This is a story of COVID-19, vaccines, medical group-think, control, abuse of power and how an army of bureaucrats and lawyers and lesser qualified Alberta physicians, took a hammer to the career of a courageous doctor who dared to express his disagreement with their dictates.Before COVID-19 arrived, Dr. Eric Payne was a sought-after pediatric neurocritical care physician and clinical researcher in Calgary. He remains so. However, he has walked through a veil of darkness. This is what happened to him.Not long after March 2020, when the Canadian response to the COVID-19 pandemic began, Payne questioned the safety of experimental medical treatments, especially for children at less risk of COVID-19 than flu season. These vaccines “were never needed and cause harm,” he said, citing research and data that was fresh at the time but has since been widely validated.Then he challenged Alberta Health Services (AHS) and the College of Physicians and Surgeons Alberta (CPSA) that in September 2021 ordered physicians to get fully vaccinated or get out. Dissenting views and public dialogue weren’t tolerated. The CPSA called expert’s concerns “misinformation.”Payne was recruited from the Rochester MN Mayo Clinic to work in Pediatric Neurocritical Care & Epilepsy at the Alberta Children’s Hospital and as assistant professor of Pediatrics and & Neurology at the University of Calgary, shortly before COVID-19 hit.For speaking up, Payne was soon pushed out. He was ostracized by colleagues. Some were hostile, others confided they agreed but guarded their careers when outspoken physicians were targeted.Payne was slapped with five complaints to the CPSA. Three remain unresolved. Payne and three other doctors launched a lawsuit against AHS.Consequently, the Children’s Hospital and the university were deprived of a brilliant medical expert. Now at a Calgary clinic, he treats vaccine injuries he was punished for warning about.“I’m seeing patients on a daily basis who are hurt by these jabs,” Payne told the Western Standard.“I still have kids who get bullied into taking the jabs when they show up for their flu shot in the pharmacy.”“Everything that has happened to me is secondary, frankly. These things are still available. That’s the most mindboggling part of this. These things shouldn’t be on the market anymore.”“The number one for me by far is the fact that our province and our country is still recommending shots in six-month-olds.”Canada Health and Alberta Health recommend COVID-19 vaccines to reduce “risk of severe illness, death and post COVID-19 condition, long COVID.” (So-called long COVID is a condition some now debunk.)The websites recommended all individuals six months of age and older receive the COVID-19 mRNA XBB.1.5 vaccines. Individuals 12 years of age and older who have contraindications to or refuse an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine can receive the Novavax XBB.1.5 (non-mRNA) vaccine.Payne cited two cases, one recent, of adverse effects in vaccinated children with epilepsy, his particular area of expertise.“This kid I’ve been following for a few years with epilepsy was doing really well. His family went in to get the flu shot. The pharmacist bullied and convinced them into taking the COVID shot.”“They called me to tell me that within the weeks of doing that he started to have seizures and issues. That went on for three weeks.”He talked them out of a second shot.When German freedom-fighting politician Christine Anderson was in Calgary in February 2023, Payne spoke at the event.“After that event a father came up to me in tears. His son was being treated for epilepsy at the Children’s Hospital I’d worked at.”“He was in tears because this kid, after a two- or four-month vaccine series, had developed epilepsy regression. He was quite delayed now.”The seizures followed COVID-19 jabs.The “doting” parents disagreed on the COVID shot, dad was against them. Mom took the boy away, was filing for divorce and “to remove his decision-making capabilities on the shots.”Studies point to multiple adverse reactions. US Dr. Paul Thomas hired a firm to track 2,700 vaccinated versus 560 unvaccinated age-matched children.Conditions such as asthma and allergies in vaccinated children increased in “off the chart differences.” Eczema, Sinusitis, Gastroenteritis, behavioural issues, ADHD, respiratory and eye and ear infections, were “significantly higher.”Reported cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in children aren’t uncommon.Then things began to change. In early 2022, Sweden refused to vaccinate children 11 years and under. Germany was recently rocked by revelations that health officials knew the vaccines caused harm but mandated them anyway. In March 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) that zealously promoted enforcing COVID-19 vaccines, backtracked, and said healthy children and teens may not need them. In January 2024, the US Children’s Health