ICWA Weekly News 9-18-24
Visit Wenatchee Saturday - top-notch health freedom speakers; New attorneys help Snohomish Regional Firefighters file appeal; DOH continues to spread misinformation; BREAKING: GATES MISINFO ON NETFLIX
In this issue:
Pandemic Response Harms Event 2.0 This Saturday in Wenatchee
Snohomish Firefighters File Appeal
The Hypocrisy of the Washington Department of Health
Keeping an Eye on Gates - BREAKING NEWS added to online copy just after print.
September 13 Episode of Informed Life Radio - - Notes and Links
Health Hour: Lithium’s Vital Role in Brain Health
Guest: Dustin Strong
Lithium is an essential neuroprotective mineral that is critically important to many aspects of health. Guest Dustin Strong, a Holistic and Clinical Nutritionist, explains the science of lithium and how proper uptake reduces risk of suicide, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and more.
Nutrition | Functional Health | Mansfield | Strong On Health
Healthy Immunity Now - Prevention, Treatments, & Natural Immunity
Read at your own risk:
Table of Contents | Pink Book | CDC; Notice the lack of Reported Cases and Deaths from Vaccine Preventable Diseases, United States, 1950-2013, archived for us by Physicians for Informed Consent.
Liberty Hour: Live from ChiroFEST
Guests: Dr. Paul Reed, Dr. Anik St. Martin, Orla Budge
Live interviews from ChiroFEST, "The Northwest’s Largest Chiropractic Movement" in Vancouver, Washington. Dr. Paul Reed summarizes the event, Dr. Anik St. Martin from Longview talks about the trials and tribulations of keeping her practice open in the face of ineffective pandemic mandates, and Orla Budge, a former ICWA volunteer, talks about her role as nutritionist teaching at Dr. Heneli Ealy's Energetic Health Institute.
Pandemic Response Harms Event 2.0 This Saturday in Wenatchee
The Truth and Accountability Project Washington (TAPWA), which serves as a valuable resource for action, news, and references for combatting the injustices of COVID-19 policies, will be holding a second session this Saturday, September 21, on the harms done by the COVID-19 response (including shots) and helping audience members find healing protocols as a way forward.
Pandemic Response Harms 2.0 – Connecting the Dots – Forward Boldly (tapwa.org)
The event, also sponsored by ICWA, will be from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Wenatchee Convention Center, 121 N. Wenatchee Ave. Doors open to the public at noon. Many invaluable exhibitors will be present.
Featured speakers include:
Dr. Kelly Victory, co-host of the Dr. Drew Show
John Stockton, NBA Hall of Fame Guard and co-host of the popular podcast, Voices for Medical Freedom.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who beat the FDA
Pete Serrano, Esq., our state’s most dedicated health freedom lawyer, founder of Silent Majority Foundation, and candidate for Washington State Attorney General.
Visit the ICWA / CHD-Washington chapter table at the event to pick up some useful educational materials to give to your local board of health.
The first TAPWA event was the last Saturday in January 2023. News Radio KPQ 560 wrote the following about that session:
Organizers of what was billed as a listening session to hear information and stories of how people were harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic response and vaccine mandates gathered for over four hours on Saturday at the Wenatchee Convention Center.
Moderator Bill Sullivan who sits on the Chelan Douglas Health District said in his welcoming remarks "People know something is wrong, but they are not being heard. There has been no after-action report on what went wrong" and the listening session would "try to give some voice to getting control over our lives.” The function was not affiliated with the health district.
KPQ previewed this year’s Pandemic Harms 2.0 event in this news article.
Snohomish Firefighters File Appeal
Jennifer Kennedy, Esq., has filed an appeal on behalf of eight Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue (SRFR) plaintiffs who had been placed on unpaid leave after they refused to take the COVID-19 shots. The opening brief was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District.
The introduction in the filing says, “When the firefighters’ sincerely held religious beliefs prevented them from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, SRFR granted their requests for accommodation but placed all eight men on indefinite unpaid leave.”
