Doctor Paul Jackson, Mississauga
17 January 2020
Mayor Bonnie Crombie, Councillor Stephan Dasko, Councillor Karen Ras, Councillor Chris Fonseca, Councillor John Kovac, Councillor Carolyn Parrish, Councillor Ron Starr, Councillor Dipika Damerla, Councillor Matt Mahoney, Councillor Pat Saito, Councillor Sue McFadden, Councillor George Carlson
Mississauga City Council:
This letter is a response to Councillor Fonseca’s reply to my initial letter, in which I ask her to justify her support for Mississauga’s mandatory face-mask legislation. That original letter of 15 December 2020 can be consulted here. The current letter is addressed to all Mississauga city councillors as well as the mayor in the hope that some among you will engage with the actual content of my criticisms and act in good faith.
I will divide this letter into four sections, intended to help you execute your responsibilities as elected representatives effectively. First, I will simply cut-and-paste Councillor Fonseca’s reply in its entirety. I am doing this in the interest of transparency and to allow all readers to understand the current response. Secondly, I will respond to Fonseca’s reply. Thirdly, I will review the 2009 swine-flu hoax in some detail in order that we can better understand (fourthly) a 2019 conference presentation to pharmaceutical insiders on how to manipulate politicians, the media, and the public.
First, here is Councillor Fonseca’s response:
Good afternoon Dr. Jackson,
Councillor Fonseca has received the following response to your email of December 15, 2020, from Peel Regional Staff:
“The provincial and local requirements for mask use inside public spaces were established to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in our communities. COVID-19 is spread from person-to-person through respiratory droplets and infected droplets can spread before a person shows any symptoms. Wearing masks can help control spread by preventing your droplets from accidentally infecting others. It is important to note that a range of protective measures and precautions are required to protect the health of individuals and limit the spread of the virus. When combined with physical distancing and proper hand-hygiene, emerging and available evidence indicates that non-medical masks and face coverings are likely beneficial in controlling COVID-19 at its source by minimizing the spread of droplets from the person wearing the mask to others. This can protect others if the wearer has COVID-19, and this is especially important in situations where it’s difficult to maintain physical distance. Peel Public Health continues to refer to the evidence reviews and analyses from our provincial health partners and officials. Public Health Ontario’s evidence brief, available here, outlines the science in greater detail. Our Peel Public Health COVID-19 website also further discusses mask use during COVID-19.
In Peel and other areas of Ontario, we continue to see unsustainably high levels of COVID-19 transmission and hospitalizations. Peel Public Health continuously monitors several ‘core indicators’ for COVID-19 – more information about these core indicators can be found in our Peel COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Updates. Peel’s case counts per 100,000 population remain high, our test positivity is one of the highest in Ontario, public health capacity to contact trace is being increasingly challenged and hospital beds are filling up quickly. As such, the provincial government and local public health continue to progressively intervene with measures to further limit spread of the virus. Masking, along with many other interventions, are essential in limiting further spread and managing the current pandemic picture in Peel.
Further, the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines signals the next phase in our continued response to keep people in Peel healthy. Peel Public Health’s immunization plan is part of an integrated strategy with all levels of government, who play important roles in delivering the COVID-19 vaccine to residents. The Government of Ontario has a 3-phase plan to distribute the vaccine starting with the most vulnerable populations and essential health care workers. Peel Public Health’s immunization plan aligns with vaccine guidance from the province. Our COVID-19 vaccine webpage includes further information.
Please visit our COVID-19 website for more information, including about the current measures in Peel and masks. If you wish to speak with someone about other COVID-19 issues feel free to call Peel Public Health at 905-799-7700. Call centre hours are 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, Monday to Friday.”
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Respectively,
Helena Francisco
Acting Administrative Assistant
Councillor Chris Fonseca, Ward 3
Let us begin by noting that you, Councillor Fonseca, did not compose one word of the reply. The substantive part of the reply came from Peel Regional Staff, which begs the question: what is the role of city council? You were elected to pass legislation. Yet, by this response, you imply that you deferred to anonymous civil servants in the framing of this absolutely critical by-law. Am I to understand that you – the city council – see yourselves as a rubber stamp for technocrats? If that is the case, you must not believe in representative government, much less democracy. In our system, in Mississauga, you are responsible for your actions on council. Are you telling me now that you were just following orders? You have not even told me whose orders you were following: unnamed and unelected Peel Regional Staffers. You, the city council, appear to be making the case for the end of our electoral system in favour of rule by technocrats. That is called a technocracy. Disconcerting as it is to find that Mississauga’s elected representatives have taken it upon themselves to change our form of government and to legislate themselves out of a job, allow me to note in passing that the technocrats are wrong.
