Posts

The Bibliophile: In Memoriam: Elaine Dewar (1948–2025)

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

On the Death of a Happy Warrior for the Public Good

I was walking into work the last week of August when Elaine Dewar called. She had just got back from holidays at a cottage with her daughters and grandchildren. I was waiting on the last round of edits for her new book, Growing Up Oblivious. But she was calling with much more dire news. She’d developed a pain on vacation, thought it might be gallstones or appendicitis, so went to emergency to get it checked out. They’d done a scan and it was cancer. There was no word on the origin or the extent of it yet, but she’d asked to see the ultrasound and had spent far too much time over her life as a science researcher looking at medical records not to know that it was almost certainly terminal. She hoped she’d have six months. She wanted to talk about the book. I demurred, said we didn’t need to now, that she had other things to worry about. But Elaine wasn’t having any of it. “Of course I’m going to worry about it, honey,” she told me gently. “It’s my last book, and it’s with you. So what are we going to do about this?” And with that, we got to work.

Elaine Dewar. Credit: Danielle Dewar.

When Sam Hiyate wrote to me in early December 2015 with a proposal for Elaine Dewar’s book The Handover, about the sale of Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart to Random House in contravention of Canada’s cultural protection laws, I knew little about Elaine’s work or reputation. Nor was this book, a work of deeply-researched nonfiction, our usual fare at the time; Biblioasis was much more strictly a literary enterprise in those years, borne forward by the ignorant hubris necessary to lay claim to such a designation. How else to continue in a world, even a small, purportedly literary enclave of the same, which cares so little about what we do? Our list in 2015—it strikes me now, at a time that one year pushes into another with almost no distinction, that 2015 was our break-out as a publisher, with three Giller nominations, a Writers’ Trust shortlisting, and a GG win, among other accolades: perhaps we wouldn’t have been sent Elaine’s proposal if that hadn’t been the case—was almost exclusively fiction, poetry, and works in translation; our only experience with nonfiction was literary criticism, with a sideline of regional history and more commercial titles to try and pay the bills. Reading Elaine’s proposal, I was worried that we didn’t have the publishing chops to pull it off. I knew that we didn’t have the money to properly fund its writing: I don’t think we’d ever paid an advance of more than a couple thousand dollars at that point. But we thought Elaine’s was an important story, so I pushed my envelope and offered $4000, which seemed a big risk for a press consistently skirting insolvency, and was able to swing her an additional $3500 in Writer’s Reserve funding. And for that Elaine produced what Jack Stoddart justifiably claimed to be “the single most important book about Canadian publishing . . . published in fifty years.” It garnered her a Governor General’s Award nomination and reams of press coverage, and resulted in a range of important conversations among anyone who cared about publishing or culture in Canada. It’s probably no surprise to those who knew her that it garnered Biblioasis’s first serious threat of a lawsuit, by a former Minister of Culture who had signed off on the sale of M&S, though when they learned that Elaine had dug up government documents that showed exactly what Elaine had claimed, this person (& their lawyer) thankfully never again darkened my inbox.

Elaine’s office and desk, with the research for Growing Up Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.

Because that was the thing about Elaine: she always had the receipts. There were times earlier in our working history that I doubted her claims, but I quickly learned that she always had the proof somewhere in a manila file folder on one of the multiple desks in her sprawling basement office; there was always a footnote. She taught me to read those footnotes with care as I read her manuscripts. She was a meticulous researcher, with a tenacity I’ve yet to see in another. Though she described herself, earlier this week, as being as “spiritual as an old sock,” she nevertheless believed her role as a journalist involved a sacred trust: to follow the facts as far as they would take her; to pursue the truth at all costs; to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. She did all three with regularity until the end.

Elaine, during our numerous editorial exchanges, offered me a first-rate education in how to edit and publish researched nonfiction, perhaps to the chagrin of those authors who’ve followed her. The key was to “never to be afraid to look stupid”; to clarify and keep pushing when you’re not clear on something; to keep asking questions until you’re satisfied. To fight over every word, every footnote, as the need arises. And we did, it seemed, fight over everything. Those initial Handover editorial rounds were bruising, unlike anything I’d experienced before as a publisher and editor. But as hard as it was, she never took it personally, as she trusted that we had her own, and her book’s, best interest in sight. She trusted in the process.