The SRFR’s complaint behind their appeal is easily summarized in the introduction:
SRFR claimed that allowing the Firefighters to continue working while unvaccinated would pose undue hardship to SRFR from the possible health and safety risk of spreading the Covid virus, despite acknowledging that vaccinated firefighters could still contract and spread it, and despite the fact that this same risk existed for the year and a half before SRFR’s mandate.
Oddly enough, Firefighter Dave Petersen found work with the Snohomish County Fire Marshal’s Office as a fire investigator, tasked with investigating fires throughout the county, including in SRFR’s district. Even though he had not taken the COVID-19 shot, Petersen had full access to SRFR’s facilities, which he would routinely use, and would interact with his vaccinated former co-workers.
Eight months after pulling the firefighters off the line, SRFR’s fire chief brought the firefighters back to work, still unvaccinated. Their job duties were identical, the safety protocols were identical, and no restrictions were placed on them. Governor Jay Inslee’s statewide proclamation requiring vaccination of health care providers was still in effect. The firefighters resumed their jobs and continued to work unvaccinated, without causing any operational difficulties or added expense.
The court filing also summarizes the previous legal proceedings of the eight Snohomish County firefighters:
After the Firefighters filed suit for religious discrimination under Title VII and WLAD, the parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment/adjudication. The district court granted summary judgment to SRFR on the basis of speculative or hypothetical hardships, since SRFR identified none during the many months when the Firefighters had worked unvaccinated. By ruling for SRFR, the court viewed the facts in the light most favorable to SRFR, not the Firefighters, ignoring considerable evidence that unvaccinated firefighters had worked successfully both neighboring departments, outside the county, and beyond. The district court did not identify any actual cost or hardship suffered by SRFR.
Two paragraphs later in the introduction, the appeal explains the senselessness of SRFR’s case that the eight firefighters were causing undue hardship by not receiving the COVID-19 jabs:
In the present case, no speculation is needed since the Firefighters all worked for many months unvaccinated both before and after they were on unpaid leave. SRFR introduced no evidence of any actual hardships it suffered while Firefighters – and before the vaccination, all firefighters – worked unvaccinated. The record is clear that there simply was no hardship. Of course, Groff clarified the standard of hardship – that “undue hardship” really means what it says, something more than a mere hardship, something “excessive” or “unjustifiable.”
The end of the introduction sums up the appeal well:
This Court “zealously guard[s] an employee’s right to a full trial, since discrimination claims are frequently difficult to prove without a full airing of the evidence and an opportunity to evaluate the credibility of the witnesses.” McGinest v. GTE Serv. Corp., 360 F.3d 1103, 1112 (9th Cir. 2004).
These faithful Firefighters deserve the opportunity to fully present their claims at trial. But even more, this court should dismiss SRFR’s undue hardship defense—not only has SRFR failed to sustain its burden to prove undue hardship— it has failed to introduce sufficient evidence to even create a triable issue of fact. There simply was no hardship, at all. None.
The following paragraphs in the Summary of Argument section go into greater detail about the lack of evidence that the firefighters were causing hardship to their fellow workers:
Firefighters presented abundant evidence that there was no actual hardship, whereas the court below relied on hypothetical hardships. Both before and after Firefighters were placed on unpaid leave, they worked unvaccinated for many months providing services to the community. SRFR produced no evidence that unvaccinated firefighters spread viral load, infected anyone with COVID-19, or that their unvaccinated status in any way disrupted operations or caused substantial increased costs either before or after their unpaid leave. In the face of such abundant real world experience of no actual hardship, the court instead chose to speculate as to potential, or hypothetical hardships arising from the potential of unvaccinated firefighters to become infected and possibly spread covid, rather than rely on what actually took place. But as will be shown below, hypothetical hardships do not satisfy Defendant’s burden of proof.
Moreover, there is considerably more evidence that unvaccinated firefighters caused no hardship whatsoever: 1) neighboring fire departments accommodated their firefighters without suffering any undue hardship; 2) one of the Plaintiff’s actually worked with SRFR firefighters and in Defendants facilities unvaccinated while on unpaid leave; 3) SRFR never determined that their prior protocols and PPE did not work to lower the risk of spreading Covid-19; 3) a September 2021 contemporaneous study by Respondent’s expert found that there was a very low risk of transmission by firefighters and PPE provides excellent protection; and 4) SRFR admits it knew at the time that the vaccine was “not the magic bullet” and that vaccinated firefighters could still become infected with, and transmit, Covid19.
