Alberta’s Ongoing COVID-19 Review Looks at Whether Data Justified Lockdowns

Until recently, little was known about a group of Alberta doctors tasked by Premier Danielle Smith with reviewing how health data was used to inform decision-making during the pandemic.

The task force is led by Dr. Gary Davidson, who publicly questioned during the height of the pandemic how the government was using data to justify lockdowns.

Information about the task force came to light April 23 via documents obtained by the Globe and Mail. Ms. Smith answered reporter questions at the legislature later that day, defending the choice of Dr. Davidson to lead the review.

“I needed somebody who was going to look at everything that happened with some fresh eyes and maybe with a little bit of a contrarian perspective because we’ve only ever been given one perspective,” Ms. Smith said.

“I left it to [Dr. Davidson] to assemble the panel with the guidance that I would like to have a broad range of perspectives.”

The task force was formed in November 2022, shortly after Ms. Smith took office, and it’s due to submit its findings in May. Ms. Smith said the report will be made public. A separate review led by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning was published last year, and it aimed more broadly at Alberta’s pandemic response.

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The task force led by Dr. Davidson is focused on how health data was used to inform Alberta’s response to the pandemic. Both Mr. Manning’s and Dr. Davidson’s reviews evaluate how Alberta should change its response to any future public emergencies.

Dr. Davidson was chief of emergency medicine at the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre in 2021 when he expressed concern that his personal experience didn’t match the picture painted by publicly reported data.

A video of Dr. Davidson speaking at an event circulated online at the time, as reported by CBC.

He said in the video that health care problems started years before COVID-19 and had to do with funding and other factors. He talked about slow periods in the hospital at the height of the pandemic, and he said lulls in admissions were often followed by lockdowns. He claimed the government arranged it that way so it could credit lockdowns with lowering hospital admissions.

“As soon as the [admittance numbers] droop, we go into a lockdown so it looks like the lockdown fixed everything, and they’ve done this every time,” Dr. Davidson said in the video. “So you know that if you’re into one-and-a-half or two days of a droop, you’re going to have a lockdown. Because if it gets better, they ‘fixed it.’”

He said staff weren’t quitting because of being overloaded with an influx of COVID-19 patients. For instance, he said, a long-time nurse at his hospital quit because a colleague had allegedly called her a “waste of skin” for not getting vaccinated.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) said at the time that his claims about the data and the lockdowns were false.

“This physician’s opinions do not accurately reflect the COVID-19 pandemic, the AHS pandemic response, or the situation at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre. In addition, they do a disservice to the incredible work our front-line teams do every day. It is disappointing that someone would spread misinformation about COVID-19 in this way,” AHS spokesperson Kerry Williamson told CBC at the time.

While Dr. Davidson has been critical of how the data was used, his task force was aimed at bringing together varying perspectives. For reasons unknown, however, some left the task force.

The Epoch Times sent inquiries to doctors who were previously members, but did not hear back as of publication. Among them are primary-care physician Ernst Greyvenstein and Chris Sarin, a medical officer of health with Indigenous Services Canada. Both were named by the Globe and Mail as former members of the task force and described as holding “more conventional views regarding the pandemic.”

The task force is currently comprised of only three doctors, including Dr. Davidson, according to the health ministry’s Ms. Smith. The other two members are anesthetist Blaine Achen and epidemiologist David Vickers, both of whom have been publicly critical of pandemic measures.

“The task force was designed to include up to 10 health professionals from diverse practice areas, including infectious disease, public health, general practice, acute care, immunology, analytics, and emergency medicine,” the ministry’s Ms. Smith said.

“Like every other jurisdiction in the world, Alberta had to develop and implement approaches to data management and decision making during the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said. “The aim of the task force is to review Alberta’s experience, alongside a jurisdictional scan, to position Alberta’s government to better manage any future pandemic.”