How a $240 million messaging machine put a three-year-old puppet to work selling an mRNA shot to parents of infants — and what the government has quietly admitted since.
It’s a well-made piece of persuasion. Elmo, who has been three and a half years old since 1984, shows off his “super duper” bandage. There “was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Then his father, Louie, looks into the camera and speaks to every hesitant parent in America:
“I had a lot of questions about Elmo getting the COVID vaccine. Was it safe? Was it the right decision?”
Eleven seconds later, the doubt has been resolved for you:
“I learned that Elmo getting vaccinated is the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy and enjoying the things they love.”
A hug follows. Then an announcer: “It’s okay to have questions about COVID vaccines for your kids.”
That’s the move worth studying. The ad takes the parent’s instinct to ask questions, gives it to a beloved puppet, and answers it before the parent has a chance to. It presents doubt so it can close it down.
This was not a whimsical one-off from a children’s television workshop. It was one output of what its own organizers called the largest communications program in our nation’s history, built with federal public-health agencies, a major medical trade association, and tens of millions of corporate dollars.
Four years later, Pfizer-BioNTech’s product is no longer authorized for children ages six months through four years. Federal guidance and product labeling have also narrowed which pediatric uses are on-label, a shift sharply at odds with the PSA’s broad, categorical reassurance. Nobody made a puppet video about that.
This is the story of who built the campaign, what it cost, and what came after.
Five institutions. Each one deserves a name and a face.
Sesame Workshop
The nonprofit behind Sesame Street produced and released the spot. Its campaign lead was Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Senior Vice President of US Social Impact. Its president at the time, Sherrie Westin, was named CEO in July 2024.
The clearest statement of what Sesame thought it was offering came from its own chief marketing officer. Launching an earlier round of vaccine PSAs, Samantha Maltin, EVP and CMO, said the goal was to:
“… harness the power of Sesame Workshop and the reach of the Ad Council…”
Harness the power. The asset being put to use was fifty years of trust that parents and children have placed in these characters.
The Ad Council
The Ad Council turns corporate media budgets into “public service” messaging. Its president and CEO, Lisa Sherman, was the campaign’s public face. On the Elmo spot:
“It’s important that parents feel informed and confident about what the COVID-19 vaccines mean for their families, and we are proud to work with our partners, medical experts – and of course Elmo – to spread that message.”
She also named the urgency: this was “an important decision many need to make in advance of the upcoming school season.”
COVID Collaborative
The COVID Collaborative is a bipartisan assembly of former officials, and it convened the vaccine education initiative with the Ad Council. Its CEO is John Bridgeland, former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Its president is Gary Edson, and its co-chairs are former Idaho Gov. and Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R) and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D). The Collaborative is a project of UNITE, chaired by Tim Shriver.
The AAP, the pediatricians’ professional association, was the other named production partner. Its president in 2022 was Dr. Moira Szilagyi. Looking back later, she said: “Somewhere what got lost in our country, I think, was what a miracle these vaccines were.”
Keep the AAP in mind. It comes back in Part IV.
Part II: Follow the Money
The Elmo spot was built on a large funding structure, and its size helps explain how thoroughly this message saturated American media.
The corporate fund. On November 23, 2020, before any vaccine was authorized, the Ad Council announced a $50 million fund for the COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative, created with the COVID Collaborative. By February 2021 it had exceeded that goal.
The COVID Collaborative reports more than $52 million raised. The leading contributors it names are Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Cisco, CVS Health, Facebook, General Motors, Google and YouTube, the Humana Foundation, NBCUniversal/Comcast, Salesforce, Verizon, Walgreens, and Walmart.
Two of those names stand out. CVS Health and Walgreens both gave the shots the campaign was promoting in their own pharmacies.
The donated media. The money was only the seed. By October 26, 2021, the initiative had surpassed its goal of $240 million in donated media and related publicity. Donors of airtime and ad inventory included Disney (ABC, ESPN, Hulu), FOX, NBCUniversal and Telemundo, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia, Facebook and Instagram, Google and YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and The Weather Channel.
The taxpayer layer. Alongside the private effort, HHS ran its own $265 million COVID public-education campaign starting in summer 2020. That included a $250 million NIH award to the Fors Marsh Group, which created the “We Can Do This” brand, all paid for through a $300 million interagency agreement drawing on CDC’s CARES Act funds. Under its “Vaccinate with Confidence” framework, the CDC funded more than 200 partners. Across the March 2021–December 2022 rollout, it funded 110 primary and 1,051 subrecipient partners at the national, state, and community level.
A note on accuracy. I have not found documentation that Pfizer or Moderna directly paid for the Elmo spot, and the campaign materials don’t list them as partners. Pfizer does appear as a Sesame Workshop donor in later years, in the $100,000–$249,999 band of its 2024 impact report. That’s worth knowing, but it’s a separate fact. The documented structure is damning on its own: corporate money, federal science guidance, and a medical trade association, all speaking through a puppet.
Part III: It Wasn’t One Ad
The Elmo spot was the youngest-audience edge of a sustained effort to put Sesame Street characters to work for vaccine messaging.
June 2022: Elmo’s PSA, released days after the FDA’s emergency authorization for children as young as six months.
Later: Sesame Workshop, the Ad Council, COVID Collaborative, and CDC launched a further series of PSAs with Elmo, Louie and other Muppets, “created in close partnership with the CDC.”
“When it starts getting into complex territory that involves the power of the state, the influence of pharmaceutical companies, the impact of coronavirus on young children — these are not issues I want resolved by members of Elmo’s family.”
The critics were dismissed as cranks at the time. Here is what the government has said since.
Part IV: The Walk-Back Nobody Advertised
There was no $240 million campaign for any of what follows. No Muppets and no hug at the end. It came out as label changes, regulatory memos, and footnotes in clinical guidance.
The cardiac warning got stronger
On June 25, 2025, the FDA required and approved expanded warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis on Pfizer’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax. The new label estimates about 8 cases per million doses in people aged 6 months through 64 years, and about 27 per million in males aged 12 through 24, in the week after vaccination.
The most important sentence isn’t about frequency, though. It’s about what happened to the hearts afterward:
“… at a median follow-up of approximately 5 months post-vaccination, persistence of abnormal cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) findings that are a marker for myocardial injury was common. The clinical and prognostic significance of these CMR findings is not known.”
Read it twice. Five months out, markers of heart-muscle injury were “common,” and the agency says their long-term significance is “not known.” This isn’t a critic’s claim. It comes from an FDA-funded, FDA-co-authored study, and it’s now printed on the label.
The spot told parents “there was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Nobody in the ad said “unknown long-term cardiac significance.”
The authorization for the youngest children was pulled
That is the age group the Elmo spot was released to reach. It went out days after emergency authorization opened the shots to children as young as six months. Four years later, one of the two products it promoted to parents of those children can’t legally be given to them.
Healthy children are now “off-label”
The broad “everyone six months and older” recommendation is gone. In May 2025, HHS dropped the routine recommendation for healthy children, and the CDC moved to what it calls shared clinical decision-making.
CDC’s current guidance, updated September 23, 2026, limits Moderna’s approval for the youngest children to those with “at least one condition that places them at increased risk for severe COVID-19.” Then it states the conclusion outright:
“Vaccination of children 5-11 years of age with any product other than Spikevax or Comirnaty and vaccination of children in this age group without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”
“Vaccination of persons 12-64 years of age without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”
In 2022, the message was that vaccinating Elmo was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.” In 2026, the CDC’s own wording is that giving the shot to a healthy child is off-label.
