OCLA Report 2022-3: “State coercion to receive medical injections confirms conflicting interpretations of the right to life, liberty and security of the person (Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms)”

OCLA Executive Director Joseph Hickey, PhD and Researcher Denis Rancourt, PhD have authored a new report (OCLA Report 2022-3) explaining that the present interpretation of Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is incorrect and non-compliant with the Charter because it causes violations of the right to life, liberty, and security of the person that do not need to be justified by the government.

From the Conclusion:

In the present “penal” interpretation of Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms used by the courts and administrative tribunals, an individual subjected to an infringement of the right to life, liberty and security of the person has the onus to show that implementation of the infringement is unjust. Due to this onus, egregious rights violations are permitted by decision makers without the government being required to demonstrably justify that its actions or laws causing the said violations are reasonable.

State coercion to receive medical injections is a prominent contemporary example, as illustrated in the Quebec Superior Court case of Syndicat des métallos. In that case, the injections were found on an evidentiary basis to be definitely coercive and to infringe the right to life, liberty, or security of the person, yet s. 7 was determined not to have been violated because the implementation was not contrary to principles of fundamental justice.

The Canadian s. 7 jurisprudence is in need of a reboot that respects the text and spirit of the Charter. Justice Wilson’s interpretation of s. 7 expressed in her concurring decision in Re B.C. Motor Vehicle Act would accomplish this and should be considered as a replacement for the penal interpretation.

Click here to read OCLA Report 2022-3.

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Analysis questioning Canadian government’s official “COVID deaths” number

OCLA is now hosting a new report, published by Correlation Research in the Public Interest, and authored by Denis Rancourt, Marine Baudin, and Jérémie Mercier, entitled “Proof that Canada’s COVID-19 mortality statistics are incorrect”.

In the report, the authors estimate the number of excess deaths over the COVID-19 period, using all-cause mortality data. Their analysis raises important questions about the reliability of the Canadian government’s official number of COVID-19 deaths.

The Abstract of the report is as follows:

We make a quantitative comparison between the COVID-19 mortality statistics of the Government of Canada (Public Health Agency of Canada; managed by the Chief Public Health Officer) and measured total excess all-cause mortality (ACM) (deaths from all causes) for the Covid period. The claimed “COVID-19 deaths” mortality is almost double the total excess ACM for the same period, which we find to be irreconcilable with reality. We describe how these numbers have been uncritically used in public Government communications, by leading media, and in a recent scientific article co-authored by Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, which claims that “without the use of restrictive measures and without high levels of vaccination, Canada could have experienced […] almost a million deaths.” We conclude that the COVID-19 mortality statistics are unreliable at best, and possibly meaningless.

Click here to read the full report.

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OCLA Report 2022-2: “Canadian court decisions on the constitutionality of Covid measures are invalid due to jurisdictional errors of law”

OCLA researcher Denis Rancourt, PhD, has authored a new report (OCLA Report 2022-2) explaining fundamental errors of law in Canadian court decisions in which the constitutionality of governmental COVID-19 measures were challenged.

From the Introduction:

The purpose of this article is to show that Canadian courts have denied their jurisdiction by deferring evaluations of key scientific questions to medical experts in constitutional cases about Covid mandates.

I write the present Report:
• to encourage scientists to research and understand the legal context in which they are asked to contribute as experts
• to encourage applicants of constitutional challenges and their lawyers to be more demanding of judges vis-à-vis protecting the institution of justice, and to pursue appeals on this basis
• to illustrate using analyses of Covid cases how wrong a scientific position adopted by the court can be
• to argue that several seminal rulings of provincial superior courts on the constitutionality of Covid measures imposed by provincial governments are invalid pursuant to jurisdictional errors of law

Click here to read OCLA Report 2022-2.

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OCLA’s submission to the Public Order Emergency Commission

OCLA strenuously opposed the Canadian government’s February 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act to quash peaceful protest at Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

OCLA has submitted the following letter and package of documents to the Public Order Emergency Commission, pursuant to its request for public submissions about the government’s actions.

OCLA’s submission to the Commission can be read here.

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COVID-Period Mass Vaccination Campaign and Public Health Disaster in the USA

OCLA Researcher Denis Rancourt just released this important paper, with his co-authors Marine Baudin and Jérémie Mercier, based on a detailed analysis of age/state-resolved all-cause mortality by time, age-resolved vaccine delivery by time, and socio-geo-economic data.

The PDF can be viewed here: LINK.