Poster for the Fourth Annual National Magazine Awards.

And in the process, she helped to reshape the direction of the press. Having been through the fire with Elaine, we knew better how to do these kinds of books, and knew, from her research, that one of the primary consequences of the sale of Canadian publishing to foreign interests was the decline in researched nonfiction. There was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, but more importantly a gap of intellectual responsibility. She fervently believed, despite her noted concerns about Canadian nationalism, that Canadians should be in charge of which Canadian stories were told. And that it would take Canadian writers and publishers to hold the powerful within Canadian society accountable. Elaine felt an intense sense of duty to tell the truth, and hated, as she called them, lying liars who lied. She used her formidable intelligence and research skills to untangle those lies, and we’re all better for it, and as another journalist wrote to me this week, now far lesser for her loss.

Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of Growing Up Oblivious.

What drove her was her indomitable curiosity about just about everything. She loved to know things, and grew infuriated when the standard account didn’t make sense. This curiosity led her to begin digging into the origins of COVID when we were all in lockdown, reading the scientific papers, and discovering right away that there were things that didn’t add up; it led her to uncover connections between Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the labs at the centre of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan, and gather evidence of the Chinese government’s infiltration of this lab that would have national political ramifications thereafter. What amazes me about the research that became her On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is that, though it was perhaps the first serious book-length enquiry into the origins of COVID in the English language (quite a feat, I must say, for a provincial publisher!), it has stood up remarkably well, with the consensus opinion moving closer and closer to Elaine’s own over the ensuing years. She followed the facts where they took her, and as usual, she ended up pretty close to the mark.

The Handover and On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years by Elaine Dewar.

Her last book started with a January 1st, 2022 email from psychologist and Native Studies professor Roland Chrisjohn asking her to investigate “‘the cover-up’ of the Canadian government’s ‘genocide’ of Indigenous people.” But in her research, she became pre-occupied by questions of what was known when, by whom; and how she, growing up in the prairies, hadn’t known about the plight of Indigenous people in the surrounding communities. She turned her sharp journalistic eye on herself, and in the process wrote a kind of journalist’s autobiography and an investigation into the mechanics of what she calls obliviousness. The book is also an investigation of Indigenous health, segregated hospitals, and how the government used the lure of health care to conduct unethical experiments on wide swaths of the Indigenous population. There are some very disturbing revelations that Elaine uncovered by doing what she did best: following the trails of footnotes to uncover what had up to now largely escaped notice. Growing Up Oblivious will be published at some point in early 2026; it may well be her most important book.

Poster from the Eleventh Annual National Magazine Awards.

When it became obvious that we didn’t have months but weeks, and then, really, days, I went up to Toronto to spend Monday and Tuesday with her in the Palliative Care Unit at Bridgepoint to work on the final edits and the conclusion. She was surrounded by family and friends who’d flown in from around the world to be with her. Though her body had completely failed by this time, and she was self-administering her pain medication as we spoke, she remained as sharp, funny, and caring as ever. We worked on a round of final edits and questions until she needed a rest; then did a second round; she did a long, wide-ranging audio interview with Marci McDonald about the book and what she uncovered, and was brilliant at it despite everything; then she shifted gears again, devoted to the attentions of her daughters and friends who were waiting for her. The next day she did another long interview with a national radio program and then we worked on the last paragraphs of her conclusion, arguing over word choices as if we had all the time in the world. She never, she told me, liked the word decency: it was a weasel word, could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. We needed something more specific to the issue at hand. We went back and forth for a while, and then it hit me. Dignity? “Yup. That’s it. Now let’s cut the rest of the fat and get it done.” And so we did.

There was so much love in that room, so much laughter, so much dignity, that it dispelled death’s shadow. It was a pleasure and honour to be there among her loved ones, if only for a little while. She seemed able to keep everything in those final days in perfect balance, the professional alongside the personal. Though perhaps, for her, that distinction wasn’t as sharp as it was for others. It didn’t seem possible that, when I took my leave, she’d be gone in less than 48 hours. And though I spent this morning watching her funeral, I still can’t quite believe she’s gone.

