I think most of my neighbors could afford to protect their kids, like send

them to private schools where all the air is filtered and they can afford. If they tell

their boss, I'm gonna work from home from now on, their jobs aren't at stake, money buys

you a lot of COVID protection. And I'm afraid that probably 95% of my neighbours have still

had COVID probably multiple times because even though they have all those privileges that

being upper middle class or whatever grants them, they don't exercise those privileges

because they wanna go to the bar and they wanna party and they feel like they're invincible

and having privilege is not enough. Having knowledge is not enough because there are people with

knowledge who don't have the privilege. You need to have that combination of privilege

and knowledge. And not just knowledge, I think it's character. I don't think someone who is

making 15 bucks an hour at McDonald's, for instance, who got infected with COVID at work, lacks

character. I think people who are like, I cannot go three days without... going to this swanky

restaurant on King West, those people that character. And being neurodivergent really helps with

this, resisting peer pressure. I go out there, I'm the only person wearing any sort of face

covering, let alone a proper respirator. I'm sure I get stared at by people. Oh, I feel

it. I live in a small town and I am- My family are the only masked people here most of the

time. My little one is the only masked one I see going to school. That hasn't stopped us.

You know, I have not dined out either. We have never, we've always maintained masking and

relative social distancing, and we've missed a lot of family, but we are in a position that,

yeah, we haven't had to go to work. I wanna go into your comment of character, not to criticize

you, but... when you describe kind of swanky neighbors and high-end jobs choosing to go

dine out on King West. We're like, yeah, of course. But we're also seeing people who should

know better. They have the resources and the knowledge and they apparently should have the

character, our allies, not doing a damn thing about COVID. And I saw a couple of tweets this

morning talking about yesterday and... the amazing show of support that came out to support queer

kids, but just not queer disabled kids. Lulu, a friend of the show, made that point, as she

often does have to remind us that we don't really take disability rights and whatnot. Not to

say COVID is just a disability issue that it only will impact disabled people because it

will actually disable you through its infection and multiple infections. However, there is

a huge... portion of our population that are already immunocompromised, that an infection

just like isn't an option. And there's a lot of letdown there. You feel that too? Because

I mean, you're trying to be, I see you, I see you, you're like screaming into the void sometimes.

Not that people aren't listening, but that, because a lot of people are, but so many are

almost agitated by it. Even my own family, for example, I'm the one that's reminding, do you

have a mask with you? You're going to mask when you go in there, right? Because I feel like

if I'm not watching, they're actually not masking because it's like it's me. I'm the neurotic

one. I use scare quotes because I feel like I'm the only one kind of couched in reality.

And my son, if you ask him, he'll say he's protecting his community. He gets it. But I'm surrounded.

We are surrounded by people that know what community defenses are. except when it comes to wearing

a mask? Help me understand that. Yeah, that's been really disappointing about the left because

the minority of people on the left who do recognize COVID as a threat as it is, recognizes that

going around maskless, you are basically furthering capitalism's destructiveness. The reason why

the powers that be, both in business and in government, have discouraged. masking, for

instance, is because it's a visible sign of the pandemic. And it prevents people, it prevents

us from, you know, enthusiastically going to wage slave for our capitalist overlords. And

it, you know, and it prevents us from, you know, going out and shopping and going to restaurants

and spending money. It is a bit of a downer, right? Like if you look around and you see

everyone mask, I don't like the white surgical colored ones, because they remind me of hospitals.

So I get I can't actually wear them. I have to wear the black ones because I'm kind of

pretending to myself it's a mask that I'm like hiding, that I'm not, and just mentally it

helps me continue to be masked because it is depressing. It is hard on the soul to continue

to live through this pandemic, not knowing when it's going to stop. I might be unusual relative

to the people that you know, but I would feel a lot more comfortable in public if I saw people

wear respirators. I have unfollowed people on social media because they've posted photos

of themselves in public places without wearing anything on their face. Because to you that

speaks to a lack of character, right? No, not just that, but I think of the implications

of what they're doing. Of the actual post. Yeah. I gotcha. I can't help but look at all these

things and think of the long-term effects of all of it. One of the biggest misconceptions

that people have, other than... erroneously thinking that the pandemic is over, is they

definitely people who are immunocompromised and people who have other serious health conditions

are usually more likely to die imminently if they get infected than people who were in generally

good health before. But more often than not, people get infected and they feel really horrible

for a week or two weeks. And then afterward they feel normal and they go on with their

lives and whatnot and they think, okay, that's what COVID is. So COVID is like a flu, even

though the flu does kill people, but COVID is just like the flu, but I'm over it now and

everything's better and it's no big deal. But they don't realize that the acute infection

stage is only a small part of it. If that acute infection phase doesn't kill you... you still

have long-term damage done to your body. There is plenty of scientific evidence now that it

damages the T cells that are the basis of your immune system. So you get more prone to all

infections in general. So a lot of people are sick now constantly because they have COVID,

but a lot of people are also sick now constantly because they're getting sick from things that

wouldn't have made them as sick before. The big lie is... you know, immunity debt and we

were in lockdown for 20 years. I was going to say they. And they restored people's immune

systems. They blame that on the fact that we wore masks for so long that we didn't expose

ourselves to viruses. And so now that we are unmasked, well, some people, they're blaming

it on the use of masks. But the truth is, no exposure to any virus is good for anyone. So

it's not immunity debt. it's people's immune systems are being weakened by all of these

infections constantly. And then they don't realize like this will scare people and it should.

