Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

COVID-19

Vaccines, Herd Immunity, Vaccine Passports and Fear 

Published

9 minute read

Since covid vaccines have become one of the early issues of Canada’s election campaign, this article and the article linked within are worthy of our attention.

Submitted by David Redman.  

After a twenty-seven year career as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, David Redman engaged with government and the private sector to develop emergency management in Alberta, and throughout North America.  His experience in emergency management is extensive with three military tours as a Commanding Officer, responsible for international logistical operations such as the withdrawal of all Canadian personnel from Canadian Forces Europe in Lahr, Germany as well as the deployment of Canadian NATO Forces to Bosnia.  

David joined the Government of Alberta in 2000, as a Director of Emergency Management Alberta and in 2001 he was appointed Director of Crisis Management Programs.  He was Executive Director of Emergency Management Alberta from 2004 to his retirement at the end of 2005.  Since his retirement David has remained active as a respected consultant in emergency management.  

Vaccines and the idea of Herd Immunity

Herd immunity does mean different things to different folk.

Scenario “a”. I remember when I was young, before solid vaccines for mumps and measles, parents would hold parties for all the kids in the neighbourhood, if one kid caught them. It was known that measles and mumps could have serious consequences if you were past puberty and caught them, so the idea was to catch them young, ONE AND DONE. If you caught them when young, you never suffered from them again.

Herd immunities mean that if most caught these diseases young, then those who did not have them young, for whatever reason, were better protected. We now have a vaccine, that needs a booster every 10 years, that does what our parents did with parties. But basically, ONE and DONE.

Scenario “b”. Things like the cold, and seasonal flus, just happened, you caught them and got better, sometimes every year. Why? These bugs / viruses transformed a bit each year and so having caught them did nothing, other than perhaps decrease the severity. Herd immunity was never even discussed, because it did not exist for things that evolve like this.

Vaccines in Emergency Management of a Pandemic

From the start of this pandemic, the MOH and Politicians have been talking about the silver bullet of a vaccine. They have always talked about it like it was going to be scenario “a” above. It was implied that “lockdowns” were needed to get us to the silver bullet, and then everything could go back to normal. You know that from the very start I did not support this approach. 

I did not believe that a vaccine was a given, as they take years to be safely developed, and SARS CoV-2 was a coronavirus, so a vaccine simply might not be possible (read my April 2020 letter to Kenney)

Lockdowns would not and did not protect those most vulnerable.

Lockdowns do far more collateral damage than any good they may ever do. We knew that. I do not believe they do any measurable good in a country like Canada.

Even if a vaccine did come along to meet scenario “a”, then damage done by “fear” to enforce lockdowns would last a generation. (see my August Letter to the 13 Premiers)

COVID-19 Vaccines – The UK Data

If you have not read the article by Dr Ramesh Thakur, please read it now. He has summarized all the important FACTS coming out of countries around the world on the vaccines and Covid as of August 2021.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/08/vaccination-certificates-an-idea-whose-time-must-never-come/

The facts coming out now from the massive data available in the UK show that at best, scenario “b” was always the case. Even with the ‘so-called-vaccines’, the situation is that you still catch, transfer, and may even need to be hospitalized, even when fully vaccinated. That term, “fully vaccinated” will now evolve in a new fear campaign to mean three, four, endless doses, with a mythical advantage from each, if we lockdown long enough.

I define the term ‘so-called-vaccine’ because I, like many perhaps, thought of a vaccine to mean protection like the vaccines we get for measles, mumps, rubella, cholera, etc. Turns out, the manufacturers never claimed these ‘so-called-vaccines’ were like that. But our MOH and Politicians acted like they would be. 

The manufacturers said, and are saying again, we told you these ‘so-called-vaccines’ would decrease the effects of the disease once caught, particularly for the most vulnerable, but we told you that they would not stop spread. So now, after 18 months of lockdowns, we must realize that there is no silver bullet and there never was going to be one, and our MOH and Politicians knew, or should have known (Due Diligence), this fact.

So herd immunity in scenario “a” is NOT possible. Scenario “b” is how we will live with the coronavirus, SARS CoV-2.

