Alberta’s Perverse New Barriers to COVID Vaccines

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s radical new rules for COVID immunization pose a genuine threat to the elderly, the working poor and pregnant moms.

Smith, who revived her ailing political career by peddling conspiratorial COVID theories, has designed a program that is not only punitive but discriminatory, bureaucratic and Soviet in nature.

“This policy is so bad that it’s actually worse than their usual failure to plan properly,” said James Talbot, the province’s former chief medical officer of health. “In fact, it is so bad it looks like they are actually planning to fail.”

Here are the three basic tenets of any successful public health program: make it available, make it accessible and make it affordable. Smith turns all three upside down.

Perversely Smith’s new rules, crafted with zero public consultation and taking effect this month, will make less vaccine available for fewer people in fewer locations with more bureaucracy to wrangle with.

And unlike every other province and territory, Alberta will charge those most vulnerable for the vaccine.

These changes, say critics, cater to a militant minority in the United Conservative Party. This slice of Smith’s base, unsettled by the pandemic, has spent the last five years in a haze of anger and frustration, calling COVID a hoax, denying its existence, rejecting masks, mocking the disabled and refusing vaccinations as some kind of Hitlerian final solution.

And so, instead of making it easier for citizens to protect themselves against a blood-clotting virus that still kills more people than influenza every year, Smith’s government has made getting a COVID shot a daunting obstacle course.

Let’s review the barriers one at a time.

1. Charging the poor and elderly for vaccines

The first hurdle is charging citizens, including elders over 65, $80 to $110 for a COVID shot. No other province or territory has gone this way.

Starting this month the rich in Alberta may get the vaccine if they can find it, but the working poor will be forced to choose between groceries, rent or school supplies and a vaccine. Without the protection the vaccine affords, some will become seriously ill, occupy a hospital bed and cost the system and their families money.

“It is a grotesquely unfair policy,” noted Talbot. “It is also what two-tiered medicine looks like and what privatization looks like.”

Smith’s new rules pointedly ignore the recommendations of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization. It says that people over the age of 65, pregnant moms, health-care workers, First Nations and the working poor should get the vaccine for free because the health benefits outweigh the vaccine costs.

2. No free vaccines for health workers

Smith’s new rules get even more punitive. If you are health-care worker of any type, you also will have to purchase the vaccine. That’s like telling firefighters they must go out and purchase their own protective gear. It also places the province at a competitive disadvantage in terms of retaining staff in an era of shortages in stressed-out health-care systems.

Vaccines, masks and air quality controls can keep health-care settings healthy and infection-free. But the Smith government obviously doesn’t get it or give a damn. Apparently, it doesn’t even know its own compelling statistics on COVID outbreaks in health-care settings. In 2024-25 there were nearly 1,358 COVID outbreaks in hospitals and long-term care facilities. Those infected patients and health-care workers harmed many patients and cost big dollars to control.

3. No more shots from pharmacists

But that’s not all. Pharmacists will no longer be allowed to provide COVID shots. Alberta was one of the first provinces in Canada to pioneer this sensible practice for immunization. It made getting any vaccine for many rural Albertans easy, affordable and practical.

Last year six out of seven COVID shots were administered by one of the province’s 5,500 pharmacists at 278 locations. But no more. Now citizens must register online with the Alberta Vaccine Booking System on Aug. 11 with Alberta Health Services to pre-order a shot at some undisclosed public health clinic. Don’t worry, you’ll be contacted at some later date.

Removing pharmacists from the COVID immunization program, and again without any consultation, means only one thing: fewer locations and limited access hours for Albertans trying to get the vaccine. In other words, the Smith government is now fiercely working against the health of its citizens and health-care system.

Getting a COVID shot is now also a “targeted” four-phase process. But targeted really means restricted. In Phase 1 residents of old folks’ homes (what the government calls “supportive living accommodations”) can get vaccines free of charge. In Phase 2 the immunocompromised and Albertans on social programs can get a free shot at a public health clinic but only if they go online and register intent and if any vaccine is left.

Everyone else has to get in line for whatever vaccines may remain, register on the internet, wait for a reply and then pay cash.

4. Reducing the total amount of vaccine available

At the same time the Smith government has reduced the volume of available vaccine by nearly 250,000 doses. Last year the province administered 750,000 doses — largely to people over 50 years of age. This year the province has ordered only 485,000 doses, a 30 per cent reduction. That means a quarter of the population, again mostly the elderly, that wants the vaccine will not find it available.

Yet data for the last two years shows that demand for the vaccines is consistently high at 700,000. What will the government do if a new variant surges and demand for the vaccine can’t meet supply?

