David Fisman’s data fabrication and 'hate science' to justify vaccine mandates

Statistician Regina Watteel explains how scientific fraud extended beyond misinformation and aimed to deceive, vilify, and advocate for harm against an identifiable group of Canadians to set the justification for future vaccine mandates.

Armed with a PhD in statistics and a solid foundation in natural sciences from McMaster University, Watteel's journey into the pandemic measures revealed alarming trends. She observed a troubling shift away from evidence-based decision-making toward the adoption of simulation models to justify harmful, suppressive public health measures.

By spring 2022, the federal government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, faced challenges in maintaining and justifying COVID-19 measures like the ArriveCAN app. This government surveillance tool infringed upon Canadians' mobility and medical privacy rights and segregated vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. In the midst of this, figures like infectious disease epidemiologist and physician David Fisman, emerged as influential in shaping pandemic response strategies with flawed modelling predictions.

Fisman's study on population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations garnered global attention, despite its numerous conflicts of interest and questionable methodology. His findings were relayed as fact, instead of the fiction that they were, and in direct conflict with what the real world data at the time was showing.

Watteel's meticulous investigation uncovered a web of deceit and manipulation that made the pretend scenario not only possible, but allowed for its unfettered amplification, which she says was orchestrated to deceive the public and advocate for harmful policies like vaccine passports at the government level.

Her efforts to shed light on what she refers to as scientific fraud and challenge the validity of the “study” that inverted reality faced resistance from institutions like the publicly-funded Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the peer reviewing Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) and the University of Toronto, where Fisman conducted his research.

Watteel works to expose the pervasiveness of "hate science" throughout Canadian institutions and the detrimental impact these misrepresentations have on scientific integrity.

Not only did it work to vilify an identifiable group of people, but there are no protections or mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening again in future. This is especially concerning as Fisman leads the modelling for future pandemic preparedness and response at UofT’s Institute for Pandemics, showing that greater scrutiny of data and statistics is needed to prevent future scientific abuses.