Justin Trudeau’s opponent would ban ministers from attending WEF
Free West Media | July 10, 2022
Pierre Poilievre, who will be running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada later this year, said at a meeting in Calgary that he would ban ministers from attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland sits on the WEF’s Supervisory Board. Shadow Minister of Natural Resources Michelle Rempel Garner can also be found on the organisation’s website. She denied in an article that Canada was run by the WEF.
Earlier, WEF chief Klaus Schwab had boasted however that more than half of the Canadian cabinet was made up of Young Global Leaders of the WEF.
Poilievre thus indicated that he wanted to take Canada in a completely different direction. He is planning to take on Trudeau in the next election and defeat him.
“I have made it clear that I will ban my ministers in my cabinet from attending the World Economic Forum if I become prime minister,” he said at an earlier meeting. “Work for Canada. If you want to go to Davos, to that conference, buy a single ticket. You cannot be part of our government and pursue a policy agenda that is not in line with the interests of our people.”
Poilievre is running in the 2022 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election and is considered to be the frontrunner. He has supported those in the Canada convoy protest against vacccine mandates who were protesting peacefully and said the federal government had abused its power by invoking the Emergencies Act during the protest and proposed limiting its power and use to prevent it from being used similarly in the future.
Poilievre demonstrated his support for army reservist James Topp’s anti-mandate protest walk from Vancouver to their planned Canada Day freedom protest on Parliament Hill, by joining Topp, Paul Alexander, Tom Marazzo, a self-declared spokesperson for the Canada convoy protest and an ex-military officer, on June 30, 2022 in the final stage of Topp’s march to Ottawa.
Joe Biden and Other Politicians, not Coronavirus, Caused Children’s Educations to Suffer

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 7, 2022
President Joe Biden declared Tuesday at Twitter: “Due to the pandemic, kids are behind in math and reading.” This is yet another example of politicians’ blame shifting we have seen throughout the coronavirus scare. Kids in America have fallen behind in their educations during the coronavirus scare, but not because of coronavirus. They have fallen behind because of coronavirus crackdown actions supported by Biden and many other politicians in the name of protecting students, teachers, and staff at schools from coronavirus that did not improve safety but did interfere with students’ ability to learn.
Since early on in the coronavirus scare it was known that children tended to be in miniscule danger from serious sickness or death from coronavirus. It was also known that, at schools, teachers and other adults tended not to get coronavirus from students. Yet, most American politicians with control over education policy did not say that “for the children” schools would be kept open and continue operating normally, something that was done in other countries and a few places in America without problems. Instead, as politicians are apt to do, they used the “for the children” plea as an excuse to wreak havoc. They shut down schools, then replaced them to some extent with dysfunctional attempts at virtual education, and ultimately reopened the schools in an absurd and menacing manner.
Many schools, when they finally reopened, had all kinds of mandates that made the schools insufferable. The mandates, while failing to protect people from coronavirus, did carry health dangers of their own. Mask mandates, obsessive disinfecting of surfaces at schools and even of children’s hands, enforcement of “social distancing,” the presence of ubiquitous plastic barriers separating people, coronavirus testing, and pressure or even mandates for students to take experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots were among the nasty changes confronting students at their “new normal” schools. Students found themselves trudging through a real life version of a dystopian novel.
No wonder students’ learning suffered through the coronavirus scare. Learning was not high on the priority list of many politicians rushing to exercise their new powers. And, due to government pressure and bad choices by people in charge, the situation was similarly awful at many private schools as at government schools.
Fortunately, this dark cloud of politicians harming student’s educations in the name of countering coronavirus does have a silver lining, though only for a small subset of students. “Enough is enough,” decided some parents along the way of witnessing the school closures, the dysfunctional virtual learning efforts implemented to replace regular school, and the dystopian “new normal” schools that ultimately came into being. These parents took their children’s educations into their own hands, moving their children to homeschooling. The result is that many more children now than before the coronavirus scare are free from the politicians’ harmful meddling, whether undertaken in the name of protecting children from phantom coronavirus danger or accomplishing other objectives at variance with advancing the math and reading skills Biden mentioned at Twitter. It is a safe bet that most of these new homeschooling parents will do a much better job than the schools they left behind at making sure their children’s educations serve their children’s needs and interests.