Finally, and most importantly, SRFR produced no evidence of “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business” that it would have incurred had it accommodated these firefighters during those few months it placed them on unpaid leave. See Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447, 470 (2023) [sic]
The following from the Standard Review and Arguments section puts the burden of proof back on the Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue department:
If indeed, Firefighters working unvaccinated was so much of a problem as to constitute an “undue hardship” on the conduct of Defendant’s operations, where is the evidence in the record to document the negative or fiscal impact on SRFR of having unvaccinated firefighters in the workforce? There is none.
The Pacific Justice Institute had represented the fire and rescue complainants and since declined to assist with the appeal. California attorney Jennifer Kennedy is joined in the appeal by attorneys Alan Reinach and Jonathon Cherne, who helped prevail in the Groff v. DeJoy decision where “because COVID” was declared impermissible rationale in summary judgment. This appeal could be the Ninth Circuit’s first chance to apply the clarified undue-hardship standard of Groff v. DeJoy.
The Hypocrisy of the Washington Department of Health
To start the month of September, the Washington Department of Health (DOH) issued a report titled, “A Chorus of COVID—Voices from the Frontlines.”
The theme of the forty-four-page report boiled down to the following excerpt on the introductory page:
The ongoing pandemic is also deeply entangled with the ways we don’t treat people well. It vividly illustrates pre-existing inequities — racial injustice, ableism, high incarceration, poor eldercare, the school to prison pipeline, lack of worker protection, no to low wage employment, housing and food insecurity, the pains of social isolation, lack of resources for those struggling with addiction, people without healthcare, life with no internet, cut-off utilities, no car or slow transit, strain carried by all caregivers.
The list above could go on.
With folksy stock graphics and neon artwork, the report gave the following examples of racial injustices during COVID-19.
American Indian/Alaskan Native (AI/AN) populations have 2.5x higher age-adjusted death rates than Asian and White populations.
Black/African American populations have COVID-19 death rates nearly 2x higher than Asian, White, and Multiracial populations.
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders populations had the highest hospitalization rates among confirmed or probable COVID-19 cases.
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander populations had rates of hospitalization 5x higher than White populations among confirmed or probable COVID-19 cases.
Jason Rantz, a KTTH host, responded to this CDC-funded report on September 3 with a scathing opinion, calling it “an aggressively unserious document that included a virulently racist claim about the evils of white people.”
He pointed to what he called an absurd claim in the report: “Don’t forget sometimes white people disengaged on safety when they learned people of color needed help.” This unsubstantiated claim is on page sixteen under the Policy Change heading.
Rantz also made the following two comments about the report:
It demands WADOH “use COVID as an opportunity to invest in… youth of color… (and) incarcerated youth” by “celebrating ways that “don’t stigmatize or typify them when society fails them.”
The report even suggests that WADOH “get creative” in promoting health crisis materials by using flash mobs or collaborating with “BIPOC artists, trans/queer artists of color, women of color of all gender expressions, incarcerated youth and adult artists.”
Speaking of “getting creative,” the report also turned to a cultural worker and poet by the name of Jordan Chaney for his artistic input. Listed in the report as one of the twenty-one contributing “thought partners,” Chaney offered the following poetic flair:
Since 2019, ICWA advocates had already seen the game plan where ‘misinformation’ was used to neutralize and castigate anyone with counterpoints. ICWA handed out postcards and wore buttons in the hallways of the Olympia Capitol with the words “It’s not misinformation. It’s the missing information.”
The conspicuously missing piece of information from the DOH report was the violation of human rights for any Washington resident who refused to take a COVID-19 shot that couldn’t protect the community since it didn’t prevent transmission of the virus. Human rights are what the Montana legislature sought to protect when it passed, and the governor signed, HB 702, which was enacted on May 7, 2021.
Notice the mention of “human rights” on the governor’s website:
Codified under Montana’s Human Rights Act, House Bill 702 prohibits discrimination based on an individual’s vaccination status. It prohibits an employer from refusing employment, barring a person from employment, or discriminating in any term, condition, or privilege of employment based on vaccination status or whether the person has an immunity passport.
