Its addled report assailed by expert critics, UCP COVID ‘task force’ quickly descends into a task farce

As predicted on Friday, it didn’t take long for the debunking of the conspiracy-theory-riddled final report of the United Conservative Party Government’s so-called task force on Alberta’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to begin in earnest. 

It started yesterday morning with a blast from Alberta Medical Association President Shelley Duggan, who assailed the document as “anti-science and anti-evidence,” accused its authors of publishing dangerous misinformation, and said it “speaks against the broadest, and most diligent, international scientific collaboration and consensus in history.”

“Science and evidence brought us through and saved millions of lives,” Dr. Duggan said. “This report sows distrust. It criticizes proven preventive public health measures while advancing fringe approaches. It makes recommendations for the future that have real potential to cause harm.”

She closed her short statement with what has to be the understatement of the year to date: “At a time when our hospitals are struggling to stay afloat and patients are waiting for care every hour of every day, the $2 million price tag for this product could have been much better spent.” D’ya think? 

The Canadian Medical Association soon followed with a statement of its own, endorsing Dr. Duggan’s remarks under the heading “CMA alarmed by Alberta pandemic task force report.”

“This report promotes misinformation and has the potential to create mistrust of the medical and scientific communities,” said CMA President Joss Reimer. 

Stand by for more detailed debunking as scholars and physicians begin to dig into the sources, many of them by definition highly questionable, cited in support of the document’s advocacy of quack COVID cures, conspiracy theories, and suggestions that COVID vaccines no longer be made available to many Albertans. 

That said, the release of the task farce report is turning into a gong show faster than anyone could have imagined. 

Last night, Globe and Mail journalists Carrie Tait and Alanna Smith revealed that Dr. John Conly, listed with a fulsome biography as one of the contributors to the report, had denied he was ever on the review panel, said he had never consented to his name being mentioned in the report, and demanded it be removed. 

“It was a gross error,” the intrepid reporters quoted Dr. Conly saying, although whether he was referring to the entire report or just the inclusion of his name was not immediately obvious. Either interpretation is plausible, after all. He added: “I’m a big promoter of vaccines.”

So Dr. Gary Davidson, chair and review lead of the $2-million project, will have some ’splainin’ to do! 

Ms. Tait and Ms. Smith referred to the final report in their lead sentence as “dangerous bunk,” a fair observation by many of the experts they spoke with, but nevertheless terminology I can’t recall reading in the lead of a Globe and Mail story before. 

Earlier yesterday afternoon, a story by Global News quoted Brian Conway, medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, observing that “this is a report that is written by individuals who clearly had an agenda, who did not want it to be peer-reviewed.”

While Dr. Conway’s main point was that you can’t take seriously a report on Alberta’s response to COVID-19 without talking to Deena Hinshaw, who was the province’s chief medical officer of health throughout the pandemic and was ignored by the report’s authors, his comment about peer-review makes an interesting point too. 

This panel was so heavily stacked with COVID vaccine skeptics and opponents that it likely wouldn’t qualify for peer review even if the Alberta government was willing to take that chance. 

“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,” said University of Alberta infectious disease specialist Lynora Saxinger in the Global story. 

According to the Globe report, four earlier members of the panel, including two who held conventional views of vaccines, dropped out. 

Readers will recall that back in April, Premier Danielle Smith defended her appointment of Dr. Davidson – a Red Deer Emergency Room physician and former UCP nomination candidate who is married to a former UCP ministerial press secretary, UCP Senate nominee candidate and party activist  – because he had “a little bit of a contrarian perspective.”

Indeed he did. He was publicly rebuked by Alberta Health Services in September 2021 for claims the province-wide health care agency had exaggerated the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. AHS called his statements “completely false.” 

As for Premier Smith, she said in April when the Globe revealed the existence of the until-then secret group that she had left it to Dr. Davison “to assemble the panel with the guidance that I would like to have a broad range of perspectives.” By the sound of it, he didn’t succeed. 

Indeed, a simple Google search reveals that most of the panel members held contrarian views about the spread of COVID-19 and the vaccines used to fight the disease. 

Blaine Achen, listed as one of the report’s authors and chief of cardiac anesthesia at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute at the time, was one of four physicians who refused to be vaccinated against COVID and went to court to challenge AHS vaccine mandates in 2021. Their application was dismissed by a Court of Queen’s Bench judge in December that year. 

David Vickers, also listed as an author, accused the federal government of promoting “counterfactual narrative” about its COVID response “quite divorced from reality” in an op-ed in the far-right Epoch Times newspaper and other publications.

Report author Justin “Rashad” Chin, an Edmonton ER doctor, used his Twitter account in 2021 to retweet statements questioning COVID-19 lockdowns and the value of vaccines, prompting a warning from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, the CBC reported in 2021.

A paper by report author David Speicher, a virologist, claiming some vaccines were contaminated aroused controversy in Australia. 

Lawyer Angela Wood was an unsuccessful UCP candidate in the St. Albert riding in the 2023 provincial election. Not much is known about her views on COVID vaccines, although if she runs again, she should certainly be asked. 

Byram Bridle, an immunologist at the Ontario Veterinary College listed as a contributor to the report, dropped a $3-million lawsuit against the University of Guelph last fall in which he had claimed his opposition to COVID vaccines resulted in harassment and censorship. 

Kevin Bardosh, another contributor, published articles calling for an “impartial” post-pandemic inquiry, assailed what he called the “cult of COVID censorship,” and criticized the World Health Organization for referring to vaccine opponents as conspiracy theorists.

The views of Jay Bhattacharya, U.S. President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the National Institutes of Health who is listed as a contributor to the report, are well known. He was an early opponent of COVID lockdowns and co-author of the discredited Great Barrington Declaration.

Researcher Natasha Gonek was the author of a report claiming Edmonton Police Service officers were injured by COVID vaccines and was a witness at Preston Manning’s so-called “National Citizen’s Inquiry” into Canada’s COVID response. 

That leaves out only two others with biographies in the now-not-quite-final report, plus Dr. Conly. Obviously, there is no way this panel can be described as balanced, or offering a broad range of perspectives.