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute
UK’s Online Safety Bill Shields Mainstream Media & Axes Alternative News Under Guise of Press Freedom
By Ekaterina Blunova – Samizdat – July 8, 2022
The British government has tabled an amendment to the Online Safety Bill seeking to prevent social media giants from taking down mainstream news without an appeal process. While London is declaring this to be a further boost to journalism protections, this new safety net is not meant to be applied on alternative media sources.
“Social media is now the main source of information about the world for 16-24-year-olds, and for all ethnic minorities in the UK,” explained Ellis Cashmore, honorary professor of sociology at Aston University in the UK.
“Yet platform moderators have practically unrestricted power to edit, and, if they wish, remove content. This is an unheard-of censorial power. I can’t think that, in history, proprietors have ever had such colossal power to control the flow and content of information, not just to one population, but to the world.”
The Online Safety Bill was first introduced in the British Parliament in March 2022 with the aim of holding social media platforms, search engines and various websites to account for hosting illegal activities or spreading harmful content.
The newly introduced amendment is “designed to guard against the arbitrary removal of articles from journalists at recognized news outlets when shared on social media platforms,” according to the UK government’s website. The authors of the amendment draw attention to the fact that half of British adults use social media for news, with Facebook*, Twitter and Instagram* being the most popular platforms. When it comes to 16-24 year-olds, the internet is the most-used platform.
Once the bill comes into force, social media giants would be required “to ensure recognized news publishers’ articles remain viewable and accessible on their sites even if they are under review by moderators.”
The introduction of the new amendment can be explained by the fact that the tech giants have proved themselves impossible to control, the professor explained.
“Tech companies operate in a relatively unrestricted way and governments around the world usually rely on the companies’ goodwill,” he said.
Still, the new amendment is focused on so-called “category one companies”, which include “the largest and most popular social media platforms”, and is not designed to shield alternative media sources.
The bill’s selective approach has been manifested by its earlier amendment obligating social media platforms “to proactively look for and remove disinformation from foreign state actors which harm the UK.” It specifically singles out Russian news, with an obvious reference to Sputnik News and RT – both presently banned by the EU and social media giants after the beginning of the Russian special operation to de-militarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
“Freedom of speech and expression are highly valued principles in western Europe and North America,” says Cashmore. “But it is interesting that, after the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, there were no protests at the decisions of western governments to prohibit broadcasts and news supplies from RT, Sputnik and maybe a few less important news outlets.”
The professor notes that wiping Russian news from the media sphere is senseless given that many westerners are interested in learning Russian perspectives. “This does not mean they would be persuaded or even influenced, but they feel entitled to make up their own minds independently. They have been denied that facility,” Cashmore stressed.
“Since February, Russia, its people and its values have been condemned, denounced and stigmatized,” said the professor. “Vladimir Putin has been personally vilified. It is difficult to see this ending, at least not for 30 years. Russia has been excluded from many world affairs and many believe Russia and the other BRICS countries may coalesce into an international configuration to rival NATO. This would become a new world order.”
Meanwhile, the bill’s amendments have raised concerns among British campaigners who are warning the government that in its current form the proposed internet safety laws are “on the verge of being unworkable,” according to The Independent.
In particular, campaigners have advocated for a number of measures to strengthen freedom of expression and rights safeguards to better protect people from marginalized backgrounds and expand transparency requirements on firms to boost access to data for researchers and academics.
*Facebook and Instagram are banned in Russia over extremist activities.
Stop the War on Doctors
My Rather Public Reply To The Threat Made Against Me By The American Board Of Internal Medicine
By Pierre Kory | July 2, 2022
Anyone in America who deviates from the group-think enforced by public health bureaucrats runs the risk of cancellation. Politicians, parents, comedians, teachers – now they’re even coming for the doctors.
As a lung and ICU specialist, I have practiced medicine for 14 years and successfully treated more than 450 patients during the pandemic. Long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, I was studying and implementing cutting-edge methods to treat critically ill patients. I’m the Senior Editor of a best-selling textbook in my field, now in its second edition, which has been translated into seven languages.
For my efforts, I now find myself on the receiving end of “disciplinary sanctions” from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), who sent me a letter threatening “suspension or revocation of board certification.”
