COVID-19
Judge puts Freedom Convoy trial on hold until summer

From LifeSiteNews
Justice Heather Perkins-McVey is giving both sides more time to build a case.
The judge overseeing the trial for Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber adjourned the court proceedings until August to allow for the government to prepare legal arguments to back its claim that the leaders were “co-conspirators” as well as give time to the defense to prepare their case that the leaders are innocent.
The months-long court case started on September 5, 2023, in an Ottawa courthouse.
On Day 38 last Friday, the Democracy Fund (TDF), which is crowdfunding Lich’s legal costs, noted in a legal update that Justice Heather Perkins-McVey stated that she would not hear the “Carter application before closing arguments” but that “it will be heard simultaneously.”
The government has been hoping to use what is called a “Carter application” to help them make their case against Lich and Barber by trying to prove that the leaders were “co-conspirators,” meaning that accusations placed against one leader automatically apply to the other.
The government’s “Carter Application” asks that the judge consider “Barber’s statements and actions to establish the guilt of Lich, and vice versa.”
A Carter application requires that the government prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there was a “conspiracy or plan in place and that Lich was a party to it based on direct evidence,” and, as such, the defense is asking the judge to dismiss the application.
According to the TDF, Perkins-McVey delayed the trial until August so the government and the defense have time to “prepare their submissions without knowing the exact evidence admitted by the Court against each defendant.”
“This is because the Court’s ruling on the Carter application determines whether the statements of one defendant can be attributed to the other,” the TDF said.
Thus far, the government has asserted “that the absence of violence or peaceful nature of the protest didn’t make it lawful, emphasizing that the onus was on the Crown to prove the protest’s unlawfulness.”
The government has held steadfast to the notion in trying to prove that Lich and Barber somehow influenced the protesters’ actions through their words as part of a co-conspiracy. This claim has been rejected by the defense as weak.
The reality is that Lich and Barber collaborated with police on many occasions so that the protests were within the law. Lawrence Greenspon, Lich’s counsel, and Barber’s attorney, Diane Magas, have said they will argue against the Carter application.
The trial will resume August 13, with extra court dates planned for August 14-15 and August 19-23. LifeSiteNews has covered the trial extensively since it began last year.
Court will allow some ‘extra’ statements from Barber to be submitted
The court also ruled Friday that only some extra statements of Barber will be allowed to be admitted as per the “one statement rule.” Perkins-McVey will soon issue a ruling “shortly,” the TDF reported.
Day 37 included some “important” updates, according to their legal team, as their lawyers argued that allowing video to be entered as evidence would provide “context and completeness” into why they led the protests.
Last Thursday’s court proceedings saw Magas continue her “submission on the admissibility of statements of videos made by her client (Barber).”
Day 37 also saw the defense move to argue that the “Carter application should be ‘bifurcated’ — that is, it should be heard and ruled upon by the Court before closing submissions.”
On Day 36, lawyers argued that video statements made by the leaders should be allowed as “evidence of the truth.”
The trial resumed for one day, on March 7, for only the second court date since the new year, with Perkins-McVey deciding to dismiss an application by the Freedom Convoy leaders that asked the court to throw out so-called conspiracy charges.
Lich and Barber are facing multiple charges from the 2022 protests, including mischief, counseling mischief, counseling intimidation and obstructing police for taking part in and organizing the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy. As reported by LifeSiteNews at the time, despite the non-violent nature of the protest and the charges, Lich was jailed for weeks before she was granted bail.
Besides the ongoing trial, Lich and Barber and a host of others recently filed a $2 million lawsuit against the Trudeau government for its use of the Emergencies Act (EA) to quash the Freedom Convoy in 2022.
In early 2022, thousands of Canadians from coast to coast came to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the Emergencies Act on February 14. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.
The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.
During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.
Courageous Discourse
March 2020 Intel Brief to PM Johnson: “COVID-19 WAS ENGINEERED IN WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY”

