December 2020

“And I want to make an offer now to all of your listeners. If people have ideas on how the government can act, to unlock that preloaded stimulus (referring to CERB, as though it wasn’t to put food on the tables, but rather to go shopping with post-pandemic), I am very, very interested”

Spoken by our Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to Amanda Lang on BNN.

It was December of 2020 and I could feel my heart drop into my stomach for reasons that weren’t clear to me, but could only be deeply felt. A feeling I know as nothing other than my intuition. She often doesn't make any sense at all, and challenges logic around every corner, and it's only recently that I've developed a deep and full sense of trust with her. At that time, I had been actively opening my mind to what my “conspiracy theorist” friends had been sharing on their feeds. Something was nudging me beneath my outward eye-rolls. I won’t lie, part of me was just pissed they kept referring to folks like me who didn’t see what was happening as “sheep”, as I much prefer ‘lion’, thank you very much. I was also curious AF to figure out wtf they were going on about because they seemed so bloody convicted in everything they posted and their level of belief was intriguing to me. The other part of me was beaten down and looking for voices of reason in a world that seemed to only have one train of thought.

So there I was, watching this news clip, listening to the Deputy PM of Canada ask Canadians for ideas on how to access their money to bring the economy back. She was awkward and ill-scripted and the vibe was not hitting right. There was no sense of hope stirring within me about the possibility of going back to normal. All I felt was an insidious infiltration of dread, but I didn't know why. I didn’t understand the larger picture at play then, all I knew was my gut was screaming that something was terribly wrong.

* * * * *

December 2018

“Just follow the money, and you’ll understand what I mean,” I said to my family in a heated dinner discussion about our Canadian healthcare system back in 2018.

I can imagine that still to this day when I get going on these topics, my family likely takes a deep breath and says a collective prayer because they know the freight train of fury that’s about to pour out of my mouth. In my family, we call this 'ranting' and it’s considered to be a fine art. That particular evening, I was going off about my experience working in the pharmacy industry and how everything is tied to obscene amounts of money. During one of my roles, I was required to audit the actual pharmacies for things like prescriptions, med reviews, blood pressure monitoring, and other such things labeled as patient-focused services. The audit was an important component of operations, in order to avoid government clawbacks. The revenue from billable services was staggering, and pharmacists were held accountable for this revenue generation with weekly targets for services provided. Physical prescriptions were something else I reviewed during these visits as the “script count” was of utmost importance. Did the doctor prescribe it? Was it filled more than once? How was it it paid for? Was the benefits company billed properly? So on and so forth... Weekly conference calls always discussed action plans for locations where the 'script counts' were down and & celebrated locations where the ‘script counts’ were up. I can remember thinking - Shouldn’t that be a good thing if the script counts were down? Doesn’t that mean people don’t need the meds anymore? Sure, scripts would go down for obvious reasons such as death, too - but what about the folks that just didn’t need or want them anymore? Healthy patients don’t make loyal customers, I learned. Bad for business. It’s truly no wonder this was the job that revealed itself to be my final straw before taking my leap into entrepreneurship. I didn’t know myself well enough at the time to fully understand the depth of misalignment in my life, but I can see it clear as day now. And so I chose to the gentle topic of how I felt our healthcare system was driven by money as opposed to genuine care for patients that evening over dinner, as any black sheep of the family would.

I often blew off steam ranting away about things like our education system and the mainstream media, but I figured I had just inherited the art of ranting from my father, and never really spent time outside of raging dinner conversations trying to follow the thread that is insidiously woven throughout the systems that prop up our society today. The interesting thing I've noticed in the last year, is the defence mechanism this triggers within people. Of course we want to defend our dear friend who is a nurse, or sister who is a police offer, or uncle that is a school teacher, or husband who is a pharmacist. Of course, we love these people. They're good people who love their jobs and are excellent at what they do. What people fail to realize though, is that the system that churns each of these entities, operates with or without them.

* * * * *

December 2020

I had started to ask questions more publicly, but I was playing it safe by putting up curious polls on my Instagram about things like lockdowns. After all, we were just notified that Christmas had been cancelled. It shook me to my core that anyone thought they had any power in my decisions & discretion to see my own family. As if they somehow knew how to protect my own flesh and blood better than I did. Wtf were we doing?

The other part of me was still afraid my healthy body was somehow going to harm my parents. Yes, I was once the person who went so far as to wash Amazon parcels on the front porch to make sure Covid-19 didn't sneak into my house. Looking back on my own thought process, it's difficult to admit how successful the narrative had infiltrated even me, the black sheep of the family who had harboured close to 20 years of skepticism for the system.

The response was interesting. Those that agreed something felt off would express a sense of relief and engage in open discussion while those who were in strong support of lockdowns would respond with anger and a swift click of the unfollow button. It was growing increasingly more obvious to me that groupthink had made its way to the pandemic, too. If you were on the outside of the allegedly popular point of view, you were wrong, selfish, crazy and a whole slew of other rage-y terms and labels. The fact that nuance had officially left the building, only deepened my concern for what was happening on a higher level that we couldn't just see. Well, except for those conspiracy theorists....

February 2021

“We need to cancel our Disney subscription." I said to my husband. They had just turfed Gina Carrano, a star in the wildly popular Star Wars spin off, The Mandelorian. Baby Yoda was all the rage. Carrano had just taken to Twitter, stating what so many of us were thinking, too. But the mob spun it as though she was somehow comparing the public hatred of Republicans to the Jewish people during the holocaust and entirely missed her point. She was calling out the division. The dangerous pitting of one group of people again at another group of people who have been painted as bad for the advancement of society. In other words, historically dangerous government behaviour. She later discussed this with Jewish Daily Wire owner Ben Shapiro in an exclusive interview - a must watch if this is of interest to you.

