COVID-19
Tech entrepreneurs allege corruption, misuse of taxpayer funds in development of Canadian travel app
From LifeSiteNews
One of the experts who testified before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates recently exposed shady subcontracting deals that were not transparent during ArriveCan’s development
Two tech entrepreneurs recently testified before a government committee that during the development of the federal government’s much-maligned ArriveCAN travel app they saw firsthand how federal managers engaged in “extortion,” corruption, and “ghost contracting,” all at the expense of the taxpayer.
During a Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) meeting on October 26, Amir Morv, the co-founder of software company Botler AI, told Canadian MPs on the committee that “acts of misconduct rarely happen in isolation.”
“It is almost always symptomatic of a larger existence and tolerance of misconduct,” he said.
“Individuals engaged in such conduct are also prime targets of exploitation and extortion,” he said.
Botler, which is a Quebec-based company, was a subcontractor for the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) and recently exposed shady subcontracting deals that were not transparent during ArriveCan’s development.
According to a Globe and Mail report, the CBSA gave three companies involved in making the app more than $17 million.
Currently, the OGGO is investigating how various companies such as Dalian, Coaradix, and GC Strategies received millions of taxpayer money to develop the contentious ArriveCAN app.
ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track COVID jab status.
When the app was mandated, all travelers entering Canada had to use it to submit their travel and contact information as well as any COVID vaccination details before crossing the border or boarding a flight.
Canada Auditor General Karen Hogan announced an investigation of the ArriveCan app last November after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.
The program was once described by a Canadian border agent as “tyranny.” It cost taxpayers a whopping $54 million, which MPs pointed out was a suspiciously high expense.
LifeSiteNews reported earlier this month that the federal government was exposed for hiding a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigation into the ArriveCan app from auditors.
Companies ‘openly’ engaged in various criminal activities
Morv and Botler co-founder Ritika Dutt testified to the committee about private conversations they had with a managing partner of GC Strategies Kristian Firth, a company with only two employees.
CSBA Director General Cameron MacDonald had urged the two to work directly with GC Strategies. However, the two quickly discovered that all of their work was being run through another company, called Dalian, but they were not told this.
Morv told MPs that the contractors are “openly engaged in various criminal activities” and that they openly “commit fraud on the government by promising influence and requesting material benefit” in return.
In essence, Morv exposed how private companies were being used to funnel taxpayer money into their coffers without public oversight.
Morv also claimed that Firth had regularly boasted that he and his friends, who were senior government officials with contracting authority, said they had “dirt” on each other, which was used as a sort of guaranteed mutual silence tactic regarding the corruption.
Notably, Morv stated that the contractors would not have acted in the way they did if they did not have “backing from factions within the government.”
He then said that part of the federal government had “mobilized to bury Botler’s reports and protect this corruption” after it had sent two reports to the CBSA.
As for Dutt, she told MPs that in December 2022 her emails were hacked and “every record of an email that Kristian Firth sent me was mysteriously deleted.”
She said that this came at the same time CBSA president Erin O’Gorman had said she was going to consider whether to send the reports to the RCMP.
Dutt said that they “watched and waited patiently for someone to do the right thing,” to “act on our reports.”
“But instead, we were heartbroken as they lied. They lied to us. They lied to you at OGGO, they lied to Parliament, and they lied to Canadian taxpayers,” she added.
So-called ‘ghost contracting’ exposed
Morv was asked by Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Stephanie Kusie to describe what so-called “ghost contracting” was when it concerned the development of the ArriveCAN app.
According to Morv, ghost contracting could have been how GC Strategies, a company with only two employees, ended up with $11.2 to help develop the travel app.
In essence, “ghost contracting” is a middleman added to the mix but does not have any sort of legal trace back to the government. The companies do no work, but they make a “significant amount of commission,” Morv said.
Morv said that he is not sure Dalion or Coradix, who received a combined $4.3 million to help develop the app, fit the “ghost contracting” definition; they had hired ghost contractors to do the actual work.
CPC MP Garnett Genuis said that the whole evolving ArriveCAN scandal showed a “horrific system of government corruption” that went beyond the travel app.
He told Morv, “You’re describing a system in which government contracts go to preferred contractors, they claim to subcontract to others, who they claim do the work and they provide reports on this.”
He added, “But those subcontractors might not be doing the work. They might not know they’re being named. They might not even exist in some cases. And then this system allows those initial contractors to overbill taxpayers. Is what’s going on here?”
