Nora Loreto - Spin Doctors - How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic

Spin Doctors

Spin Doctors

How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID -19 Pandemic

Nora Loreto

Fernwood Publishing Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright 2021 Nora Loreto

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing: Lisa Frenette Cover design: Tania Craan Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Fernwood Publishing 32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0 and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Spin doctors: how media and politicians misdiagnosed the COVID-19 pandemic / Nora Loreto.

Names: Loreto, Nora, 1984- author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210259418 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210259469 | ISBN 9781773634876

(softcover) | ISBN 9781773635064 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773635071 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: COVID -19 Pandemic, 2020-Canada. | LCSH: COVID -19 (Disease)Canada. | LCSH: COVID - 19 Pandemic, 2020-Press coverageCanada. | LCSH: COVID-19 (Disease)Press coverage Canada. | LCSH: COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-Political aspectsCanada. | LCSH: COVID-19 (Disease)Political aspectsCanada. | LCSH: COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-Government policyCanada. | LCSH: COVID- (Disease)Government policyCanada.

Classification: LCC RA644.C67 L67 2021 | DDC 362.1962/41400971dc23

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

March 2020 The Pandemic Emerges

April 2020 Disaster in Residential Care

May 2020 COVID- Hits Food Processing Industries

June 2020 Systemic Racism and COVID- Spread

July 2020 The Lie of Personal Responsibility

August 2020 The End of CERB

September 2020 Back to School

October 2020 Migrant Workers and COVID-

November 2020 The Race for the Vaccine

December 2020 The Gendered Impact

January 2021 Disability Erased and Distorted

February 2021 Workplace Spread

March 2021 One Year in Media Cuts

Conclusion Canada after COVID-19?

Notes

Index

Dedicated to the memory of every single person whose death could have been prevented, and in celebration of everyone whose labour saved a life, including their own.

Acknowledgements

W riting a book at the best of times can be a challenge. Writing one during and about the Canadian impact of a global pandemic, and in such a short amount of time, required a lot of support from others.

I have to thank the team at Fernwood for everything. When I pitched this book in August 2020, I didnt think theyd be able to take on a new project while my previous book was still being printed. Their early support for this allowed me to have as much research and writing time as possible, given the constraints of writing a book in six months. Thanks especially to Fazeela Jiwa whose fastidious editing, wonderful feedback and enthusiastic support has been a pillar in my pandemic isolation.

Thanks also to Sam Tecle and Rinaldo Walcott online friends who first suggested that funding be crowdsourced for my nightly covid -19 deaths research. While that research wasnt specifically for this book, it paid for work that gave me a deep understanding of how journalists and politicians had been spinning the pandemic. I have never won an award so great as the show of support from this fundraiser. Thank you to the 753 people who contributed to the fund. I would list all of your names here but then this book would be even longer than it already is.

Spin Doctors relied on a lot of other peoples work. I consumed thousands of articles that were the results of hours spent in press conferences and chasing sources, gathering documents and interviews. To every journalist whose work appeared in this book, thank you. And thanks also to all journalists who wrote about covid -19 , regardless of whether Ive cited you. You were working under difficult circumstances and I know many of you share the criticisms that I have highlighted in this book.

Thanks to Gabrielle Peters for her many hours of messages exchanged. Her insights and brilliance related to justice, socialism, disability theory and activism deeply impacted me. While I assume responsibility for all shortcomings in the analysis presented in these pages, I owe a lot to her in how I thought through and wrote about disability and the pandemic.

Thanks to early readers of this manuscript: David Bernans and Julia Caron. Thanks also to the optimistic early readers who didnt get a chance to get through it: dont worry about it! Thanks to Sandy Hudson who challenged me each week to think about the pandemic in different ways. The fruits of those conversations appear throughout this book. And to the DM: thanks for giving my brain ten second breaks whenever I finished writing something.

I also want to acknowledge the tens of thousands of people who died in Canada. Their legacies live on in their family members and friends, in the results of their acts and the remnants of their struggles. To every person who lost someone they loved during this pandemic, Im so sorry. My aim in writing this book is that we will never forget that policy decisions directly led to so many deaths and that someday, there will be justice.

Finally, thanks to my partner Jes for refusing to allow the kids to bug me when I was writing and school was closed. Id thank the kids too but they didnt contribute much.

Introduction

The Black Death acts only as an exaggeration of the class relations; it chooses . It strikes the wretched, it spares the wealthy.

Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method

I t didnt occur to us to cancel our March Break plans. When I flew to Toronto from Los Angeles on February 29, 2020, someone at the meeting I was attending suggested our annual conference might need to be cancelled. She worked in the airline industry and I thought she was being dramatic. While the world would change less than two weeks later, on March 2, I didnt yet feel it. covid-19 was still thousands of kilometres away.

We left Toronto for Philadelphia on March 3. Aside from the giant jugs of hand sanitizer in the hotel lobby, everything was normal. Museums and bars were open. We watched the Flyers play against the Colorado Avalanche, my first live nhl game. Like thousands of other Quebecers, we flew home on planes that very well could have had covid-19 cases in the cabin, a threat from the United States that was barely evident by the time we returned on March 7.