There are credible scientific reports coming out now that COVID does the kind of damage

to your body long term that HIV, like untreated HIV does. You know, some of the bolder people

in the COVID cautious community, who I agree with, are calling it, you know, airborne aids.

Like people don't realize you could be fine for a couple of years or more, think that you're

fine. And all of a sudden, all that hidden damage starts to surface and you're more prone to

heart attacks and strokes. And there's been links found to cancer and COVID. And the brain

damage thing scares me the most. You did talk about that because you rely so much on your

brain to do your work. Yeah. What I'm about to talk about, there is a ton of nuance. I

think if people can wear a proper respirator to go and get their COVID vaccines, then if

they wear a proper respirator to do so, they should go and do so. It does at least reduce

your chances of imminent death. Contrary to what the anti-vaccine are saying, all these

horrible health effects people are having are not from the vaccines, they're from COVID,

if I say. But... The problem with the COVID vaccines is they're always for a strain of

COVID that is a year old or more. And because people are going out and about maskless and

they're spreading the virus around willy-nilly, every person in fact, it gives the virus more

and more opportunities to mutate. So because of how quickly all these strains are coming

out all the time, vaccination should never, ever, ever be your only line of defense. It

should always be a part of a stack of various mitigation measures that you're taking. So

one of the big lies of the powers that be sold us is if you get your vaccine, you don't need

to wear your mask anymore. Vax and relax. Yeah, exactly. And we're going to shift a little

bit from individual responsibility and mitigation to our governments or a collective, more of

a collective response. And there was one tweet, again, most of my interactions with you are

on Twitter. So this is where a lot of our conversations are starting. It was pretty controversial in

that it said, essentially, we might have been better served under Trump during a COVID response

versus Biden. And everyone in the show is going to be like, gasp, you know, like that just

sounds awful. But it was in the way the media responded to Trump and all his ridiculous claims

about COVID not existing or being treated with malarkey. And they questioned him. They pressed

him. They were critical of him. And then when Biden took over, he had the real vax and relax

approach. It was completely swallowed by the media and regurgitated back to us without question.

Still is, right? We can't criticize Biden still, just like we can't criticize our own leftists,

apparently. But this, this is a bit of a controversial take, but it's hard to argue with because people

are generally just going to take what's coming from high up. I mean, we are a little more

critical of folks now and we know how the anti-vaxxers feel about Trudeau. It doesn't matter what

his health officials say. But for most people, they carry a lot of weight. I cannot reiterate

that Donald Trump is evil. There's no doubt about that. He is completely evil. The liberals

probably don't want to hear that Joe Biden is also evil. Joe Biden and Donald Trump's politics

are actually pretty similar. And Joe Biden as well has a long history. of being super racist

and of enacting really racist policies. You know, you and I, because we're not liberals,

we look at Joe Biden and we know we're looking at someone who's not just right, but from my

perspective, someone who's far right. So to me, there's not much difference between Donald

Trump and Joe Biden except for aesthetics. But also... And how the media respond to them.

Yeah. But the problem is... Liberals are more likely to listen to Joe Biden, whereas they

know if Donald Trump is saying something that he's lying and he's completely evil. The liberals

were in, you know, they were masking when Donald Trump was president of the United States. The

liberals were resisting and all that stuff. And now they're going to brunch. So that is

a huge problem. As far as I'm concerned, Biden and Trump are equally evil, but it's how people

react to them that impacts the way things are. You went back to that point of the visual of

the mask, right? And it was a sign of resistance, or at least that something's not well, right?

Like things can't be hunky dory if everyone's walking around in a respirator. And we lost

that resistance because they had to put up that strong front that we are okay, that we're doing

a better job than the last guy. And that need for political clout has cost fucking lives.

I wonder, Kim, if you could make decisions, knowing what you know now, especially like

three years into this, and you were to call on the government at the onset, like what could

we, could we have done anything right to... mitigate COVID from the beginning? Or is it

like capitalism on the global scale and socialism on the global scale? Sure, you could have got

Canadian governments to do the right thing, but then we would have needed every other country

to do it. What's your thoughts on how this should have been handled from the very beginning?

Dr. Elizabeth F. Jones Yeah, globally, we could have completely

a proper lockdown for a month. And I know a lot of people depend on their jobs outside

the household to pay their bills, give those people money to stay home for that period.

And the only people not staying home being like people like firefighters, for instance. And

if we had done that, we could have completely eliminated COVID. Unfortunately, doing things

to fight COVID effectively is counter to capitalistic interests. We had a little bit of stay at home

and a little bit of ineffective mask wearing and stuff like that in 2020. We had our $2,000

a month is a lot more money than people on OW get and people on OGSP get. For a lot of people,

it's a significant pay cut. But it's something that was able to keep some people at home a

little bit. I think that payment should have been like at least four grand a month for most

people. And I don't think it's fair that OW is less than $1,000 a month or ODSP. The way

things are with inflation, how much everything costs and all that, everyone should be taking

home at least five grand a month, whether they work or not. everybody on lockdown for a month

and only a month or two months and not six months of disruption and now three years of the unknown.

