Manitoba’s pandemic response a lesson in what not to do: retired EMO boss By: Carol Sanders Posted: 7:30 PM CST Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2021 Last Modified: 9:35 AM CST Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021 Updates

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Problems with the province’s vaccine rollout and its handling of the COVID-19 crisis could’ve been prevented, said Chuck Sanderson, who ran Manitoba’s Emergency Measures Organization for 11 years before retiring. He said there’s a “fatal flaw” in it.

“They tasked all the planning to an already exhausted health department,” he said. “They’re not equipped to be emergency managers.” The Emergency Measures Act requires that EMO oversees all aspects of preparedness in the province as well as manage, direct and co-ordinate the response of all departments to a disaster.

He said he’s not seen evidence of that happening throughout COVID-19. “The EMO role is to corral all the resources of government and private sector, relieving health of all the logistical nightmares,” Sanderson said.

Putting health care officials in charge of contact tracing, testing and vaccine implementation, when their area of expertise is health care planning and delivery, was too much to ask of them during Manitoba’s worst health care and economic crisis, he said.

“Right off the bat, they were in a world of hurt.” The problems with the vaccine rollout — referred to as “hiccups” by the premier — could’ve been avoided if EMO was in charge, Sanderson said.

Pallister has said his appointed Treasury Board secretary, Paul Beauregard, is overseeing the vaccination implementation task force. Sanderson said the government failed to prepare for the second wave and COVID-19 vaccinations. The province says it has been planning for months, but so far there’s been little evidence of that, Sanderson said.

The province hasn’t made public the next priority groups for vaccination, for example.

“All we know is they’re going after people in personal care homes and front-line workers first,” Sanderson said. The rest of the population should know where they stand on the priority list, the 66-year-old said. The province planned to announce next week the government’s next priority group to be vaccinated, but on Monday said that would be postponed because of the delayed shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

“‘We can’t tell you anything because we don’t know what our supplies will be’ is hokum,” Sanderson said. “You should be able to articulate ‘If this happens, then we’re going to do this,'” he said. “There should be umpteen scenarios” of what could happen and a host of contingency plans for all the issues that may arise, including a glitch in supply, said Sanderson.

He’s asked federal officials to plan for a scenario where a province is “failing” in its ability to administer the COVID-19 vaccine but doesn’t ask for help. “If there’s a weak link in the chain, what are you going to do? Let them struggle?” said Sanderson, who also has many questions for the province.

Why did it wait so long to hire and train people to administer the vaccine when it has known since the pandemic started that it would need such a plan, he asked. Why did it need to sign a single-source emergency contract in late fall with Quebec’s PetalMD — which has twice included the wrong address when it sent vaccine notifications to health care workers — if it had been planning for the vaccination rollout for months, Sanderson asked.

Doctors Manitoba, which recently wrote to the province to say its members are willing to help with vaccinations, should have been involved in a plan formed months ago, the retired EMO boss said.

The Thompson “vaxport” is another example, he said. The premier announced in early January that a vaccination super site for the north would be located at the Thompson Airport — dubbed vaxport — without consulting local leaders. They told the province that vaxport is too far from the city for Thompson residents and has no public transit service. On Monday, the province announced it would open a vaccination site in Thompson and delay the opening of the vaxport site.

“When you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to make unilateral decisions like the Thompson Airport and hope for the best,” said Sanderson.

A spokesman for the province said the EMO is “decisively engaged” in response to the pandemic and “a critical component of the pandemic response structure that has remained in place throughout this pandemic.”

“They are leading a number of important strategic pandemic response initiatives and, through the Manitoba Emergency Co-ordination Centre, provide planning support and guidance to other government departments, municipalities and external partners,” Blake Robert, the province’s director of media relations and issues management said in an email.

EMO mobilized a logistics section to support early co-ordination of government PPE and critical supplies, and that’s why Manitoba’s supply remains “robust.” It has provided emergency preparedness expertise on how to structure the various committees that oversee the response, and the EMO sits at all these tables “along with public health to provide whole-of-government input and co-ordinate multi-departmental tasks that arise at these committees.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca