COVID-19
Post-pandemic: Canada desperately needs an impartial COVID-19 inquiry

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute
By Kevin Bardosh
Now that the panic has subsided, it is time to move to a thoughtful and objective Covid evaluation to investigate the social harms created by government infection control policies.
Nearly four years after the Canadian government first imposed unprecedented Covid-19 policies, the nation still lacks a coherent plan for how to evaluate the effectiveness of these policies and their costs and consequences.
Sadly, recent efforts to promote a federal inquiry do very little to diminish concerns that key scientific and policy questions – about lockdowns, school closures, masks, contact tracing and vaccine mandates – will go unanswered. Rather than seriously questioning the dominant covid policy approach, these efforts toward an inquiry parrot a set of misguided axioms set on justifying and institutionalizing them for the future.
A series of articles in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) called for an independent Canadian Inquiry in mid-2023 (Clark et al. 2023). Supportive editorials were written by most Canadian media outlets and a launch event for the series was supported by the Royal Society of Canada. Yet, despite the BMJ series being entitled “Accountability for Canada’s Covid-19 response”, scientific data that contradict the necessity of government infection control policies as well as the social harms to Canadian society from these far-reaching policies were largely ignored.
The BMJ article series assumes a unique form of implicit bias and faulty logic that I have called Covidization, and which has predominated as the mainstream position in government, media, the courts, academia and medicine since 2020 (Bardosh, 2023a). ’Covidization’ over-states the evidence supporting Covid policies and downplays the evidence of their harm, or unintended consequences. It also assumes that more centralized government action was needed to control the virus and valorises population compliance. Take, for example, one of the most cited sentences in the BMJ series:
“What saved Canada was a largely willing and conforming populace that withstood stringent public health measures and achieved among the world’s highest levels of vaccination coverage. In other words, Canadians delivered on the pandemic response while its governments faltered.”
This mainstream position also inverts the burden of proof and contradicts key principles of public health ethics (Jamrozik, 2022): it is critical to appreciate that most Covid policies were not recommended for use during a viral respiratory pandemic by the World Health Organization and most governments pre-2020 because the evidence was weak and the anticipated harms substantial (Bardosh, 2023a). Pre-2020, the various vaccine mandates and passports used during the pandemic were also generally believed to be unethical and against the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Bardosh et al. 2022).
Yet the social atmosphere of fear and panic during the pandemic re-engineered axiomatic truths and governance models including accepted ethical standards (e.g. precautionary principle) and cost-benefit analysis in decision-making. Instead, a narrow logic that approaches infection control a priori as the highest moral goal reigned.
The BMJ series is worrying because it was modelled on a similar article series launched just before the UK began its own formal Covid Inquiry (McKee et al. 2022), which began in June 2023 (Bardosh, 2023b). The UK-focused BMJ articles were written, in part, by prominent advocates of Zero Covid, who, like China, promoted stricter containment believing the virus could be eliminated. This position went on to be reflected, in varying degree, in the biases and assumptions of the UK Public Inquiry itself.
The UK Inquiry will run until 2026 and is estimated to be the most expensive British public inquiry ever, costing taxpayers £300-500 million. Yet the structure of the inquiry has given preferential status to bereaved family groups through legal representation, who are set on blaming the government for the death of their family members. This means that key assumptions about the effectiveness and appropriateness of Covid measures are simply taken for granted. Prominent scientists who advised the government, especially epidemiological modellers, have also been given preferential treatment by the barristers and the few scientists providing an alternative position, such as one more aligned with the idea of focused protection outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration (Kulldorff et al. 2020), have been largely maligned and ignored (Bardosh, 2023c).
The convergence between the UK inquiry and a possible Canadian inquiry may be more likely than anticipated. According to Canadian journalist Paul Wells, rumour has it that Prof. Sir Mark Walport, who testified to the UK Inquiry and recently chaired a UK Royal Society review on Covid interventions that ignored key data and the costs and consequences to society (Bardosh, 2023d), could head a Canadian inquiry (Wells, 2023). This has yet to be confirmed or denied.
