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Canadian gov’t lawyers try to claim Freedom Convoy leaders were overseeing an ‘occupation’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The Crown has attempted to make a case that Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were co-conspirators responsible for the uprising in Ottawa in 2022

On Day 31 of the trial against Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, government lawyers attempted to paint the two as heading a kind of “occupation” in Ottawa that was an assertion the leaders’ lawyers swiftly rejected.

According to a Day 31 update from The Democracy Fund (TDF), which is crowdfunding Lich’s legal costs, the Crown spent a “significant part” of its presentation last Thursday focused on “characterizing Lich and Barber as leaders of an “occupation.”

In court, the Crown was able to give this response to the defense, which for the past week has been submitting its case in court defending Lich and Barber, who were the main heads of the 2022 Freedom Convoy that headed to Ottawa to demand an end to all COVID mandates.

The TDF noted how the Crown directed the court’s attention to “videos depicting the blocking of roads in downtown Ottawa, including one featuring Barber expressing approval.”

The Crown also showed the court press conferences with Lich and Barber held in early 2022, along with “Facebook posts, and videos portraying them as key figures in the movement,” as noted by the TDF.

“The Crown argued that their actions and statements, including a text exchange discussing ‘misleading’ tactics, demonstrated a shared purpose in opposing mandates through unlawful means,” the TDF observed.

The Crown also highlighted to the court how Barber had called for more protestors to join the movement, including showing a TikTok video of him telling people to come to Ottawa. The Crown claimed that this video, and other evidence show Barber was trying to flood the city with protesters in some kind of “occupation.”

Lawrence Greenspon, defense counsel for Lich, objected to the Crown’s “changing positions on the furtherance submissions,” as noted by the TDF, and asked for an “opportunity to respond,” which was granted by Judge Heather Perkins-McVey.

Crown has given weak case in trying to prove that Lich and Barber influenced the protesters’ actions through their words as part of a co-conspiracy

On Day 30 of the trial, the defense detailed to the court how text message exchanges from one of the leaders showed he was trying to ensure protestors were as respectful as possible and wanted to work with police.

Last week, on Day 29, Lich’s legal counsel argued that her use of the rallying cry “hold the line” during the 2022 protests did not imply she was calling for people to engage in illegal activity.

In court last week, however, Perkins-McVey reminded the Crown that not everyone involved in the Freedom Convoy was working together. The Crown agreed this was the case.

The Crown has also been trying to justify its so-called “Carter application” before the court.

On Day 28 of the trial last week, the defense argued that a Crown request to make it so that criminal charges against one leader should apply to the other leader as well, and vice versa, should not be allowed to take place, as there is no evidence the pair worked in a conspiratorial manner.

The defense teams for Lich and Barber told the court they intended to bring forth two applications, the first being a call to dismiss the Crown’s “Carter application.”

The Crown’s so-called “Carter Application” asks that the judge consider “Barber’s statements and actions to establish the guilt of Lich, and vice versa,” TDF stated.

TDF noted that this type of 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.”

Last Thursday in court, the Crown claimed, when speaking about its Carter application, the emphasis was not “to prove every element of a conspiracy for the purpose of responding to the application brought by defence,” as noted by the TDF.

The Crown has claimed that non-violent protests could still be “disruptive and result in criminal charges,” as noted by TDF, adding that the court should consider limitations to Charter rights when looking at charges made against the leaders.

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 extensively.

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BREAKING: Days before Trump Inauguration HHS fires doctor in charge of gain of function research project

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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 system2we 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 emergencea 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.

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Canadian judge rejects complaint against maskless workplaces as frivolous

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

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.

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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