“Dangerously short sighted.” That’s how the President of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Gil McGowan, describes the Alberta government’s new COVID-19 vaccination strategy.
Starting today, Albertans who want to get the COVID-19 shot this year, will need to pre-order the vaccine — and they’ll need to pay for it out of their own pocket.
The province announced the plan back in June, after the federal government put the provinces in charge of buying COVID-19 vaccines, as is routine with other immunization programs.
Albertans who place an order through the Alberta vaccine booking system will be sent a reminder in early October to book an appointment to get the shot.
Visitors to a Medicine Shoppe pharmacy in Edmonton are invited to scan a QR code for a link to a website where they can pre-order this year’s Covid vaccine.
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Another change this year is the vaccine will only be available through a public health clinic and not a pharmacy, as it has been in previous years.
Provincial health officials won’t say how much the vaccine will cost, but when the change was announced the province said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated the cost of the vaccine at $110 per dose.
The province claims it will still pay for some Albertans to get immunized against COVID-19, including those who have compromised immune systems, people on social programs and seniors living in a congregate setting.
In a statement emailed to Global News, Alberta’s Ministry of Primary and Preventative Health Services called the new policy “a responsible, targeted approach to COVID-19 immunization.”
“Making COVID-19 vaccines accessible to those Albertans at highest risk of severe outcomes will reduce hospitalizations and deaths in those populations and help curb the spread of COVID-19,” the statement said.
The president of the Alberta Federation of Labour describes the changes the province has made to this year’s Covid vaccination program as “dangerously short sighted.”
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However, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Gil McGowan, describes the provincial government’s new strategy as “not a vaccine roll out. It’s actually an anti-vax strategy, dressed up as a vaccine role-out strategy. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“Covid is not a cold, it’s not the flu,” McGowan said. “It’s a multi-system disease that can do real serious damage.”
McGowan agrees with the government’s decision to provide the vaccine to seniors and medically vulnerable people, but he said the government also needs to consider occupations when deciding who gets priority access to the vaccine.
“So healthcare, education, and basically any workplace where workers are doing a lot of frontline contact with large groups of people — from our perspective, representing workers, that is a gross omission because people working in workplaces like healthcare and education, they’re at much higher risk of infection and reinfection” McGowan said.
“From our perspective, you know, it’s clear to us that the provincial government is really not serious about encouraging vaccine uptake.”
McGowan pointed to the ongoing measles outbreak in Alberta —which has surpassed the entire United States in the number of confirmed measles cases — as a cautionary tale of what could happen with COVID-19.
So far, provincial health officials haven’t said how much Albertan’s will be charged for the vaccine, but pointed to an estimate from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that pegged the cost at $110 per dose.
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NDP health critic Dr. Luanne Metz accused the UCP government of being anti-science, anti-vaccination and anti-public health.
“It’s totally political,” Metz said. “Every other province in this country is making vaccines available to their residents. Many are making them available to anyone who lives there.”
“This government is limiting them. Eighty-seven per cent of doses lasts year were given in a pharmacy, which is very convenient for people,” Metz added. “Now they’re asking people to register, and on top of that most people are going to have to pay for the vaccine and it won’t be covered by insurance.”
When the government announced the new COVID-19 immunization strategy in June, Premier Danielle Smith said that $135 million worth of vaccines expired or were wasted last year because fewer Albertans chose to get a shot.
The Ministry of Primary and Preventative Health Services says that “only 13.7 per cent of Albertans received the COVID-19 vaccine last year.” McGowan responded, saying, “To make individual Albertans, the vast majority of individual Albertans, pay for access to their vaccine, is going to depress vaccine uptake. From our perspective, that seems to be exactly what the government intends to do.’