Government admits key COVID death data withheld over 'privacy' concerns

Subhead: Federal response confirms key death data by vaccination status wasn’t publicly reported, limiting transparency on pandemic outcomes# The federal government is acknowledging it withheld key COVID-19 death data from public reporting, citing privacy concerns, while defending a methodology that limited transparency around how deaths among vaccinated Canadians were tracked. In response to Order Paper Question Q-849 from Conservative MP Dean Allison, officials from the Public Health Agency of Canada confirmed they did not consistently publish weekly COVID-19 death counts by vaccination status. The reason, they say, is that the numbers were often too small and could pose privacy risks. That decision meant Canadians were not given a clear, time-based breakdown of deaths by vaccination status during key periods of the pandemic, including vaccine rollout, booster campaigns, and successive waves of infection. The government also confirmed it began tracking outcomes from December 2020, when vaccines were approved, rather than when individuals actually received their shots. In practice, that means deaths were analyzed within a “vaccinated-era” framework before large portions of the population had been vaccinated.

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