(i) COVID-19 Vaccination Mandates ‘Stripping Canadians of Their Dignity’: Tory MP
(ii) Organizations That Impose COVID Mandates Must Also Be Responsible for Harms They May Cause: Ethicist
(iii) Claim Alleging Injury or Death From a COVID-19 Countermeasure to Be Compensated
(iv) COVID-19 a Pandemic of Fear ‘Manufactured’ by Authorities: Yale Epidemiologist
______________________
COVID-19 Vaccination Mandates ‘Stripping Canadians of Their Dignity’: Tory MP
[NB – It’s encouraging that there are a few honest and brave politicians still left, though they appear to be in the minority, and within Canada, they tend to be marginalized within their own parties when they speak out, e.g., Derek Sloane, Roman Baber, and others. Standing up for the unvaccinated at this time is important. They are being dehumanized and discriminated against, unjustly, as are people being forced by these mandates to take an experimental drug against their will.]
by Andrew Chen, Epoch Times, Dec. 17, 2021
A Conservative MP is speaking up for Canadians across the country who have lost their jobs as a result of the vaccine mandates.
MP Jeremy Patzer said during the parliamentary sitting on Wednesday that thousands of front-line workers across Canada—from members of the military to first responders, nurses, and educators—have already lost or are facing the loss of their jobs as a result of the vaccine mandates.
“These are our neighbours, our colleagues, our fellow citizens—many have sacrificed and given so much to build up our country, and many who have served us throughout the worst of this pandemic,” Patzer said.
“Yet now in the blink of an eye, these same individuals that we once praised as heroes are being treated as second-class citizens for a decision that every Canadian should have the freedom to make for themselves.”
Patzer also criticized the federal government for denying these front-line workers employment insurance (EI)—which they have long contributed to—if they refuse to comply with the vaccination mandates.
“It’s a disgrace to see how this Liberal government is intent on stripping Canadians of their dignity and sending a rift of division from coast to coast,” he said.
Employment and Social Development Canada has published guidelines to help employers fill out records of employment (ROE)—a document needed to apply for the EI benefits—when an employee is suspended or terminated from work for refusing to comply with the mandatory vaccination policy.
Patzer said he will “continue to stand” for his constituents and other Canadians who have lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates, “and for this country, the true north, strong and free.”
[read the rest of the article here]
__________________
Organizations That Impose COVID Mandates Must Also Be Responsible for Harms They May Cause: Ethicist
[See the original story on Ponesse, and this speech by her. She is heroic, in my opinion, for standing up in this way, as a matter of principle. She not only taught ethics but more importantly, lives according to ethical principles.]
by Andrew Chen, Epoch Times, Dec. 3, 2021
Organizations that impose COVID-19 mandates must also be responsible for the harms those mandates could potentially cause and cannot be absolved by claiming they were following orders from Health Canada, says ethicist Dr. Julie Ponesse.
Ponesse was fired from Ontario’s Huron University College in September after refusing to comply with the its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine mandate. She told The Epoch Times that she found the decision “very problematic” because the university did not do its due diligence to explore whether the public health mandate is ethically justified.
“This is really a very complicated issue because it gets to the heart of what rights and freedoms we really have in a democracy,” she said.
Ponesse said the issue raises questions about what rights and responsibilities organizations have when following orders from federal authorities.
“I don’t think the university gets to say, ‘Well, we’re imposing it just because Health Canada says we should,’ because if that mandate ends up causing harm, then the university is complicit in that harm,” she said.
“They’re partly responsible for that harm, and they can’t completely absolve themselves of responsibility—moral or legal responsibility—just by claiming that they were following the orders of Health Canada or the government.”
Ponesse was suspended from the college, which is affiliated with Western University, after a video in which she described the ethical dilemma she faced in refusing her employer’s vaccine mandate went viral on the internet.
The professor, who taught ethics in the philosophy department for 20 years, was terminated from her teaching position roughly a week after her suspension. Ponesse said the termination letter stated her refusal to comply with the school’s vaccine mandate as one of the reasons for her dismissal.
“I just don’t believe that the circumstances we had in Canada at the time warranted that kind of incursion into a person’s private medical information,” she said of the mandate.
According to Ponesse, Western University first rejected mandating COVID-19 vaccination for its staff but reversed course in August to require masking, social distancing, and proof of vaccination. The university also removed the testing option in lieu of providing vaccination proof around the time her video was published.
Ponesse said the university also accused her of using the video to gain publicity from the situation and accused her of spreading “misinformation”—a term she says is a product of “cancel culture” and increasingly used by authority figures to shut down legitimate discourse.
“The experts have a monopoly on truth and anybody else is malicious and a threat to democracy,” she said.
“When you call someone a misinformer these days, you don’t just mean that they’ve made an error in their calculation about what’s true. I think you mean that they are a plague on society and that therefore they need to be cast out.”
The Epoch Times reached out to both Huron University College and the University of Western Ontario for comment but did not receive a response.
