The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - "Wanna Buy a Vaccine?"

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

The darknet opens up to selling vaccines, fake negative tests, vaccine passports and a lot more.  But is it real or just another big scam?And when Drake wrote YOLO was he thinking this?  Plus a lot more from airports to 12 year old college grads.

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. You want to buy your own vaccine? Come on over to the dark web. Like you, I have been so grateful and so thankful for frontline workers during the COVID crisis. Let's just talk about the frontline workers at SickKids, which is one of the world's best children's hospitals. SickKids doctors also work behind the scenes on incredible breakthroughs to help our kids and generations to come. Listen to their inspiring stories in a new season of the popular podcast called SickKids Versus. Each episode explores a major SickKids discovery like, well, a virus-fighting supermolecule or a cure for hard-to-treat cancers.

Just visit sickkidsfoundation.com slash podcast or search SickKids versus and spell versus VS. So SickKids VS. You'll be amazed at what you learn. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Yes, this is The Bridge. And yes, we're going to talk about the dark web in a moment. But first, one of the things I used to love about holding a newspaper in my hand every morning, and it's been a while since I've done that. You know, I read papers, but I read them online.

But I used to, you know, hold a newspaper in my hand, sit there over breakfast, over coffee, and I'd often flip to page two in whichever paper I was reading. Could it be in a local paper? Could it be in a national paper? Could it be in an international paper? And often the big good papers on page two will have a little thing called a correction box. And to me, that always gave that periodical more credibility.

If they were willing to admit their mistakes, good on them. And sometimes they were pretty trivial mistakes, but they admitted them. Could have been the spelling of somebody's name. Occasionally, it'll be something bigger, more important, if you will. Well, this is the correction box for the bridge on this day. Because actually, I've had a couple of things that need correcting just this week. And thanks to the ever-vigilant listeners to the bridge, the corrections have been brought to my attention that I should make them. And I absolutely am willing to do that.

The first one deals with, I think it was Tuesday's podcast, we talked about malaria and the huge gains that have been made just in the last couple of years towards a vaccine against malaria, a disease that's plagued the world for centuries, literally centuries. It used to be called the Roman fever. Well, it looks like we're finally getting around to it, which underlines just how amazing it is, how quickly they've come up with vaccines on the COVID front.

But in the discussion about malaria, I made a mistake. And a fairly basic one. I call malaria a virus. It's not a virus. It's a parasite. All right. Parasite. Malaria is a parasite, not a virus. Still needs a vaccine, but it's a parasite. That's correction number one. Correction number two was just yesterday on Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. I started off by talking about an interview I once did with the former mayor, the late Rob Ford of Toronto, with his brother, Doug Ford, now premier, sitting beside him,

giving him kind of strategic advice. So, in that little story that I was telling, I mentioned how, among other things, Rob Ford had said in the interview that he was no longer on drugs, was no longer on alcohol, and he was never going to take either one again. It was kind of putting down a marker to establish the fact that he wanted to keep his job.

Well, within two months, that was proven to be a lie. He was back on drugs and he was back on alcohol. To the extent at which he went into rehab. Now, I'd said yesterday that he, after admitting that, in fact, he was on all this stuff, and after promising in that interview he wouldn't be on it,

that he ended up resigning. He didn't resign. He did go into rehab, and the city council took away most of his real power as mayor. So in effect, while he was still technically the mayor, he had no power as mayor. But he didn't resign. In fact, within the next couple of months, it became clear that his medical problems were more than just the issue of needing rehab.

He was also suffering from cancer, which he never recovered. However, he did still run again for office, not as mayor, but he ran for his old council seat, and he won that council seat. But I was wrong when I said he resigned as mayor, because he didn't. Lost most of his powers as the city council took them away from him, but he did not resign. All right, glad we cleared those up. And you get your corrections for this day.

Now, I did a little tease off the top. This is Thursday, potpourri day, so we're catching up on a number of things. But I did a tease off the top about whether you might want to buy your vaccine. For that matter, buy a vaccine passport, as opposed to waiting in line, taking your turn. Well, supposedly there's a way to do this. The BBC did a really good piece last week that's still kind of reverberating around because it listed a lot of things that are available on the dark net. Some people call it the dark web.