COVID still kills more than the flu

Remember that for COVID, as for influenza, mortality is highest in age groups beyond 60 years.

So why would a government make it harder for older people to get vaccines against COVID, which dispatched 389 citizens from 2024 to 2025 compared with influenza’s 239 deaths, even though last year’s influenza outbreak was unusually nasty and even though the same government continues to make flu vaccines free?

And why make it harder for health-care professionals to get a COVID vaccine that protects them and their patients from a virus that can damage almost every organ in the body and lead to chronic ill health?

Why ask why? It all comes down to the extreme nature of Smith’s politics. Recall that at the beginning of the pandemic she suggested that people who agreed to vaccination against COVID had succumbed to tyranny. She also equated COVID vaccination mandates with the behaviour of Nazi doctors who conducted human experiments in concentration camps.

But it’s Smith who is violating basic public health ethics by consigning the vulnerable to higher risks of death.

The false excuse of wastage

You will hear Premier Smith claim that she is merely championing choice and efficiency. According to Smith, one million doses of the vaccine (paid for by the federal government) got wasted in 2023-24 at a cost of $135 million. She blamed the wastage on Albertans concluding that “the vaccine doesn’t work very well.”

As is all too common, however, the disingenuous premier hasn’t told the full story or the truth. No, the vaccine isn’t a silver bullet that stops transmission. The vaccine does, however, reduce hospitalization, death and incidence of long COVID.

A blistering letter by Brittany Zelmer, president of the Alberta Pharmacists’ Association, recently corrected the record on the issue of wastage. As Zelmer notes, the federal government paid the cost of COVID vaccines for the last four years. (The province didn’t start paying until April.) During that time “the Provincial government raised no concerns about wastage. In fact, Alberta Health’s directive to providers was clear: vaccinate as many people as possible, even if it meant some doses from multi-dose vials might go unused.”

In other words, half-empty vials were considered acceptable wastage at the time. The province could have managed things better but didn’t. Now that vaccine manufacturers have addressed the issue by producing single-dose packaging, wastage is no longer a concern. So wastage, the so-called motive for rewriting Alberta’s COVID immunization rules, was never an issue for the Smith government until it could be used as an excuse to restrict access to the vaccine.

The Tyee has also learned that the Alberta government has told pharmacists and other immunizers to stop using Pfizer KP.2 COVID-19 vaccines by the end of July and to remove the vaccine from their shelves no later than Aug. 31 whether the vaccine has expired or not.

Anti-vaxers driving policy

A former Alberta assistant deputy minister of health told The Tyee that Smith’s COVID stance is untenable and just wrong. “Twenty per cent of the population is now making anti-vax conspiracy policy that harms 80 per cent of the population.”

“The UCP government are purposefully, and with design, doing many things to absolutely make it very difficult for many people to get the vaccine,” added the former high-ranking official, who preferred to remain unnamed for fear of political backlash from Smith’s camp. “This is a deliberate and non-transparent policy to totally undermine immunization for COVID.”

The criticism is hardly isolated. The United Nurses of Alberta, along with the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, have condemned the changes as dangerous, illogical and immoral. The Alberta Pharmacists’ Association recently sent a letter to its 5,500 members describing Smith’s new COVID rules as “bad policy based on bad math.”

According to the Edmonton-based Institute of Health Economics, another group the government failed to consult about its new restrictions, COVID continues to be a huge economic liability for society.

In 2023 the institute calculated that the total burden of long COVID on the Canadian health-care system alone ranges between $7 billion and $50 billion a year. Unvaccinated individuals not only experience worse outcomes but generate the highest hospitalization costs. You’d think that a fiscally responsible government might want to keep those costs down with accessible vaccine programs, clean air policies and sensible infection controls (mask up in hospitals) that keep COVID out of health-care settings. But not Alberta.

With this move, Smith adds to her growing international reputation for rejecting basic public health tenets. Alberta already has made headlines for leading every other jurisdiction in North America in terms of measles cases.

The deliberate undermining of the province’s COVID immunization program will have predictable consequences for hundreds of thousands of Albertans.

Zelmer’s letter to members of the Alberta Pharmacists’ Association correctly spelled out what is likely to happen: “As vaccination rates decline, we can expect hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths to rise, placing even greater pressure on the health-care system. The true cost of these decisions will be measured in lives and health outcomes.”

Not that Premier Smith apparently gives a damn. Protecting certain lives is inconvenient to her chaos-making political agenda. The priorities of a different group matter far more. After all, many of the leaders of Alberta’s anti-vax movement are, like Smith, now campaigning for separation from Canada or joining the United States.