The ‘so-called-vaccines’ are very good for our seniors, but for no one else. In fact the data now emerging shows that they may even be slightly harmful to those under 50, as they do not stop you catching Covid, but there seems to be a slight increase in negative outcomes if you do catch Covid.

Below is Table 5, out of the United Kingdom, Technical Briefing 20, dated August 6, 2021, by the Public Health Agency of Great Britain. This is part of the evidence quoted by Dr. Ramesh Thakur in his Article, Vaccination certificates – An idea whose time must never come (linked above).

From Dr. Thakur’s article “In the UK,  the Delta variant accounts for 99% of all Covid hospitalizations. Of these, 34.9% were fully vaccinated and 55.1% had received at least one dose. Public Health England’s Technical Briefing 20 in early August showed that while vaccination does reduce mortality in the over-50s by more than threefold, for those under 50, the fatality rate among the vaccinated is 57% greater than in the unvaccinated. On 10 August, a panel of experts, including most importantly the head of the Oxford vaccine team, called for an end to mass testing in Britain because the Delta variant has destroyed any chance of herd immunity through vaccination. The scientists believe it’s time to accept there’s no way of stopping the virus spreading through the entire population and monitoring people with mild symptoms is no longer helpful.”

Also from Dr. Thakur’s article:

The waning efficacy of vaccines is also seen in Israel, including some who have been thrice-jabbed. In a locality in Jerusalem where only 42.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated, 85-90% of all hospitalised patients were fully vaccinated.”

Because vaccinations do not prevent infection or transmission, they cannot stop the spread of the virus. Because they do reduce the severity of the illness and mortality rates, they remain important. Putting the two together, vaccines should be made available to all, strongly recommended for all vulnerable groups but not made mandatory for anyone.” 

The Way Ahead 

I have avoided the discussion of herd immunity, as it became a lightning rod very early in this pandemic. It is not part of the discussion about emergency management in a pandemic anyhow.

Protect the most vulnerable, and for the rest

STAY CALM and CARRY ON. 

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

Follow Author

espionage

Canada’s Missing Intelligence Command: Convoy Review Takes on New Relevance After FBI Warnings

Published on

Sam Cooper's avatar Sam Cooper

An element overlooked in previous analyses of Natterjack may be its most damning: the complete absence of an organizing vision across Canada’s security and intelligence arms.

As Ottawa faces mounting pressure from Washington to respond to fentanyl trafficking, human smuggling, and terror threats stemming from a convergence of Chinese Communist operatives and transnational mafias from Mexico and Iran, a fresh assessment of Canada’s policing strategy and governance reveals the stunning absence of a “Criminal Intelligence Committee to deal with a number of intelligence policy and related issues”—while simultaneously raising troubling doubts about the RCMP’s capacity to prioritize, analyze, and target serious threats free from political influence.

The Bureau’s comparative analysis is based on a sweeping 2024 external review of the RCMP’s response to the pandemic-era “freedom convoy,” which suggests Canada’s federal police force—working for “clients” who do not understand or value how intelligence should shape decision-making—bent under severe political pressure, compromising its intelligence collection and reporting integrity, and helping execute an unprecedented crackdown on citizens’ financial freedoms during the winter 2022 protests in Ottawa.

The 92-page report, produced under a post-operation initiative called Project Natterjack, paints a portrait of intelligence breakdowns, governance failure, and inappropriate political influence—particularly from senior officials in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. The review, first obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, included survey responses from 1,641 RCMP officers and personnel deployed during the protests, which paralyzed downtown Ottawa and disrupted key international border crossings.

Yet an element overlooked in previous analyses of Natterjack may be its most damning: the complete absence of an organizing vision across Canada’s security and intelligence arms.

This structural vacuum comes at a time when the national security threats facing Canada are increasingly hybridized—blending terrorism, organized crime, election interference, cyber warfare, and financial infiltration. These are precisely the kinds of threats Washington is now pressing Ottawa to address, including investigations into fentanyl superlabs and hostile networks tied to the Chinese Communist Party, Mexican cartels, and Iranian and Russian threat actors.