The reply from anonymous Peel Regional Staffers does not address any of the content of my original letter. (Only the first paragraph addresses face masks, the subject of my letter.) I don’t understand how you could have read their comments and been satisfied in any way. The anonymous authors justify their support for face masks on the basis of the very same references I invalidate in my original letter to you. Then, they engage in exactly the unscientific, barroom kind of speculation that I have already argued cannot serve as the basis of public policy. They make unsupported claims about the nature of nanoparticles as well as of the effects and consequences of wearing face masks. They do not cite one peer-reviewed randomized control trial with verified outcomes to support mandatory face mask legislation. On the other hand, I have referred you to those published trials, the only science that exists on the matter that is capable of informing public policy. The anonymous authors do not acknowledge the existence of those studies nor the history of arbitration hearings in Ontario that I discuss. After this response, we are in exactly the same place we were before I sent the letter, except that we have a better idea of who is running Mississauga. Or, to be precise, who is not running Mississauga.
Those anonymous “experts” did not pass By-law 0169-2020. You, not they, are responsible for it. In my letter to you, I ask you to justify how city council balanced all the ills that face masks are inflicting on Mississaugans with any presumed benefits. In your reply, you do not acknowledge any of those issues. I asked you to account for the capricious enforcement of the by-law. Nothing in response. You ignored all of my very pointed criticisms. I asked you to account for the unconstitutionality of the by-law, a negation of our common-law heritage. You ignored that fundamental issue. You, not the anonymous public-health “experts,” are responsible for all of those matters, none of which have you addressed.
You, the city councillors, and the mayor have passed wide-reaching legislation based on one narrow issue: the presumed (and still unsubstantiated) effect of face masks in slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Now, it is clear that, even on that one point, you cannot cite any supporting science. City council has surrendered its responsibilities to anonymous medical “experts” who cannot justify face masks on medical or scientific grounds.
When you passed By-law 0169-2020, what other experts did you consult? The by-law mentions only the Peel Regional public-health officer. Whom did he consult on the very narrow question of the utility of masks in preventing the spread of a virus? Is he also hiding behind unnamed Peel Regional Staffers? So far, you have not been able to present any evidence that would trump the actual science that I have offered you (and that you have ignored.)
We will take an historical detour that could help you to understand the risks you are taking in abrogating your responsibilities as elected representatives of Mississaugans. This is a cautionary tale for us all.
The History of the Swine Flu “Pandemic”
In 2020, mainstream media removed from the Internet its coverage of the 2009 swine-flu hoax. Using archived sources, allow me to briefly reconstruct those aspects of that history that might inform your response to the present situation.
Beginning in 2006, governments were warned that the avian flu (H5N1) might evolve into a form that could be transmissible from human-to-human. Consequently, they stockpiled the anti-viral drug Tamiflu and entered into “sleeper contracts” with pharmaceutical corporations for potential vaccines. The contracts would be activated in the event that the World Health Organization announced a phase-six pandemic. Those same drug companies had representatives inside of the WHO, the media, and academia. (Penetration that has increased exponentially since then.)
In the town of La Gloria, Mexico, a seven-month-old baby died of bacterial pneumonia in February 2009; a two-month old died of the same cause a few weeks later. Then many local people started getting sick. They blamed the huge pig farms that surrounded the town, owned by a subsidiary of the American pork transnational, Smithfield Foods. The pigs are imprisoned in more than seventy metal buildings, each with a large tank attached where waste from the pigs festers. Pigs who die before they are fat enough to slaughter are left to rot in pits. Breezes blow a putrid air from the open pools that settles over the town, trapped by the surrounding hills. Local activists had fought to stop the expansion of the plants, but the Mexican authorities stood with Smithfield Foods against the town. Instead, they fumigated the open cesspools, adding another level of toxicity. What caused the flu-like symptoms and, ultimately, seven deaths in La Gloria? Was it the ecological nightmare that the factory farms had introduced onto the pastoral landscape? Or, was it a virus that had been incubated in the imprisoned pigs? Either way, the government and industry came down hard on the local activists who advocated against the presence of the factory farms.
