Sandra Finley

Sep 262024
 

https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/events/roundtable-discussion-on-american-health-and-nutrition-a-second-opinion/roundtable-discussion-american-health-nutrition-second-opinion/?utm_source=luminate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=chdtv&utm_id=20240925

“Sen. Ron Johnson (USA) and a panel of experts provide a foundational and historical understanding of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare industries which impact the current state of national health.”

Panelists:

  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
  • Jillian Michaels
  • Jordan Peterson
  • Max Lugavere
  • Vani Hari
  • Calley Means
  • Marty Makary, M.D., MPH
  • Brigham Buhler
  • Joe Holder
  • Mikhaila Fuller
  • Dr. Chris Palmer
  • Jason Karp
  • Courtney Swan
  • Grace Price
  • Alex Clark
Sep 242024
 

BREAKING: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announces province will amend Bill of Rights to include vaccine refusal. Legislation will be tabled in the coming weeks.

With thanks to Dan – –

2024-09-24 1:52 p.m.:

Subject:  We may move to Alberta yet!

Especially if the BC NDP remain in power this election.

1) the right over vaccinations and all medical decisions,

2) the right to not be deprived of property and

3) the right of individuals to acquire, keep and use firearms.

https://x.com/westcdnfirst/status/1838634795854966951

 

 

 

 

Sep 232024
 

PREVIOUS WAS:   For Your Selection, end of August, 2024

For Your Selection SEPTEMBER 2024

BREAKING: 

2024-09-24   Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announces province will amend Bill of Rights to include vaccine refusal. Legislation will be tabled in the coming weeks. Video’d press conference. Hallelujah!

 

NOTE:  There’s a lot of exciting news.   I’m sending this out;  not all the postings are polished up.  The 3rd posting below, Monica Smit  – – – don’t miss it.

2024-09 Covid trial concludes. Tamara Lich, Freedom Convoy. Interview of Lawyer Lawrence Greenspon. Levant, Rebel News.

2024-09- Covid: Senator Rand Paul interviewed by RFK Jr

2024-09-22 Monica Smit ordered to pay $250K after WINNING unlawful Covid arrest case. Australia. Think we can’t win? Monica will change your mind.  (URL:   https://www.rebelnews.com/the_price_of_freedom_monica_smit_speaks_out)

Andrew Bridgen on Starmer, Trump & War with Russia (URL  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQx3AARRXEs4558^tucQpx^)

Bridgen is excellent.  Among other things he talks about “the illusion of choice” in political parties. “it’s happening all around the world” . . . “corporations with more power than nations, and that’s very, very dangerous . . .”

Posted earlier re Bridgen:   2024-04-18 Covid: Another important day, the U.K. Parliament

2024-09-14 TO: Jordan Peterson & John Rustad, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors.

2024-09-12 UN ‘Pact for the Future’: Digital IDs, Vaccine Passports, Massive Censorship. Michael Nevradakis, CHD

2024-09-11 Their Vaccine Injury Reports Disappeared From VAERS — So They Developed a Tool Anyone Can Use to Track Their Own Reports. Baletti, CHD

2024-09-14 CARPAY: COVID-19 in Italy, what actually happened? “Nothing statistically significant, actually”. Western Standard

2024-09-05 Covid Apocalypse and the triumph of fear over facts, JCCF

2024-09-13 The UK and US Plot Global Speech Crackdown

2024-09-10 Reclaim the Net: strong on fighting censorship

2024-08-30 Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess? By Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone Institute

2024-09-11 Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) orders all COVID vaccines destroyed. By Tamara Ugolini, Rebel News.

2024-09-09 STIFF SENTENCES: Jail terms handed down to Coutts 2, Carbert and Olienick six-and-half years apiece. PLUS Packed gallery, disappointing outcome in Coutts sentencing. Both by By Jen Hodgson, Western Standard

2024-09- Important interview, lawyer Lisa Miron with Tamara Ugolini, Rebel News. Bill C-293.

2024-09-07 Tamara Lich’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, They’ve nothing on Tamara, as far as her actual involvement on the streets.

2024-09-10 Jordan Peterson faces five new complaints from woke censors, by Alex Dhaliwal, Rebel News. (I battle for principles of Free Speech.)

2024-09-09 1 Million March for Children gaining momentum as second event looms. By Linda Slobodian. Western Standard.

2024-08-28 In the beginning (#1 in a series to wind down to something different)

Sep 232024
 

My God!  these young women are good – – AND they’re EVERYWHERE, around the Planet!   Spectacular messaging.  Have a listen to Monica.  (No fund-raising.  No donations being sought.)

