SARS-CoV-2 ‘Never Existed in the Natural World’ — and FBI Knew of Possible Lab Leak in March 2020

SARS-CoV-2 ‘Never Existed in the Natural World’ — and FBI Knew of Possible Lab Leak in March 2020

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., January 26, 2024

Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know showing U.S. scientists were planning to work with scientists from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to develop novel coronaviruses may “explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats,” according to Nicholas Wade, former science editor for The New York Times.

A trove of documents released last week by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) may “explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats,” according to one prominent science reporter.

Writing for City Journal, Nicholas Wade, former science editor for The New York Times, said the newly revealed documents — which showed U.S. scientists were planning to work with scientists from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to develop novel coronaviruses, provide evidence that COVID-19 “has never existed in the natural world.”

The USRTK documents revealed that scientists involved with a joint U.S.-China research proposal — “Project DEFUSE” — a year before the outbreak of COVID-19, planned to engineer coronaviruses that would be rare in nature, and that had many similarities with the genome of SARS-CoV-2.

Meanwhile, an investigation by Public published Tuesday revealed the FBI received credible intelligence in March 2020 that COVID-19 had leaked from the WIV — long before the FBI or U.S. government acknowledged a possible lab leak.

And blogger Jim Haslam, who has written extensively on COVID-19’s origin, reported this week that University of North Carolina researcher Ralph Baric, Ph.D., who has worked with Peter Daszak, Ph.D., president of the EcoHealth Alliance, patented genomes “less than 2% different” than SARS-CoV-2, in 2018.

Daszak and Baric were both closely involved with Project DEFUSE.

Commenting on the new developments, Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a frequent critic of gain-of-function research, told The Defender:

“Two or three dozen corrupt scientists, most in one narrow subfield of science, have damaged, possibly irreparably, public trust in the many tens of thousands of scientists across all fields of science.

“Science, as a whole, needs to excise and eliminate the tumor, expelling the two-to-three dozen who caused the pandemic and defrauded the public.”

COVID ‘had all the unique properties’ of a virus produced in a lab

According to Wade, the documents “provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA designed to be a consensus sequence — the genetically most infectious form — of viruses related to SARS1, the bat virus that caused the minor epidemic of 2002,” Wade noted.

“Prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure,” he added.

According to the New York Post, EcoHealth submitted the DEFUSE proposal to the Pentagon-affiliated Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), proposing experiments to increase the transmissibility of bat coronaviruses to humans. The application included a request for a $14 million grant to conduct this research.

“The grant proposed to ‘introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites’ into SARS-related viruses, a procedure that could have led to the creation of SARS2, with its distinctive furin cleavage site, depending on the starting virus used for the manipulation,” Wade wrote.

However, the DEFUSE proposal concealed plans to conduct this research at the WIV, the USRTK documents revealed, and also left out the name of a Chinese researcher — Shi Zhengli, sometimes referred to as the “Bat Lady” — who was involved with this research.

“The new drafts show the authors planned to synthesize eight to 16 strains of SARS-type bat viruses, selected for their likely ability to infect human cells,” Wade said, “to make a vaccine to immunize bats in regions that military troops might have to enter.”

Haslam noted that while “FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] vaccine approval for humans takes 15-20 years,” for research conducted on animals, the approval period is “just 2-5 years.” He described this as a “bureaucratic loophole” that “created a huge incentive for live bat research.”

There were close similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and the DEFUSE proposal and contradict virologists who claim COVID-19 developed naturally, Wade said.

“The genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, matches the viruses described in the research proposal,” USRTK wrote, while according to Wade, “When SARS2 first appeared in the world, it had all the unique properties that would be expected of a virus made according to the DEFUSE recipe.”

“Instead of slowly evolving the ability to attack human cells, as natural viruses must do when they jump from animals to humans, SARS2 was immediately infectious to people, possibly because it had already been adapted in humanized laboratory mice to the human cell receptor,” Wade added.

Baric patented genome less than 2% different from SARS-CoV-2 in 2018

The USRTK revelations also appear to confirm recent observations made by Haslam.

In a Substack post this week, Haslam wrote that, in 2018, Baric had developed — and patented —“SARS-like chimeras” known as 293 and HK3, which are 20% different from epidemic strains, and only 2% different from SARS-CoV-2.

“This was a Baric patent for the individual genome now called SARS-CoV-2,” he wrote.

