Authors
Vasudha noticed the growing problem of mis/disinformation online after studying New Media at ACJ in Chennai and became interested in separating facts from fiction. She is interested in learning how global issues affect individuals on a micro level. Before joining Newschecker’s English team, she was working with Latestly.
The coronavirus pandemic, now in its third year, has claimed over 55,90,000 lives worldwide. On social media, however, the notion that COVID is a “fake pandemic” created by “global elites” for personal gain continues to gain traction. It is in this context that some ‘believers’ are sharing a post on social media platforms claiming that the Superior Court of Justice in Canada has accepted a lawsuit against the W.H.O. and “the Davos Group (the World Economic Forum led by 80+-year-old Klaus Schwab)”.
The post details that the lawsuit filed by “a team of more than 1,000 lawyers and over 10,000 medical experts”, is being led by German-American lawyer Reiner Fuellmichalleges. Terming it ‘Nuremberg 2’, the post further says the lawsuit alleges “crimes against humanity” on part of the two organisations
Several social media users shared posts claiming that the Canadian court has accepted a lawsuit against the W.H.O. and the W.E.F. believing it to be true.
The post claims that Fuellmich and his team have collected over a “thousand of pieces of scientific evidence proving the total unreliability of PCR tests and the fraud behind them.” It adds that “the ‘experimental’ vaccine violates all 10 Nuremberg Codes, which provide for the death penalty for those who violate these international treaties.”
Newschecker also received the post on our WhatsApp tipline (+91 9999499044) requesting it to be fact checked.
Who Is Reiner Fuellmich?
Reiner Fuellmich is a German-American lawyer who is known for his involvement in lawsuits against big corporate firms including Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen. He owns a law firm in Germany’s Göttingen. The Covid-19 outbreak proved to be a ‘claim to fame’ opportunity for Fuellmich who founded the corona ausschuss or “corona committee’, in July 2020, to investigate “why the federal and state governments have imposed unprecedented restrictions in the context of the coronavirus and what consequences these have had and are having for people.”
According to an article by Vice, dated October 19, 2021, titled ‘Nuremberg 2.0: Why COVID Conspiracy Theorists See This Lawyer As Their Saviour’, Fuellmich “has vowed to put world leaders and leading scientists in the dock for supposedly engineering a fake pandemic.”
Fuellmich believes that those who are involved in engineering coronavirus scare should be “tried for crimes against humanity,” and called the pandemic “worse than the Third Reich.” In late May 2020, Fuellmich had claimed that a number of big lawsuits will begin “over the next two or three weeks,” as reported by Vice.
While Fuellmich is a popular figure among covid deniers, he has been called out by various fact-checking organisations in the past for making fake and misleading claims regarding coronavirus. You can read them here and here.
But followers of Fuellmich continue to believe that he will soon lead a legal battle against prominent scientists, businessmen and world leaders for allegedly engineering a fake scare around Covid-19 and will eventually put them on trial for “crimes against humanity”, a trial they refer to as Nuremberg 2.0.
Why Nuremberg 2.0?
According to Britannica, the Nuremberg trials were a series of trials held in Nürnberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946 following the end of World War II. Former Nazi leaders were indicted and tried as war criminals for their conduct by the International Military Tribunal. The general outlook of Fuellmich’s followers is that his legal battle against ‘those responsible for engineering fake pandemic’ will have a global impact as significant and as historic as that of the Nuremberg trials, hence they started referring to it as the ‘Nuremberg 2.0.’
You can read more of Newschecker’s COVID-19 related fact checks here.
Fact Check/Verification
To probe the claim that the Superior Court of Justice of Canada has accepted a lawsuit against the W.H.O. and the Davos Group for “crimes against humanity,” we looked up keywords ‘Nuremberg 2.0, Reiner Fuellmich, COVID, Vaccine, PCR Test’ on the official website of the court. However, we could not find any such case listed on the website.
