A former Trump official has been spotted at Ottawa’s trucker convoy protest

Oliver O'Connell
·2 min read

A one-time science adviser to the Trump administration has been in Ottawa for several days participating in the trucker convoy Covid-19 vaccine mandate protests.

Paul Alexander has described his presence there as a “personal mission”, CBC’s Alexander Panetta reports.

During his time in the Canadian capital, he has appeared on stage, at news conferences, alongside People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier, and has been tweeting about supplying fuel to protesting truckers.

Mr Alexander, who spoke at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington DC earlier this year, also claims that he has been contacted by people hoping to organise a similar convoy in the US, which the Department of Homeland Security has already issued a warning about.

“The truckers have common sense,” Mr Alexander told CBC, adding that the possible US version of the protest is going to be “massive” and “politicians had better pay attention”.

While the Ottawa protest is anti-mandate and not anti-vaccine, Mr Alexander is very critical of Covid vaccines, saying they should not be administered to young, healthy people and that he wants to see those who promoted them imprisoned.

“I don’t care who you are. You should sit in a jail,” he said. “One day, I wish, and I hope, that we re-examine this.”

He stresses he is not against all vaccines, only those for Covid-19.

Mr Alexander’s views are fringe, and evidence from around the world continues to show the vaccines have suppressed case numbers, hospitalisations, and deaths, while unvaccinated people are many times more likely to suffer severe Covid and in some cases death.

The former science adviser to Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, left the role in September 2020.

Internal emails seen by Politico have since shown he lobbied for a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, writing in July 2020: “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk…. so we use them to develop herd … we want them infected.”

“[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected” in order to get “natural immunity … natural exposure,” the Trump appointee added, also lamenting that colleges were not open to allow the spread.