Those checks could be bigger because it would have been for a much shorter period of time,

right? An actual lockdown in earnest. Absolutely. We know the funds are there for emergency services

like that, red baiting as it goes. China's not even a communist country. It's a bit of a hybrid.

We were not here to get into that, but we do love to demonize China in Canada, at least

our governments do. They did use real lockdowns where food was delivered, martial law essentially

declared, nobody on the streets. Their economy did not collapse. They were able to do it a

few times when needed to bring the numbers down. It's strange that- we still continue to even

criticize those lockdowns as like undemocratic, authoritarian, yet they were doing everything

possible to save the people. If you have a safe home, and I know a lot of people don't, a lot

of people unfortunately live on the streets or they have domestic violence at home, but

for people who are safe at home, a lockdown is great. Like really. Maybe because I'm an

introvert, I don't get it. But if you have a comfortable, safe home to stay in, it's not

a big deal to spend a month at home. We've got the internet, we've got TV, we've got books

and movies and a lot of us have video games and we can talk to people online and stuff

like that. To some people, not being able to go out drinking every couple of days is torture

for them, I guess. That pisses me off so much because I've been like on a three year lockdown.

Yeah. I go go, I do our shopping, but there's no extra. If it's extra, it's outdoors. So

many family things missed for years now because some people, our governments mostly, because

we really did need leadership at the beginning to show that all hands on deck to solve something

like this. And it really wasn't. You're in Ontario with me. That lockdown was just an absolute

joke. The exceptions that were made in you know, started to include nail salons at one point.

Construction sites, like my husband was going to a construction site where you are working

right beside people, it was ridiculous. The rule on site, Kim, you're gonna love this,

if you were smoking, you didn't have to wear a mask. So folks would just have an unlit smoke

hanging out of their mouth all of the time so that their foreman couldn't make them put on

a mask. And, you know, he had to go to work in these conditions. That's what's bad. We

never ever had a lockdown. We never had any government really taking this seriously. And

so now after three years, I feel like it's three years. I don't know. It's all a blur. Three

and a half at least. We're starting to see these health officials come out with masks again.

What's going on? I haven't seen them in a mask in a while. Yeah. I think some parts of our

capitalist overlords, I think our capitalist overlords are at odds with each other right

now, because there are some who are recognizing, this is hearsay that I hear through social

media, but most workplaces right now have most people off sick. So that's all they care about

is people showing up to work and wage slaving for their capitalist overlords. You know, a

McDonald's franchise, for instance, say it employs 40 people, if 39 of those people are out sick,

then... You know, that McDonald's franchise has to hire new people immediately, like within

a couple of hours, or shut down for a few days. And even the most right-wing pro-capitalist

person would be forced to do that. So I think another problem is, and I think this is really

important for people to understand, the masks that we were sold on originally in 2020 were

not effective masks. You mean the blue ones with the ear loops? or the hand knitted ones.

Yeah, surgical masks, in the COVID cautious community, we call those bandages. The thing

is, the reason why, you know, ineffective cloth masks and surgical masks were pushed on us

in 2020, is because the powers that be did not want to acknowledge that COVID is airborne.

They wanted the theory that it was droplets, transmitted by droplets. with wash your hands,

that was the main messaging. So the wash your hands, stay six feet apart. Still some shopping

malls have things on the floor where it's like everyone stand six feet apart from each other

and it's like smoke. If you've ever seen someone light a joint or a cigarette and seen how the

smoke travels, that's how COVID travels. Surely my neighbors smell my smoke. Exactly. And it

also means that Okay, let's say for instance, like my home is very, very COVID safe. I've

got, I've got HEPA filters everywhere. I've got good ventilation, but let's say I didn't

have any of that and someone who was actively infected with COVID and they weren't wearing

a respirator and they walked into my apartment and they hung out for a couple of minutes,

breathing in and out, and then breathing COVID into the air in my apartment as they were doing

so. And then they left. And then, Two hours later, someone who was not infected with COVID

walks into my apartment and they can get infected by that person who was in my apartment two

hours ago. They're not there anymore, but some traces of the COVID they left in the air are

still in the air. If you don't have CR boxes or HEPA devices and you don't have good ventilation,

then that's going to stay in the air for a lot longer. Then there's so much nuance because

there are... People who I don't agree with, who are considered to be part of the COVID

cautious community, who, you know, just as it's wrong to think of vaccines as the only measure

of mitigation, it's wrong to think of air quality as the only measure of mitigation. It's a very

important one. And it's, you know, all those groups that are fighting to clean the air in

children's schools and whatnot, they are doing very good work and they should keep on. doing

that. And it's horrible now to think of the air quality that we had to deal with, even

before the pandemic when we were in public school, like it's brutal. And COVID is not the only

reason why the air should be cleaned and ventilated and whatnot. But the benefits, as far as COVID

is concerned, the benefits of filtering the air and good ventilation means that COVID doesn't

stay in the air for as long of time, right? So instead of being in the room for hours,

it's in the room for 20 minutes. But it's still in the room for 20 minutes while that ventilation,