Haslam noted that Daszak confirmed, via a post on X Jan. 20, that this occurred.

“In 2015, Baric was looking for coronaviruses that were less than 25% different than epidemic strains. In November 2019, Daszak said Baric was still ‘identifying’ these types of strains … SARS2 was 22% different than epidemic strains,” he wrote.

According to USRTK, “The genome of SARS-CoV-2 falls within the range of a 25 percent genetic difference from SARS.”

‘Nothing to do with the wet market or the bat soup story’

Public investigative reporters Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag on Tuesday said the FBI received credible intelligence in March 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 had leaked from the WIV.

According to Public, information from “multiple sources” revealed that a “Chinese national from Wuhan, working as a confidential human source for the FBI, told their handler at the FBI’s Chinese Intelligence Squad.”

“[COVID-19] didn’t have anything to do with the wet market or the bat soup story they were going with,” the sources told the FBI.

The FBI’s sources contacted Public after reading a recent story Public published about scientists funded by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), previously headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who “sought to insert a furin cleavage site right where it exists on SARS-CoV-2.”

Public’s sources asked to remain anonymous to “protect their identities and those of their colleagues.”

USRTK also noted that drafts of the DEFUSE proposal indicated “the scientists’ particular interest in furin cleavage sites” — characteristics of the virus which helped contribute to the high transmissibility of COVID-19.

According to Public, the sources said the FBI trusted the individual who provided the intelligence “because the person’s information had been corroborated at least three times previously,” adding that the FBI considered the Wuhan revelations “good intel.”

“The fact that the FBI knew COVID came from a lab at least as far back as March 2020 raises questions about why other U.S. government officials, including Anthony Fauci and researchers he had funded, continued to insist that a lab leak was implausible for several more years,” Public wrote.

‘Of course the FBI would cover this up’

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, bioweapons expert and author of the book “Resisting Medical Tyranny: Why the COVID-19 Mandates Are Criminal,” told The Defender he would not be surprised by an FBI cover-up regarding when it received intelligence about a lab leak at the WIV.

“Of course the FBI would cover this up,” he said, noting similarities with the 2001 anthrax lab leak.

“As I established in my book, Resisting Medical Tyranny, the FBI covered up the fact that anthrax had leaked out of a U.S. biological warfare weapons program and lab. Indeed, I had told the FBI that in the last week of October 2001,” he said.

He said that despite speaking to a “high-level official” at the FBI, no investigation followed. Instead, the “FBI went out to the U.S. government’s lab in Ames, Iowa, where they keep all the anthrax strains, and authorized the destruction of all of them.”

Boyle called this “destruction of evidence … a federal crime,” and said the FBI sought “to prevent a genetic reconstruction of anthrax” that would reveal details about its development.

Boyle, a critic of gain-of-function research, said such experiments could lead to a “Disease X,” which the World Health Organization warns may lead to a new pandemic.

“This is why we really have to get on top of this and stop these people,” Boyle said. “They first go out and develop the weapon, and then they develop an alleged vaccine to deal with blowback.”

Scientists engineered viruses despite ‘clear-and-present danger’ of pandemic

The DEFUSE proposal was led by Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, who have been implicated in controversial gain-of-function research at the WIV and who worked closely with Baric.

Baric “was set to engineer twenty or more ‘chimeric’ SARS-related viral spike proteins per year of the proposal, and two to five full-length engineered SARS-related viruses,” USRTK wrote.

“The documents describe the SARS-related viruses to be studied in the grant as posing ‘a clear-and-present danger of a new SARS-like pandemic,’” USRTK noted, adding that the scientists involved with this research “planned to use new reverse genetics systems and test viruses in vivo … to engineer live viruses with novel backbones.”

The documents also showed that “the researchers planned to test engineered spike proteins in these familiar backbones as an initial test that would help them prioritize genomes for the next step: the generation of synthetic viruses in six pieces,” USRTK wrote.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) claimed the DEFUSE research involved the engineering of viruses with viral backbones already in the public domain. The NIH is the parent agency of NIAID.

“The spike proteins identified by the group this way to have ‘pre-epidemic potential’ would be employed in the next step, the generation of ‘full genome length viable viruses,’” USRTK added.

According to USRTK, these documents contradict prior statements by scientists who have promoted the zoonotic — animal to human — theory of COVID-19’s origin, including by Kristian Andersen, Ph.D. — an advocate for the natural origin theory and one of the authors of the now-infamous “Proximal Origin” paper published in Nature Medicine.

