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TORONTO, Ontario, May 5, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The Ontario provincial government has given hospitals unprecedented powers to move patients out of wards and into retirement homes and other long-term care residences, without their permission, as part of plans to free up bed spaces in hospitals purely for COVID-19 patients.

An announcement was made on April 28 by Deputy Premier and Health Minister of Ontario Christine Elliot, wherein she declared a patient could be transferred to any nursing home based on a doctor’s determination of the needs of the patient and the need for bed space, regardless of the patient’s wishes or consent. The measure has been introduced on the basis of a predicted surge in COVID “cases” brought about by an apparent third wave of the virus.

The amendment to the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act permits hospitals to override a patient’s choice of long-term care facility “when absolutely necessary to respond to a major surge event and when the attending physician is satisfied that the patient will receive the care they require in their new setting,” Elliott said.

She confirmed the amendment is intended as a “temporary emergency order,” designed to “provide hospitals with the flexibility to transfer certain patients, those whose doctors have determined no longer require hospital care and could be better supported in a more appropriate setting, to a long-term care or retirement home.”

Elliot cushioned the announcement by assuring Ontarians that efforts to consult the patient on the move would be made and that any decision to move a patient to temporary holdings “would be done in only the most urgent of situations when a hospital is at risk of becoming overwhelmed [with COVID-19 patients].”

“This would be a temporary transfer and [any] patient who is transferred to a long-term care home that is not their first choice will continue to maintain their place in line for their first choice,” assured Elliot.

The provincial health minister attempted to quell fears of a COVID spike in nursing homes by suggesting, “Every effort will be made to ensure patients have been fully vaccinated before being transferred.”

Elliot’s proposal, however, did not account for the growing medical consensus that people injected with mRNA-developed COVID-19 vaccines can become a source of “shedding” the Spike protein, a pathogen which causes numerous illnesses particularly troublesome for women and the elderly. The shedding phenomenon has been recognized by Pfizer in its own vaccine trial documentation.

The decision to usurp patient rights was supposedly a “very difficult decision to make, however, the consequences of not doing so could be devastating if we don’t have the hospital beds we urgently need to care for the growing number of COVID-19 patients across the province,” Elliot claimed.

David Cooke, the campaigns manager at Campaign Life Coalition in Canada, told LifeSiteNews that the Ford government’s treatment of hospital patients “is unconscionable,” and that the government “has no excuse to perpetrate this assault on patients’ rights.”

Cooke derided the government for “treating hospital patients like pawns on a political chessboard, moving them all around the province without their consent, putting them into ill-equipped facilities, potentially hundreds of miles away from their home support networks.”

“Mr. Ford has had over a year to bolster our provincial healthcare system,” Cooke added. “COVID-19 is nothing new.”

Even Liberal House Leader John Fraser admitted that the Ford administration’s latest healthcare-related legislation constituted “overriding people’s rights.”

The introduction of forced relocation for non-COVID patients follows measures implemented the week prior, whereby all surgeries considered non-urgent have been indefinitely suspended, again based on a supposed third wave.

A spokesperson for Public Health Ontario said at the time, “This directive, in addition to the emergency orders recently issued, are being taken in response to escalating case counts, which have led to increasing hospitalization and ICU occupancy rates which are already over the peak of wave two.”

“This decision will be closely monitored on an ongoing basis with the intention of bringing on surgical capacity as soon as safely possible,” the statement read.

Executive director for the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Alex Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews that, though patient consent is of grave concern, “the greater concern is the pandemic rule in Ontario that will enable a physician or hospital to withdraw treatment, such as a ventilator, from a patient while the person is receiving treatment.”

Schadenberg explained that Ontario protocol now allows doctors to reassign medical equipment “based on an assessment that determines that another patient is more likely to benefit from the treatment than the person currently receiving that treatment.”

Until now, legal precedent in Ontario has required physicians to obtain patient consent before withdrawing any treatment in the case of reassigning equipment, Schadenberg said. “This pandemic protocol enables the withdrawal of effective life-saving treatment without consent,” he warned.

The cause cited as necessitating drastic and unprecedented medical protocols has been found in a supposed third wave of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But despite these concerns, evidence has come to the fore which may explain Ontario’s high coronavirus test positivity rate, pointing towards a fault in the testing technology rather than a fierce new wave of COVID-19 ravaging the province.

Explaining how PCR testing works, Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, wrote an article last August along with Tom Jefferson, an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford.

In the article, the eminent scholars described that the test relies on multiple cycles of amplification to produce results and that a positive result doesn’t necessarily indicate if someone is infected with COVID-19, only if they have more or less of a viral load.

Besides the unreliability of the amplification process in determining true positive cases of active COVID-19, a new study has shown that tests had a likelihood of returning positive results based on the time of day that swabs were taken.

Nevertheless, PCR testing remains a popular method with businesses, medical groups, and at state-regulated test sites to determine infection with the virus.