Amid what the U.S. government sees as a growing vulnerability that Ottawa has failed to address in coordination with Washington under Trudeau’s Liberals, the Natterjack report highlights a deeply relevant structural failure in Canadian policing.

“Many interviewees expressed a level of concern that beyond the informal networks that loosely bind criminal, tactical, and strategic analysts from a variety of law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies, there is not a recognized national body that comes together to advocate, address and advance issues in criminal analysis,” the report states. “The absence of a Criminal Intelligence Committee to deal with a number of intelligence policy and related issues appears glaringly missing and should be explored.”

Regarding the “freedom convoy,” the review’s most serious suggestion is that RCMP intelligence officers felt pressured to present the protests through the lens of “ideologically motivated violent extremism”—a national security framework typically reserved for terrorism investigations. Intelligence teams were subjected to hourly briefing demands from federal officials and were forced to issue rapid assessments under tight timelines, with resulting reports often presenting skewed or misattributed findings.

“Interviewees also indicated that there were issues with information and intelligence that was disseminated to external Government of Canada agencies,” the report states. “Specifically, some Government of Canada partners would misrepresent the information or misattribute third-party information as RCMP information… Interviewees and survey respondents felt immense pressure from the Government of Canada to be briefed on a regular basis… in particular when briefings were requested on an hourly basis.”

As the review notes bluntly: “When there is that much pressure to produce a report within an hour or a few hours’ time, it is not productive.”

Taken together, the findings paint a sobering portrait of a federal police force struggling to preserve its independence and credibility under political strain. While officers were deployed to confront a disruptive but largely peaceful protest, critics inside and outside government have pointed to the RCMP’s relative inaction toward far more dangerous networks—namely, fentanyl trafficking cartels, Chinese underground banking structures linked to the same political influence operations involved in federal election interference, intelligence-connected money laundering syndicates, and hostile state-sponsored actors operating inside Canada.

One telling passage indicating a scramble within RCMP command to produce findings on ideological extremism—whether fully valid or not—reads: “Ideologically Motivated Criminal Intelligence Team and the Joint Intelligence Group were both operating to provide the strategic threat picture, and reaching in directly to the Divisions for intelligence updates. As such, some interviewees noted that they were inundated by requests for intelligence updates from different intelligence teams at National Headquarters.”

In parallel, the federal cabinet invoked the Emergencies Act—suspending civil liberties and activating sweeping enforcement powers that allowed financial institutions to freeze protestors’ bank accounts. Between February 15 and 23, 2022, the RCMP’s Federal Policing Criminal Operations Financial Crimes Unit made 57 disclosures to banks and other institutions, targeting 62 individuals and 17 businesses for asset freezes.

The report pointedly states: “The act of participating in a demonstration is not in itself a form of ideologically motivated violent extremism.” Yet that nuance appeared largely lost amid the political urgency to classify the protests as a national threat.

Interviewees also noted limitations in their ability to disseminate protected information and intelligence to certain external agencies and private financial institutions. Specifically, they indicated that encryption was not consistently available across these external channels.

Perhaps most revealingly, the review found that senior officials—referred to as intelligence “clients”—did not appear to value intelligence or allow it to meaningfully guide decision-making during the crisis. “Interviewees and survey respondents expressed the need to educate intelligence clients on the value of intelligence and how it can be used for decision making,” the report notes. “Interviewees noted that the role of intelligence was not valued during the convoy-related events.” The admission sits uneasily beside the broader findings: that RCMP intelligence was not only shaped to support a political narrative that exaggerated the role of ideological extremism in the protests, but ultimately sidelined when it failed to serve that narrative.

The report also paints a picture that fits with a serious assertion previously conveyed to The Bureau by an RCMP source: that in the days following the convoy’s dispersal, investigators felt they were pressured to reconstruct investigative timelines to match political expectations—to sustain a national security narrative even when the underlying evidence did not necessarily meet threshold.

The Emergencies Act was revoked after just nine days. In January 2024, a federal judge ruled that the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Act was both unnecessary and unlawful, concluding that the legal threshold for a national emergency had not been met.