HEPA filtration, all that is going on. So there are people in our community who are like, oh

the CO2 level in this room is 450 and there's a CR box over there. I can take off my, we

can all take off our masks. But just like it travels like smoke. So Having all that stuff

in the room means if you lit a cigarette, your cigarette smoke is not going to stay in the

room for as long. Only a teenage kid trying to smoke before their parents come home believe

that, right? Right. Leaving it away, I'll be good. No, it lingers. But if someone smokes

a cigarette in front of you, that cigarette smoke is still going to be there for several

minutes at least before it's all filtered or ventilated out. So you need a combination of...

respirators and air filtration. And then another misconception is that you can't get infected

outdoors. But if you're walking outside with someone smoking a joint, you can smell their

joint. So people have gotten infected. It's safer to be maskless outdoors than it is to

be maskless indoors. But you can get infected, especially if someone right across from you

is infected. So there's all this nuance that people don't understand. And the reason why

surgical masks and cloth masks aren't very good is they are good for droplets. So if the problem

is your spit is infected, that will protect you, because it'll protect- Your sneeze, your

cough especially, right? Like contain. Yeah, but then we're also realizing that the common

cold and other diseases are also airborne. So you won't get hit by someone's mucus if they're

wearing a surgical mask, right? But there could still be virus spreading in the air, like not

for six feet, for many, many feet, like the whole room. Unfortunately, it can be a bit

expensive. I keep boxes of 3M Aura. They're N95 grade 3M Aura respirators. And I buy like

the big boxes of 40 of them. and they still work out to be about $2.50 each. And that's

not a big deal if you're middle class. You can throw out a $2.50 respirator every day if you're

middle class, no problem. But yeah, if you're on OW or homeless, that is, you cannot handle

that expense at all. You don't have, there's no money for it, even if you're buying them

individually. No, I even messaged you the other day about more affordable masks, my little

guy, he loses them, right? He always has extra in the back of his backpack, but sometimes

it's more than one a day, plus what we need to go around and do anything that we need to

do. And that's a huge barrier for folks. They never really did hand out masks. Our vaccines

are free because our healthcare is so called free, but masks were never distributed on mass,

which really... puzzles me, the rapid tests were and all of that, but nothing to actually

stop the spread. And even the efforts, I remember the hashtag, COVID is airborne, like there

were real efforts made mostly by grassroots people to drive home that very simple point

that we seem to understand now. But when we were in the droplet, it's wash your hand phase,

not just the schools that was, you know, there's been a lot of work to do. to clean the air

in schools because they almost have no choice there. But even scientific facts bringing them

to the forefront was like required activism, which to me is just so absurd because of the

amount of money that we spend on our public health system and research and all of that.

They had to have known it was airborne. They did. From the onset. I was so angry. It's no

wonder nobody trusts them. I was so angry because like early in March, 2020, when it started

to become an official problem in Canada. The first message that we were given by the powers

that be is if you don't work in healthcare, you don't need a mask. Save the mask for the

healthcare workers. I was ticked off by that already, but then I think a few weeks later,

when the message changed, I made my first fabric mask. And I wish I had known that the fabric

mask and all the hair and sanitizer and all that were all for naught. but they knew as

early as February 2020, if not earlier, that COVID is airborne. And I recommend that listeners

to this show, if you're not on X Twitter, no one calls it X, we call it Twitter. Probably

that's the best, or go to Mastodon or Blue Sky now, and search for World Health Organization,

so WHO and Tedros, T-E-D-R-O-S, in February 2020. and the World Health Organization did

a press conference in February 2020. And Dr. Tedros said briefly, it's airborne. And then

Dr. Mike Ryan, who was right next to him, said, whispered something into his ear. And you can

see this on video if you search for it online. And then all of a sudden he said, no, I'm sorry.

I didn't mean that. That is the military word. It is droplets, droplets. And I would be happy

to share that with you and you can put it in the show notes. I will gladly link that. I've

already jotted it down. Now, the reason why they didn't want us to think it was airborne

was that if we acknowledge that COVID is airborne, that is no longer an individual, you and me,

responsibility completely. It is society's, it's society's and it's business and it's our

institutions, it's their responsibility. to clean the air and they did not want to do that.

So they want me, it's your individual responsibility. So there's so much of that shit going around

from climate change to poverty, it putting it all on the individual. And you know, there's,

there is no way that this pandemic can end by making it an individual problem. That doesn't

mean that I forgive people for being maskless in public. Right, right. I hate our powers

that be. But I also sincerely detest my neighbors when I see them going around maskless. There

are people who I like, love and respect, but my feelings about the general population and

humanity at large, my opinion of people in general has plummeted since this pandemic has started.

I don't think you're alone there. Even within families, it's been a real divider. Yeah. It

crosses all political lines. because early in the pandemic, I lost comrades almost immediately.

