The University of Waterloo spreads covid-19 disinformation

And they won’t correct it.

The University of Waterloo’s (UW’s) official podcast and news bulletin carried an interview with UW president Vivek Goel in January 2022.

UW was proud of the interview. It featured prominently in the hero section of UW’s covid-19 “Information” page for several weeks (until 7 February 2022). The host began, “You are an expert in public health…. We are so lucky to have someone with your expertise leading us at the university during such uncertain times.”

Focusing on covid-19, the host asked Goel to explain Ontario’s “explosive growth in hospitalization.” Goel said,

Unfortunately, what we are seeing in our hospitals right now is the vast majority of people being hospitalized, and almost all the people needing to be in intensive care and having to have ventilators, are the unvaccinated. (9:26 mark)

Goel’s claims are grossly false.

According to Ontario’s official hospitalization data, in January 2022, most patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were “vaccinated.” For example, on 30 January 2022, approximately,

• 75% (1908 of 2575) of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were “vaccinated,” and

• 56% (249 of 448) of intensive care patients with COVID-19 were “vaccinated.”¹

Similar trends were observed across Canada in January 2022.

The serious factual errors went unchallenged by the host.

UW was notified of the errors months ago (on 7 February 2022). They have not issued a correction yet.

In addition to being advised by external sources spreading covid-19 misinformation, Goel makes grossly false claims about covid-19. No wonder his coercive policies fail to make campus safer or healthier.

Or perhaps the falsehoods aren’t mistakes but help advance a specific agenda.

Should we feel lucky to be led by such “experts”?

1. These numbers were taken directly from Ontario’s official covid-19 data in real time. Ontario doesn’t make it easy to retrieve historical data for verification, though. A contemporaneous news report gives different overall counts but similar percentages.