“Some scientists who favor the natural origin theory have argued that the Wuhan lab would have only employed familiar backbones in the published literature and swapped out spike proteins. Because these backbones in the published literature are too genetically dissimilar to have generated SARS-CoV-2, they have argued the DEFUSE proposal is irrelevant to the pandemic,” USRTK added.

But according to USRTK, the “language in the newly revealed documents echoes a 2022 analysis that uncovered a pattern of two restriction enzymes, BsmBI and BasI, that segmented the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome into six even pieces.”

“The scientists estimated the likelihood of observing this pattern of evenly spaced segments in nature to be highly improbable,” USRTK noted. The analysis in question, a preprint hosted on the BioRxiv database, “predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way,” according to Wade.

In a post on X — formerly Twitter — Valentin Bruttel, Ph.D., one of the authors of the preprint, acknowledged the similarity between the publication he co-authored and the revelations in the documents released by USRTK.

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV's "Good Morning CHD."

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Source

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sars-cov-2-never-existed-natural-world-fbi-lab-leak/

Disease-X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Health Policy

Disease-X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Health Policy

ByREPPARE   January 26, 2024   Pharma, Policy, Public Health   11 minute read

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Public health messaging should provide accurate information so that the public and their leadership can formulate appropriate responses, weighed against society’s competing priorities. Planning for the future requires scarce resources to be concentrated on areas of greatest need and with the expectation that they can achieve the widest benefit. However, policy can become skewed towards narrow vested interests when non-health goals, such as financial profit, come to compete with health benefits during the decision-making process. Thus, decision-making for health policy must be cognizant of, and resistant to, conflicts of interest and narratives that promote those interests. 

To gain legitimacy, public health policy must be vested in institutions answerable to the public and based on reliable evidence. In the case of the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) venture in public health policy advocacy in Davos, neither of these measures of legitimacy were met. Also in question is legitimacy in the media coverage, where the basic tenets of journalism – questioning evidence, corroborating sources, providing context, and awareness of conflict of interest – seem to have gone missing.

On September 17th 2024, the WEF held a meeting on preparing for pandemic health threats, centered on a hypothetical pathogen, ‘Disease X.’ The term Disease X refers to an unknown infectious agent that could pose a serious threat to humanity. The WHO added Disease X to its list of prioritized pathogens in 2018 to stimulate better preparations for these types of hypothetical threats, particularly scenarios where vaccines and known therapeutics are unavailable. 

The WEF is a private forum supported by, and representing, private corporate interests that control much of the world’s financial and economic activity. For this reason, it also attracts many senior politicians and public policy makers. While it could be argued that this is a reasonable forum for political leaders to court private sector input and financial commitments for already established public health policies, it is arguably an inappropriate forum for the making of public policy. Regardless, in the run up to Davos, Disease X was touted as being potentially 20 times more deadly than Covid-19. Using official WHO Covid-19 figures, this would equate to nearly 140 million deaths worldwide.

As expected, the debate around Disease-X and the WEF quickly became polarized. On one side, sceptics suggested that the WEF is merely a ‘globalist’ forum aimed to restrict state sovereignty and that Disease-X is designed to justify pandemic policies that reduce human liberties. On the other, there have been defenses of using Disease-X as a hypothetical scaffold for policy development as well as using the WEF forum as a place to help respond to this imminent ‘existential threat.’ 

Yet, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. There are of course benefits to using hypotheticals in policy planning. Equally, there are of course vested geopolitical and ‘global’ corporate interests represented in Davos. Those interests include more than avoidance of the larger economic costs of the next pandemic, since there are also enticing business opportunities that such a hypothetical and somewhat open-ended narrative could present. It generates attention, response, and potential investment by private shareholders, but also governments, who have developed a considerable reliance on vaccines as the primary mechanism for pandemic preparedness and response.

Furthermore, intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO also understand the opportunities that Disease X generates. It helps to create a sense of urgency, enables a clear return on investment narrative, and legitimates the agency’s place as the epistemic authority for health policy post-Covid. To put it bluntly, creating a sense of urgency and future crises will diminish reflection, allowing policies to more quickly manufacture agreement and mobilize resources.

It is here where interests align at the WEF. And it is here where that alignment can skew and pollute health policy in ways not in the wider interests of global public health. One way to determine how appropriately these interests align with public health, and whether they should help determine its future, is to unpack and better understand the assumptions that are driving the WEF pandemic response narrative. In this case, Disease X.

