Professor Patrick Provost, formerly of Laval University

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Dr. Patrick Provost has 35 years’ experience working as a biochemist, notably in RNA, lipid nanoparticles, and genomics, and he has publicly stated that the COVID jabs “are not vaccines.”

A Canadian professor of immunology and microbiology has been sacked from his job at Quebec City’s Université Laval because of his strong opinions against the mRNA COVID injections.

Dr. Patrick Provost has 35 years’ experience working as a biochemist, notably in RNA, lipid nanoparticles, and genomics, and he has publicly stated that the COVID jabs “are not vaccines.” On March 28, 2024, he got a letter from the Vice-Rector of Human Resources and Finance, André Darveau, telling him he was no longer employed by Université Laval.

Provost stated that Université Laval’s treatment of him because of his views on the COVID shots is “illegal, unjust, unreasonable and abusive.”

“I am probably the first professor to be dismissed in the exercise of his academic freedom since (Quebec’s) ‘Act respecting academic freedom in the university environment,’ which is supposed to protect it, came into force on 7 June 2022,” wrote Provost to his work colleagues in a letter dated April 23.

On May 3, 2024, nine fellow professors signed an open letter to Université Laval which called on the university to give him his job back. It was published by the Brownstone Institute.

“Patrick Provost drew a line at what amounted to medical experimentation on children,” the professors wrote.

“He was in a good position to grasp the potential harms of the Pfizer and Moderna modified mRNA injections. He came to the conclusion some time ago that the risks outweighed the rewards, at least where children were concerned.”

“Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA products are based on a completely new technology and are not ‘vaccines’ – the definition of which was changed in September 2021 – in the traditional sense of the term as understood by the general public,” Provost wrote in his own letter.

“Being aware of the potential risks, known and unknown, associated with these new ‘vaccines,’ I could not remain silent on such important issues, where lives were at stake, particularly those of children. So, I decided to go public with my deep and legitimate concerns, which have evolved over time and are based on recognised concepts, solid scientific evidence, and reasoning.”

RELATED: Quebec medical professor who opposes COVID jabs for kids suspended a 4th time

Provost was suspended from his job four times before his firing.  In 2022, he was suspended for eight weeks without any pay, and then again for four months last year, which LifeSiteNews reported. After his suspension in 2022, Provost noted to the press that censorship protecting the mainstream COVID jab narrative is so intense that even speaking against it is “worse than the N-word.”

“You’re condemned by the media, by the government, and you’re chased and put down,” he said.

In June 2022, Provost spoke out against COVID restrictions and said that the COVID shots should not be given to kids: the risk they have of getting the virus is lower than the risk of suffering side effects from the shot, he said.

Provost’s long career has seen him win three Discovery of the Year awards. He has also obtained close to $6 million in government funding which allowed him to train some 60 students over the years. His research has been published in about 100 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and he has been cited in over 16,000 articles.

LifeSiteNews has published an extensive amount of research on the dangers of receiving the experimental COVID mRNA jabs, which include heart damage and blood clots.

The mRNA shots have also been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

Of note, in 2022, British Medical Journal editor Dr. Peter Doshi and colleagues discerned analysis that the COVID shots are more likely to put a person in hospital with a serious adverse event than to keep a person safe from COVID.

Many Canadian doctors who spoke out against COVID mandates and the experimental mRNA injections have been censured by their medical boards, or the university they work at.

Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, an Ontario pediatrician who has been embroiled in a legal battle with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) for her anti-COVID views, has received the support of billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By PETER ROFF

The lockdowns instituted during the COVID pandemic were only supposed to last a few days. Remember “14 days to flatten the curve” was all that was needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by patients infected with the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus.

Two weeks turned into three, then months. Schools were closed. Businesses were shut down. Commercial activity in the world’s most powerful nation ground almost to a halt, but the virus kept killing, mutating and spreading.

States like California and Kentucky enforced the lockdowns with ruthless efficiency. The free exercise of worship and assembly was crushed on the altar of public health and safety.

Was it worth it? The Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s report, “COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years,” says no. Its authors, who include the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Scott Atlas (who served as an adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force), Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke and the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan conclude, by using publicly available data and peer-reviewed studies, that the lockdowns cost more lives than they saved.

Atlas, Hanke, Mulligan and Phil Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) and the fourth and final co-author, conclude: “The ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefits while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs.”

“We did not focus on theories or models. We looked at cold, hard facts,” Kerpen says. “The evidence is overwhelming. Lockdowns, school closures, and societal panic/disruption resulted in a staggering number of excess non-COVID deaths in the United States versus zero in non-lockdown Sweden.”

Kerpen estimates that the policies implemented during the lockdowns saved approximately 16,000 lives while causing about 400,000 extra deaths and imposing staggering economic costs, including the loss of 49 million jobs.

Other adverse consequences stemming from the lockdowns cited in the report include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and delayed hospital care in part due to the forced social isolation.

In the U.S., catastrophes like COVID are usually followed by the appointment of bi-partisan, blue-ribbon commissions to study everything and issue recommendations we’re told will prevent something similar from happening again.

That hasn’t been done this time, which reinforces the suspicion in some minds that COVID-era policymakers who are still in a position to influence the conversation are hiding something. Having made a hash of things, they just as soon allow it all to slide down the memory hole.

Even in China, where popular opinion doesn’t matter, the investigation into the origins of the virus hit a stonewall thanks to what news reports have called “bureaucratic infighting.”

Too many people think the lockdowns worked. They’re ignoring the data. The CTUP report shows them to be wrong. It’s a call for a further probe that searches for the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Without it, how can we be sure the public’s health and safety will be protected the next time, not to mention our civil liberties?

The CTUP report offers a few “lessons learned” that should inform policymakers’ decision-making in the next crisis. One is that “Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them.”

“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” the authors conclude. During the pandemic, responsible officials in the public eye “intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”

As hard as it is to argue against that, it’s easy to suggest the crisis was used as a political club. What of it? Suppose public health officials, the media, and other policymakers deliberately ignored sound science and proven pandemic countermeasures to inflict political damage on a president they wished to see booted from office. Does that matter? The answer is yes, it does.

There’s more to be learned because there’s more to be studied. None of the nations that used lockdowns to prevent COVID from spreading can report that they worked as intended.

“The best-performing major country in the world was Sweden,” Kerpen says, “which did not employ mandatory lockdowns. Yet, to the extent that official and unofficial commissions in many countries have issued reports, they say the principal lesson to be learned from the pandemic is to lockdown harder and faster. The evidence doesn’t support that. It tells us that the lockdown policies must never be imposed again.”

If Kerpen is correct, and the evidence suggests he is, then policymakers are drawing the wrong conclusions. Lockdowns were a failure, not a success.

Other ways must be found to prevent a future outbreak from turning into a pandemic, hopefully, before the next crisis presents itself.

A former U.S. News & World Report columnist and United Press International senior political writer, Peter Roff is an acknowledged expert on U.S. politics and the policy process. His take on politics and policy appears frequently in print and on U.S. and international broadcasting outlets. Email him at RoffColumns AT gmail.com. Follow him on social media AT TheRoffDraft.