By April, people starting getting sick in Europe with an apparently new strain of influenza dubbed the Mexican flu. We now know it as the swine flu. The following month, the WHO changed its definition of a pandemic, which had been defined, until then, as “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” The issue of deaths is crucial because, every year, the flu kills far more people than swine flu ever would. In May, the WHO eliminated severity as a criterion for naming a pandemic. At the time, the swine flu had killed, worldwide, the number of people who die every few hours of the seasonal flu. But, by the new definition, the swine flu became a global emergency. European nations reacted with alarm.
For instance, the British National Health Services advised political authorities to prepare the morgues for 65,000 deaths and to put the armed forces on stand-by. (In the end, there were 5,000 cases and 251 deaths, the vast majority among people with serious co-morbidities.) The Daily Mail reported that Sir Roy Anderson, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College in London, who advised the government on swine flu, also held a $177,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, which produced anti-flu drugs and vaccines from which it would profit handsomely from the swine flu hoax.
Politicians were feeling the pressure from all sides. The media were publishing horror stories about the lethality of the new virus and the dark times ahead. Germany had signed a contract with GlaxoSmithKline for the vaccine Pandemrix. The contract would come into effect should the WHO name swine flu a phase-six pandemic. Medical institutes (beholden to the pharmaceutical industry) put pressure on politicians to act more aggressively to contain the spread of swine flu.
In mid-May, thirty representatives of pharmaceutical corporations met with WHO Director-General Chan and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. The meeting was called under cover of ensuring that poor countries would have access to a vaccine, but the main concern was the declaration of a phase-six pandemic that would activate billions of dollars worth of contracts.
On 11 June 2009, on the advice of fifteen experts from around the world and after 144 deaths attributed to it globally, the WHO declared the swine flu a phase-six pandemic. Germany was now committed to the GSK vaccine, Pandemrix. By mid-July, 727 Germans were infected. Only thirteen percent of the population wanted any vaccine.
On 9 October 2009, Doctor Wolf-Dieter Ludwig, an oncologist and chairman of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association, said, “The health authorities have fallen for a campaign by the pharmaceutical companies, which were plainly using a supposed threat to make money.” Still the campaign of fear continued. Two weeks later, a newspaper headline warned, in toxic yellow, “Swine Flu Professor Fears 35,000 Dead in Germany!” That professor, Adolf Windorfer, had received payments from GSK and Novartis. (An advertisement for the German Association of Pharmaceutical Companies appeared next to the headline.) Even as the swine flu was clearly not living up to its hype as a killer, the media kept the fear alive that it could mutate into an horrific pathogen.
Doctor Wolfgang Wodarg was head of health at the Council of Europe at the time. He explained, “In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight healthcare resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.” In January 2010, Wodarg calculated that the WHO’s classification of the swine flu as a phase-six pandemic had earned the pharmaceutical corporations a windfall of eighteen billion dollars. On 5 March 2010, German states proposed selling ten million doses of Pandemrix (that no German wanted) to Pakistan.
A number of countries, including Canada, the US, UK, France, and Germany granted the pharmaceutical giants indemnity from liability for the consequences of their swine-flu vaccines, so that those injured from the shot would not have recourse to the courts in the case of corporate negligence.
About sixty million people received the Pandemrix vaccine. Vaccinations were discontinued when doctors took note of severe adverse reactions. Pandemrix contained a substance, never administered previously, that triggered narcolepsy and cataplexy in certain people. Narcolepsy disrupts the victim’s sleeping cycle such that they cannot sleep for more than ninety minutes at a time. As a result, they fall asleep at any time during the day, making it impossible for them to lead a normal life. It also damages mental functions and memory. Cataplexy causes its victims to lose consciousness when they experience heightened emotions. Laughing, for instance, is dangerous. Eighty percent of the victims were children, who were more vulnerable to the vaccine. Also affected were healthcare workers who took the vaccine and were left unable to work subsequently. In 2014, the British government agreed to pay victims sixty million pounds in compensation.