Abstract

All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting and epidemiologically characterizing events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge or collapse in deaths from any cause. Such data is not susceptible to reporting bias or to any bias in attributing causes of death. We compare USA all-cause mortality by time (month, week), by age group and by state to number of vaccinated individuals by time (week), by injection sequence, by age group and by state, using consolidated data up to week-5 of 2022 (week ending on February 5, 2022), in order to detect temporal associations, which would imply beneficial or deleterious effects from the vaccination campaign. We also quantify total excess all-cause mortality (relative to historic trends) for the entire covid period (WHO 11 March 2020 announcement of a pandemic through week-5 of 2022, corresponding to a total of 100 weeks), for the covid period prior to the bulk of vaccine delivery (first 50 weeks of the defined 100-week covid period), and for the covid period when the bulk of vaccine delivery is accomplished (last 50 weeks of the defined 100-week covid period); by age group and by state.

We find that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign did not reduce all-cause mortality during the covid period. No deaths, within the resolution of all cause mortality, can be said to have been averted due to vaccination in the USA. The mass vaccination campaign was not justified in terms of reducing excess all-cause mortality. The large excess mortality of the covid period, far above the historic trend, was maintained throughout the entire covid period irrespective of the unprecedented vaccination campaign, and is very strongly correlated (r = +0.86) to poverty, by state; in fact, proportional to poverty. It is also correlated to several other socio-economic and health factors, by state, but not correlated to population fractions (65+, 75+, 85+ years) of elderly state residents.

The excess all-cause mortality by age group (also expressed as percentage of pre-covid-period all-cause mortality for the age group) for the whole USA for the entire covid period through week-5 of 2022 is:

all ages    1.27M    23%
0-24    13K    12%
25-44    109K    41%
45-64    274K    27%
65-74    319K    30%
75-84    316K    24%
85+    240K    14%

The corresponding fatality risk ratios are relatively uniform with age (non-exponential and non-near-exponential with age; and even skewed towards young adults), which holds essentially for all states, and for all examined periods within the covid period. This fundamental result implies that a dominant cause of excess mortality could not have been assigned COVID 19, which consistently has been measured to have a strong near-exponential infection fatality ratio with age. The implication is further corroborated by the absence of correlation between all-age-group-integrated excess mortality and age, by state. COVID-19 was not a dominant cause of excess mortality during the covid period in the USA.

All of our observations can be coherently understood if we interpret that the covid-period socio-economic, regulatory and institutional conditions induced chronic stress and social isolation among members of large vulnerable groups (individuals afflicted and co-afflicted by poverty, obesity, diabetes, high susceptibility to bacterial respiratory infection [inferred from pre-covid-period antibiotic prescription rates], old age, societal exclusion, unemployment, drug and substance abuse, and mental disability or serious mental illness), which in turn caused many of these individuals to be more and fatally immunocompromised, allowing them to succumb to bacterial pneumonia, at a time when a documented national pneumonia epidemic raged and antibiotic prescriptions were systemically reduced; in addition to possible comorbidity from COVID-19 vaccine challenge against individuals thus made immunocompromised, under broad and hastily implemented “vaccine equity” programs.

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OCLA’s Spring 2022 Newsletter

Dear OCLA Supporter,

This email is to update you on the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA)’s work so far in 2022.

OCLA’s scientific criticism of the Fisman et al. CMAJ paper alleging disproportionate risk to vaccinated people from unvaccinated people

OCLA researchers Denis Rancourt and Joseph Hickey wrote an incisive scientific criticism of a fundamentally flawed modeling paper that was published on April 25 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ).

The modelers claimed to show that unvaccinated people pose a disproportionate, “excess” risk to vaccinated people, which is increased when the two groups interact less often. The claims were widely covered in the Canadian media the day the paper was published, using a slant that amounts to an unjust mobbing of Canadians who declined COVID-19 vaccination.

As can be seen in the CMAJ’s Letters to the Editor section, many scientists have made valid critiques of the Fisman et al. paper, especially of the authors’ unrealistic use of certain input parameters. However, OCLA’s criticism is the only one that pinpoints the fatal mathematical flaw in the paper that explains why the authors’ claims are not even consistent with the results of their own model, irrespective of unrealistic parameter choices.

Denis presented OCLA’s criticism in a Zoom presentation to the Canadian Covid Care Alliance (video available here) and in a podcast interview with Trish Wood (formerly of The Fifth Estate) and immunologist Dr. Byram Bridle.

OCLA continues to examine the scientific errors in the Fisman et al. paper in view of making further public criticisms.

Letter to Members of Parliament and Senators opposing the federal government’s introduction of a new crime of “Holocaust denial” as part of the 2022 Budget

The federal government is proposing, as part of its 2022 Budget, to create a new crime of “Holocaust denial” in Canada.

In response, on April 22, OCLA sent a public letter to Canadian Members of Parliament and Senators asking them not to implement the proposed Criminal Code provision, since it is squarely contrary to international law and will damage Canadian democracy. All statements of fact and opinion about all historical events must be open to questioning in a free society.

