De Bruin wins monobob bronze, Canada roars into women’s hockey final

The Canadian Press

Published

4 years ago

9 minute read

BEIJING — Christine de Bruin wore an Olympic medal around her neck for the first time in her career, and the Canadian bobsledder liked the feeling.

“It feels awesome,” she said of the bronze medal she claimed in the Olympic debut of the monobob. “It feels heavy. It’s nice.”

No doubt, the feeling of two medals would be even nicer.

The native of Stony Plain, Alta., picked up Canada’s first sliding medal of the Beijing Olympics on Monday when she raced to third place in the monobob in a time of four minutes 21.03 seconds.

She will have a chance to add to Canada’s coffers in the two-woman event on Saturday. She said the knowledge of the track at Yanqing National Sliding Centre gained during her monobob runs should serve her well.

“It means that I have a really good understanding of the track and with Buj (Kristen Bujnowski), my brakewoman behind me, we have a very competitive push,” de Bruin said.

“Put the two together and we should have a great result.”

Kaillie Humphries, de Bruin’s former teammate, led a one-two punch atop the podium for the United States with a dominating time of 4:19.27. American veteran Elana Meyers Taylor took silver in 4:20.81.

Humphries picked up her fourth Olympic medal. She won two gold and a bronze in the two-woman event as a competitor for Canada before switching to represent the United States after the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Elsewhere on Monday, Canada assured itself of at least one more medal in Beijing with a 10-3 win over Switzerland in the women’s hockey semifinals. The Canadians will face the winner of a later semifinal between the United States and Finland for gold on Thursday.

Canada’s women’s curling team rebounded from a three-game losing streak with an 11-5 win over Russia, and looked to even its record with a win over Britain later Monday. The men’s curling squad improved to 4-2 with a comfortable 7-3 win over Italy. And the nation’s snowboarders look poised to add to their success after a total of five athletes qualified for the finals of the men’s and women’s big air events.

Max Parrot will be looking to follow up his gold-medal slopestyle performance from last week with a similar result in the big air, and appeared on form after topping the men’s qualifier.

Parrot said he was “stoked” by his performance, despite making a mistake on his third jump, but said his focus was firmly on the future.

“I’ve got my ticket for the final so really just focusing on that,” he said. “That’s what’s important. It’s not to finish first in (qualifiers) or second or third, it’s to make it to the final.”

Teammate Mark McMorris was eighth and Darcy Sharpe finished 12th to secure the last spot in the final. Sébastien Toutant, the event’s defending champion, fell twice and did not advance.

On the women’s side, Laurie Blouin qualified fourth for the big air final and Jasmine Baird was 10th.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia Asselin also qualified for the finals of the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle. Asselin finished in 11th after scoring a 64.68 on her first run at the Genting Snow Park in Zhangjiakou. Megan Oldham, who finished fourth in the big air, did not advance to the final.

Humphries’ first gold medal sliding for the United States came after a trying four years that included an acrimonious split with Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton — the sport’s national governing body.

Humphries filed a harassment complaint with the organization in 2018, claiming she was “repeatedly and horribly verbally and mentally abused by the head coach.”

Todd Hays, who led the U.S. women’s team from 2011 to 2014, has been Canada’s head coach since 2017.

The allegations remain under investigation.

Asked if she had any words for Canada, Humphries started off by saying “not really” before continuing.

“I’m still Canadian,” said the dual citizen. “I will never forget my time as part of Canada, and I am so proud and honoured to still consider myself Canadian. I am also American. To me, it’s not a rivalry. I’m not picking and choosing one country over the other.

“Canada will always hold my past. Every single time I represented Team Canada, I did so with my heart and soul. The U.S.A. has my future.”

Toronto’s Cynthia Appiah was eighth on the 1,615-metre, 16-turn track located about 90 kilometres north of Beijing.

In women’s hockey, team captain Marie-Philip Poulin scored twice and Claire Thompson had a goal and two assists as the Canadians set a new Olympic tournament record with 54 goals.

“I know when you look at the Olympic scores, you kind of think it has been an easy road for us, but that could not have been any further from the truth,” forward Sarah Nurse said.

“We want to generate a ton of offence but we know we have to clean things up defensively. I know going into the championship (game) we will have to tighten some things up defensively.”

In figure skating, Toronto’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier of Unionville, Ont., finished a disappointing seventh in ice dance in what could be their last Olympics.

Gilles and Poirier botched a rotational lift, which was reflected in their score of 204.78.

Gilles fought back tears as she tried to explain what went wrong. Poirier said to her gently: “You were amazing.”

They could still capture a medal in the team event, pending the decision on the Russian team. Canada was fourth in the team event, but Russia, which was first, could be disqualified after it was revealed that 15-year-old superstar Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned heart drug.

Valieva was cleared to continue competing by the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Monday, but any medal she wins could still be taken from her.

Those issues will be dealt with in a separate, longer-term investigation of the positive doping test that will be led by the Russian anti-doping agency.

The International Olympic Committee said Monday afternoon that if Valieva finishes in the top three, there will be no medal ceremony during the Games. There will also be no ceremony for the team event.

Canada’s Marion Thénault was seventh in women’s aerials. Thénault, from Sherbrooke, Que., just missed out on the superfinal with a 91.29 on her second run of the final. Thénault was part of the team that won the bronze medal in the mixed team aerials event.

China’s Xu Mengtao won gold with 108.61 points in the superfinal.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 14, 2022.

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Daily Caller

Ex-FDA Commissioners Against Higher Vaccine Standards Took $6 Million From COVID Vaccine Makers

Published on December 19, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

Ten of the twelve former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioners and acting commissioners opposed to the Trump administration’s stiffer standards for vaccines quietly disclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry, a Daily Caller News Foundation review shows.

The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.

“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”

But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.

The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.

Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.

Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.

Mark McClellan has received $3.3 million from Johnson & Johnson as a member of the board of directors since 2013, SEC filings also show. McClellan also consults for the new pharmaceutical arm of the alternative investment management company Blackstone, which invested $750 million in Moderna in April 2025.

Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.

FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.

The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.

Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.

“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.

Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.

Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.

Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.

The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.

Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.

Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.

Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.

The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.

David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shots with Pfizer and Moderna.

Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.

That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.

International

DOJ fails to fully comply with Friday deadline for Epstein files release

Published on December 19, 2025

Duane Rolheiser

From The Center Square

By Thérèse Boudreaux

The U.S. Department of Justice will not release the entirety of the federal government’s files on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein by the end of day Friday, failing to fully comply with a mandate from Congress.

DOJ will release several hundred thousand documents, however, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News interview. He estimated that “several hundred thousand more” will be released “over the next couple of weeks.”

The delay, Blanche explained, is due to the significant number of redactions that the department must complete in order to protect the identifications of witnesses and victims in the files.

By failing to fully comply with a congressional edict, lawmakers would have grounds to impeach or hold U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress.

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Nov. 18, which President Donald Trump signed into law the next day.

The bill, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., requires that the U.S. Attorney General “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” that relate to Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Any Justice Department official who does not comply with this law will be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice,” Khanna vowed.

Epstein died in jail awaiting trial in 2019 and Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.

President Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton, billionaire businessman Bill Gates, and dozens of other high-profile figures have received intense public scrutiny for their connections with Epstein and Maxwell.