The deaths question
On November 28, 2025, Dr. Vinay Prasad, then director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, sent staff a memo headed “Deaths in children due to COVID-19 vaccines and CBER’s path forward.” He wrote that career staff “have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” based on an initial review of 96 child deaths reported to VAERS between 2021 and 2024.
The FDA’s formal analysis, made public in May 2026, came back more cautious. Of the 96 reports reviewed, none were classified as “certain.” Five were classified “possible” and two “probable,” mostly involving myocarditis, with an average age of 13. The agency stressed that these classifications don’t prove causation.
Media coverage framed that result as a debunking. Set the headline aside, though. The FDA’s own conservative review, using WHO causality criteria, still found seven child deaths it could not rule out as vaccine-related, and it called two of them probable.
And yet, still being promoted
This is where the irony stops being subtle.
Visit the FDA’s parent-facing page today, Vaccines for Children – A Guide for Parents and Caregivers. The COVID-19 vaccine is still listed alongside measles and polio among “the most commonly administered vaccines.” And parents are still told:
“Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is the best way to prevent COVID-19, including the potential consequences of hospitalization and death.”
That’s Louie’s line almost word for word, four years later, from the same agency whose label now carries the cardiac warning, whose authorization for under-5s was pulled, and whose own reviewers flagged seven child deaths.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, a production partner on the Elmo spot, hasn’t backed off either. As of September 2026, the AAP recommends COVID-19 vaccination for “all infants and children ages 6 months through 23 months,” and for “anyone ages 2 to 18 who isn’t at risk but whose parents or guardian wants them to get a shot.”
So we have two different postures at once. The regulator has narrowed approval, expanded the warning, and reclassified healthy-child use as off-label. The professional association that helped make the puppet ad still recommends the shot for every baby. And the FDA’s own parent guide still uses the 2022 talking points.
Part V: What They’ll Say — and Why It Doesn’t Save Them
Serious readers deserve the strongest counterargument, so here it is.
That’s a legitimate data point and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t answer the question this piece is asking, for three reasons.
First, the comparison is an average over a population of teenagers and young adults. It says nothing about a healthy toddler with near-zero risk of severe disease. That’s the child this campaign targeted, and the child for whom the CDC now calls the shot off-label.
Second, it doesn’t address the finding printed on the label: persistent markers of heart-muscle injury at five months, of “not known” significance. The open letter discussed below says there are “no studies demonstrating prevention of hospitalization or death” in children. If that’s right, an unknown cardiac risk is being weighed against a benefit that was never shown.
Third, and most importantly, the argument here doesn’t depend on any contested injury number. It depends on an asymmetry. When the product was being promoted, it got a puppet, $50 million, a quarter-billion in donated airtime, the CDC’s logo, and the pediatricians’ endorsement. When the regulator narrowed the product, it got a label revision and a footnote. The public was sold a certainty the evidence never supported, and was never told when that certainty was withdrawn.
That isn’t public health communication. It’s a marketing campaign that never issued a correction.
Part VI: The Petition — Why I Signed
Earlier this month, 168 physicians, scientists, researchers, lawmakers, and health-freedom advocates, representing more than 63 million followers, sent an open letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump demanding removal of the mRNA platform. The effort was coordinated by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden. The signatories include Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louisiana Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Sean Troxclair, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Tucker Carlson, and others.
I’m one of them, and I want to explain why.
The letter’s first demand is to “ban mRNA/gene therapy-derived technologies for all vaccines.” That includes the products still being given to children. Its other demands are to end the PREP Act declaration and its “ironclad liability shield for manufacturers and administrators,” ask Congress to repeal the PREP Act, ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, end the incentive structures that push providers toward medical coercion, and end conflicts of interest at the CDC, FDA, NIH, and NIAID.
On children specifically, the letter makes the point this whole piece has been building toward:
“Parental choice is not realistic when parents are not getting informed consent on the true risks of these products.”
It also takes on the “shared clinical decision-making” framework directly:
“By treating the decision to inject a child with mRNA as a ‘shared decision,’ while treating routine injections as the default, a dangerous legal precedent is being set that assigns powers to the federal government that have historically belonged solely to parents.”
According to the letter, more than 50 million Americans received mRNA COVID shots this year, including about 7 million children, and HHS has awarded $1.24 billion in contracts to Pfizer for future mRNA shots, “including for children.”
The Elmo spot is exactly why that line about informed consent matters. You can’t give informed consent to a hug from a puppet. A one-minute ad that turns a parent’s hesitation into a script and then answers it in eleven seconds isn’t informing anyone. It’s persuasion aimed at the people least able to push back: parents who trust Sesame Street and children who love Elmo.
HHS’s response to the open letter, through press secretary Emily Hilliard, was that Secretary Kennedy “believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny,” and that HHS had “wound down investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses because the technology does not effectively protect against infection from rapidly mutating viruses such as COVID-19 and flu.”
Think about that sentence next to the Elmo spot. The federal health department now says the technology “does not effectively protect against infection” from COVID. In 2022, a puppet told America it was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.”
Heightened scrutiny isn’t enough. A product that federal officials now concede doesn’t reliably prevent infection, that carries a cardiac warning with unknown long-term significance, whose own regulator calls it off-label for healthy children, and whose makers are protected from liability should not be given to children at all.
Conclusion: The Correction That Never Aired
Every institution in the Elmo spot is still operating. Sesame Workshop is still making children’s programming. The Ad Council is still running “public service” campaigns. The CDC’s logo is still on its creative. The AAP still recommends the shot for every infant. The FDA’s parent guide still repeats Louie’s line.
None of them has produced a PSA that says: We told you this was the best way to protect your baby. Since then the label has been changed to warn about heart injury. The authorization for the youngest children was withdrawn. The government now calls this use off-label for healthy kids. We’re sorry we used Elmo to tell you otherwise.
That’s the one-minute spot this country is owed. Until it airs, the original belongs where I’ve put it: in the Hall of Fame of the Covid-era Mockingbird Media, as a case study in what happens when institutions that are supposed to earn a parent’s trust decide to manufacture it instead.
Watch it again. Listen for the moment Louie asks, “Was it safe?”
It was a good question. It still is. They just never let him wait for the answer.
🚨From the Covid-era Mockingbird Media Hall of Fame: Targeting Kids with Covid Jabs using Sesame Street Characters
June 2022. Elmo, “age 3½,” shows off his bandage. His dad Louie tells parents of kids as young as six months: “I had a lot of questions… Was it safe? Was it the… pic.twitter.com/rbEbCdEno2
50 Canadians out of 1,400 who came forward finally had their stories heard.
This final report features firsthand accounts of life-altering injuries and deaths following COVID-19 vaccination, paralysis, neurological damage, cardiac events, and families left without answers.
In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth covered the hearings after mainstream outlets stayed away.
MP Dean Allison explains why he launched the inquiry: too many people were suffering in silence.
The injured describe being dismissed by the medical system, denied support through Canada’s vaccine injury program, and treated as if their experiences didn’t count.
Watch the testimonies and share them!
These stories were never supposed to stay hidden so please:
Or you can send an e-transfer to dan@pressfortruth.ca
If you’re old fashioned like we are and prefer to keep it old school, we also accept cash, cheques (made out to Dan Dicks), equipment and words of encouragement! You can send us those things here: Dan Dicks P.O. Box 1521 Squamish BC V8B 0B1
Fresh off testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, physicist Denis Rancourt joins Del to examine mortality and cancer data among 5- to 24-year-olds—and what could be behind their striking, lockstep rise.
