Tangle - Minky Worden explains what is happening in China — and how we know

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

On today's podcast, we sit down with Minky Worden, the Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch. Worden authored the 2008 book China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges and has previously lived and worked in Hong Kong as an adviser to the Democratic Party of Hong Kong chairman Martin Lee.We chatted with Worden about the current human rights crisis in China, the state of press freedom there, how global organizations could respond in a helpful way and the opportunity to do something about it before the 2022 Olympic games in Beijing, China.You can follow Worden on Twitter here.And if you're not yet subscribed to Tangle, you can get the daily newsletter here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to my Tangle listeners, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate and independent thinking without the hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. In today's episode, I am very excited to follow up on a Tangle newsletter from a few weeks ago where we discussed some of what was happening with the Uyghurs in China. A BBC investigation has found evidence that China's policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities from northwest Xinjiang to factory jobs, often far from home, is being used as a method of uprooting and assimilating the population.

We've seen China's Muslim re-education camps the way the Chinese wanted us to see them on a tightly controlled tour earlier this year. He just told me that Hamza's mom went back to get her other four boys and was arrested. They say they were never given a reason why. Like their mom, Hamza's brothers are also missing. They are Uyghurs. The White House says more than a million of this mostly Muslim Chinese population have

been subjected to religious persecution and sent to what it deems political indoctrination camps. And joining me to discuss the topic is someone who knows a lot more about it than I do. Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. Minky, thank you so much for being on the show with us. Thanks, Isaac. I'm delighted to be here. Minky, I guess the best way to start this is maybe if you could just tell our audience a little bit in broad terms about the work that you do at Human Rights Watch and what your role is and what you feel like your responsibility is on the global stage right now.

So I have been at Human Rights Watch for 22 and a half years. Before that, I lived and worked in Hong Kong. And I have both a professional and I think you could say a personal interest in the Beijing Olympics as a consequence. My work at Human Rights Watch is I oversee all of our research, advocacy, and communications around sports. So that can, so for example, we published a 67-page report on child abuse in sport training in Japan ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, which are taking place this summer. We've done a lot of work, for example, on the exclusion of female fans from stadiums in Iran. We've done work on sexual abuse in the sport of football or soccer, and two presidents of football federations sexually assaulting members of the women's national team. So I think if you think about it this way, sport is one of the world's great uniters.

The Olympics and the World Cup are both watched by about half of the world's population, 3.5 billion people over the age of four watched the World Cup in 2018. And we expect about the same number to watch the Olympics in Japan this summer. But I think it's also important to note where these events contribute to serious human rights abuses. And it's also an opportunity to throw a global spotlight on abuses that are happening that may not be getting enough attention. events like the Beijing Olympics, but it's also direct research into abuses that happen to journalists, workers, women, athletes, and others in the world of sport. Got it. And I am very excited to speak with you, especially about the upcoming Olympics. And I think one of the things that is on a lot of people's minds who worry about these issues and are concerned about human rights right now is what's happening with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and sort of what we know about what China's role, the Chinese government's role is in what's happening to them. I'm wondering if maybe you could give us the rough outline from your perspective, from the Human Rights Watch perspective, about what we sort of understand is going on inside

China right now and how we know that. I mean, what the evidence for it is and what the global reaction has been. Thanks. I think it's always a good thing to start by not assuming that people know who the Uyghurs are or where they're located. So the Uyghurs are an ethnic minority group in China. It's in the western part of China and an area called Xinjiang. is supposed to be a so-called autonomous region where the people who live there, there are about 13 million Muslims, Turkic Muslims, and not all of them are Uyghurs. There are other kinds of Muslims who live there. This part of the country has long had members who have been pushing for more autonomy. And as a consequence, there have been a series of crackdowns that Human Rights Watch has been documenting, in fact, for more than 20 years. But before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, that was the summer

Olympics, there were terrorist attacks. And the government used this as an excuse to jail many people, to lock up a lot of people who were not associated with the terrorist attacks, but who simply had the misfortune of being Muslim and in the wrong place at the wrong time. China came back to host the winter, to bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2015. And interestingly, the latest crackdown on Uyghurs by the central government in Beijing really began in 2014. As part of its efforts to win the right to host the Winter Olympics in 2022, the Chinese government made a number of promises, including press freedom, human rights, and protections for minorities. But as we have seen, instead of loosening its chokehold on ethnic minorities, and this, by the way, would also include Tibetans or Hong Kongers, as well as