Freedom activist Monica Smit has won her case against Victoria Police for false arrests but still faces up to $250,000 in court costs.

With thanks to (Rebel News) – –

Anti-lockdown campaigner Monica Smit has secured a legal victory against Victoria Police, with a court ruling that two out of three of her arrests during Melbourne’s brutal Covid lockdowns were unlawful.

However, despite this, the founder of Reignite Democracy Australia now faces the potential burden of paying up to $250,000 in legal fees.

Smit, who represented herself during the trial, stood firm against a team of taxpayer funded lawyers, stating that her motivation was public vindication rather than financial compensation.

 

“I got exactly what I wanted, which was public vindication,” she said, after the County Court of Victoria awarded her just $4,000 in damages for the unlawful arrests.

She revealed that she had been offered a settlement of $15,000 before the trial but turned it down as it lacked accountability.

“It wasn’t about the money; I wanted a public apology,” she said. However, due to the court awarding a lower amount, Smit now faces paying the legal costs for Victoria Police, which could exceed $250,000.

 

Last Thursday 12th September, I won a 13-day trial against the government self-represented. The next day the court then ordered me to pay the loser’s legal expenses of over $240,000. Yes, it’s insane I know but don’t worry it’s not over.
1. I will NOT be running a fundraiser BUT you can help by buying my audiobook 🙂 monicasmit.com/shop
2. Don’t let the cost order be the thing you remember…remember that I won…WE WON! They want to scare you into not pursuing justice…don’t fall for it.
4. Don’t feel bad for me…this isn’t over. I will not be paying any large bills to them without negotiating and getting clear explanations.
3. This won’t stop us, this will just make us stronger. My next case will be way better and I’ve learned a lot that I can apply to that.
16.9K   Views

Smit voiced concern about the message this outcome sends to others seeking justice.

“It sends a really dangerous message that even if you win, you can still lose in the end,” she remarked, adding that she plans to appeal the decision to protect others from facing similar consequences.

Despite the financial setback, Smit remains resolute:

“I still won,” she declared, calling out Victoria Police for their unlawful actions and holding them to account in the courts.

Monica Smit / Reignite Democracy Australia
@reignitedemaust
This isn’t the end…maybe it’s only the beginning 

Image

17.6K  Views
 
Sep 152024
 
 Censorship/Surveillance

World leaders will convene later this month in New York to discuss proposals that critics believe will enshrine global digital ID and online censorship and give the U.N. secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers.

head controlling the globe with UN logo inside head

 

World leaders will convene later this month in New York to discuss proposals that critics believe will enshrine global digital ID and online censorship and give the United Nations (U.N.) secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers.

Proposals to be discussed at the 79th U.N. General Assembly include the Pact for the Future, described by the U.N. as an “opportunity to create international mechanisms that better reflect the realities of the 21st century and can respond to today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.”

The proposed Pact for the Future encompasses 11 policy proposals. These include proposals for the establishment of a U.N. “Emergency Platform” and a “Global Digital Compact,” and policy proposals on “Information Integrity” and “Transforming Education.”

Also among the U.N.’s proposals is the “Declaration on Future Generations.”

Under these proposals, the secretary-general would have “standing authority” to declare “an Emergency Platform in the event of a future complex global shock of sufficient scale, severity and reach.”

Discussions for the Pact for the Future will take place under the auspices of the Summit of the Future, described as “a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future.”

The proposals are part of “Our Common Agenda,” an initiative described as “the Secretary-General’s vision for the future of global cooperation.”

 

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‘Lack of checks and balances is very worrying’

Critics of the proposals warned The Defender that they threaten personal and health freedom, will grant the U.N. unprecedented powers and may lead to an internationally binding treaty.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst said the U.N. is attempting to attain “more executive power.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “What the secretary-general is trying to do is an end run around the United Nations charter and delegate to himself all the powers he can possibly assume.”

“The lack of checks and balances is very worrying. The member states will have very little or no power,” Terhorst said, noting that these proposals are drawing increasing opposition as they threaten national sovereignty.

The emergency powers and other proposals contained in the pact may have ominous consequences for humanity, Boyle warned.

“The most pernicious [outcomes] would certainly be extremely dangerous vaccines that probably would violate the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation, such as these mRNA vaccines, and then also censorship, outright censorship for anyone who dissents,” Boyle said.

