News Round-Up: Epidemiologist on the BBC's Covid Misinfo, WHO Chief's Concern about the Pandemic Treaty and Canadian Court on Justin Trudeau's Emergencies Act Use

Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.

Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:

• British professor: the BBC spread misinformation and panic during the pandemic.

• WHO chief: pandemic treaty at risk of collapse.

• Canadian court: use of the Emergencies Act to forcefully end the Freedom Convoy protests in 2022 was unjustified.

• UK: transideology alters gender pay gap statistics.

• Study: wind farms force wildlife to leave habitats.

British professor: the BBC spread misinformation and panic during the pandemic

Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and one of the government's Covid advisers there, said the BBC misled the public during the pandemic, reports The Telegraph. Woolhouse was giving evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry. One of his key messages was that media outlets – the BBC in particular, he said – misled people at the start of the pandemic into believing that everyone was equally at risk from Covid. “They routinely reported deaths of healthy young adults, thereby giving the impression that these were common. In reality, such deaths were extremely rare; the great majority of Covid deaths occurred in the elderly, frail and infirm,” he wrote in a statement to the commission. It was well known all along, he said, that the risk of death from Covid was 10,000 times higher among people over 75 than among people under 15.

According to Woolhouse, the BBC also guided people to think, from the very beginning of the pandemic, that the medical system in the country was under extraordinary pressure. “One example is that they gave the impression that hospitals were being overwhelmed during the first wave. Some (mainly in London) were, but overall hospital bed occupancy was at an all-time low during that period,” he wrote, adding that, possibly, this kind of presentation was an attempt to back up government public health messaging – for example, the hugely misleading claim that 'we are all at risk'. “I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population,” Woolhouse reasoned, adding that in fact, the lockdown policy was the least effective at protecting the most vulnerable precisely because of their need to have contacts with health care and social care workers.

Professor Mark Woolhouse suspects that part of the reason why media outlets - particularly BBC - guided people to think the medical system is overwhelmed and the virus does not discriminate was back government health messages. Here is one example. Photo: screenshot.

The BBC disagreed with the criticism and, through its spokesperson, said that it had followed the broadcaster's own rigorous editorial standards and was using a range of official and scientific sources.

WHO chief: pandemic treaty at risk of collapse

There is a high risk that the international pandemic agreement currently under discussion at the World Health Organisation (WHO) will not move forward, according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, reports The Guardian. According to him, a deal between all WHO members is necessary to prevent the next global health crisis, but is now stalled because of "lies and conspiracy theories".

The need for such an international pact was first promoted a few years ago during the Covid crisis, and at the end of March 2021, a number of then heads of state, European Union leaders and heads of intergovernmental organisations issued a statement calling for such a treaty. The WHO started working on this in December of the same year.

The plan is for the 194 WHO member states to approve the treaty by the end of May this year, but unless someone takes the initiative, Ghebreyesus said, there is a risk that this will not happen. “Time is very short. And there are several outstanding issues that remain to be resolved,” he said, adding that failure to reach an agreement would be “a missed opportunity for which future generations may not forgive us”.

Ghebreyesus said the agreement was necessary to be ready for the next pandemic, as it would help countries to detect and share pathogens that pose a threat and ensure access to tests, treatment and vaccines. Claims that the pact cedes part of national sovereignty to the WHO, or gives the organisation the power to impose lockdown policies and vaccine mandates on countries, are false, he said. “We cannot allow this historic agreement, this milestone in global health, to be sabotaged,” he said.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the pandemic treaty is stalling because of ‘misinformation’ being spread. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

In reality, Ghebreyesus' claims are not entirely accurate. Combined with the International Health Regulations (IHR), which are due to be amended, the pandemic agreement would give the WHO a major power boost. For example, the WHO would be given broader powers to decide whether and when to declare a public health emergency of international concern, and the recommendations they issue would have to be followed by all member states. It would also put the onus on member states to fight 'misinformation’ and 'disinformation', i.e. to clear the public domain of any information that is not in line with WHO messages, although, in reality, it may not be erroneous at all. We saw how true information was labelled as 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' during the Covid crisis, and how the WHO itself at the same time distributed real misinformation that caused panic. For example, scientists who criticised the coercive methods used by the governments that were claimed to stop the spread of the virus but lacked actual science were extensively censored. At the same time, the WHO spread intimidating messages, such as that the mortality rate for the coronavirus being extremely high – acclaimedly, 3.4% in March 2020. However, the actual percentage, as was already known at the time, was almost 30 times lower.

