Alberta’s minister of health says it contains “a broad range of perspectives” — comprising health-care professionals, academics, researchers and advisers” — and its recommendations offer a perspective on how the government can be better positioned to protect the health and safety of Albertans in the future.”
Critics call it “a sad document — that lacks significant credibility,” one that “takes a lot of pieces of information completely out of context.”
On Friday afternoon, the government of Alberta quietly released the report of a task force that assessed the province’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report — with a budget of $2 million — was commissioned shortly after Premier Danielle Smith swept to power in late 2022, promising to redress the COVID-19 grievances of her supporters.
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The task force was chaired by Dr. Gary Davidson, a former chief of emergency medicine at Red Deer Hospital, who, during the height of the pandemic, accused the province of exaggerating COVID-19’s impact, saying the number of hospital admissions was overblown and being manipulated to justify public health restrictions.
Smith defended Davidson’s appointment, saying she wanted to hear a wide range of viewpoints, including from those “shouted down in the public sphere.”
Among the other dozen members of the task force was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an outspoken critic of American COVID-19 policies and President Donald Trump’s choice to run the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Brian Conway, medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, criticized the document.
“This is a report that is written by individuals who clearly had an agenda, who did not want it to be peer-reviewed,” Conway said.
“Deena Hinshaw [former Alberta chief medical officer) is not involved even as a contributor and as someone who would comment on the report — and she’s the one leading all of the decisions that are made in Alberta. How can you write a report about what happened in Alberta without Deena Hinshaw?”
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“Some of the key decision makers who are not in government, but apparently even within government, wouldn’t talk to the task force because I think they felt — and rightly so — that the deck was already stacked against them,” Mount Royal University political science professor Dr. Duane Bratt said.
“I think that’s what’s happened here. Like it was a group of people who are selected, who are already known in the public domain to have extreme or fringe views about things like vaccination and about things like, you know, restrictions, public health restrictions,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease specialist from the University of Alberta.
The report is 269 pages long and contains a long list of grievances over the province’s pandemic response. Among the report’s findings and recommendations:
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“This is completely dangerous,” Conway said. “It speaks of the fact that we neglected natural immunity — hybrid immunity. We did not. This was part of the messaging from very early on. It speaks of the vaccine being ineffective. It’s highly effective. Before the clinical trials’ initial trials report published, we had stated that 50 per cent efficacy in these trials would be something very important — but it was over 80 per cent.
“It’s taking a lot of pieces of information completely out of context,” Conway said. “So it’s surprising to me that a document of this type might make it to the premier’s office and receive any credibility.”
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Saxinger describes the report as an attempt to “rewrite history.”
“I have one colleague actually who was on our scientific advisory group who is listed as a contributor who actually asked his name to be withdrawn,” Saxinger said.
“If you take it at face value, it would make you really question everything that happened in the pandemic, and I don’t think people should have to do that,” Saxinger added. “If you assume that the outcome of these recommendations would be kind of more of a U.S.-style approach, there would have been 15,000 deaths in Alberta — and that’s a lot more than we actually saw.”
Speaking on an Alberta podcast on Friday, Davidson, the chair of the task force, defended the panel’s research methods.
“There’s no such thing as consensus in science. That makes no sense. Science is about questioning everything, experimenting and improving whether it’s true or not,” Davidson said. “That’s science.”
In a statement to Global News, the office of Alberta’s health minister, Adriana LaGrange, said the “Alberta government will review and consider this report and its findings, however, no policy decisions have been made in relation to it at this time.”
