Bonnie Henry Vaccine Injury Emails Freedom of Information Release: “Public Health Experts” or “Public Relations Experts”?

Bonnie Henry Vaccine Injury Emails Freedom of Information Release: “Public Health Experts” or “Public Relations Experts”?

A freedom of information request resulted in the release of 40 pages of emails exchanged by BC public health experts and bureaucrats including Dr. Bonnie Henry. These emails reveal internal discussions and emails from the public surrounding COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Reading through the emails is an insightful endeavor despite their heavily redacted nature.

What’s clear is that:

1. Bonnie Henry was fielding emails outlining adverse events following the vaccines and therefore knew full well that there are risks associated with these injections since January of 2021.

2. The default position taken by these experts/bureaucrats is that the injury in question was not caused by the vaccine.

3. If a patient has an adverse event following a COVID vaccine, getting it reported is difficult and many patients face ridicule when trying to speak with healthcare professionals about an adverse event after immunization (AEFI).

4. These public health bureaucrats seem to really believe they’re doing a good job.

Let’s consider these points in turn.

Dr. Henry was fielding emails outlining adverse events following the injections since the beginning of the campaign to inject every British Columbian.

With full knowledge that adverse events reports were beginning to accrue, Dr. Henry came on our TVs and radios to tell us that we would just have to fall in line and “do (our) part”. That these vaccines were “safe and effective” and anyone who dared question this rhetoric was to be ridiculed and was “anti-science”. When, according to ever-shifting goals, not enough people complied, she started to use coercive tactics including taking away people’s right to participate in many aspects of society. She even went so far as to take away many healthcare providers’ right to earn a living in the jobs they loved.

The fact that Dr. Henry was aware of myriad adverse events occurring only adds to the already outrageous fact that informed consent, a previously hailed principle of any enlightened medical practice, had been brazenly abandoned by our public health officials. As responsible healthcare providers, we must respect the Canadian doctrine of informed consent which clearly states that every person’s body is considered inviolate, that unwanted medical treatment must not be administered, and that individuals must be allowed to make their own choices about their medical care¹. Consent must furthermore be voluntary and individuals must be free to refuse treatment free of any suggestion of duress or coercion_¹. Forced or coerced medical interventions are considered assault. And though an ever-continuing “emergency” seemed to give public health officials carte-blanche to order the widespread assault of hundreds of thousands of British Columbians, requests to prove that there was indeed an emergency that justified such a rash and otherwise illegal measure were and continue to be met with deafening silence.

The default position taken by these experts/bureaucrats is that the injury in question was NOT caused by the vaccine.

These emails reveal several instances wherein the reporting of adverse events is actively discouraged, reported adverse events are dismissed as “likely not related to the vaccine”, and there is an overarching tone of keeping up appearances.

Of note is an email from Dr. Charles Hoffe, a family physician in Lytton, BC who wrote to Dr. Henry on April 7, 2021, with regards to “terrible side-effects from the Covid vaccines in my medical practice” with reference to an attached (open) letter.

By the time Dr. Hoffe wrote that email he had inoculated 900 First Nations people with the Moderna vaccine and had tried to report to the medical authorities that many of his patients had suffered serious adverse events soon after. Two of his patients had anaphylactic reactions, one patient died, and many others suffered lasting neurological and pulmonary injuries². His letter was sent to the Interior Health Authority to which he received a reply telling him that he was not to say anything negative about the COVID vaccines and was threatened with being reported to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC if he refused to obey². He was told to direct his questions to Dr. Carol Fenton, the medical health officer responsible for vaccine rollout in his area. When he did not hear back from Dr. Fenton regarding the mechanism of injury and how to treat the injuries, he wrote the open letter that he then made publicly available and emailed to Dr. Bonnie Henry³.

After some internal back and forth in the released emails regarding checking for AEFI reports and connecting with the First Nations Authority, Dr. Fenton wrote within the internal thread “I am in the process of crafting a response with our communications department to try and mitigate the harm”. The string of emails finishes with Dr. Henry saying “talk to him first and then let us know whether this is something we should bring to the attention of the College”. There is no evidence in the emails (or anywhere for that matter) of any genuine attempt to listen to Dr. Hoffe’s concerns or to take seriously his First Nations patients’ terrible suffering after their Moderna injections. What can be found online are countless defamation articles directed at Dr. Hoffe.