The pharmaceutical industry funded the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza, headed by Albert Osterhaus, who was also one of the WHO’s key advisors on influenza vaccines. He, along with Johannes Lower of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, advised the WHO on swine-flu vaccinations. Lower later claimed, “We expected a real pandemic, and we thought that it had to happen. There was no one who suggested re-thinking our approach.”
Swine flu, in short, was a dud. It had been hyped into a global pandemic by the pharmaceutical industry and its lackeys in academia, media, and various foundations. It had representatives in government who advised politicians like Mississauga’s city council. Those politicians failed to ask critical questions. They accepted unsubstantiated models and wild claims about how the virus would devastate their populations.
There is a class of researchers that can be called virus hunters, whose life work is to look for a killer virus with the potential to ravage humanity. So far, they have failed to find their El Dorado. But they will keep looking, funded by governments and pharmaceuticals.
European Scientific Working Group on Influenza
So, what became of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI) that was founded by pharmaceutical giants to advise governments during the swine-flu pandemic? It is a greater force now than it was a decade ago when it got everything wrong about the swine flu. But it has not changed. Albert Osterhaus is still its chairman. He has been sounding alarm bells throughout 2020 for more lockdowns, raising the level of fear as high as one man can.
ESWI holds conferences periodically. Its purpose is to “improve public health protection against influenza, turning the ESWI network into a unique and effective organization to address influenza issues in Europe.” Its partners are AstraZeneca, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, and Seqirus.
On 22 January 2019, the ESWI held an influenza preparedness conference at Chatham House in London with the theme “Joining Forces in Influenza Pandemic Preparedness.” Among the speakers was Doctor Marc van Ranst, who had been the flu commissioner for Belgium during the 2009 swine-flu fiasco. I urge you all to view his presentation, called “Communication and Public Engagement.”
Van Ranst discusses in detail how, as flu commissioner, he attempted to guide policy as well as the public response to the swine-flu phenomenon in Belgium. Remember that the notion that the swine flu, which van Ranst promoted as the Mexican flu, was a pandemic was entirely unfounded. There was never any evidence that it would become a global catastrophe. And it did not. However, the promoters of the 2019 conference had done their best, in 2009, to ensure that the public was frightened and that politicians – at all levels, from local to national to international – were cornered into acting hastily, based on the advice of people behind the scenes. Van Ranst, in the presentation at the conference ten years after the fake pandemic, discusses his strategy to control the narrative, the media, and the public. Never does he seem to realize that all of his actions were misguided and malign. The pandemic was created by the manipulation of the WHO’s definition. Belgians were never in danger, except from the vaccine that he promoted. In 2019, ten years after the swine-flu fiasco and a year before the COVID-19 phenomenon, he is describing how he tried to sell a pandemic even without evidence that one existed. (He explains, for example, that you can give the public case and death figures that are wholly unremarkable, but, that, unfamiliar with normal mortality rates, they will receive with alarm.) He is describing his playbook, his strategy, and tactics. It is a shameless class in how to manipulate the public, politicians, and media in the interests of Big Pharma.
An elucidating moment in his talk is when he “shames” Wolfgang Wodarg (at fifteen minutes into the video) for his role in thwarting the hoax. In reality, Wodarg saved lives and was the key player in ending the debacle. But, to the participants at the pharmaceutical-funded ESWI conference in 2019, he was still the enemy, not of the people, but, of the pharmaceutical arm of the technocrats.
In light of the current situation, I think that all politicians must proceed with extreme caution. While Van Ranst is talking to industry insiders, he is also telling you how you, members of Mississauga’s city council, are being played. Your job as elected representatives is to judge all advice on its merits and to act in good faith.
I urge you to do that before it is no longer possible.
Remember that the topic of this correspondence is the efficacy of face masks in affecting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Whether or not we are seeing the promotion of another false pandemic, as happened in 2009, is irrelevant to that issue. The question on the table is whether Mississauga By-law 0169-2020 is justified. Again, I refer you all to my original letter and all of the science and history referenced there.
Paul Jackson, PhD