COVID-19
Our dumb country: an update
Belated welcome to Canada, Sir. We’re like this sometimes
Posted with permission from Paul Wells
Here at the Paul Wells newsletter, we get results. It just always seems to take more work than it should. Today we have an update on Sir Mark Walport FRS FRCP FRCPath FMedSci FRSE, who was asked last summer by the government of Canada to look into Canada’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I have known this since several days after Sir Mark’s work began. (Sir Mark is one of the UK’s leading medical research administrators. Over ’ome, I learn, if somebody is both a physician and a knight you address them as Sir Or Lady Firstname, followed by the appropriate abbreviations for their credentials, not as Dr.) I waited until November for the government to announce it, and was surprised when this didn’t happen. In fact I assumed my source was mistaken. (My source didn’t even want to be a source, they were just somebody who knew stuff and was chatting with me.) I have a longstanding interest in the notion that governments, being the creature of fallen humans, can benefit from introspection. So I thought some outside eyes-on the COVID response might help reduce the casualty count of some future catastrophe. The most recent of several posts I wrote to that effect is here.
My source kept assuring me that the Sir Mark thing was a real thing, and the government kept keeping schtum, so in November I finally gathered up my courage and wrote to the health ministry to ask whether this thing that I knew was happening was, you know, happening. The finest modern communications strategists have now perfected the government’s communications to the point where if you ask the government any question at all about anything at all, a process begins whereby dozens of people Working From Home figure out a way to suck your brains out through your nose using a ceremonial ceramic straw, and indeed this is what happened here.
Twelve days and two follow-up emails after I sent my query, a process I detailed with a kind of heartsick fascination in this post from November, I received this response:
The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant and complex health, social and economic impacts on our society.
As the Government of Canada continues its transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic response phase, internal and external partners are undertaking reviews of their role in the government’s response to COVID-19 and are identifying strategies to strengthen Canada’s preparedness for future health emergencies.
This reply was a thing of terrible maddening beauty, like the planet-smashing robot in the second-season Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine, and I stared at it helplessly, the way William Windom did when the whale-shaped automaton finally turned in space and descended on him with its immense glowing orifice. This response, built up layer after layer by nameless armies of the powerless like the Pyramids themselves, managed to acknowledge the accuracy of my request while providing no actual information. It was the sound of one hand clapping, performed by committee.
Well, that was it for me. I tapped out. I was done. But Cathay Wagantall, whom I don’t believe I’ve met, picked up the baton from my shattered grasp. Wagantall is the Conservative MP for the riding of Yorkton — Melville, in Saskatchewan. Members of Parliament are allowed to send written questions to the government, which is required to reply. At the end of Nov., as I noted at the time, Wagantall put the following question on the Order Paper:
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You can click on that to read it in full, but essentially she asked: What’s Sir Mark doing, when will we hear more, what’s it cost and why haven’t you said so?
The thing about the House of Commons is, it does have some powers, and thus cornered by one of its members, the government finally relented. On Monday the government tabled Sessional Paper 8555-441-2022 in response to Wagantall’s question. Here it is!
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In this reply we learn real things, without quite learning the answer to everything Wagantall asked. In August Health Canada, PHAC and the Chief Science Advisor (that’s Mona Nemer) asked for an “independent expert panel” to “conduct a review of the federal approach to pandemic science advice and research coordination.” Sir Mark is indeed the panel’s chair.
Note that his mandate is narrow. He hasn’t been asked to look at medical supply, pharmaceutical production capacity, quarantine practice, stay-at-home orders, curfews, the wisdom of in-person vs. virtual schooling, or all the myriad of other issues that are worth looking at. This is neither proper nor improper, it just is what it is. Did you hear much about the advice Dr. Nemer provided the government during COVID, in her capacity as Chief Science Advisor? I bet you didn’t, though she wasn’t secretive about it, it just didn’t get much attention amid everything else that was going on. Sir Mark will apparently mostly be looking into how to make this little-noticed corner of the pandemic response work better. As for all the other stuff a government could look at — maybe they’ll leave it in the hands of a future generation of political staffers who are, for the moment, baristas! Maybe there’s some other after-action process going on, but we asked for the wrong one! One never knows, do one!
Sir Mark isn’t getting paid much, and, mirabile dictu, his report will be made public within two months. I’ve got a hunch that wasn’t the original plan.
The response to Wagantall’s Order Paper question is signed by Mark Holland, the Minister of Health. I notice that, like many ministers who were moved in 2023, Holland inherited his mandate letter from his predecessor, Jean-Yves Duclos. I also notice that mandate letters no longer contain this paragraph, which appeared in every mandate letter to the original 2015 cabinet:
We have also committed to set a higher bar for openness and transparency in government. It is time to shine more light on government to ensure it remains focused on the people it serves. Government and its information should be open by default. If we want Canadians to trust their government, we need a government that trusts Canadians. It is important that we acknowledge mistakes when we make them. Canadians do not expect us to be perfect – they expect us to be honest, open, and sincere in our efforts to serve the public interest.
I guess that was then.
From LifeSiteNews
With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.
DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.
At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”
The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”
Dr. @P_McCulloughMD: "This Is a Military Operation"
"The military said in 2012, 'We will end pandemics in 60 days using messenger RNA.' That's long before Moderna and Pfizer were even in the game. … They are profiting from this, but they didn't drive it." pic.twitter.com/71jAV5wfG0
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 12, 2023
As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.
The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“
Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?
Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:
Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.
The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:
“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.
“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.
With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.
For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”
Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”
When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:
“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025
On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”
Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.
Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”
Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?
“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.
In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.
The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.
DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.
The Theory of Mind program will also:
… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.
This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.
We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.
They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.
DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?
If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.
And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.
From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.
“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.
Kennedy on Covid Jabs as a Military Operation:
"Turns out that the vaccines were developed not by Moderna and Pfizer. They were developed by NIH.”
“They're owned. The patents are owned 50% by NIH.
They were manufactured by military contractors.”
pic.twitter.com/R6y8i8tAsD— Jonny Paradise 🌱 (@plantparadise7) April 15, 2025
Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.
From LifeSiteNews
Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.
Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.
In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.
The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.
According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.
“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.
She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”
The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”
Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.
Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.
The report concluded that one in five contracts did not have proper documentation to show correct security clearances. Also, the report found that federal organizations did not monitor how the contract work was being performed.
‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.
“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.
“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”
ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.
ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.
As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.
LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.
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