Defense (CHD) headed to the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that a lower court erred in dismissing its lawsuit to stop the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) emergency-use authorization in October 2021 for child COVID-19 vaccines.The appeal opposes the FDA “misuse and misappropriation of emergency powers to market an unsafe, dangerous biologic to little children in order to deny them informed consent.”The CHD board, it's chairman is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — on leave to run as an independent in the US presidential race — has argued the risks of serious adverse events outweigh benefits for children.It alleges the FDA used “critically flawed” benefit analysis to push child vaccines.It cites adverse effects — severe injection site pain, fatigue, fever, diarrhea, vomiting, muscle or joint pain and anaphylaxis; lymphadenopathy; syncope; and Bell’s palsy.The case remains before the courts.And Dr. Payne? He is one of many Canadian physicians who put careers second and patients —and their own health — first.Payne comments that despite 18 years of medical training and a highly specialized practice he was forced to “capitulate to medical tyranny or leave a dream job.”The assault on his career was triggered by a 19-page September 2021, letter he wrote to the CPSA. He objected to being forced to take a “novel experimental mRNA therapy” despite the absence of long-term data.“The medical evidence demonstrates that the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines has decreased significantly, they do not prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission or symptomatic disease, and while evidence for protection against serious illness continues to exist in Calgary, that too is dissipating globally,” wrote Payne, including 80 bullet points to support his arguments.Government and regulatory coercion to take experimental medical treatments is a violation of Charter rights, he said.The CPSA never responded.Payne had had a brilliant career. He had completed medical school and pediatric neurology residency at the U of C and Alberta Children’s Hospital. At the Mayo Clinic, Payne had worked as a pediatric neurology and epilepsy consultant from 2014 to 2020. In February 2020, the Calgary Children's Hospital “came soliciting,” offering a three-year “generous” package with 50% protected research time.This was the career that “exploded fast,” when he used the directly related expertise he had gathered over 20 years, to question policy set by people who wouldn't even listen to him.In January 2022, the university declined to renew his contract due to “non-compliance” of the vaccine directive that it would drop just a few weeks later. AHS locked him out and then refused to renew his salary contract.He has testified at the National Citizens inquiry into COVID-19 health protection measures by all levels of government in Toronto and Red Deer.He’s on the science committee of COVID Care Alliance that campaigns to stop vaccinations for children.In December, he recused himself from the task force set up by Premier Danielle Smith to investigate Alberta’s COVID-19 response.“I was spinning my wheels saying the same thing over and over again. I was extremely enthusiastic at the beginning, but I realized the big replacements that were made under the current premier’s watch were not an improvement. They're part of the existing health care bureaucracy that was there when (former premier Rachel) Notley was there.”Dr. Mark Joffe, for example, was appointed chief medical officer of health on Premier Danielle Smith's watch but was "one of the senior AHS guys" when Payne was contending with the system.Payne said Health Minister Adriana LaGrange “seems to mean well for sure... I get the sense they are fighting the bureaucracy and they don’t really have the ability to do some of the things they want.”Meanwhile, outstanding complaints hang over him three years later.“They’ve decided preliminarily that I’m guilty of unprofessionalism for spreading disinformation without being able to particularize this. That one’s still open. What they’ve been trying to get me on is anything else.”“The people that were supposed to be protecting us were the ones going to court to prevent the release of data that we were supposed to have at the time to make decisions.”Other physicians remain embroiled in battles.“The linchpin is the college right now. If the physicians could speak to the truth that they’re seeing and the college wasn’t aggressively censoring and attacking the doctors who are trying to speak truth which they know to be the truth, this would disseminate out.”Many physicians still fear getting “attacked.”Provincial jurisdictions “absconded their jurisdiction on health care” and let the WHO and Health Canada take control. It could happen again.“No one’s been held accountable.”“We should be having a full stop on giving these vaccines to kids.”