The “sin” threatening to end my medical career was my unwillingness to go along with Fauci’s monolithic vaccines-above-all-else strategy. The failure of this approach is plain to see, and anyone with an ounce of curiosity knows there are many methods of treating the virus.
Ivermectin is one of them. This cheap, readily available generic medicine is approved by the FDA for certain uses in humans – but not for Covid-19, despite 85 controlled trials from around the world demonstrating its effectiveness. In Brazil, the largest study to date found a reduction in Covid mortality rate of 70%. In India, the second most populated country in the world, the drug has been credited with near eradication of the disease. Studies attempting to discredit ivermectin have been debunked again and again.
Other trials, such as the recent TOGETHER trial, are designed to fail from the start to drive a desired narrative. In the National Institutes of Health’s ACTIV-6, despite starting the majority of patients on treatment after five days of Covid-19 symptoms at a lower than recommended dose, they found a statistically significant reduction in the time to recovery, particularly among the most severely ill. Unsurprisingly, major newspapers reported that the study showed ivermectin was ineffective.
Despite ivermectin’s proven effectiveness, in the opinion of the ABIM, advocating for its usage is a form of “disinformation” and carries the penalty of losing one’s medical license and livelihood.
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve maintained an open mind, analyzed what works for patients, discussed strategies with fellow doctors, and conducted my own extensive research. When new data arose that changed my understanding, I admitted as much and changed course—like with the vaccines. If only the powers that be at the ABIM and our government could say the same.
Consider the evolution of accepted facts about Covid-19 safety measures from Fauci and his ilk. Despite government mandates, neither lockdowns nor cloth masks prevent transmission. They never have. It turns out former Surgeon General Jerome Adams had it right when he tweeted in March 2020 that masks are, “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus” – a comment for which he was pilloried. We are only beginning to learn the impact of the societal costs of these early preventative measures, a price our children who were kept home from school will be paying for years.
Second, there is no evidence the vaccines stop Covid-19, despite the constant lecturing from the Biden Administration and the mainstream media. In the United States and globally, cases continue to rise and fall without any correlation to the pace or percentage of population vaccinated. This is not what we were promised. In 2021, Fauci said vaccinated people were “dead ends” for the virus, and President Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Today, approximately 110,000 cases are announced daily in America, where more than two thirds of the population is fully vaccinated.
There is a backlash brewing in America right now, and it goes beyond inflation rates and gas prices. People are tired of arrogant public officials and compromised institutions who believe they have all the answers but constantly get it wrong and make no apologies as they steamroll those who don’t support the current narrative. The ABIM’s sudden (and suspiciously well-funded) persecution of doctors who stray from the party line is only the latest example.
Doctors on the ABIM’s board and across the country need to stand up against this witch hunt. It’s demeaning to honest doctors and dangerous to the patients we’ve dedicated our careers to serving.
Pierre Kory, M.D., is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
Dutch officer present at shooting incident goes into hiding
TCS Wire | July 7, 2022
A Dutch police officer present at the shooting incident on Tuesday (likely the one who shot at Jouke Hospes) has reportedly gone into hiding.
According to Leeuwarder Courant, at least one officer has been rehoused because the “atmosphere around him became too grim.”
“The man lives in a village in the municipality of Opsterland. He left the village under guard on Wednesday evening. His house will be secured on Thursday,” reports Leeuwarder Courant.
The incident occurred late Tuesday night, just before midnight, wherein fired two rounds at an unarmed teenager in his tractor who was leaving the scene of a protest.
Jouke Hospes, the 16-year-old that was shot at by Dutch police for participating in a distribution centre blockade, says that he is currently under investigation for attempted manslaughter.
In a message obtained by The Counter Signal, Hospes says that he was shocked to see video of the incident that led to his arrest after being released from prison.
“I still can’t figure out why the police fired. The images [and video] show very well that I’m not doing anything wrong… I’m lucky that I survived.”
He continues, saying that he is now under an active investigation for attempted manslaughter.
“I have been released for the attempted manslaughter and am still a suspect tonight in my own bed,” Hospes says. [translated from Dutch]
Police are claiming that the teen attempted to ram into police and vehicles and [that they] had fired warning shots before firing two “targeted shots.”