Family photos of a young Elaine Dewar.

Elaine once described herself as aspiring “to be a happy warrior for the public good.” She was that. She was fierce, and tough as nails. But she was also a warm, beautiful person, matriarch to what I’ve learned is an incredible family, and a very good friend. She was, always, inspiring, and never more than in the last days; she approached her fate with resolve. I still haven’t entirely processed these last, intense few weeks, those days alongside her and her family and friends at Bridgeport, but I’m grateful once more for the gift of her time, intelligence, care, and compassion, and we will all at Biblioasis try to live up to the example she set.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

In good publicity news:

Elaine Dewar: Who’s Afraid of Angela Rasmussen?

/in /by

The following is a response from Elaine Dewar to Dr. Angela Rasmussen, regarding her recent appearances on Canadaland and The John Gormley Show.

Once upon a time, scientists explained their findings and opinions in peer-reviewed journals or in carefully worded lectures delivered at scientific meetings. Now science moves at internet speed and Twitter has taken the place of learned societies as a favored forum. In the white hot propaganda war over the origin of SARS-CoV-2, scientists on opposing sides of the lab-leak versus nature debate have taken to Twitter like penguins in search of lunch in Antarctica’s waters. On Twitter, they heave nasty adjectives at their opponents with all the subtlety and care of the late Rush Limbaugh. Recently, a virologist named Angela Rasmussen (who claims over 200,000 Twitter followers), formerly of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and now with the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, threw certain adjectives at me. I had been a guest on a Canadaland podcast explaining the findings of my new book, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years, to Jesse Brown. Ms. Rasmussen, who, since the pandemic began, has turned into a one-woman defender of globalized virological science on as many TV shows, newscasts, magazines, newspapers willing to quote her (see her cv) got herself invited to the Canadaland podcast to denounce my book and her version of the main theory it propounds.

I don’t normally fuss over critiques of my published work. Journalists who throw stones are used to stones being thrown back and a good critique improves the work. I also try to live by a line made famous by champion boxer John L. Sullivan when some drunken twerp challenged him in a bar: “If you hit me,” said Sullivan, “and I hear about it….” On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years exposes undeclared competing interests, cover-ups by China’s officialdom, the manipulation of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory by China’s civilian/military virological establishment, and that labs outside the reach of US regulation have been doing dangerous gain-of-function experiments with USAID and NIH money given to them via a New York charity. The book follows the money and it names names. It shows that science done in authoritarian regimes cannot be trusted and why. So I expected pushback and I welcome it.

Nevertheless, I must respond to Ms. Rasmussen. She makes too many untruthful claims to ignore. While Ms. Rasmussen is entitled to dump on my book if she’s read it, her critique on the Canadaland podcast made it clear she hadn’t. Though I wrote to Jesse Brown, as did my publisher, asking him to attach my rebuttal of her false assertions to her podcast episode, Canadaland decided not to “re-litigate” the matter. Thus, this blog post.

I listened with amazement as Ms. Rasmussen began by accusing me of publishing a book that is “riddled with error starting with the title.” Why was the title in error? Ms. Rasmussen insisted that HIV/AIDS is the deadliest pandemic in 100 years, not SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. While it is true that HIV/AIDS has killed about 35 million people over fifty years, Ms. Rasmussen must know that the WHO—which is the international body charged with declaring pandemics—did not declare HIV/AIDS to be one. Killing 35 million over fifty years is bad, but killing at minimum 6 million people around the world (while infecting hundreds of millions) in 18 months is the worst pandemic in 100 years.

Ms. Rasmussen then asserted that my publisher failed to fact check the book as evidenced by the title. In fact my publisher had four fact checkers go over it from the cover to the acknowledgements—400 pages with over 400 endnotes drawn mainly from scientific publications but also from interviews with virologists—starting with the title.

