by Greg Piper
A year after promoting passports for the COVID-19 vaccines he helped fund as a way to reopen the global economy, philanthropist Bill Gates complained about their lackluster performance against infection and transmission starting with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. He even called Omicron “a type of vaccine” whose natural immunity could protect unvaccinated groups.
Now the billionaire Microsoft co-founder may have to pay a price for his foundation’s role in promoting the novel therapeutics, at least in the land of windmills, canals and “tulip mania.”
The Court of North Netherlands in Leeuwarden ruled that Gates must stand trial in the wealthy European country in a vaccine-injury lawsuit for allegedly “deliberately misleading” the plaintiffs, whose names are redacted, “in an unlawful manner and thereby inducing them” to take COVID vaccines, which Gates knew or “should have known … were not safe and effective.”
He is subject to Dutch jurisdiction due to the “anchor defendant,” Everhardus Hofstra, chair of the Dutch Association for Infectious Disease Control, the court wrote. Along with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, they appear to be the only non-Dutch among the 15 defendants including the state itself, who allegedly “implemented the Covid 19: The Great Reset Project” as a group.
The Oct. 16 ruling gave Gates two weeks to pay more than 1,400 euros in legal costs for contesting its jurisdiction over him. The court will hear his response Nov. 27.
The Recht Oprecht Foundation, which filed the suit, posted the legal documents and Dutch publication Zebra Inspiratie reported on the litigation and posted clips, including an emotional Sept. 18 hearing where a vaccine victim’s father testified because she could no longer speak.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense made the ruling known to U.S. audiences last week. Dutch independent journalist Erica Krikke said the seven plaintiffs “got sick” after vaccination and one had already died.
The Gates Foundation didn’t answer Just the News when asked how it will respond to the ruling.
It’s the second major setback for architects and enforcers of COVID policy in a week.
A U.S. jury awarded more than $1 million each to six employees fired by Bay Area Rapid Transit — already facing an annual “structural deficit” of $300 to $400 million — for refusing COVID vaccination. BART declined to comment to SFGate.
Though religious-exemption requests for 70 employees among “approximately” 179 who submitted them were approved, none received a religious accommodation such as “job restructuring, job reassignment or modifications” such as working from home or regular COVID testing, according to the suit by the San Francisco-based Pacific Justice Institute.
The jury rejected BART’s claim that the agency denied accommodations because of undue hardship and that the objections of several employees were “more secular than religious,” agreed the plaintiffs showed a “genuine conflict” between their faith and vaccine mandate, then added $1 million each to their expert witness’s lost-wage calculation, PJI crowed Thursday.
President Brad Dacus called the ruling “a 7.8 San Francisco legal earthquake,” comparing its impact to just under that of the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that destroyed the city in 1906.
The Gates Foundation is affiliated with “Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance,” originally the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and the World Economic Forum, the ruling specifies.
The Netherlands’ National Institute for Safety and the Environment convened an “outbreak management team” including Hofstra Feb. 28, 2020, and the government imposed mandatory face masks and vaccinations over the next year.
Gates gave a “video message” on YouTube on April 30, 2020, on the “race for a Covid-19 vaccine, explained” and again on Dec. 3, on NBC News, as seen in a YouTube clip titled “lt Looks Like Almost All The Vaccines Are Going To Succeed.”
In between, WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab coauthored “Covid-19: The Great Reset,” and WEF invited defendant Mark Rutte – then Dutch prime minister, now secretary general of NATO – to its 2021 annual meeting, telling him the “underpinning” would be the “unprecedented mobilization” of the Great Reset to “shape the post-COVID-19 world.”
Under this process, the plaintiffs allege “all factors that determine human life are made the subject of forced change by the WEF and the UN … by pretending that the world is suffering from major crises that can only be solved by centralized, hard global intervention.”
The defendants, bound by anchor defendant Hofstra and grouped together, misled plaintiffs into getting vaccinated through the Great Reset implementation, the court summarized from the plaintiffs. “These Covid-19 injections were never intended to protect [them] from a venomous virus” and they “suffered mental and physical injuries as a result of these injections.”
Because the U.S. and Netherlands don’t have a treaty determining “jurisdiction in civil and commercial matters … general international jurisdiction law” controls, the ruling says.
Dutch courts have jurisdiction “provided that there is such a connection between the claims against the various defendants that reasons of expediency justify joint proceedings,” and European Court of Justice case law rules claims as related if “based on the same set of facts.”
Hofstra lives in the court’s jurisdiction, and Gates’ two YouTube videos allegedly “committed this deception internationally” through “a false representation of the necessity of the Covid-19 injections and the safety of those injections respectively,” making it “foreseeable to Gates that the group action created the risk” of vaccine injury to the public.
“There is a risk that separate proceedings … will lead to irreconcilable judgments on this complex of facts, which is the same for all defendants,” the court ruled.
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Just the News reporter Greg Piper has covered law and policy for nearly two decades, with a focus on tech companies, civil liberties and higher education.
Photo “Bill Gates” by Bill Gates.