“At about 10:40 pm, tractor drivers attempted to drive into officers and service vehicles. This happened at the entrance Mercurius/A32 in Heerenveen. A threatening situation arose. Warning shots were fired, and targeted shots were fired,” Politie Fryslân tweeted following the incident. [translated from Dutch]
“A tractor was hit. A tractor drove away from the incident and was stopped shortly afterwards on Jousterweg. Three suspects have been arrested. No one was injured.”
However, while police claim that Hospes attempted to ram into them before they fired two shots at him, video taken by onlookers tells an entirely different story.
Video shows that Hospes was driving very slowly in his tractor, was as far away from the officers as he could be without going off the road, and was clearly attempting to leave the scene without incident.
Hospes describes the moments leading up to his arrest, saying when farmers heard that a mobile police unit was going to do a sweep of the distribution centre blockade, they collectively decided it was time to break it up and were already starting to leave when police arrived on the scene.
“Behind me, it was clear, so I decided to go around it. I calmly crossed the sidewalk and drove very calmly. I went to see if traffic was approaching and if I could cross the road. I was driving [slowly], and suddenly I heard a PANG in my right ear. I thought there soon would be a second one.”
“I didn’t have any damage, so I thought it was a rubber bullet… However, I stopped for a while at Oudehaske, and when I was walking around the tractor, I saw a hole in the iron. All kinds of thoughts went through my head.”
Images taken after the shooting show clear bullet holes, suggesting that officers were using live rounds against protesters.
Hospes was later arrested and subsequently freed the next day after Dutch protesters showed up in droves outside the prison holding him.
As previously reported by The Counter Signal, the police’s actions come after several municipalities declared emergency ordinance orders, bestowing upon police unprecedented powers to deal with protesters blockading food distribution centres.
Since the orders were declared, police have been seen wearing military-style equipment, have used tear gas against protesters, and have now shown that they’re willing to fire on anyone, even a teenage boy.
Moreover, several videos have been taken across the Netherlands of heavily armed police waving pistols around at traffic stops, signifying a dark turn in the protests.
LA parents can now file for damages from the illegal COVID vaccine mandates
A judge has ruled that the LA Unified School District wasn’t authorized to mandate the COVID vaccines or force kids into independent study. If you were injured, I’ll help you recover damages.
By Steve Kirsch | July 5, 2022
An important decision on vaccine mandates was just signed and released this morning.
The case was filed by a father on behalf of his son who attends the Science Academy STEM LAUSD magnet school. The lawyer in this case was Lee Andelin.
LAUSD will likely appeal the decision, but it’s unlikely they will prevail.
The decision means that:
- LAUSD was wrong in requiring the COVID vaccines
- For all but ten vaccines, a personal belief exemption must be respected.
- LAUSD can no longer send kids away from their school and to independent study because they are not vaccinated.
- Only the Department of Public Health can mandate vaccines, not the schools
- The ruling applies to all students, not just the student filing the complaint
- Parents whose children were injured, either by having to have their child vaccinated (regardless of whether your child has a vaccine injury or not) or whose child was shifted into independent study, now have an opportunity to sue for monetary damages.
If you are in the last category, please register here and I’ll let you know how you can join with other parents to preserve your rights and to potentially recover monetary damages.
EPA now stuck between a rock and a hard place on CO2
By David Wojick | CFACT | July 5, 2022
There are lots of happy reports on the Supreme Court’s ruling throwing out EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan. Some go so far as to suggest that EPA is barred from regulating power plant CO2 emissions.
It is not quite that simple and the result is rather amusing. EPA is still required to regulate CO2 under the terms of the Clean Air Act, but that Act provides no way to do that regulation. The Clean Power Plan attempted to expand an obscure minor clause in the Act to do the job but SCOTUS correctly ruled that the clause does not confer that kind of massive authority.
EPA is between a rock and a hard place. It should tell Congress that it cannot do the job and needs a new law, along the lines of the SO2 law added to the Act in 1990, curbing emissions. But such a law has zero chance of passing in the foreseeable future.
EPA is stuck. What they will now do is anybody’s guess. Enjoy their dilemma!
Here is a bit more detail on the situation.