How Big is the Pandemic Threat?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/a-mysterious-disease-x-could-be-the-next-pandemic-to-kill-millions-of-people-heres-how-worried-you-should-be/

WEF laid out the reasoning behind convening this week’s pandemic panel in a 2018 article on its website, which was updated for the 2024 meeting. The article states:

The inescapable truth for those who study disease outbreaks, new viruses, and the spread of illness is a haunting one.

The next pandemic is coming.

Known, incurable diseases lurk in hidden reservoirs all over the world. Thousands of unknown viruses circulate around the globe.

Much of this statement is technically correct. Though few who study outbreaks may be as “haunted” by these fears as the WEF suggests, since natural outbreaks of major impact are uncommon and less harmful than many endemic infectious diseases (see below). In addition, it is inescapably true that thousands of viruses do exist and remain undiscovered, since nature’s diversity is vast. Yet, nearly all are harmless to humans, as we have been encountering them or their variants for hundreds of thousands of years. Occasionally, in these everyday encounters, a more significant outbreak will occur. What then matters is its frequency and severity.

The potential exception, as the WEF went on to point out, is non-natural introduction of a pathogen through laboratory manipulation of viruses. However, as a biosecurity issue, this would normally fall under approaches and policies of national and international security interest and would not be best handled by private for-profit entities or rival geopolitical national laboratories that may have had a hand in creating them. This is therefore a strange subject for a private Swiss corporate club. So, we must assume, for sake of argument, that Disease X is considered to be of natural origin within the WEF’s narrative. 

In terms of natural pathogenic threats, the WEF listed a priority disease list developed by the WHO in 2018, which outlines what it understood to be the potential major threats to human health (Public Health Emergencies of International Concern). Of note, it does not include influenza, as extensive surveillance and response mechanisms already exist for influenza outbreaks: 

• Covid-19
• Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever
• Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease
• Lassa fever
• Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
• Nipah and henipaviral diseases
• Rift Valley fever
• Zika
• “Disease X”

Beyond Covid-19, the only disease in this list to have more than 10,000 recorded deaths is Ebola. The West African Ebola outbreak of 2014-15 – by far the largest in history – had a mortality of 11,325. Except for Lassa fever, an endemic West African disease, no other disease in the list appears to have over 1,000 identifiable deaths reported globally. SARS and MERS-CoV caused about 800 each. 

This is where context is important for understanding public health risk and to give the current WEF policy narrative some perspective. Tuberculosis causes 1.3 million deaths per year, or over 3,500 deaths per day, while malaria kills over 600,000 children every year. Cancer and heart disease kill, globally, many times more people (10 million and 17.9 million). As a result, such ailments cause these outbreak diseases to pale in comparison, but excite less fear as we have become accustomed to such numbers, even when, in cases such as malaria, they are readily preventable.

From a public health perspective this is what should excite most interest and until recently received most funding. Relatedly, the major causes of the extension of average lifespan in more developed countries – improved sanitation, nutrition, general living conditions, and antibiotics – were a key focus of improving health (and consequently economies in lower income settings). 

Unfortunately, this recent shift to concentrate on unusual and low-impact diseases could have significant costs. For example, recent pandemic preparedness and response policy narratives are insisting that countries with higher preventable health burdens, such as malaria, accept diversion of resources to address unknown pandemic risks. According to the G20 report A Global Deal for a Pandemic Age, an estimated $26.4 billion a year in pandemic risk investments will be required from low- and middle-income countries to fill existing preparedness gaps, with an additional $10.5 billion from Overseas Development Assistance.

In the context of recognized outbreaks, Covid-19 is an outlier – and represents by far the most significant pandemic in 50 years in terms of deaths reported by the WHO (the 2009 pandemic influenza outbreak killed less than seasonal influenza normally does). In other words, the WHO priority watchlist has a very low disease burden in relation to the world’s biggest and most chronic killers. 

That is, of course, until Disease X strikes. 

Disease X: Manufacturing Severity

In the build-up to WEF 2024 and its pandemics panel, the WEF website posed the following question: “with fresh warnings from the World Health Organization that an unknown ‘Disease X’ could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic, what novel efforts are needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead?” This alert was immediately picked up and repeated by many news outlets, which in turn sparked several controversies on social media and via public statements made by politicians and public health professionals.

