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COVID-19

Canadian citizen-led inquiry’s final report calls for all COVID court cases to be reviewed at once

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7 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By  Anthony Murdoch

‘These testimonies provide irrefutable evidence that an unprecedented assault has been waged against the citizens of Canada. Not since World War II has the nation experienced such a devastating attack on its people,’ a National Citizens’ Inquiry commissioner said.

The final report from the Canadian citizen-led and funded National Citizens’ Inquiry (NCI), which was created in 2022 to investigate the “unprecedented” COVID mandates imposed on Canadians by all levels of government, has called for a full review of all COVID-related court cases.

In the NCI’s final report, released November 28, one of the main recommendations it made is that a full review of all COVID court cases be held, to restore the public’s faith in Canada’s judiciary system.

The final report is 5,324 pages and includes dozens of recommendations for politicians (lawmakers) along with public institutions and the general public.

The report was compiled by four independent commissioners. The NCI was tasked with looking into the negative side effects many Canadians experienced after getting the experimental COVID shots, with testimony from doctors affected by the jabs.

According to NCI, “three out of four Canadians report having been harmed by Canada’s COVID-19 policies.”

One of the NCI’s commissioners, Kenneth Drysdale, noted how the policy, legal, and health authority “interventions into the lives of Canadians, our families, businesses, and communities,” were “to a great extent remain, significant.”

“These testimonies provide irrefutable evidence that an unprecedented assault has been waged against the citizens of Canada. Not since World War II has the nation experienced such a devastating attack on its people,” Drysdale added.

Thousands of Canadians who defied COVID mandates were fined, with many others serving jail time, including Christian pastors. Others lost their jobs for choosing not to get the COVID shots.

Some provinces, however, had showed some leniency. In the province of Alberta, in July, Justice Barbara Romaine from Alberta’s Court of Kings Bench ruled that politicians violated the province’s health act by making decisions regarding COVID mandates without authorization.

As a result of July’s court ruling, Alberta Crown Prosecutions Service (ACPS) said Albertans currently facing COVID-related charges will likely not face conviction but will instead have their charges stayed.

Thus far, in addition to Johnson, café owner Chris Scott and Alberta pastors James Coates, Tim Stephens, and Artur Pawlowski, who were all jailed for keeping their churches open under the leadership of Kenney, have had the COVID charges against them dropped due to the court ruling.

Countless others have had smaller charges against them for going against COVID mandates dropped as well. However, there are still some facing charges relating to border blockade protests. Also, many other Canadians who do not live in Alberta are still fighting their COVID-related charges.

The NCI was announced in the fall of 2022 and was headed by former Leader of the Official Opposition Preston Manning, who was an MP for years and the sole leader of Canada’s Reform Party.

It is a citizen-led and funded independent initiative investigating the government’s response to the COVID so-called pandemic.

NCI hearings saw testimony from 300 Canadians

The NCI held 24 days of public hearings in eight Canadian cities, with testimony from 300 witnesses, many of them doctors, lawyers, teachers, psychologists, morticians, and officials in emergency management. The NCI had issued 63 non-legally binding “subpoenas” to people in government, but none appeared before the inquiry.

The NCI’s final report documents how COVID mandates, including vaccine mandates, enacted at the hands of government at all levels, did irreparable harm to Canadian society.

The report said that a full judicial investigation into how COVID shots were approved in Canada needs to occur, which would include the potential to see if there is any criminal liability under current Canadian law.

The NCI’s interim report was released in September 2023 and called for an end to the use of the current COVID-19 injections.

LifeSiteNews covered previous testimony from the NCI. In May, a former journalist who worked for the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) shockingly revealed that reporters were stopped from being able to cover stories critical of COVID vaccines and lockdowns and were instead encouraged to push government “propaganda.”

The shocking revelations were made by past CBC Manitoba reporter Marianne Klowak during testimony at the NCI on May 18 in Ottawa.

Earlier this year, retired Canadian Lt. Col. David Redman testified before the NCI that legacy media outlets such as the CBC are “ministries of propaganda.”

The four commissioners on the NCI included Drysdale, Janice Kaikkonen, elected school board trustee Heather DiGregorio, a senior partner in a law firm, and Bernard Massie, an independent consultant in biotechnology.

Throughout most of the COVID crisis, Canadians from coast to coast were faced with COVID mandates, including jab dictates, put in place by both the provincial and federal governments.

After much pushback, thanks in particular to the Freedom Convoy, most provincial mandates were eliminated by the summer of 2022.

In late 2022, the Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally “suspended” a COVID jab travel mandate for flying.

COVID-19

NIH Quietly Altered Definition For Gain-Of-Function Research On Its Website, Former Fauci Aide Confirms

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JASON COHEN

 

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak confirmed on Thursday that his agency’s communications department altered NIH’s definition for gain-of-function research, with the change being “vetted” by “experts.”

The NIH until Oct. 20, 2021 defined this research as “modif[ying] a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent,” while “some scientists use the term broadly to refer to any such modification,” according to the House Oversight Committee. Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York questioned Tabak, a former aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, about the agency changing its definition of the research on its website, asking him who authorized the alteration.

WATCH:

The current website does not define gain-of-function research, but asserts this research is usually uninvolved with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens.

“The change was made by our communications department because of the confusion that people have about the generic term of gain-of-function and the specific term gain-of-function,” Tabak testified.