Anti-vaxxers that were almost, not almost, they were very aggressive about it. In your face,

angry, and I didn't even understand that point of view at all at that point, but the divide

was there. And yeah, when you have families where some of them are taking it seriously

and then some are flaunting it. It creates the animosity that you just talked about because

you're doing everything you can and it will mean fuck all for the community unless everybody

does it right. I can keep my family safe ish but not as good as I could if my neighbors

could also do the same. Right. And so you get like resentful but then you're physically separated

too because you're not going to take precautions because leftists are going to hold events that

don't have mandatory masks or any kind of social distancing or any precautions whatsoever. you're

not welcome there anymore. All of these spaces where, yeah, people are screaming at each other

and standing up, but they're side by side by side by side with no mask on. And so you've

been ostracized in a way, or you have to create your own community of COVID conscious people,

which is dwindling because it becomes harder. Like there were people in my family that were

like, yes, we're on it and they're tired. I have to remind them more and more and more,

and I kind of get flack. It's like, yeah, give me the mask, here I go. You know, it's getting

harder and harder to keep people vigilant. It's disparaging. Maybe some of these people would

be a little more, maybe not all of them, but maybe some of them would be a little more vigilant

if they understood that it's not flu symptoms for a couple of weeks and then you're fine.

There is scientific evidence that COVID fuses brain cells together. is a new story, I can

find it so you can add to the show notes too, of a 19-year-old young woman who has dementia.

It might be the youngest medically recorded case of Alzheimer's disease. I don't know if

it's Alzheimer's disease or general dementia, but this young lady, her brain was perfectly

fine until she had a COVID infection. It's probably absolutely terrifying to be immunocompromised

or you're a cancer patient or for any number of reasons like that. But it seems the difference

between immunocompromised people and people who aren't yet immunocompromised is just your

risk of imminent death. And even that's not confined to immunocompromised people. Right.

Because folks sometimes don't even know how sick they are. They don't know that they have

comorbidities to begin with. And those comorbidities are a lot. So that was another really disheartening

narrative that really took hold at the onset was sure people were dying, but they were already

sick. That was a big fuck you to the disabled community as well. You're literally saying

it's okay, it's only disabled people dying, you'll probably survive. Like this is before

we understood long COVID, at which some people still don't. And just to know, like you've

mentioned a lot of it, but... Long COVID is this rainbow of still-to-be-understood issues,

health issues that are seemingly lifelong for some folks. Some, you know, it's a few years,

we don't know, because obviously we were only three years into this, but decreased lung capacity,

your heart weakens, some things you don't even notice until you go in to figure out something

else and they find out your body's actually been ravaged by something that is barely holding

together this whole time. and something simple has completely wrecked you. So like we don't

even fully understand, but surely, surely there is no person that has been untouched by COVID.

I've had, like I've known two people to pass away from COVID decidedly, like not after the

fact, not from long COVID, from an acute infection. I can't be an anomaly with the numbers that

we see. So why doesn't that hit people, you think? Why doesn't that personal loss or that

threat of long-term disability or chronic health issue, why doesn't that scare people enough?

Yeah, I'm banging my head about it too. Even if I didn't need my brain in order to labor

for my capitalist overlords, if brain damage is your main symptom after COVID. From what

I hear, it is really scary. Cause like to, I have one friend in the COVID cautious community

who unfortunately has been infected at least once. And she says she doesn't recognize faces

anymore. Some people congenitally are face blind and they've grown up without all their lives

and they've learned how to, you know, recognizing people by their faces was never a thing for

them. So it's not such a big deal because they've adapted all their lives to it. But for someone

to have recognized faces all their lives and then suddenly lose that ability, one of the

most common things I hear from people online is they used to be able to watch a movie and

follow what's going on and now they can't. So they can't even like sit back at home and enjoy

a movie because they can't follow what's going on. That that is scary. Like. It's a shame

that we need to be mentally and physically capable in order to wage slave for a capitalist overlord.

But even in our downtime, that stuff really messes you up. Well, even most people don't

need their smell or taste to do their work. You know, chefs aside, that scares me. Yeah.

All these other scary things, I guess you kind of deal with a lot. Like I could, I could.

have a heart attack, my dad had a heart attack, my uncle, like that's a possibility for me.

I kind of live with those possibilities all the time. And I smoke weed, so my lungs aren't

great. So maybe I was like, well, but actually the idea of never being able to taste your

favorite food or smell the roses is, that's a bit of a loss of your humanity. Not to say

that folks that don't have that are less human, but that is an intricate part of your life.

