COVID-19
Judge allows B.C. government workers’ lawsuit against COVID mandates to proceed
From LifeSiteNews
‘Our legal campaigns are a critical, precedent-setting fight to ensure the preservation of all workers’ employment and Charter rights in British Columbia and Canada for generations to come,’ celebrated the British Columbia Public Servants Employees for Freedom.
A court has ruled that a class action lawsuit launched against the provincial government of British Columbia on behalf of “all unionized” public servant workers in the province who faced persecution resulting from COVID mandates can proceed.
The court case will be heard in April of 2025, noted the British Columbia Public Servants Employees for Freedom (BCPSEF), a non-profit organization that assists public service workers in the province.
“Since October 2021, BCPS Employees for Freedom (BCPSEF) has led a campaign in defense of medical privacy and bodily autonomy on behalf of all public servants and our fellow British Columbians. This has involved raising awareness about the provincial government’s harmful proof of COVID-19 vaccination policy and undertaking a series of legal actions,” said the group in a press release.
“Our legal campaigns are a critical, precedent-setting fight to ensure the preservation of all workers’ employment and Charter rights in British Columbia and Canada for generations to come.”
The class action was initially brought forth by Plaintiff Jason Baldwin’s, with the BCPSEF explaining that now the “Baldwin class action has been merged together with a separate class action claim by unionized B.C. healthcare workers that is being supported by @UHCWBC.”
“Certification of both claims will be argued at 5 days of hearings scheduled in B.C. Supreme Court in Victoria beginning on April 7, 2025,” said the group.
Both class actions made the arguments that workers who refused the COVID shots and were discriminated against had their rights violated “under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for imposing new terms and conditions of employment on existing and freely negotiated employment agreements absent collective bargaining, consideration, or consent.”
“The actions also claim breach of employees’ common law and statutory privacy rights, as well as misfeasance in public office by B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry,” said the group.
The class action was initially filed in October of 2023. According to the BCPS, some 38,000 public servants were directly impacted by the B.C. provincial government’s “coercive and unjustifiable proof of COVID-19 vaccination mandate” which it noted caused “untold suffering and harm.”
Some 314 employees related to public service in the class action were fired for refusing to take the COVID shots, with another 175 placed on leave.
The NDP (New Democratic Party) government of British Columbia, which was just re-elected, had in place a COVID jab mandate for healthcare workers years after most provinces dropped theirs. It was not until July of this year that its chief health officer Bonnie Henry formally announced an end to the COVID jab mandate policy for those working in health care.
Many healthcare workers were fired or placed on leave for refusing to get the COVID shots.
Despite removing the mandates, the provincial government announced that it was creating “a vaccine registry,” forcing all healthcare workers to disclose vaccination status to their employer.
The class action by British Columbian public servants is just the latest in a string of lawsuits against provincial governments for enacting draconian COVID mandates which resulted in thousands of businesses going under as well as many people fired for not getting the shots.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, a recent class-action lawsuit on behalf of dozens of Canadian business owners in Alberta who faced massive losses or permanent closures due to COVID mandates has been given permission to proceed by a judge.
COVID-19
Trump DOJ seeks to quash Pfizer whistleblower’s lawsuit over COVID shots
From LifeSiteNews
The Justice Department attorney did not mention the Trump FDA’s recent admission linking the COVID shots to at least 10 child deaths so far.
The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to dismiss a whistleblower case against Pfizer over its COVID-19 shots, even as the Trump Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is beginning to admit their culpability in children’ s deaths.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in 2021 the BMJ published a report on insider information from a former regional director of the medical research company Ventavia, which Pfizer hired in 2020 to conduct research for the company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 shot.
The regional director, Brook Jackson, sent BMJ “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails,” which “revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety […] We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.”
According to the report, Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.” Overwhelmed by numerous problems with the trial data, Jackson filed an official complaint with the FDA.
Jackson was fired the same day, and Ventavia later claimed that Jackson did not work on the Pfizer COVID-19 shot trial; but Jackson produced documents proving she had been invited to the Pfizer trial team and given access codes to software relating to the trial. Jackson filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for violating the federal False Claims Act and other regulations in January 2021, which was sealed until February 2022. That case has been ongoing ever since.