Cancel culture was the new black when Carrano posted her explosive tweet. I was on the other side of the underbelly of woke culture by this point and was able to clearly see how oppressed groups were being sickeningly leveraged by the media & the government in order to create further division under the guise of equality, and in turn, position themselves as saviours. The old "create and uphold the problem and offer the solution so you can be in power" trick. I digress. You'll read more about what I mean by the underbelly of woke culture in another part of my story as there's an important distinction to be made between fighting for equality and leveraging the plight of marginalized people for political power.

Back to Carrano. I was pissed. I could see the stage being set for censorship. I mean, banning a sitting president from Twitter should’ve been the first clue - love him or hate him. We were entering into an era where free thought and free speech were socially punishable and often incorrectly labeled as full blown hate or incitement, and it felt like a slippery fucking slope. I was noticing headlines growing more and more alienating for folks who simply had a different point of view. I was watching people digitally die left right and center on social media for not conforming to the latest groupthink trend, sending a clear message to everyone that there were dire consequences for speaking your own truth, if it didn't fit the pre-determined narrative.

By this time, the vaccines were also making their debut. I had never considered myself an anti-vaxxer, although I was always the one they rolled their eyes at during flu season at the office because I was usually the only one that never got the shot. The regular comeback was always - Don’t you care about the elderly? My response was - if the vulnerable got their flu shots, then they shouldn’t need to worry about me not getting mine. Sound familiar? I was never against them and respected anyone who chose to get them, I just didn’t feel I needed one, and certainly never took well to being pressured to take one. I was however, very much of the thought process that anti-vaxxer parents were hippies, but I never recalled any tantrum like behaviour from the masses over whether or not someone chose to vaccinate. We minded our own business, whether we agreed with one another or not. Yet I could see the tensions rising online. The unsettling level of fear that had been provoked by the narrative around Covid-19 was causing skepticism for some, and urgency to get poked by others. The division was brewing.

When the vaccines were beginning to make their way into Canada and my parents were getting closer to being eligible, a mixture of concern and curiosity started to brew within me. I knew they were being labeled as safe and effective, but I just couldn’t accept that at face value, despite the "Trust The Science" campaign that was making its round by dutiful citizens. I decided to see what I could find using the largest database of information in the world - the internet. I stumbled across the CDC's Vaccines Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and was able to review Covid-19 vaccine reactions for January and February of 2021 in the USA. As a person who loves reports, I was excited to see data available in this way. I hit the button on my query to start the search, without having any expectations or points to prove - just curiosity as a result of an unexplainable gut feeling. So when the query populated and the number appeared on the screen, I can remember just staring at the screen. Remember, this is near the end of February and only a small, small fraction of the population had been inoculated by this point in America. Yet, I was staring at thousands of reported injuries, and nearly 1,200 deaths. My breath shallowed, as I was starting to acknowledge a deep sense of malevolence brewing from somewhere around the globe, for reasons that made no logical sense to me.

For a brief moment, I tried to justify what I was seeing on the screen in front of me. Perhaps this was normal? After all, I had never looked into vaccines before. So I decided to search for the Polio vaccines since I figured that majority of people in America would have likely received these shots. I ran the Polio vaccine data for the same time period. A tiny number appeared in the search. I thought to myself, ‘well - I supposed since the Covid-19 vaccines were being rolled out in a mass campaign, technically they would be distributed in a much higher volume in a 2 month time frame.’ The CDC data captured vaccines back to the year 1980, and so I decided to see just how many adverse events were reported for the entire recorded history of Polio vaccines that they had tracked, which was 41 years.

Around 400 reported deaths populated in the search, across arguably one of the most popular vaccines, over a period of 41 years. That was an average of 10 or so deaths per year across 2 different vaccines. A number that paled in comparison to just two months of Covid-19 jabs. What??? The numbers must be wrong. I ran the Covid-19 vaccine query again, I tripled checked I had every box properly selected and that I wasn’t populating any data that didn’t belong in the search. The same data appeared again - around 1,200 deaths in America alone. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing so I embarked on a furious search across the CDC website and found that only an average of 1-10% of vaccine injuries gets reported, meaning the 1,200 I was staring at could be much, much higher. I felt nauseous. I felt disoriented. Like I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to see. I proceeded to search for what death count was “acceptable” before they pulled a vaccine from further distribution and found that the last SARS vaccine was pulled from human trials with concerns the vaccine could cause harm or a reduced immune response. Unbeknown to me at the time, was the censorship that existed even within Google itself (and not just on social media) which made information incredibly difficult to find. I didn't know about search engines like Duck Duck Go at the time, so cut me some slack, y'all.

I closed my laptop. I sat in disbelief for what felt like ages but was really just a handful of minutes. I couldn’t process how something with this kind of data behind it, could continue to be rolled out, let alone be celebrated by officials around the world. Why wasn’t anyone else talking about this? And when people did talk about it, why was rage and ridicule the only response? Why no open discussions? Why wasn't the government being transparent about it on our provincial health websites? Why wasn’t this on the news? I was sure they would shut it down and stop the rollout. But they didn't.

…what the fuck was going on?

Who was I to question, though..? A woman without a medical degree, doing research on the internet - a total menace to society.

Sarah Swain's Substack

And then I woke up - Part 1