Emergency medicine physician Ron Elfenbein M.D. went from running federally supported monoclonal antibody clinics to facing federal health care fraud charges after challenging the government’s handling of COVID therapeutics.
The anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 did more than frighten Americans — they helped create the legal, regulatory and biosecurity framework that later enabled the government’s response to COVID-19, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.
Speaking at the Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later conference last week in New York City, Nass drew a direct line between the anthrax letters of 2001 and the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s worth thinking about the similarities between the COVID experience and the anthrax letters because it seems that both were inside jobs planned by the same cabal for the same purpose,” Nass said.
Nass, an internal medicine physician who has conducted extensive research on biological warfare and anthrax, outlined what she sees as striking parallels between the two events.
“Each had an uncanny, scripted simulation preceding it,” she said, pointing to the Dark Winter tabletop exercise in 2001 and Event 201, a pandemic simulation, in 2019.
“Each was blamed on countries the U.S. government had already targeted,” Nass said. The anthrax attacks were initially blamed on Iraq while COVID-19 was blamed on China.
“A huge, expensive biodefense gravy train resulted after each of them,” she said.
Both events were also accompanied by “a massive amount of false narrative construction and control of the media to project the false narratives.” And neither received a serious investigation into who perpetrated the event, according to Nass.
In addition, both crises “led to a mushrooming of the surveillance state,” Nass said.
‘We got fear propaganda pumped out 24/7’
The anthrax letters began arriving in the weeks after 9/11, as Americans were already on edge. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to media outlets and government offices, killing five people and infecting another 17.
Nass said the attacks opened a new public-health pathway that ultimately led toward “a surveilled, totalitarian and technocratic state.”
“As the hysteria from 9/11 wound down, the anthrax letters appeared and we got fear propaganda pumped out 24/7,” Nass said.
She highlighted several consequences that followed the anthrax crisis, including a continuing fear of contagion, repeated pandemic scares, billions of dollars in biodefense spending, a growing emphasis on vaccines and looser regulations governing medical products.
The pattern has repeated itself again and again, she said. “How many ginned-up pandemics can they pull off?”
Nass listed 11 disease threats that she said major media outlets “tried to scare us with” during the 25 years since 9/11: SARS-1, H5N1 avian flu, Zika, swine flu, three types of Ebola, Marburg, SARS-2, monkeypox and hantavirus.
She also pointed to the dramatic growth in government biodefense spending.
“We were spending less than a billion dollars on biodefense before the anthrax letters,” she said. “In the decade following, we went to $6 billion to $7 billion a year. And then in the decade after that, we went to $10 billion to $11 billion a year.”
During the Biden administration, officials were seeking nearly $20 billion a year for biodefense, she said.
‘Congress went crazy … expanding liability shields’ for drug manufacturers
Nass said one of the most consequential changes came through federal laws that made it easier to deploy medical products during national emergencies while shielding manufacturers from liability.
“After the anthrax letters, Congress went crazy legalizing the use of unlicensed pharmaceuticals and expanding liability shields for them,” she said.
The Project BioShield Act of 2004 created the framework for emergency use authorizations and provided billions of dollars for vaccines and drugs intended for pandemics and biological warfare.
Nass said an unlicensed drug or vaccine could be used during a national security emergency if public health officials thought “it was more likely than not that it would be useful.”
“So a very low bar to start using unlicensed drugs and vaccines,” she said.
According to Nass, these changes were critical during COVID-19 because they created a system for rapidly deploying medical products while eliminating manufacturers’ legal risks.
“The PREP Act … legalized the use of liability-free vaccines and drugs that might or might not be licensed,” she said.
She also criticized the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016, which protected manufacturers from legal claims for vaccines recommended to pregnant women.
“The nastiest thing was to remove liability for all vaccines that are recommended during pregnancy,” Nass said. “So if anything happens to the fetus or to the pregnant mother, there is no liability.”
‘Biosecurity agenda is not actually about protecting the public’
Nass said the post-anthrax expansion of biodefense eventually evolved into a broader global biosecurity agenda.
She pointed to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, which was established to accelerate the development of vaccines and other countermeasures against pandemic threats.
CEPI’s goal of making vaccines available within 100 days represented a dramatic departure from the traditional development timeline, Nass said.
“It normally took 10 years or more by the time a vaccine could be rolled out for use,” she said. “But all of that was going to be thrown in the trash.”
To achieve that speed, countries around the globe would need to loosen regulatory requirements and establish liability protections, according to Nass.
“CEPI was working on all of that,” she said. “Trying to get … the [World Health Organization] WHO involved, which would then sort of produce its own guarantees or licenses for drugs and vaccines and would use very minimal … regulatory standards. And then they would try to impose these WHO standards on all the other countries.”
Nass said the same approach helped create the conditions for the COVID-19 response, which included developing, authorizing and deploying vaccines and other medical products at unprecedented speed.
Nass also challenged the premise behind the pandemic-preparedness system — that governments must develop products in advance for unknown future threats.
“What will we face? We don’t know,” Nass said. “But we have to start making products anyway, even though we don’t know what we need.”
She argued that repurposed drugs could be deployed more quickly during a respiratory pandemic — but said governments and the WHO suppressed them because they offered fewer financial opportunities.
“There’s no money to be made from them,” Nass said. “And this tells me that the biosecurity agenda is not actually about protecting the public, but it is about protecting the industry and government.”
Anthrax case involved ‘creating a lurid … narrative and repeating it over and over’
Nass also challenged the official account of who carried out the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The FBI concluded in 2008 that Dr. Bruce Ivins was responsible. Ivins died by suicide three days before the FBI’s announcement, after the bureau said it planned to pursue him as the perpetrator and seek the death penalty, according to Nass.
Nass, who knew Ivins, said the case against him was never adequately established. “The case is unsolved, although the FBI would like you to believe otherwise.”
Nass said the FBI focused on Ivins despite what she described as substantial evidence pointing elsewhere.
“The FBI had publicly chased [seven other scientists] in their search to find a patsy that they could pin the case on,” she said.
The National Academy of Sciences later concluded that the available scientific evidence could not establish the origin of the anthrax spores in the mailed letters. Nass said that finding undermined the FBI’s conclusion.
Nass posted a blog in 2010 with more than 20 reasons why Ivins could not have been responsible and “how the FBI had deliberately fudged the case.”
“By creating a lurid Ivins narrative and repeating it over and over and over, most Americans still wrongly think the case was solved, and Ivins did it,” Nass said.
A similar strategy unfolded during COVID-19, when officials and media repeatedly promoted narratives about the virus, its origins and the appropriate public-health response, according to Nass.
Global biosecurity initiative ‘a very, very lucrative and special industry’
Nass said she sees the anthrax attacks as the starting point for a system that ultimately made the COVID-19 response possible.
She warned that expanding international biosecurity programs could bring more surveillance, emergency powers, vaccine mandates and centralized control over public health.
The potential scale is enormous, Nass said. She cited estimates that a globally coordinated biosecurity initiative, such as the proposed WHO BioHub System, could cost $30 billion to $40 billion a year.
The proposed system would facilitate the sharing of biological materials with “epidemic or pandemic potential,” according to the WHO website.
She also described biodefense as an unusually lucrative industry because governments determine what products are needed and they shield manufacturers from liability.
“There are no standards or rules,” Nass said. “Nobody knows what products you need, what vaccines or drugs, what tests … how many doses … how many gowns, how many masks or gloves.”
Nass said manufacturers simply persuade government officials to fund their products.
“You get a contract. You can charge almost what you want. You’re almost certain to be granted a liability shield,” she said.