It's a portion of the Internet that's only accessible through specific browser tools. I don't have those. I don't think I'd want those. But you hear about it every once in a while, the dark net. What you can get there. What you can see there. Well, the BBC went in and they determined a number of things about vaccines and vaccine passports and fake negative test papers.

They're all being sold there on the dark net. Prices range between 360 pounds. That's what, $600 Canadian, roughly, somewhere in there. And almost $1,000 for doses of AstraZeneca, Sputnik, Sinopharm, that's the Chinese one, Sputnik's the Russian one, or J&J, Johnson & Johnson. Fake vaccination certificates are being sold by anonymous traders for as little as about $250 Canadian. Researchers say they've seen a sharp increase

in vaccine-related dark net advertisements, while the BBC has been unable to verify if the vaccines are real. And not only that, when testing, trying to purchase some of these things, and after the money had been handed over, that's the last they ever heard of it. They never got a vaccine. That's not to say none of these are workable, but the ones they tested, they couldn't prove that what was up for sale was real or in some cases, if they could even get it. But it's out there.

And what does that say about where we are on this story? The BBC quotes researchers at the cyber security company Checkpoint, who've been monitoring hacking forums and other marketplaces since January when the vaccine advertisements first appeared. They say the number of adverts they've seen has tripled to more than 1,200. Sellers appear to be from the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and Russia.

The team found multiple adverts in Russian and in English. One seller is even offering next day delivery saying for overnight delivery emergency leave us a message another advert on a hacking form is offering fake negative tests and reads we do negative covid tests for travelers abroad for getting a job etc buy two negative tests and get the third one for free so i guess none of us should be surprised that this is going on, right? That once vaccines became available, somebody would find a way to try to make money off this who had nothing to do with the vaccines.

And whether they're real or not, whether the vaccines, if you actually get one, is a real vaccine or not, we don't know when you're obviously taking a chance if you're trying to get one. A lot of scammers out there, and I'm sure there are a lot of scammers on this area as well. The area of fake vaccines, fake passports, fake negative tests. Now, the police have told the BBC, we're going to break this up. We're going to stop this from happening.

But it's all feeding on a public that is, in some cases, in some countries, desperate for vaccines. And people who feel they have the money to take a chance. And at a time when this whole issue of vaccine passports is making the rounds and is being discussed, the opportunity to get a fake vaccine passport may tempt some people, especially if they have not figured out a way to get one legitimately. All right. Here's our next story.

On Potpourri Thursday. Do you like Drake, the singer, the Canadian singer from The Six, from Toronto? May well be, if not the most popular recording artist in the world. He's certainly close to it. Sales are astronomical. I mean, you don't even want to it. Sales are astronomical. I mean, you don't even want to guess. Well, about 10 years ago,

he had a song that was very popular called Motto. Right? If you know Drake, you know motto. Well, I had a line in there that was just letters. YOLO. Y-O-L-O. You know what that means?

YOLO. I'd what that means? YOLO. I'd sing it. You know, Drake sang it, but I can't sing. And I certainly can't sing like Drake. If I could sing like Drake, I wouldn't be doing this. But among the few words in that song that I could actually repeat on this podcast, YOLO is one of them. And YOLO stands for You Only Live Once. All right?

You only live once. Well, YOLO was very popular 10 or 12 years ago when the song was a big hit. But it's come back into vogue now in a very different way. And it's come into vogue on the part of those who are in the kind of, I don't know, 20 to 40 age group. What are those, millennials? Well, whoever they are, the group that is interested in YOLO are a group that have been quite successful in their relatively early years.

Good jobs, good incomes, good lifestyle, work really hard, really hard, long hours, long days, to achieve the status they've achieved. YOLO was a term that they are starting to use, saying this coming especially after the last year, year and a half of the pandemic, where they're saying to themselves,

you know what? You only live once. Do I really want to live like this? In the last year, I recognize that there are other things in life that I could take advantage of. If I scale down the way I work, after a year where there's been a degree of kind of languishing around,

do I really want to go back to where I was a year and a half ago? Where I'm busting my butt every day. I'm living a great lifestyle. But you only live once. So I'm looking at this piece in the New York Times just the other day. Welcome to the YOLO economy. Burned out and flush with savings, some workers are quitting stable jobs

