Citing opposition to vaccine mandates, prominent industry figure says she’s “vaccinated against bullsh*t”
A prominent member of the Canadian mortgage industry has expressed her strong opposition to the possibility of COVID-19 vaccine mandates for mortgage professionals, saying that she will “never, ever” be vaccinated against the virus – and that she’s also discouraging her staff from getting the jabs.
Rena Malkah (pictured), president and CEO of the Thornhill, Ontario-based brokerage CYR Funding, told Canadian Mortgage Professional that she believed there remained a number of “unanswered questions” about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, describing them as “not safe,” despite the recent approval by the US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the Pfizer vaccine.
“I try to tell everybody not to do it,” she said on vaccinating against COVID-19. “Nobody knows the medium- and long-term effects of these so-called vaccines. I don’t know why you would be forced to put something into your body that’s not properly tested yet.”
Malkah said that animal trials on COVID-19 vaccines would not be completed until 2023, and that all animals involved in trial processes so far had died.
While Reuters reported in June that claims had spread on social media about COVID-19 vaccine producers skipping animal trials due to the animals in those trials dying, the agency described those claims as false, finding no evidence to support them.
The “estimated study completion date” for Pfizer-BioNTech’s clinical trials is listed as May 02, 2023. However, Reuters said that does not mean trials will continue for that long, instead referring to continued safety monitoring after the approval and rollout of the vaccine. The agency said that this is standard practice within the industry.
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Leading health bodies have highlighted the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, with the World Health Organization saying that they go through a “rigorous, multi-stage testing process, including large clinical trials that involve tens of thousands of people.”
The Government of Canada describes vaccines as “very effective” against severe illness, hospitalization and death from COVID-19, noting recent reports that indicate less than 1% of those who were fully vaccinated have become sick with the virus in Canada.
Malkah said that they were lying, and that censorship of immunologists, virologists, epidemiologists and professors who opposed that scientific evidence had taken place.
“Why are they not allowing freedom of speech? Why are they not allowing scientists to say the other side, so people can actually make an informed decision and know both sides of the story?” she said.
She claimed that repercussions from the vaccine had included blood clots, heart attacks, convulsions, paralysis and deaths, and said that prominent vaccine sceptics had been “de-platformed” – including former Pfizer vice president Michael Yeadon, who has described the idea that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective as a “major lie.”
However, the Government of Canada has stated that just 0.006% of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered were accompanied by adverse events (3,310 cases from more than 51 million doses).
Reuters has labelled several of Yeadon’s statements as false, including claims about the risk posed by COVID-19 vaccines.
Canada’s five largest banks – Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD), Bank of Montreal (BMO), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) recently announced that they would require employees working from their offices to show proof of full vaccination before entering company premises.
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Those decisions arrived hot on the heels of the federal government’s announcement that employees and public servants in various federally regulated sectors must have received full immunization against the coronavirus.
Four of the banks told employees that they must be fully vaccinated by the end of October, with Scotiabank not having announced its own timeline yet.
Malkah, who described herself as “vaccinated against bullshit,” said that she would either stop attending industry events or ask for an exemption if companies or associations in the mortgage industry required attendees to prove that they had been vaccinated against the virus.
“I’ll take the vaccine over my dead body. I don’t care what privileges they take away from me – I’m not going to shorten my life for it,” she said.
“I don’t think anybody can force you to have a medical treatment, and I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what your medical status is. That’s private information; I don’t have to tell anybody if I’m vaccinated or not.”
