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Plus: a double book plug!

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Okay, you guys win.

No more masks. No more vaccinations. No more social distancing. No more vaccine passports.

Get rid of ’em all. You win.

Whether you’re a freedomer up in Ottawa, with your kids tucked beside some Jerry cans of diesel in the cab of your truck, or if you’re a Liberal backbencher nobody has heard of before and who decided to speak up only after concluding you’re unlikely to ever be in cabinet, you win. We give up.

Just forget what millions of doctors and nurses have been saying about COVID-19 — about how transmissible it is, how it’s a shape-shifter virus, one that requires us to accept that it can’t be beaten overnight.

About how it is so deadly — killing at least six million people so far — and how it has made more than 400 million people really, really sick.

Forget about all that. Forget, too, that the real experts — not the ones on Twitter with a Viking for a profile picture, and the name “Freedom” followed by a lot of numbers — sound scared, really scared, that we are pretending that the war against COVID is won.

When it isn’t, and when it has killed at least 35,000 men, women and children in Canada so far — the equivalent of the entire population of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, or Grand Prairie, Alberta, where the governments just lifted basic pandemic protections.

Forget about all that. Forget, as well, what it does to you when you get it — which you still really, really could. The chances of which are greater than ever before, because we’re apparently getting rid of masks and vaccines and mandates.

There’s three stages to it, really, when you get COVID.

Sandra Pearce is an American respiratory specialist. She’s been on the front lines of caring for patients with COVID since the beginning.

Here’s what she says you can expect.

In the first stage, Pearce says symptoms range from mild to severe — and can include fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion, runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea.

Half the time, she says, people are asymptomatic, meaning they are spreading the disease without even knowing it.

In the second stage, the virus has crept into your lungs, freedom fighters, and it causes pneumonia. That’s when you will have trouble breathing, chest pain and even confusion.

“When you’re constantly coughing and can’t take deep breaths, your oxygen level can decrease,” Pearce says.

At this stage, she’s seen a lot of people who can’t even walk across the room without getting winded. COVID is starting to kill them.

Stage three is the worst, of course, but all those truckers and nobody MPs in Ottawa know better.

In stage three, Sandra Pearce says, your body starts to shut down. This is the stage when your lungs go into what is called a hyperinflammatory response, which usually leads to sepsis and total organ failure. It’s ugly. It’s painful.

Often, in this stage, they’ll put you on a ventilator because you can’t breathe on your own anymore. Sometimes they’ll stick a tube through your rib cage, because too much pressure has built up in your lungs.

“This is when we call your family because it may be the last time you’re able to talk to them,” Sandra Pearce says.

She adds: “I’ve cried. It’s hard to watch when they are close to the end.”

But those folks up in Ottawa — waving Confederate flags and swastikas, and blaring their horns all day and all night, and pissing on the War Memorial — they know better than experts like Sandra Pearce. They say it’s a hoax, or it’s overblown, or it’s Justin Trudeau’s way of controlling all of us for a Great Reset or One World Government. Something like that.

So they’ve won. Because they’re afraid to get a little needle. Because they don’t like a little bit of inconvenience. Because they are disinterested in treating the lives of friends and family with reverence. Even though life should always be revered.

So, you’ve won. Get rid of the masks. Get rid of vaccines. Get rid of the things we know help to protect us and those we love. Get rid of all of that.

And when you are in an intensive care unit in a hospital somewhere, drowning in your own bodily fluids, gasping your final breath, someone like Sandra Pierce will be looking down on you. And she will be crying.

But me? I won’t be.

— Warren Kinsella was chief of staff to a federal minister of health

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