Ontario doctor continues her battle to speak freely about harmful COVID measures.
TORONTO: The Democracy Fund (TDF) announces that it will join lawyer Lisa Bildy of Libertas Law in representing Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, who will appear before the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board (HPARB) tomorrow to request that cautions ordered against her by the College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPSO) over her Twitter commentary in 2020 be overturned.
Dr. Gill is a specialist physician practicing in the Greater Toronto Area, with significant post-graduate training in pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology, including scientific research in microbiology, virology and vaccinology at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s highest security level-4 biosafety laboratory in Canada, the National Microbiology Laboratory, and has published extensively in these areas. Dr. Gill is a medical professional who regularly administers vaccines, including routine childhood vaccinations, and has devoted years of her life conducting scientific research to harness the powers of natural T-cell immunity found amongst HIV-resistant Kenyan sex-workers for the development of HIV-1 candidate vaccines. She also supports COVID-19 vaccines for high-risk individuals with informed consent.
Dr. Gill has a large following on Twitter where she has shared scientific studies and opinions about various government COVID policies since the start of the pandemic, including her concerns about the harms caused by lockdowns, particularly to the most marginalized, and the lack of ethical and scientific justification for unprecedented lockdowns.
In August of 2020, she was the target of a malicious online campaign, encouraging the public to file complaints to the CPSO about her tweets. Over a span of a week, six complaints were filed, with a further one later and a separate Registrar’s investigation initiated as a result. All eight matters were considered by a panel of the CPSO, called the Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee (ICRC), on February 3, 2021. Although there were eight separate files, most of the complaints involved the same series of tweets. The ICRC dismissed five of the complaints, but issued orders for three separate cautions to be placed on Dr. Gill’s public record, despite the fact that they all related to these same two tweets, dating to August of 2020:
► “There is absolutely no medical or scientific reason for this prolonged, harmful and illogical lockdown. #FactsNotFear”
► “If you have not yet figured out that we don’t need a vaccine, you are not paying attention.”
There was no COVID vaccine authorized anywhere globally in August 2020. The latter tweet was in relation to a press conference that day by Dr. Theresa Tam in which she stated that, despite the anticipated authorization of a vaccine possibly by that year’s end, it would not be a silver bullet and lockdowns and restrictions could persist for at least another two or three years. In other words, the arrival of the vaccine and mass vaccination would not end the lockdowns, as many expected. That indeed proved to be the case.
Although Dr. Gill provided ample evidence to support her position with respect to the catastrophic impacts of lockdowns through her previous counsel, the ICRC found that her statement did not align with the information coming from public health, and that lockdowns in China and South Korea were “evidence that lockdowns can and did work in reducing the spread of COVID-19.” Accordingly, the committee said, for Dr. Gill “to state otherwise is misinformed and misleading and furthermore an irresponsible statement to make on social media during a pandemic.”
The use of widespread and prolonged lockdowns of healthy and low-risk people was contrary to all prior pandemic planning and principles of public health. The World Health Organization even sounded the alarm against lockdowns as early as October of 2020, and evidence of lockdown harms has continued to mount. The Chinese approach to COVID-19 has been discredited on almost every available metric, and predictably so. Yet physicians like Dr. Gill, who recognized quickly that this was the wrong approach, faced professional censure, expensive legal bills and targeted attacks for trying to warn of these harms.
“It was unreasonable for the CPSO to insist that doctors’ comments align with the government,” said lawyer Lisa Bildy. “The College’s duty is not to the government, but rather to the public, and those interests are not necessarily aligned. To punish a doctor for raising alarm bells, and to stifle scientific debate especially on novel measures being imposed on a massive scale, is a dangerous path to be on.”
Complaints against Dr. Gill in 2020 regarding her tweets on natural T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and the early use of Hydroxychloroquine in high-risk COVID patients were all dismissed by the ICRC in 2021. The ICRC found that Dr. Gill’s comments were based on reasonable scientific and medical evidence available at the time which supported the existence of natural T-cell immunity and the drug’s usage in the early stages of COVID.
Dr. Gill looks forward to having the lockdown cautions reviewed by an HPARB panel this week to determine if the CPSO committee acted reasonably in issuing a public censure to an ethical physician concerned about extraordinary public health policies which were known to be destructive and unscientific.
To help in the fight for physicians to freely express concerns and openly debate the science on public health policies, you can make a tax-deductible donation to support TDF.
About The Democracy Fund:
Founded in 2021, The Democracy Fund (TDF) is a Canadian charity dedicated to constitutional rights, advancing education and relieving poverty. TDF promotes constitutional rights through litigation and public education. TDF supports an access to justice initiative for Canadians whose civil liberties have been infringed by government lockdowns and other public policy responses to the pandemic.
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Lisa Bildy, Libertas Law
Email: [email protected]