Herein lay a central problem: those who advocated for Covid policies are now called to evaluate them. Epidemiological models and observational studies have been given substantial weight by government and public health agencies despite confounding effects, data reliability issues, incorrect assumptions, circular reasoning and inappropriate claims of causality (Grant et al. 2022; Doidge et al. 2022; Vickers et al. 2023).
In a desperate failure to ‘follow the science’, too many individuals in the mainstream medical establishment continue to frame efforts to question Covid policies as ‘misinformation’ or ‘revisionism’ (Murdoch and Caulfield, 2023). This perspective cherry-picks the evidence and ignores the totality of data on policies such as school closures, mask mandates and lockdowns (Fitzpatrick et al. 2022; Vickers et al. 2022). It also ignores other factors that can explain Covid epidemiological trends: seasonality, innate immunity, voluntary risk reduction and herd immunity (Bardosh, 2023e).
Worryingly, provincial and federal governments are not required by law to evaluate the health, social or economic consequences of any emergency response in Canada, including Covid (Khoury et al. 2022). This leaves fundamental questions unanswered: Did government policies cause more harm than good? What should we do next time?
Now that the panic has subsided, it is time to move beyond the Covidization groupthink. Any thoughtful and objective Covid evaluation should be evidence-based and take as a starting position the investigation of social harms created by government infection control policies (Bardosh, 2023a).
This includes consequences on health and health services, such as an alarming mental health crisis (Agostino et al. 2021; Frounfelker et al. 2022; Jenkins et al. 2022) and rise in non-Covid excess mortality, for example due to drug overdoses among young people (Dmetrichuk et al. 2022; Lee et al. 2022). It includes a range of negative lifestyle changes that appear to be compounding risks for noncommunicable diseases: exercise, obesity, sleep, screen use, diet, addiction, frailty, and child development (Andreacchi et al. 2022; Colucci et al. 2022; Shillington et al. 2021; Potvin et al. 2022).
Pandemic policies closed businesses and shifted employment patterns, whilst also dramatically increasing government spending, debt and inflation (CFIB, 2021; Moran et al. 2022; Lemieux et al. 2020; Razak et al. 2022). What are the consequences and long-term legacy of these economic impacts? And, of course, economic consequences are likely to have had adverse effects on general well-being. It remains unclear how useful the vast government financial assistance programs really were (Kroebel et al. 2021).
The social fabric of Canada was also ruptured, with significant effects on domestic violence, child abuse, gender relations and social polarization (Baker et al. 2023; Smith, 2022; Wu et al. 2022; Wathen et al. 2022). Pandemic policies impacted children and teenagers at crucial points in their education and psychosocial development and are predicted to have various long-term consequences (Cost et al. 2022; Haeck and Larose, 2022). Studies on university students consistently show that well-being, social relationships, financial stress, quality of learning and optimism about future job prospects were impacted (Appleby et al. 2022; Houlden and Veletsianos, 2022).
Socio-economic groups were affected in different ways. A generational paradox emerged: the virus itself caused minimal mortality among younger people who were most severely impacted by pandemic disruptions (Ciotti et al. 2022). More marginalized and vulnerable social groups also experienced disproportionate mental health and socio-economic effects (Jenkins et al. 2022). The quality of social services diminished as a result of accommodating social distancing protocols (Baker et al. 2023; Wathens et al. 2022). And the elderly were often isolated and locked-up in care facilities under inhumane conditions (Saad et al. 2022; Chu et al. 2022; Rangel et al. 2022).
The civic infrastructure of democratic accountability also eroded (Baron and Van Geyn, 2023), with significant consequences for human rights, civil liberties, and checks on executive power (Joffe, 2021; Mykhalovskiy et al. 2022). Debate was, for the most part, abandoned at our institutions of higher education. An artificial ‘consensus’ was manufactured by the mainstream media (Capurro et al. 2021; Labbe et al. 2022; Norman et al. 2022). Science itself was politicised and a profound failure occurred in multidisciplinary scientific policy advice. The advice offered to policymakers focused almost exclusively on a pathogen-centric perspective (Bhatia et al. 2023) and disregarded the expertise of other relevant disciplines. Population compliance was supported through unprecedented laws on protest, data privacy and media freedom largely upheld by the courts (Ballard et al. 2021; CCLA, 2021; McClelland Luscombe, 2021). Growing public distrust culminated in the 2022 Ottawa Trucker Convoy protest while the biases of the Rouleau Commission that upheld the use of the Emergencies Act revealed similar failures in government accountability (Alford, 2023).
