Later in the season than optimal in the fall of 2025 I went online and made an appointment to get my COVID-19 vaccine. In the previous five years I had received both the COVID and flu shots earlier in the season, for free, whenever I happened to visit my local pharmacy. Now, for reasons unclear to me, the COVID vaccine was only available for a $100 fee and required an appointment at a public health clinic, which I’d have to reach by public transit or an expensive Uber, since I don’t drive. I wanted to be protected, and I was willing though not happy to pay the fee. But the whole thing was a pain. Meanwhile, I knew I could get the flu shot at the same time, as I hadn’t received that one yet either.
I ended up getting a ride from a friend, B, who had tried but failed to make an appointment at the same time. I was ushered into a cubicle, where a public health nurse showed me a list of conditions that exempted patients from the fee. I was pretty sure I didn’t have any of them, but to my surprise I had two. As the nurse administered my shots, I distracted myself by asking questions, and she suggested that vaccine uptake was down for both COVID and flu; Albertans couldn’t figure out how to make appointments or couldn’t be bothered; families couldn’t afford the fee. Many folks, like me, did not realize they were exempt.
On the ride home, B admitted she probably wouldn’t find time to return for her own vaccinations. “Maybe I’ll do it,” she shrugged.
Meanwhile, no one seemed to know why the change in policy had occurred, not even my family doctor.
Normally the provinces are responsible for publicly funded vaccines, but the COVID-19 ones, as a response to a national emergency, were procured and funded federally. On April 1, 2025, that responsibility shifted to the provinces and each needed to create its own policy with guidance from the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI). That same spring Alberta split its ministry of health into four new “pillars” or portfolios, including the ministry of primary and preventative health services under minister Adriana LaGrange. In June she announced Alberta would begin charging a $100 fee for most COVID-19 vaccinations. Among the other provinces, only Quebec followed suit in charging a fee.
The ministry’s rationale was and remains twofold. First, Alberta had for the previous three years received far more doses than its residents used—$274-million worth, with $135-million (roughly 54 per cent of ordered doses) wasted in the 2023–24 season alone. Their second rationale hinges on the NACI guidelines, which, as the ministry told me, suggest vaccination is “optional for healthy, non-senior adults.” Following those guidelines, the ministry of primary and preventative health services has chosen to focus “on protecting those most at risk … now that strong population-level immunity … has led to a much lower risk of severe illness.”
Minister LaGrange’s announcement of the policy was followed immediately by formal statements of objection from the United Nurses of Alberta, the Alberta Pharmacists’ Association, the Health Sciences Association of Alberta and the Canadian Public Health Association. Alberta NDP MLAs Sarah Hoffman and Dr. Luanne Metz released statements in June and August 2025 calling the government “anti-science, anti-vaccination and anti-public-health.” They argued the “reduced uptake and wastage was a direct result of undermining … efforts to promote vaccines.”
The province proceeded with its plan, ordering 485,000 doses for the 2025–26 season—roughly three-quarters of the 700,000 doses of previous years. Then the “phased rollout” began, starting with free vaccines for seniors living in facilities, home care clients and others deemed high risk before allowing the general public and independent seniors to make appointments at public health clinics, online or by phone to receive doses at the $100 fee “pending availability.” That brings us to later in the fall, when B drove me to my appointment. I asked around and learned that many Albertan friends and acquaintances—and strangers on Reddit—had struggled or not bothered to get their vaccines that fall. Generally speaking, confusion reigned.
Many who did get vaccinated had their fee covered by employment insurance, though some of these same people would have qualified for the fee exemption if they’d known to ask. Some got their vaccines for free in other provinces, mostly BC, even driving there for that specific purpose. I heard about a couple with five children who passed on receiving the vaccine rather than shell out $700. One friend had suffered from long COVID for years, but that condition did not exempt him from the fee. He embarked on a letter-writing campaign for an exemption, and after getting no response from the Alberta government ended up declining the vaccine in protest of the fee’s implementation. Many others had given the matter little to no thought. When they couldn’t get vaccinated at their pharmacy, if they even noticed, they shrugged. No shot this year, then. My friend B never did find time to return to a clinic for her seasonal vaccines, and many faced greater and more consequential barriers than she did.