We also conducted a keyword search for ‘Superior Court of Justice of Canada has accepted a case against the WHO and the Davos Group,’ ‘Case against WHO and the Davos Group by Reiner Fuellmich’ ‘Lawsuit against WHO in Canada’ on Google, but could not find any news report conforming to the same.
Newschecker decided to further probe the claims made in the viral post one by one.
The claims mentioned in the article are broadly two pronged- one rests on the alleged ‘inefficiency’ of RT-PCR tests and the other claims that the vaccination violates the Nuremberg code.
Claim 1: ‘Unreliability of PCR Tests’
The viral post claims that Fuellmich and his team have collected “thousands of scientific evidences” proving the total unreliability of PCR tests. However, the RT-PCR test is considered to be the gold standard to detect the coronavirus and has been recommended by several health organisations, including the W.H.O., to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for causing Covid-19 disease. According to an article by the Mayo Clinic, “RT-PCR tests are very accurate when properly performed by a healthcare professional.”
According to an article by the Harvard Medical School, the rate of false negatives for the PCR test varies depending on how long infection has been present: in one study, the false-negative rate was 20 per cent when testing was performed five days after symptoms began, but much higher (up to 100%) earlier in infection.
The article adds that the “false positive rate should be close to zero. Most false-positive results are thought to be due to lab contamination or other problems with how the lab has performed the test, not limitations of the test itself.”
It concludes, “A molecular test using a nasal swab is usually the best option because it will have fewer false-negative results than other diagnostic tests or samples from throat swabs or saliva.”
A study published by NCBI gives further more sense of the efficiency of the tests. The study says, “In the diagnostic example, for every 10,000 individuals, there will be 1,000 infected and 9,000 uninfected persons. Of the infected persons, 950 will be detected by the test (true positives) and 50 will be missed (false negatives). For the 9,000 uninfected people, 8,820 will correctly have negative tests (true negatives) and 180 will be positive (false positive). The positive predictive value (PPV) is the proportion of all positive tests that are true positives, in this case, 950/(950 + 180) or 84%. Thus, most of the positive tests are true positives.” Thus, the claim that RT-PCR are unreliable and are inefficient is misleading.
Claim 2: Vaccines Violate The Nuremberg Code
The next part of the post claims that the ‘experimental’ vaccine violates all 10 Nuremberg Codes, which provide for the death penalty for those who violate these international treaties. However, COVID vaccines are approved and authorised by health regulators after proper-scientific trials, hence they don’t violate the Nuremberg Code.
Nuremberg Code is a ten-point statement specifying the permissible medical experimentation on human subjects. They are listed in the “Permissible Medical Experiments” section of volume II of the Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. These include voluntary consent of the human subject, experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society and be designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease among others.
But vaccines are not ‘experimental’, they have been cleared by W.H.O. for emergency use after a strict evaluation process. Vaccines developed by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and others have been approved by the health regulator after following due process.
WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure for vaccines can be checked here. The status of COVID-19 Vaccines within the W.H.O. EUL/PQ evaluation process can be checked here.
Conclusion
The viral claim that the Superior Court of Justice of Canada has accepted a lawsuit against WHO and the Davos Group (World Economic Forum led by 80+-year-old Klaus Schwab) for “crimes against humanity” by Reiner Fuellmich is misleading.
Result: Misleading Content
Sources
Official website of Superior Court of Justice of Canada: https://www.ontariocourts.ca/scj/
Mayo Clinic: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/covid-19-diagnostic-test/about/pac-20488900
Harvard Health School: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/which-test-is-best-for-covid-19-2020081020734
NCBI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7934325/
Official Website of WHO: https://www.who.int/
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Authors
Vasudha noticed the growing problem of mis/disinformation online after studying New Media at ACJ in Chennai and became interested in separating facts from fiction. She is interested in learning how global issues affect individuals on a micro level. Before joining Newschecker’s English team, she was working with Latestly.