On one hand EPA’s legal mandate to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act is clear. First the (prior) Supreme Court ruled that CO2 was a “pollutant” under the Act. This is because buried in the 1990 Amendments was a clause adding causing climate change to the definition of “pollutant”. The Court accepted the government’s claim that the CO2 increase could cause climate change. The new Court could change this but is unlikely to do so.
Given CO2 as a pollutant under the Act, EPA was required to decide if it was dangerous to human well being or not. It then produced an “endangerment finding” saying that CO2 was indeed a threat.
Given these two steps the Act then requires EPA to regulate CO2. It has been trying to figure out how to do so ever since.
The deep problem is that the Clean Air Act specifies very specific regulatory actions, none of which work for CO2. This is because CO2 is nothing like the true pollutants that the Act was developed to regulate.
The Act’s mainline mechanism is the NAAQS (pronounced “nacks”) which stands for National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These standards specify the ambient concentration levels allowed for various pollutants. Carbon dioxide’s cousin carbon monoxide is one of these pollutants. Locations that exceed the NAAQS receive stiff penalties.
Clearly this mechanism assumes that local levels are due to local emissions, which can be controlled to achieve and maintain compliance.
But CO2 is nothing like that. There is no way America can control the ambient CO2 level. Even if humans are causing that level (which is itself controversial), it is then based on global emissions. CO2 is not a local pollutant.
For a CO2 NAAQS EPA could either set the standard below the global level or above it. If below then all of America would be out of compliance and subject to the Act’s penalties, with no way to comply. It is very unlikely that the Court’s would allow these universal endless penalties.
If the CO2 NAAQS were above the present level then there would be no legal basis for EPA taking any action, since compliance was complete.
So the NAAQS mechanism simply does not work.
Another major mechanism is to control the emissions of what are called “hazardous air pollutants” or HAPS. EPA explains it this way:
“Hazardous air pollutants are those known to cause cancer and other serious health impacts. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate toxic air pollutants, also known as air toxics, from categories of industrial facilities.”
But CO2 is nontoxic, so not a HAP. In fact our exhaled breath contains over one hundred times the ambient level of CO2, that is over 40,000 ppm. Clearly if ambient 400 ppm CO2 were toxic we would all be dead. It would be absurd for EPA to try to classify CO2 as a HAP. No Court would stand for it.
The only other piece of Clean Air Act that EPA might try to use is called “New Source Performance Standards” but as the name says they only apply to new construction (or major modifications). The myriad existing fossil fueled power plants that supply our daily juice would not be covered. Even worse if EPA drove up the cost of new gas fired plants we would likely restart the host of retired coal fueled plants. What a hoot that would be!
So there you have it. EPA bought itself CO2 as a Clean Air Act pollutant, but there is no way under the Act to regulate it. To mix metaphors, EPA is all dressed up with no place to go. The Supreme Court decision returned EPA to its regulatory dead end.
I find this ridiculous situation to be truly laughable. What were they thinking? Does the EPA Administrator understand this? Has he told the President? How about Congress?
EPA’s problem with CO2 is much deeper than the latest Supreme Court Decision. The Clean Air Act simply does not work for CO2. What will EPA do?
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy.
Every third Dutch farm to be closed down or expropriated!
Free West Media | July 6, 2022
CO 2 hysteria was so yesterday. In the Netherlands there’s now a nitrogen alarm. Ironically, at a time when the specter of food shortages and hunger is looming, the “Green Deal” of the all-powerful, misanthropic EU has prompted Commissioner Frans Timmermans to demand that ten percent of agricultural land be set aside across Europe.
In order to help this madness prevail, a Dutch “nitrogen problem” has been invented. On this basis, they want to force the livestock farmers – who are named as the main culprits – to give up their businesses. The Dutch “Minister for the Environment and Nitrogen”, Christianne van der Wal, announced that 30 percent of livestock farmers would have to give up their farms. Those affected now have the choice to give up their farms voluntarily and leave, or to pledge never to practice their profession again – only then would they be compensated. Those who do not comply face expropriation by the state. The aim is to reduce nitrogen emissions by up to 95 percent by 2030.
The Netherlands is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of food, exceeded only by the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China, according to World Bank statistics.
