Public Health Agency of Canada records show officials debated how to explain the end of public COVID vaccine injury reporting while internal communications identified delays, inconsistent definitions and concerns over public trust.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Internal Canadian government records are raising new questions about how federal officials tracked and publicly reported COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, as thousands of Canadians who reported injuries seek changes to the country’s vaccine injury compensation system.
Documents requested and reported by Just the News under Canada’s Access to Information Act show that Public Health Agency of Canada officials privately discussed problems with vaccine safety data between October 2023 and September 2024, even as the agency moved to stop updating its public vaccine safety webpage.
The records show that PHAC officials identified data delays, inconsistent definitions between federal agencies and limits in provincial reporting systems. They also show that senior staff debated how to describe the end of public reporting and how to frame public messaging about COVID vaccine safety.
At one point, PHAC Executive Director Susanna Ogunnaike-Cooke objected to proposed language saying “COVID-19 vaccines are safe.”
“Sorry to be difficult, but we can’t/shouldn’t say” that “COVID-19 vaccines are safe,” she wrote March 26, 2024, because “there have been a few (though rare) causally associated adverse events that caused serious morbidity and even some deaths.”
She instead suggested language stating that “extensive evidence on COVID-19 vaccine safety has been gathered globally,” wording that later appeared in the agency’s public explanation.
The PHAC webpage for “Reported side effects following COVID-19 vaccination in Canada” says it was last updated Jan. 19, 2024, with data through Jan. 5, 2024. The page says that as the COVID response became “an ongoing health issue,” and because “extensive evidence on COVID-19 vaccine safety has been gathered globally,” the agency no longer needed to continue updating the site.
The records released to Just the News, made searchable in the PHAC release package, show that the public reporting system had significant limitations before it was discontinued.
PHAC’s standard public reporting schedule operated on a five-week delay, designed to capture adverse events reported within 30 days of vaccination and allow another week for data entry. Internal communications show that the system was backlogged for months.
In a Jan. 15, 2024, draft document on the future of adverse events following immunization reporting, epidemiologist Ashley Weeks identified a “misalignment of timing of vaccine administered data availability and the Online report schedule.” She wrote that a Dec. 22, 2023, public report using data pulled two weeks earlier would require vaccination records through Nov. 3 to reflect recent vaccinations, but the most recent data available to the agency at that time only reached Sept. 14.
Weeks also wrote that PHAC did not “receive denominator information on the coadministration of vaccines,” limiting the government’s ability to determine how many shots were actually administered when COVID vaccines were given at the same time as other vaccines, such as flu shots.
According to the documents, the federal system relied entirely on provincial registries, which were not tracking cases where a patient received a COVID vaccine at the same time as another immunization. That gap affected the baseline data used to evaluate reported events.
PHAC also faced complications from differences between its reporting system and Health Canada’s Canada Vigilance Database. At the time, Health Canada was tracking “adverse events of special interest” including anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, multisystem inflammatory syndrome and myocarditis/pericarditis.
Although PHAC was integrating Canada Vigilance Database data into its public adverse event reporting, Weeks’ draft noted “limitations with including Canada Vigilance,” including “differences in serious definition.”
Weeks wrote that Health Canada’s approach could increase counts by including “other medically important events as serious,” and raised the possibility of removing the Canada Vigilance Database data from the public report.
“We should anticipate lots of public pushback if we were to completely remove CVD,” Weeks wrote in a table of options for the future of the online COVID vaccine report.
She warned that “the public may not understand why the sudden change, might worry we’re hiding things, and may claim that our previous way of reporting wasn’t proper.”
As of Jan. 26, 2026, the Canada Vigilance Database had received 2,040 domestic and 29,619 foreign adverse event reports for myocarditis and pericarditis alone, according to March 11, 2026, Order Paper Q-766, requested by Conservative Member of Parliament Ted Falk.
Health Canada has said that such reports do not necessarily establish a causal relationship and that the risks of COVID illness outweigh vaccine harms, “including the rare risk of myocarditis or pericarditis which, despite hospitalization, is relatively mild and resolves quickly in most individuals.”
The internal records show officials spent months discussing how to explain the end of public COVID vaccine adverse event reporting rather than resolving the data conflicts and delays described in the documents.
In a Jan. 19, 2024, email, Ogunnaike-Cooke gave talking points to the Director General’s Office ahead of a meeting with the Office of the Chief Public Health Officer, then led by Theresa Tam. The talking points cited the “transition from pandemic to endemic,” declining vaccine uptake and a “decrease in [Health Canada’s] COVID-19 specific resources” as reasons for ending public reports.
The agency had already reduced reporting from weekly to monthly and then to quarterly between January 2021 and spring 2023 before discontinuing the public report entirely on Jan. 19, 2024.
Weeks’ Jan. 15 draft also identified another emerging issue: the “desire from [Health Canada] and PHAC to shift demands for data including AEFI data from CVD to pre-pandemic levels.”
By February 2024, PHAC was planning a new system “aiming to transition to a new webpage inclusive of all vaccines,” according to Weeks’ planning document. That system later became STARVAX, which combines COVID vaccine statistics with other routine immunizations, including flu shots.
Weeks’ planning document listed “minimum key variables” for the new system. Under “seriousness,” the document said officials should communicate that most reported issues were “non-serious to increase confidence in the vaccine.”
A footnote added, “It could be interesting to create a new seriousness definition and see if there are any reports MAE [Medically Important Adverse Event] deem serious which are not picked up in the new definition.”
The internal debate continued after the public COVID vaccine adverse event report had already been discontinued. When a member of the public emailed Health Canada in April asking when the next report would be posted, officials began a nearly three-month exchange over how to respond.
One internal instruction suggested keeping links live until May instead of archiving them “in case people are searching,” delaying broader public awareness that the reporting program had ended.
The disclosure comes as Canadians who say they were injured by COVID vaccines are preparing to press for changes to the vaccine injury compensation program. More than 3,000 people who reported injuries are expected to share their stories in Ottawa later this year, Global News reported.
A Global News investigation found that PHAC and Oxaro, the third-party consulting firm that formerly managed the compensation program, underestimated claims by predicting about 40 per year. The program has received about 400 claims annually, with 3,317 applications filed and 1,738 people still waiting for decisions, according to the investigation.
PHAC took over the program in April after investigations showed Oxaro had spent $34 million of a $50 million budget on administrative costs instead of patient compensation.
Concerns about vaccine adverse event tracking have also surfaced in the United States. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson presented evidence that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration used flawed algorithms under the Biden administration that allegedly obscured serious COVID vaccine safety signals.
A whistleblower has claimed senior FDA officials had been shown adverse events associated with the vaccines, including cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, Bell’s palsy and several types of strokes, but used an algorithm that masked those signals to avoid creating vaccine hesitancy.
More than 13 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. PHAC and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 100 million doses administered in Canada and 676 million in the United States.
The records show that even as Canadian officials publicly described the move away from COVID-specific reporting as part of a broader transition in pandemic management, internal communications acknowledged major weaknesses in the data pipeline, unresolved differences in definitions and concerns that the public could perceive the changes as an attempt to hide information.
Original article
Comments