Public Health Agency of Canada

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Dr. Amrita Bharat, who is the Chief of Antimicrobial Resistance and Nosocomial Infections at the National Microlab.

The National Microlab is part of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Dr. Barrett completed her PhD at McMaster University and her postdoctoral training at the NML with the late Dr. Michael Mulvey.

Dr. Barrett holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Manitoba.

And then we also have Dr. Rudnick, Dr. Wallace Rudnick, who will be joining us as well today for the podcast.

We have a nice panel discussion on the program and the surveillance network.

And Dr. Rudnick heads the AMR-NET program within the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microlab, overseeing a national antimicrobial resistance surveillance initiative across human and animal health sectors.

She holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program.

It, it's gone from being an urban male having sex with male disease to a broader community of both, of heterosexuals, number one, and into the communities, into the rural areas, and specifically the underserved, um, undertaken care of or under-resourced areas of our country.

So the rates are the highest right now in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, whereas the rate right now is 5.5 per 100,000 according to the Public Health Agency of Canada across Canada.

In Manitoba's number one up around 19, and Saskatchewan's very close behind around 18.

So the numbers are very high, and as I said, the population's moved.

That's it.

So Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, many members of Parliament did not show up.

Congratulations to those who did.

But there's a complete refusal of governments all over the world to recognize that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign was a debacle.

And then that needs to happen across the country so that we're not just poaching from each other with incentives to get people to move a province or two over to come work, but actually have a plan for health care and the workforce in Canada.

yeah i don't want to in any way take away from the the dire alarms being raised here but uh you know to to your health care uh having said that it's it's not a competition i'm here to bang a different drum today of course so you know i'll point out that that we are in the biggest public health crisis in our history right it's taken more lives than aids it's taken more lives than covid and it continues it's not over and so uh not to diminish anything you know that we need to do with regards to enforcing the canada health act and so on but I mean, the Public Health Agency of Canada, through public health law, has enormous power.

You know, they could regulate the toxic drug supply tomorrow if they wished, and they've chosen not to for... 10 years that they count and a few more that they don't.

So it's really simple.

By the time I was brought in for my professional standards compelled interview, I had 10 binders of information, or what police would call evidence.

I had the Pfizer documents, um, whatever I could pull from Public Health Agency of Canada.

I had also pulled, um, different, like, Twitter videos that our public health officials were telling everybody, including pregnant mothers and breastfeeding mothers, that these vaccines are safe and effective.

Yet, the Pfizer documents we had in our own country here show that they've never been tr- tested on pregnant or breastfeeding women, mothers.

I, I think, you know, I, I think our government's been great in many ways, but I think what we haven't done as well as a government is, is had this sort of teamwork approach.

And so, you know, we should have an approach, and I was reading about Australia is trying to do the same thing now, is really get the regulators, you know, the ISED type groups, uh, Health Canada, you know, PHAC, all those people working together s- instead of being separate entities.

I mean, you still have to have that s- separateness for, for Health Canada to, uh, oversee regulations, but I think there should be more of a, a feeling of we're collaborating together.

We're solving problems for Canadians, and we're not setting up barriers.