in search of post-pandemic adventure. Here's what it says in there, part of what it says. If languishing is 2021's dominant emotion, YOLOing may be the year's defining workforce trend. A recent Microsoft survey found that more than 40% of workers globally were considering leaving their jobs this year. Blind and anonymous social network that is popular with tech workers recently found that 49% of its users plan to get a new job this year. We've all had a year to evaluate if the life we're living is the one we want to be living, said Christina Wallace, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, especially for

younger people who've been told to work hard, pay off your loans, and someday you'll get to enjoy your life, a lot of them are questioning that equation. What if they want to be happy right now? Fearful of an exodus, employers are trying to boost morale and prevent burnout. LinkedIn recently gave the majority of its employees a paid week off, while Twitter employees have been given an extra day off per month to recharge under a program called Day of Rest. Credit Suisse gave its junior bankers $20,000

lifestyle allowances, while Houlihan Loki, another Wall Street firm, gave many of its employees all expenses paid vacations. Man, are we working at the wrong place, right? Raises in time off may persuade some employees to stay put, but for others, the only solution is radical change. It feels like we've been so locked into careers for the past decade, and this is our opportunity to switch it up, said Nate Mosley, 29, a buyer at a major clothing retailer. Now, this is no small-time guy, Nate Mosley.

He recently decided to leave his $130,000 a year job before June 1st, the date his company is requiring workers to return to the office. He created an Excel spreadsheet. I'm just going to read one more, a couple of lines from this piece because it's great. So Nate created an Excel spreadsheet called Late 20s Crisis, which he filled with potential options for his next move. Take a coding class. Start mining Ethereum.

Ethereum. Ethereum. Join a 2022 political campaign. Move to the Caribbean and open a tourism business. Okay, that sounds like a good idea. He looks at it regularly. He said, adding new pros and cons for each option. The idea of going right back to the pre-COVID setup

sounds so unappealing after this past year. If not now, when will I ever do this? YOLO. You only live once. Drake. Do you think he knew what he was going to be starting when he started that? What do you think? Now, YOLO works if you're, you know,

not married with kids. It'd be much harder to pull that off if you're married with kids. But I wonder, it says like 40% of the people they surveyed are thinking that way. That's a big number, and it would have been a big change in the workforce.

Something to think about. And here's something to think about for when we come back. Airports. You know airports. I love airport stories. Airports and bees. That's right. Bees.

When we come back. Are you still trying to find ways to get into the world of crypto? Well, look no further. BitBuy is Canada's number one platform for buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitbuy has launched a brand new app and website with a new look, lower fees, and new coins. Bitbuy is your one-stop shop to get involved and super easy to use for beginners. Visit bitbuy.ca or download the Bitbuy app. Enter referral code PODCAST20 to get $20 free when you make your first deposit. All right, back here with The Bridge. I'm Peter Mansbridge. I'm in Stratford, Ontario.

And we're going to talk for a moment here about bees. Bees in airports. Now you're probably wondering, really? Like how far down the barrel have you gone on trying to find an airport story to tell us this week Mansbridge? Well, pretty far down the barrel. But I like this one. It's from airspacemagazine.com or airspacemag.com slash flight if you're looking for it. And the title is the latest in airport Jobs. Beekeeper. It's got a great picture of a couple of beekeepers, you know,

in the whole, like, beekeeping hazmat suit. On the property, clearly of an airport, because there's a plane just landing in the background. So this all started, or at least this particular focus on it started, about 10 years ago when Drake was writing YOLO at the Pittsburgh International Airport. When they had a plane come in, there was just this hive of thousands of bees attached to the plane. They landed on the winglets of a Delta aircraft headed to New York, interrupting refueling and baggage loading. And the wildlife administrator at the airport,

and airports have these people for lots of different reasons, right? Bird strikes, you know, wildlife that's roaming the acreage around an airport because there's lots of it keeping buildings away. So the wildlife administrator looks at these bees and basically tells other people, you deal with it. I'm not going anywhere near that. Well, the more he studied the situation, this fellow was

the wildlife administrator, started reading up on honeybees. He learned that while some crops can be pollinated using the wind, most need the help of bees in the United States. This is the crops that are in the airport lands. In the United States alone, honeybees pollinate more than $15 billion worth of crops annually.