Other experts warned the U.N. is not being fully transparent.

According to independent journalist James Roguski, “The U.N. is not being fully transparent about the process leading up to the Summit of the Future. At this time, a consensus agreement has not been reached and the status of the three documents has not been honestly presented to the general public.”

Roguski noted that a fourth revision of the Global Digital Compact was drafted Aug. 27 but “has not been made publicly available on the U.N. website.”

And according to Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, the pact “puts the U.N. ‘at the center’ of international affairs, giving the U.N. unspecified powers.” It contains no definitions for the terms used, “allowing it to be interpreted later in ways citizens may not like.”

A means of ‘turbocharging’ the ‘Great Reset’?

Critics also connected the U.N.’s proposals to the agendas of other international organizations, such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), which promoted the “Great Reset” and “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

“In spirit, the Summit and Pact for the Future is a relaunch of the Great Reset,” said Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable. “Both talk about reshaping our world, which includes a desire to transform the financial system and to implement global governance surrounding issues such as climate change, healthcare and all things related to the SDGs” (Sustainable Development Goals).

“While the WEF has no direct, authoritative or legislative power to carry out its agendas, the Pact for the Future would be signed by member states whose governments wield actual executive and legislative powers,” Hinchliffe said.

“What they are trying to do is to take the WEF agenda … and turn it into solid international law and from there into solid domestic law,” Boyle said.

According to Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda,” the U.N.’s proposals “have been written in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the ‘global governance’ regime that it aims to establish.”

Rectenwald said the proposals involve “accelerating the achievement of the SDGs” and represent the U.N.’s continued “attempt to establish a global socialist world system that is ‘inclusive’ and ‘equitable.’”

“‘Inclusion’ is achieved through such technological means as closing the ‘digital divide,’ which depends on the universal adoption of a digital identity system. Digital identity is the means by which one is ‘included’ and without which one essentially does not exist. Thus, there is to be nothing outside the system — i.e., totalitarian governance,” Rectenwald said.

 

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Global Digital Compact calls for digital IDs, vaccine passports

Accompanying the Pact for the Future is a proposal for “A Global Digital Compact — an Open, Free and Secure Digital Future for All.”

Published May 2023, the proposed compact sets out “principles, objectives and actions for advancing an open, free, secure and human-centred digital future, one that is anchored in universal human rights and that enables the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.”

However, the compact contains proposals for the introduction of digital ID, “digital public goods” and “digital product passports,” and calls for “addressing disinformation” and preventing the “misuse” of online tools.

“With digital ID, it is easier for governments to censor and threaten voices with a different opinion,” Terhorst said. “In the U.N. proposals, suppressing ‘disinformation’ or ‘hateful speech’ is mentioned. Who is to decide what information is right and what is wrong?”

Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief goes further, specifically addressing “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation.” It also calls for “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge,” but does not clarify how this “consensus” would be determined.

Similarly, a policy brief on “Transforming Education,” proposes “incorporating practices that strengthen the ability of learners and teachers to navigate the increasing flow of false and fake information.”

The compact also proposes “Novel platform-based vaccine technologies and smart vaccine manufacturing techniques … to produce greater numbers of higher-quality vaccines.”

Terhorst said the goal of digital ID is to introduce global vaccine passports that would “overrule the right of everyone to say no to a vaccination.”

Hinchliffe noted that the U.N. has “established principles for a ‘Code of Conduct‘ that calls on not just member states, but private groups such as stakeholders, digital platforms, advertisers, and news media to crush narratives that go against the U.N. and the SDGs.”

 

Secretary-general ‘trying to set himself up as the UN dictator’

According to Boyle, the U.N. secretary-general is “supposed to function as a secretary in charge of the secretariat,” but these proposals are trying to “set himself up as the U.N. dictator.” He noted that the U.N. is composed of six independent organs, but said these proposals may usurp their independence.

“He would have authority over them and arguably could exert authority over U.N. specialized agencies like the World Health Organization. That ties in with the International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Treaty,” Boyle said.

Boyle argued that by specifically referring to the Pact for the Future as a “pact,” the U.N. is intentionally “trying to turn this into an international treaty that is binding” under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

“If you call it a pact … that would clearly fall within the terms of the Vienna Convention,” Boyle said.

“We’re in the fight of our lives here. The world has to be alerted to the dangers of this pact.”

