Margret Kopala did the world a favour with her lengthy article, “The Virus, the Vaccine, the Victims: Beginning the Great Reckoning.” The essay, first published in the respected C2C Journal on May 26, and by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, pointed to mounting evidence that connected waves of death and injury to COVID-19 vaccination. Critics who say the facts aren’t on Kopala’s side have made great omissions and falsely stamped the opinions of authorities to be facts.
One 1200-word rebuttal distributed to the Frontier Centre and others dedicated roughly one-quarter of its content to disparage Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RFK who wrote the popular book The Real Anthony Fauci, and Kopala briefly juxtaposes this book’s subject with its author. Kopala suggested while RFK was gaining attention as a presidential candidate Fauci no longer had his famous public role—another sign that public perception was shifting against the narratives of authorities.
Whether RFK’s chances to be president in 2024 were “credible” as she stated, (he is the second most popular Democratic candidate running up to 20% in recent polls), were a matter of opinion, not fact, and had little to do with her lengthy argument. Nevertheless, the rebuttal took great lengths to dismiss her entire article based on a critique of RFK that borrowed heavily from the article “The reality of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by radiologist Pradheep J. Shanker and published in the National Review.
Shanker writes that RFK has “distorted facts,” but points to a claim apparently made by RFK that Kopala does not even include in the article. RFK reportedly said that one in every 39 children were injured by the COVID vaccine, as shown by the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, making the vaccine the most harmful in history.
One claim that Kopola did cite was also chided “As of March 3, 2023, [cardiologist Dr. Peter] McCullough said, VAERS had recorded 17,071 deaths in just the U.S. that occurred within a few days of taking the Covid-19 vaccines and 16,454 permanently disabled Americans,” she wrote.
The rebuttal rightly points out that if someone dies shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination, it does not automatically prove that the vaccine caused the death. However, it goes too far when it states, “McCullough might claim that VAERS data prove COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, but he is plainly wrong: The facts are against him.”
This “fact” was not another data set or analysis, but more of an argument. The VAERS website states, “When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established.” Shanker says causality in any given case can only be confirmed by investigation. True, but McCullough says no less, and he does so right in Kopala’s article.
“It is my testimony that no more than 10, 15, no more than 50 deaths…would ever be tolerable, that programs would be shut down [followed by] a deep dive on safety to find out why people are dying,” said McCullough.
McCullough was only stating that 50 adverse VAERS reports is usually enough to trigger an investigation, which means 17,000 should clearly be enough to do so. Kopala quotes him as saying, prior to 2020, VAERS had “a total on average of 158 deaths per year in this entire data system.” Indeed, when there’s this much metaphorical smoke, civilians should flee the scene while investigators see how much fire is really there.
And, as the article pointed out, McCullough based his concerns not just on VAERS, but on 39 datasets from around the world. Kopala gives us plenty of reason to believe he know to interpret such data in with nuance, given he had 1,000 publications to his name, 660 citations in the National Library of Medicine, and was a former chair of many medical safety boards.
Kopala’s question, “If Covid-19 is over, why are more of us dying?” still begs an answer. A Cleveland Clinic study of its 51,000 employees found the more vaccines they had, the more likely they were to contract COVID. This was said in a rebuttal to be counter-factual, with no specifics given.
The analysis by Denis Rancourt and Edward Dowd, both witnesses to Canada’s National Citizens Inquiry on COVID-19, were reported by Kopala and neither mentioned nor rebutted. Rancourt, a PhD physicist, is quoted by Kopala as saying, there is “no way to escape the conclusion that the vaccines definitely caused death in significant numbers.” His initial estimate, included by Kopala was 10,000 to 35,000 in Canada alone, though later testimony to the NCI placed this at 28,000 to 31,000, depending on what one used as a baseline.