Morv said, “In this case, the system encouraged the contractors to actually do this. That is correct.”
When the Trudeau government introduced the ArriveCAN app, they made sure of quick compliance by saying at the time, “If you don’t submit your travel information and proof of vaccination using ArriveCAN, you could be fined $5,000.”
Top constitutional lawyers have said ArriveCAN violates an individual’s constitutional rights and that people’s civil liberties on paper have been rendered “meaningless effectively in the real world” because of COVID.
Eventually, in the fall of 2021, the Trudeau government banned the vaccine free from traveling by air, rail, or sea both domestically and internationally.
This policy resulted in thousands losing their jobs or being placed on leave for non-compliance.
Trudeau “suspended” the COVID travel vaccine mandates on June 20, 2022. Last October, the Canadian federal government ended all remaining COVID mandates regarding travel, including masking on planes and trains, COVID testing, and allowing vaccine-free Canadians to no longer be subject to mandatory quarantine.
More than 700 vaccine-free Canadians negatively affected by federal COVID jab dictates have banded together to file a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Trudeau’s federal government.
COVID-19
BREAKING: Days before Trump Inauguration HHS fires doctor in charge of gain of function research project
Dr. Daszak will likely be protected by the DoD & CIA from additional penalties.
By John Leake
HHS Formally Debars EcoHealth Alliance, President Peter Daszak Fired.
On January 17, 2025—just three days before President Trump is to be sworn in—Congress issued a press release with the following statement:
Today, after an eight-month investigation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut off all funding and formally debarred EcoHealth Alliance Inc. (EcoHealth) and its former President, Dr. Peter Daszak, for five years based on evidence uncovered by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
As far as I can tell, the New York Times did not report this story, though the New York Post did.
More interesting than the superficial news reporting is the HHS ACTION REFERRAL MEMORANDUM recommending that Dr. Peter Daszak be barred from participating in United States Federal Government procurement and nonprocurement programs.
The Memorandum also states:
Dr. Peter Daszak was the President and Chief Executive Officer of EHA from 2009 until his termination, effective January 6, 2025. Dr. Daszak was the Project Director (PD)/Principal Investigator (PI) for Grant Number 1R01AI110964-01.
I am not sure what to make of this document, which is written in such an arcane and convoluted style that it challenges the attention span of even the most focused reader.
I have been researching this story for four years, and I found the following paragraphs the most intriguing:
9. In a letter dated May 28, 2016, the NIAID contacted EHA concerning possible GoF research based on information submitted in its most recent Year 2 RPPR. The NIAID notified EHA that GoF research conducted under Grant Number 5R01AI110964-03 would be subject to the October 17, 2014, United States Federal Government funding pause, and that per the funding pause announcement, new United States Federal Government funding would not be released for GoF research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. In the letter, the NIAID requested that EHA provide a determination within 15 days of the date of the letter as to whether EHA’s research under Grant Number 5R01AI110964-03 did or did not include GoF work subject to the funding pause.
10. In a letter dated June 8, 2016, EHA provided a response to the NIAID’s May 28, 2016 letter. EHA explained that the goal of its proposed work was to construct MERS and MERS-like chimeric CoVs in order to understand the potential origins of MERSCoV in bats by studying bat MERS-like CoVs in detail. EHA stated that it believed it was highly unlikely that the proposed work would have any pathogenic potential, but that should any of these recombinants show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than certain specified benchmarks involving log growth increases, or grow more efficiently in human airway epithelial cells, EHA would immediately: (1) stop all experiments with the mutant, (2) inform the NIAID Program Officer of these results, and (3) participate in decision-making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.
11. Based on the information provided by EHA, the NIAID concluded that the proposed work was not subject to the GoF research pause. In a letter dated July 7, 2016, however, the NIAID informed EHA that should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under the grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, EHA must stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and WIV Institutional Biosafety Committee, with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes.
Note that various statements in the above paragraphs are inconsistent with what Baric et al. state in their 2015 paper A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus shows potential for human emergence—a research paper funded by the NIAID EcoHealth Grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
As the authors state in the section on Biosafety and biosecurity:
Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/
dualuse/Documents/gain-of- function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.
As I noted in my series of essays titled The Great SARS-CoV-2 Charade, one of the silliest lies told by Dr. Anthony Fauci has been his insistence that NIAID did not approve Gain-of-Function work by EcoHealth.