We spoke about the problems with the new WHO treaties in a recent interview with Swiss lawyer Philipp Kruse, who has been keeping a close eye on the situation. We also touched on the same subject when speaking to experienced US physician Dr Meryl Nass.

Canadian court: use of the Emergencies Act to forcefully end the Freedom Convoy protests in 2022 was unjustified

A Canadian court ruled on Tuesday that the use of the Emergencies Act to break up a large-scale protest against Covid restrictions and vaccine coercion in the country's capital Ottawa in early 2022 was not justified, The National Post reports.

The Freedom Convoy protests against the particularly strict Covid measures in Canada began at the end of January 2022. In addition to the capital, the protesters led by truckers also blocked the Coutts Bridge in Alberta, an important link for trade between Canada and the United States. The peaceful protests continued for several weeks until the government decided to use the Emergencies Act to suppress them with a massive and brutal police crackdown. In fact, it was the Emergencies Act that gave prime minister Justin Trudeau and his government the broad powers to ban protests and use the police to break them up. In addition, the law allowed the state to freeze the assets of people and companies involved in the protests, which the state did.

Justin Trudeau’s government used the Emergencies Act to disperse peaceful protests with police force. Photo: Maksim Sokolov/Wikimedeia Commons.

Canada's Emergency Act is intended to be used in exceptional circumstances, i.e. when something seriously endangers the health and safety of Canadians or seriously threatens the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada. In essence, it is a law to be used in a situation of war – indeed, in 1988 it replaced the previous War Measures Act, and the new law had never been used by any national government before that.

The use of the Act was challenged in court by two Canadian citizens' associations – the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitutional Foundation. On Tuesday, federal judge Richard Mosley ruled that the protests, which took place in early 2022, although damaging to Canada's economy, did not rise to the level of a threat to national security as defined in the Act. "I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation (of the Emergencies Act) does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified," the judge wrote in the ruling. The use of the emergency bylaw to create a no-go zone in downtown Ottawa in order to chase protesters away violated the freedom of expression of peaceful participants, he added. He also pointed out that the seizure of the protesters' accounts did not consider how it could affect the relatives of the seized account holder. The right of relatives to be protected against unjustified search and seizure was thus violated.

The Canadian government announced the same day that it would appeal the decision.

UK: transideology alters gender pay gap statistics

UK officials are urging employers to collect data on the difference between men's and women's pay based on so-called gender identity rather than a person's actual sex, The Telegraph reports. Specifically, guidance published by the Government Equalities Office last March encourages data collection so that men who tell employers they are women are counted as women and vice versa. Under the rules, all companies with more than 250 employees must submit a gender pay gap report, as the government aims to eliminate it. However, if correct data is not collected, it is not possible to draw conclusions from the statistics.

The UK Equalities minister and Business Secretary is not happy with the Government Equalities Office. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Conservative Government is not happy with this situation. Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities has promised to intervene and is “looking very closely” at what can be done about the guidance to make it clearer that pay gap statistics are meant to record the difference between the biological sexes.

Looking at it from the outside, of course, one might observe that the solution seems to be quite simple – to get the statistics based on the biological sex, you just need to stop manipulating the collection of statistics and collect the data based on biological sex.

Study: wind farms force wildlife to leave habitats

A recent study by the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luonnonvarakeskus) shows that wind farms have a profound impact on animal species and force them to abandon their habitats. The authors of the study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, reviewed 84 previous studies in 22 countries and concluded that 63% of bird species, 72% of bats and 67% of terrestrial mammals move away from areas where wind farms are built. In addition, there was a reduction in mating and offspring – in particular, the mating behaviour of birds changed and the offspring mortality increased.

Migration of animals and birds from wind farm sites varied between species. Reindeer, owls and cranes generally moved away from wind farms to a distance of five kilometres. Bats moved, on average, one kilometre.

"Wind energy is a fast-growing source of energy worldwide. It is important for mitigating climate change, but it also accelerates biodiversity loss through habitat loss and displacement of wildlife," the researchers write in the study's abstract.