That system makes biodefense “a very, very lucrative and special industry.”
Nass urged the audience to resist efforts to give international organizations greater control over health emergencies, and oppose the creation of global pathogen-lending libraries and press Congress to end emergency-use and liability protections.
“Ending those liability shields is the most critical thing we can do,” she said.
The legal and regulatory changes that followed the anthrax attacks created tools that were later used during COVID-19. Those tools need to be dismantled “so we, the people, will be saved from junk drugs and vaccines and maybe deliberately dangerous drugs and vaccines,” Nass said.
“And we should never again allow the government or WHO to control the medical care that you receive,” she said. “We’ve already been there once.”
A mouse study, a wave of new global cancer data, and disturbing testimony out of Canada are all pointing in the same direction. Jefferey digs into what the lipid nanoparticle from the COVID-19 vaccine might be doing to your immune system, and why some researchers think this issue is only getting started.
Excess mortality researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., on Tuesday told Canadian lawmakers that national mortality statistics show “screaming safety signals” following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — including increases in deaths among infants and children and increases in turbo cancers.
Testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, Rancourt also argued that COVID-19-era government interventions — including lockdowns, isolating the elderly, closing businesses and withdrawing government support programs — also drove excess mortality during the pandemic.
Rancourt based his arguments on his analysis of official mortality data from Statistics Canada and in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He described how COVID-19 vaccines directly harmed individuals, and how specific pandemic policies caused broader societal harm.
His presentation came on the opening day of the Allison Inquiry, a four-day hearing chaired by Canadian Member of Parliament Dean Allison. The inquiry collected testimony from 50 Canadians injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with testimony from physicians, scientists and other witnesses.
4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. alone
Infant mortality had been declining in the U.S. before the pandemic. That trend reversed during the pandemic, according to Rancourt’s data — but not until 2022, nine months after COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women.
Rancourt estimated the change represented approximately 4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. from 2022 to 2024.
He presented a similar case for Canada, although the raw numbers were much lower due to the smaller population. After Canada issued its vaccine guidance for pregnant women on May 28, 2021, he said mortality rose among infants, with a marked increase nine months after the recommendations.
He estimated there were 200 excess infant deaths in Canada during that time, with 10 excess pregnancy-related deaths.
Data show 2,000+ excess deaths among 1- to 4-year-olds in U.S.
Rancourt identified more than 2,000 excess deaths among children ages 1-4 in the U.S. between 2021 and 2024.
He attributed an initial increase in 2021 partly to the abrupt withdrawal of federal financial assistance in some states.
But Rancourt said the largest increase coincided with the June 17, 2022, authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for young children. Excess deaths peaked precisely with the vaccine rollout.
Canadian mortality data showed a similar age-specific pattern. Rancourt shared mortality trends for Canadian children ages 1-4, 5-9 and 10-14, showing each group experienced a pronounced increase during the year COVID-19 vaccines became available for that particular age group.
The spikes in excess mortality were “very sudden,” he said. The increases did not occur during the first two years of the pandemic, he emphasized.
“As soon as you vaccinated these age groups and not before, not when there was COVID, not in the first two years of the pandemic. But when you started vaccinating them, that is the signature that you see in the mortality [data],” Rancourt said. “It’s absolutely stunning.”
He estimated 410 excess deaths among Canadian children ages 1-14.
‘Turbo cancers’ and excess cancer deaths
Rancourt said that rapidly progressing cancers, also called “turbo cancers,” are not a new phenomenon. Scientific literature on “hyperprogressive disease,” or HPD, has reported such cancers in some patients undergoing immunotherapy since 2015, when the new treatments became available.
However, excess mortality data now show signals of an unusually aggressive increase in cancer mortality following the vaccine rollouts, according to Rancourt.
Rancourt identified more than 4,000 excess cancer deaths among Americans ages 5-44 during the study period. An estimated 960 of those were among young people ages 5-24. He highlighted a sharp increase in deaths from cancers of the long bones and limbs.
Rancourt called the increase “definitely a safety signal.”
He also estimated that 240 excess deaths among Americans ages 25-44 involved multiple primary cancers — separate primary tumors occurring in different organs rather than a single cancer metastasizing to other parts of the body.
Approximately 1,500 excess deaths due to these cancers occurred in people 75 and older. He said his research group has observed similar signals in Canada, but researchers are still analyzing those data.
It’s not just the vaccines — pandemic policies also linked to excess deaths
The second half of Rancourt’s presentation focused on an argument his research group has built over several years of excess mortality analysis — that government policy responses to COVID-19 caused excess mortality.
For example, his research team examined more than 80 province-specific socioeconomic variables in Canada to determine which were linked to excess mortality.
They found that excess mortality correlated strongly with GDP per capita. “The more wealth generation you have in the province, the more excess deaths you have,” he said.
He surmised that when the economy shut down in provinces with vibrant economies, it had devastating effects on workers and their families.
Policies designed to protect elderly contributed to their deaths
Rancourt compared weekly excess mortality with an Oxford University index measuring the intensity of measures intended to protect elderly people, including isolation and lockdown policies.
Increases in the severity of those measures corresponded with large mortality peaks, Rancourt said. Those peaks were then followed by periods of unusually low mortality.
“And that’s because you’ve killed so many people in that first peak that there’s less people of that age to die in the weeks that follow,” he said. “That’s called the dry tinder effect.”
He interpreted the pattern as evidence that measures intended to protect elderly Canadians instead contributed to their deaths.
During questioning after his presentation, Rancourt was asked whether that meant elderly people should not have been isolated and locked down.
“Absolutely,” he responded.
Rancourt said social isolation and severe stress can have profound physiological effects, particularly among vulnerable populations.
“If you had not tried to save the elderly by isolating them and locking them in” the mortality outcome would have been different, he said.
“You have to know that isolation kills,” he said. “This is unambiguous.”
Cutting financial support also correlated with deaths
Rancourt said another mortality signal appeared when governments withdrew pandemic-era financial assistance.
Canada and the U.S. initially provided enormous financial support to workers and families after governments shut down large portions of the economy.
Those programs were so effective that poverty actually declined in Canada during 2020 and 2021, when more than $1 trillion was given out, Rancourt said.
But mortality increased following major reductions in financial assistance, according to the data he presented.
“It’s worse if you give money, if you give support and you cut it, it’s worse than if you’d never given it,” Rancourt said.
No evidence of viral pandemic, Rancourt argued
Rancourt said his team’s all-cause mortality research across North America and Europe failed to show the mortality pattern that would be expected if a spreading respiratory virus were the primary cause of excess mortality.
Rancourt described the spread in mortality as “geostatic,” rather than “geotemporal” — meaning mortality sometimes appeared to peak in one geographic location without spreading into neighboring regions.
As an example, he cited the dramatic differences between the area around Milan in northern Italy, which experienced massive early mortality spikes, and Rome, which had no comparable event.
Both cities had similar demographics and similar types of exposure — through international airports and other types of transportation networks — but very different outcomes.
If there had been a viral disease, they should have seen a similar type of spread and similar mortality rates.
“Identical systems, identical types of societies, just as many poor, high-density urban areas,” he said.
Rancourt said the geographic patterns were “inconsistent with the accepted theory of how a virus spreads” through person-to-person respiratory transmission.
‘Assaults’ drove excess mortality, ‘not a virus’
Rancourt ended his presentation by telling the members of the inquiry that his research led him to conclude that government policies and toxic vaccines were to blame for excess deaths in the COVID-19 period.
