Canadians have lost faith in Dr. Theresa Tam and the Public Health Agency of Canada, Conservative MPs said during a House of Commons health committee where they grilled senior public health officers on their response to COVID-19.
During an Oct. 18 committee meeting, Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux read a selection of statements made by Tam and Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo in the early days of the pandemic, asking “what we could do differently or next steps that could have been taken to prevent the rapid spread of the pandemic.”
Jeneroux cited quotes from Tam, who said that “Canadians should not be concerned they can pick up the virus from an infected individual by any casual contact such as walking through the airport or any other public space” on Jan. 27, 2020, that “sealing off the borders is not an effective approach to containing the virus” on March 4, 2020, and that “putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial" on March 30, 2020.
He also read a quote from Njoo, who said, “We have contained the virus,” on Feb. 26, 2020.
“Hindsight is 20/20,” Tam said in response. “Information and the evolution of the understanding of the virus was changing all the time.”“We need to have humility in the face of these viruses for sure,” she said. “I am sure there’s a lot we can do.”
Dr. Njoo also defended his earlier remarks, noting that he had said that “things were unknown” at the time, and that the public health officials were just starting to consider implementing public health measures like social distancing.
‘Lack of Credibility’
Conservative MP Randy Hoback raised concerns about what he said was the health agencies’ “lack of credibility.”Hoback said constituents were frustrated by the discrepancy between federal and provincial public health measures, with PHAC directives sometimes contradicting medical advice from Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer Dr. Saqib Shahab.
“What one of the concerns I have coming out of the riding of Prince Albert is lack of credibility now in our government institutions all the way around,” Hoback said. “Coming from Saskatchewan, Dr. Shahab would make a recommendation that we could remove masks. I’d fly to Ottawa and we’d be fully masked. So Canadians would say, ‘Oh, how come the science in Saskatchewan says one thing yet the science in Ottawa says something different?’”
“How do you build credibility back in those scenarios going forward?” he added. “What really scares me is we don’t have credibility in the organizations now and if there was a bad virus that’s really bad, where you needed to bring forward the lockdowns and things we had to do supposedly at the start of COVID, Canadians wouldn’t listen to you.”
“They would say, ‘Never. We’re never doing this again. We don’t trust you, we don’t listen to you.’”
In response to Hoback’s question on how the public health agencies will “build back that trust,” Tam said it is important that they “come together and work together and earn that trust.”
She then added that “the outcome [of the pandemic] for Canada has been relatively good.”
“While we are in the same pandemic, everyone is in a different context. We do work with similar data ... where it differs is how those policies have been applied, whether requirements have been applied,” Tam said, pointing to her discussions with other medical officers.
“It is difficult, in a country as big and as diverse as Canada, that we are not recommending complete, blanket approach to everything, and that can sometimes undermine communication and trust, but we do have to recognize that there are differences.”