Sep 152024
 

After a group of people injured by the COVID-19 vaccine asked the FDA for an external audit of VAERS, they never heard from the agency again. Now they’re developing a system to audit vaccine injury reports in a continuing struggle to hold public health officials accountable.

vaers logo and covid-19 vaccine syringe

A team of researchers is developing a tool to track reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), so vaccine-injured people can follow what happens to the reports they submit.

As part of a broader effort to hold public health agencies accountable, the tool will also make it possible to audit the VAERS system by identifying what types of reports are deleted, insufficiently updated or contain errors.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which jointly oversee VAERS, have refused to do this work despite multiple appeals by advocates for the vaccine-injured, according to React19, the group leading the initiative.

React19, founded by a small group of medical professionals injured by COVID-19 vaccines, works with institutions and providers to increase understanding and awareness of patients experiencing lasting effects following COVID-19 and/or COVID-19 vaccines.

The group is teaming up with computer programmer Liz Willner, founder of OpenVAERS — a website that provides tools for more easily accessing and searching VAERS data — and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) to develop the tool.

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The idea for developing the automatic VAERS report tracking tool came out of a VAERS audit the group conducted in 2022 to assess how the FDA and CDC were following up on COVID-19 vaccine injury reports.

React19 worked with outside experts to review a sample of 126 VAERS reports filed by some of its members who wanted to know what happened to their reports.

After tracking down each person’s reports and following them through the VAERS system, they “were kind of shocked at how bad it is,” members of React19 told The Defender.

They found that only 61% of the reports filed were correctly logged and published in VAERS. Twenty-two percent of the reports were never issued a permanent ID and are therefore not publicly visible, 12% were deleted and in 5% of the cases, a report couldn’t be filed or their report number remains unknown due to system errors.

That means more than 1 in 3 reports searched couldn’t be found in a database that is meant to be publicly accessible and transparent. It also suggests that problems of “omission of data and underreporting may be even greater than estimated,” according to the audit report.

The group also found that the medical status of the deleted reports, “by and large, had a worse outcome than the ones that were still in the system,” they said. For example, they said, in the public-facing VAERS system, 23% of reports were for permanent disabilities — but in the deleted reports, 53% were for permanent disability.

“One of the more alarming things we found out was that not all death reports are investigated,” Brianne Dressen, React19 founder, told The Defender.

The group brought this to the attention of public health officials in their meetings, sharing examples of reports that had been updated by people’s families when they died, but didn’t show up on the public system.

They also found that many follow-up reports containing updates on worsening symptoms were gone from the system.

At the time, the group was meeting regularly with top officials, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, to discuss vaccine injuries and why the agencies were doing nothing to address them.

In those meetings, according to Dressen and React19 member Dr. Joel Wallskog, when they raised the issue that the agencies weren’t following up on VAERS reports, the FDA told them VAERS wasn’t a reliable indicator for vaccine injuries, because anyone could file an injury complaint, including “Mickey Mouse or Michael Jackson.”

“We told them we know thousands of people that have not had any follow-up on their VAERS reports that are not Mickey Mouse, and they’re suffering it every single day waiting for you guys to get back to them to investigate what happened to them,” Dressen said.

“And of course then they never did anything. So we were like, OK, fine. If they’re not going to generate the evidence, then we will ourselves.”

The group submitted their findings to Marks during a meeting with him and his team. Based on their findings they also requested an external audit of the entire VAERS system and posed a series of questions listed on their audit report webpage.

They never heard from the agencies again.

“We were like, really?” Dressen said. “We were having these regular meetings with them every one month or every two months, and then after that, they wouldn’t meet with us anymore.”

Dressen, who was injured in the AstraZeneca clinical trials and whose diagnosis of post-vaccine neuropathy and other vaccine-related disorders was confirmed by the National Institutes of Health, said her own VAERS report is not visible to the public. The agencies haven’t told her why.

More recently, still hoping for accountability from the public health agencies, React19 submitted its audit and complaint to the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The only response they received was an autoresponse confirming receipt of the complaint.

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Attempt to ‘bring power back to the people’

In its small pilot audit, React19 found the VAERS system is “obviously broken from top to bottom.” According to Dressen, “One thing we can easily conclude is that the FDA and CDC have no interest in addressing these issues.”

Now, the group is scaling up the project to do a larger audit with more data.

With help from OpenVAERS and CHD, the team built a backend, automated administrative tracking system that eliminates the need to manually search for each report and its journey through VAERS — something the analysts had to do for the first iteration of their audit.

Participants will register on the React19 website and will be invited — if they are interested — to share their stories as part of the organization’s project to collect and publish vaccine injury testimonials.