Uyghurs. The Chinese government, the central government has tightened that chokehold and has taken steps to repress the local population. So instead of having more autonomy, they have less. And you would ask how we know this. So Human Rights Watch is an international human rights organization. We've covered China for close to 40 years. Our researchers do very difficult work to document human rights abuses. And in 2018, Human Rights Watch released a report on the Chinese government's mass arbitrary detention, including torture, forced political indoctrination, and mass surveillance of the Xinjiang Muslims. We also documented things like the authorities' involuntary collection of biometrics, including

DNA, voice samples, and their use of data to track residents in the region. The use of artificial intelligence to monitor this population is present and increasing. We also did a separate report where we reverse engineered an app that all Uyghurs were required to have on their phones that was used to track their activities. And one of the questions that I sometimes get, we sometimes get at Human Rights Watch is, wow, the Chinese government put a million million Uyghurs into forced re-education camps. How is that even possible? And it was by reverse engineering the app on the phone, we were able to document how the way a man or a woman might be sent to prison could be something as simple as his wife wore veils. He left by the back door instead of the front door. He called a cousin in Europe. He prayed after each meal. So these are some of the

reasons why ordinary Uyghurs who are certainly not terrorists got sent, more than a million of them, to these so-called political education camps. By the way, this even included, and we know of at least one athlete, a very talented young soccer player, who, as you would expect, soccer players have to travel overseas for matches, for international tournaments. So he was picked up for international travel, which of course he had to do for his job as a soccer player. So something as simple as that could end you, could result in one, two, three years of so-called re-education in these camps with quite brutal conditions. So one of the things that I found really interesting was after I wrote this piece, I heard from a lot of people who sort of gave

pushback on the idea that maybe the Western media was framing this issue as being more serious than it was, that it was sort of this, the corporate pro-war media trying to encourage some sort of saber rattling between the United States and China. And in speaking with you, I understand that there is obviously a lot of Chinese state propaganda that comes out of China, but I'm also interested to hear, you know, what's the what is the actual life like for somebody who's on the ground in China who wants to report on some of these things that are happening? I mean, what do we know about what it's like to be a journalist or be a member of the press who is in China right now? That's a that's a terrific question. And I think, you know, if we look back at the sweep of history since, say, 1989, when there was the Tiananmen Square massacre, at the time of the Tiananmen

Square massacre, all journalists were forced out. Domestic journalists in China were arrested. And that was sort of the lowest point. I think right now it's fair to say that we're at the lowest point since the Tiananmen massacre in terms of press freedom. And that's actually something you can measure. Obviously, there are overseas mainland Chinese reporters for state-run media who are based all over the world and who are constantly sending out and producing propaganda. But what's happened over the last few years is that many of the most critical voices in China, international reporters, who are reporting on not just things like the crackdown in Xinjiang, but reporting on environmental catastrophe, reporting on conditions for women and girls,

reporting on access to education. All of these reporters have been systematically ejected from China so that the ones who are left, many of them are struggling to report. There is an organization called the Foreign Correspondence Club of China, which does an annual report on media freedom. And this year's report says that the Chinese government dramatically stepped up, that's a direct quote, efforts to frustrate the work of journalists. It says all arms of state power, including surveillance systems that were introduced to curb coronavirus were used to harass and intimidate journalists, their Chinese colleagues, and those that the foreign journalists try to interview.

So what this means in practice is that, for example, for the Olympics, press freedom is one of the things you have to have, right? The sale of media rights is a major source of revenue for the IOC. And also the world really relies on journalists to say what's happening in China. I think the world saw at the time of COVID-19 that instead of telling the world about the new pandemic that was preparing to sweep across borders, the Chinese government actually harassed, arrested and endangered hundreds of health workers in China who were trying to sound the alarm about this new pandemic, COVID-19. So I think we can't leave it to the Chinese government to report what's happening in the country. Free and independent journalists play an absolutely important role. And I should say, it's also quite tragic that Chinese journalists themselves have been frequently arrested in recent years, and some of them have been detained without charge or without access to their colleagues or their news organizations. the Foreign Correspondents Club of China report concludes that for a third consecutive year, not a single correspondent said working conditions improved. So I think that tells you it's a pretty

grim situation. And this is just at a time when the world really needs to know what's happening in China. Right. And I guess related to that, one of the things that it feels like we're seeing is a little bit of history repeating itself. And you alluded to this at the top of the show, but obviously this is not the first time China has hosted an important Olympic game event. And my understanding is that in 2008, you wrote a book about this, about the upcoming Olympics, and had a maybe rather optimistic view of how China might change and position itself in order to meet these human rights requirements. on what it looked like in 2008 to you and what actually happened, and now sort of what you're seeing as these 2022 Olympics approach, and whether you have hope about China maybe using this moment to move forward with the rest of the world, or if you are much less optimistic about where things stand now? Thanks. That's a great question. And I think it's important for