However, in terms of evidence, it remains unclear whether the WHO actually claimed that Disease X should ever be understood as being this severe. In fact, in our search, it was not possible to find where the WHO had made this direct numerical attribution. More interestingly, the claim that Disease X could be 20 times more deadly than Covid-19 has now been removed from the WEF website, suggesting that this error has now been recognized.

By doing a basic search, the origin of this “20 times” calculation seemingly comes from a website article published by the Birmingham Mail on 24 September 2023. The Birmingham Mail article states that “the new disease could be 20 times more deadly than coronavirus, which caused 2.5 million deaths” (it should be noted that this is not accurate, and it is not clear why the article used this figure – the official figure for Covid-19 was around 7 million on that date). This claim of ‘20 times’ is apparently derived from a statement made by Kate Bingham, the former chair of the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce, who told the Daily Mail in an earlier article that “the 1918–19 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I. Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exists.” 

Consequently, it appears that the author of the Birmingham Mail article arrived at the calculus of “20 times more deadly” by taking 50 million Spanish flu deaths and dividing it by 2.5 Covid-19 deaths to relate the magnitude of severity for Disease X. For WEF, this multiplier was seemingly picked up for use on its website, but this time referring to much higher Covid-19 mortality based on actual WHO reported Covid deaths (e.g. 7 million).

By this faulty logic, Disease X would hypothetically amount to 7 million Covid deaths x 20 = 140 million deaths. This would put Disease X in truly uncharted territory, far beyond any historical pandemic precedent. And it is extraordinary that no one, including noted health professionals, balked at this eye-watering number. What is also extraordinary is that major news outlets like the Daily Mail continue to parrot these under-substantiated claims post-Davos, which reproduces narratives in such a way that they become a social fact influencing practice, despite having weak scientific foundations. 

This is troubling for several reasons, but mainly in terms of evidence-based policy and the pollution that can occur when forums like the WEF overstep their remit. Although the use of hypotheticals such as Disease X can be extremely useful for stress testing preparedness and for wider policy reflections, they should not be devoid of known experience. In addition, as in the case of its inclusion on the WHO’s watchlist, hypothetical diseases like Disease X can act as a general placemark for unknown diseases that should also be taken into consideration in our preparedness efforts. But again, this unknown should still be based on ‘known unknowns,’ to borrow a cliché. 

Therefore, any hypothetical like Disease X and associated modelling should be based on empirical conditions rather than mere speculation. Otherwise, we could simply pick any calamitous number from thin air and multiply it by official Covid-19 or Spanish flu deaths. With regards to the latter, this might be an equally problematic model when recontextualized, since the likelihood of the Spanish flu resulting in the same number of deaths in 2024 is greatly reduced. Most Spanish flu deaths are attributed to a lack of antibiotics (This was over a century ago, we have antibiotics now!). Medical care has, we hope, also improved in the past 100 years. Against this backdrop, such comparisons are somewhat fanciful.

Lastly, evidence-based policy is predicated on the idea that policy decisions should be substantiated by rigorously established objective evidence and not based merely on ideology or common belief. This standard raises several concerns regarding how Disease X is currently being used and the basis upon which its severity has been wrongly purported by WEF and many others. In other words, the underwriting evidence base for public health discussions, such as those that took place at Davos, should not be based on a Birmingham Mail article that paraphrases an estimated calculus from an unsubstantiated comment made during an interview using incorrect mortality statistics. This cannot withstand even modest scrutiny and makes the whole Davos affair an embarrassment to rational thought. 

Public Health and Pharma Profit Are Not the Same

Planning for outbreaks is a logical priority in public health. Allocating resources in the context of competing priorities and understanding the health costs of resource diversion from higher burden diseases is fundamental to such policy development. What is the antithesis of good public health is the promotion of fear, exaggeration, and random hypothetical calculi that have reverberated unreflectively across numerous communication and policy channels for months. 

In the context of interest promotion, it makes sense that pharmaceutical corporations, their investors, immediate benefactors, and even the media produce such material. It is an issue from which they stand to gain profit and influence. Yet, this should not be mistaken for a legitimate approach to health policy or population health, and it should be rejected outright as a credible approach to the development of public health policy.

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Author

• REPPARE (REevaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda) involves a multidisciplinary team convened by the University of Leeds, and led by two principal investigators.