Ms. Rasmussen insisted that if only I’d bothered to interview virologists, I would have been set straight on a number of points, including the function of a genetic sequence conserved in all coronaviruses known as the RdRp ( which stands for the RNA dependent RNA polymerase). That’s when it became quite clear that she had not bothered to read the book but was responding to what she thought I said in the interview I’d given Jesse Brown. If she had read the book, she would have known how many virologists I tried to interview, and who among them finally agreed to speak with me. One who did consent to be interviewed, virologist Linfa Wang, is a close associate of Shi Zhengli, the so-called Bat Woman of China. It is Shi Zhengli’s lab that has become a focus for those arguing that a leak from a lab may have caused the pandemic. I interviewed others as well, but in particular a Canadian government virologist, Basil Arif, who, since 1998, has worked on the journal Shi edits, Virologica Sinica, which is published by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Arif has also done important papers with Zhihong Hu, the former director of the WIV and the former boss of Shi Zhengli. Arif has been going annually to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for more than twenty years, which cannot be said of Ms. Rasmussen who admits she doesn’t know Shi Zhengli, but knows “friends” of hers, and that she is “honest.” Unfortunately, as my book shows, that claim is also far from true.

When Brown asked Rasmussen why, if my book is riddled with errors, the well-known science writer and editor, Nicholas Wade, had praised it, she replied that Nicholas Wade should be ignored on the grounds that a book he wrote in 2014 defines him as a racist. (Racist is a word she hurls around fairly frequently, along with the epithet grifter.) Wade’s views on the subject of intelligence, the subject of his book, are beside the point. The article he wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—describing, among other things, his concern about how leading scientists tried to label as conspiracy theorists all who raised the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab—finally made it possible for leading major media in the US to publicly consider the question. Instead of speaking to Wade’s points, she used a vile name to try to write him off.

Similarly, she mis-characterized what I wrote about the unusual five year relationship between the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and the leading military/civilian virologists in China, including George F. Gao and Major General Chen Wei of the Peoples’ Liberation Army.

She also insisted that I believe the genome sequence known as RaTG13 is the viral ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. In fact, the book makes clear that I believe RaTG13 is a red herring and a symptom of the many things we have not been told about work done in Shi Zhengli’s lab. While until recently RaTG13 was the closest published viral sequence to SARS-CoV-2, it is fairly distant and does not have the furin cleavage site which makes SARS-CoV-2 so efficient at causing infection. (We now know that Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang, and American colleagues Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak sought $14 million from DARPA in 2018 to, among other things, insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-related coronaviruses isolated by Shi’s lab. They didn’t get that grant, but we don’t know if Shi Zhengli got grant money elsewhere and did the planned experiments herself.) My book makes clear that I like best a quite different origin theory proposed by plant virologists Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson. They sought to explain why SARS-COV-2 appeared to be so well-adapted to human beings from the start of the pandemic. If it originated in a bat or jumped to humans through an intermediate animal, why were there so few mutations in the first few months of its circulation? This adaptation to humans from the start was pointed to by Alina Chan and colleagues who compared it to SARS’s rapid mutation in the first quarter of its circulation. Chan’s work was only published as a pre-print (and poohpoohed as such by Rasmussen) but many other scientists in peer-reviewed papers pointed to the same issue, including one paper published in the journal Cell and commented on by Rasmussen herself.

Latham and Wilson argue that SARS-COV-2 or its direct ancestor, became well-adapted to humans in the lungs of six miners back in 2012. They had been hired to clear bat feces out of a copper mine in Yunnan, China. They got terribly sick with a SARS-like pneumonia. Three died. Samples from their lungs, taken over the course of several months, were sent to Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology because she was by then expert in SARS-like coronaviruses. Shi only admitted she had those samples after a Masters thesis and PhD thesis describing the miners’ illnesses, treatments, and where their samples were sent, were discovered by members of a group of curious volunteers called DRASTIC. Shi Zhengli has still not published anything about what she found in those samples but has confirmed that they remain in her lab. Latham and Wilson argue that studying those samples would have given Shi a ringside seat as a bat virus evolved in real time into something that could easily infect humans. When challenged by Jesse Brown on that point, Ms. Rasmussen said Latham and Wilson are plant virologists, so their argument holds no water. In fact, their argument had already been supported by a study done in the UK and published in a medical journal in February. Doctors there took a series of samples over several months from the lungs of a man infected with SARS-CoV-2. These samples were sequenced and showed in real time how the virus adapted through mutation to the different treatments tried.

