Second anti-vaccine UCP townhall draws crowd and criticisms in Calgary

A UCP MLA-hosted town hall took place in Calgary, the second time that anti-vaccination remarks have been discussed in the city. Teri Fikowski reports.

A sold-out crowd turned out at Southside Victory Church in Calgary Monday night for another controversial anti-vaccine town hall, featuring the head of Alberta’s COVID-19 pandemic response taskforce.

An Injection of Truth: Healing Humanity is the second event of its kind, hosted by Calgary-Lougheed MLA Eric Bouchard and his constituency association.

“Why am I leading this charge? I had a business downtown Calgary that was lost due to mandates. I became engaged in the political process and now, you know, I represent the constituents in Calgary-Lougheed and I’ve heard many of their sad stories,” said Bouchard.

The town hall called for the government to implement recommendations in the provincially commissioned COVID-19 pandemic response, including the suspension of immunizations for certain youth and pregnant women.

The lead author of the report, Dr. Gary Davidson, was among the speakers at the event and was met with a standing ovation.

“It’s not an inquiry, it’s not a witch hunt, it’s just a review,” Davidson told the crowd.

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Davidson briefly went through highlights of each chapter, including the modelling used during the pandemic.

“It’s just nonsense. It’s right up there with, there’s going to be no polar bears in 2012. Remember that was said in 2000? Same modelling,” he said. “But, it’s hard to be too critical of modelling because it’s like a weather forecast.”

The report also recommends allowing for greater flexibility in the use of therapies such as off-label medications including Ivermectin, which Health Canada has not authorized for use against COVID-19.

“There is a lot more things more deadly than Ivermectin. I just did not understand that,” he said.

“I prescribed Ivermectin hundreds of times and wasn’t giving people horse paste, I was giving people prescriptions from pharmacies, and we prescribed it all over Western Canada and had it FedExed in if we had to, and I didn’t have anybody clogging up the ER department.”

The $2-million report commissioned by the province was widely rejected amongst those in the health and science professions.

Many doctors and scientists argue the taskforce, including many who spoke at Monday’s town hall, was made up of those opposed to vaccines and health restrictions.

They’re also critical of the report’s omissions of studies supported by the scientific community about the safety and benefits of vaccines.

“The reality is these are not simply approved and forgotten, we have been continually monitoring patient safety from day one and really when we look at the MRNA vaccines we’re looking at tens of millions of doses around the world,” said Dr. Craig Jenne, an infectious disease expert at the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary.

“The evidence and health care professionals that study this for a living continue to affirm the safety and efficacies of MRNA vaccines for COVID-19 vaccines.”

More than 560 tickets were sold to the crowd, which booed a picture of Canada’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Theresa Tam, and cheered for a picture of the United States Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, whose been under fire for his own stance on vaccines amid a growing measles outbreak.

Timothy Caulfield, the research director at the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute, said events like the town hall further validates the wave of growing misinformation that’s having devastating consequences on public health..

“I’m disappointed given the robust body of evidence we have, given the fact we’re still hosting or even legitimizing the ideas we’re seeing with this kind of event,” said Caulfield.

“This event seems to be really be about creating doubt and creating doubt about that evidence and we know unfortunately the creating of doubt works. We’re seeing the increase of vaccine hesitancy increase.”

Dr. Bryam Bridle, a viral immunologist, speaker at the town hall, and contributor the pandemic report defended his findings.

“People who have constantly accused people like me of spreading misinformation are doing it through rhetoric,” he said.

“I have yet to see any hard science brought to the table.”

Although critics of the report accuse it of being anti-science.

“I am concerned that lots of the reports that we’re seeing that is informing the government are based on retracted studies, on studies that haven’t be validated, on old research that has been contracted by a large body of evidence,” said Caufield, who will be speaking at a townhall, ‘Health misinformation and its consequences,’ hosted by the O’Brien Institute for Public Health on Tuesday.

On Monday, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said she’s still reviewing the report.

“No decisions have been made yet but we’ll base those decisions on evidence,” she said.