Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has allegedly tested positive for COVID-19 amid the historical gathering of people protesting against vaccine (and other) mandates. It a recent tweet he said that he is "feeling fine" and will continue to isolate and work remotely this week while following public health guidance.

He has been in isolation since Thursday after one of his children supposedly tested positive for COVID. Trudeau and his family have also been moved to a secret location amid these peaceful protests, but the government is not commenting on his location for "security reasons."

Some feel that Justin Trudeau has 'tested positive for COVID' to avoid having to address the Trucker Freedom Convoy waiting outside his office in Ottawa, demanding that all vaccine mandates be dropped in Canada.

Whether or not Trudeau actually has COVID, one thing is quite certain, COVID vaccines do not stop the transmission of the virus. Some may argue that they help to reduce the transmission of the virus, but there are many examples that point to the fact that this doesn't seem to be the case. Some of the most vaccinated regions on the planet have been experiencing exponential COVID outbreaks throughout this pandemic. This is clearly not a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" as politicians have claimed.

Furthermore, both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals can carry the amount of virus. According to a study published in October, infected vaccinated and unvaccinated people can  carry the same viral load. Viral load is a good proxy for infectiousness.

Another study was conducted with positive samples from asymptomatic testing at UC Davis for Healthy Yolo Together and at the Unidos en Salud walk-up testing site in the Mission District of San Francisco.

The researchers looked at 869 positive samples, 500 from Healthy Yolo Together and 369 from Unidos en Salud. All the Healthy Yolo Together samples were from people who were asymptomatic at the time of positive test result, and three-quarters were from unvaccinated individuals. The Unidos en Salud samples included both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases. Just over half (198) of the Unidos en Salud samples were unvaccinated.

A press release from UC Davis Explains,

When they analyzed the data, the researchers found wide variations in viral load within both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, but not between them. There was no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, or between asymptomatic and symptomatic groups.

Vaccinations can help reduce the severity of symptoms and lessen the chances of a visit to the ICU, but for people who already have an extremely low chance of hospitalization and chance of death, like healthy people under the age of 50 for example, does it make sense to force them to take a vaccine? How are they protecting someone else by getting vaccinated if the vaccine does not stop and/or reduce transmission of the virus?

Of course, this discussion must also include the risks of vaccination. Vaccine injuries are commonly not talked about but are happening all around the world. For some age groups, the risk of injury is great enough that some countries are not recommending vaccines for citizens. They are also not mandating vaccines for anyone in the populace.

One last point, what was hospital capacity like before COVID? Hospitals have long been operating at over-capacity and ICU resources have always been low, especially in places like Canada. Is this a problem because of COVID and a lack of a 100 percent vaccination rate, or are hospitals so underfunded and under-equipped that they can't deal with a flu season let alone COVID. There are multiple examples of flu seasons putting hospitals at over-capacity and filling up ICUs, and as a result, postponing surgeries. This seems to happen every single year. How significantly has COVID changed this?

There are also public perception issues created with mass testing. Will the pandemic end? Doctor Peter Doshi, a senior editor at the British Medical Journal provides an interesting perspective.

Some historians have observed that pandemics do not conclude when disease transmission ends “but rather when, in the attention of the general public and in the judgment of certain media and political elites who shape that attention, the disease ceases to be newsworthy.”8 Pandemic dashboards provide endless fuel, ensuring the constant newsworthiness of the covid-19 pandemic, even when the threat is low. In doing so, they might prolong the pandemic by curtailing a sense of closure or a return to pre-pandemic life.

Deactivating or disconnecting ourselves from the dashboards may be the single most powerful action towards ending the pandemic. This is not burying one’s head in the sand. Rather, it is recognising that no single or joint set of dashboard metrics can tell us when the pandemic is over.

The massive protests in Ottawa and the coincidence of Trudeau testing positive may go to show how the majority of Canadians, as well as the rest of the world, truly feel about these measures nearly two years into the pandemic.