COVID-19
Regulatory body continues prosecution of nurse over free expression
From the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
REGINA, SK: The Justice Centre announces that the disciplinary hearings against Saskatchewan nurse Leah McInnes continue today in what could become a landmark decision about freedom of expression for nurses and other professionals, and the power of regulatory bodies to control and censor the speech of professionals who are required to belong to a professional association in order to earn a living.
Exercising her Charter freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, Saskatchewan Nurse Leah McInnes attended a national rally against mandatory Covid vaccination policies in early September 2021. Ms. McInnes also expressed her opposition to the government’s mandatory vaccination policies on social media between August and October 2021, even while stating that vaccines should be promoted by her profession, that vaccines can decrease severe disease, reduce the burden on the healthcare system and save lives, and that vaccines play a vital role in the fight against the Covid pandemic and should be promoted.
On September 26, 2021, a nurse filed a complaint against Ms. McInnes to the College of Registered Nurses of Saskatchewan (CRNS). The Discipline Committee of the CRNS investigated the social media activities of Ms. McInnes and then charged her with professional misconduct under the Registered Nurses Act for her posts and for her participation in the rally. The CRNS accused Ms. McInnes of spreading misinformation, disinformation and/or misleading information surrounding vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. Further, the Disciplinary Committee of the CRNS alleged that Ms. McInnes had been operating from a position of power as a nurse when participating in the rally and when posting about vaccines, that she had misused this power, and that she had acted outside the proper scope of this power.
Lawyers acting for Ms. McInnes point to the Code of Ethics for Registered Nurses of the CRNS, which says, “Nurses support a climate of trust that sponsors openness, encourages the act of questioning the status quo and supports those who speak out in good faith to address concerns.” Lawyers argue that Ms. McInnes had questioned the merits of mandatory vaccine policies in good faith. Further, counsel for Ms. McInnes argue that her expression, however disagreeable it may have been to the CRNS, is protected by section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and by relevant case law.
In particular, counsel for Ms. McInnes point to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal ruling in Strom v. Saskatchewan Registered Nurses’ Association, which states that “…criticism, even by those delivering those services, does not necessarily undermine confidence in healthcare workers or the healthcare system. Indeed, it can enhance confidence by demonstrating that those with the greatest knowledge of this massive and opaque system, and who have the ability to affect change, are both prepared and permitted to speak and pursue positive change. In any event, the fact that public confidence in aspects of the healthcare system may suffer as a result of fair criticism can itself result in positive change. Such is the messy business of democracy.”
Lawyers for Ms. McInnes argue that, rather than bringing the nursing profession under disrepute, the good-faith objections to mandatory vaccination policies promote public confidence in the transparency of the healthcare system and in the dedication of healthcare professionals to pursue positive change.
Andre Memauri, one of the lawyers representing Ms. McInnes, stated, “The Discipline Committee today will hear how Ms. McInnes advocated against vaccine mandates and vaccine passports in support of patient autonomy, dignity and privacy in compliance with her ethical obligations. The Investigation Committee alleges Ms. McInnes disseminated misinformation, disinformation and misleading information, all while the record established that Ms. McInnes was not only remarkably accurate but also that the social media activity of CRNS itself disseminated false information.”
“It is very unfortunate that a registered nurse in the Province of Saskatchewan again faces regulatory reprisal for fair criticism of the healthcare system, after the Court of Appeal’s decision in Strom,” continued Mr. Memauri.
John Carpay, President of the Justice Centre, stated, “This case is about the freedom of nurses and other professionals to participate, as citizens in a democracy, in public discussions and debate. This case raises important questions about whether government agencies like the College of Registered Nurses of Saskatchewan should have the power to determine what is true or false, and to impose that determination on professionals who are required to join the regulatory body in order to practice their profession and earn a living.”