In October 2025 the Parkland Institute released the report “Sabotaging Prevention,” in which Rebecca Graff-McRae argued that the government’s pay-for-vaccine policy created a “perverse inversion of the principles of accessibility and prevention,” such that “the only thing being prevented was preventative health itself.”
Aileen Jang, president of the Alberta Pharmacists’ Association, saw this play out at the Edmonton pharmacy she has owned and run since 1983. Many long-time patients planned to visit the pharmacy as usual for their seasonal shots, and when she and her staff explained they were not administering the COVID vaccine anymore, patients were dismayed. Many seniors were not computer literate and tried to make appointments by phone. After long waits on hold, they gave up. Some people had mobility issues, and getting to a public health clinic was too much of a hurdle.
Public health advocates and experts continued to call the policy a “false economy.” On the face of it, they argued, the province’s lament over wasted doses in previous years failed to justify the fee. One COVID-related ICU stay costs the system an average of $82,711. Moreover, the notion of population-wide immunity does not hold up. According to the Alberta Medical Association, even a 10 per cent decline in vaccination uptake is estimated to cost the province $130-million in additional hospitalizations and ICU admissions, while an Institute of Health Economics study found that unvaccinated people who got COVID tended to cost more to treat than patients who were vaccinated. The institute estimated long COVID would eventually cost the Canadian healthcare system between $7.8-billion and $50.6-billion. Vaccination, they showed, would significantly reduce these long-term costs.
Yet, the winter of 2026 passed, and in May the Ministry of Primary and Preventative Health Services told me by email that their plan was working well: “We are seeing [the expected] lower risk in our monitoring, with levels of COVID admissions [to hospital] in 2025 to date the lowest since 2020.”
No one seemed to know why the policy had changed, not even my family doctor.
In fact, from August 2025 to August 2026, Alberta’s reporting period for respiratory viruses, 6,445 patients had been admitted to hospital with COVID, 20,218 with influenza, and 5,087 with RSV. In May, when the ministry sent me its statement, the COVID numbers were indeed lower than in previous years, but throughout the winter, Medicine Hat ER doctor Paul Parks had seen people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s admitted with COVID—people he knew would be less sick or not sick at all if they had been vaccinated. Meanwhile, the flu and RSV numbers were so disastrously high that waiting rooms and hallways at Alberta’s emergency departments could barely hold all the incoming patients. He and a group of other emergency physicians had already sent a letter to the Alberta government documenting six deaths and more than 30 near misses in just the first two weeks of 2026 that they attributed to overcrowding and delays in emergency departments. Parks described hospital waiting rooms and hallways as “death zones.”
It wasn’t all COVID, but it was all related. The winter’s record-high respiratory illness season, though dominated by influenza and RSV, resulted from what Parks calls “spillover,” meaning the barriers to COVID vaccination discouraged many Albertans from seeking vaccines at all. The resulting lack of hospital capacity overall led to delayed essential cancer surgeries and chemotherapy treatments. Parks told me he expected to see the same in the fall of 2026 and winter of 2027.
In our May email exchange, the ministry also told me that “uptake of the COVID vaccine has been dropping; in 2024–25, only 14 per cent of Albertans received the COVID-19 vaccine.” This was meant to demonstrate that their policy was justified. Why would our government encourage and relish low COVID vaccine uptake? I believe getting vaccinated seasonally against COVID-19 is a good decision for everyone, as individuals and as community members.