Fauci has repeatedly asserted this in a loud and vexed tone, as though he is outraged by the mere proposition. And yet, Ralph Baric and his colleagues—including Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—plainly state in their 2015 paper that their Gain-of-Function experiments, performed in Baric’s UNC lab and Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab in Wuhan, were grandfathered in, given that they were funded before the 2014 Pause.
Another statement (in paragraph 11 of the recent HHS Action Referral Memo) that deserves special scrutiny is the following:
In a letter dated July 7, 2016, however, the NIAID informed EHA that should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under the grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, EHA must stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and WIV Institutional Biosafety Committee, with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes.
Again, it’s tough to interpret this statement, given that Baric et al. had, by the own admission, already generated chimeras that “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Let’s review what Baric et al. state in their Abstract about the functionality of the chimeric virus (named SHCOI4-MA15) they claimed to have generated. Using humanized mice (genetically modified to have primary human airway cells) as their experimental animals, the authors state:
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.
To this day, no legal authority that I am aware of has investigated the question: What became of the the chimeras SHC014-MA15 and WIV1-MA15? The latter chimera was documented by Baric et al. in their March 2016 paper titled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence—a chimera “that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone.”
What did the Wuhan Institute of Virology do with these chimeras? Did its researchers continue to modify and experiment with these chimeras?
Another exceedingly silly claim made by U.S. government officials—including members of Congress—is that the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to remain a mystery, given that the Chinese government and military will almost certainly never agree to perform a full and transparent investigation of their Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What did the U.S. government expect when it agreed to share cutting edge American biotechnology with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long been known to be run by the Chinese military?
One grows weary of our U.S. government officials evading responsibility by pretending to be imbeciles or by revealing themselves to be true imbeciles.
If you found this post informative, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our Substack. Penetrating the smoke and mirror show performed by the abominable U.S. government requires a great deal of time and effort.
COVID-19
Canadian judge rejects complaint against maskless workplaces as frivolous
From LifeSiteNews
Federal Court Justice Benoit Duchesne ruled that Elections Canada manager Nicolas Juzda’s complaint of feeling ‘unsafe’ following the end of mask mandates in federal workplaces was unreasonable
A federal judge ruled that complaints that maskless workplaces pose a danger to employees’ health are frivolous, ending the final chapter of COVID regulations.
According to information published on January 15 by Blacklock’s Reporter, Federal Court Justice Benoit Duchesne ruled that Elections Canada manager Nicolas Juzda’s complaint of feeling unsafe following the end of mask mandates in federal workplaces was unreasonable.
“The applicant’s concern about an unsafe workplace was based on his assessment that a significant number of people would return to the workplace under the return-to-work model, that any of these people may have contracted Covid-19 and that the non-mandatory recommendations and precautions relating to Covid-19 fell short of what he believes would be a safe work environment,” wrote the court.
Masks were mandated in federal workplaces from April 20, 2020, to February 14, 2023, under the direction of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At the same time, millions of Canadians were forced to mask in public settings such as grocery stores or hospitals.
After the mandate had lifted, Juzda, a “fully vaccinated” individual without any particular health issues, complained that he felt unsafe in the Gatineau headquarters.
“I must excuse my right to refuse work that constitutes a danger,” he wrote, referencing the Canada Labor Code that allows federally regulated staff to refuse work “that constitutes a danger to the employee.”
Juzda claimed that masking “reduces the risk of contracting Covid-19 but is of limited effectiveness if not combined with other measures, particularly during prolonged exposure to unmasked infected individuals such as being nearby in an indoor office for an entire day.”
“Covid-19 is a disease that in addition to often being extremely unpleasant during the acute period poses significant risks including death,” he continued.
“Handwashing and workplace cleaning are of minimal use in limiting the spread of Covid-19,” Juzda claimed.
His complaint was quickly dismissed as “frivolous” by executives, a move which Duchesne agreed with, calling Juzda’s concerns unwarranted.
Indeed, LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on overwhelming evidence showing that masks are ineffective in preventing transmission of COVID and that they come with harmful effects.
Back in 2021, 47 studies confirmed the ineffectiveness of masks for COVID, while 32 more confirmed their negative health effects.
According to another 2021 report, more than 170 studies have found that masks have been ineffective at stopping COVID and instead have been harmful, especially to children.
In fact, in 2020, before masks were widely mandated, Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam admitted that masks were not effective in preventing COVID.
“There is no need to use a mask for well people,” she said in the first few weeks of the pandemic. “It hasn’t been proven really to protect you from getting the virus.”
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