Despite these varied impacts on Canadians, no major scientific and institutional effort has emerged to collate and analyze the full data on these societal harms and explore their implications for pandemic policy. Two recent efforts are, nonetheless, worth mentioning. First, the new conservative premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, commissioned a public health emergency governance review which recommended, among other things, broader expertise in management and science advice and the need to better protect rights and freedoms (Kelly-Gagnon et al. 2023). Second, a grassroots independent movement recently completed a National Citizen Inquiry (2023), based on public testimony from a 7-city tour, and has released a final report focused on the varied impacts of Covid measures on society.
The Federal government can call for a national commission of inquiry at any time and set the scope and format. Such inquiries have had lasting institutional impact in the past; the Canadian blood services emerged from the stained blood scandal in the 1980s. And their tendency to keep an issue in the news cycle helps ensure institutional change (Stutz, 2008).
However, before any Canadian inquiry takes place, it is critical that a reversal of perspective occurs about the key questions (Norfolk Group, 2023). Scientific analysis about the effectiveness of Covid policies in Canada need to be approached in an attitude of impartiality and with a willingness for self-criticism. The data on policy harms need to be taken seriously. This is certainly within the remit of the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and many other government agencies.
All things considered, it would be wise to establish an independent scientific review with sufficient broad support, expertise and neutrality outside government. This could then inform the establishment of any future public inquiry. Otherwise, like the UK Covid Inquiry, we risk eschewing a critical and objective assessment of the evidence and the difficult policy trade-offs between infection control, social harm and civil liberties.
Canada needs a proper Covid inquiry but ensuring that the public gets one will require political acumen, scientific rigor and a correct orientation toward the key social, political, and medical questions at stake.
About the author
Kevin Bardosh, PhD is Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global, a research institute and educational charity based in the UK. He is also affiliated with the School of Public Health, University of Washington and Edinburgh Medical School. A Canadian, he has worked in more than 20 countries around the world on infectious disease research and control programs, including in the response to Zika and Ebola.
COVID-19
Nearly Half of “COVID-19 Deaths” Were Not Due to COVID-19 – Scientific Reports Journal

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH
45.3% of “COVID-19 deaths” in Greece had no symptoms — exposing the coordinated PSYOP deployed to maximize fear and enforce mass compliance with draconian control measures.
The study titled “Deaths “due to” COVID-19 and deaths “with” COVID-19 during the Omicron variant surge, among hospitalized patients in seven tertiary-care hospitals, Athens, Greece” was just published in the journal Scientific Reports:
Abstract
In Greek hospitals, all deaths with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test are counted as COVID-19 deaths. Our aim was to investigate whether COVID-19 was the primary cause of death, a contributing cause of death or not-related to death amongst patients who died in hospitals during the Omicron surge and were registered as COVID-19 deaths. Additionally, we aimed to analyze the factors associated with the classification of these deaths. We retrospectively re-viewed all in-hospital deaths, that were reported as COVID-19 deaths, in 7 hospitals, serving Athens, Greece, from January 1, 2022, until August 31, 2022. We retrieved clinical and laboratory data from patient records. Each death reported as COVID-19 death was characterized as: (A) death “due to” COVID-19, or (B) death “with” COVID-19. We reviewed 530 in-hospital deaths, classified as COVID-19 deaths (52.4% males; mean age 81.7 ± 11.1 years). We categorized 290 (54.7%) deaths as attributable or related to COVID-19 and in 240 (45.3%) deaths unrelated to COVID-19. In multivariable analysis The two groups differed significantly in age (83.6 ± 9.8 vs. 79.9 ± 11.8, p = 0.016), immunosuppression history (11% vs. 18.8%, p = 0.027), history of liver disease (1.4% vs. 8.4%, p = 0.047) and the presence of COVID-19 symptoms (p < 0.001). Hospital stay was greater in persons dying from non-COVID-19 related causes. Among 530 in-hospital deaths, registered as COVID-19 deaths, in seven hospitals in Athens during the Omicron wave, 240 (45.28%) were reassessed as not directly attributable to COVID-19. Accuracy in defining the cause of death during the COVID-19 pandemic is of paramount importance for surveillance and intervention purposes.
