Is Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) seriously proposing to make anyone who wants an influenza or COVID-19 vaccination next year order it during an unannounced 78-day window that is already 20 days gone and closes on December 15?
Alternatively, are they planning to base the amount of COVID-19 and influenza vaccine they’re expecting to order based on a survey on the government’s website that has not only never been announced but is partly hidden on a vaccine ordering page?
The statement on the government’s BookVaccine.Alberta.ca site reads: “Pre-ordering of vaccines for the 2026-2027 immunization season starts on September 29 and ends on December 15. Vaccines can only be pre-ordered during this period.” (Emphasis added.) You’ll have to start the process of pre-ordering before you will see the message.
A message about pre-ordering vaccines next year but without reference to the tight time frame is also found on low on the MyHealth.Alberta.ca vaccine ordering web page now operated by the Primary Care Alberta administrative silo.
No news release announcing this policy appears to have been sent to media by the government and no memorandum appears to have been circulated to provincial health care employees about it.
When the notices appeared on the booking website is not immediately clear. No one seems to have noticed it until last weekend, and no one in the government seems to have made any effort to draw the policy to the public’s attention.
On Saturday, a sharp-eyed physician spotted the statement on the BookVaccine.Alberta.ca website.
“This is inexplicable news to share,” David Keegan posted on the Bluesky social media application. “If in Alberta and you want flu and covid shots for NEXT year (2026-2027), you have only until December 15 of THIS year to order them.”
He continued: “It’s a deliberate choice to prevent as many people as possible from getting vaccinated.
“The ONLY reasons to do this are to get more people infected, overwhelm the public healthcare system, destroy it, and usher in private healthcare. There are zero defensible economic or efficiency reasons to do this. Zero. It’s anti-life.”
I’m not certain that the only explanation is to get people infected, although it’s not hyperbole to say it’s plausible.
It’s also possible that Premier Danielle Smith and her coterie of MAGA enthusiasts in the UCP actually believe that COVID is a fake disease, or is better treated with Ivermectin or something, and deliberately want to suppress the number of people vaccinated to prove their case. But surely even MAGA accepts the reality of influenza!
Regardless, whatever the explanation, if the UCP really intends to proceed with this at the same time they are dismantling the integrated public health care system, it is both bizarre and extremely dangerous.
Clearly Premier Danielle Smith and Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange have some explaining to do.
While we’re at it, where’s our premier on Tylenol, Tylenot and Trump?
Both as a right-wing talk radio host and a politician, Premier Smith has often been quick to jump on the bandwagon of any quack cures and pharmaceutical conspiracy theories circulating through the extensive MAGA information ecosystem south of the Medicine Line.
How long will it be, one wonders, before the premier and her loyalists in the caucus and party take up the claims of her political hero, U.S. President Donald Trump, and his secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that Tylenol causes autism, with a boost from infant circumcision?
With RFK Jr. cast as Alberta’s de facto chief medical officer of health nowadays, in a sense it’s surprising Smith hasn’t already been all over this opportunity.
One suspects she would have been were it not for that embarrassing $70-million purchase of Turkish Tylenot back in 2022. What in the name of Almighty Trump, many of her most passionate supporters must be now asking themselves, was she buying Tylen-anything for?
So this is exactly what Smith doesn’t need now that she’s got former Manitoba judge Raymond Wyant’s limited and carefully equivocal conclusions about the acetaminophen purchase and other questionable contracts to let her claim that she, her staff, her cabinet and her caucus did nothing scandalous.
As Deirdre Mitchell-MacLean pointed out in an excellent dissection of Wyant’s conclusions and the whole dodgy contracts scandal on her Women of ABpoli Substack Saturday, the former judge “did not interview Ministers in place at the time” and “does not specify who refused to sit for an interview or who sat for interviews but refused to answer questions.”
Obviously, we still need a public inquiry. Just as obviously, as long as the UCP remains in power, we’re never going to get one.
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