In a recent development in the defense of Dr. Charles Hoffe against the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons, the judge ruled that the College has to prove its alleged "incontestable truths."
“Incontestible” (/ĭn″kən-tĕs′tə-bəl/): 1) not open to question, obviously true or 2) incapable of being contested or disputed.
My readers may recall the four part series that I published which detailed my expert legal defense of Canadian emergency medicine physician Dr. Charles Hoffe. To recap, Dr. Hoffe is defending himself against the British Columbia (BC) College of Physicians and Surgeons who are going after his license (and his money) for publicly sharing his medical and scientific opinions on various aspects of Covid, the vaccines, and early repurposed medicine treatments. The College’s position is that his opinions consist of “misinformation which harms the public.”
A brief review of Dr. Hoffe’s case:
Canadian community doctor Dr. Charles Hoffe was one of the first to notice something was “wrong” with the vaccines in April 2021 after he witnessed terrible injuries (strokes etc.) and even a death in the patients he was vaccinating. He then wrote an open letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia with his observations and concerns, suggesting that perhaps the jabs should be put on pause until their safety could be more assured. One paragraph from the letter said:
“In our small community of Lytton, BC, we have one person dead, and three people who look as though they will be permanently disabled, following their first dose of the Moderna vaccine. The age of those affected ranges from 38 to 82 years of age,” he wrote.
Hoffe was then banned from working in the local emergency ward and other provincial hospitals. He later submitted more than a dozen claims of vaccine injuries on behalf of his patients, but all were denied validity.
*For more background, click tweet below by Dr. Mark Trozzi (another persecuted Canadian doctor) for a summary of what is happening to Hoffe (it also includes a link to a powerful speech by Dr. Hoffe).
I submitted lengthy and highly referenced pro-bono defenses of four of Hoffe’s many accurate statements (my colleagues Jessica Rose, Kevin Mckiernan, and Peter McCullough defended other of his statements). The 5 statements that I defended were:
Although our team of experts wrote lengthy and highly referenced defenses supporting the scientific accuracy of Hoffe’s many public statements, the College responded with a motion submitted to the Disciplinary Panel, “seeking judicial notice of the truth of facts.”
Wait, what? “Judicial notice?” “Truth of facts?” Let me explain (from Brave browser AI):
So what “facts” were they seeking judicial notice of? The below was taken from the summary of the Panel’s ruling written by Hoffe’s amazing attorney Lee Turner (his legal summary is included in full at the end of this post):
The College asked the disciplinary panel to take judicial notice of the following “facts” and thereby prevent Dr. Hoffe from presenting any contrary evidence in his defense (Ed: I bolded what I maintain are the “false facts” in the list below):
The Covid virus kills or causes other serious effects;
The virus does not discriminate;
Vaccines work;
Vaccines are generally safe and have a low risk of harmful effects, especially in children;
Infection and transmission of the COVID-19 virus is less likely to occur among fully vaccinated individuals than for those who are unvaccinated; vaccines do not prevent infection, reinfection or transmission, but they reduce the severity of symptoms and the risk of bad outcomes;
Health Canada has approved COVID vaccines, and regulatory approval is a strong indicator of safety and effectiveness;
Health Canada has not approved ivermectin to treat COVID-19; and
Health Canada advises that Canadians should not consume the veterinary version of ivermectin.
Fortunately for Dr. Hoffe, in its June 29, 2024 decision, the disciplinary panel declined to take judicial notice of items 2-5, did take judicial notice of items 7-8 (the straightforward anti-ivermectin recommendations), and took judicial notice of a revised version of items 1 and 6. The short story on Item 6 is that they ruled “the safety and efficacy of a pharmaceutical product cannot be discussed in such blunt fashion as to say that it "is" or "is not" safe and effective.” Further, they “declined to take judicial notice that Health Canada’s approval was a strong indicator of safety and effectiveness.” Hah! So, essentially, the College was shot down in their attempts to gain “judicial notice” for absurd and easily disprovable scientific falsehoods.
Note that the above attempt at “judicial action” is exactly what the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) did in their response to me and Paul Marik’s defense against their accusations that we violated their shiny new “misinformation policy” that the ABIM launched in the middle of Covid.
With the help of lawyer Alan Dumoff, we submitted a massive 69 page document with eleven exhibits (totaling hundreds of pages) and almost two hundred references which supported the numerous scientific statements that we had publicly made about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and the mRNA vaccines.