OCLA’s efforts to oppose this new speech crime law follow on our past calls for the “hate speech” provisions of the Criminal Code to be repealed, as summarized in our blog post about the new Holocaust denial law.

OCLA’s statements condemning the government’s use of the Emergencies Act

The Freedom Convoy movement that arrived at Parliament Hill in late January was an outstanding example of effective peaceful protest against authoritarian government policy, in this case vaccination mandates that objectively violate the fundamental freedoms of religion, conscience, and life, liberty, and security of the person.

The Convoy’s successes were summarized in their Statement of Accomplishments, which OCLA posted on our site at the link here.

Throughout the Freedom Convoy’s presence on Parliament Hill, OCLA researchers attended and observed the protest, which informed our following two public statements in support of the protesters’ rights and against the government’s extreme and unnecessary use of the Emergencies Act:

OCLA research report on vaccine adverse events (VAERS) data in the USA

Unlike in Canada, the USA maintains a large, public database of adverse events following injections with vaccine products, called the “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System” (VAERS) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The VAERS database is a rich source of data that can be used to deepen understanding about the adverse impacts of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. OCLA researchers Joseph Hickey and Denis Rancourt authored a research report using the VAERS data entitled “Nature of the Toxicity of the COVID-19 Vaccines in the USA”, which can be read here.

The main findings of the research are that:

  • the products are toxic (Janssen > Moderna > Pfizer)
  • targeting vulnerable elderly people early in the roll-out harmed them disproportionately (including death)
  • the distribution of days-to-death since injection displays a robust pattern giving insight about the nature of the toxic effect, and this pattern also exists for flu vaccines
  • toxicity (number of deaths per dose) increases exponentially with age
  • there is no evidence of batch-specific toxicity; rather, variability of harm is more likely due to age-dependent spread of vulnerability to toxin
  • the toxicity (deaths per dose) for COVID-19 vaccines is about 27 times greater than for flu vaccines (ref: pg. 34/766 at the link here)

OCLA’s research was covered in Rebel News (here) and in an extensive interview (in French) on Science en Conscience with Jérémie Mercier (here).

OCLA continues to research the VAERS data, with plans to publish an updated and expanded version of our report.

OCLA in the media

All past media articles featuring OCLA’s work can be read here.

How to stay connected to OCLA

Website: https://ocla.ca
Twitter: https://twitter.com/oncivlib
MeWe: https://mewe.com/group/5f282c504c45c17d75d6ace4
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKqbht2j2BPu4Wb2epM4BKw

Note about OCLA’s Facebook group: Our group, which had almost 10,000 members and was formed in September 2012, was unilaterally removed by Facebook during the Freedom Convoy in February 2022, with no explanation provided.

Donations

As an independent non-profit organization with a very small budget, we depend on donations to continue our work, and appreciate any contribution you can make. Donations can be made in three ways:

1) Through PayPal, by clicking the “Donate” button in the top-right corner of our site at https://ocla.ca.

2) With cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and other options) at the link here.

3) By sending a cheque to “Ontario Civil Liberties Association” to our (new!) mailing address:

Ontario Civil Liberties Association
28 Concourse Gate, Unit 105
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada K2E 7T7

OCLA is not affiliated with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) or the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA). All three associations are separate and distinct.

Thank you for your support!

Sincerely,

Joseph Hickey, PhD
Executive Director
Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca)

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Dr. Denis Rancourt presents OCLA’s criticism of the CMAJ Fisman et al. paper to the Canadian Covid Care Alliance

OCLA researcher Dr. Denis Rancourt presented the OCLA’s criticism of the recent Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) paper by Fisman et al. to members of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance at a Zoom meeting on May 4, 2022.

OCLA expressed its criticism of the Fisman et al. article in an April 27 public statement and in a Letter to the Editor to CMAJ published on April 29.

The video of Dr. Rancourt’s presentation is embedded below and can also be viewed on Bitchute here.

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OCLA Statement on CMAJ Fisman et al. Article Claiming Disproportionate Infection Risk from Unvaccinated Population, and on Negligent Media Reporting

(A PDF version of this statement is available here)

(Une traduction en français de cette déclaration est disponible ici)

Update: A condensed version of this statement has been published as a Letter to the Editor on CMAJ’s website (here)

The recently published article by Fisman et al. “Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission” (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/16/E573) has received disproportionate coverage in the mainstream media, which risks causing societal vilification of people who have refused the medical intervention aggressively promoted by governments and large corporations.

As scientists familiar with epidemiological modelling and actual epidemiology, we have carefully examined the article of Fisman et al. and find its main conclusion (that risk of infection among vaccinated people can be disproportionately attributed to unvaccinated people) does not follow from the model presented.

Fisman et al. concocted a new parameter, never before defined in the scientific literature, which they call “unvaccinated contribution to infection risk, Ψ”. Google Scholar has no other scientific article that defines this parameter.