Malliotakis responded by suggesting the communications department would not be qualified to make a change like this and must have had other input.

“The content was vetted,” Tabak testified. “By individuals who are subject-matter experts.”

Fauci firmly denied that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) before the COVID-19 pandemic during a Senate hearing in May 2021.

“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said.

Tabak testified on Thursday that the NIH did fund this research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it “depends on [the] definition.”

The NIAID, which Fauci previously led, funded the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance to study bat-based coronaviruses in China that consisted of the transfer of $600,000 to the WIV, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.

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COVID-19

COVID Lab Leak: Over four later, EcoHealth Alliance funding is finally suspended

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From Heartland Daily News

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Federal Funding Stripped From Nonprofit at Center of COVID Lab Leak Controversy

Today, the Biden administration suspended federal funding to the scientific nonprofit whose research is at the center of credible theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was started via a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it was immediately suspending three grants provided to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) as it starts the process of debarring the organization from receiving any federal funds.

“The immediate suspension of [EcoHealth Alliance] is necessary to protect the public interest and due to a cause of so serious or compelling a nature that it affects EHA’s present responsibility,” wrote HHS Deputy Secretary for Acquisitions Henrietta Brisbon in a memorandum signed this morning.

For years now, EcoHealth has generated immense controversy for its use of federal grant money to support gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

In a memo justifying its funding suspension, HHS said that EcoHealth had failed to properly monitor the work it was supporting at Wuhan. It also failed to properly report on the results of experiments showing that the hybrid viruses it was creating there had an improved ability to infect human cells.

Congressional Republicans leading an investigation into EcoHealth’s research in Wuhan, and the role it may have played in starting the pandemic via a lab leak, cheered HHS’s decision.

“EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health [NIH] grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), chair of the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a statement. “These actions are wholly abhorrent, indefensible, and must be addressed with swift action.”

Beginning in 2014, EcoHealth received a grant from NIH’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study bat coronavirus in China. Its initial scope of work involved collecting and cataloging viruses in the wild and studying them in the lab to spot which ones might be primed to “spillover” into humans and cause a pandemic.

Soon enough, EcoHealth used some of the viruses they’d collected to create “chimeric” or hybrid viruses that might be better able to infect human lung cells in genetically engineered (humanized) mice.

This so-called “gain-of-function” research has long been controversial for its potential to create deadly pandemic pathogens. In 2014, the Obama administration paused federal funding of gain-of-function research that might turn SARS, MERS, or flu viruses into more transmissible respiratory diseases in mammals.

In 2016, NIH flagged EcoHealth’s work as likely violating the 2014 pause.

EcoHealth President Peter Daszak argued to NIH at the time that the viruses his outfit was creating had not been proven to infect human cells and were genetically different enough from past pandemic viruses that they didn’t fall under the Obama administration pause.

Wuhan Institute of Virology and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance

NIH accepted this argument under the condition that EcoHealth immediately stop its work and notify the agency if any of its hybrid viruses did show increased viral growth in humanized mice.

But when these hybrid viruses did show increased viral growth in mice, EcoHealth did not immediately stop work or notify NIH. It instead waited until it submitted an annual progress report in 2018 to disclose the results of its experiments.

A second progress report that EcoHealth submitted in 2021, two years after its due date, also showed its hybrid viruses were demonstrating increased viral growth and enhanced lethality in humanized mice.

In testimony to the House’s coronavirus subcommittee earlier this month, Daszak claimed that EcoHealth attempted to report the results of its gain-of-function experiments on time in 2019, but was frozen out of NIH’s reporting system.

The HHS memo released today says a forensic investigation found no evidence that EcoHealth was locked out of NIH’s reporting system. The department also said that EcoHealth had failed to produce requested lab notes and other materials from the Wuhan lab detailing the work being done there and the lab’s biosafety conditions.

These all amount to violations of EcoHealth’s grant agreement and NIH grant policy, thus warranting debarment from future federal funds, reads the HHS memo.

That EcoHealth would be stripped of its federal funding shouldn’t come as too great a shock to anyone who watched Daszak’s congressional testimony from earlier this month. Even Democrats on the committee openly accused Daszak of being misleading about EcoHealth’s work and manipulating facts.

Rep. Raul Ruiz (D–Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House’s coronavirus subcommittee, welcomed EcoHealth’s suspension, saying in a press release that the nonprofit failed its “obligation to meet the utmost standards of transparency and accountability to the American public.”

An HHS Office of the Inspector General report from last year had already found that EcoHealth had failed to submit progress reports on time or effectively monitor its subgrantee, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

When grilling Daszak, Democrats on the Coronavirus Subcommittee went to great lengths to not criticize NIH’s oversight of EcoHealth’s work. The HHS debarment memo likewise focuses only on EcoHealth’s failures to abide by NIH policy and its grant conditions.

Nevertheless, it seems pretty obvious that NIH was failing to abide by the 2014 pause on gain-of-function funding when it allowed EcoHealth to go ahead with creating hybrid coronaviruses under the condition that they stop if the viruses did prove more virulent.

NIH compounded that oversight failure by not stopping EcoHealth’s funding when the nonprofit did, in fact, create more virulent viruses, and not following up on a never-submitted progress report detailing more gain-of-function research until two years later.

The House Subcommittee’s investigation into NIH’s role in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab is ongoing. Tomorrow it will interview NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawerence Tabak. In June, it will interview former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

Originally published by Reason Foundation. Republished with permission.

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