He said:
“History will record that the COVID period was, in effect, a massive and unnecessary multifaceted assault against people, exploiting fear and causing harm, injury and death, especially in the most vulnerable. All governments under U.S. hegemony and media influence cooperated or imitated. Canada was no exception.
“The vaccines are toxic and caused many deaths and injuries in plain sight of robust national statistics.”
He listed economic shutdowns, fear, mandates, isolation, medical interventions and vaccination among the “assaults” that he believes, based on the data he analyzed, caused excess mortality.
Rancourt singled out COVID-19 vaccination as the most devastating. Unlike other pandemic measures, it involved administering a pharmaceutical product directly to large numbers of healthy as well as vulnerable people, including elderly people, pregnant women and children.
Rancourt conceded that excess mortality data cannot, on their own, conclusively prove what caused individual deaths. He argued instead that uncertainty about causation should not become a reason to ignore unusual population-level signals.
“Science can never prove causality,” Rancourt said. But institutional capture can “always minimize and invalidate screaming safety signals and personal hardship.”
The patterns he presented should have triggered investigation and changes in government policy, he said.
“These are the signals I showed you today,” Rancourt said. They “needed to be acknowledged right away and used to change government and medical establishment behavior.”
Years before the world heard of COVID-19, top vaccine officials openly discussed how a “disruptive event” could fast-track a new genetic vaccine platform. Jefferey follows the trail of deals, diary entries, and a Zika vaccine that faded from view, right up to the pandemic that changed everything.
The documentary Silencing Detective Grus, produced by the Grus Justice Project with Matador Films, concerns Detective Helen Grus of the Ottawa Police Service. Her case became the longest and most costly police disciplinary proceeding in Canadian history. The question at its center was whether a police officer is permitted to investigate a possible link between the COVID-19 injections and a cluster of infant deaths. The tribunal’s answer, delivered March 25, 2025, was no. This essay engages material that establishment institutions frame in their own vocabulary. Product designations, agency names, and documented adverse events appear in the language in which they were made and recorded, since those are the terms of the record. The analysis operates from a different register: injection harm, institutional capture, and the responsibility of agencies that knew and pushed the shots regardless. The occasion is the release of the film, and the reason it matters now.
The Keystroke
January 13, 2022. Detective Helen Grus, in her nineteenth year with the Ottawa Police Service, opens the Records Management System from her desk in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Section.¹ A colleague in her unit has mentioned at the water cooler that they have seen a doubling to tripling of sudden infant deaths over the previous year. Ottawa normally sees two or three a year. “I took it on myself,” Grus recalls, “on January the 13th, 2022, to look into the database to see if it was true.”²
It was.
She pulls one case that had been closed as non-suspicious. The investigator had never reviewed the autopsy results. The SUDI questionnaire, the multi-page document in which parents are asked what the child ate that day, what medications the household received, what vaccinations the child had, was not in the file. Grus follows up over the following days to see whether the autopsy report will appear. It never does.
The detective who signed off on that closure was, and is, the sister-in-law of the prosecutor who would lead the case against Grus at her disciplinary tribunal.³
That is the shape of the story. What follows is what happens to a Canadian police officer who runs a database query her employer did not expect her to run.
What She Found
The pattern was real. In one case, an infant had died in the parents’ arms. “To me, that is suspicious,” Grus says. “In twenty years of policing, I had never seen that happen.”⁴ Another death involved an enlarged heart, a presentation she describes as abnormal for an infant fatality.
The field around the Ottawa file was already noisy. Eighty-six stillbirths in the Waterloo region between January and July of that year, against a normal rate of roughly one every two months.⁵ A physician who appears in the film describes a patient who had received her second injection at eleven weeks of pregnancy. Two months later, at a routine October checkup, there was no fetal heart rate. Her three prior pregnancies had all been healthy.⁶
A bereaved mother in the film describes her own loss. She was thirty-two weeks pregnant. She woke feeling something wrong, went to the hospital, was told everything was fine, and was sent home. The next morning there was no heartbeat. Two prior pregnancies had been healthy and full-term. “Because then you look at her, and there’s nothing wrong with her. Like, nothing. She was a perfect little baby. She was big, and she was healthy.”⁷ She describes what happens next: the C-section for a baby who has already died, everything she had bought becoming “a memory that you put away, stick in a box,” the suggestion of antidepressants as a solution. “We will really never know. But that is the only thing in my life that was different, was putting the COVID vaccination in my body.”⁸
Grus had institutional context she could not have known she had. Pfizer’s own February 2021 adverse event review had already identified placental changes, increased fetal deaths, and one child born with severe dyspnea, or shortness of breath, all attributed by the manufacturer’s own reviewers to the injection itself.⁹ In the same month, the Canadian Medical Protective Society was writing to the federal Deputy Minister of Health asking about liability protection for doctors administering the shots.¹⁰ The public messaging was, and would remain for years, “safe and effective.”
None of that was in her mind when she opened the database. She was checking a colleague’s observation, the way an investigator checks any tip. What she saw when she looked was enough to keep looking.
Who She Was
Helen Grus is the third of ten children born to Czechoslovak immigrants who left the communist bloc in the 1960s and met in Canada.¹¹ Her father worked three full-time jobs and eventually bought a motel in St. Pete Beach, Florida. The family bounced between motels in the United States before returning to Canada and settling in Arthur, Ontario. Ten children in a small Ontario town in a Czech immigrant family formed a polka band, because that was what the father wanted.
Grus joined the Ottawa Police Service on August 14, 2003. She spent her early years on patrol, worked as a breath technician and a coach officer, and moved to West District Investigations in 2007.¹² She describes her work as puzzle-solving. “I love investigating. It’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together every day. So I love finding the truth.”¹³ In one Ontario Police Association nomination cycle, she was the most-nominated officer for the province’s Top Cop award. She did not receive a mention.¹⁴
She is not an activist. She is a career investigator from an immigrant family who liked her job and was good at it. When Canadian institutions moved to punish someone for asking about the deaths of infants, that is who they moved against.
The Suppression Begins
The database was not Grus’s only move. She had also been briefing her command about what her unit was seeing. In late 2021 and early 2022, she twice briefed Chief Peter Sloly and other senior Ottawa Police officers on the cluster of infant deaths, Pfizer’s exclusion of pregnant women from its trials, the advisories on myocarditis in children, and her concern that harms were going unreported. Command took no action. In early February 2022, she was suspended.¹⁵
Within days of her suspension, Ottawa Police secretly wiretapped Grus and her family under the “urgent emergency” provisions of the Criminal Code, provisions written for abductions, hostage situations, and terrorism. The wiretap produced no evidence.¹⁶
The first charge was insubordination, on the theory that Grus should not have accessed the RMS at all. That charge collapsed once she was permitted to explain what she had been doing. It was replaced, in the same interview, with discreditable conduct.¹⁷
The stated rationale for the new charge was that the CBC had run a story on her database query, framing it as an unauthorized access for personal reasons. The story was false. Someone inside the Ottawa Police Service had leaked to the CBC. Grus asked for an investigation into the leak. Her request was declined. She was now to be held responsible for the reputational damage caused by a leak she did not authorize, about an investigation she had been running lawfully.¹⁸
The rumors introduced against her in the disciplinary process ranged from the strange to the trivial. That she believed the mRNA injections contained tracking nanobots. That she had lied to local hockey arenas to get her children ice time. Neither had any relationship to the substance of her investigation. Both traveled through her file.¹⁹
She was offered a plea. Thirteen bullet points, a small penalty. When she read the sheet, her badge number was wrong and eight of the thirteen bullets were inaccurate or misleading. “I’m not going to sign off on a document that is not accurate,” she said.²⁰ She took the matter to a hearing.