Key Findings:
Massive Overcounting of COVID-19 Deaths
- Out of 530 hospital deaths registered as COVID-19 deaths, only 290 (54.7%) were actually caused by COVID-19.
- 240 deaths (45.3%) were found to be completely unrelated to COVID-19 — patients died with a positive PCR test, but showed no symptoms, required no COVID-specific treatment, and died of clearly unrelated causes.
Death Certificate Inaccuracy
- Of the 204 certificates listing COVID-19 as the direct cause of death, only 132 (64.7%) were confirmed as such after clinical review.
- Of the 324 certificates listing COVID-19 as a contributing factor, only 86 (26.5%) were found to be truly related.
Hospital-Acquired Infections Misclassified
- Patients infected during hospitalization were significantly more likely to be misclassified as COVID-19 deaths (OR: 2.3, p = 0.001).
Younger Age and Severe Comorbidities Associated with Misclassification
- Patients who died “with” COVID-19 were younger, more likely to be immunosuppressed, have end-stage liver disease, or be admitted for other causes.
Symptoms and Treatments Differed Sharply
Patients who died “due to” COVID-19 were more likely to:
- Exhibit classic symptoms: hypoxia (44.1%), shortness of breath, fever, and cough
- Require oxygen support (93.4% vs. 66.9%) and receive COVID-specific therapies:
- Remdesivir (5-day course: 61.9% vs. 35.2%)
- Dexamethasone (81.7% vs. 40.7%)
Study Strengths
This study went far beyond death certificate coding, implementing a rigorous, multi-source clinical audit:
- Full medical chart reviews: Included physician notes, lab data, imaging, and treatment records.
- Attending physician interviews: Structured questionnaires captured real-time clinical insights from those who treated the patients.
- Dual independent expert assessments: Two experienced infectious disease specialists (each with >2,500 COVID cases) reviewed each case independently for classification accuracy.
This study found that nearly half of all registered COVID-19 deaths during the Omicron wave in Greece were misclassified, with no clinical evidence linking them to COVID-19 as the true cause. Given that similar death coding practices were employed across Western nations, it is reasonable to conclude that COVID-19 death counts were artificially inflated to a comparable degree elsewhere.
This drastic inflation of death counts aligns with what many now understand to be a coordinated psychological operation (PSYOP)—designed to instill fear and maximize compliance with draconian pandemic measures such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and mass mRNA injection campaigns.
It is this weaponization of fear that has prompted criminal referrals in seven U.S. states, triggering active criminal investigations into top COVID-19 officials for terrorism, murder and racketeering:
BREAKING – The Pandemic Justice Phase Begins as Criminal Investigations Commence |
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By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH
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Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation
Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.
2025 Federal Election
Before the Vote: Ask Who’s Defending Our Health

From the World Council for Health Canada
The health of Canadians has been compromised by government-mandated COVID-19 injections. The upcoming federal election is an opportunity to demand change and accountability. As you decide which candidate or party is most committed to defending the health of yourself and your family, please consider the following:
The Injections Were Never What They Claimed
The Canadian government successfully mandated the COVID-19 injections by labeling them “safe and effective vaccines.” These products are still being promoted and administered across the country. However, the truth is:
- They are not vaccines: Click Here
- They are not safe: Click Here
- They do not prevent infection or transmission.
- Evidence shows they increase the risk of COVID-19 disease and death: Click Here
These Products Contain Multiple Mechanisms of Harm
- They cause injury through multiple biological mechanisms: Click Here
- They have surpassed all vaccines in recorded history—for all infections, for all of the past thirty years combined—in causing deaths and injuries: Click Here
- They are chemically contaminated and adulterated with DNA: Click Here
- In Pfizer’s case, fraud is evident: the DNA contamination includes genetic engineering tools derived from the SV40 virus, associated with cancer risks: Click Here
This Election, We Must Demand Accountability
Insist that to have your vote, candidates must:
- Denounce the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
- Support a full halt to their manufacturing and administration.
- Uphold informed consent, scientific integrity, and bodily autonomy.
Your voice is important. Use it to reject censorship, harm, and medical coercion.
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