Source: The Conversation – Canada
In early September, Conservative Party MP Dean Allison held a four-day independent, unsanctioned “inquiry” for “Canadians to share their personal experiences of injuries…from the COVID-19 vaccine(s).” The event heard testimony that alleged the response to COVID-19 was “a miserable failure,” not least due to the “assaults on freedom and other malign actions.”
An opinion piece in the Toronto Sun subsequently claimed that COVID-19 vaccine programs “killed thousands of Canadians,” repeating a call for an immediate stop of COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations, as well as “resignations, arrests and a full public inquiry…by the prime minister.”
It further claimed that Canada’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts represent, at best, the “biggest health policy mistake in Canadian history.”
But testimony heard at this inquiry — and responses to that testimony — conflate factual claims with ethical claims. As a consequence, it fails to recognize the ethical factors critical to understanding and justifying COVID-19 vaccination efforts.
As public health ethicists, we’re interested in clarifying the factors necessary to substantiate claims about “policy mistakes” and informing expectations for future vaccination policy decisions.
The conflation of facts and ethics
Some of the claims made in the Allison inquiry and related reporting pertained to facts, both stated and omitted. Other claims were ethical in nature. The difference is critical to understanding and justifying COVID-19 vaccination efforts.
For example, questions of facts are:
- How many people were injured or died as a result of COVID-19 vaccination
- How were vaccine candidates tested and regulated
- How many people were saved by vaccines.
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Getting on the same page about these facts and dispelling mis- and disinformation remains crucial.
For example, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) records 455 reports of deaths following COVID-19 vaccination, noting these deaths weren’t necessarily attributable to the vaccine. After assessing causality, PHAC reports a total of four deaths consistent with causal association to immunization. To put this in context, more than 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in Canada.
But getting on the same page about facts is not enough. That’s because claims about whether the government is justified in imposing certain obligations or burdens on the public — for example, requirements that citizens get vaccinated — are not answerable by facts alone. These are questions of ethics.
These claims are about what one should do or what governments have legitimate authority to do, morally speaking: in other words, what is considered good or right or just.
Values and policy decisions
Such ethical claims are a matter of values, which people or groups may prioritize differently. For example, in deciding on health policy options, some may prefer the option that preserves personal autonomy above all else. Others may prioritize fairness and the policy option that minimizes deaths or health disparities. And some may locate the preservation of autonomy in policy options that are fair for all and that saves lives.
Critically, no policy decision is ever free of values and value judgments. All policy decisions, including those related to vaccination, involve trade-offs of competing values. That necessarily means there will be trade-offs in the distribution of benefits, risks and burdens experienced across individuals and groups in society.
While evidence can tell us what those benefits, risks and burdens might be, it cannot by itself tell us what the right trade-off is. That is, whether it is ethically justifiable to limit autonomy in some ways in order to preserve autonomy in others or to protect certain segments of the population from severe illness or death.
In other words, facts alone will not determine how those competing values should be balanced, what outcomes matter the most and whose interests should be prioritized, among other things.
Discussions about the legitimacy of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts or determining whether it was the “biggest health policy mistake in Canadian history” requires not only solid scientific facts, but also explicit ethical reasoning. This entails careful analysis of the values at stake, how trade-offs may reasonably be made between those values and ultimately what governments are ethically justified in doing in the name of public health.
The ethics of imposing risk
Fundamentally, the nature of the ethical claims made throughout the Allison inquiry and relevant reporting relate to one’s freedom to choose whether to be placed at risk by taking the COVID-19 vaccine. Yet, as our research argues, such claims about vaccine risks often fail to acknowledge or attend to the reciprocal nature of those risks and the reciprocal nature of freedom.
At the same time that we may be exposed to risk when getting vaccinated (since no medical intervention is entirely risk-free), we also impose risk on others by choosing to forgo vaccination or choosing policy options that fail to effectively address vaccine-preventable diseases.
Just as having the freedom to engage in an activity necessarily entails accepting some of the risks that are created in doing that activity, imposing risks on others can correspondingly justify limits being placed on one’s freedoms.
A useful example is driving a car: Choosing to drive means accepting risks to one’s own safety, and it also imposes risks on other road users. Those risks to others can justify restricting the freedom to drive at high speeds by imposing and enforcing speed limits.
The existence of risk alone doesn’t preclude governments from implementing policy or health interventions. Every choice carries risk, including the choice not to act.
While vaccines themselves do entail some small risks, they are used to reduce a much greater risk of disease that people may not be able to avoid or mitigate on their own. Vaccination policies are not implemented against a backdrop of zero risk, and so doing nothing — such as choosing not to introduce vaccination policies — also creates risk. In certain situations, such as pandemics, it can create more risk, and governments should be accountable for these risks as well.
Some of the statements made at the Allison inquiry and in corresponding media coverage appear to hold that governments cannot impose risk on the public. From an ethical standpoint, this is not a given, especially when action and inaction both involve risk.
Such claims need further ethical analysis and reasoning that examines the nature of the risks and benefits, how they are distributed and the strength of the justifications used to defend policy action or inaction.
Greater attention to ethics in policymaking and evaluation is critical to help identify the values at the heart of policy prescriptions, including related to freedom and risk, and to separate factual uncertainty from disagreement about those values. Only then will we be able to have constructive discussion about vaccination and vaccine policy in Canada.
Maxwell J. Smith serves in a non-remunerated advisory capacity to the Public Health Agency of Canada, World Health Organization, and Public Health Ontario.
Diego S. Silva and Kari Pahlman do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/21/an-inquiry-into-alleged-covid-19-vaccine-injuries-fails-to-weigh-the-ethics-and-risks-of-canadas-response/