In regard to our treatise on ivermectin, they simply rebutted our conclusion using less than a handful of the over 100 controlled trials available. They then simply claimed that our statements on ivermectin were wrong and that ivermectin did not work (note they only pulled from the fraudulent “Big 6” trials and ignored all the meta-analyses). Total joke.
On the inefficacy of vaccines claim, they literally cited the original 2020 Pfizer trial purportedly showing 95% effectiveness (with more deaths in the vaccine arm) as well as other vaccine manufacturer conducted trials. Note they cited the findings of the 2020 study to support their argument… in July of 2023. Yup.
But their response to our detailed analyses and citations showing the toxicity of the Covid mRNA vaccines was nothing short of outrageous. I maintain it was an example of a type of “judicial notice” type action because they ignored all of the immense data we had provided by instead simply concluding that the mRNA vaccines were safe based on, get this… the published “consensus” opinions of completely captured agencies like the CDC and WHO as follows:
Moreover, the vaccine safety data overwhelmingly contradicts your statements about vaccine risks. See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/safety-of-vaccines.html (updated March 7, 2023) (reporting that “Adverse Events (Serious Safety Problems) Are Rare,” and that “[t]he benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks”); World Health Organization, “Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/safety-of-covid-19-vaccines (March 31, 2021) (stating that “[b]illions of people have been safely vaccinated against COVID-19,” that “mRNA vaccines [for COVID-19] have been rigorously assessed for safety, and clinical trials have shown that they provide a long-lasting immune response”).
The ABIM basically said to us, as Attorney Turner wrote in his summary of the BC College Panel decision, “It is so because we (CDC and WHO) say it is so.” Insane. Remember, scientific conclusions should be transparent, debatable, and allow for differences in interpretation and weighting of evidence. It should also draw data from as many sources as possible (i.e. the totality of the evidence approach). Further, conclusions should change accordingly as data accumulates and evolves. I would now also add that scientific conclusions should avoid over-reliance on captured medical journals controlled by Pharma and RCT’s controlled by Pharma - those sources are highly suspect and in my mind are the root cause of everything that went wrong in medicine during Covid.
The best part of the ABIM’s argument was this absurd contradictory statement:
For all these reasons, the CCC (Credentials and Certification Committee) concluded that you have provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public. Your conduct thus poses concerns for patient safety. Contrary to the assertions in your submissions, the CCC does not reach this conclusion as a means of advocating for “public health messaging,” stifling legitimate scientific debate, or questioning whether physicians may – as they deem appropriate – prescribe medications off-label for their patients. Rather, the CCC seeks to “further the professional integrity of medicine by encouraging evidence-based debate” (emphasis added). Indeed, as set forth in ABIM’s False or Inaccurate Medical Information policy, physicians have an ethical and professional responsibility to provide factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence.
The contradiction (in case you didn’t catch it) is that they say they want to “encourage evidence based debate” but only if the data we use to debate is limited to “consensus driven scientific evidence.” What? How can you debate a scientific topic when you can only use evidence that has been deemed valid by their own established “consensus?” Clown world my friends. And that is why we are likely to lose our ABIM certifications. Note that although the CCC voted to revoke our certification already, the decision is not final because, subsequent to the CCC’s above letter, Paul and I were allowed to defend ourselves in an appeal hearing before a panel of physicians but we are still awaiting that panels final decision.
However, in the Hoffe case, the recent Panel decision to not allow “judicial notice,” as Lee Turner wrote in his summary, “prevents regulatory bodies from saying “it is so because we say it is so.” They instead now have to prove the facts they assert and those who disagree will be allowed to challenge those facts and present contrary evidence.
Scientific debate is still alive for Dr. Hoffe and us expert witnesses. Game on. My deposition as an expert witness is coming up this month. Wish me luck :)
*If you value the time and effort I put into researching and writing my posts, Op-Ed’s, and pro bono doctor defenses, support in the form of paid subscriptions would be appreciated.
