COVID Vaccine Injury Reporting: ‘Logic and Ethics Out the Window,’ BC Doctor Laments

Group creates reporting system independent from government, citing lack of trust in current system

A woman receives a COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in Surrey, B.C., on May 14, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck)

Canada’s health-care system is not properly tracking COVID vaccine injuries, a B.C. family doctor says, and he is discouraged because his efforts to report and investigate the side effects seen in his patients have been ignored, he says.

Dr. Charles Hoffe, based in Lytton, a village 260 km northeast of Vancouver, garnered publicity after he wrote an open letter in April 2021 to B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry highlighting what he said were serious side effects in his small community from the Moderna COVID vaccine, along with the challenges he faced getting feedback from the Ministry of Health.

“I had just tried to report the vaccine injuries in my own patients and I’ve sort of given up, I got so despondent,” he told The Epoch Times. “They just arbitrarily decide this is a coincidence without ever having examined the patient.”

Dr. Hoffe said this is the opposite of what one would expect from medical authorities for such a novel treatment.

“The fact that the vaccines are experimental should mean they should be very, very vigilant about any possible adverse effect. You should have a much higher index of suspicion of harm from an experimental treatment than from something else that’s been around for years,” he said.

But “it was exactly the opposite. In Canada, they would say there’s no way of proving this is from the vaccine networks and it can’t be from the vaccine. So they sort of gave this special dispensation of confidence to these vaccines that they’ve never given to any other medical treatment before. Logic and ethics have just gone out the window.”

The BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), for its part, says that “post-marketing vaccine surveillance of safety on a population level is needed to help ensure vaccine safety” and that such a system is in place for the COVID-19 vaccine.

In a statement to The Epoch Times, the centre said health-care professionals are required to report “any serious events (i.e. requiring hospitalization or resulting in disability or death), any events that require urgent medical attention, any usual or unexpected event, and any clusters of events.”

The BCCDC touted its one-page reporting form for COVID-19 vaccine adverse reactions to simplify reporting for doctors, and a provincial database to help the centre gather and identify patterns and other concerns and take action if needed.

The centre also said it files weekly reports to the Canadian Adverse Events Following Immunization Surveillance System, which is part of the Public Health Agency of Canada, and participates in weekly meetings with federal and provincial counterparts “to review analyses of reported events and share information on new findings from the international vaccine safety network.”

And to reassure parents, Canada has a pediatric, hospital-based surveillance system called IMPACT that monitors adverse vaccine reactions in children at a national level, the statement said,.

‘It Should Be Investigated’

Max Daigle, spurred by similar stories in his native New Brunswick, shared Dr. Hoffe’s frustration, so he decided to do something about it.

Daigle created a vaccine injury reporting system for his province last December, and soon expanded it for all of Canada. After consulting with the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, he created the Canadian Adverse Event Reporting System (CAERS).

“We hear about stories of under-reporting and medical doctors filing a report and then it getting denied by public health,” Daigle told The Epoch Times.

“If the family decided to report, then it would go up to public health. And then if [public health] decided to deny it, there was no investigation to see if the symptoms are possibly related to the inoculation for COVID-19.”

Daigle cited the Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act, also called Vanessa’s Law. In particular, he’s concerned about how the government and medical system may be disregarding one of the key parts of the act—enabling the government to “require strong surveillance, including mandatory adverse drug reaction reporting by health-care institutions.”

“It’s a red flag to say something changed in their environment, they have certain symptoms, and it should be investigated,” Daigle said.

Daigle says CAERS has a team of health-care practitioners from across Canada who follow up with individuals filing submissions and evaluate the claims.

But CAERS won’t disclose who is part of its organization.

“We wish it would be safer to have a difference of opinion and choice towards our civil liberties, but trust in government and media is currently lacking. We will not disclose any information regarding who works with CAERS until that bridge of trust is present,” the group states on its website.

Dr. Hoffe was removed from hospital duty in May 2021 after speaking out about COVID vaccine side effects.

Daigle said that “Vanessa’s Law, passed in 2014, basically states that any possible adverse event must be reported. The important words in there are ‘must’ and ‘possible.’ If [public health authorities] deny it, they should be able to prove it with a source that it’s not related to the inoculation. So right there, they’re not doing their job.”