people who work in human rights or people who work in foreign policy or writers to assess the veracity of their predictions or their assumptions. And I will say that the book I published in 2008 was called China's Great Leap. And although it was quite critical of the human rights abuses in China, it was essentially optimistic about the future of China. And for one very good reason, the one reason, you know, even with the repression of China's current leader, Xi Jinping, there's always a very good reason for optimism in China. China's current leader, Xi Jinping. There's always a very good reason for optimism in China, and that's actual Chinese people who are smart and hopeful and who have the same aspirations that everyone does around the world for more freedom, less government intrusion into their

lives, and greater opportunities. I think the Human Rights Watch extensively documented very serious abuses in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. And these were things like forced evictions. There were reports that as many as 10,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes, bulldozed from their homes without compensation. Migrant labor abuses. I think many of your listeners may remember the Bird's Nest Stadium, which is the beautiful stadium that was designed by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist. Six workers died building that stadium alone, right? Ai Weiwei, since he designed the stadium, was persecuted in China, arrested and beaten by the police, and now lives in exile. The civil society before the Beijing

Olympics in 2008 was on an upward trajectory. There were activists working on health rights, on the environment, on women's rights, and they had really very bravely carved out a lot of space. Almost all of them are in prison or have fled the country. defending people who were victims of human rights abuses themselves have now largely gone to prison. So a lot of the reasons that there were for hope in 2008 have been crushed since then. And I think it's fair to say that the Olympics themselves, instead of elevating the best and most hopeful elements in Chinese society, the ordinary people. It elevated the security state, the People's Liberation Army, and the surveillance network. And I think that's the big fear going into the 2022 Olympics is that the last Olympics significantly led to a significant deterioration in human rights abuses. Now, the human rights situation is far worse. So the question is, if it's going to get worse as a result of the 2022 Olympics, that's something that that everyone should be concerned about. So, you know, I wrote a piece about this issue and was, you know, my newsletter basically takes

arguments that are coming from across the political spectrum and reflects on them a little bit. And based on Charles Yu's award winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province.

Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. When I got to the point in the newsletter where I'm supposed to present some kind of solution or talk a little bit about how I'm viewing these arguments, I found myself feeling, frankly, really hopeless. I mean, I had a sense that there seems to be not a lot we can do in response to some of these human rights abuses that we're seeing with the Uyghurs or across China more generally, the crackdown on press freedom because the Chinese state seems to have so much collective power right now, both in terms of trade, but also on the ground and military power. And I'm wondering, I mean,

from your perspective, what do we do? What does the United States do? What are these international bodies do? How can we respond in a way that is, you know, productive? Is it possible? Is there a way we can pressure China into, or the Chinese Communist Party into halting this kind of human rights abuses that are happening on the ground there? Yeah, that's a terrific question. I think, you know, there's always reason for hope. And as I said, the biggest reason for hope is Chinese people themselves, the people who live in China. And among the things that China has done in recent years that have left us with less information and also less reason for optimism is that China has excluded UN monitors, which is why we're not able to say, there aren't UN monitors who are able to come in and interview people who are in these reeducation through labor camps. The journalists aren't able to travel freely and interview people and anyone they do interview gets arrested. So that's obviously a dire state of affairs. The crackdown in Hong Kong, you know, the 2008 Olympics also took place in Hong Kong at the time.

The 2008 Olympics also took place in Hong Kong at the time. And I think the crackdown that we've seen, especially on press freedom in Hong Kong, has been very worrying because a lot of what we know about China has come through Hong Kong, through the very robust and brave journalists who work there, the robust news operations. But I think we could look at the coming Winter Olympics as a pressure point to actually achieve some change. And the change that I think the world would like to see is a China that respects and protects human rights at home and does the same abroad. So that's the overarching goal. And then you think, well, how do we get there? And I do think that the requirements of upholding human rights that all Olympic hosts bear is one pressure point. In December of this past year, December 2020, the International Olympic Committee published an expert report written by Prince Zaid, who was the former High Commissioner for Human Rights with the UN, and Rachel Davis of Shift. And it's a strategy for the IOC to adopt human rights,

and especially business and human rights. So this would allow, for example, the IOC to insist that China uphold, you know, hold itself to the same standards that, for example, the IOC is going to demand for the Paris Olympics in 2024, or the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. So I think sport is essentially about a level playing field, everyone upholding the same rules. And there is quite a lot of space for the IOC to insist that China uphold the promises it made to get the Olympics back in 2015. And just one example of that to pick up on our discussion of how bad things are for journalists, press freedom is absolutely required under the Olympic Charter.