Ponesse’s video was made in co-operation with the advocacy group Canadian Covid Care Alliance, a coalition of scientists, doctors, and health-care professionals who aim to provide “balanced evidence-based information to the Canadian public about COVID-19.”
Ponesse said she is not planning on taking legal action against Western over her dismissal because rights infractions around COVID-19 mandates have become widespread, and the solution will ultimately be found within society and through thoughtful discourse.
“I think the problems we face now are so systemic that it’s not clear to me that counter-narrative cases, or cases that challenge the narrative, are getting or will get, fair evaluation in our courts of law,” she said.
“I think we need to change the culture. We need to open up in people’s minds that there’s another way to look at this before we’re going to see judges … being brave enough even just to hear expert testimony and to look at the evidence.”
Since leaving her teaching position, Ponesse has continued to work with the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, and has joined constitutional rights organization The Democracy Fund as its pandemic ethics scholar.
_________________
Claim Alleging Injury or Death From a COVID-19 Countermeasure to Be Compensated
[NB – Governments signed contracts with pharmaceutical corporations that waived liability for those corporations in case of injury or death. But this is an important development because it seems that some part of the U.S. government may be willing to be held responsible, at least partially, for injuries caused by the mandates they’re imposing.
Although the idea of “awaiting a decision” and “pending a review” by a government agency doesn’t sound too hopeful.
Right now, both the drug itself and the mandates and passports are harming, either directly or indirectly, the lives of hundreds of millions of people — for a disease that has a low mortality rate and is easily treatable by other, less harmful means.
This is clearly not really about protecting health; logically, it’s being driven by a political agenda — namely, the ‘Great Reset.’ Trudeau and others politicians have openly admitted this. The Great Reset itself is not really about mitigating climate change; it’s about concentrating power into the hands of an elite, at the expense of the masses.]
More than 4,000 other claims await a decision by the U.S. government compensation program
by Meiling Lee, Epoch Times, Dec. 18, 2021
For the first time amid the pandemic, the U.S. government compensation program will pay out one of the 4,751 claims alleging injuries or death arising from the administration of a covered countermeasure used to diagnose, treat, or prevent COVID-19.
Countermeasures may include emergency authorized or federally approved vaccines, drugs, and medical devices that the Food and Drug Administration allows for use during a public health emergency.
“One COVID-19 claim has been determined eligible for compensation and is pending a review of eligible expenses,” the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) reported.
[read the rest of the article here]
COVID-19 a Pandemic of Fear ‘Manufactured’ by Authorities: Yale Epidemiologist
[NB – Another heroic individual speaking out an obvious injustice, and telling the truth, even though doing so means being publicly defamed by ruthless political pundits.]
by Isabel van Brugen and Jan Jekielek, Epoch Times, Dec. 5, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of fear, manufactured by individuals who were in the nominal positions of authority as the virus began to spread across the globe last year, according to Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch.
In an appearance on Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, Risch, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, argued that by and large, what has characterized the entire CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic has been a “degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.”
“Overall, I’d say that we’ve had a pandemic of fear. And fear has affected almost everybody, whereas the infection has affected relatively few,” said Risch.
“By and large, it’s been a very selected pandemic, and predictable. It was very distinguished between young versus old, healthy versus chronic disease people. So we quickly learned who was at risk for the pandemic and who wasn’t.
“However, the fear was manufactured for everybody. And that’s what’s characterized the whole pandemic is that degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.”
Risch has authored more than 300 original peer-reviewed publications and was formerly a member of the board of editors for the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The epidemiology professor suggested that individuals who held the nominal positions of authority during the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 initially spread a much worse picture of the “dire nature” of the virus than was warranted.
That included the message that everybody was at risk, anybody could die from contracting the virus, and everybody needed to stay in their homes to protect themselves, and, in this way, protect society.
“People were quite afraid of that message, as anybody would be … with the government, with authorities, with scientists, scientific people, with medical people in authority in the public health institutions, all saying the same message starting in about February, March of last year. And so, we all kind of believe this,” he said.
In the first two months of the pandemic, stringent lockdowns and mask mandates were implemented to curb the transmission of COVID-19 in the United States and across the globe. Risch said that the types of messages issued by authorities led to widespread heightened anxiety levels.
“All of our anxiety levels were raised, and we all made decisions to curtail, to various degrees, our exposures to other people, some more than others, but I think everybody had levels of anxiety that really affected how they carry out their life at that time,” he said.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has said that 96 to 98 percent of Americans need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before the nation can “go back to normal,” pushing the rhetoric that unvaccinated Americans are to blame for slowing down the nation’s economic recovery.
Related Coverage: Dr. Harvey Risch: Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and Other Therapeutics Highly Effective in Early COVID Treatment
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of Dec. 4, just over 70 percent of American adults were fully vaccinated against the virus, while 23.9 percent had received a booster dose.
Watch the full interview with Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch below, or watch and read the full transcript on Epoch TV.
In defense of human freedom 