The former University of Ottawa lecturer has experience and expertise in nano-particles, molecular science, statistical analysis, theoretical modeling, and measurement methods, found substantial spikes in mortality coinciding with waves of vaccination. He’s been cited more than 3,200 times, according to Google scholar, and has made more than 30 studies of COVID-19. It’s a good thing no one has attempted to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Dowd, the former portfolio manager at Blackrock Inc. and author of Cause Unknown The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 told the NCI that “everything went off the rails in 2021” and “The whole of the U.S. insurance industry experienced 40 percent excess mortality among those between the ages of 25 and 64.” Dowd blamed the vaccine for 300,000 excess deaths and 1.4 million disabilities in 2021-2022.
Given all this, should we really believe the vaccine was safe and effective, just because the Centres for Disease Control said so? Is it a rock-solid assumption they examined every VAERS report and made detailed assessments to reach an informed, unbiased conclusion? McCullough, for one, seemed to think not nearly enough investigation had taken place.
There’s plenty of reason to not regard the CDC as a reliable fact checker, let alone a fact-establisher by decree. The conflation of statements by official government bodies with “facts” is the problem Orwell described in the book 1984. When 2+2=5 because the government said so, a power game is in full effect and objective truth is out the window.
The CDC can also be criticized on a less philosophical basis. On September 28, 2020 the Washington Post pointed out the CDC had made “technical blunders” and “experienced a loss of institutional credibility at a time when the nation desperately needs to know whom to trust.”
Worse, “This harsh assessment…comes from the agency’s friends and supporters — and even from some of the professionals within the agency’s Atlanta headquarters.” All this when “the CDC has to lead the effort and persuade people to get their shots.”
Question: how eager, thorough, and forthcoming would the CDC be regarding the possibility they augmented deaths instead of preventing them?
What the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, or anyone else says today may not be what they say tomorrow, and to say their word is gospel is to be naïve. Kopala points out correctly that they were often wrong. The Imperial College of London made exaggerated claims of the deadly threat of the virus. Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam claimed COVID mitigation measures saved 800,000 lives, something Rancourt dismissed as impossible in testimony to the NCI.
Throughout the pandemic, big tech was too trusting of the authorities, and censored opinions contrary to medical health authorities, even though those authorities sometimes reached contrary conclusions themselves.
“Flip-flop Fauci,” as Edmonton pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson once called him, said on U.S. national TV that masks were useless in the pandemic, only to advise everyone to wear them. Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus leaked out of the Wuhan lab, but later, it later came to light the National Institutes of Health had been involved in gain-of-function research for coronaviruses in that very lab. As Kopala pointed out the lab leak theory is now accepted as the most plausible.
As Kopala pointed out, Canada’s Health Infobase had recorded 54,569 vaccine adverse events, of which 10,685 were considered serious. This occurred despite accusations “of suppressing honest reporting of adverse events.” It is dubious indeed to find that Health Canada has only linked four deaths as caused the vaccine, out of 442 reported to Canadian authorities.
My experience as a journalist gives me a window on how such a small number might be reached and why it should not be believed. This author interviewed a Saskatoon woman whose husband died the third day after his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, only to have a doctor deny any vaccine connection to the death was even possible. In another case, a Yorkton, Sask. man threw up in the parking lot outside the grocery store pharmacy where he had received his second COVID-19 shot less than an hour earlier. He died six days later of kidney failure despite receiving a clean bill of health from a doctor a few weeks prior. His daughter told me in an interview the province would not acknowledge a connection, though the Vaccine Injury Support Program might.
Dr. Charles Hoffe, who has practiced medicine almost 30 years in Lytton, B.C., told the NCI and myself that he submitted 14 vaccine injury reports (including one death) to authorities, only to have them all rejected outright without even interviewing his patients. So much for due diligence by national authorities.
As the old story goes, the Emperor has no clothes. Those who insist that he does simply because he says so aren’t looking at plain facts at all. Real eyes realize real lies. For anyone with those eyes to see, the illusions around the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccine are fading out to expose some harsh realities.
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