Last August, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale dismissed most of Jackson’s claims with prejudice, meaning they could not be refiled. Jackson challenged the decision, but the Trump DOJ has argued in court to uphold it, Just the News reports, with DOJ attorney Nicole Smith arguing that the case concerns preserving the government’s unfettered power to dismiss whistleblower cases.
The rationale echoes a recurring trend in DOJ strategy that Politico described in May as “preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions,” even in cases that involve “backing policies favored by Democrats.”
Jackson’s attorney Warner Mendenhall responded that the administration “really sort of made our case for us” in effectively admitting that DOJ is taking the Fair Claims Act’s “good cause” standard for state intervention to mean “mere desire to dismiss,” which infringes on his client’s “First Amendment right to access the courts, to vindicate what she learned.”
Mendenhall added that in a refiled case, Jackson “may be able to bring a very different case along the same lines, but with the additional information” to prove fraud, whereas rejection would send the message that “if fraud involves government complicity, don’t bother reporting it.”
That additional information would presumably include the FDA’s recent admission that at least 10 children the agency has reviewed so far “died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination.”
“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” admitted FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad in a recent leaked email. “It is horrifying to consider that the U.S. vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”
The COVID shots have been highly controversial ever since the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative prepared and released them in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a large body of evidence has steadily accumulated over the past five years indicating that the COVID jabs failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own.
Ever since, many have intently watched and hotly debated what President Donald Trump would do about the situation upon his return to office. Though he never backed mandates like former President Joe Biden did, for years Trump refused to disavow the shots to the chagrin of his base, seeing Operation Warp Speed as one of his crowning achievements. At the same time, during his latest run he embraced the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its suspicion of the medical establishment more broadly.
So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current jabs optional but not supporting work to develop successors.
In a July interview, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.
COVID-19
Canadian Health Department funds study to determine effects of COVID lockdowns on children
From LifeSiteNews
The commissioned study will assess the impact on kids’ mental well-being of COVID lockdowns and ‘remote’ school classes that banned outdoor play and in-person learning.
Canada’s Department of Health has commissioned research to study the impact of outdoor play on kids’ mental well-being in light of COVID lockdowns and “remote” school classes that, for a time, banned outdoor play and in-person learning throughout most of the nation.
In a notice to consultants titled “Systematic Literature Reviews And Meta Analyses Supporting Two Projects On Children’s Health And Covid-19,” the Department of Health admitted that “Exposure to green space has been consistently associated with protective effects on children’s physical and mental health.”
A final report, which is due in 2026, will provide “Health Canada with a comprehensive assessment of current evidence, identify key knowledge gaps and inform surveillance and policy planning for future pandemics and other public health emergencies.”
Bruce Squires, president of McMaster Children’s Hospital of Hamilton, Ontario, noted in 2022 that “Canada’s children and youth have borne the brunt” of COVID lockdowns.
From about March 2020 to mid-2022, most of Canada was under various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, including mask mandates, at the local, provincial, and federal levels. Schools were shut down, parks were closed, and most kids’ sports were cancelled.
Mandatory facemask polices were common in Canada and all over the world for years during the COVID crisis despite over 170 studies showing they were not effective in stopping the spread of COVID and were, in fact, harmful, especially to children.
In October 2021, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced unprecedented COVID-19 jab mandates for all federal workers and those in the transportation sector, saying the un-jabbed would no longer be able to travel by air, boat, or train, both domestically and internationally.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, a new report released by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) raised alarm bells over the “harms caused” by COVID-19 lockdowns and injections imposed by various levels of government as well as a rise in unexplained deaths and bloated COVID-19 death statistics.
Indeed, a recent study showed that COVID masking policies left children less able to differentiate people’s emotions behind facial expressions.
COVID vaccine mandates and lockdowns, which came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society.
-
National1 day agoCanada’s free speech record is cracking under pressure
-
Energy1 day agoTanker ban politics leading to a reckoning for B.C.
-
Energy1 day agoMeet REEF — the massive new export engine Canadians have never heard of
-
Business1 day agoTaxpayers Federation calls on politicians to reject funding for new Ottawa Senators arena
-
Fraser Institute1 day agoClaims about ‘unmarked graves’ don’t withstand scrutiny
-
Censorship Industrial Complex2 days agoOttawa’s New Hate Law Goes Too Far
-
Business1 day agoToo nice to fight, Canada’s vulnerability in the age of authoritarian coercion
-
Business1 day agoAlbertans give most on average but Canadian generosity hits lowest point in 20 years