Users can share any information they have about their VAERS report — their ID number if they have one, or if not, details about their case. Then they will receive a monthly email with the status of their report.

For example, someone who has a user ID and a public-facing report will be informed if their report disappears. In the case of those people who filed a VAERS complaint but never got an ID number, the system will search each month for the record and try to find the ID.

“We’ll be able to track these reports through the system and figure out what happens to them,” Willner said. “Do they disappear? Do they appear and the person doesn’t get notified? Do they appear incorrectly?”

“So people will be able to track their own reports with less effort and React19 will be able to audit a much larger user base than they initially did.”

Willner said auditing VAERS in this way also reveals details about how the agencies are “either lying or deliberately obfuscating the process.” In the first audit, it was clear there was no systematic or automated way that, for example, reports were deleted.

The tracker and the audit will provide valuable data that no one else has. Rather than having only the stories, Willner said, they will have the data backing up those stories. “Now we have a group of injured people that are all talking with one voice.”

“Without more pressure and more discovery,” Wallskog said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to get the truth out. Ultimately, we want to get this information to the masses of people that just don’t know what’s happening, particularly with this data, and that we’ve all been duped.”

Dressen said the project is an attempt to “bring the power back to the people.”

The COVID-19 vaccine produced a large swath of vaccine injuries all at the same time, she said. Auditing the COVID-19 entries in VAERS will provide an opportunity “to show through massive numbers where those problems are, not just with the systems that are supposed to be monitoring vaccine safety, but also the actual harms themselves and what those are, but the government’s not doing their job on that.”

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The two faces of VAERS and the problem of accountability

Willner said Dressen’s injury report, sitting in VAERS limbo, spoke to one of the major issues around claims of transparency in the database — that there are two versions of VAERS, a public-facing database and a private one.

The BMJ reported last year that it investigated the VAERS database and found that the public facing database contains only initial reports. And “a private, back end system containing all updates and corrections — such as a formal diagnosis, recovery, or death.”

The CDC told The BMJ that this was part of patient confidentiality, but the publication found that in the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System, they do update the database — “raising the question of why VAERS can’t do the same.”

And during the React19 audit, the group found that VAERS was sometimes deleting people’s legitimate reports or the more detailed updated reports that some people were submitting.

Another problem, Willner noted, is that a lot of key information — such as race, pregnancy and report provider — is unnecessarily withheld from public VAERS reports. She also said the agencies sometimes leave reports on there that are clearly false or jokes, which then discredits the database in the public’s eyes.

On the CDC website, Willner said, “you’re basically looking at a doctored set of books.”

Wallskog said the agencies “try to live on both sides of the fence” with VAERS, presenting it as a key tool for monitoring vaccine injuries. But when it shows a safety signal or an issue with vaccines, they discredit it as a problematic surveillance system with a lot of limitations that can’t be trusted.

“It’s incredibly frustrating for injured people,” he said.

The team working on the new VAERS tracking system and audit said they hope it will raise public awareness and force the public health agencies to take responsibility for the vaccine injuries.

Rochelle Walensky said the CDC is charged with finding legitimate vaccine injuries and reporting them,” Willner said. She added:

“If that’s the case, where is that? We don’t have access to the actual database to figure it out so we want to know where is the report from the CDC on the people that were actually injured by the COVID vaccine that the government accepts were legitimately injured? That report doesn’t exist.”

Sep 152024
 

RELATED:   2024-09-05 Covid Apocalypse and the triumph of fear over facts, JCCF

. . . Dr. Ferguson’s track record of inaccurate claims has been glaringly evident for decades. For example, in 2005, . . .

John Carpay, writing in the Western Standard.   Carpay is the prolific President of the JCCF.

COVID-19 in Italy, what actually happened? “Nothing statistically significant, actually”.

A friend and I were discussing the pros and cons of lockdowns when he exclaimed “But just look at what happened in Italy!” as an argument to justify lockdowns. His argument was that COVID-19 inflicted massive carnage on Italy and therefore, even if lockdowns caused a lot of harm, they were worth trying, in order to prevent “what happened in Italy” from also happening in Canada.

What happened in Italy in 2020 is what has happened around the world, every day and every year, since time immemorial: people died.

Italy’s aging population peaked at 60.8 million in 2015, and has been slowly declining since then. As Italy’s population has aged, the death rate has increased slightly every year. When too few babies are born in a country, that country’s death rate (the annual number of deaths per 1,000 people) rises.

