Dr. Philip McMillan,  John McMillan

Thousands of Canadians filed injury claims after COVID-19 vaccination, and a small fraction were approved. A retired regulator’s handwritten record of the pandemic helps explain why so many stopped trusting the system meant to catch them.

Between June 2021 and November 2025, 3,557 Canadians filed claims with the federal Vaccine Injury Support Program. Its medical review board assessed 1,433 of them and approved 252. Of 551 appeals, 11 succeeded. Total compensation came to about $21.5 million.

Those numbers can be read two ways, and both readings deserve a hearing. A rejected claim does not mean a person is well, or lying. An approved claim does not mean science has proven the vaccine caused the harm. What the figures do show is a narrow door, with a lot of people standing outside it.

This month, some of those people finally got a room. The Allison Inquiry, chaired by Conservative MP Dean Allison, sat in Ottawa from September 8 to 11. More than 1,400 people applied to testify, and a panel of doctors chose about 50. It had no power to subpoena records or compel Health Canada to answer. Still, few pandemic reviews anywhere have put the vaccine injured at the center of the story.

Why Cause Is So Hard To Prove

Take one case presented at the inquiry. A 45-year-old single mother who taught yoga took two Pfizer doses in the summer of 2021. Within 30 minutes of the second, tingling shot down both legs. She reported it at the clinic and was waved off. That evening brought uncontrollable chills, severe nerve pain and muscle spasms. By autumn came stabbing abdominal pain, incontinence, chest pain and palpitations. From 2022 onward: chronic fatigue, spasms, balance problems.

The timing is hard to ignore. Yet this is exactly the kind of case a compensation board struggles with, because she already lived with an autoimmune condition affecting her joints. Was this a vaccine injury, or a flare of something already there? Her symptoms are real, but symptoms are not a blood test. Without an objective marker, a reviewer is weighing a story against a probability, and the default answer is no.

Another witness described half her face going slack, one eye paralyzed open under a patch, plus hearing loss and balance trouble. Facial paralysis of this kind, often called Bell’s palsy, can leave permanent weakness. For patients like her, treatment rarely means a cure. It means calming the immune system so things stop getting worse.

Long Covid, Long Vax

Clinicians who follow these patients draw a line between two conditions. Long COVID is lingering illness after infection. “Long vax” describes a strikingly similar pattern after vaccination, with no infection involved. People vaccinated and later infected sit in a murkier middle.

One working model, still a hypothesis rather than settled science, runs like this. The first dose primes immune cells called macrophages to overreact to spike protein. The second dose sets them off. That surge suppresses regulatory T cells, the immune system’s peacekeepers, whose job is to stop the body attacking itself. With the brakes released, a dormant autoimmune condition can flare and spread to the nerves, brainstem and gut, with microclots and overactive mast cells adding fuel.

Laid over the yoga teacher’s timeline, the fit is uncanny: a quiet first dose, a neurological storm after the second, gut trouble months later. A good fit is not proof, and no large study has confirmed the chain. But it gives these patients something they rarely get: an explanation that takes them seriously.

The Iceberg Below The Waterline

The witnesses in Ottawa are the tip. Picture three layers. At the top sit people who fell ill after vaccination, suspect a link and say so openly. It is the smallest group. Below them, a larger group wonder privately but have told neither their doctor nor their family. At the bottom, possibly the largest group of all, are people who are sick and have never connected it to a shot.

That bottom layer can be stubborn. One patient arrived with inflamed toes and peeling skin, a bizarre pattern with no obvious trigger. No new medication. No recent infection. Any vaccinations? Yes, a COVID shot about ten days earlier. When the possibility of a link came up, she flatly refused to consider it. How do you help someone who won’t look at the cause? Mostly, you can’t. And a patient who never names the cause never files a claim, so 3,557 counts only the people who got as far as asking.

A Diary That Kept Score

Susan Langlois spent 45 years in biotech, the first 20 managing international regulatory approvals, quality departments and clinical trials, including at the vaccine maker Connaught. When COVID cases first flickered across Canadian television in early 2020, she began writing. Every day, some days minute by minute, she logged what officials announced. Around a thousand handwritten pages now sit in an offsite fireproof safe. Trimmed of personal material, they became a 400-page book, Surviving the COVID Pandemic: Contents of a Diary, published in June.

Memory drifts. Ink doesn’t. One 2020 entry lists the regulatory steps a new mRNA vaccine would need, with a timeline for each, and concludes they could not all be completed by October. Fast-tracking helps, but six months of trial monitoring cannot be squeezed into two. Another entry records the original promise: shots for the elderly and vulnerable, and no talk of mandates.

Then the story changed. The trials were designed to show whether vaccinated people got sick with COVID, not whether they stopped passing it on. Leaders in Ottawa and Washington still sold vaccination as the road out of the pandemic. When uptake stalled, pressure followed: jobs lost, travel barred, restaurants off limits to the unvaccinated.

For someone who once answered personally for every batch that left the plant, that gap was unthinkable. Emergency release is not unusual, but patients receiving experimental drugs are told exactly what has not been tested. Here, pregnancy, fertility and transmission were open questions, and the public heard “safe and effective.” Would she have signed off?

“I wouldn’t have filed it even. I wouldn’t have filed the submission the way it was,” said Langlois.

Follow The Patents

Money hovers in the background. The technique that stabilizes the spike protein in both mRNA vaccines was patented by the US National Institutes of Health with Dartmouth and Scripps Research. Moderna paid a $400 million catch-up payment for the license, and BioNTech settled with NIH for $791.5 million in 2024: roughly $1.19 billion together. The lipid nanoparticle that carries the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine into cells came from Acuitas Therapeutics, a University of British Columbia spin-off.

So the two countries pushing hardest for universal uptake were home to key pieces of the technology, and one government was collecting royalties. None of this proves money steered a single decision. It does raise a fair question: why wasn’t that interest declared loudly, and up front?

Who Carries The Blame

Trust broke in layers too. Patients trusted doctors. Doctors seeing hundreds of patients a day, with no time to read product monographs, trusted the regulators. Langlois’s brother-in-law, in his 70s, keeps taking boosters for one reason: his doctor recommends them. When things unravel, the finger tends to land on the person in the white coat.

And the injured, many of them low risk or already infected before their shots, have been left with little.

“When someone was well prior to being vaccinated and then has persistent long-term injury, it is not right to absolutely leave them with nothing in support,” said Dr. Philip McMillan.

Every unanswered claim does quiet damage beyond the person who filed it. Families notice. Neighbors notice. Each learns whether public health will stand behind them next time, and that lesson outlasts any slogan. There will be a next emergency. Both the hearing room in Ottawa and one retiree’s stack of notebooks point to the same habit worth keeping: write it down, and keep asking who was left out.