Another example of correspondence that sheds light on a drive to minimize adverse events reporting is found in the email written by Dr. Monika Naus of the BCCDC on February 10, 2021, which reads “we are receiving an increasing number of reports unfamiliar to health care professionals.. unusual reactions following the Moderna vaccine in which there may be an initial local reaction (pain, redness and swelling at the injection site)… then returns 8-10 days after the vaccine.. accompanied by unusual.. ringed erythema as well as pruritus”. After a redacted portion she goes on to advise the email’s recipients, who included the Vaccine Safety working group and HealthLinkBC, that if the severity criteria for reporting AEFI are not met and are, therefore “not reportable” as AEFI, they are to be taken as “expected” events. However, the BC Public Health Act clearly states that health officials must report adverse events following immunization, where an adverse event is defined as: a negative change in a person’s health that (a)occurs after the person receives an immunization, (b)is serious, unusual or unexpected, or for which medical attention is sought and (c)cannot clearly be attributed to a cause other than the immunization⁴ (emphasis added). A couple of things stand out with respect to this email. 1. An adverse event doesn’t have to be serious to report; it can simply be unusual or require medical attention. 2. Many healthcare providers were pointing out the same unusual adverse reaction with this particular vaccine which would likely constitute a strong signal for a causal relationship. However, reporting this adverse event was inexplicably discouraged.

The above are just two recorded examples of adverse events being pushed under the rug in two different ways. There are furthermore several instances wherein the language in the released emails surrounding adverse events that were reported is disparaging of a likely causal relationship with the vaccines. Examples include “at this point.. the CSC does not consider the death to be linked to the vaccine” and “(w)e have two temporally associated thrombocytopenia reports…., but as you know this is associated with a variety of causes..” It seems odd that there would be an opinion one way or another. The point of collecting data on adverse events is to see if there is a signal that indicates there may be a causal relationship. Believing the event is not caused by the vaccine lays bare an inherent bias, undoubtedly spurred on by the “safe and effective” mantra that had been playing on repeat, to be encountered at every switch of a radio, glimpse of a bus, or billboard, or glance at a newspaper or social media.

If a patient has an adverse event following a COVID vaccine, getting it reported is difficult and many patients face ridicule when trying to speak with healthcare professionals about an adverse event after immunization (AEFI).

One email sent to Dr. Henry by a member of the public is written by someone describing a serious neurological adverse event, though the exact nature of the injury is redacted. They write “We would like to ensure that you are aware of these concerning adverse reactions to the vaccine. We would like to request that you consider a more straightforward and transparent process for reporting adverse reactions to vaccines, for both healthcare professionals and individual citizens…”… “As individual healthcare consumers, we rely on healthcare professionals to report adverse events, but there is no way to report our own symptoms to ensure that a report has been made about our situation. The criteria for reporting have not been updated for the current vaccination roll-out and in news articles I’ve found for the province (CTV), the very low numbers of adverse reactions and the lack of mention of neurological symptoms leads me to believe that not all adverse reactions are being reported. ”… “If these types of neurological symptoms are occurring after vaccinations for healthy middle-aged adults… then it is quite possible that others are having these types of experiences, but they don’t know how to report their concerns. There are many reasons why someone would not report adverse reactions: fear of being perceived as someone who is anti-vaccine, fear of not being believed, fear of not being treated respectfully, lack of access to healthcare, lack of awareness for how to report etc.”

This is an eloquently worded email that draws attention to an issue that we at Healthcare Workers United are keenly aware of and have published on before⁵. There is no government-backed way for individual citizens to report adverse events and the vast majority of healthcare workers strongly believe the “safe and effective” mantra (though it is worth noting that individuals can report adverse events via the Canadian Covid Care Alliance here.) It can be nearly impossible for citizens suffering from an adverse event following their COVID immunization to receive empathetic help coming from an impartial perspective regarding the virtue of following one’s duty as a healthcare provider under the BC Public Health Act to report AEFI. And indeed, it is unclear from the emails if this person’s particular adverse event was ever reported.

Because a process (if convoluted) exists for reporting them, some adverse events do get recorded despite the red tape and active discouraging of adequate reports. You can read the Canadian government report on adverse events on the Government of Canada page “Reported side effects following COVID-19 vaccination in Canada”⁶. However, what these emails make clear is that these numbers are almost certainly a gross underrepresentation of the true figures.

These public health bureaucrats seem to really believe they’re doing a good job.

Throughout these emails, there is a palpable lack of awareness and a sense of importance. Adverse events are often minimized and dismissed and the management of public opinion is placed above human suffering.

A veneer of respecting downtrodden minority groups is evident. Pronouns are proudly displayed in signatures. Grateful acknowledgments of living and working on unceded traditional territory of First Nations Peoples are haughtily declared. But when real disparity came to the forefront with the suffering and death that the Moderna injections seemed to be causing in a largely First Nations population, our public health officials had more important things to worry about, like maintaining their “safe and effective” public relations campaign.

Take-Aways

These emails make clear that our “public health experts” might more aptly be called “public relations experts”; that adverse events are almost certainly being grossly underreported; and that the suffering of genuinely injured citizens is being ignored and shunned.

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