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Dr. Gary Davidson Sworn: Alberta COVID Data-Review Chair

Day 4 · 3:09:28 · Glen Motz · Dr. Gary Davidson

  • ✈️ Emergency physician and former Red Deer chief flies in from Seoul meetings to testify.
  • 📋 Premier’s 2022 letter created a two-year data review (not subpoena inquiry) he chaired; report filed January 2025.
  • 🔬 Mandate examined data sources, qualifications, jurisdictional scans and outcomes across nine pandemic-response areas.

Introduction and origin of the Alberta task-force report.

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Transcript

Glen Motz · 3:09:28

Our next witness is Dr. Gary Davidson. Um, Dr. Davidson, will you take the Bible in your right hand? Dr. Gary Davidson, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? I do. I understand that you, uh, just flew in from Seoul, South Korea. That's true. Are you reliving the same day or—.

Dr. Gary Davidson · 3:09:57

Um, no, I lost— I think I lost it. No, I don't know.

Glen Motz · 3:10:02

I have no idea. I, I appreciate though that you're going to be very fatigued, but you were down there, you had meeting with Minister of Health there, and likely some other government officials, right? I won't ask you about that. Um, but most Canadians don't understand that actually there was a government inquiry into COVID-19 and COVID-19 issues, and that was in the province of Alberta. And I just— I'm going to introduce you to the inquiry, and then my question after that is simply going to be, can you explain to me kind of like how did that come about and what were the terms of reference and the purpose? And then, and then We'll go a little further. So for the inquiry, Dr. Davidson was an emergency physician at the Red Deer Regional Hospital for over 16 years. Dr. Davidson was the clinical lead of emergency medicine for the central zone and chief of the emergency department at Red Deer Regional Hospital from 2016 to 2020.

Glen Motz · 3:11:05

He was also an associate clinical professor at the University of of Alberta when his position was terminated due to his stance against some public health measures. Um, I live in Alberta. I know that Dr. Davidson has an extremely good reputation and, and is called upon to assist the government at times with advice. Dr. Davidson, how did it come about? It just— because whenever there's an inquiry, um, it seems that the last name of the person heading the inquiry— so I think of it as the Davidson Report, but that's not the name. It's like people think of this as the Allison inquiry. Um, can you share with us how this, um, government task force came about and what its mandate was and what it did? Sure.

Dr. Gary Davidson · 3:11:52

Um, the Premier wrote a, uh, a letter to the Health Minister in November 2022 and asked, um, the Health Minister to set up a— it actually ended up being a data review. And the difference between a data review and inquiry— an inquiry, a formal inquiry, you can subpoena people to show up and they have to show up and testify and tell the truth. The data review is, um, we were— it will allow to ask anybody, we could ask questions, but people weren't made to answer our questions necessarily.

Glen Motz · 3:12:23

But I'll just stop you because this is the Minister of Health asking you guys to do this, so surely all the departments— I'm being facetious because I know they didn't— would share information with you.

Dr. Gary Davidson · 3:12:34

Yeah, you would have thought. Yeah. So we did get a lot of information for sure, but, but it wasn't a formal judicial inquiry. So we— people had to volunteer or be willing to share with us. Yeah. So yeah, the Premier asked for it, the Minister of Health, then I was asked to chair the task force that then set up the committee and, and we were given 2 years to write the report, of which we handed in January 24th, 2025, I think.

Glen Motz · 3:13:11

And what was the purpose of this task force? Like, what was it?

Dr. Gary Davidson · 3:13:18

Yeah, our mandate was to review Alberta's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, was the, you know, what our scope was. And what we in the end, when we finished writing it all, the terms of reference that I was obviously involved in writing was it's a data review. So we want to know what data was used, what information was used to make the decisions Alberta made in everything they chose to do during the COVID-19 response. So we looked at what data they used, where they got it from, who gave it to them, who interpreted it. Whether they were qualified to interpret, did they do a jurisdictional review or a jurisdictional scan, did they look at other places doing similar to see if it worked or didn't work. We looked at how it was implied or applied, and then did it turn out the way they thought. So these were the, the, the questions we had. And then we had different areas we looked into.

Dr. Gary Davidson · 3:14:18

So we looked into data flow, or, you know, data and governance So how did the information get shuffled around? Where did it come from and who is in charge of that? We looked at the vaccines, the therapeutics, which included any treatment. We looked at masking specifically, lockdowns, things like that. So we looked at 9 different areas, but we asked those questions. What data did you use? And that's what the data review was.

Glen Motz · 3:14:46

And I assume the purpose was, is to assist the government if they find themselves in a similar situation, to basically be able to make changes so that decisions are made as, as the best decisions possible, right?