From March 2022, personnel from the Public Health Agency of Canada monitored the Grus file, communicated with Ottawa Police officials, and shaped the investigation. Two of those PHAC personnel were the mother and grandmother of one of the nine deceased infants Grus had been investigating. The grandmother was a senior PHAC scientific manager associated with the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, whose recommendations underwrote Canada’s mandatory-injection policy for employment and travel and its recommendation that pregnant and breastfeeding women receive the shots. The federal officials whose work had shaped the policy Grus was investigating were among those shaping the prosecution of the officer investigating it.²¹
The Tribunal Machinery
What followed became the longest and most costly police disciplinary proceeding in Canadian history. The Ottawa Police Service retained outside counsel to prosecute the matter, the firm of Linda Bordeleau, wife of the retired Ottawa Chief of Police Charles Bordeleau. Cost estimates to the Ottawa taxpayer run into the seven figures.²²
The hearing officer was retired Superintendent Christopher Renwick. Under the applicable rules, hearing officers who are not trained lawyers may seek independent legal advice for the proceeding. Renwick declined it and relied instead, when confused, on the arguments of the prosecution.²³
The prosecution’s conduct in the room is on the record. Constant objections before defense counsel could complete a sentence. Objections during defense closing submissions, which in ordinary legal practice are sacrosanct. During one exchange the prosecutor said “objection,” slammed her laptop shut, and walked out of the hearing.²⁴ In one line of questioning she compared Grus’s conduct to that of Colonel Russell Williams, the Canadian Forces officer convicted of murder and sexual assault.²⁵ To compare a detective’s database query about infant deaths to a serial rapist and murderer requires a particular quality of malice.
The expert witnesses Grus had prepared to call, whose function was to demonstrate that the medical basis for her investigation was sound, were not permitted to testify. Five witnesses in total, including three medical doctors, were barred.²⁶ The affidavit her defense filed contained federal correspondence showing that Canadian public health officials knew of injection-associated harm to pregnant women and infants and continued to promote the shots as safe. When Grus attempted, during her own testimony, to explain what the Pfizer trial records showed about infant outcomes, the hearing officer lurched forward and ordered her to stop.²⁷
Shortly before her scheduled testimony, Grus received an email from Inspector Hugh O’Toole, head of the Ottawa Police Professional Standards unit, ordering her not to use records in her affidavit that had already been filed and disclosed. Her defense counsel, Bath-Sheba van den Berg, described the email in one word. Intimidation.²⁸ No charges were laid against O’Toole. He resigned. During the same period, a different Ottawa officer facing criminal charges for sexual assault and forcible confinement was actively defended by his police association, while Grus, facing discipline for doing her job, was refused association support.²⁹
Of the witnesses who testified against Grus, all but one received promotions during or after the hearing.³⁰ Steve Bell, the acting chief during the initial charging period and the officer who designated Renwick as hearing officer, is now the Chief Operating Officer of the Ottawa Police Service.³¹
The evidence Renwick did allow into the record showed that three of the nine infants Grus had been investigating died from causes officially listed as known adverse effects of the COVID-19 injections.³² He convicted her anyway.
Grus’s own frame did not move. “For me,” she says, “the victims in this are those families that lost the babies.”³³
The Ruling
On March 25, 2025, Superintendent Renwick found Detective Grus guilty of discreditable conduct.³⁴
His written decision holds two propositions that Canadians should understand plainly.
The first is that a police officer facing a misconduct charge has, in effect, no defenses available. It does not matter whether the underlying investigation was warranted, whether the officer’s suspicion was reasonable, or whether what the officer found was later confirmed by evidence. What matters, per the ruling, is whether the officer crossed an administrative line. Substance is legally irrelevant.³⁵
The second is that a police officer cannot conduct an investigation into government officials without prior authorization. The Police Services Act, which had long granted officers the discretion to open an investigation on their own initiative, was amended in this period to require supervisor permission. The Grus ruling made explicit what the amendment had permitted implicitly. In Ontario, and by clear signal to every other Canadian jurisdiction, police may no longer look at the state without first asking the state.³⁶
Take those two propositions together and what you have is a specific legal architecture. A single office, the office of the chief of police, controls every institutional lever in the process by which an officer can be disciplined for asking about the state. The chief authorizes the charge and designates the hearing officer. The prosecuting counsel is retained on his authority. The officers who testify against her serve under his command. There is no independent institution anywhere in the process. This is not the failure of a system built to hold police accountable. It is the system working exactly as its recent redesign intended. The message to every constable in Ontario is precise.
What the Film Is For
A scholar interviewed in the opening minutes of the documentary makes a point about films of this kind that is easy to miss. He is asked whether the film should aim to open the minds of people who still believe the official narrative, to persuade the unpersuaded. His answer is that this is not what films do. Books and films of this kind, he says, do not convert. They consolidate the people who have already understood that something is wrong. They give shape to the sense that those people were right to be concerned. They create cohesion and rationality among those who are already drawn to being critical.³⁷
That framing is the essay’s answer to a question a promotional piece has to address. If the film does not convert, what is the point of watching it, sharing it, screening it?
The point is that in a country where a career detective can be destroyed for opening a database, where a ruling now strips an entire profession of the right to investigate its own government, the people who suspect that the official messaging on injection safety was wrong need a common reference. They need to see what a real Canadian tribunal looks like when its purpose is signaling rather than adjudication. They need to hear the parents of babies who died speak for themselves. The film shows them the career professional from an immigrant family who queried the database that day, and what happened to her when she did.
The film is that common reference. It is calmly made. Its subject describes her career and her investigation in her own words. Her lawyers walk through the tribunal they watched. Parents describe what they lost. A scholar addresses how compliance is maintained in institutions under pressure. The film neither editorializes over its own material nor pleads with the viewer. It records what happened, and the record is severe enough that it does not need help.
The Firing Squad and What to Do
The film closes on a story from the scholar’s childhood. He watched a World War Two film at the public library. In it, the German army lines a group of civilians against a wall. Every German soldier except one raises his rifle. The officer walks over and speaks with the soldier who did not. After a moment, the soldier lowers his rifle, walks to the wall, and joins the civilians. The command is given. Everyone against the wall is killed.
Most viewers think the point of that story is the soldier who chose principle. It is not. The significance of the story is that every other soldier raised his rifle.³⁸
Detective Helen Grus is the soldier who did not raise the rifle. The story the film tells is what the Canadian institutional structure did to her for it, and what that reveals about the readiness of every other soldier in the formation.
If any of this has landed for you, the film is where the record lives. Watch it. Twenty-four-hour rental at grusjusticeproject.org for twenty Canadian dollars.³⁹ That is the cost of seeing what happened to a career detective who queried a database about a cluster of infant deaths, told in her own words, in the voices of her lawyers, and in the voices of parents whose children died.
Once you have watched, send the link to people you know who have been asking their own questions. The Grus Justice Project offers a Host a Screening pathway for community groups who want to bring people together in a room. Contributions to the ongoing legal work go through the project’s donation page.⁴⁰ The costs of defending the case remain real: the March 2025 conviction stands, and sentencing continues into 2026.⁴¹
Which of those pathways is right for you is your decision. Canadian police in Ontario may no longer investigate the state without the state’s permission. Where you fit in what comes next is a question the film will not answer for you.
The ruling is not the end of the story. It is the precedent. Somewhere in Ontario a detective is about to notice something in a database, and the ruling was designed to determine what she does next. The film exists so that when she weighs the cost of asking, she knows the name of at least one person who paid it, and knows the kind of person that officer was before she asked.