When you do have that, for me, That's how you experience joy. Yeah. And I would never wanna

lose that or the sharpness that comes like from how my neurodivergent mind works. If I ever

lost the ability to make all those connections rapidly, I would not be myself anymore. Although

it's a curse sometimes, I still, it's me. And it would, that would be terrifying to lose

a cognitive ability you've always had. Yeah. Food is a pleasure that probably most people

who are able to afford the food they like, they take for granted. They take for granted that

their favorite comfort food is there and they can taste it and enjoy it. So, yeah, that is

a pleasure that's taken away from you by the damage that COVID can do. Another thing is,

if you're my age or older, you probably remember like around 1998. when Viagra first came out,

it was such a big deal. It was such a big moneymaker for the pharmaceutical companies when they

learned that it treated erectile dysfunction and people were buying it in masses. COVID

has been found, and because of the damage it does to your blood vessels, it has been found

to cause erectile dysfunction in people with penises. And for people with penises, regardless

of their gender, their ability... to have an erection is a private pleasure for them. And

again, it's taken away if comid damages their penises. And you would think with how popular

Viagra was that not wanting to lose your ability to orgasm would be enough motivation for people

to wear a respirator. I don't know what effect it has on clitorises for those of us who have

clitorises, but it's probably similar, right? the people with penises talk make me think

of the warnings on cigarette packs that started just with texts and grew and grew and they're

convinced now that if they take up three quarters of the pack with the most grotesque image that

is going to trigger fear in you, that isn't working. So if we can't scare people into masking

or staying home. what do we do? Yeah. Because people, I mean, at least people get joy out

of smoking. I don't get it. I don't like the smell I used to smoke as a kid. You don't even

get high. So I know it calms some people down, but generally it's kind of a lot of risk for

very little gain, but it persists. I know there's a physical addiction, but people start smoking

even though they see this. Absolutely. So like something's wrong with humans in our brain,

the cognitive dissonance that we do or the damage that we do to ourselves voluntarily. self-preservation

isn't always our best attribute, I suppose. But that's why I think we got to go back to

governance. Although everything is great that comes from the bottom up, we do have governance

for a reason. Like, is there anything you think the government could do that we could be lobbying

for them to do or demanding rather? Fuck lobby. Taking to the streets to demand. What would

that be? Would that be another 30 day lockdown or is that not going to cut it now? Yeah, maybe

the lockdown wouldn't work so well at this point, but definitely we need to, and I should mention

this on the show in case there are people listening who do need free respirators who can't afford

them, you can go to DonateMask.ca and that charity will give you free respirators if you can't

afford to buy them yourselves. But that's something that the government should be doing. not a

private organization. There should be an enforced mask mandate in public places. And if you don't

already have a respirator mask on, one is given to you. And they did that sort of thing in

Vietnam. And it worked very well. You might not get 100% compliance, but you know, back

when we did have mask policies, there was at least 90% compliance. There was never a mask

mandate on the TTC. Really? Since 2020, I have not been on the TTC and it's such a mind fuck

because I don't drive a car. I live in a place with good public transit, like the 501 Queen

Streetcar goes by near where my apartment building is. When I first moved back to Toronto, I bought

a Metro Pass every month, and I was on the TTC subway and on streetcars and all that 20 plus

times a week. I have not been on the TTC since early 2020 because they never had a mask policy.

For a brief period of time in 2020, I think they had, please wear a mask if you can, but

there wasn't zero enforcement and it wasn't even mass or mandatory. It was, again, suggested,

recommended. I don't get that because you're talking about places where, like a subway.

for example, where people are crammed on there, there's zero ventilation, your heads are beside

one another. You would think that would be the one place other than hospitals that would be

the first to experience the mask mandates. We like to roll things out, not to scare people,

right? A lot of people, they have no choice, but to take public transit for their wage labor

jobs. Yeah, not everyone can get an Uber, right? Right, yeah, well. I work from home and then

the odd time that I have to go to a completely different part of Toronto for something, I

take a taxi. What do you do if your taxi driver's not mass? Oh, I now have a routine. So like

one of the reasons why I use taxis like once every couple of months is I have hair appointments

and my hairstylist is in North York and I'm in South Etobicoke. You love your hairstylist,

Kim. So yeah, so that is like a $70, $80 taxi fare one way. That's a privilege, definitely.

I mean, I could have done that for $3 on the TTC. Some taxi drivers, and I always use like

a Beck taxi or traditional taxi and not Uber, because although traditional taxi drivers are

exploited as we are, we're also exploited. But all things being relative, traditional taxi

drivers are less exploited than Uber drivers. So I take a traditional taxi, usually back

taxi, and a year ago when I started doing this, I found that some taxi drivers now don't have

any sort of masks. The odd one that you do has a completely ineffective surgical mask and

they don't even wear it. It's like dangling on the ignition of their car or whatever. And,

you know, they might put it on once you're already inside the vehicle, when all that time they

could be breathing COVID inside. Anyway, I hate it. I wear the last americ respirator, which

means it's like silicon where it touches my face. It's reusable. I have learned because

there was one time when I was so frustrated and I just like gave the taxi driver a lecture

about how their surgical mask wasn't any good. And it was not any good to just put it on when

I entered the car. and he broke down and tears and he's like, ma'am, I cannot afford anything

better. And I used to be poor, but I have been out of poverty for long enough that I had forgotten

what it's like to not be able to afford like two, three dollar N95 respirators. So from

that point on, and the only reason why I buy the disposable 3M Aura respirators, is because

I need to give them away to people. So now when I go take a taxi, I have a few 3M's on me wrapped

so you know that they're hygienic and all that. In my bag, I hand one of them to the driver

and I say, I am not taking this taxi trip unless you put this on. And I make it as easy for

them as possible. And I say to them, you will get a good tip if you put this on. That's a

lot, that must be, it's exhausting and expensive. It's so stressful. for me, yeah. What's it

like always being the COVID conscious person, both in your daily life with everybody you

interact with, but also consistently advocating online for something that gets a lot of flak?

