COVID-19
COVID-19 inquiry in UK asks whether ‘terrible consequences’ could have been avoided
LONDON (AP) — A mammoth three-year public inquiry into the U.K. government’s handling of the response to COVID-19 opened Tuesday by asking whether suffering and death could have been avoided with better planning.
Lawyer Hugo Keith, who is counsel to the inquiry, said the coronavirus pandemic had brought “death and illness on an unprecedented scale” in modern Britain. He said that COVID-19 has been recorded as a cause of death for 226,977 people in the U.K.
“The key issue is whether that impact was inevitable,” Keith said. “Were those terrible consequences inexorable, or were they avoidable or capable of mitigation?”
A group of people who lost relatives to COVID-19 held pictures of their loved one outside the inquiry venue, an anonymous London office building. The first day of public hearings began with a 17-minute video in which people described the devastating impact of the pandemic on them and their loved ones.
Britain’s pandemic death toll is one of the highest in Europe, and the decisions of then Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government have been endlessly debated. Johnson agreed in late 2021 to hold an inquiry after pressure from bereaved families.
The inquiry, led by retired judge Heather Hallett, is due to hold hearings until 2026. It is due to investigate the U.K.’s preparedness for a pandemic, how the government responded and what lessons can be learned for the future.
Senior scientists and officials including Johnson are expected to appear as witnesses. Hallett, who has the power to summon evidence and question witnesses under oath, is currently in a legal battle with the government over her request to see an unedited trove of notebooks, diaries and WhatsApp messages between Johnson and other officials.
U.K. public inquiries are often thorough, but rarely quick. An inquiry into the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath began in 2009 and issued its 2.6-million word report in 2016.
Hallett says she will release findings after each section rather than waiting until hearings conclude.
Keith said the first section would look at whether British planning relied too heavily on the mistaken assumption a future pandemic would resemble influenza.
He said that at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the government had said that “the United Kingdom was well prepared to respond in a way that offered substantial protection to the public.”
“Even at this stage, before hearing the evidence, it is apparent that we might not have been very well prepared at all,” he said.
Keith also said planning for Britain’s exit from the European Union after voters backed Brexit in a 2016 referendum distracted resources from work to prepare for potential pandemics.
“That departure required an enormous amount of planning and preparation, particularly to address what were likely to be the severe consequences of a no-deal exit on food and medicine supplies, travel and transport, business borders and so on,” he said.
“It is clear that such planning, from 2018 onwards, crowded out and prevented some or perhaps a majority of the improvements that central government itself understood were required to be made to resilience planning and preparedness.”
Business
Trudeau gov’t threatens to punish tech companies that fail to censor ‘disinformation’
From LifeSiteNews
A report from the House of Commons Heritage Committee claimed that ‘some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money.’
A report from a Canadian federal committee said MPs should enact laws to penalize social media and tech companies that don’t take action to quell so-called “undesirable or questionable” content on the internet.
MPs from the ruling Liberal, New Democratic Party (NDP), and separatists Bloc Québécois party on the House of Commons Heritage Committee summarized their opinions in a report.
“The Government of Canada notes some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money,” reads the report titled Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.
“Disinformation creates ‘doubt and confusion’ and can be particularly harmful when it involves health information,” it continues.
The report notes how such “disinformation” can cause “financial harms as well as political polarization and distrust in key institutions,” adding, “The prevalence of disinformation can be difficult to determine.”
As noted in Blacklock’s Reporter, the report claims that many of Canada’s “major societal harms” have come from “unregulated social media platforms relying on algorithms to amplify content, among them disinformation and conspiracy theories.”
Of note is the committee failed to define what “disinformation” or “conspiracy theories” meant.
Most of the MPs on the committee made the recommendation that Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms, which ironically have at one point or another clamped down on free speech themselves, “put mechanisms in place to detect undesirable or questionable content that may be the product of disinformation or foreign interference and that these platforms be required to promptly identify such content and report it to users.”
“Failure to do so should result in penalties,” the report stated.
As it stands, the federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has plowed ahead to push laws impacting free speech online.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian legal group The Democracy Fund (TDF) warned that the Liberal government’s Bill C-63 seeks to further clamp down on online speech and will “weaponize” the nation’s courts to favor the ruling federal party and do nothing but create an atmosphere of “fear.”
