Former Canadian lawmaker has no regrets about refusing COVID shot despite losing his job

MPP Rick Nicholls was ousted from the Progressive Conservative Party by Doug Ford, but he said he has talked to party people who have told him, ‘Rick, I was against what you did, but you did the right thing.’

Former Ontario MPP Rick Nicholls, who was once an elite member of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative (PC) Party before Premier Doug Ford kicked him out for refusing to take the COVID shot, says he has no “regrets” for refusing to bow to pressure to get COVID jabbed, noting he feels justified for his actions for going against the party leader’s demands.

Nicholls, who once served as the deputy speaker of the Ontario legislative assembly, noted, as per an Epoch Times report, that as increased information comes out about the COVID shots, he has talked to party people who have told him, “Rick, I was against what you did, but you did the right thing.”

Nicholls had been an MPP since 2011 but was booted from Ford’s ruling PCs in August 2021. In the same month and year, Ford mandated that all of his MPPs have the COVID jabs. At the time, Nicholls said he voiced his “concerns about our policy privately to the premier and to the Ontario PC caucus.”

He observed that from the get-go he did not call the COVID injection a “vaccine” but instead a “jab, or the shot,” noting how a vaccine should not need multiple boosters.

“That’s not a vaccine,” he said.

Nicholls also blamed the legacy media for promoting the shots at the behest of federal and provincial governments despite not having any long-term data on the effectiveness or safety of the jabs.

“I blame the legacy media for not printing the truth,” he said.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Nicholls in 2021 said people should not be “penalized for their choice” to refuse the COVID jabs, the safety of which he questioned, while having to announce he was forced to step down as deputy speaker of the Ontario Legislature. He then sat as an independent MPP for a time before joining the Ontario Party to serve as their only sitting member until the 2022 election.

Draconian COVID mandates, including those surrounding the experimental mRNA vaccines, were imposed by the provincial Ford government as well as the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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.

Last week, LifeSiteNews reported that the shots were heavily promoted on social media by the federal government. Indeed, a recent Inquiry of Ministry request revealed that Canada’s Public Health Agency (PHAC) along with Health Canada have combined to spend approximately $9.9 million on social media advertising to promote the experimental COVID injections since 2020.

Ford asked former MPP to do him a ‘favor’ by getting the shot

Nicholls observed as per The Epoch Times that while he had early in the COVID crisis, albeit with caution, gone along with Ford’s government position regarding COVID mandates and lockdowns, it was not until August 2021 that Ford demanded he either get the jab or he would get the boot.

Ford called Nicholls and said, “I need you to do me a favor,” adding “I need you to get vaccinated.’”

The request from Ford came after he told media that he would make it so that all his caucus members had the shot. Nicholls told Ford that media pressure to get the shots was not a good reason for him to bow to pressure and get injected.

After being told to think about getting the shots by Ford, Nicholls noted that he got many calls from party insiders and other MPPs urging him to get the jabs.

In one direct call to Nicholls from the PC’s campaign manager, he was told, “Rick, you’ve got 72 hours. You either get vaccinated or I’m removing you from caucus.”

Despite the pressure, Nicholls did not waver, and on August 19, 2021, he told the media he would not be getting the shot. He noted how he had taken Ford’s “word” that “vaccination is a choice and that all Ontarians have a constitutional right to make such a choice” to the media at the time.

“I stand strong in my personal choice not to be vaccinated, which ultimately led to (my) decision to step down. I oppose mandatory vaccines. I believe in personal choice when it comes to having a foreign substance injected and that an individual should not be punished for CHOICE,” he told reporters.

Nicholls said he received notification that he was being removed as deputy speaker not from Ford but through media reports.

“I want to thank the media for letting me know that the government has actually already selected a replacement for me. Yes, that’s correct. The government didn’t let me know,” Nicholls said.

Nicholls noted, according to The Epoch Times, that had he gotten the COVID shot there was an exceptionally good chance he would have been re-elected in 2022.

“I knew that had I stayed and got the shot — and survived the shot I might add — I knew that I had an excellent chance of being re-elected again (to a) fourth term,” he said.

While sitting as an independent, he was able to ask challenging questions to the minister of health and Ford himself regarding the COVID shots “and the vaccine and information that I’m getting that they were denying.”

“And if I had a dollar for every time that former Minister of Health Christine Elliot said these vaccines are safe and effective, I’d be a rich guy,” he said.

COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

The jabs also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result of this, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.

As reported by LifeSiteNews recently, the Trudeau government is still under contract to purchase multiple shipments of COVID shots while at the same time throwing away $1.5 billion worth of expired shots.

The continued purchase of COVID jabs comes despite the fact the government’s own data shows that most Canadians are flat-out refusing a COVID booster injection. It also comes as the government has had to increase spending on Canada’s Vaccine Injury Program (VISP), as reported by LifeSiteNews last week.

Canadians’ decision to refuse the shots also comes as a Statistic Canada report revealed that deaths from COVID-19 and “unspecified causes” rose after the release of the so-called “safe and effective” jabs.

Related Topics:#AnthonyMurdoch #CovidVaccine #DougFord #LifeSiteNews #OntarioMPPOusted

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

Published on May 16, 2024

Todayville

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.

COVID-19

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

Published on May 16, 2024

Todayville

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.