Yeah, it takes tremendous stubbornness. If I was in my 20s, I don't think I'd even have

the fortitude to resist as much as I've been doing. Yeah. I wish more people around me would

care about this stuff more, so then the psychological burden of always having to make conculations

in my head all the time. Are they doing this? Is this going on? Are they cooperating? How

do I get them to cooperate? Blah, blah, blah. I am very fortunate in that my romantic partner,

who does not live with me, but we've been together for five and a half years now, and he does

visit my apartment on average one day a week. and he spends overnight here most of the time.

I am, because I hear horror stories online about how COVID has separated couples. I'm very fortunate

that he cooperates with me. I pay for, you know, rats are not completely useless, but a rat

will often only detect that you're infected like four or five days into your infection.

I... by Q-Test and Q-Test are significant financial investment that a lot of people can't afford.

All this stuff is more expensive here in Canada than it is in the United States. Of course.

But the initial investment is about $700. You get a peripheral that's like the small white

dock that charges in the wall by USB and it connects with Bluetooth to your phone. and

then your phone is supposed to have an app and you also get like a, for the $700 investment,

you also get like a 10 pack of tests. And it's also, you got to sign up for a $50 subscription

on top of that. And they only give you 10 tests with your initial $50 subscription, but you

can order new packs of three tests for about $250. Wow. I use the Q-Test for my partner.

So he has the Q-Doc. I bought, again, I'm paying for all this stuff and I'm having to do all

these calculations and thinking about stuff. He has the doc at home. I have the app on my

phone. He has the app on his phone. The condition for him to visit me is that the Q-Test that

he takes the day before he comes, the day that he comes over, like that morning, has to be

negative. They have a better accuracy rate, much better. Almost as good as a PCR test.

Yeah, all this stuff the government should be paying for. Not us. And the fact that, you

know, probably more than half of Canadians would have real problems with forwarding all this

stuff. But like I was below the poverty line for like a good 20 years of my life. If this

pandemic had happened back then, I would have certainly been infected multiple times by now.

No matter how much knowledge I had. But yeah, so he has to test negative. I buy him a good

quality respirator. I bought him HEPA devices for his home. I remember to buy him replacement

filters. So I ordered them like from Amazon. I know Amazon evil, but, and I have all this

stuff shipped to his home. And I, he cooperates, thank goodness he cooperates because not all

partners even cooperate with all this. Still, like this should not be my burden. It should

be society's burden. It should be like the government paying for this. Absolutely, and it reminds

me of the shots of Davos that we saw, I think, last year. And I can only imagine they had

these cue tests everywhere. And they were taking every precaution imaginable, right? Because

as much as we hate them, they do have access to a lot of knowledge and they have incredible

privilege. Not so much character, but they know it's important to keep themselves safe. Yeah.

Right? While they're exploiting millions and billions of workers across the world and hoarding

all of the resources that we have, still those one percenters were making sure not to infect

each other. Yeah. Because of the threat that it holds to them. I thought folks seeing that

would be an eye opener because I think a lot of times COVID conscious people were labeled

as neurotic. obsessive, too much. And on top of all of the cost and the layers of thinking

that you need to do, and I really see the tie between that and being an ethical hacker or

cybersecurity, you know, having to anticipate how other people are going to react and mitigate

that before you have to worry about it. That is a heavy burden. But then on top of that

being kind of labeled a bit of a pain in the ass and having to kind of go up against that

over and over, you know, when you take a cab, when, you know, you're reinforcing with your

partner. Yeah. You're right. Like that is a load no individual should carry. And if we

had gotten leadership, actual leadership from the onset, I feel like people's mindset would

be different, even with the burdens that it would have carried with it. If it weren't for

capitalism, then society would be doing the right thing, and we wouldn't be burdened so

much. Those of us who are doing everything that we can to avoid it. Capitalism has caused two

major crises that we are dealing with right now that will probably, if not spell the end

of humanity, at least spell the end of society as we know it, which is climate change and

this pandemic. We both know how capitalism has caused both of those problems.

I'm almost 40 now. I fully expect by the time I'm in my 60s, things will totally be Mad Max,

if not worse than that. It might come a lot sooner. As we both know, the worst of climate

change is hitting the planet a lot sooner than anticipated. We've had the most extreme weather

all around the world this year. There are vast areas of this planet that have been either

burned or flooded. The food prices are rising to a point that it's a struggle for most Canadians

to buy food. But if you think things were bad this year, as far as grocery store prices are

concerned, and we know, you did a great episode on it, we know that it's like the Western Corp

and all these corporate monopolies. But the other factor is we've lost so much farmland

that next year and all the years after that, food is going to be even more expensive. You

used kind of a small scale analogy, but it should be applied to the whole broader scope of a

McDonald's restaurant having X amount of employees sick so much so that it can't operate. We only

have public health care here because capitalists understand they need a healthy workforce. The

same goes for public education. These were capitulations to make sure that they had an adequate workforce.