From 2009 to 2023, there has been no significant change in Italian death rates.

From 2009 to 2019, the death rate in Italy rose from 9.815 per 1,000 people to 10.566 per 1,000 people. In 2020, it rose slightly to 10.651 per 1,000 people, and continued rising each year thereafter, reaching 10.953 deaths in 2023, and 11,026 deaths as of mid-2024.

If COVID-19 was an unusually deadly killer, not just a bad annual flu, then death rates in Italy and around the world would have been significantly higher in 2020 than in 2019. This is not the case. There was nothing remarkable about the very small increase in the death rate in Italy from 2019 to 2020.

However, politicians and their media allies frightened people around the world by repeatedly showing photos and video clips of dead and dying Italians, along with body bags containing the deceased. These visual images did not shed any light on how many people were dying, whether more people were dying than previously, or what people were dying from. Scary visual images create massive fear while imparting only minimal and selective facts.

Like so many other Canadians, my friend who fretted about “what happened in Italy” was impacted emotionally by pictures of sick, dying, and dead Italians, in combination with panicked journalists claiming that something very unusual was taking place. These scary images were shown over and over again on television and the internet, for weeks and months on end, around the world.

For a country with an aging population and a death rate that rises gradually each year, 2020 was a normal year in Italy, even with COVID-19. The media did not report on this fact. Doing so would have made its COVID-19 coverage rather boring, even irrelevant.

The sensationalist “journalism” that was inflicted on us in 2020 is what one would expect from lurid gossip magazines seeking to shock and entertain, not from ethical and responsible reporters seeking to inform the public about facts and reality. The media suggested, incorrectly but very effectively, that astronomically high numbers of Italians were dying of COVID-19, when this was not the case.

With the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, the media was certain not to let facts get in the way of a good story. The media’s story was so good that it kept billions of people glued to their computer screens and smart-phones for the next several years!

What happened in Italy was replicated throughout the world: trends in death rates did not change significantly from 2019 to 2020, proving previously projected COVID-19 deaths to be wild exaggerations, especially those propagated by Dr. Neil Ferguson and the World Health Organization, which formed the basis of much of the lockdown policies implemented throughout the world.

Sadly, the highly misleading media reports about “what happened in Italy” impacted not only the average member of the Canadian public. In constitutional challenge to lockdowns in Manitoba, Gateway v. Manitoba, the judge actually mentioned “what had happened in places like Italy” as part of his rationale for upholding the Manitoba government’s violation of Charter freedoms.

The judge made no reference to Italian data or Italian death rates when using “what happened in Italy” as part of his justification of lockdowns in Manitoba.

Contrary to the panicked and inaccurate assertions about COVID-19 that are found throughout the Gateway v. Manitoba ruling, the death rate in Manitoba has remained virtually unchanged in the past 30 years.

You would never have known it from watching the daily news in 2020, but COVID-19 did not alter the death rate in Manitoba. Manitoba’s death rate from 1993 to 2023 has remained very constant: between eight and nine deaths per 1,000 people, per year. Manitoba’s death rate in 2019-2020 (COVID-19’s first year) was slightly higher than in the previous year, but also lower than the death rate in 2002-03, and lower than the death rate in 2022-23.

Canadian death rates as a whole, based on the government’s own data, show the same pattern as Italy and Manitoba. Contrary to the daily media fearmongering through use of frightening images, death numbers in Canada were not impacted significantly by Covid. In the past 40 years, we’ve gone from seeing seven deaths per 1,000 Canadians per year in 1983 to eight deaths per 1,000 Canadians per year in 2024, due to declining birth rates and an aging population.

As in Italy and Manitoba, COVID-19’s impact on Canadian death rates was negligible. From 2019 to 2020, the death rate in Canada did rise slightly from 7.758 to 7.803. However, the death rate continued to rise thereafter, to 7.849 in 2021, 7.894 in 2022, 7.940 in 2023, and 8.006 in 2024.

In Gateway v. Manitoba and other court rulings across Canada, governments did not present evidence to support their claim that COVID-19 was an extraordinary or unusual health menace.

Governments simply asserted the claim, and judges believed it. The governments’ own data — for the provinces and for Canada as a whole — shows that COVID-19 was not the unusually deadly killer that politicians and the media were making it out to be. In spite of that, and tragically, some Canadian judges have simply repeated the false media narrative in their court rulings, upholding lockdowns as justified violations of our Charter rights and freedoms.

John Carpay, B.A., LL.B, is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca)