Don't call it 'safe': Public records suggest Canada didn't accurately track COVID vaccine injuries

As the Public Health Agency of Canada internally discussed the rationale it would give the public for no longer publishing reported COVID-19 vaccine injuries on its vaccine safety webpage two years ago, its executive director made a startling request: Don't call the immunizations "safe."

Records requested by Just the News under Canada's Access to Information Act show the Canadian government's internal tracking of COVID vaccine adverse events and vaccine safety data was far less reliable than senior officials publicly let on, as documented by communications within PHAC from October 2023 to September 2024.

Even as the agency's tracking was crippled by mismatched data production timelines and disagreements with the overarching federal health agency, Health Canada, about what counted as "serious" medical events, planners chose to discontinue the public website rather than address underlying data production issues.

While the government operated on a standard five-week data lag to generate its public updates, intended to capture adverse events within 30 days of jabs, internal communications show tracking was backlogged for months.

The revelations come as more than 3,000 Canadians who have reported COVID vaccine injuries are slated to share their stories in Ottawa later this year, to press for reforms to the vaccine injury program, Global News reported. 

PHAC and Oxaro, a third-party consulting firm that formerly managed the vaccine injury compensation program, underestimated the number of injured Canadians for the claims, predicting just 40 claims a year, according to a Global News investigation.

They have in fact received 400 claims a year, with 3,317 applications filed and 1,738 people still waiting on their claims, the investigation found. PHAC took over the program in April following investigations showing that Oxaro had spent $34 million of $50 million on administrative costs rather than helping patients.

Systemic failure to accurately track and report COVID vaccine adverse events is not unique to Canada. 

Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson presented evidence that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration used flawed algorithms that hid serious safety signals to track COVID vaccine adverse events under the Biden administration. 

A whistleblower claims senior FDA officials had been shown adverse events associated with the vaccines such as cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, Bell’s palsy, and various types of strokes, but chose to use an algorithm that masked such signals to avoid creating vaccine hesitancy.

The World Health Organization says more than 13 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered internationally to date, including more than 100 million in Canada and 676 million across the United States, according to PHAC and the CDC, respectively.

The public 'might worry we're hiding things'

Just the News sought records explaining and supporting the government's decision to discontinue updates to its "Reported side effects following COVID-19 vaccination in Canada" website, including briefing notes, decision records, internal correspondence, analyses, or communications created, reviewed or relied upon to make or justify the update cutoff, including records addressing COVID vaccine safety surveillance or adverse event reporting. 

The COVID vaccine safety page says it was last updated Jan. 19, 2024, with data up to and including Jan. 5, 2024. As the COVID response evolves into "an ongoing health issue," and "extensive evidence on COVID-19 vaccine safety has been gathered globally," there's no reason to keep updating the site, it says.

However, the records shared by PHAC with Just the News, which made the production searchable, show significant discrepancies in the data behind the agency’s regular updates to the page from 2021 to 2024.

Epidemiologist Ashley Weeks sent PHAC colleagues a draft document Jan. 15, 2024, of "considerations for [the] future" of reports on COVID adverse events following immunization (AEFI), with a section on "emerging issue[s]."

She cited a "misalignment of timing of vaccine administered data availability and the Online report schedule," whose five-week data lag relies on the assumption that side effects will appear within 30 days of vaccination and another week will be needed to enter data into the system. 

An online report for Dec. 22, 2023, using data pulled two weeks earlier, would require vaccination records up to Nov. 3 to reflect recent vaccinations, but the most recent data available at the agency for that date was stuck at Sept. 14, Weeks' draft said.

She said that another emerging issue was that they did not "receive denominator information on the coadministration of vaccines," further diluting the government’s ability to track the total number of shots actually given. 

According to the documents, the federal tracking system was entirely dependent on provincial registries, which were not tracking instances in which a patient received the vaccine at the same time as another shot like the flu vaccine, skewing the baseline of the data.

Tracking was also complicated by conflicting definitions between federal agencies. At the time, Health Canada’s Canada Vigilance Database was tracking "adverse events of special interest" for conditions such as anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, multisystem inflammatory syndrome and myocarditis/pericarditis.

Though PHAC was integrating the CVD data at the time it was tracking AEFI reports for the public, Weeks' draft cited "limitations with including Canada Vigilance," such as “differences in serious definition.” 

She noted Health Canada inflates the numbers by including “other medically important events as serious," and considered removing the data altogether.

"We should anticipate lots of public pushback if we were to completely remove CVD," Weeks wrote in an entry for a table on options to consider for the future of the online COVID report, including its advantages and considerations. 

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, CVD had received 2,040 domestic and 29,619 foreign adverse events for myocarditis and pericarditis alone, according to the March 11, 2026, Order paper Q-766, requested by Conservative Member of Parliament Ted Falk that legally forced disclosure of numbers in Health Canada's CVD database.

Health Canada has said that these do not necessarily imply a causal relationship, and that the risks of COVID illness outweigh the harms of being vaccinated, “including the rare risk of myocarditis or pericarditis which, despite hospitalization, is relatively mild and resolves quickly in most individuals.”

Don't call COVID vaccines 'safe,' just backed by 'extensive evidence'

Documents show that officials spent months debating public messaging on the reasons for discontinuing online reporting, instead of trying to reconcile conflicting federal definitions or resolve data delays.

PHAC Executive Director Susanna Ogunnaike-Cooke gave the Director General's Office talking points on reasons for ending AEFI public reporting ahead of a meeting with the Office of Chief Public Health Officer, then led by Theresa Tam. 

The Jan. 19, 2024, email pointed to 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.

She noted it had already scaled back reporting from weekly to monthly, then quarterly from January 2021 and spring 2023, before discontinuing the report altogether that same day of Jan. 19.

Four days earlier, epidemiologist Weeks' draft on the future of AEFI reports identified another "emerging issue," bureaucratic burnout, namely the “desire from [Health Canada] and PHAC to shift demands for data including AEFI data from CVD to pre-pandemic levels."

By February 2024, the agency was planning an alternative system "aiming to transition to a new webpage inclusive of all vaccines," as Weeks' planning document said. That would ultimately launch STARVAX, which lumps COVID vaccine statistics into routine shots like the flu vaccine. 

Weeks' planning document for AEFI surveillance includes a table of "minimum key variables" to be included in the new system. Under "seriousness," the document says officials should communicate that most reported issues were "non-serious to increase confidence in the vaccine."

"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," a footnote also said. 

PHAC's Ogunnaike-Cooke put her foot down a month later when communications staff and senior officials pored over the wording of the "Draft Blurb For the Vaccine Safety Website," as the email subject line calls it.

“Sorry to be difficult, but we can't/shouldn't say" that "COVID-19 vaccines are safe," she wrote March 26, 2024, since "there have been a few (though rare) causally associated adverse events that caused serious morbidity and even some deaths." 

Instead, Ogunnaike-Cooke suggested the ambiguous statement that would end up in the blurb: "extensive evidence on COVID-19 vaccine safety has been gathered globally."

At least one member of the public noticed the absence of reported side effects, emailing Health Canada in April to learn when the next report would be posted. This triggered a back-and-forth between departments to clarify official public messaging that carried on for nearly three months.

Even as the report had already been discontinued in January, staff debated how to avoid public scrutiny for months. One internal instruction suggested keeping the links live until May instead of archiving them "in case people are searching," delaying public realization that the program had been killed.