Fisman et al. define their Ψ parameter as “the fraction of all infections among vaccinated people that derived from contact with unvaccinated people, divided by the fraction of all contacts [involving vaccinated people] that occurred with unvaccinated people”.

Fisman et al. then falsely claim that their Ψ parameter means the following: “Effectively, this represents a normalized index of the degree to which risk in one group may be disproportionately driven by contact with another.”

This incorrect characterization of their own parameter Ψ is the only basis for their main conclusion. It is incorrect for the following reason: the model is blind as to whether the “contacts” in the normalizing denominator of Ψ are infectious or benign, irrespective of vaccination status.

Indeed, by definition in the model, most “contacts” in the model are benign (not involving an infectious person and a susceptible person), whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.

This means that the normalizing denominator of Ψ cannot be assumed to represent “contacts driving infection”, as advanced by Fisman et al.

Fisman et al. are either incompetent or disingenuous.

It is easy to see that Ψ is a nonsense parameter in Fisman et al.’s own results:

a. Their Figure 2A shows Ψ dropping dramatically with increasing reproduction number. This would mean that unvaccinated people threaten vaccinated people proportionately less when the presumed pathogen is more infectious. The state should not worry about unvaccinated people if the pandemic is sufficiently virulent?

b. Their Figure 2B shows Ψ approaching large values as the mixing coefficient η approaches 1. This would mean that unvaccinated people are proportionately more of a threat to vaccinated people as the two groups are more and more isolated from each other, up to complete isolation. This is an absurd result.

In fact, the obvious parameter that Fisman et al. could have reported is the numerator of Ψ, which is “the fraction of all infections among vaccinated people that derived from contact with unvaccinated people”.

We plot this “numerator of Ψ”, for parameters used by Fisman et al., versus the mixing coefficient η, and for different population fractions of unvaccinated people, here:plot-numer-Psi-v-eta-R0-6

We see that there is no indication of disproportionate infections caused by unvaccinated people, and that the “the fraction of all infections among vaccinated people that derived from contact with unvaccinated people” is bound by the relative populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated susceptible individuals for random mixing, and goes more and more quickly to a value of zero as isolation between the two groups increases, as it must.

These are trivial results.  The only way to get the simple model to say anything else is to concoct and misinterpret an ad hoc parameter.

We refrain from saying much about how distant the model actually is from reality, except to point out that Fisman et al. did not use the most relevant work of Singanayagam et al. (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00648-4/fulltext) whose detailed empirical study of transmission with the Delta variant shows the vaccine inefficiency value of 0.2 used by Fisman et al. to be incorrect.  Singanayagam et al. find “The secondary attack rate in household contacts exposed to the delta variant was 25% (95% CI 18–33) for fully vaccinated individuals compared with 38% (24–53) in unvaccinated individuals”, which corresponds to a vaccine inefficiency of 25%/38% = 0.66. Fisman et al. did not cite the paper of Singanayagam et al., which was peer-review published 29 October 2021.

Finally, we are obliged to comment on the negligent media frenzy that ensued.

There is no way that a journalist could critically evaluate the subterfuge inherent in the parameter Ψ. Therefore, they should have recognized their limits and sought expert counter opinions before participating in their mobbing of unvaccinated people, especially since the Competing Interests statement has: “David Fisman has served on advisory boards related to influenza and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for Seqirus, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Pasteur Vaccines …”

Likewise, one has to wonder how the competent anonymous reviewers at the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) managed not to question the use and meaning of the unusual parameter Ψ.

Denis Rancourt, PhD
Joseph Hickey, PhD

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OCLA letter opposing government’s proposed new crime of “Holocaust denial”

The federal government is proposing, as part of its 2022 Budget, to create a new crime of “Holocaust denial” in Canada.

OCLA sent a letter today to Canadian Members of Parliament and Senators asking them not to implement the proposed Criminal Code provision, since it is squarely contrary to international law and will damage Canadian democracy.

OCLA’s letter to MPs and Senators can be read at the link here.

OCLA’s past letters calling for the existing “hate speech” provisions of the Criminal Code to be repealed can be read at the links below:

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OCLA researcher Dr. Denis Rancourt will be a keynote speaker at the Canadian Centre for Learning’s launch event

Dr. Rancourt will be a keynote speaker, alongside Dr. Julie Ponesse and Anita Krishna, at the April 27, 2022, event.

The Canadian Centre for Learning is an “interdisciplinary, collaborative higher learning community that provides opportunities for learners to study and work with world class, experienced and dedicated academics and professionals. As a beacon of freedom, CCL is a place where people’s voices matter, learning is joyful, ideas are inspirational and impact is transformational.”

More information about the event can be found on the CCL’s site here.

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