Right. Roads, same thing. You know, it's not. to make sure individuals are okay, it's to

keep capital okay. How have we not hit a point though that capital needs to understand that

the workforce is becoming mass disabled and they will start to mitigate this even just

for their own factory sake because otherwise, yeah, it'll collapse. Your Mad Max has me a

little bit anxious and I know some folks out there will get a little bit of political despair

when they think of this, when we really look at the big picture, it's hard. But on the bright

side, surely this has to spell the end to capitalism. Yeah. Oh yeah, we are in end stage capitalism

right now. This is a discussion that we've had in COVID cautious circles. It is a mass disabling

event. Most people will not be able to. keep on wage-saving for much longer, not after their

third, fourth, fifth infection. And I think most people are on infections number three

or four at this point. But there are some really great advocates in the disability community.

One that I recommend is Amani Barbarin. So Amani Barbarin is very prominent. She has loads of

followers, like hundreds of thousands of followers. on Twitter and she's big on TikTok, either

like a Manny Barbarin or Crutches and Spice. And she has talked about this, not just about

COVID being a mass disabling event, but also there are, you know, about companies like BlackRock

and whatnot. They're like some of the most evil corporations out there. Some of these same

kinds of companies are betting on exploiting us when we the institutionalization of us,

whether it's in prison or it's in long-term care facilities or whatnot, making a profit

off of us anyway. So even if we're not in a position where we can wage slave, if we're

in a terrible long-term care home, we're being abused there, the government is still paying

that corporation like 10 grand a month or whatever to exploit us there, right? So there's no short

of profiteering off misery. The made industries, another example. So a dollar sign can be put

on our heads, it seems like, whether we can labor or not. Fuck. AI can't do everything.

Robots can't do everything. There is an element of capitalism eating itself. One example of

that is Zoom. Everyone knows what Zoom is, the video conferencing app, right? Zoom headquarters

is forcing their employees go back to their office to work, saying that you can't use Zoom

to log into working at Zoom. You have to go to the Zoom office physically. And it's like,

aren't you kind of trashing your own product? I feel their shares plummeting as you talk.

That's capitalism in itself, right? And also capitalism is not sustainable obviously, because

it concentrates all these resources to very few people. The vast majority. of our labor

is not going to benefit society, it's going to make some billionaire richer. So it's a

tremendous waste of human potential and labor and effort. And then our planet has finite

resources and we've pretty much exhausted that. And you know, our planet is starting to become

uninhabitable now. There were some fortunate white people in the middle of the 20th century.

My parents are a perfect example of that, who did great because that was like an earlier...

stage of capitalism. My dad was born in the 1930s and my mom was born in the late 1940s

and they both had white privilege, like especially my dad, even though they did not come from

noble families or anything like that. They did, your average working class white person, I'm

saying white person because we know that those privileges did not extend to people of colour,

to indigenous people. It was mainly half of... you know, working class white people thrive

relatively speaking in the mid 20th century. Can't say that now. You can't say that now.

I mean, white privilege certainly still exists, but there is almost no middle class and they

didn't even have to go to college or university and they could get a decent paying job in the

auto plant because of unions, obviously. Yep. My father is a perfect example of what you're

talking about as well. Absolutely. But I can only hope that we are in the end stages of

capitalism and that COVID is helping to pull that curtain back a little bit and disrupt

people's just wholehearted support of capitalism that still exists for some reason in some people.

As we do on this show, we'll provide as many ways to disrupt capitalism and today, hopefully

you got a few ways to disrupt COVID. And that's why it's so aggravating that all these supposed

leftist institutions, like I'm not talking about the NDP, I'm talking about, you know, people

who call themselves Marxists and whatnot, are, I used to have a subscription to Canada Marxist

Fightback magazine, I had a subscription. up until this past winter when I cancelled my

subscription. And the reason why I cancelled my subscription was none of the issues ever

even mentioned COVID. So I was like, why? I'm more than happy to pay for a subscription to

benefit a Marxist organization, but not if they completely ignore the issue of COVID. That

and they kept holding schools, gatherings, conferences, completely unmasked. And like single them out

isn't... terribly fair there an example, but it's been a massive letdown. Yeah, from folks

who definitely should have know better and definitely from the folks we expected this from. Thank

you, Kim, for coming on and sharing, you know, not only your expertise, but also a bit of

your vulnerabilities and just being a great example of what it means to be like persistently

COVID conscious, not just when it was comfortable, but when it's really uncomfortable because

I feel like that's when it's most needed. So we're going to see numbers go up again. I hope

it takes traction. I hope people aren't too exhausted by hearing it, you know, three years

in that they've just tuned out. Like we've tuned out so much because we just can't afford it.

We absolutely can't afford it. And I want to take myself out of lockdown at some point.

So get it together, people. I've been living in lockdown too. Yeah. Thank you so much, Kim.

Thank you. That is a wrap on another episode of Blueprints of Disruption. Thank you for

joining us. Also, a very big thank you to the producer of our show, Santiago Jaluc Quintero.

Blueprints of Disruption is an independent production operated cooperatively. You can follow us on

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