And there's a lot the IOC could be doing now. And some of it's very practical. It's allowing journalists to use virtual private networks so that they're able to access the internet. It's allowing journalists who are legally able and who need to work in China to work in China. It's not harassing and arresting the Chinese news assistants. So there's a lot that could be done using the pressure point of the Olympics, getting the UN monitors back in, restoring some of the press freedom

that's been lost in recent years, looking at supply chains to make sure those Olympic mascots are not made by forced Uyghur labor. And I think, of course, the biggest thing would be be the possibility of enough pressure on China to empty those re-education camps and send the Uyghur Muslims home to their families. So these are big and optimistic, somewhat optimistic goals. But I think with a human rights situation that is as grim and as dismal as China's is currently, that is as grim and as dismal as China's is currently, we do have to remember what the rules of the game are. And what we've learned in the past is that you really can't and shouldn't be hosting an Olympics if you are locking up more than a million of your population in camps. So, I mean, I guess to play the role of the cynic here, it feels to me like, you know, the trains kind of left the station already. I mean, the Olympics aren't that far

away. Has the IOC shown any indication that they're going to try to enforce these kinds of standards on China? I mean, what's the possibility that something like this actually happens? Well, I think China has by and large gotten a pass for the reason of coronavirus. So another finding of the recent Foreign Correspondents Club was that a lot of correspondents were trying to do their work, a lot of reporters were trying to work and then they were getting stopped because of coronavirus restrictions. So I do think that as the pandemic lifts around the world, there will absolutely be more scrutiny of what's happening in China. And I do think that China has used, cynically used the cover of coronavirus to accelerate its repression. And as the pandemic recedes, I think there will inevitably be more scrutiny on what China

has done in this pandemic time. So I think it's, yes, it's late. It's one year to go until the Winter Olympics. But there are a lot of pressure points, including athletes, right? You may remember that when Daryl Morley, the Houston coach, tweeted in favor of democracy in Hong Kong, The entire NBA was punished, right? But the Chinese government's going to find it pretty hard to control the opinions or the tweets of thousands of athletes. So I think that there are the sponsors themselves are also quite exposed in this. If the IOC doesn't take action against China's terrible abuses, then a lot of the pressure, I believe, is going to turn on to some of the sponsors who are names like Coca-Cola, Visa, Airbnb, GE.

So these are all big companies who are underwriting the Olympics, but may be finding themselves underwriting crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. So I think that's also something to look for is what pressures are brought to bear on companies and what effect does that have in this Olympic ecosystem? One of the things that seemed to keep coming up when I was reading and researching this is a criticism that's often lobbed at the United Nations for not taking a harder stance on what's happening in China. And you mentioned briefly that some of the UN inspectors have not been allowed into these so-called re-education camps. I'm wondering if that is part of the reason why we haven't seen the UN maybe take such a stance or stand up to them in a way that we've seen them take on a

country like Israel before in the past for human rights violations. And I'd love to hear what it might take for an international body with that kind of weight behind it to do that? Because it seems like there is this criticism that, you know, maybe the UN is experiencing too much influence from the CCP, and that's why they're not willing to sort of go out on a limb and call it like it is. I think that's a good insight. Human Rights Watch actually did a book-length report on how China is manipulating the various agencies and institutions of the UN to take control of them and to silence criticism it doesn't want to hear. So that's a very good analysis. I think the Chinese government has said that UN observers are welcome to come

to Xinjiang, but they have a lot of conditions. So those conditions are, you know, similar to what the World Health Organization encountered when it was trying to get to the bottom of the coronavirus, right? And I think on the one hand, China cares very much about what the international community says and does, right? And I think on the one hand, China cares very much about what the international community says and does, right? As you could see, you know, the harsh reaction over Daryl Morley's tweet. And on the other hand, they're not playing by the rules. So they're not admitting UN monitors or a human rights commission to investigate what's happening. So the Chinese government says those aren't concentration camps, but the United Nations, it's not the Chinese government that is

tasked with determining that. It's the United Nations. So the thing that should happen quite immediately is a visit of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. And I think the urgency of this is also, you may have seen that there have been a number of recent media reports with Uyghur women coming forward and revealing that they were subject to forced rape, mass rape, or sexual assault. And I think the nature of these complaints and the detail of them, also the stigma in the Muslim religion against coming forward if you've been the victim of sexual assault, might have kept these reports out of the public view until now. But this sort of firsthand testimony of systemic rape and sexual abuse in these internment camps makes it actually quite urgent that the UN is allowed to go and inspect these camps. One of the things that I think I struggle with is to what degree it's

