COVID-19
Australian Senate launches landmark excess death inquiry following COVID shot rollout
From LifeSiteNews
By David James
The Australian Senate has initiated an inquiry into the surge of excess deaths since the 2021 COVID vaccination program, marking the first formal parliamentary examination of this issue worldwide.
The Australian Senate has begun an inquiry into excess deaths since the mass vaccination program of 2021 in an effort to isolate the causes of what is described as the worst level of excess mortality since World War II. It is being touted as the first instance in the world of a Parliament formally examining the issue.
The successful motion, brought by United Australia Party (UAP) Senator Ralph Babet, was his fifth attempt to launch a parliamentary inquiry in two years. Previously, the left-wing Labor government and the Greens had blocked the motion, without explaining why. The Senate’s Community Affairs References Committee is now required to investigate the factors contributing to the abnormally high mortality. The report is expected by the end of August.
It will be a difficult task, and the likelihood that there will be any admissions of wrongdoing by government bureaucrats and politicians is vanishingly small, even if the findings compellingly point to the vaccination program as the reason behind the excess deaths.
A range of excuses and misdirection will be used to confound the picture. The most obvious is the point that correlation does not prove causation. It will likely be argued that just because the excess deaths happened at about the same time as the mass inoculations it does not necessarily mean there is a causal connection. This is true, but it only means that the evidence is circumstantial, which is valid and can be conclusive, especially when there is no obvious alternative explanation and similar surges in deaths have been observed in most countries that were heavily vaccinated.
READ: US gov’t scientists received $710 million from Big Pharma during COVID, watchdog finds
There are likely to be arguments about the precision of the data and the establishment of an appropriate base line. There is little doubt about the overall trend. The Australian Actuaries Institute sounded the alarm in early 2023. But a favoured tactic of bureaucrats is to argue over fine detail in order to distract from the big picture.
There will thus need to be work to get precise data, if that is possible. For example, according to Babet on March 26 this year, the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) provisional mortality figures “confirm that to November 2023 there were 15,114, or 10 percent, more deaths than the baseline average.”
Different figures are in an article in globalresearch.ca (referencing figures from Mortality Watch). The excess death figures were below 4 percent in 2021, just under 14 percent in 2022, and just over 7 percent in 2023.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has different figures again: -3.1 percent in 2020 (when politicians were saying a deadly pandemic was ravaging the country), 1.4 percent in 2021, 10.9 percent in 2022, and 9.1 percent in 2023. These inconsistencies will have to be resolved.
Ed Dowd, author of Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022, observes that Australian data has several limitations, one of which is that it “does not allow us to observe the excess mortality in younger age groups with sufficient detail.” His figures, which are broken down by age, show that the excess deaths were worst for most ages in 2022 and then declined in 2023. The exception was the 75-84 age bracket, where excess deaths rose in 2023.
Another likely tactic is that it will be argued that the problem is “multi-factorial”: that the deaths were caused by many things. This will have some truth to it – the lockdowns probably led to increased suicide rates, for example – and it is likely that it will be used to confuse the picture. But it will not explain the size of the excess mortality, which is the equivalent of what happens in a war. To explain that a novel reason is required, not causes of death that have existed for a long time.
READ: UK study of children shows heart inflammation develops after COVID vaccination, not infection
The aggregate mortality statistics are not the only relevant data; there are other pieces of evidence that can help fill in the picture. One is that the excess deaths, which have occurred in all age groups, do not seem to have been the result of COVID itself. According to the ABS in 2022, when the excess deaths were at their peak, the median (average) age of death for COVID-19 was 86, significantly higher than average life expectancy in Australia. That suggests relatively few working age and younger people died from the disease. So, what killed them?
Another pointer is a report that there have been 20 percent more sudden cardiac arrests in Victoria than five years ago – and more than 95 percent of the patients are dying. “Of the 7,830 people whose hearts stopped beating due to this condition in 2022/23, just 388 survived, the latest Ambulance Victoria figures reveal,” reports the Herald Sun. The ABC, the national broadcaster, reported that many of the heart attack victims are young, but did not investigate any further.
The state government’s response has been to buy more defibrillators. There has been no mention of the vaccines as a possible cause despite accumulating evidence that the heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis are the most commonly reported adverse events associated with the vaccines.
Especially telling has been the TGA’s response. They simply stopped reporting on myocarditis and pericarditis. Such tactics are typical of Australian bureaucrats’ efforts to protect themselves.
The biggest challenge will be analyzing causation of the deaths in an environment where most of the people providing the data have a vested interest in not having their actions exposed, especially when the evidence might show that they have committed a homicide. Australian doctors and academics are also under threat of losing their careers if they voice their doubts about the vaccines. They, too, are hardly likely to be eager to take responsibility for deadly mistakes.
It is more likely that the exposing of the truth in Australia will have to wait for the insights of experts such as Dr. Francis Boyle, who was responsible for drafting the United States’ 1989 Biological Weapons and Antiterrorism Act. He recently testified in a Florida court case that the “mRNA nanoparticle injections” are “biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction.”
If true, it seems very unlikely that Australian health authorities knew. The TGA admitted that it just followed the FDA’s recommendations throughout the crisis. But given that it is supposed to be their job to know it is no excuse.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
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Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own
Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
From LifeSiteNews
The Crown’s appeal claims the judge made a mistake in her verdict on the intimidation charges, and also in how she treated aggravating and mitigating factors regarding sentencing.
Government lawyers for the Crown have filed an appeal the acquittals of Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber on intimidation charges.
The Crown also wants their recent 18-month conditional sentence on mischief charges replaced with harsher penalties, which could include possible jail time.
According to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), it is “asking the Ontario Court of Appeal to enter a conviction on the intimidation charge or order a new trial on that count,” for Barber’s charges.
Specifically, the Crown’s appeal claims that the judge made a mistake in her verdict on the intimidation charges, and also in how she treated aggravating and mitigating factors regarding sentencing.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, both Lich and Barber have filed appeals of their own against their house arrest sentences, arguing that the trial judge did not correctly apply the law on their mischief charges.
Barber’s lawyer, Diane Magas, said that her client “relied in good faith on police and court direction during the protest. The principles of fairness and justice require that citizens not be punished for following the advice of authorities. We look forward to presenting our arguments before the Court.”
On October 7, Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey sentenced Lich and Chris Barber to 18 months’ house arrest after being convicted earlier in the year of “mischief.”
Lich was given 18 months less time already spent in custody, amounting to 15 1/2 months.
Lich and Barber were declared guilty of mischief for their roles as leaders of the protest against COVID mandates in April 2022, and as social media influencers. The conviction came after a nearly two-year trial despite the non-violent nature of the popular movement.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September 2024, more than a year after it began. It was originally scheduled to last 16 days.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian government was hoping to put Lich in jail for no less than seven years and Barber for eight years.
LifeSiteNews recently reported that Lich detailed her restrictive house arrest conditions, revealing she is “not” able to leave her house or even pick up her grandchildren from school without permission from the state.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich, reflecting on her recent house arrest verdict, said she has no “remorse” and will not “apologize” for leading a movement that demanded an end to all COVID mandates.
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