  Garrett W. Brown

  Garrett Wallace Brown is Chair of Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds. He is Co-Lead of the Global Health Research Unit and will be the Director of a new WHO Collaboration Centre for Health Systems and Health Security. His research focuses on global health governance, health financing, health system strengthening, health equity, and estimating the costs and funding feasibility of pandemic preparedness and response. He has conducted policy and research collaborations in global health for over 25 years and has worked with NGOs, governments in Africa, the DHSC, the FCDO, the UK Cabinet Office, WHO, G7, and G20.

  
  

  David Bell

  David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modeling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, and worked on infectious diseases and coordinated malaria diagnostics strategy at the World Health Organization. He has worked for 20 years in biotech and international public health, with over 120

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• Source

• https://brownstone.org/articles/disease-x-and-davos-this-is-not-the-way-to-evaluate-and-formulate-public-health-policy/

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Canadian Truckers Score Big Victory Over Trudeau in Federal Court The Canadian government said it will appeal Tuesday’s ruling by Canada’s Federal Court that the government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to disperse truckers protesting the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates violated several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Canadian Truckers Score Big Victory Over Trudeau in Federal Court

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., January 24, 2024

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The Canadian government said it will appeal Tuesday’s ruling by Canada’s Federal Court that the government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to disperse truckers protesting the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates violated several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Canadian government said it will appeal Tuesday’s ruling by Canada’s Federal Court that the government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to disperse truckers protesting the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates violated several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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In a historic decision, Canada’s Federal Court on Tuesday ruled the Canadian government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to disperse truckers protesting the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates was “unreasonable” and violated several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The truckers, dubbed the “Convoy for Freedom,” organized a cross-country protest beginning in January 2022, following a Jan. 15, 2022, order by the Canadian federal government mandating the vaccine for all cross-border U.S. and Canadian truckers.

In his 190-page ruling, Justice Richard G. Mosley said the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility — and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.”

The court ruled that invoking the Emergencies Act infringed upon Section 2(b) of the Charter, which protects freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, and Section 8, which pertains to the right to be secured from unreasonable seizure.

Mosley, who according to Global News “is a 21-year veteran of the Federal Court and is a respected voice on national security legal matters,” found that the freezing of protesters’ bank accounts amounted to such seizure.

Arguments in the case were heard over three days in April 2023, CTV News reported.

Plaintiffs included the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), Canadian Frontline Nurses and five individuals — two of whom “had their bank accounts frozen.”

According to The Epoch Times, the plaintiffs “argued … that the Liberal government did not meet the legal threshold to invoke the legislation in response to the protest.”

In a statement provided to The Defender, attorneys for the Canadian Frontline Nurses said:

“We are proud to be the party that initiated the application to the Federal Court challenging the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protest.

“We are pleased that the Federal Court agreed with our position that the Trudeau government’s action in invoking the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and outside their jurisdiction and that it was a violation of Canadians’ rights and freedoms under the Charter.”

Tom Marazzo, a spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy and author of “The People’s Emergency Act: Freedom Convoy 2022,” told The Defender, “The ruling by Judge Mosley was a great victory for all who participated and supported the Freedom Convoy.”

Marazzo said:

“When the government overreaches, as the Provincial, Municipal and Federal governments did, it is up to the citizens to remind them that they work for us and that we determine the direction of Canada. Unfortunately, the political class in Canada see themselves as royalty and not as simple representatives.

“Judge Mosley also reminded the Liberal/New Democratic Party government that they don’t rule over Canadians with impunity.”

Marazzo was referring to Canada’s ruling government coalition led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who attended the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, said the government will appeal the decision.

According to the CBC, this may lead to “a legal battle that could go all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.”

Ruling ‘a rebuke’ to the Canadian government

According to The New York Times, The Freedom Convoy resulted in “encampments of trucks in the nation’s capital.” In response, and as the convoy reached Ottawa, Canada’s federal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in its history on Feb. 14, 2022.

Tuesday’s decision is “the first instance of a court delivering a rebuke to Mr. Trudeau over his handling of the protest,” the Times wrote.

According to CTV News, the government argued “that the national security risks stemming from the protests justified its use.”

CTV News reported that the act “allowed the federal government to enact wide-sweeping but temporary powers,” which CBC said included “extraordinary powers to remove and arrest protesters … the power to freeze the finances of those connected to the protests [and] the ability to commandeer tow trucks to remove protesters’ vehicles.”

The Times reported that, under the act, “an enormous force of police officers from across the country finished clearing the streets” in Ottawa — an operation during which 230 protesters were arrested

The bank accounts of 257 Canadians were frozen under the act, The Countersignal reported.

