Western Standard - October 22, 2021


AHS drops 26,000+ employees from vaccination rate tracking

Topics
AHS vaccination mandate & uptake
Mentioned
Carol Crossan Jason Copping Verna Yu
Allan Report details foreign cash being used to fight Alberta oil Equalization referendum passes by 62%

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

130.84

Word count

534

Sentence count

27


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The mandatory vaccine policy announced by Alberta Health Services in August will require all personnel without approved vaccine accommodations to be fully vaccinated as of October 31. Over 3,500 Alberta healthcare workers sent an open letter to AHS demanding they rescind their vaccine mandate on September 20.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 Information obtained by the Western Standard from Alberta Health Services shows vastly
00:00:12.720 different rates of employee vaccination uptake than reported by AHS publicly. The records show
00:00:18.960 a count of over 104,000 employees, with 69,000 reported being double vaccinated for a 66% vaccine
00:00:28.000 uptake rate. However, that data was updated as of October 18 for the Alberta government's latest
00:00:33.680 provincial COVID-19 address, with more than 26,000 employees removed from the count entirely.
00:00:40.480 The removal of the 26,000 employees radically shifted the reporting vaccination uptake rate
00:00:46.400 from 66% to 91.4%. The updated information showed vaccine uptake among employees had risen
00:00:55.280 by over 2,647 in one week to a total of over 71,000. However, the total number of employees
00:01:04.720 in this data set dropped from over 104,000 to just over 78,500, producing a new uptake rate of 91.4%.
00:01:15.840 That new rate was then quoted by AHS President and CEO Dr. Verna Yu in Tuesday's provincial update.
00:01:22.480 They did not note casual employees were dropped from the reporting.
00:01:26.240 Yu said under 1% of employees were looking for a vaccine exemption and stated based on the numbers,
00:01:32.800 there is very broad support of the vaccine policy. When reached for comment by the Western Standard,
00:01:38.560 AHS said the discrepancy was due to the removal of casual employees from the total number of AHS
00:01:44.720 employees recorded. AHS continued, saying there is about 29,000 casual staff within the system,
00:01:51.600 although the number of active casual staff changes daily. About 74% of casual staff have provided proof
00:01:58.880 of immunization. Based on the information provided from AHS, that leaves over 7,500 casual staff who have
00:02:06.480 yet to report their vaccination status. AHS did not say why approximately 90% of its casual employees were
00:02:13.920 dropped from the report, but has advised that only those casual employees who have been double
00:02:18.880 vaccinated will be called on for shifts after the mandatory deadline of October 31. An AHS official
00:02:26.240 told the Western Standard, the majority of those casual staff members who haven't provided proof of
00:02:31.840 immunization likely simply haven't submitted their proof of immunization. It does not mean they are not
00:02:38.400 immunized. You also said in her Tuesday's provincial update that 7% of full-time and part-time staff have
00:02:45.440 yet to provide their proof of vaccination as well. As we've already highlighted, 92% of part-time and
00:02:52.080 full-time AHS employees and 92% of physicians providing proof of immunization represents broad support of
00:03:00.320 the vaccine policy, the AHS official said. The casual employee pool makes up nearly one-third of AHS's total
00:03:07.760 number of employees. The mandatory vaccine policy announced by AHS in August will require all
00:03:14.000 personnel without approved vaccine accommodations to be fully vaccinated as of October 31 to gain access
00:03:20.320 to AHS facilities. Over 3,500 Alberta healthcare workers sent an open letter to AHS demanding they
00:03:27.360 rescind their vaccine mandate on September 20. Calgary constitutional lawyer Carol Crossan represents
00:03:34.560 the vaccinated and unvaccinated staff members who are seeking help to assist them in their right to
00:03:40.400 choose COVID-19 vaccination or not. Alberta Health Minister Jason Copping rejected the open letter on
00:03:46.240 September 29. Crossan has indicated to the Western Standard she will be working with this group of AHS workers
00:03:53.040 to explore their legal options moving forward.