Over four days in September, Conservative MP Dean Allison held an inquiry to hear from Canadians who say they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines.
The inquiry did not hear from Health Canada, and it wasn’t sanctioned by the federal government. Most mainstream outlets largely ignored it.
As someone who has suffered with long COVID for three years now, I have genuine sympathy for anyone who experienced a serious adverse event after a COVID-19 vaccine.
However rare, real injuries matter, and those individuals deserve support and recognition.
That said, the data from Canada’s official surveillance systems do not support claims of widespread vaccine harm.
More than 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered in Canada, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, which monitors adverse events following immunizations.
Of the 455 death reports that occurred in the period after COVID-19 vaccination, only four deaths were identified as causally linked to the vaccine.
Critics will often cite 2024 figures of 2,835 adverse events and 225 serious reports from 44.7 million doses. But those refer to all vaccines distributed that year, not COVID-19 vaccines alone.
In fact, the vast majority of reported events were mild or coincidental; serious reports remained rare, and no ongoing safety signals of concern have been identified in recent years.
It is also clear that COVID-19 caused more deaths than the vaccines did: over 60,000 deaths in Canada have been attributed to the virus.
That disparity — tens of thousands of deaths from the disease versus a handful causally linked to the vaccines — is not a matter of opinion. It is the recorded outcome under Canada’s surveillance systems, which include provincial reporting, medical case review and specialized causality committees.
No medical intervention is risk-free. Yet the COVID-19 vaccines came remarkably close to the ideal of minimal serious harm relative to the threat the vaccines addressed. The vaccines were also developed and distributed quickly, under intense time pressure.
Governments must regularly balance personal freedoms against public health — often at cost to some individuals.
I also experienced this cost personally. In 2023, eight months after my third dose, I became seriously ill after a transatlantic flight.
I may have caught the illness from a man two rows behind me who was coughing, unmasked, and seemingly unconcerned about those around him. His decision may have imposed real costs on others — just as an intoxicated driver does when he gets behind the wheel.
In both cases, one person’s choice collides with the safety of others.
Good governance has long recognized this principle on the roads: we accept speed limits, seat-belt laws, and impaired-driving prohibitions because the alternative is preventable injury and death.
The same logic applies to infectious disease. A Ministry of Health equipped with measured powers to restrict high-risk behaviour during a pandemic is not an act of government overreach; it is the public-health equivalent of keeping drunk drivers off the highway.
The data show the vaccines themselves caused vanishingly few serious harms. The far greater risk came from the virus — and from those who treated shared spaces as private entitlements.
Arnold Neufeldt-Fast is an associate professor of theology and former dean at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. He is on long-term medical leave due to Long COVID.
