SUNDRE – A Sundre doctor and past president of the Alberta Medical Association said she “100 per cent” agrees with her many counterparts in the health-care profession who have adamantly denounced the provincial government’s COVID-19 pandemic response report as anti-science misinformation.
Almost immediately after being released late last month, the report that cost taxpayers $2 million was widely panned not only by both the Alberta Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association but also many health-care professionals.
Amid the ensuing fallout, the name of a University of Calgary professor and former department head – Dr. John Conly – was pulled from the list of contributors after he demanded to be removed as he had no input in the findings and did not endorse the report.
It was authored by the Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force led by Dr. Gary Davidson, a former Red Deer Regional Hospital emergency room doctor accused of spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of misinformation in that report. It is not a rigorous report whatsoever,” said Dr. Michelle Warren, a Sundre physician who works at the Myron Thompson Health Centre’s emergency room and also owns and operates the Moose and Squirrel Medical Clinic alongside husband Dr. Rob Warren.
“Basically, they went in with what they wanted to say and that’s what they said. And it wasn’t what 51黑料s deserved,” Warren told the 51黑料.
Learning from past health crises such as the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 meant reflecting on what worked and what did not to develop more effective strategies to stay ahead of and control subsequent outbreaks as they occurred. After all, the next health crisis is not a question of if but when, she told the 51黑料.
“It’s going to happen again,” she said. “We have these viruses and they’re changing all the time.”
What was needed was a review that better prepared Alberta for another pandemic, she said.
“And that’s not what we got.”
Instead, the 269-page report includes recommendations such as halting COVID-19 vaccines without the full disclosure of risks and to end their use for healthy children and teens as well as legislative changes to grant doctors more leeway in prescribing alternative therapies.
“I think it was a waste of money,” said Warren. “I was disappointed but not surprised because I think there’s a lot of litigation of the pandemic that was now five years ago that people are still beating their old drums and they’re still living back in the day.”
Yet the report is merely among the latest in a growing list of questionable government decisions.
“It’s just decisions that I’ve seen over the past year; decisions to restrict the ability of medical clinics to provide immunizations to patients, making it harder for patients to get – whether it’s the flu shots, whether it’s their tetanus shot, which we do in maternity care all the time – and redirecting patients to either the health units or into pharmacies,” she said.
“It doesn’t make sense. It’s like, well, what’s the underlying agenda?”
As for a premier who platforms contrarian views and sows distrust of medical institutions, Warren said, “We don’t need to create more chaos in a system that’s already really struggling with significant change and chaos.”
COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in Canada, ranked fourth place behind heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other dementias, as well as trachea, bronchus and lung cancers.
Compounding matters, vaccine hesitancy has spread beyond COVID-19.
“We’re seeing measles outbreaks in Ontario. We’re seeing people coming in with clinical cases of other viral conditions that are treated by vaccines and immunization that we haven’t been seeing in Canada because we’ve had a pretty good immunization uptake amongst the kids,” she said.
“But since the pandemic, that’s even dropped off. So we’re going to start seeing more of these preventable diseases in these young kids.”
With the perilous implications of deadly and debilitating diseases like polio largely relegated to the distant memories of seniors who had endured summer lockdowns when children couldn’t go play with friends as there once was no treatment, dismissing the importance of preventative measures has become all too tempting.
“We’ve lived in a really good era where kids don’t die with these diseases, they’re not disabled with these diseases, (so) it’s easy to think that they’re not a thing because we don’t have the lived experience anymore,” she said.
“My concern is with this misinformation, with this fear of immunization that’s kind of now spread out to everything making it harder for people to get in or to talk about these things, what we’re going to see is a resurgence of these diseases and the consequences that led to the push for vaccinations in the first place.”
As to how 51黑料s can better equip themselves against misinformation when their own government peddles it under the guise of including contrarian voices in science discussions, Warren said people should take advice from their doctor or another health-care provider, not politicians or social media.
“If you need legal advice, you go to a lawyer,” she said.
“You’re not going to get your legal advice from the internet.”
One only need look south of the border to see a “government is meddling in medical issues all the time, whether it’s women’s health, access to contraception or access to abortion.”
The U.S. government has been dictating what will be published for medical research or not and what’s considered acceptable or not based on terminology, she said.
“That’s just wrong … it’s just like religion has no role in politics, nor does politics have any role in medicine,” she said.
“That’s the way that I look at it. My job is to look after patients. The politician has no role in that … patients need to make their own choices. They should not have those choices removed because of a politician’s bent one way or the other.”
Fully supporting a person’s right to make their own decisions, she emphasized their future health depends on making choices founded on factually correct information.