The keystroke was on January 13, 2022. The verdict was on March 25, 2025. What comes between them is on record, and the record is on the screen.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine a teacher who notices that more children than usual are getting hurt on the playground. Way more. Two or three times as many. That is her job to notice, because she is one of the grown-ups who watches out for the kids.
She looks a bit closer. She finds that the other teachers, the ones who were supposed to check what was going on when a child got hurt, had not filled in the forms properly. Some of them had not even asked the parents what happened. She wants to know why.
Before she does anything else, she goes to the principal and tells him. She tells him twice. She says: something is happening on the playground, and I think it might have something to do with the new shots that all the children have been given this year. She says: some of these injuries look like the ones that were already known to happen after the shots. The principal does not tell her she is wrong. He just does not do anything about it.
So she keeps asking, because that is what a good teacher does.
Then things get strange. Grown-ups start showing up in her file who should not be there at all. Some of them work in the office that decided all the children should get the shots in the first place. One of them is the grandmother of one of the children who died. She helps write the rules about the shots.
So the principal punishes the teacher. First he makes up a small reason. When the small reason falls apart, he makes up a bigger one. He sends people to sit outside her house and listen to her phone calls, as if she were a dangerous person. She was not. They found nothing.
Then he does something bigger still. He makes a new rule. From now on, no teacher in the whole school is allowed to ask questions about the playground without first asking his permission. Not one teacher. Not one question.
The film is about the teacher.
It is also about what happens to a school when the principal makes rules like that. And it is about the teachers who come after her, who will one day notice that more children are getting hurt, and will have to decide whether to say something.
References
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Detective Grus is identified as a veteran investigator in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit.
Grus Justice Project. Silencing Detective Grus. Directed by Todd Harris. Produced with Matador Films. 2026. Available at grusjusticeproject.org. Detective Grus’s direct account of the January 13, 2022 database query.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s testimony regarding the closed case and the familial relationship of the investigating detective to the prosecutor who led the disciplinary case against her.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s testimony regarding the case in which an infant died in the parents’ arms.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen statement regarding Waterloo region stillbirth figures. The figures are as presented in the film and have not been independently verified in this essay.
Silencing Detective Grus. Physician’s on-screen account of the loss of a patient’s pregnancy following her second injection.
Silencing Detective Grus. Continuation of the bereaved mother’s testimony regarding aftermath and the injection as the sole differentiating variable from her prior healthy pregnancies.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen commentary regarding Pfizer’s February 2021 knowledge of injection-related pregnancy outcomes, including placental changes, fetal deaths, and dyspnea in one child. See also Pfizer, “5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” released under U.S. court order following Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency v. FDA, for the underlying pharmacovigilance record.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the February 2021 correspondence between the Canadian Medical Protective Society and the federal Deputy Minister of Health.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of her policing career.
Silencing Detective Grus. Direct statement by Detective Grus regarding her investigative work.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen statement regarding the Ontario Police Association’s Top Cop nomination process.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of Detective Grus’s two late-2021 and early-2022 briefings to Chief Peter Sloly and senior Ottawa Police officers, and the subsequent February 2022 suspension.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the Ottawa Police wiretap of Detective Grus and her family under the “urgent emergency” provisions of the Criminal Code, and the tribunal testimony that the wiretap produced no evidence.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the sequence of charges.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of the CBC leak and the declined internal investigation into it.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the rumors introduced into the disciplinary file.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s direct statement in response to the plea offer.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the Public Health Agency of Canada personnel monitoring and influencing the Grus file from March 2022, the familial relationship between two PHAC personnel and one of the nine deceased infants, and the grandmother’s senior scientific manager role at PHAC and association with the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the outside counsel arrangement and the estimated cost to the Ottawa taxpayer.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the hearing officer’s decision to forgo independent legal advice.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the prosecutor’s conduct during hearing objections.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the prosecutor’s line of questioning comparing her conduct to that of Colonel Russell Williams.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of the exclusion of all five defense expert witnesses, including three medical doctors.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of being ordered to stop testifying about the Pfizer trial infant outcomes.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of Inspector Hugh O’Toole’s email to Detective Grus shortly before her testimony, and defense counsel Bath-Sheba van den Berg’s characterization of the email as witness intimidation.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the differential treatment between Detective Grus and Officer Eric Post by the police association.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the promotions of witnesses who testified against Detective Grus.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen identification of Acting Chief Steve Bell and his current position as Chief Operating Officer of the Ottawa Police Service.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the trial evidence showing that three of the nine deceased infants died from causes officially recognized as adverse reactions to the COVID-19 injections. See also Vincent Gircys, “For Police: A Message to Serving and Retired Officers,” grusjusticeproject.org.
Silencing Detective Grus. Direct statement by Detective Grus regarding the families of the deceased infants.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. See also the on-screen date of verdict in Silencing Detective Grus.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the ruling’s “no defenses” reasoning.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the change to the Police Services Act requiring supervisor permission for investigations, and the ruling’s application of that framework to investigations into government officials.
Silencing Detective Grus. Statement by a scholar interviewed in the opening minutes of the film on the function of critical books and films.
Silencing Detective Grus. Scholar’s closing story on the firing squad and the significance of the soldiers who complied.
Grus Justice Project. “Silencing Detective Grus – 1 Day Access.” grusjusticeproject.org/buy/silencing-detective-grus-1-day-access/. Twenty-four-hour rental at CA$20 (regular CA$40).
Grus Justice Project. “Home.” grusjusticeproject.org. Host a Screening and donation pathways.
Donald Best, “Sentencing Update: September 5, 2025,” Grus Justice Project, grusjusticeproject.org. Report of the September 4, 2025 adjournment of the sentencing hearing to a date in 2026.
In Print
Ten of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.
Three take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself — the paradigm question underneath the whole shelf.
Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.
A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
The legal pressure surrounding the COVID origins controversy continues to build. Jefferey follows newly surfaced emails, shifting alliances, and the growing list of figures facing uncomfortable questions about what happened behind the scenes.
There is a vast difference between believing in witches and embarking on a witch hunt. While belief in witches likely prevailed throughout most of human history, mass hysteria driving a hunt for them is rare. The case of wokeness points to a similar dynamic: since the 1960s, U.S. institutions have propagated a conspiratorial sociology and a Manichaean anthropology worldwide, positing that Christendom, across all eras, has been inherently hostile toward women, blacks and gays. Yet, it was only in the 2010s, spurred by social media, that a significant segment of society began looking for racists under the bed and denouncing them everywhere. The onset of this hysteria coincided with the Euromaidan protests (2014), and represented the U.S. as a beacon of freedom standing against oppression. Moscow, the traditional villain, ceased to be viewed as communist and came to be seen as homophobic.
Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to suggest that the “woke” phenomenon was merely a pandemic-induced delusion. While that isn’t strictly true, the lie gains traction because people were indeed not their usual selves during the pandemic, and wokeness was in full swing. I would venture to identify the George Floyd protests—which emerged in the U.S. in 2020 and were almost instantly replicated across Western Europe—as the peak of this pandemic-era delirium. There was even an attempt to stage a Brazilian version in São Paulo, led by soccer fan groups claiming to fight for democracy (this was during the Bolsonaro administration, which the most radical woke adherents viewed as a dictatorship). I single this out as the height of the madness because the press had spent the preceding months practically branding anyone who dared step outside a murderer, yet suddenly, taking to the streets to form a mob and topple “racist” statues was treated almost as a civic duty. Schools and churches were shut down because they caused “crowding,” yet gathering in crowds to vandalize the city was given the green light. Woke pedagogy and religion were the only forms of expression permitted in the public square.
