There’s No Justification for BC’s Continued War on Unvaccinated Health Workers

Commentary

The threat of COVID-19 has passed. But the threat of COVID-19 policy remains for the thousands of health-care workers terminated as a result of their decision to refuse the COVID-19 genetic vaccines. And the threat of COVID-19 policy also remains for all British Columbians who wish to preserve our essential right to informed consent, and our essential freedom to refuse both unwanted medical interventions and non-consensual experimentation.

To be perfectly clear, COVID-19 restrictions are not over in B.C.—not by a long-shot. On the contrary, the temporary restrictions brought in ostensibly to deal with COVID-19 are now formalized. In other words, these emergency measures, which flagrantly violated the rights and freedoms of British Columbians, have been written into B.C. law on a permanent basis.

Unvaccinated B.C. health-care workers have been stripped of their right to employment since October 2021. Hailed as heroes the year before, thousands of vitally important health-care professionals have been fired, with nearly half of these in the Interior and Northern Health regions. Rural hospitals throughout B.C. are unable to operate their emergency departments due to staffing shortages. And just as the province is experiencing a health-care crisis—fuelled by this staffing shortage—continuing COVID-19 restrictions are forcing highly trained and experienced health-care workers to leave B.C. for work in other provinces or take early retirement.

B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, has issued a series of catastrophically harmful and arguably unlawful public health orders. The most recent of these, announced on April 6, mandates COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment for health-care workers and as a condition of enrolment in training for health-care professions. When rights restrictions are imposed upon a population in the context of a public emergency, there is a legal requirement that the restrictions be necessary, legitimate, proportionate, and temporary. To begin with, this public health order is utterly unjustified, because there is no COVID-19 emergency in B.C. Even worse—showing a blatant disregard for the law—this particular order is not only unnecessary, illegitimate, and disproportionate, but it has no termination date.

When we examine this order, we see that the Public Health Officer has formally terminated all of B.C.’s unvaccinated health-care workers, even those who practice alternative medicines such as acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, and chiropractic medicine, to list a few. There is essentially no recourse for these health professionals and support workers. Stripped of income, not eligible for unemployment insurance, and not eligible for legal aid, our terminated health-care workers have no means to effectively challenge the lawfulness of this order.

Henry’s April 6 order should be terminated immediately. Furthermore, those deprived of employment by the order should be reinstated and receive fair compensation for loss of income and other consequential damages. There is no justification whatsoever for a vaccination or a vaccination status requirement for health-care workers. Even the World Health Organization announced on May 5 that COVID-19 no longer constitutes a pandemic.

Public health orders that coerce individuals to accept a medical treatment not voluntarily chosen can arguably never be considered lawful, even in a state of public health emergency. Orders, such as that of April 6, that use the coercion of job loss to compel involuntary submission to injection with a pharmaceutical product that is either ineffective, unsafe, or properly considered experimental, are always unlawful and prohibited by both Canadian and international law during normal and emergency times.

In addition to blatant disregard for the law, the public health order of April 6 ignores established scientific facts. The order fails to acknowledge that COVID-19 genetic vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of disease. The last date that the BC Centre for Disease Control released data linking COVID-19 vaccine status to hospitalizations and deaths was on June 23, 2022. During the period of Jan. 2 to June 18, 2022, about 74 percent of British Columbians who were hospitalized and 81 percent who died with COVID-19 were double- or triple-vaccinated for the virus.

The April 6 public health order completely ignores the proven effectiveness of natural immunity, which is expected to be very high in health-care workers to begin with in view of their increased exposure to COVID-19 patients in the first year of the pandemic. Now, the vast majority of people in B.C. have acquired both natural and vaccine-induced immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Unvaccinated health-care workers simply do not pose a greater risk to patients than their vaccinated colleagues.

The April 6 order also ignores mounting evidence available in government vaccine injury reporting systems such as VAERS in the United States, EudraVigilence in Europe, and the World Health Organization’s VigiAccess databases, that there are more reports of COVID-19 vaccine injuries, hospitalizations, and deaths than from more than 80 other vaccines combined from over 30 years. The risk of these injuries have been well documented to be unacceptably high for a vaccine given to healthy adults. For example, published data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control shows a risk for symptomatic myocarditis or perimyocarditis in about 1 in 1,900 males aged 18 to 29 years after the second inoculation with the Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. By placing the health of health-care providers at risk in this way, we are actually endangering the health of all people in our province.

The April 6 order also prohibits unvaccinated and non-disclosing students, faculty, and staff in post secondary institutions from any work in health-care settings. The order thereby prevents unvaccinated students from completing training in the health-care professions and other occupations. This is particularly egregious given that there is no factual basis for assuming that unvaccinated students pose any COVID-19-related risk to those in health-care facilities. Furthermore, by barring admission to health-care premises, this order also effectively prevents unvaccinated and non-disclosing staff and faculty from remaining employed.

The April 6 order bans already certified and desperately needed health workers from employment. It thereby further reduces timely access to competent health care in B.C., even as patients suffer life-threatening health-care delays because of staffing shortages. And for those who are not yet aware, B.C. is indeed facing a health-care crisis. More than 35 emergency room physicians in Surrey have warned that patients are going without timely care and even dying due to a shortage of both acute care beds and adequate hospital accommodation.

With the second-worst wait times for cancer patients in all of Canada, the B.C. government has announced that starting May 29, the province will pay to send patients currently awaiting radiation therapy to the United States for treatment. The financial costs for this program will be enormous. Additionally, it will place increased stress upon patients with an attendant decrease in positive outcomes. At the same time, patients unable to travel for treatment will be faced with increased risk of death due to further treatment delay. In a particularly sad twist of irony—considering both the terrible cost of cross-border radiation treatment and the groundless prohibition of employment for unvaccinated health-care workers in B.C.—vaccination is no longer required for health-care workers in Washington state.

By limiting the pool of trained health workers allowed to serve the critical needs of cancer patients—even as B.C. cancer treatment centres are being plagued by staff burnout—the April 6 order compounds the problems that B.C.’s health-care system is facing. It requires no great flight of the imagination to see that this public health order will inevitably lead to enormous harm for the people of British Columbia—particularly those in need of urgent care.

Apart from Nova Scotia and B.C., none of the other provinces require mandatory COVID-19 vaccination of health-care workers at this time. In contrast to B.C., public health authorities in many countries, including Australia, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, no longer even recommend COVID-19 vaccinations for healthy adults and children. It is time for the B.C. Ministry of Health to acknowledge what has become plainly obvious to health authorities elsewhere, i.e., COVID-19 is not the threat that it once was, and the harms of these genetic vaccines may outweigh their benefits.

Health-care workers should not be forced to continue to be subjected to mandatory COVID-19 vaccination that their training and experience does not support.

The April 6 public health order must be terminated immediately. Our health-care workers must be reinstated with compensation. Unlawful orders such as this must never again be imposed upon the people of British Columbia, and those responsible must be held accountable.