By Markham Hislop, Editor

I’m having a hard time seeing the Calgary H1N1 vaccination issue as a “Soviet-style debacle” (Don Braid in the Calgary Herald and echoed by Rick Bell in the Calgary Sun).  Yes, people waited in line for hours to get a shot – or not, for the unlucky ones.  And the Flames got special treatment and jumped the queue, reminiscent of pre-Glasnost apparatchiks.  But is all this hysterical hand-wringing appropriate?

Exactly what did the Tories do wrong?

They seemed to have started with a good plan.  As far as I can tell, the strategy was to start immunizing the highest-risk individuals first, mostly pregnant women and children between six months and 5 years old.  So far, so good.  Once that group was completed, they would proceed down the list of those at risk provided by Health Canada.  Which, by the way, is pretty much what every other province did.

Where the Alberta government seems to have goofed is deciding to loosen the restrictions in those early days.  Pregnant moms are welcome, but if a few healthy people happen to get in line by mistake, well, gosh, this is Alberta, I’m sure we can slip them in.  In other words, the impulse was inclusive, which is generally thought to be a good thing.

In light of the the long line-ups and crisis atmosphere that later developed, why in the name of Mikhail Gorbachev would Alberta Health and Wellness do that?

It turns out the bureaucrats were monitoring opinion polls about Canadians’ intentions to be vaccinated.  And the polls were telling them there was no panic in Alberta.  A lot of people were dissing the vaccine itself, claiming it had cancerous agents in it and other such nonsense.  My social media network was rife with posts comparing the H1N1 vaccine to the Kennedy assassination plot, or worse.

Health and Wellness officials thought they would have a surplus.  Opening up the clinics to people who weren’t high-risk seemed like the generous thing to do. 

Then something changed.  The clinics opened Monday, October 26 with line ups around the block in some cases.  And it only got worse from there.

Howard May, the spokesperson for Health and Wellness I interviewed for SECN’s story, thinks it was the high-profile deaths from H1N1 of youngsters in Ontario that began to change peoples’ minds.  In particular, the case of Evan Frustaglio, a 13 year-old hockey player who became ill during a tournament and died the same Monday morning the clinics opened in Calgary.  Parents were a little frightened. 

Still, Mr. May says, health officials thought they were doing a pretty good job.  There were complaints that four clinics weren’t enough, but Mr. May said the issue was staffing, not lack of locations.  Health and Wellness could have opened eight clinics instead of four, but instead of 30 nurses there would have been half that number per location and where would be the benefit? he asks.

At that point Calgarians were frustrated, tired of standing in line and the government was taking some flak, but it wasn’t a crisis.  Not yet.

By the of the week, however, rumors were flying about impending shortages and clinic closures.  Calgarians flooded the clinics, hoping against hope that they would receive their vaccination before supplies ran out.

Then the federal government dropped the bomb: GlaxoSmithKline, Canada’s only vaccine manufacturer, had decided to switch its production run to another form of the vaccine, meaning shipments to Alberta would be greatly reduced.  Instead of 200,000 units only 90,000 would be sent.

Alberta was out of vaccine, or nearly so.  Suddenly, the Alberta government’s seeming act of genorousity had seriously bitten its ass.  Had Health and Wellness just stuck to the original plan and innoculated those with high-risk conditions, there might still have been vaccine on the shelves.

To make matters worse, it was revealed that the Flames had had their own private clinic, with players and their families receiving the vaccine.  The public, at least much of it, was outraged.  The team pointed out that players had the shots Tuesday, days before anyone realized there might be a shortage.  Didn’t matter.  A scapegoat had to be found, heads had to be seen to roll, so the poor sap in Health and Wellness who authorized the private clinic, who no doubt thought he was doing a good thing, was summarily canned.

It didn’t matter. As I write this the province is in a tizzy.  Citizens are angry, frustrated and fearful that they or their family are in danger.  The media is having a field day, calling for Health Minister Ron Liepert’s head on a pike.  The Liberals are demanding that Liepert resign.  The Tories are sending mixed messages and clearly are in damage control mode, and not doing a very good job of it.

Did the government make a mistake?  Clearly it did.  If it had just stuck to it own pandemic protocol it would likely have been safe.   The 400,000 units of vaccine available when the clinics opened their doors would most likely have taken care of all high-risk individuals, with some left over for low or no-risk people.  GlaxoSmithKline’s announcement might not have come as such as shock.

But all of that is said with the benefit of hindsight.  Health and Wellness made its decisions with the best information it had at the time, which included the (we now know) erroneous polling data. 

Had the issue broken just a little differently, Ron Liepert might have been a hero.  Alas, the Tories were hit with the perfect storm of bad news: far more people wanting the vaccine than expected, a vaccine shortage over which it had no control, and the emergence of the Flames as high-profile symbols of all that had gone wrong.

Hey, that’s politics.  Sometimes governments hit it out of the park, sometimes they strike out.  But I can’t criticize the Tories for wanting to protect the maximum number of citizens it could from the H1N1 flu.  Their heart was in the right place.

Comparing the Alberta government to the Soviet Union is unfair and, well, just plain silly.

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