Top medical experts call for national inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 'failures'

Three and a half years after the virus behind Covid-19 began its rampage around the world — eventually killing tens of thousands of Canadians — a group of top medical experts is calling on federal officials to launch a full national inquiry into Canada's pandemic response.
In a sweeping set of editorials and analysis papers published today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), more than a dozen physicians and health advocates are shining a spotlight on what they've dubbed the country's "major pandemic failures," from the devastation in long-term care homes, to Vaccine hoarding, to higher death rates among lower-income communities. Those shortcomings all played out against the backdrop of the country's complex, fragmented health-care system. That decentralized approach, the authors argue, led to dramatic differences in how each province handled the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus first reported in Canada in Jan. 2020.

When compared with the "shambolic" U.K. response and the "chaos and divisiveness" of the U.S., Canada appeared to rise to the occasion when Covid hit, wrote several authors in an introductory editorial, including Dr. Jocalyn Clark, a Canadian physician who is currently the BMJ's international editor. Yet the reality, the papers explain, remains far more nuanced, with the full scope of successes and failures still unclear. "We wouldn't know because no pandemic inquiry has been established by its federal government," the group continued. "This is a mistake."

The most important reason for an inquiry, the group stated, is accountability for the losses of the pandemic, after more than 50,000 direct deaths, millions of additional infections that "devastated families" across Canada, and a lasting legacy of Long Covid patients...Read more

How important is an inquiry like this in your opinion?