The George Floyd protests also help clarify one thing: during the pandemic, traditional media acted as the catalyst for mass hysteria. While mainstream media certainly embraced wokeness, it is widely acknowledged that the driving force behind this hysteria was social media—specifically Facebook and Twitter. Traditional media generally followed suit rather than taking the lead: TV networks would have anchors spout politically correct platitudes while discussing the news or feature black women or Asian gays in prominent roles, but they were not the ones instigating cancel culture campaigns. As far as I recall, it was only during the pandemic that traditional media began actively inciting “woke” demonstrations, thereby assuming a position of genuine leadership. The Black Lives Matter organization lacked CNN’s mobilizing power; in Brazil, the Corinthians fan base lacked Globo’s reach.
The segments of the population led by traditional media differ from those led by social media influencers. The former group is much larger, considerably older, and far less politicized. Yet, during the pandemic, the two groups converged, moving in the same direction.
The discovery of Fauci’s diary compels us to revisit that period in history. Fauci kept an online diary on a government server, where he recorded his impressions of press coverage, his personal feelings, and so on. No hacking was required to uncover this information; one simply had to consult U.S. government servers, where Fauci’s emails and messages were also stored. Currently, there is a U.S. Senate investigation into this individual’s conduct during the pandemic, and this inquiry has uncovered matters of the utmost gravity. For instance, Fauci was privately warned that the experimental COVID “vaccines” could cause miscarriages, yet publicly he insisted they posed no risk and should be taken by pregnant women. As someone who is not a doctor, I take pride in having spoken out in 2021 against the propaganda made by YouTube for pregnant women, which offered them unrealistic assurances of safety. Time has proven me right, yet any expectation of a mea culpa is in vain.
One of the few topics from the Senate committee investigations that the mainstream media has touched upon is the laboratory origin of the coronavirus. So-called “conspiracy theorists” had long known that Fauci funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan; however, only now—with the release of correspondence revealing Fauci’s efforts to enforce the “bat soup” narrative—has the mainstream media begun to feign surprise at the subject. The U.S. creating biological weapons in overseas labs? Never! That would be conspiracy theory territory; instead, call it “gain-of-function research”, where selfless scientists simply play the role of nature by creating new, lethal viruses, all to discover a vaccine in advance, for the good of humanity.
When I was a child, there was enough medical information available to know that the flu vaccine was always lagging behind, because the flu virus is constantly mutating—yet now I am expected to believe that gain-of-function research offers a realistic prospect of anticipating the wildest viruses nature would have cooked up anyway. God forbid we believe Russia’s allegations regarding biolabs in Ukraine! Or rather, God forbid we even become aware of them!
Ever since the emergence of these hastily developed, mandatory vaccines, it became clear to me that there was a geopolitical divide far more significant than the one between Right and Left. In Brazil, for instance, skepticism became associated with the Bolsonarist Right, whereas the Left embraced the Democrats’ narrative en masse. Yet, I observed that Cuba and Venezuela were using chloroquine. Where Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are present, U.S. influence prevails; where such vaccines are absent—and where seeking off-label treatments is not taboo—U.S. influence does not prevail.
Commenting on the latest news regarding Fauci, a rare article published by Opera Mundi (one of the few Brazilian leftist outlets sympathetic to Chavismo) stated: “The controversy surrounding biolabs became one of the most intense political debates in the U.S. during the pandemic. The ‘bat theory’ was automatically linked to Democratic progressivism, while any mention of biolabs was dismissed as yet another piece of Trumpist fake news. Since then, the goal has no longer been to uncover the truth, but to stake out a position against the opposing camp. In Brazil, this importation of ‘ideas out of place’ was even more clumsy than Roberto Schwarz could have imagined. We didn’t even copy the new phase of the controversy; we preferred to pretend nothing happened.”
This is the state of affairs in Brazil: if it didn’t air on Jornal Nacional, it didn’t happen; it’s all just fake news from crude right-wingers. A state investigation by the world’s greatest power, conducted by representatives of the people—that simply didn’t happen. As a large, monolingual country that does not, in practice, require its middle class to know English, Brazil is susceptible to this dynamic.
Take, for instance, the day I tried to show a doctor that I was right and she was wrong regarding COVID vaccines. I was astonished to find her literally offended because I shared news reports that contradicted her beliefs; she invoked the argument of freedom of conscience—typical of religious warfare—when, in reality, the issue involved simple factual matters that should be verifiable by atheists and believers of all stripes alike. A lack of broader knowledge made any English-language website suspect—even the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton. The doctor in question, as is common among her social class, opposes to Lula’s Party. The non-Bolsonarist Brazilian right is also staunchly pro-COVID vaccine (see the stances of former Governor Ronaldo Caiado and movement leader Renan Santos, both of whom run for presidency). This is a right-wing faction that adores the U.S., loathes Trump, and finds itself uncomfortable with shifting geopolitical realities.
If there is one thing that unites adherents of this right-wing faction with the left in general—especially the “woke” left—it is the conviction that they are more enlightened than the average person, standing on a plane far above the common rabble. In a sense, Trumpism in the U.S. and Bolsonarism in Brazil serve to create a straw man—the uncultured, utter ignoramus—against whom the conformist citizen, devoid of any particular virtue, can feel special simply by comparison. It is an ego crutch. I am not sure if this maps perfectly onto the New Right parties in Europe; given the vigorous prevalence of wokeness in the European Union, a conformist citizen need only label someone a fascist or a racist to feel superior to many of their fellow countrymen.
The years of pandemic mass hysteria have crystallized into a cult of Fauci followers whose self-worth hinges on their beliefs regarding the pandemic. These are people who believe that only what appears in the mainstream media is true; who think that without the arrival of the “vaccines,” COVID would still be highly lethal today (surely the Brazilian Indians invented the flu vaccine in the 16th century, thereby avoiding extinction); who believe that when they are afraid, it is right and necessary to sacrifice the lives of healthy young people, who notoriously would not have died from COVID, for the sake of their own emotional comfort (from the start of the pandemic, it was widely known that the elderly and the obese were the most vulnerable—yet, before the Ozempic fad, telling someone to lose weight was “fatphobia”). And later, once they have blood on their hands, having engaged in or legitimized a witch hunt against the unvaccinated and skeptics in general, they deem it right and necessary to uphold the lie so they can maintain that emotional comfort.
It is difficult to envision a solution for these people. Just as crack addicts will use every last cent to numb themselves, these conformists with inflated egos will use any pretext to cling to their own beliefs. This situation is all the more serious given the medical community’s widespread adherence to this creed. It means that many of our so-called doctors are nothing more than pharmaceutical propagandists, lacking the competence and critical judgment to act in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath.
This one email from FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock in May 2021 epitomizes everything wrong with our government’s treatment of vaccines and the vaccine injured.
Woodcock emails Fauci and Collins (head of NIH) to inform them that “a number of people” including healthcare workers she personally knows contacted her about injuries from every one of the available Covid-19 vaccines. She admits that:
(1) these injuries would not be picked up by FDA or CDC surveillance systems;
(2) there is no money set aside to study these harms (while billions are given to pharma companies for vaccines);
(3) no one will take these injured people seriously;
(4) no one knows how to treat them;
(5) there is no effort to study this serious issue; and
(6) “the industry” will not support the necessary studies.
I also agree with her sentiment that, “if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later…” Later is here.
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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