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Eileen de VillaTEDx Talks / YouTube

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TORONTO, March 8, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The woman who has kept a city of nearly three million people in one of the strictest government “lockdowns” of North America — Eileen de Villa — is married to a doctor with financial ties to two of the leading COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.

The Medical Officer of Health for the City of Toronto where many businesses have been shuttered since Oct. 9, and citizens have been confined by a stay-at-home order since Jan. 13, is married to a Toronto cardiologist who listed COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca among his “financial interests” at an online medical panel discussion on Jun. 12, 2020.

Richard Choi, the husband of de Villa, works at Riverside Clinic in Toronto. A moderator for the panel discussion he participated in described the panelists’ ties to pharmaceutical industries as “conflicts” and “disclosures,” and they were presented as “relationships with financial interests” on a slide presentation.

The government of Canada has agreed to purchase at least 20 million doses of its pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine.

Last week, Health Canada agreed to purchase 2 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, which was granted emergency use authorization by the World Health Organization in mid-February.

Posts on Twitter and other social media denounced de Villa’s husband’s financial ties to vaccine industry manufacturers as a “conflict of interest.”

“Was the fact that [de Villa’s] husband (Richard Choi), who was paid by Pfizer and [AstraZeneca], ever disclosed, or assessed for potential conflict of interest?” tweeted Peter Varelas.

“Strange how so many public health members supporting #lockdown have these interesting connections. [John Tory and Christine Elliott,] are you sure you can trust the people around you?” Lysander Murphy posted.

De Villa has come under fire for refusing to move Toronto out of its “Grey Zone” draconian lockdown status, though just 0.004% of the population is hospitalized with the coronavirus. 108 patients in the city were hospitalized with the virus on March 3, 43 of them in ICUs, when she said the stay-at-home orders would continue another two weeks. Toronto has a population of more than 2.7 million people.

At a press conference on Wednesday, when de Villa was asked to cite data she was using to keep Torontonians out of work and school and tens of thousands of businesses shuttered, she did not answer but said it was about protecting public health.

“Like Ontario Science Table member, David Fisman, who took money from a teachers’ union to argue against school reopening, Dr. de Villa stands in clear conflict of interest with her power to stoke public fears and, consequently, increase demand for Pfizer and [AstraZeneca] vaccines,” said a statement made by a group called Bright Light News.

Christine Colebeck, vice president of the Canadian chapter of Children’s’ Health Defense, told LifeSiteNews that COVID czars like de Villa are non-elected individuals who have “no accountability.”

“They say, ‘there’s a virus’ and they have completely unregulated power,” Colebeck said.

Numbers for the media relations contact, Lenore Bromley, for de Villa’s office and her administrators at the Toronto Department of Health all went to a message machine that was unable to accept messages on Thursday, stating that the message boxes were full.

Email requests to de Villa and her husband Choi to respond to the allegations of conflict of interest, and asking if either one of them had financial investments in vaccines or other pandemic countermeasures, were unanswered on Thursday.

Under de Villa’s leadership, Toronto Public Health has been used as a tool to counter any “misinformation” about vaccination. De Villa has also been behind efforts to use big tech companies as censors “and has advocated for advertisers and social media platforms to clamp down on misleading anti-vaccination information.”

De Villa was also behind a call to ban vaccine exemptions because of religious or philosophical beliefs, and she has worked to decriminalize recreational drugs, create a “safer” drug supply and supervised injection sites where people can inject illicit drugs more “hygienically.”

The information about Choi appears to have originated from Greg Staley of Diverge Media.

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.