So for at least a third of farmers it is a matter of survival. No wonder, then, that the protest is huge. For weeks, the angry farmers have been blocking roads and marching in front of government buildings to make their displeasure visible. Among other things, the access roads to some supermarkets were blocked. It was also announced that the access roads to the international airport in Amsterdam would be closed.
A few days ago farmers broke through a police barrier with their tractors and sprayed the minister’s house with liquid manure – symbolically the right thing to do because nitrogen is a building block for biological life on earth, the most abundant element in the atmosphere. It needs carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, lightning and bacteria, to provide “reactive” nitrogen. Fertilizer is just the workaround. Unbelievably, the Rutte government is targeting the manure people!
The mainstream media tried to sweep the issue under the carpet as tens of thousands of farmers took to the streets for days to demonstrate against EU regulations and government plans that would ruin Dutch agriculture. The police announced tougher action against the demonstrators, which, however, will probably only result in further escalation.
In Stroe alone, 30,000 farmers from all over the Netherlands came together to demonstrate against the government’s plans. In concrete terms, these plans stipulate that nitrogen emissions must be greatly reduced following a ruling by the highest court. In natural areas, the value is to be reduced by 12 to 95 percent, depending on the area category. According to government figures, this could mean the end for about a third of Dutch livestock farms, but it is much higher, farmers say.
The police meanwhile speak of a “threatening and unacceptable situation”. According to polls, about 45 percent of the Dutch population back the protests. In October, it was still 38 percent.
Shooting at protesters
The police fired shots at a farmers’ protest in Heerenveen on Tuesday evening. According to Facebook group Verzet Friesland, 16-year-old Jouke was shot at by police as he drove off with his tractor.
“The media are shouting that he drove into them, but it is very clear on camera that that was not the case. He just wanted to drive home.” Police opened fired on Jouke. Fortunately he was not injured, but the bullet missed him by two centimetres.
“The photos that are circulating show that the bullet(s) hit the cab of the tractor and missed Jouke by a hair. There was no shooting at tyres or in the air. It is by sheer luck that the police and the ministry responsible do not have a fatality on their conscience,” said lawyer Sietske Bergsma. Dozens of farmers tell the same story of police brutality.
Dutch anti-globalists are praying that this protest be the straw that break the Rutte camel’s back.
‘We Need to Be Allowed to Ask Questions,’ Says Canadian Prof Suspended for Questioning COVID Shots for Kids

By Julie Comber, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 5, 2022
A Canadian university professor suspended for comments he made during a December 2021 conference about COVID-19 vaccines in an interview this week with The Defender called for “openness, critical thinking and to stop believing what we are being told is the truth.”
“We need to be allowed to question again,” said Patrick Provost, Ph.D., an infectious and immune diseases researcher who learned June 13 that Laval University in Quebec City was suspending him for eight weeks without pay.
Laval University also suspended Nicolas Derome, Ph.D., a professor in the university’s biology department, for concerns he raised in November 2021 about Quebec’s campaign to vaccinate 5— to 11-year-olds.
In his interview with The Defender, Provost also discussed an article he wrote questioning COVID-19 policies, published June 22 on the Québecor media platform, then retracted a day later.
For the article, Provost used Quebec’s publicly available data to raise questions about the province’s management of the pandemic. The province of Quebec is home to about 8.5 million people, the second-most populous province in Canada.
“I was so happy when I found out my article was going to be published,” Provost told The Defender, “I really thought it would be a game-changer in the public debate about COVID-19 [in Quebec]. That finally, based on official public data, we could start to discuss the situation.”
However, by the next day, June 23, Québecor had removed Provost’s article from all of its websites.
Sébastien Ménard, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Journal de Québec, one of Québecor’s publications, tweeted (in French):
“Although we encourage debating ideas, we have decided to remove this letter [by Dr. Provost] from our websites. After verification, some of the elements it contained were inaccurate or could mislead the public, which we cannot support.”
Commenting on the retraction, Provost said:
“I’m really worried about the direction we are heading, about our democracy. Why hide the truth? These numbers are real, this was just my analysis of them. Maybe it’s a disturbing truth.”
Libre Média, a new Quebec-based independent media website, on June 24 published Provost’s article so it is still publicly available.
