Jamie Sarkonak: Defunding COVID vaccines a perfectly reasonable step for Alberta

The COVID pandemic has been over for a while now, leaving Canadian officials to wrestle with the cost of providing an expensive, but largely unwanted, vaccine to the public. Alberta’s come up with a reasonable compromise: give the vaccine to vulnerable populations for free, but charge elective vaccine recipients $100 for the shot.

Financially, it’s absolutely the best way to go. Post-pandemic, Canada has been dumping COVID vaccines and therapeutics like mad: the feds trashed $1.2 billion in unused product in 2023-24, which is probably why they ultimately passed the buck to the provinces this year. The move saved the federal Liberals from having to answer for the waste, or defunding the vaccine for the general population and dealing with whatever nasty blowback that would follow.

The cost will naturally differ by province, but in Alberta, the wastage figures aren’t good. More than a million doses were thrown out in 2023-24, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on her Saturday radio show. At a news conference days earlier, she said that half the province’s COVID doses had spoiled.

So it would appear as though there was enough supply for about half the province, but only a fraction of that population took advantage of it. In 2024-25, 400,000 doses (worth $44 million) went unused. In total, 14 per cent of Albertans chose to get the booster last year, or roughly 670,000 individuals.

You could advise Alberta to simply purchase fewer doses — if only 14 per cent of the province wants the vaccine, purchase only enough vaccine to cover 14 per cent of the population. But it doesn’t work that way. The vaccines are packaged in groups, and the 12-hour expiration clock starts ticking down the moment the package is opened.

“They were putting it in packs of 10,” Smith explained on her radio show. “So if you opened it up and gave one shot, you had to throw the rest out after 12 hours because it would expire, so that’s why we ended up with so much wastage.”

You can picture what this looks like: if one vaccine recipient went to Rexall and another went to the Shoppers across the street, and they were the only customers within a 12-hour window, that would create 18 wasted doses. If they both went to Shoppers, that’s still eight wasted doses. Now multiply that across the entire province.

With a virus that acts like a common cold throughout most of the population, well, what’s the point? Remember that this is no Spanish flu. The average age of those who died of COVID in 2020 was 84 years — higher than the average age of death in Canada in 2019 (76.5 years).

Alberta’s new policy has riled up the “covidians” — the minority of people who continue to shape their lives according to a heightened fear of the virus and maintain various pandemic-era habits, such as wearing a mask.

The AlbertaPolitics blog decried the move as an appeal to “the UCP’s MAGA base, probably only a few thousand people, potentially at great cost to literally millions of other Albertans.” A similar critique was made by University of Alberta health law professor Timothy Caulfield. But not even a million Albertans take the booster anymore, while millions have rejected the shot.

It is convenient for Smith that the staunchly anti-vaccine parts of the United Conservative Party will applaud her decision to pull back on Pfizer, but so what? Waste is waste, and keeping on with vestigial universal coverage because the alternative upsets the covidians is not sound decision-making.

Those who are particularly vulnerable to COVID will still be eligible for free boosters. That includes group home residents (both seniors and non), in-home care recipients, homeless people, the immunocompromised and anyone over the age of six months who has underlying medical complications. Also included in the free-vax group are health-care workers (who were looped in after some public pressure). So that satisfies the high-risk, high-exposure contingent.

This won’t be enough for anyone who blindly endorses Canada’s national COVID vaccine guidelines, which cast a wider net for coverage. But read the guidelines before you judge. They recommend vaccine coverage for “members of racialized and other equity-denied communities” — that is, the entire non-white population of Canada (27 per cent, as of 2021).

The feds don’t provide the biological mechanism that causes those of non-European ethnicity to be particularly vulnerable to complications from COVID. Probably because it doesn’t exist. Instead, they cite the unquantifiable will-of-the-gods factor that forms the core of leftist social thought: systemic racism.

“Social inequities have contributed to increased risk of exposure to and severe disease from SARS-CoV-2. Throughout the pandemic, NACI has acknowledged that racialized, marginalized and other equity-denied populations in Canada were disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Systemic barriers to accessing necessary supportive care for COVID-19 included factors such as poverty, systemic racism and being unhoused,” read the guidelines. Elsewhere, it also notes the impact of “historic and ongoing colonization.”

The rest of Western Canada hasn’t been so brave in drawing a reasonable line in the sand. B.C. and Manitoba are even planning to provide elective COVID vaccines to Albertans willing to make the pilgrimage. We’ll see how long that lasts. Soon enough, they’ll realize that their money would also be better spent on hiring more doctors.