Toward the end of the podcast, Brown asked Rasmussen if she knew why W. Ian Lipkin—one of the coauthors of an early paper published in Nature Medicine that claimed a lab leak to be highly unlikely—had changed his mind and wanted a proper investigation of that possibility. Over most of 2020, that Nature Medicine paper was pointed to again and again as the refutation of any who dared to say a lab leak might have been possible. That paper served the propaganda interests of China, but also the interests of the American institutions that had funded Shi Zhengli’s work—USAID, the NIH/NIAID—through EcoHealth Alliance, also a major funder of Lipkin’s work at Columbia’s Mailman School. Most of the papers’ coauthors, including Lipkin, failed to acknowledge any competing interests, such as their relationships with those funders and with China. Ms. Rasmussen told Brown that though she used to work for Lipkin (until 2020), she did not know why he’d changed his mind. Yet Lipkin had been widely quoted on that subject. He said information had emerged about very dangerous gain-of-function experiments done by Shi Zhengli and her colleagues in low security labs which was “unsafe.” Even if Ms. Rasmussen did not read those articles, if she’d read my book she would have known exactly why Lipkin changed his mind.

Ms. Rasmussen may be a terrific virologist but critiquing a book she did not read is a dubious scientific practice. She might want to reconsider as well her strong support of global cooperation among scientists without regard to the conditions under which some scientists work. In particular, she should rethink whether we can rely on science done by colleagues working in authoritarian regimes. Early in the pandemic, China’s officials made clear to its scientists that they must get official permission to publish anything on SARS-CoV-2, or else, and that getting that permission would depend upon whether an article fit the propaganda interests of the government of China. Scientists in the west need to take care to avoid being dragged into China’s propaganda machinery which is extensive. The Propaganda Department of China regards scientific publishing as part of its purview and reports directly to the highest leadership.

Ms. Rasmussen’s appearance on the Canadaland podcast was clearly useful to China. CGTN—the China Global Television Network—took note of it and published on its website an article that bears this false title: “Virologist refutes Dewar’s theories….”

—

Read the original post on Elaine Dewar’s blog here.

Elaine Dewar’s bio.

Get your copy of On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years here.

 

Biblioasis News, Reviews, and Excerpts!

/in /by

IN THE NEWS!

ON THE ORIGIN OF THE DEADLIEST PANDEMIC IN 100 YEARS

Elaine Dewar, author of On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation (August 31, 2021), was featured in an article on CBC Manitoba titled “New book debunks Winnipeg-lab conspiracy theory but questions collaboration with Chinese military scientist”! The article was published online on August 31. You can read it here.

Elaine Dewar also appeared on CHCH Morning Live for an interview about her book On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years. The interview with Annette Hamm aired on September 2. You can watch it on their website here.

Get your copy from Biblioasis here!

 

HOUSEHOLDERSHouseholders cover

On August 25, Quill & Quire published their Best of Fall 2021 Guide for Fiction, Short Fiction, and Poetry, and Kate Cayley’s Householders (September 14, 2021) was on the list!

Andrew Woodrow-Butcher wrote about Householders:

“The accomplished fiction writer, playwright, and poet veers from the fantastic to the mundane and back again in her latest collection of intertwined stories, which features neighbourhood drama, zombies, and an underground bunker.”

The Best of Fall 2021 Guide will be published in the September 2021 issue, and can be read on their website here.

Householders (September 14, 2021) was also included by the Lambda Literary on their list “September’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature”! The list was put together by Sydney Heidenberg on September 1, and it can be read on the Lambda Literary website here.

Order your copy from Biblioasis here!

 

On Decline cover

ON DECLINE

Andrew Potter, author of On Decline (August 17, 2021), published an article in The Globe and Mail titled “The COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change. Culture wars. For the West, the party is over”! The article was published online on August 20. You can read it here.

An excerpt was also published in The Walrus on August 25. You can read the excerpt here.

Get your copy from Biblioasis here!