CBC reported that the Canadian government “has long argued the measures it took under the Emergencies Act were targeted, proportional and temporary.”

But writer and blogger Margaret Anna Alice, whose writings have focused on health, politics, mass control and propaganda, and who has written extensively about Canada’s COVID-19 policies, told The Defender, “This single act of peaceful noncompliance triggered a cascade effect that dissolved the mental enslavement keeping the populace under the thrall of tyranny.”

“That is precisely what occurred as freedom convoys began erupting all over the world,” Alice said. “And yet, as this peaceful movement rose, so did the government’s tyranny.”

In his ruling, Mosley said he initially believed invocation of the Emergencies Act was justified as a response to an “unacceptable breakdown of public order,” but that the plaintiffs’ arguments swayed him.

“There was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires,” he wrote.

“Trudeau and his cabinet did not make even a single attempt to engage with the truckers. In blatant violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they leapt to invoking the Emergencies Act without meeting the necessary threshold,” Alice said.

Joanna Baron, plaintiff and CCF executive director, told the CBC the decision is a “huge vindication for many people.” In a statement CCF provided to The Defender, Baron said, “The invocation of the Emergencies Act is one of the worst examples of government overreach during the pandemic.”

Christine Van Geyn, CCF’s litigation director, said the ruling is “a complete vindication of the position of civil liberties organizations who viewed the invocation of the Emergencies Act as illegal, unjustified and unconstitutional.”

Speaking to the CBC, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director of the CCLA, said “Emergency is not in the eye of the beholder. Emergency powers are necessary in extreme circumstances, but they are also dangerous to democracy.”

CCLA attorney Ewa Krajewska told Global News, “I think it’s in the interest of this government and future governments and all Canadians that the threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act remains high.”

The ruling elicited reactions from across the political spectrum in Canada. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, the country’s main opposition party, tweeted:

Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, said his party “reluctantly” supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act, in remarks quoted by CBC.

Journalist and podcaster Trish Wood told The Defender, “The trucker protest was a classic class struggle [involving] citizens taking on the power elites and winning until government decided it had had enough,” adding that “This decision restores some power back to the people.”

Greg Hill, a captain with a major Canadian airline who was suspended in 2021 for not complying with Canada’s vaccine mandate and who subsequently became director of the Free to Fly advocacy group, told The Defender “We certainly welcome the decision. The unjustified and unconstitutional use of the Emergencies Act resulted in grave professional and personal loss for thousands of Canadians — damage that’s ongoing.”

Internationally acclaimed novelist Colin McAdam attended the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. He told The Defender “There are many things to be happy about with this decision, not least the declaration that the government acted illegally.”

“What is most encouraging is that the ruling upholds certain sections of our Charter of

Rights and Freedoms, which has otherwise been a feckless document through the COVID years,” he said. “I like that it has been acknowledged in law that when people fight for their rights, those rights are paramount to inconvenience.”

Alex Pattakos, Ph.D., co-founder of the Global Meaning Institute and contributing writer for Psychology Today, is unvaccinated and was unable to travel while Canada’s vaccine mandates were in effect. He told The Defender invocation of the Emergencies Act was “a stain on Canada’s identity and history.”

“It’s a reflection of the Trudeau government’s fear of its citizens and a manifestation of a ‘totalitarian movement’ it has been advancing in the name of the public good,” he said.

Freezing protesters’ accounts an ‘unreasonable search and seizure’

Mosley’s ruling referred to the freezing of hundreds of protesters’ financial accounts. In writing that this action violated Section 8 of the charter, Mosley said the government’s decision to freeze the accounts, even if for a “pressing and substantial” reason, was “not minimally impairing,” as “less impairing alternatives” were available to the government.

He added that freezing the accounts amounted to “unreasonable search and seizure of the financial information of designated persons” and infringed upon freedom of expression, “as they were overbroad in their application to persons who wished to protest but were not engaged in activities likely to lead to a breach of the peace.”

This rejects arguments made by the Canadian government when the measures were invoked. According to The National Post, federal lawyer Timothy Huyer claimed at the time, “The Emergency Economic Measures Order does not seize any assets.”

Notably, Mosley’s ruling also found that the Canadian government’s action did not infringe upon people’s right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

Mosley did rule that the Canadian government was wrong in its application of the Emergencies Act, under which a national emergency can be declared only if the situation “cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.”

