Dr. Irvin Studin is President of the Institute for 21st Century Questions.Here’s a very Canadian curiosity nearly seven years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic: no one ever declared its official end.The result is an inertial mess across our vast country, with different jurisdictions, communities, institutions, and social groups all interpreting appropriate “post-pandemic” norms, behaviour, and measures according to invented preferences. One is reminded of the inertial mess following the conclusion of the Second World War, when partisans and soldiers in various military theatres around the world continued to fight and ambush well after the Axis powers had formally surrendered.It turns out that Newton’s First Law of Motion (the so-called “Law of Inertia”) applies to public policy and administration just as it does to classical physics. It states that a body in motion stays in motion unless countered by an external force.The pioneering Allison Inquiry demonstrates that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, launched with explosive energy in early 2021, is the most glaring inertial relic of the pandemic period in Canada even in late 2026 — a relic that no external force has yet mastered well enough to end categorically.Nay, as if in a parallel universe, just as the Allison Inquiry recently heard from scores of regular Canadians maimed by the COVID mRNA vaccine — and families of Canadians killed by the vaccine — Canada doubled down in launching its newest round of seasonal COVID vaccination. And just as the Allison Inquiry announced on November 5 nationwide town halls for Canadians injured by the COVID vaccine, one could not help but be bombarded by fresh social media posts from public health officials, pharmacies, and bien-pensant politicians encouraging Canadians six months and up to get their next COVID booster. “Just got my latest Covid vaccine. You should go get yours!”Why? Surely, on any sane Canadian day, manifest apprehension of injury (or even death) for Canadian citizens would lead to the immediate removal of any representative product from Canadian shelves and markets. Surely. We do this, after all, even for small outbreaks of salmonella infections for any species of food product — failing which official heads typically roll..The COVID vaccine campaign carries on unabated in Canada, with its own exceptional inertia. This campaign remains unqualified by any warnings or humility or apologia from medical leaders. If Health Canada persists in pretending that the horrific Allison Inquiry testimonies have not taken place, it must also imagine that the vaccine-injured are marginal exotica, rather than our close friends, neighbours, and family members — some of whom, on the numbers, may themselves even work at Health Canada and within the federal and provincial health bureaucracies! It also ignores, for good measure, the conclusions of multiple peers — advanced — countries around the world that, as Alberta lawyer Shawn Buckley emphasized at the post-Inquiry press conference on November 5 have ended or heavily restricted COVID vaccination for at least their younger populations.Our pandemic-period inertia now begins to assume criminal contours, with official acts oscillating arguably between the de minimis bookend of criminal negligence and the de maximis catastrophe of crimes against humanity. And given the generality, intensity, and iteration of COVID vaccination across our population, its dastardly consequences for the well-being of our society begin easily to swamp those of the infamous tainted blood scandal of the 1980s and 1990s by multiple orders of magnitude.The invocation of the 1993 Krever Commission at the press conference on November 5, 2026, is therefore completely opposite. For there will soon have to be a Krever equivalent for our COVID vaccination campaign — if our governing institutions wish to maintain proper legitimacy before a public that has been ill-served by sloganeering health authorities still peddling an ill-tested, defective product approved in the haste, haze, and panic of emergency. As I have stated previously, this formal inquiry is to be called by Prime Minister Mark Carney himself — and imminently. He must not delude himself into believing that his laudable efforts in foreign affairs absolve him of the duty to arrest and provide a proper domestic accounting for the biggest health policy mistake in Canadian history.If we in Canada have been swept away by the huge inertia of the pandemic disaster, such that no one can stop the COVID vaccination machine we have let loose, let us cease at once to tell ourselves escapist, pious stories couched in zombie language even as we continue to injure very real Canadians on the ground.Who in our national setup, short of the prime minister himself, is ultimately responsible for this machine — for approval, regulation, marketing, distribution, administration, and yes, correction — or non-correction — of its catastrophic mistakes? Who has failed to stop it?Answer: Health Minister Marjorie Michel herself. She must resign forthwith.Dr. Irvin Studin is President of the Institute for 21st Century Questions. He was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for leading work across Canada and around the world on the pandemic-period catastrophe in education and youth.
