Citizen-Led Inquiry Asks Ottawa to Cancel COVID-19 Vaccine Approval

A nurse prepares a COVID vaccine shot on Oct. 3, 2021. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

The National Citizens’ Inquiry (NCI) has written to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking him to immediately stop the use of COVID-19 vaccines, saying their approval process wasn’t robust enough to guarantee safety and efficacy.

“In the face of your government’s reported intention to promote booster injections in coming months, the urgency now lies in telling the truth to Canadians and taking corrective action,” says a Sept. 14 open letter written by Ches Crosbie, the NCI’s administrator.

Mr. Crosbie alleges that contrary to what the public was told, Health Canada was not able to determine that the vaccines are safe. He says regular drug approval guidelines were not followed, and that an interim order was implemented to speed up the process.

Health Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but it has told The Epoch Times on several previous occasions that the approval process was robust, even though manufacturers were allowed to provide data from clinical trials on a rolling basis, as opposed to all at once.

Health Canada does not test or review the vaccines but relies on the manufacturers’ expected goodwill and transparency.

“As a matter of common sense, the objective falsity of the ‘proven safe’ claim, brings into question the basis for informed consent to the administration of the injections, creating potentially enormous liabilities,” says Mr. Crosbie.

This year, the NCI conducted hearings across the country over the course of several months this year to gather testimony from experts and lay individuals about the government’s management of COVID-19 and its real-world impacts.

While NCI commissioners are currently writing a report based on the testimonies, they have decided to release an interim version on Sept. 14, due to new developments surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines.

“We’ve been waiting for months as they put together this huge report,” said NCI spokeswoman Michelle Leduc Catlin during a virtual press conference.

“However, with the recent government announcement that a new Moderna shot has been approved, [the commissioners] felt that it was urgent to release this one piece of the report.”

On Sept. 12, Health Canada approved a new Moderna shot for individuals as young as six months old. It targets a variant of the virus that’s almost extinct. Testing was conducted on 50 individuals, one of whom had an unspecified adverse event leading to a medical visit.

Approval Process

The NCI’s interim report says the “unfortunate result” of Health Canada modifying its approval process, based on the testimony collected, is that many Canadians were “injured or killed” by the injections.

“At the same time, the Covid-19 vaccine was revealed not to be effective in preventing infection and transmission nor reducing the severity of illness,” said the report.

Health Canada does not promote the injections as being able to prevent COVID infection, but says they do protect against severe outcomes. It also says their benefits continue to outweigh the risks of the disease.

As of June, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) says 55,145 people have reported side effects out of 98,194,601 doses administered. PHAC recognizes that its passive surveillance system produces a lot of underreporting, while financing certain projects to improve its awareness, such as the Canadian National Vaccine Safety (CANVAS) Network.

In one CANVAS survey, there were 870,516 side effects reported out of 1,173,748 doses, seven days after individuals received a shot. One out of every 45 doses administered, there was one self-report of a symptom affecting the cardiorespiratory system.

PHAC has also documented a small number of deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccination.

‘Conflict of Interest’

On top of criticizing an irregular approval process for COVID-19 vaccines, the NCI report suggests circumstances were such that the approval was essentially just a rubber stamp.

It says the government was under enormous pressure from the media to secure and distribute vaccines to Canadians, and hence ordered millions of doses from manufacturers.

“This placed the Government in a conflict of interest because it had purchased and imported unapproved vaccines while it waited for itself to approve the vaccines. The Interim Order appears to have been designed to ensure that the vaccines would have no problem in receiving authorization,” says the NCI.

It adds that if the injections had not been authorized, the government would have suffered “significant political blowback.”

“Thus, it needed to authorize the Covid-19 vaccines, and it needed to do it quickly,” says the NCI. “The Government of Canada essentially put itself in charge of authorizing a drug that it had spent millions of public dollars on, had promised publicly on many occasions, and that it wanted to administer to every Canadian citizen.”

These conditions led to the approval of a drug that is neither safe nor effective, says the NCI. The group is calling on Ottawa to withdraw the products from circulation, launch a judicial investigation into the authorization process, and make public all related documents.

Contracts

Government contracts with vaccine manufacturers have been hidden from public view, except in rare cases. In South Africa, legal action recently forced the government to disclose its contracts with Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, which showed they protected themselves against vaccine injury claims.

Canadian MPs sought to view the contracts last winter, but the Liberal government resisted, saying they would need to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said at the time the contracts have so many redactions because they show the position of weakness Ottawa was negotiating from.

“It’s because these documents were signed at the beginning of a pandemic when everybody was desperate for vaccines, when companies were being told to rush vaccine production, do testing in an unprecedented way, in a way they normally don’t do it,” he said in February.

He added that the companies were exposed to “way higher liability” for rushing the products to market, skipping the testing that in a normal scenario would take years to complete.

“So that’s why these companies said, ‘If I’m going to deliver you this product that I haven’t tested in my normal way, I want to have different conditions.’”

Under the Hood

Vaccine contracts is not the only area where there is a lack of transparency. Health Canada itself has not reviewed manufacturing processes since they are proprietary.

Concerns have been raised about this in recent months, given manufacturers like Pfizer used a different production process to make the batches used in clinical trials from those for mass distribution. The latter injections were not tested for safety and efficacy in clinical trials.

“Efficacy and safety demonstrated using clinical batches manufactured using ‘Process 1’ are also applicable to commercial batches produced using ‘Process 2,’” Health Canada previously told The Epoch Times.

Scientists have also found faults in the production process, with plasmid DNA not having been completely removed from the mRNA injections and being in higher quantity than what is permitted by regulators.

“There are pieces of plasmid DNA in the vaccine," Dr. Phillip J. Buckhaults, professor of cancer genomics and director of the Cancer Genetics Lab at the University of South Carolina, previously told The Epoch Times.

“No one knows if this DNA does anything clinically significant, but it is prudent to check vaccinated people for any evidence of genome modification.”