London prof criticized for Holocaust reference
The tweets compared the COVID -19 advice given to Ontario by its scientific advisers to something out of the Holocaust, calling those experts “public health extremists.”
They came from a professor at Western University's medical school, Donald Welsh, its chair of molecular neuroscience and vascular biology, who later posted that he wanted to pump the brakes on a public health approach “that deeply troubles me as a scientist.”
In the fallout Friday, Welsh was rebuked by both Canada's oldest Jewish human rights organization and Premier Doug Ford's office and his comments called “offensive” by the dean of his school.
“These inflammatory comments are totally unacceptable. Nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust,” Ivana Yelich, a spokesperson for Ford, wrote in an emailed statement, adding the province's science advisers have “provided critical data that has been instrumental in supporting our fight against COVID-19.”
B'nai Brith Canada called the comparison “vile and false.”
It's an “absurd and beyond the pale” reference to the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews in Europe, one “nobody with this sort of impressive background should be making,” Michael Mostyn, the organization's chief executive, said in the aftermath of the tweets.
“Whereas the relative merits of lockdowns and the federal and provincial response to the pandemic in general are all legitimate matters of debate to be had in the public square, such gross and inflammatory comparisons have absolutely no place in these discussions,” Mostyn said.
“There is absolutely no historical parallel to be had, and people should be ashamed of themselves for making those sorts of comparisons,” he said.
The provocative tweets taking shots at Ontario's handling of the virus crisis went out Friday, but after The London Free Press reached Welsh, they were taken down and a new thread posted.
Welsh would not speak to a reporter about his Holocaust comparison.
“We are moving down a very dangerous path that deeply troubles me as a scientist,” Welsh posted Friday afternoon after deleting his original tweets.
“I appreciate that some felt this parallel is too strong and I do apologize for that, particularly given the abbreviated format of Twitter.”
His original posts referred to Ontario's COVID-19 advisers, a panel of dozens of doctors and public health professionals that advises the province on issues and responses in the pandemic.
“For 14 months, we have all been part of a highly dangerous experiment. It was foisted upon us, without consent, by a radical group of public health fundamentalists. These extremists have terrorized civil society and attempted to shut down and destroy free thought,” Welsh tweeted in the thread later deleted.