*Dr. Hoffe’s Attorney, Lee Turner, wrote a summary of the import and details of the panels decision from a legal perspective below:
Dr. Charles Hoffe is a family and (former) emergency room physician in British Columbia who is the subject of disciplinary proceedings before the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia for making public statements about SARS-CoV-2, the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, and other alternative treatments including ivermectin, has successfully defeated an application made by the College seeking judicial notice of the truth of facts alleged by the College concerning these issues. In its efforts to discipline the physician, the College has alleged that the statements made by the physician are misleading, incorrect or inflammatory and constitute professional misconduct. The College asked the discipline panel to take judicial notice of the following facts and thereby prevent the doctor from presenting any contrary evidence in his defence:
The Covid virus kills or causes other serious effects;
The virus does not discriminate;
Vaccines work;
Vaccines are generally safe and have a low risk of harmful effects, especially in children;
Infection and transmission of the COVID-19 virus is less likely to occur among fully vaccinated individuals than for those who are unvaccinated; vaccines do not prevent infection, reinfection or transmission, but they reduce the severity of symptoms and the risk of bad outcomes;
Health Canada has approved COVID vaccines, and regulatory approval is a strong indicator of safety and effectiveness;
Health Canada has not approved ivermectin to treat COVID-19; and
Health Canada advises that Canadians should not consume the veterinary version of ivermectin.
In its June 29, 2024 decision, the disciplinary panel of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia declined to take judicial notice of items 2-5, did take judicial notice of items 7-8 (the straightforward ivermectin claims), and took judicial notice of a revised version of items 1 and 6.
The panel was prepared to take judicial notice of item 1 that reads: "COVID-19 can kill or cause other serious effects”.
The College explained their rationale for taking judicial notice of a revised version of item 1 by referencing evidence presented by the doctor in his defence that included the following:
risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 is extremely skewed to those above 70 years of age, especially those with multiple comorbidities. The average age of persons that died from COVID-19 in Canada was approximately 84 years old;
very low proportion of COVID-19 related deaths in Canada occurred in those under 50 years of age-the data shows very high (although not 100%) survival rates for those under 70;
average rate of lethality from COVID-19 for Canadians is much lower than estimates given by public health officials; and
reported hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 have been over-counted, because many hospitalizations and deaths "with, and not from" COVID-19 were wrongly attributed to COVID-19
With respect to item 6, the panel endorsed findings of an earlier provincial Court of Appeal decision that held the safety and efficacy of any drug is always relative and as a rule the safety and efficacy of a pharmaceutical product cannot be discussed in such blunt fashion as to say that it "is" or "is not" safe and effective. The panel held that the issues raised in the citation should be determined based upon the evidence that is tested through cross-examination rather than by taking judicial notice of one party's assertion of the facts, and in this case, based upon statements made by public health officials or public health agencies. The panel held that it was prepared to take judicial notice of the fact that Health Canada had approved the COVID -19 vaccines, but declined to take judicial notice that Health Canada’s approval was a strong indicator of safety and effectiveness.
This decision on the issue of judicial notice, is consistent with the June 28, 2024 decision of the US Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo Secretary of Commerce et. al. which overturned the landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The Chevron decision had given rise to what is commonly referred to as the Chevron deference doctrine. Under this doctrine, federal agencies had the power to interpret a law that they administer when that law is vaguely written, and courts were required to defer to the agency's interpretation of a statute. In Loper, the US Supreme Court rejected the Chevron deference doctrine calling it "fundamentally misguided." They said court should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws rather than having to accept the agency's interpretation. Commentators have suggested that the Chevron deference doctrine gave the powerful - the people who control the agencies like the FDA, CDC and FCC - a significant advantage in court making them essentially the ultimate decision-makers in interpreting ambiguous laws. Commentators have pointed out that many of these agencies are captive agencies with close ties, including financial ties, to the industries that they are charged with regulating and therefore they lack objectivity with respect to those industries. The ruling in Labor means that federal judges now have more authority to interpret these laws. The decision by the British Columbia Disciplinary Panel of the College of Physicians of Surgeons of British Columbia prevents regulatory bodies from saying “it is so because we say it is so”. They have to prove the facts they assert and those who disagree will be allowed to challenge those facts and present contrary evidence.
The case against Dr. Hoffe is far from over. This development is significant in that a government agency cannot make the rules, interpret them, and claim they hold the truth on an evolving scientific or medical issue.
There has been a long tradition in medicine called SECOND OPINION? That was basically to assure the first doctor is not stupid. Such tradition was canceled by the covid goons.
Thank you for your hard work, Doctor. I trust that the criminals you're fighting will be brought to justice soon.
There has been a long tradition in medicine called SECOND OPINION? That was basically to assure the first doctor is not stupid. Such tradition was canceled by the covid goons.