According to the review, RCMP officials shared protected personal information with financial institutions using processes that lacked consistent legal oversight. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner raised formal concerns, citing the RCMP’s reliance on open-source and social media research to flag individuals—many of whom had no demonstrated connection to criminal activity.

The Natterjack review further confirms that RCMP intelligence operations during the protests were defined by duplication, confusion, and political interference. At least three separate intelligence units—the Ideologically Motivated Criminal Intelligence Team, the Combined Intelligence Group, and the Joint Intelligence Group—were simultaneously tasked with protest reporting, resulting in overlapping and sometimes circular intelligence products. RCMP sources said the structure was unsustainable and exacerbated by National Headquarters’ failure to provide unified command or governance.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, in a televised interview that sent shockwaves through Washington, Ottawa, and Victoria, FBI Director Kash Patel warned that a new axis of global threat actors—consisting of Chinese Communist Party operatives, Iranian proxies, and Mexican cartel networks—is exploiting Canada’s lax border enforcement, immigration systems, and critical infrastructure in Vancouver to move fentanyl and terror suspects into the United States.

“Where’s all the fentanyl coming from still? Where are all the narco traffickers going to keep bringing this stuff into the country? The northern border,” Patel said. “Our adversaries have partnered up with the CCP and others—Russia, Iran—on a variety of different criminal enterprises. And they’re going and they’re sailing around to Vancouver and coming in by air.”

Patel’s public assessment aligns disturbingly well with the key findings of a Bureau investigation first published in August 2024. That report, based on testimony and documentary evidence from former Canada Border Services Agency officer Luc Sabourin, warned that systemic corruption and compromised enforcement at Canada’s ports of entry had already created the kind of vulnerabilities now cited by the FBI.

The Bureau is a reader-supported publication.

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Invite your friends and earn rewards

If you enjoy The Bureau, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.

Invite Friends

Continue Reading

COVID-19

Will Chris Barber be jailed for peacefully protesting? Court to decide soon

Published on

“Big Red” (Courtesy of Chris Barber)

Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announces that a decision on Chris Barber’s Stay of Proceedings Application—which, if granted, would halt the Crown’s proposal that Mr. Barber be imprisoned for two years or more—could arrive as early as Friday, May 23, 2025.

The hearing is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. in Room 5 at the Ottawa Courthouse from Wednesday to Friday, May 21 to 23, 2025.

Mr. Barber’s legal team will argue that he followed the advice of officials and the police in good faith during the protest and that the charges should be stayed despite his conviction for mischief and for counselling others to breach a court order on April 3, 2025.

In court documents submitted to the judge, the Crown claims that there is no merit to Mr. Barber’s Application and that it should be thrown out. The Crown argues that he knowingly broke the law during the peaceful Freedom Convoy protest. The Crown is also demanding that Mr. Barber’s primary source of income, his 2004 Kenworth long haul truck, called “Big Red,” be seized and forfeited to His Majesty the King.

If Justice Heather Perkins-McVey of the Ontario Court of Justice grants the Application, sentencing would not proceed, and the charges would be stayed. Mr. Barber is expected to testify on Wednesday, May 21, 2025, to explain the official advice he followed.

Diane Magas, Mr. Barber’s lawyer, explained that an “officially induced error defence” is rarely used but that it is an appropriate defence in the particular circumstances of this case.

Mr. Barber is a trucker from Saskatchewan and a central figure in the 2022 Freedom Convoy. The grassroots Freedom Convoy protest began in January 2022 as a response to federal and provincial Covid vaccine mandates, particularly those affecting cross-border truckers. As mandates increasingly tied Canadians’ ability to work, travel, and participate in public life to their vaccination status, frustration grew among those who felt sidelined for exercising their right to bodily autonomy. What started as a convoy of trucks rolling toward Ottawa quickly grew into a broader national demonstration, drawing thousands of supporters from across the country.

“To imprison a man who sought and followed legal advice would bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” stated John Carpay, President of the Justice Centre. “Mr. Barber consistently followed the legal advice that he received from police officers, lawyers, and a Superior Court judge.”

A sentencing hearing will proceed at a later date, only if the Stay of Proceedings Application should fail.

Continue Reading

Trending

X