the responsibility of the United States to sort of flex its power. And I'll apologize on behalf of my international readers and listeners for a moment to just look at this through a very American-centric lens. But I know a lot of people feel like we don't want to get involved and stick our nose in another country's business anymore. I don't subscribe to that view, but I think a lot of my readers and listeners do. And I'm curious, what your read is on Joe Biden, President Biden, and how he might approach this issue. And if you were in his shoes, if you had a say in how the United States was going to handle diplomacy with the Chinese Communist Party, what would be your guidance on how to move forward, given.S. or what's best for the U.S. We're really looking at things through what are the international human rights standards, and those apply to everyone. So, you know, in the same way that we are extremely tough,

we do extremely tough reporting about the United States or the U.K. or Canada, we would do extremely tough and fair reporting about China or Russia or Saudi Arabia. So I think that's one good thing about human rights is it's not subjective in that way to politics. But I would say that this is not something that any one government should tackle alone. It was very encouraging to see at the UN Human Rights Council that 39 governments stepped forward to vote to censure Beijing over its human rights abuses at the last UN Human Rights Council meeting. I think the United Nations is the appropriate body to carry out inspections because there's no possibility of anyone saying,

well, this is a political matter. And if you think about what's happening in relation to other countries, the threats and bullying that China has been carrying out, and I'll just cite here, two ordinary Canadians were essentially kidnapped and are being held hostage because of a business prosecution that the Chinese government didn't like. So this type of behavior is not something that should go unchecked in the international community. Australia, the UK and other countries have also, Norway have also experienced the sharp end of China's spear. I think this, it would be a big mistake for the US to go it alone in relation

to China. I think this is a multilateral problem. And so I do, you know, where China policy is concerned or where you're developing a response, for example, to the crackdown this week, you know, where China policy is concerned or where you're developing a response, for example, to the crackdown. This week, you know, many of the greatest humanitarians and leading lights in the legislature for 20 or 30 or 40 years are going on trial in Hong Kong. Some of them are going on trial for holding an opinion poll. You know, as you identified earlier in our conversation, the changes and the repression is coming so fast that people can barely stay on top of it. And that too is what calls for an international solution to the problem of China's both domestic repression, but also its projection of that repression beyond its borders. Minky, I know you're a busy lady, and I appreciate you giving

us so much of your time today. One last question, and I'll let you go. I'm just curious, you know, in the coming weeks, the coming months, given everything we've just spoken about, what are you going to be keeping your eye on for people who are interested in following along with this story and seeing where China goes next? Where should they be watching? What's a good place for them to be observing in order to have the best understanding about how the next year or two might play out? Yeah, thanks very much. One thing that I always want listeners all over the world to understand is that what happens in China affects them too. Because of the way globalization has shaped labor markets, we're probably all wearing or carrying phones with components made in China. We're eating food that was

manufactured in a supply chain that we're not sure about. And I think if you're looking ahead to a crystal ball for what is likely to happen, I do think that the world has not seen since the Olympics in Germany in 1936, has not seen an Olympics under preparation in a system of such extreme human rights abuse. And there have been crises around the Olympics before. There was in South Korea in 1988, there were massive public demonstrations against the military dictatorship. There have been sanctions brought before by the IOC on Olympic hosts or on Olympic participants. Everything that happens in China should be of interest to everyone in the world. It should be of concern since it's going the wrong way. And it should be something that we all feel that we can have an opinion about and that we can

do something about. And I say again, because the Olympics is the world's most watched sports event, that's why the Chinese government wants to host it. They get enormous benefits from this, both at home and abroad. And I think that's also why it has become such a flashpoint. So I would say stay tuned to see what steps are taken by various governments and the UN in relation to the camp, the re-education through labor camps, the problem of forced labor in supply chains. I would look for legislation that bans companies from using, from having forced labor in their supply chains. And then finally, I would look to see what happens in the immediate run up

to the Winter Olympics, which kick off next February 2022. Minky Worden from Human Rights Watch, thank you so much for coming on the Tangle podcast today to speak with us. And I hope we can check back in maybe a year or two from now and reflect a bit on the Olympics and sort of where things stand. It'd be great to have you back on. Thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to talk through these important topics. Today's podcast was produced by Tangle Media in partnership with our friends over at Impostor Radio. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to give it a five-star rating, share it with your friends, and go check out retangle.com for more. The faster money and data move,

the further your business can go to a seamless digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward together. In life, interact. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal

web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.