By John Leake
Briefing from former head of SIS and other top security analysts stated unequivocally that pandemic originated at WIV, refuted fraudulent “Proximal Origins” paper by Andersen et al.
Fellow Substack author Michael Schellenberger just shared an intelligence briefing dated 27 March 2020 from Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence, and other ranking security analysts to Prime Minister Johnson. The following is a reproduction of the first page.
In other words, Sir Richard and his team expressly told Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 27, 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 came out of the WIV.
Note that the authors state that the Nature Medicine paper published by Andersen et al. (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”) is incorrect and that:
the scale and nature of its errors and its prime source (Zhou et al) raise important further non-virological questions, including of geo-strategic and domestic security, that can be addressed separately in slower time.
We judge therefore, that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is conducting information operation to embed the natural causation narrative, and, by misdirection, and to conceal the true origin and responsibility.
We know from Andersen et al.’s private e-mail correspondence with Anthony Fauci in late February 2020 that they knew that SARS-CoV-2 was not of natural origin.
This raises an extremely pressing question: Were Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry, and Anthony Fauci working for the PRC?
Sir Richard Dearlove and his colleagues raise this suspicion, because they must have known that Andersen et al. weren’t simply hoodwinked by Chinese virologists Zhou et al.
We know that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Professor Ralph Baric were collaborating with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID was supporting their research as well.
Setting aside questions about the legality of their research, shouldn’t all of these people be arrested and tried for the fraudulent concealment of information of vital public interest?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to conceal from the British public the reality disclosed in this memo. Does British law make him immune from liability for concealing this matter of vital public interest from the British people? Note that Johnson also took decisive action to sabotage peace talks between Ukraine and Russian in Turkey in March 2022.
Should the British people trust Johnson’s representations about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia—representations that have been endorsed by his successor, Keir Starmer? For all the British people know, Johnson received security briefings about this conflict that contradict what he has told them about the war.
Then there’s the abominable mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain that characterized everyone who pointed out the obvious indications of the lab origin as “conspiracy theorists.”
The New York Times just published an ass-covering Opinion titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives”—as though the Times editors someone managed to remain ignorant about the mountain of evidence of this until now.
The disclosure of this British intelligence memo comes on the heels of almost identical disclosures about the German government of Angela Merkel. As investigative journalist Michael Nevradakis just reported in the CHD Defender:
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, determined with 80%-95% certainty in 2020 that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic originated with a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — but successive governments kept the information “under lock and key,” according to a German investigative report.
The report, published jointly on Wednesday by Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, was the result of an 18-month investigation.
The investigation found that in 2020, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel commissioned a BND operation code-named “Project Saaremaa” that targeted Chinese agencies and research institutions.
When the BND’s investigation concluded that a Wuhan lab leak was the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Merkel government prohibited the spy agency from releasing its results to the public.
When Mr. Nevradakis asked me what I thought about the German disclosure, I told him the following:
The revelation that German intelligence knew that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, and was not of natural origin, is no surprise, given the vast amount of evidence that the pathogen was not zoonotic. It’s also not surprising that the Merkel government decided to conceal the spy agency’s findings.
The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has long worked very closely with the CIA, and the Merkel government consistently complied with Washington’s directives. Concealment of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with the German government’s concealment of Paul Ehrlich Institute’s assessments about many elements of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For over three years, Dr. Peter McCullough and I have expressed our conviction that the cover-up of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the greatest organized crime in history. The latest revelations about the BND and the Merkel government confirm our long held suspicions.
For a full copy of the March 27, 2020 Security Briefing to Prime Minister Johnson, click HERE.
Censorship Industrial Complex
They knew it was a lab leak all along

MxM News
Newly Revealed Documents Confirm Lab Leak Coverup
Quick Hit:
The global debate over COVID-19’s origins has taken a dramatic turn after newly uncovered reports indicate that intelligence agencies in Germany had determined with near certainty that the virus originated in a Chinese lab as early as 2020. Despite this revelation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly chose to suppress the findings, aligning with a broader pattern of obfuscation by Western governments and media outlets.
Key Details:
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German newspapers Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, concluded in early 2020 with 80% to 95% certainty that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
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The intelligence was based on a combination of public-domain research and classified investigations under the code name “Saaremaa.”
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Merkel’s administration allegedly buried the findings, with her successor Olaf Scholz continuing the suppression, ensuring the information remained hidden from the public until now.
Diving Deeper:
Journalist Alex Berenson detailed the shocking revelations in his Substack op-ed, underscoring how “the American media is doing its best to ignore the biggest news this week.” Berenson criticized legacy media outlets for fixating on the five-year anniversary of COVID-19 while sidestepping the implications of newly surfaced intelligence.
According to Berenson, German intelligence reached its high-confidence conclusion after analyzing public materials and conducting covert operations. “The material… indicated that there had been some risky research methods used there [at the Wuhan Institute of Virology], compounded by breaches of laboratory safety rules… [and] so-called gain-of-function experiments, in which viruses occurring in nature are manipulated [to become more dangerous or transmissible],” he wrote.
Rather than alert the world to the evidence, Merkel chose to suppress it. Berenson sarcastically noted, “Who immediately told the world of the findings and demanded a full investigation into what China’s totalitarian government knew and when it knew it? Nah, I’m funning you. Angela stuffed that report in a drawer and got back to doing what she did best, destroying Germany’s industrial base to make Greta Thunberg happy.”
The refusal to disclose this intelligence aligns with a broader pattern of deception from both governmental and media institutions, which spent years dismissing the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. Berenson noted that during early 2020, “Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Peter Daszak… were gently steering their fellow scientists towards a conclusion that COVID’s origins were 100 billion zillion percent natural.”
Even after Merkel left office in 2021, Scholz’s government continued to keep the intelligence under wraps. “The BND told her replacement, Olaf Scholz, ‘without the results finding their way to the public’ — as the British newspaper The Telegraph delicately put it,” Berenson wrote. Now that the findings have emerged, the German government has not denied the reports, leaving Berenson to conclude, “There’s about a 100 to 100 percent chance they’re true.”
The final takeaway? “We all sorta knew this already, right? Both the lab leak and the coverup,” Berenson observed. “But there’s knowing and there’s knowing. And it looks like the same American news outlets that spent 2020 and 2021 lying (or, at best, being hopelessly credulous) about China and COVID still aren’t ready to come clean.”
As new evidence continues to surface, the question remains: Will legacy media and world leaders finally acknowledge the lab leak theory as fact, or will they continue to deflect responsibility and protect their preferred narratives?
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