Furthermore here in Washington, during an October 11, 2022, Whatcom County Council meeting, the council members heard public comments before voting on forming a Racial Equity Commission (REC), which they eventually passed with all four Democrats voting for it and all three Republicans voting against it.
Be Brave Washington leader Natalie Chavez used the REC debate to tell the board how Whatcom County residents, regardless of ethnicity, were being discriminated against for refusing to take the COVID-19 shots:
I have black and brown friends in this community who were discriminated against and fired from their jobs over the last year because of the unethical COVID-19 shot mandates by Bellingham Mayor Seth Fleetwood and the Bellingham City Council. My friend’s spouse, who is black, got fired from the Bellingham Police Department and a number of his co-workers were fired too, and a number of them took an early retirement, resigned, or moved out of town. So, we probably lost twenty officers when all was said and done, which is one of the reasons Bellingham is struggling so much with crime and public safety and having to triage 9-1-1 dispatch calls. If this ordinance does not cover all community members, not even all the black and brown community members, then I have a problem with that. I hope the Whatcom Racial Equity Commission continues as a service-based organization in this community and changes its name to reflect an inclusivity for all community members for those who are black, brown, white, LGBQT, unvaccinated, amongst others so that everyone in Whatcom County feels that they belong.
A public comment on Zoom drove straight to the commission’s hypocrisy:
Equity should be the last thing coming out of you people on the left’s mouths after what you have done to the people who wanted to have freedom over their body and were then discriminated against every single day. People of every color and race were fired from their jobs for not taking the COVID-19 jab. They were put out on the streets. They were homeless. They couldn’t feed their families because they chose to protect themselves against a dangerous, untested, unproven, vaccine. And now you have the word equity in your mouth? I have never seen so much hypocrisy in my life. You guys need to start thinking about the word equity. So long as they agree with you, it is equity. If they disagree with you, it is not equity.”
This “missing information” hypocrisy is evident in the DOH report as well.
Keeping an Eye on Gates
On Monday, Children’s Health Defense Defender ran the article Bill Gates Defends Free Speech Unless It Hurts his Investments. The retired Microsoft founder, infectious disease philanthropist, and recent divorcé is on the speaking circuit again, appearing on CNBC and CNET for starters. He’s being widely quoted as saying “We should have free speech, but if you’re inciting violence, if you’re causing people not to take vaccines…”
Stopping right there, this idea flies in the face of the fact that these medicines, as a broad category, are not magical and always come with dangerous side effects.
But he’s obviously biased and doesn’t want to be wrong about all his investments. This graphic indicates where he’s placed his bets, and some of the ways he influences the outcomes and policies used to push his project’s products.
We’re still looking for the source of this graphic and would like to verify the data, but you get the idea – this Washingtonian just loves vaccines and he’s got his finger on all the levers to produce desired outcomes, even if a project/product doesn’t work. And this chart doesn’t even include all the other Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds spread around to the Infectious Disease Modeling (IDMOD) group, and the University of Washington and its various public health centers like Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which are routinely queried for official statements by the mainstream press when quotes are needed for health news. Nor does it call out the donations (a.k.a. investments) to media companies such as NPR, PBS and The Guardian.
Imagine how many resources he might be willing to deploy to dress up or cover up his bad bets. Will you call him out? Let us know in the comments what you’d say to Gates if you ran into him on the street. Keep it clean, people. 😉
BREAKING: Bill Gates has just announced on his Gates’ Notes that you can watch his new Netflix show on What’s Next: The Future with Bill Gates, where he has an episode dedicated to misinformation: Truth or Consequence. We’ll be sure to give a full review next week. Meanwhile, if Lada Gaga lecturing you about misinformation is likely to make you break out in hives. Or video of the Microsoft founder raises the hackles on your neck like Voldemort is near, you can read this sneak-peak transcript of his take in what to about all that pesky mis(sing) information.
Here's what happened with Bill Gates in Seattle recently...https://madmaxworld.tv/watch?id=66df7a796fb0999443fac877
love to see this action!!