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COVID-19

Freedom Convoy leaders’ trial concludes for 2023 but will resume in 2024

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5 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The trial, which began on September 5, 2023, was supposed to have lasted just over two weeks.

The trial against Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber has concluded for 2023 but will be back again early next year.  

Last Thursday, day 33, was the last day of the trial for 2023. The court is expected to resume on January 4, 2024. 

During day 33 of the trial, the Democracy Fund (TDF), which is crowdfunding Lich’s legal costs, noted that the court will resume in 2024 with a “voir dire,” or trial within a trial, to be “held over how comments made by the judge presiding over the Ottawa injunction order of February 2022 should be treated.” 

“In the days following, there should be a decision on the defense motion to dismiss the Carter application,” noted TDF.  

The trial, which began on September 5, 2023, was supposed to have lasted only a few weeks.  

Last year, lawyers for both sides agreed that 16 days would be a reasonable amount of time to have a fair case. The Crown however took a long time in going through its witness list, which slowed the pace of the trial to a crawl. 

On Day 33 of the trial, legal counsel for Barber reiterated to the court that it’s not a “crime” that the leaders did not tell people to leave Ottawa, as the Crown claims it was.  

Thus far, per TDF, the Crown has asserted “that the absence of violence or peaceful nature of the protest didn’t make it lawful, emphasizing that the onus was on the Crown to prove the protest’s unlawfulness.”  

The Crown in court has been holding steadfast to the notion in trying to prove that Lich and Barber had somehow influenced the protesters’ actions through their words as part of a co-conspiracy. This claim has been rejected by the defense as weak.  

To back the claims up, the Crown has been hoping to use what is called a “Carter application” to help them make their case. The Crown’s so-called “Carter Application” asks that the judge to consider “Barber’s statements and actions to establish the guilt of Lich, and vice versa,” TDF stated.  

TDF has said that a Carter application is very “complicated” and requires that the Crown prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there was a “conspiracy or plan in place and that Lich was a party to it based on direct evidence,” and as such, the defense is asking the judge to dismiss the application.  

The reality is that Lich and Barber worked with police on many occasions so that the protests were within the law.   

On day 32 of Lich Barber’s trial, the defense counsel for the leaders exposed gaps in the Crown’s main argument that the protests were unlawful even though there was no violence during the demonstrations. 

Lich and Barber are facing multiple charges from the 2022 protests, including mischief, counseling mischief, counseling intimidation and obstructing police for taking part in and organizing the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy. As reported by LifeSiteNews at the time, despite the non-violent nature of the protest and the charges, Lich was jailed for weeks before she was granted bail.  

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast-to-coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the Emergencies Act on February 14.  

During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.  

Lich and Barber’s trial has thus far taken more time than originally planned. LifeSiteNews has been covering the trial extensive.  

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COVID-19

New Study Finds COVID-19 ‘Vaccination’ Doubles Risk of Post-COVID Death

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A few days ago, the study titled Evaluation of post-COVID mortality risk in cases classified as severe acute respiratory syndrome in Brazil: a longitudinal study for medium and long term was published in Frontiers in Medicine:

Background: There are few studies in the literature evaluating post-COVID mortality in Brazil, along medium and long term, especially in those who presented severe clinical disease.

Objective: This study aims to investigate the factors associated with post-COVID mortality of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cases from 2020 to 2023 in Brazil, along medium and long term.

Methods: Retrospective cohort study using notification data of SARS classified as COVID-19 from the Brazilian National Information System, “Sistema de Vigilância Epidemiológica (SIVEP),” during the period 2020 to 2023. Data included demographics, comorbidities, vaccination status, number of COVID-19 vaccine doses, city of residence, and survival outcomes. Classic Cox, Cox mixed effects, and Cox fragility models were used to assess medium and long-term risks of dying post-COVID.