I was and remain a vaccine enthusiast, as almost everyone used to be. During my last semester of high school, a girl in my grade died suddenly of meningitis. That evening, the whole student body was called back to school for a meningococcal vaccine and a heavy dose of the antibiotic rifampin, which can turn body fluids bright orange, including tears. Throughout the intervening decades, I’ve remembered the incident with sadness and gratitude: thanks to vaccines and antibiotics, there was no spread in my school and no one else died.
Of Albertans who never received COVID vaccines, 91 per cent supported the UCP.
People who remember the first polio immunizations recall a similar, if less dour, atmosphere. They had seen friends and strangers maimed, even killed, by this illness, and the danger was always real that they or their loved ones might succumb. I can imagine their elation at the almost unbelievable knowledge that, thanks to Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin and their discovery of polio vaccines, none of them would fall to that fate. The scientists were public heroes; Salk, especially, acquired the status of a celebrity.
The next time I lined up for a vaccine, I was 43; it was April 26, 2021, and my husband and I were eligible for the first COVID-19 vaccine. I was excited: this meant lockdowns would ease and we could interact someday in the imaginable future the way we used to. I assumed everyone else was thinking the same thing. I could not have imagined what would soon occur.
I don’t need to remind anyone how attitudes toward vaccination, and COVID-19 vaccines in particular, began to shift. Not that the pandemic created vaccine hesitancy wholesale; since humanity’s first immunization, some people have found the idea suspicious if not repellent. Back in 2014, long before the pandemic, I wrote a story for this magazine about a measles outbreak in Alberta following Andrew Wakefield’s bogus studies correlating the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine with autism. That situation has only grown worse. Whereas in 2013 the measles outbreak peaked at 44 cases in Alberta, in 2025 the province had 2,008 cases. The numbers are down in 2026, but remain relatively high—as of June, we’d already seen 317 cases province-wide.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy not only grew and morphed into outright vaccine hostility, it became politicized. Timothy Caulfield, research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, has been fighting the good fight against anti-vaccination disinformation since long before 2020. His hate mail used to come from a new-age minority. But for the last five years it has come from the far right, and there’s a lot more of it. According to the logic of pandemic times, if you believed in freedom, you hated lockdowns, masks, social distancing and vaccine mandates. Those on Team Freedom pulled their masks below their noses and eschewed vaccines. Some joined the convoy to Ottawa. Most people who held to ideas of the public good, and who generally trusted experts, asserted that our governments’ measures comprised their best, if imperfect, efforts to prevent mass illness and death; the vaccines freed us from lockdowns and saved countless lives.
In sum, during a time of overwhelming fear, confusion, death and suspension of ordinary rights, many found solace in discovering their team and demonstrating fealty. One acquaintance of mine lost several friends over her decision to get vaccinated in 2021, and she was caring for both an elderly mother and a husband going through chemo. She called those now-former friends selfish. They called her a sheep, said she’d blindly followed our coercive overlords and contaminated her body. Practically everyone experienced some social fallout along those lines, especially in this province, where some 20 per cent of residents did not receive a COVID vaccine. Today Alberta continues to have the lowest vaccination rate among the provinces.
Years after lockdown, our attitudes and behaviours around COVID vaccines remain tightly entwined with our social and political identities. The social costs of speaking out remain high. Caulfield has spoken with people who felt during the pandemic that their concerns were dismissed until they found the anti-vax community and in some cases the trucker-convoy crowd. Since then, “if they want to change their mind [about vaccination], they feel like they can’t, because they don’t want to be disloyal to this wonderful community.”
Those communities mapped and continue to map almost perfectly onto political alliances. Provincial data show that of Albertans who never received COVID vaccines, 91.1 per cent supported the UCP and only 5.3 per cent backed the NDP. So 20 per cent of Albertans suspect or loathe COVID vaccines, and that same 20 per cent happens to comprise the current UCP’s base. That puts the government in a genuine bind, says health policy scholar Patrick Fafard, “which, by the way, they helped create. But you have to respond to the people who vote for you. You and I may not like the conclusions they [the UCP government] come to, but they are, on the face of it, trying to do a balancing act.”
