Radical leftist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau published a video on Wednesday in which he claimed to receive doses of a Wuhan coronavirus booster shot and a vaccine against influenza — a promotional campaign to convince Canadians to do the same.
Trudeau appeared in the video wearing a T-shirt reading “vaccines cause adults” — apparently mocking individuals who question the safety of many vaccine products — and showed off a tattoo on his upper left arm, which prompted widespread online curiosity following the publication of a similar video attempting to convince Canadians to intake doses of coronavirus vaccine products in 2021.
“My tattoo is planet Earth inside a Haida raven. The globe I got when I was 23; the Robert Davidson raven for my 40th birthday,” Trudeau explained on Twitter in 2012. The Haida are an indigenous community native to what is now western Canada.
Trudeau first received a dose of the coronavirus vaccine product developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca in April 2021, at a time during which male world leaders and government officials around the world were engaging in similar campaigns to convince the public to trust coronavirus vaccine products via photo shoots. European leaders, in particular, published photos in which they appeared partially disrobed, or fully shirtless while receiving vaccine doses.
Coronavirus vaccine campaigns have largely subsided in much of the world, however, as new variants of the virus have emerged. Many governments, such as Canada, nonetheless continue to encourage the public to ingest vaccine products against coronavirus, including some new “boosters” developed to target variants that had not been identified in 2021.
Trudeau’s vaccination campaign emerged after public health experts complained that the Canadian government had not properly explained to Canadians how to keep updated on coronavirus booster shots.
“There is a lot of confusion with the vaccine rollout this year,” Sabina Vohra-Miller of the platform Unambiguous Science told Canada’s Globe and Mail in late October. “Going into our third vaccine season, we should have been better prepared for all these scenarios and we’re not.”
Dawn Bowdish, Canada Research Chair in aging and immunity at McMaster University in Hamilton, lamented to the newspaper that many people who would otherwise schedule their booster shots are not doing so because they do not know they have to.
“There’s a whole group of people who aren’t vaccine hesitant. It’s just no one told them they should get an update,” Bowdish said.
Others are receiving original versions of coronavirus vaccines rather than the updated shots meant for new variants, Globe and Mail observed. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discontinued emergency approval for the original mRNA-based vaccine products approved in 2021, by the companies Pfizer and Moderna, in September. The FDA simultaneously approved updated booster vaccine products by those companies.
The leftist Canadian government under Trudeau imposed mandates on government workers and several other key groups of people, including truckers crossing the border between Canada and the United States regularly, shortly after the rollout of the original vaccines. Trudeau campaigned heavily for Canadians to ingest the vaccine products, equating not receiving coronavirus vaccinations with misogyny and racism.
“We all know people who are deciding whether or not they are willing to get vaccinated, and we will do our very best to try to convince them. However, there is still a part of the population (that) is fiercely against it,” Trudeau said in December 2021. “They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist.”
“This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?” he asked at the time.
Trudeau’s mandates led to widespread protests in early 2022, most prominently a movement known as the “Freedom Convoy” in which thousands of protesters, many of them truckers refusing to accept vaccine mandates or any coronavirus-related violation of their civil liberties, descended on Ottawa. Trudeau disparaged the protesters as a “fringe minority” and claiming ingesting coronavirus vaccine products was part of “defines what being Canadian is.”
“The protesters are talking about freedom,” Trudeau said. “Well, Canadians know that freedom means getting back to the things that they used to enjoy, and the way to be able to do that is to get vaccinated. The way that we built this country was by being there for each other. That’s what defines what being Canadian is.”
“The vast majority of Canadians know that [protesting] is not how we can end this pandemic,” he said at the time. “The way out of this pandemic is getting vaccinated. It’s listening to public health advice, and the best way to get out of this pandemic and to continue to be there for each other is to show that we understand the importance of following science, facts, and health experts. That’s how we’ll get out of this pandemic.”
Trudeau ordered an unprecedented activation of the Emergencies Act to dislodge the peaceful protesters of the Freedom Convoy, leading to police brutality against the public. In one particularly disturbing aggression caught on video, a group of Canadian police officers on horseback trampled an indigenous elder attending the Freedom Convoy protests. The elder, Candice Sero, survived the attack with a fractured collarbone and significant bruising.
Canadian provincial governments began ceasing coronavirus-related civil liberty violations in the aftermath of the protests.
In April, Trudeau claimed that his government had never “forced” the public to ingest vaccine products, but rather offered “incentives” for them to do so, prompting outrage among those who opposed the mandates.