Results: In the medium and long-term periods studied, 5,157 deaths were recorded out of 15,147 reported SARS/COVID-19 cases. Of these deaths, 91.5% (N = 4,720) occurred within the first year, while 8,5% (N = 437) after the first year. People without formal education, the older adult, had higher percentages of deaths in both periods. In the medium-term post-COVID period, the risk of death was reduced by 8% for those who had been vaccinated while in the long-term post-COVID period, the risk of death almost doubled for those who had been vaccinated. While in the medium term, there was a reduction in mortality risk for those who took two or three doses, in the long term the risk of death was greater for those who took one or two doses.

Conclusion: The protective effect of COVID-19 immunization was observed up to one year after the first symptoms. After one year, the effect was reversed, showing an increased risk of death for those vaccinated. These results highlight the need for further research to elucidate the factors that contribute to these findings.

 

As illustrated in the Kaplan Meier survival curves, over the long-term, those that refused COVID-19 injections were less likely to die compared to vaccinated individuals. While vaccination initially reduced post-COVID mortality risk in the medium term, this protective effect completely reversed in the long term, ultimately doubling the risk of death​.

The authors said that the ‘protective effect’ in the medium term could have been due to the following factors:

(1) Vaccination may be associated with healthier behaviors or greater health awareness. For example, vaccinated individuals may be more likely to follow other public health recommendations, such as staying up-to-date with preventive health measures, having regular medical check-ups, or adopting healthier lifestyles. This could lead to a reduction in the risk of death from other causes in the medium term.

(2) Access to healthcare – since people with comorbidities were prioritized for COVID-19 immunization, these populations may also have benefited from increased medical monitoring and access to healthcare, which may have contributed to a reduction in the risk of death from other causes.

The authors then gave possible reasons behind the complete reversal to doubling the risk of death in the long-term:

(1) Adverse effects of the vaccines – while COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be safe for the vast majority of people, there are concerns about potential long term adverse effects (although rare), such as myocarditis, thrombosis, or other rare conditions associated with vaccination. These effects may be more pronounced in some groups, particularly in more vulnerable individuals, which could contribute to an increased risk of death from other causes over time;

(2) The COVID-19 vaccine may have an indirect effect on the immune system – for people with pre-existing conditions or those with weakened immune systems (such as patients with autoimmune diseases or those on immunosuppressive treatments), the immune response to the virus may have unexpected or complex effects that increase vulnerability to other infections or lead to complications of pre-existing conditions.

This study corroborates Alessandria et al, who found that COVID-19 ‘vaccination’ reduced life expectancy by 37% and increased all-cause death risks during the 2-year follow-up period:

These data help explain why at least 17 million people may have died from COVID-19 ‘vaccination’ as demonstrated by Rancourt et al. Life-reducing injections should NOT be recommended for anyone and must be immediately removed from global markets to safeguard the public from further injury and death.

In the United States, COVID-19 genetic injections are estimated to have caused more deaths than American casualties in WWI and WWII combined. The death toll even rivals the scale of the Civil War. This is a profound national tragedy, and accountability is urgently warranted.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

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Brownstone Institute

Who Is Wei Cai, German Public Health’s ‘Hidden’ Scientist from Wuhan?

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Brownstone Institute Robert Kogon 

So, who exactly is Wei Cai, the scientific staff member of Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), who, as revealed in hitherto hidden minutes of the institute’s “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” comes from none other than Wuhan? And when I say “hitherto hidden minutes,” I mean hidden precisely in the ostensible leak of the unredacted “RKI Files.” For, as I discussed in a recent article, the file in question was not included among the supposedly “complete minutes” assembled by Aya Velazquez, the prostitute-turned-journalist and anti-Covid-measure activist who unveiled the documents at a highly-publicized press conference in Berlin on July 23rd.

As discussed in a postscript to that article, although I have asked her, I have not received a coherent answer from Velazquez as to how she could have overlooked these minutes, which are indeed the minutes of the very first RKI “crisis group” meeting of which we have a public record.

