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Part IV:  Clerical Errors Affect Real People!

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6 minute read

Medical clerical staff are significant workers in the health centres.

Not only do they support the doctors and nurses in their roles, but they also ensure accurate results which turn into statistical analysis for future treatment recommendations.

But consider the case of my mother, who was allegedly diagnosed with Covid 19 at a seniors’ home and consequently spent two weeks in isolation (quarantine) as per government policy.

Nearly two weeks later, a note was added to her file of which the content follows:

November 27, 2020

Dear Resident/Family Member

 

I am writing to you to confirm that we have had no other residents at …. test

positive for COVID-19. With that being said, we have taken many residents off isolation today

due to a clerical error from AHS that resulted in a false positive reporting.

The director of the facility ends the letter off with an interesting paragraph:

Please also know that the best defense against the spread of this virus are actions that are well

within each of our control: stay home as much as possible, practice physical distancing (2

metres)/ wash your hands regularly/ use good cough etiquette and avoid touching your mouth.

 

 Without playing the victim card, what is the consequence of this clerical error to the individual who made the error?

For my mother, she lost 2 weeks of her life isolated in her apartment with a hazmat suit, masks and gloves in front of her unit.  She could not receive visitors and was not able to see her family.

 

Like any senior, student, teacher or worker who may have received a false positive, they are not faceless or nameless.  Errors have real life consequences.

This marks the 5th time of isolation in the retirement home.  Of these 5 times, ALL were due to policy i.e. 2-week isolation for a negative test or returning from a trip to visit family.  While initially based on a positive indicator, this last circumstance was triggered by a hallway disinfection during which she had coughing symptoms and a test was administered.  It turns out the particular disinfectant used by the home may trigger a coughing reaction.

However, the test was conducted and the positive was overturned.  Mea Culpa.

I have to wonder what the clerical staff who erred received for their gaffe?  The note is not clear as to if the clerical error was on the part of the technician or the individual entering the results. Either is unacceptable-technical or clerical side.  Or the alternate questions, how many other people had their lives turned upside down due to the error?  We also have to wonder how many people were contact traced and as well had to isolate?

We can probably estimate that for each false positive, 5 people were requested to be tested and if the test was incorrect OR the clerical staff erred there could be as many as 50 false results that day.

Province wide, what was the impact on the daily fright report?  If again, 50 people were false, our daily numbers would fall.  Perhaps more results were incorrect?   We do not know, but we do know that peoples’ lives are not to be tampered with and such activities should not be merely accepted.

Extending the argument system-wide, it is these types of errors that continue widespread criticism of our response to the virus.  Clerical errors can cause elevated numbers and create more panic (and thereby justify more extreme measures) just as inaccurate or no reporting of other diagnosis such as the influenza and related deaths, suicides, automobile accident fatalities, drug overdoses due to depression and potential  prescription related deaths (#3 in the US).

It is well know by anyone who has undergone physiotherapy for shoulder or leg injuries that if your left arm is injured that you will over compensate on the right side.  Therefore as one limb heals, the other can also be injured leading to another cycle of physio.  The same principle should apply to our health system.

While Covid 19 is a ‘real’ virus with real world threat, it must be considered as part of a larger pie to give world citizens a balanced view of our national health threats else our go to strategy for health management is crisis instead of calm and long term nutritional and holistic approaches.

Clerical errors not withstanding, errors must be publicly acknowledged and corrected.  Incorrect positive tests (cases) must be modified and appropriate actions taken to ensure honesty in health reporting.  The citizens of our cities, provinces and countries deserve truth from our health providers and ministries.  Responsibility and accountability MUST be part of a responsible and responsive health system.

To take a quote out of context, “One small misstep for man, one large misstep for mankind.”

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Lasiuta is a Red Deer writer, entrepreneur and communicator. He has interests in history and the future for our country.

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Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

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From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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