“The act defers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s [CSIS] definition of such threats [including] serious violence against persons or property, espionage, foreign interference or an intent to overthrow the government by violence,” CBC said.

Testimony heard by the Public Order Emergency Commission, a public inquiry examining the invocation of the Emergencies Act, revealed CSIS did not believe the Freedom Convoy posed a threat to national security, The Epoch Times reported.

According to CBC, the inquiry, led by Justice Paul Rouleau, heard from over 70 witnesses and reviewed more than 7,000 documents — and found that Trudeau met the threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act.

CBC reported that Rouleau determined, “Lawful protest descended into lawlessness, culminating in a national emergency.” However, he acknowledged that he did not consider the factual basis for the invocation “overwhelming” and added that “Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion” from his.

In its defense, the Canadian government cited the seizure of a cache of weapons, body armor and ammunition in Coutts, a town in Alberta where the border with the U.S. was blockaded by truckers, according to CTV News, which added that four men are awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to murder Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers.

According to Global News, “Much of the Coutts blockade was cleared prior to the Feb. 14, 2022, declaration of a public order emergency, the first step in invoking the act.”

According to The Countersignal, less than a day before the invocation of the act, Trudeau was told by a national security adviser that there was potential for a “breakthrough” in talks with the Freedom Convoy protesters.

And according to an investigation by Public, the Trudeau government used fake intelligence to frame participants in the Freedom Convoy as “violent extremists” and then shared the information with other “Five Eyes” countries.

Global News reported that “CCLA successfully argued that the existing laws of Canada were sufficient in dealing with the blockades and extraordinary powers granted by the Emergencies Act were not needed.”

In his ruling, Mosley wrote that “The harassment of residents, workers and business owners in downtown Ottawa and the general infringement of the right to peaceful enjoyment of public spaces there, while highly objectionable, did not amount to serious violence or threats of serious violence.”

“Sadly, the concept of a ‘state of exception’ is used by many governments today as the rule, not the exception, in order to transcend the rule of law, suspend freedoms and exercise what otherwise would be considered government overreach,” Pattakos said.

McAdam said what he observed during the protests in Ottawa was far from violent.

“When I was on Parliament Hill in the early part of the convoy, there was a beautiful feeling of celebration and togetherness,” he said. “As the weeks passed this dissipated. By the time the Emergencies Act was declared, the scene was more Orwellian. If I had simply stood on the Hill in those final days with a ‘placard,’ as the judge hypothesized, I could have been arrested and my bank account frozen.”

Canadian government to appeal, ‘convinced’ it was ‘the right thing to do’

At a press conference in Montreal on Tuesday, Freeland said the federal government will appeal Mosley’s decision, while according to CBC, Justice Minister Arif Virani cited the inquiry’s findings and said it “also informs our decision to appeal.”

“I would just like to take a moment to remind Canadians of how serious the situation was in our country when we took that decision,” Freeland said, in remarks quoted by CTV News. “The public safety of Canadians was under threat. Our national security, which includes our national economic security, was under threat.”

“It was a hard decision to take,” she said. “We took it very seriously after a lot of hard work, after a lot of careful deliberation. We were convinced at the time — I was convinced at the time — it was the right thing to do, it was the necessary thing to do … I remain and we remain convinced of that.”

Sarah Choujounian, co-founder of the Canadian Frontline Nurses, told The Defender she was not surprised by the government’s reaction.

“We expected that they would appeal if they lost,” she said. “At the moment, we are not sure what this means for anyone affected by these measures. We hope that, in time, justice will be served. One thing is for sure, it will be much harder for anyone to impose the Emergencies Act in the future, and we see that as somewhat of a victory for now.”

Marazzo said the appeal “is yet another demonstration of the Liberal government’s hubris,” adding that “Unsurprisingly, the government is denying any accountability and plans to continue their abuse of Canadians with an appeal. Regardless, we need to remain steadfast and unmovable in working for a return to truth, principle and justice.”

In CCF’s statement, Van Geyn said that the government now has “a mountain to climb” after Tuesday’s ruling, adding, “We look forward to the fight.”

And in remarks shared with CTV News, University of Ottawa associate professor of criminology Michael Kempa, Ph.D., said the federal court’s decision is “legally binding” and “sets a legal precedent” — unlike the conclusion reached by the inquiry.

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV's "Good Morning CHD."

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Source

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/canadian-truckers-big-victory-trudeau-federal-court/