Libre Média prefaced the article with a note that it was publishing Provost’s article in full, “in accordance with its mission to protect freedom of the press.”
Criticism of COVID vaccines for young children led to suspension
Two days after Québecor removed his article, Provost went public with the news that Laval notified him on June 13 that the university was suspending him, effective June 14.
Provost filed a grievance through his union, the Union of Laval University Professors.
According to Provost, he sent an email to all his colleagues at Laval University last December, in which he urged them to engage in debates on COVID-19 vaccination and public health measures, because he felt public debate had been lacking.
In the email, he gave the example of a lecture he had given at a conference on Dec. 7, 2021, in which he criticized Quebec’s campaign to vaccinate 5- to 11-year-old children against COVID-19.
The conference was organized by Réinfo Covid Québec, a Quebec collective of caregivers, doctors and citizens “gathered around an idea: the need for a fair and proportionate health policy in Quebec and elsewhere in the world.”
“As a result of this, a professor from the faculty of medicine filed a complaint against me in January, outraged that I was raising questions,” Provost told The Defender. “In particular, that I said the risks of adverse effects [of Pfizer’s mRNA shot] outweighed the benefits for children.”
Provost said his suspension didn’t factor into Québecor’s decision this week to censor his article, as he had not made the news of his suspension public before the article was removed.
COVID mortality rate ‘greatly overestimated’ data show
In his article, Provost noted that the vaccine mandates for travel within Canada and for federal public servants had been suspended two days before, on June 20.
However, mandates could be reimposed, so Provost invited readers to consider a true portrait of the impact of COVID-19 in Quebec, based on the province’s own publicly available data.
As of June 19, when Provost accessed the cumulative data online, there were 15,462 deaths related to COVID-19 (Chart 2.1) out of a total of 1,077,256 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (Chart 1.1), for a calculated mortality rate of 1.44%.
Provost wrote:
“This mortality rate is greatly overestimated, mainly (i) by including, in the numerator, deaths with, and not because of, COVID-19, which were apparently as numerous, and (ii) by excluding, in the denominator, cases of asymptomatic or unreported infections, which were several times higher than the reported symptomatic infections.”
Provost then turned to official figures from the Institut de la statistique du Québec and the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), and made these five observations based on the data:
- There was no excess all-cause mortality since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, except for people age 70 and over during the first wave (April to June 2020) and in January 2022, shortly after the lockdowns and curfews were imposed, which was also when the third vaccine doses were offered.
- More than 90% of people age 70 or older who died with or from COVID-19 had two or more pre-existing medical conditions (Table 2.2).
- 69.2% of the people who died were over the age of 80 (Figure 2.3), thus the average age of people who died with or from COVID-19 was beyond their life expectancy at birth.
- The number of deaths (Table 2.1) compared to the number of cases (Table 1.1) is 0.07% in people with no pre-existing conditions, 6 times higher in people with one pre-existing medical condition (0.4%), and 98 times higher in people with two or more pre-existing conditions (6 .9%), according to data last updated on May 2.
- Between 0 and 5 people under the age of 40 (with less than one pre-existing medical condition) have died in Quebec since the start of the pandemic (Table 2.2).
According to Provost, early on in the pandemic, the analysis of official government data showed two of the main risk factors for complications and death from COVID-19: “advanced age and the number of pre-existing medical conditions, in particular, obesity.”
“The threat of COVID-19 was very real,” wrote Provost, “but was it of the magnitude that we have been told?”
According to the public data available on the sites of INSPQ and of Quebec Data Partnership, from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, there were 20,616 hospitalizations due to COVID-19 out of a total of 986,607 hospitalizations — so approximately 2.1% of hospitalizations were a result of COVID-19 infections.
At the worst point in the crisis, COVID-19 hospitalizations peaked at 5.9% of the total.
Given the above data, Provost asked if the public health measures taken were justified. He raised a series of questions, including:
- Did the data support imposing such severe and comprehensive health measures, rather than targeted ones that would protect those most at risk?
- Did the data justify not considering the collateral effects of restrictive health measures?
- Did the data justify preventing physicians from making individualized risk versus benefit assessments of a medical intervention (COVID-19 vaccination) with their patients?