COVID-19
BREAKING: Days before Trump Inauguration HHS fires doctor in charge of gain of function research project
Dr. Daszak will likely be protected by the DoD & CIA from additional penalties.
By John Leake
HHS Formally Debars EcoHealth Alliance, President Peter Daszak Fired.
On January 17, 2025—just three days before President Trump is to be sworn in—Congress issued a press release with the following statement:
Today, after an eight-month investigation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut off all funding and formally debarred EcoHealth Alliance Inc. (EcoHealth) and its former President, Dr. Peter Daszak, for five years based on evidence uncovered by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
As far as I can tell, the New York Times did not report this story, though the New York Post did.
More interesting than the superficial news reporting is the HHS ACTION REFERRAL MEMORANDUM recommending that Dr. Peter Daszak be barred from participating in United States Federal Government procurement and nonprocurement programs.
The Memorandum also states:
Dr. Peter Daszak was the President and Chief Executive Officer of EHA from 2009 until his termination, effective January 6, 2025. Dr. Daszak was the Project Director (PD)/Principal Investigator (PI) for Grant Number 1R01AI110964-01.
I am not sure what to make of this document, which is written in such an arcane and convoluted style that it challenges the attention span of even the most focused reader.
I have been researching this story for four years, and I found the following paragraphs the most intriguing:
9. In a letter dated May 28, 2016, the NIAID contacted EHA concerning possible GoF research based on information submitted in its most recent Year 2 RPPR. The NIAID notified EHA that GoF research conducted under Grant Number 5R01AI110964-03 would be subject to the October 17, 2014, United States Federal Government funding pause, and that per the funding pause announcement, new United States Federal Government funding would not be released for GoF research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. In the letter, the NIAID requested that EHA provide a determination within 15 days of the date of the letter as to whether EHA’s research under Grant Number 5R01AI110964-03 did or did not include GoF work subject to the funding pause.
10. In a letter dated June 8, 2016, EHA provided a response to the NIAID’s May 28, 2016 letter. EHA explained that the goal of its proposed work was to construct MERS and MERS-like chimeric CoVs in order to understand the potential origins of MERSCoV in bats by studying bat MERS-like CoVs in detail. EHA stated that it believed it was highly unlikely that the proposed work would have any pathogenic potential, but that should any of these recombinants show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than certain specified benchmarks involving log growth increases, or grow more efficiently in human airway epithelial cells, EHA would immediately: (1) stop all experiments with the mutant, (2) inform the NIAID Program Officer of these results, and (3) participate in decision-making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.
11. Based on the information provided by EHA, the NIAID concluded that the proposed work was not subject to the GoF research pause. In a letter dated July 7, 2016, however, the NIAID informed EHA that should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under the grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, EHA must stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and WIV Institutional Biosafety Committee, with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes.
Note that various statements in the above paragraphs are inconsistent with what Baric et al. state in their 2015 paper A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus shows potential for human emergence—a research paper funded by the NIAID EcoHealth Grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
As the authors state in the section on Biosafety and biosecurity:
Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/
dualuse/Documents/gain-of- function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.
As I noted in my series of essays titled The Great SARS-CoV-2 Charade, one of the silliest lies told by Dr. Anthony Fauci has been his insistence that NIAID did not approve Gain-of-Function work by EcoHealth.
Fauci has repeatedly asserted this in a loud and vexed tone, as though he is outraged by the mere proposition. And yet, Ralph Baric and his colleagues—including Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—plainly state in their 2015 paper that their Gain-of-Function experiments, performed in Baric’s UNC lab and Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab in Wuhan, were grandfathered in, given that they were funded before the 2014 Pause.
Another statement (in paragraph 11 of the recent HHS Action Referral Memo) that deserves special scrutiny is the following:
In a letter dated July 7, 2016, however, the NIAID informed EHA that should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under the grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, EHA must stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and WIV Institutional Biosafety Committee, with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes.