But honeybee numbers, as many press reports have noted, have dramatically declined in the past few years. Perhaps, thought this wildlife administrator, the airport could host some bees. So he started that project at the Pittsburgh airport. Approached management about placing hives on the property. At first, they were not too keen on this idea But then a new CEO came to the Pittsburgh airport in 2015 And her grandfather was a beekeeper

She thought this is a good idea, let's try it So they've been trying it and it's been really successful And other airports have picked up on the idea because it's pollinating the land around their airport. They're actually producing honey. Some airports, they're bottling or canning the honey and giving it away free in the airport. They use it, first of all, to test what's in the air.

What's, you know, is there pollution from whatever, gas fumes, etc., etc. But a growing number of U.S. airports, including Chicago's O'Hare, Seattle, Tacoma, St. Louis, Lambert, Austin, Bergstrom, and Minneapolis, St. Paul, have partnered with local beekeepers to set up apiaries on airport property. It's a win-win situation. Airports typically have unused land surrounding the operations area to help suppress aircraft noise. And the type of forage preferred by bees isn't as appealing to large mammals. Think deer or geese and seagulls, two species that are frequently involved in bird strikes.

And airports don't want them near their properties. Even the military, U.S. military has got involved. Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base installed beehives in 2015. Now, I'm not sure if this has spread to Canada yet. If some of you know, let me know. Drop me a line at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com.

But I think it's a great little story. And once again, you know, it's an innovative idea. Tells us something about, you know, the world in which we live and the way some people are going to find new ideas. And that one started kind of as a fluke. The guy standing at the airport being called in saying, hey, we got a problem with this flight that just arrived, this Delta flight.

You're suddenly got thousands and thousands of bees stuck to the wing here. So airports and beehives. Gosh, I don't know what we'll come up with for next week on the old airport story front. All right, here's the last one for this week. Now, I know, and I know from personal experience and family experience, how difficult this situation at schools is right across the country.

And how some schools in some provinces that are fighting COVID have closed completely. Even Nova Scotia this week only had, what was it? 95 cases, I think, yesterday or the day before. Sounds like nothing compared with other provinces, but for Nova Scotia, that's a lot, considering they've had basically nothing since this started. Well, they're not screwing around. They immediately went into full lockdown mode, and that includes schools right across the province.

But other provinces where there are real problems, including in schools with teachers and students, they're still open for in-school classes. So that's the difficult part of the story. Here's an interesting story that I saw on CNN, not on the TV, but on online CNN. It's about a 12-year-old kid in North Carolina who decided when he couldn't go to school,

but everything was online classes, he decided to really focus in. kid loves learning his name is Mike Wimmer once again he's 12 years old so what did he do as I said he focused he He focused. He focused in big time. And as a result, in a couple of weeks, he's going to, at 12, he's going to graduate not only from high school, he's going to graduate from college as well at 12. He went all in, took classes at both high school and college,

and worked his proverbial butt off for the last year. Completed four years of school in one year, two years of high school, and a two-year associate's degree. He'll graduate from Rowan Cabarrus Community College on May 21st and from Concord Academy High School on May 28th, where he'll also be the valedictorian. He's 12. He said his GPA at Rowan Cabarrus Community College is 4.0, while his high school GPA is 5.45.

Despite being several years younger than his classmates, he said he gets along well with them, was even nominated as homecoming court, whatever that is, last year. He's got an interest in robotics. I'm the kind of math and science guy in my class, he says. He's always had an affinity for technology. He got his first iPad.

Wait till you hear this. He got his first iPad when Wait, wait, wait. You'll hear this. He got his first iPad when he was 18 months old. He learned almost all of his programming and robotic knowledge through trial and error and online videos. He's got his own website.

It's called Next Era Innovations. Next Era Innovations. Maybe you can check that out. Ah, boy. I wonder if he'll be taking a YOLO at 13. You know, he's accomplished everything at 12. All right, folks. There's your potpourri Thursday.

Tomorrow's the weekend special. This afternoon at 5 o'clock Eastern on Sirius XM Canada. Channel 167 Canada Talks. Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Join us. There's still that free offer up. SiriusXM.ca slash Peter Mansbridge. You get a month free of Sirius where you can listen to good talk and we

have a good time doing good talk that's this afternoon Thursday afternoon 5 p.m. Eastern repeated at noon on Sunday Eastern all right folks anything you on Sunday, Eastern. All right, folks. Anything you want to add for the weekend special tomorrow? You can drop me a note at the Peter Mansbridge,

or no, what is it? The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Been great talking to you. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.