Epidemic of Incompetence

Smith and the UCP put Albertans at risk with reduced vaccine access

A government rarely releases good news at 4:30pm on a Friday, that’s generally when the trash gets taken out. Last Friday the UCPs trash was the announcement that most Albertans will now have to pay out of pocket for COVID vaccines.

The government press release doesn’t provide any science to back their decision to reduce access to COVID vaccines. They mention the recent FDA decision to stop recommending the vaccine for pregnant women and healthy children but fail to mention that the CDC recommends the vaccine for everyone and the Canadian authority on vaccines (NACI) continues to recommend specifically for pregnant women.

What the press release does do is make the case for why the UCP is so terrible at managing our health care system. It turns out that when you do nothing but post a couple social media ads, you end up with excess vaccine doses. Our own health minister can’t bring herself to recommend that Albertans get vaccinated for anything, and our chief public health officer…well, do we even have one of those anymore? Given the deafening silence on the measles outbreak sweeping the province, I would guess not.

Let’s look at a bit of data. For the 24/25 reporting year there were 3031 hospitalizations, 189 ICU admission, and 368 deaths attributed to COVID. What was the cost to provide that acute care? Was it more or less than the cost to vaccinate those people?

COVID is one of three respiratory viruses that we have data on. Over the same time period RSV caused 2365 hospitalizations, 213 ICU admissions, and 78 deaths. For influenza it was 3348 hospitalizations, 364 ICU admissions, and 171 deaths. The RSV vaccine is available free to all Albertans over the age of 70 and the flu shot is free and widely accessible to all Albertans.

I know I’ve lost a lot of you in this entry rife with acronyms and numbers, but if you’re still with me can you tell me why we would limit vaccine access for COVID when the flu shot is free and accessible? After all, COVID killed twice as many Albertans.

I get it, Smith and the UCP have to cut costs wherever they can. How else will they find the cash to pay for all those bloated private surgical contracts? The UCP base is still upset that we had to wear masks for a few months while thousands of Albertans died of COVID, public health is the new bogeyman. A competent government should be considering the health and safety of it’s entire population, not catering to extremists inside their tent.

The UCPs new guidelines for who is eligible for a free COVID vaccine misses these five groups from the NACI (National Advisory Committee on Immunizations) recommendations:

· All adults age 65 and over

· Pregnant women

· Members of First Nation and Metis communities

· Members of racialized and other equity-denied communities

· Health care workers

The UCP should immediately expand the criteria for free vaccination to include these groups. And then they should get better at their jobs and figure out the right number of doses to order for any other Albertan who wants to protect themselves against a disease that has, to date, killed 6,717 Albertans and over 7 million people worldwide.