Again, it’s tough to interpret this statement, given that Baric et al. had, by the own admission, already generated chimeras that “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Let’s review what Baric et al. state in their Abstract about the functionality of the chimeric virus (named SHCOI4-MA15) they claimed to have generated. Using humanized mice (genetically modified to have primary human airway cells) as their experimental animals, the authors state:
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.
To this day, no legal authority that I am aware of has investigated the question: What became of the the chimeras SHC014-MA15 and WIV1-MA15? The latter chimera was documented by Baric et al. in their March 2016 paper titled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence—a chimera “that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone.”
What did the Wuhan Institute of Virology do with these chimeras? Did its researchers continue to modify and experiment with these chimeras?
Another exceedingly silly claim made by U.S. government officials—including members of Congress—is that the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to remain a mystery, given that the Chinese government and military will almost certainly never agree to perform a full and transparent investigation of their Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What did the U.S. government expect when it agreed to share cutting edge American biotechnology with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long been known to be run by the Chinese military?
One grows weary of our U.S. government officials evading responsibility by pretending to be imbeciles or by revealing themselves to be true imbeciles.
If you found this post informative, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our Substack. Penetrating the smoke and mirror show performed by the abominable U.S. government requires a great deal of time and effort.
COVID-19
Canadian judge rejects complaint against maskless workplaces as frivolous
From LifeSiteNews
Federal Court Justice Benoit Duchesne ruled that Elections Canada manager Nicolas Juzda’s complaint of feeling ‘unsafe’ following the end of mask mandates in federal workplaces was unreasonable
A federal judge ruled that complaints that maskless workplaces pose a danger to employees’ health are frivolous, ending the final chapter of COVID regulations.
According to information published on January 15 by Blacklock’s Reporter, Federal Court Justice Benoit Duchesne ruled that Elections Canada manager Nicolas Juzda’s complaint of feeling unsafe following the end of mask mandates in federal workplaces was unreasonable.
“The applicant’s concern about an unsafe workplace was based on his assessment that a significant number of people would return to the workplace under the return-to-work model, that any of these people may have contracted Covid-19 and that the non-mandatory recommendations and precautions relating to Covid-19 fell short of what he believes would be a safe work environment,” wrote the court.
Masks were mandated in federal workplaces from April 20, 2020, to February 14, 2023, under the direction of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At the same time, millions of Canadians were forced to mask in public settings such as grocery stores or hospitals.
After the mandate had lifted, Juzda, a “fully vaccinated” individual without any particular health issues, complained that he felt unsafe in the Gatineau headquarters.
“I must excuse my right to refuse work that constitutes a danger,” he wrote, referencing the Canada Labor Code that allows federally regulated staff to refuse work “that constitutes a danger to the employee.”
Juzda claimed that masking “reduces the risk of contracting Covid-19 but is of limited effectiveness if not combined with other measures, particularly during prolonged exposure to unmasked infected individuals such as being nearby in an indoor office for an entire day.”
“Covid-19 is a disease that in addition to often being extremely unpleasant during the acute period poses significant risks including death,” he continued.
“Handwashing and workplace cleaning are of minimal use in limiting the spread of Covid-19,” Juzda claimed.
His complaint was quickly dismissed as “frivolous” by executives, a move which Duchesne agreed with, calling Juzda’s concerns unwarranted.
Indeed, LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on overwhelming evidence showing that masks are ineffective in preventing transmission of COVID and that they come with harmful effects.
Back in 2021, 47 studies confirmed the ineffectiveness of masks for COVID, while 32 more confirmed their negative health effects.
According to another 2021 report, more than 170 studies have found that masks have been ineffective at stopping COVID and instead have been harmful, especially to children.
In fact, in 2020, before masks were widely mandated, Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam admitted that masks were not effective in preventing COVID.
“There is no need to use a mask for well people,” she said in the first few weeks of the pandemic. “It hasn’t been proven really to protect you from getting the virus.”
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