Provost also asked if the data justified overriding the right of individuals to consent, in a free and informed manner, to an injection that is still experimental.
He questioned mass vaccination of the entire population for a disease that particularly affects the very old and sick, and of imposing vaccination on young people and workers.
Quebec used vaccine passports, and Provost asked if the data justified restricting the right to access public places and hindering the freedom of movement by train or plane of people who were not “adequately” vaccinated, “even though the shots do not prevent infection or transmission.”
With respect to governance, Provost said the government assumed power by self-proclaiming and perpetuating a state of health emergency and certain measures beyond the emergency period.
He noted that professionals and academics were muzzled if they were critical of health measures, through pressure from their professional organizations or their institutions, under penalty of losing their jobs.
He also pointed out that the polarized and polarizing media coverage sowed fear, anxiety and division, and that citizens were encouraged to discriminate against people who were not vaccinated against COVID-19.
As part of the remedy to what he viewed to be heavy-handed public health measures, Provost stressed the “importance of depoliticizing decisions that infringe on individual rights and freedoms by establishing, for example, by a Council of Scholars that is independent from the government, so that these decisions are based on science and are made more quickly.”
Provost closed his article by calling for a review of the management of the pandemic:
“An assessment of the management of this crisis, which has revealed the limits, even the flaws, of our system and our democratic life, is essential.
“We owe it to too many seniors whom we have failed to protect, as well as to those whose rights and freedoms have been violated for too long.”
Dozens of messages of support
Provost told the Defender that in the hours before his article was pulled, one idea was to have another professor write a rebuttal to his article.
But instead, Quebecor’s news sites simply deleted the article.
On Monday, Joel Monzée wrote an article in Libre Média about the censorship of Provost’s article and its implications for science. “Science is only science because it questions itself,” Monzée wrote.
Monzée said that with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, “It is blithely claimed that there is a scientific consensus. However, this only exists because certain academic personalities seem to have enough influence over their colleagues to curb any questioning of the consensus, at least in public.”
Monzée asked, if there were inaccuracies in Provost’s article, then why not address them with a counter-analysis?
Provost is the supervisor of four Ph.D. students whose work has been affected by his suspension.
“Because of my suspension, I cannot go on the campus, enter the Research center or talk to them,” Provost said. “They are essentially left alone. They are collateral damage.”
Provost said that though the situation was difficult, in the past few days he had received dozens of messages of support, and also observed that a growing number of citizens “have a thirst for truth and openness.”
Provost told The Defender, “I would like to raise awareness about how our society is evolving, it’s not in a good direction. It is getting to the point where private interests will be directing our country, we will just be servants.”
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London wants social media to “proactively” tackle would-be disinformation from states such as Russia
Samizdat | July 5, 2022
London has proposed new legislation that would require social media to “proactively” tackle “disinformation” that allegedly pours into the UK from foreign states such as Russia and harms the nation, the government said on Tuesday. Platforms failing to do so will be subject to huge fines or could be blocked.
The legislation, which is subject to parliamentary approval, would oblige social media platforms to hunt down what the government believes to be fake accounts that act in the interests of foreign states and seek to influence UK politics, including elections.
The new amendment will also compel social media, search engines and other websites to crack down on such accounts in order to minimize the number of people exposed to “state-sponsored disinformation.”
“We cannot allow foreign states or their puppets to use the internet to conduct hostile online warfare unimpeded,” said Nadine Dorries, the UK culture and digital secretary, pointing out that the Ukraine conflict has shown that Russia is ready to weaponize information.
According to the proposed law, social media will have to make creating fake accounts more difficult and will also need to fight bots used for misleading the public. Ofcom, the British media regulator, will have the authority to fine any internet resources that don’t comply up to 10% of their global turnover.
The amendment is set be included in the National Security Bill, which will be discussed by British MPs next week.
This latest move by the UK government would directly target, for instance, the Russian pranksters known as Vovan and Lexus, who had pulled a stunt on UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel. As a result, their channel was banned by YouTube in late May.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticized the West for harassment of Russian journalists, saying that Western countries have “buried the freedom of speech with their own hands.” In his view, Western governments intentionally create their own laws allowing them to decide what is “freedom of information” and what is “propaganda.”