Be that as it may, the reason why the revelation of the RKI’s link to Wuhan is important – and why German authorities may have preferred that it remain secret – is because, as I have documented in, among other places, my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told,’ Germany in fact had a very active publicly-funded research partnership in virology with several research institutions in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Indeed, the German-Chinese virology network, known as the “Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre” or TRR60, gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab, not only right in Wuhan but indeed right in what is regarded as the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city. For this and other (microbiological) reasons outlined in my ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan,’ the members of the German-Chinese virology partnership ought to be prime suspects in any genuine investigation into a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.  But, instead, they have been completely ignored in favour of suspects in far-off places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The below photo shows various members of the partnership, as well as associated German and Chinese luminaries in the field of virology. It was taken in 2015 at a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin organised by the German Co-Director of TRR60, Ulf Dittmer. Dittmer is the bald man in the middle of the picture. None other than Christian Drosten, the German designer of the ‘gold standard’ SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s renowned bat coronavirus expert, can be seen together in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.

Other notables include Chen Xinwen, the then-director of the WIV. Chen is the small, somewhat buck-toothed man in the lower right-hand corner. He was a member of TRR60. The young woman with the long hair next to Shi Zhengli appears to be the current Director of the WIV, Wang Yanyi. The former President of the Robert Koch Institute, Reinhard Burger, is also in the picture. He is the white-haired man with the blue shirt near the centre of the group.

Given the WIV’s famed practice of gain-of-function research, it is worth noting that this get-together took place precisely during the American moratorium on such research. It is also worth noting that Christian Drosten himself, as touched upon in my ‘The Greatest Story‘, has coordinated a German research project on the MERS coronavirus involving gain-of-function experiments. Indeed, that ‘RAPID’ project got underway just two years after the Berlin get-together and likewise while the American moratorium still remained in place.

So, did Wei Cai have anything to do with the German-Chinese virology network? Well, yes, from her publications, we know that she did. Thus, she is a co-author with Michael Roggendorf of this 2013 paper on PCR detection of Hepatitis and HIV infections. Roggendorf is none other than the founder of the German-Chinese partnership. He is the white-haired man with the red bowtie next to RKI president Burger in the above photo. The former Chair of the Department of Virology at Essen University Hospital, he would cede his position as German Co-Director of TRR60 to his colleague Dittmer in 2013. Essen University Hospital is the lead German institution in the German-Chinese virology partnership.

Roggendorf can be seen below receiving the “Chime Bell” award from the Governor of Hubei Province in 2016 in honor of his contributions to the German-Chinese partnership. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province.

In early 2020, Wei Cai would then appear as co-author with Christian Drosten on a paper about the famous first cluster of Covid-19 cases in Germany. As discussed in my series of articles herehere, and here, it was precisely this cluster that first raised the spectre of ‘asymptomatic spread’ of Covid-19, even though – contrary to what was claimed by Drosten and other German authors in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine – Patient Zero was not in fact asymptomatic and none of the members of the cluster appear to have been particularly ill.

As touched upon in my previous article, Wei Cai would then go on to complete a PhD in Medicine at Drosten’s Charité University Hospital in Berlin, although under the direction of her supervisor in the Infectious Diseases Unit of the RKI, Walter Haas. Per her Linked-In page (hat-tip: FrauHodl), she completed a first degree in medicine at the Hubei University of Chinese Medicine in Wuhan in 2000 before going to Germany to do a master’s in public health in Bremen.

It should be noted that Wei Cai is an epidemiologist, not a virologist. Hence, she would not have been involved in the sort of laboratory experimentation on viruses that was being conducted under the aegis of TRR60 in Wuhan.

Nonetheless, the questions remain. Why was the very existence of the RKI’s staff member from Wuhan redacted in the original official release of the “RKI Files?” Why were the minutes in question, now unredacted and revealing her existence, hidden in the ostensible leak, as if the leakers were somehow sensitive to the Government’s concerns? And why, finally, do German – unlike American – links to Wuhan appear to be off-limits for German media, both traditional and new? Why the omertà?

Republished from The Daily Sceptic

Author

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs.

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