As balancing acts go, this one seems to be tilting ever farther to the right, where there’s significant overlap between the UCP and ardent supporters of Alberta sovereignty, a demographic we know Danielle Smith is eager to appease. Her inclusion of the separation question in the October referendum reveals this as clearly as anything ever could.
To illustrate Alberta sovereignty and anti-vaccination’s close kinship, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s “The Value of Freedom: A Draft Fully Costed Plan for an Independent Alberta” includes a proposed point system for immigrants to a future Commonwealth of Alberta. One line reads, “Health: no serious illnesses, no experimental mRNA injections (10 pts).” I asked Jeffrey Rath, general counsel for the group and one of its main spokespeople, about the second part of that line. He told me it was there to “see if anyone was paying attention.” Nothing to do with Alberta independence, he added, but he does believe COVID vaccines should be “banned” on the grounds that they are “poison.”
When I asked Rath to explain further, he said the January 2025 final report of the Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force underpins his argument.
That report, chaired by Red Deer emergency room doctor Gary Davidson, was commissioned by premier Smith with a $2-million budget. Many of its findings stood in sharp contrast to mainstream scientific consensus, including its recommendation to ban certain COVID vaccines. Both the Alberta Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association said the report was full of misinformation and potentially harmful, while critics, including Caulfield, noted the panel was stacked with known vaccine skeptics and argued it was intended to pander to the UCP’s radicalized base.
When the report came out, Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare, says he immediately realized the UCP was heading “down this very anti-science, politicized vaccine road.” He and colleagues hoped the report itself would be as far as it went. But then the government started acting on it.
The first change came in the province’s 2025 budget, which halved the funding for promoting seasonal vaccines. In previous years, billboards throughout Alberta publicized the importance of COVID and flu vaccines and explained how to get them. Not since 2025. Neither have the health ministers nor the premier released their usual messages to launch the vaccine season. “Most of them wouldn’t even tell the public if they got the vaccine themselves,” Gallaway recalls.
In an ideal world, Parks notes, our government would strategize to restore trust in public health and vaccinations, and to make primary care as accessible as possible. Our leaders would, as Caulfield says, “stand up and talk about what the scientific consensus really is.” Instead, they seal their lips, seeking the “balance” that Fafard sees the UCP working to maintain. Without condemning the vaccine, they step back from saying anything about it at all. And that matters. When leaders remain silent, other voices fill the void—often voices spreading disinformation on social media. Conversely, strong government messaging does improve vaccination uptake.
For instance, Alberta’s 2025 measles outbreak—which led to Canada losing its measles elimination status—prompted the province to launch a public information campaign urging Albertans to get their children immunized. The government made access easier and clearly communicated the dangers of disease. Uptake increased.
Of course, that uptake also resulted, undoubtedly, from the stark reminder of what measles actually looks like. Vaccine skepticism can flip when we see loved ones and children afflicted with illness. Public health messaging, though, is key.
But with mere silence, it was relatively easy for the UCP to benefit politically by tilting toward anti-vaxxers. Then the fee structure for COVID-19 vaccines came into effect without much blowback. As Fafard says, “The people who are opposed [to vaccines] are really opposed, and the people who are not opposed … they don’t know, they don’t care, they’re not paying attention.” Most folks just don’t want to have to think about COVID at all, he says. “And that gives any government way more room to manoeuvre. If you’re the UCP, you can satisfy your base at relatively small cost. The political downside is getting smaller and smaller; the political upside is staying the same.”
That calculus, Fafard and Gallaway both note, has allowed the UCP government to push forward an agenda to privatize healthcare. By making people pay $100 for a vaccine, Gallaway says, “they are trying to normalize having to pay for certain things … really priming people for the idea that access to care has cost out of your pockets.”
Naomi K. Lewis is an author and editor in Calgary. She was the 2025–26 writer in residence at Athabasca University.
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