Bill C-63 was introduced by Liberal Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome.
Jordan Peterson, one of Canada’s most prominent psychologists, recently accused the bill of attempting to create a pathway to allow for “Orwellian Thought Crime” to become the norm in the nation.
Conservative MPs fight back: ‘A government bureaucracy should not regulate content’
Conservative MPs fought back the Heritage Committee’s majority findings and in a Dissenting Report said the committee did not understand what the role of the internet is in society, which is that it should be free from regulation.
“The main report failed to adequately explore the state of censorship in Canada and the role played by tech giants and the current federal government,” the Conservatives wrote in their dissenting report, adding, “Canadians are increasingly being censored by the government and tech giants as to what they can see, hear and say online.”
The Conservative MPs noted that when it comes to the internet, it is “boundless,” and that “Anyone who wants to have a presence on the internet can have one.”
“A government bureaucracy should not regulate which content should be prioritized and which should be demoted,” it noted, adding, “There is space for all.”
LifeSiteNews reported how the Conservative Party has warned that Trudeau’s Bill C-63 is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced or become known before the next election.
The law calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content.
The bill’s “hate speech” section is accompanied by broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics, including levying pre-emptive judgments against people if they are feared to be likely to commit an act of “hate” in the future.
Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.
COVID-19
Blue Cross Blue Shield forced to pay $12 million to Catholic worker fired for refusing COVID shots
From LifeSiteNews
A jury ruled that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan committed religious discrimination against 30-year IT specialist and Catholic Lisa Domski when it denied her a religious accommodation from the company’s COVID shot mandate.
A former IT specialist for Blue Cross Blue Shield has been awarded $12 million in damages and lost wages for her lawsuit over being fired for refusing the COVID-19 shot, in a major victory for religious liberty.
Newsweek reports that the insurance company fired 30-year employee Lisa Domski in 2021 after she sought a religious exemption to their jab mandate and was turned down. The insurer reportedly questioned the sincerity of her religious objections as a Catholic, but denied religious discrimination in the trial.
Domski further maintained that the rationale behind mandating the shot didn’t apply in her case, as 75% of her work was remote before the pandemic and had shifted to fully remote during it, meaning she could not possibly have endangered others even if the shot did prevent transmission, which has since been admitted to not be the case.
“Our forefathers fought and died for the freedom for each American to practice his or her own religion,” declared her attorney Jon Marko. “Neither the government nor a corporation has a right to force an individual to choose between his or her career and conscience. Lisa refused to renounce her faith and beliefs and was wrongfully terminated from the only job she had ever known. The jury’s verdict today tells [Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan] that religious discrimination has no place in America and affirms each person’s right to religious freedom.”
In response, the company said it was “disappointed” in the jury verdict and would be “reviewing its legal options and will determine its path forward in the coming days.”
Many religious and pro-life Americans like Lisa Domski have a moral objection to using medical products whose existence is owed in some way to abortion.
According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design and development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science has admitted the same, and even the left-wing fact-checking outlet Snopes acknowledges the statement “that such cell lines were used in the development of COVID-19 vaccines is accurate.”
Moral qualms are just one of the reasons for the ongoing controversy, next to a large body of evidence identifying significant risks to the COVID shots, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,068 deaths, 218,646 hospitalizations, 22,002 heart attacks, and 28,706 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of October 25, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID shots, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 jabs and offered several theories for a causal link.
All eyes are currently on former President Donald Trump, who last week won his campaign to return to the White House and whose team has given mixed signals as to the prospects of reconsidering the shots for which he has long taken credit. At the very least, Trump has consistently opposed mandating them and is expected to fill more federal judicial vacancies with jurists favorably inclined to the rights of employees in similar lawsuits.
Meanwhile, some hope that legal action can succeed in bringing accountability on the issue by legally targeting the companies for misrepresentation rather than their products directly. In Florida, an ongoing grand jury investigation into the shots’ manufacturers is slated to release a highly anticipated report on the injections, and a lawsuit by the state of Kansas has been filed accusing Pfizer of fraud for calling the shots “safe and effective.”
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