03. Dr. Patrick Phillips.mp4: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix
03. Dr. Patrick Phillips.mp4: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Trish Wood:
Next up is Patrick Phillips, who is also a doctor. And he's coming in on Zoom from Ontario. And he was, as I understand it, sanctioned for prescribing Ivermectin, writing exemptions to mandates and reporting vaccine injuries. I think. Is that does that about sum it up?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah. I mean, my my file with the CPSO is pretty extensive, but but yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I'm currently suspended, not able to practice medicine any longer.
Trish Wood:
Oh, I'm so sorry. Let me just get you to our our affirmation, if you don't mind, which is just to to ask you to affirm that what you're saying today is true and you know that to the best of your ability and recollection.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah. So what I'm about to say is true to best, my ability and recollection.
Trish Wood:
Okay. And and tell us why you're here then, please.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Chris Yeah. So. Patrick So basically I want to kind of bring to the forefront my experience with reporting adverse events in the system that we have in Canada and specifically here in Ontario. Because I believe there's some, some pretty major issues with this system that I've that I've run into. So in my community of Engelhart, Ontario, which is a town of about 1500 people, the vaccine rollout began late March into into April of 2021. And at the time, I was working primarily in the emergency department in my town, and I started to see adverse events start starting to come in through the emergency department. People specifically saying that that they thought they suffered from a vaccine injury or people, who it was clear after the vaccine…It was within a few days and some people up to a few weeks after the vaccine that these new, new or worsening symptoms came on. And I'll just go through the nine adverse event reports very briefly to preserve confidentiality, but I'll just give you an idea of what they were. So one patient came in with facial numbness that lasted for eight days at the time they came in that came on right after the vaccine. Another patient had left arm weakness to the point that he wasn't able to work and he was dropping things. Another patient had abdominal pain and vomiting for two weeks.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
New onset palpitations in one patient, a large rash over the entire arm that persisted for one week and was growing at the time. I saw them arm, numbness and weakness with debilitating, debilitating fatigue and impairing her ability to work. But also, just again, weakness in an arm, which is we consider a pretty major symptom. Right. We have to rule out stroke and mass or other other problems. When patients present that way. Another patient had progression in her dementia after getting the vaccine to the point that she was no longer really talking or able to get out of bed. So she had to be hospitalized. Another patient had severe fever and arm weakness two days like immediately after the vaccine, but she came in two days later and had to be hospitalized. Another patient had severe vertigo and tinnitus, which I diagnosed as vestibular neuritis, again impairing his ability to drive. So these are what what came into the emergency department and all of these following my obligation actually under the law, I reported these to public health, who's the main reporting body here in Ontario. So after my first five that I reported, actually my public health officer sent me a letter and I'm just going to. Am I able to share my screen? I'm not sure where. Either way, I can just I can just.
Trish Wood:
I think you should probably just read from. In case of something. Yeah, I think you should probably just.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Okay. So, yeah. So on a letter dated April 27, 2021, my public health officer wrote me. Basically, the gist of it is saying, for your information, all five of the cases that you reported do not meet criteria for adverse event following immunization, and the patients have been or will be advised accordingly. So I was. Quite surprised at this. I mean, I'd understand if one or two were rejected, but but all of them essentially were rejected. He gave me actually access to a document that goes over the criteria for what's considered an adverse event following immunisation. I do have that here. Let me see. Yeah, right here. So what's. It'd be nice if I could share this, but anyway, it's not. It's no patient information or anything, but there's very specific criteria for what's considered an adverse event following an immunisation. And it's basically a one pager. If you look at, for example, anesthesia and paresthesia, which is loss of sensation for non live vaccines, it can it has to occur within 15 days. Otherwise, it doesn't count as another example of how specific these are. If a patient faints and has an injury, it only counts if it's within 30 minutes of the vaccine. It doesn't count as a recordable event if it happens at 31 minutes.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
And there's lots of these criteria for only a kind of a handful of different events. And if it doesn't meet these criteria according to public health, it doesn't count as an adverse event. So this actually is very much in contrast to the regulations put out by Health Canada, where they have much a much more broad definition of adverse reactions that are actually obligated to be reported to be able to maintain safety and pharmaceutical products. So according to according to them, I'm just pulling it up here. They have four criteria only. If it meets these four criteria, it has to be reported to Health Canada. So I'm just pulling it up here. Sorry. There's a lot of documents I'm kind of scrolling through. So the four criteria is one unidentifiable reporter, which would be myself. B is an identifiable patient, which I definitely did. I gave the patient information. And C c a suspect product. So meaning there's there's something that they received that's a pharmaceutical product and d an adverse reaction. That's that's their minimum criteria. Obviously, they say they want more, but if it meets those criteria, it's obligated to be reported. So this is there's two contradicting kind of different criteria here.
Trish Wood:
I just want to be clear about that. Exactly, because you say that they are contradictory. So who wins? I mean, why is public health narrowing or the the what they consider an adverse event when when the federal body is more broad, how which one takes precedent then over the filing of an injury?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
That's a good question. I don't have that that answer for you. I mean, in my opinion, especially for an emergency, this is just for all any new marketed product, but even more so, I would say with an emergency use authorized authorized product, which is hasn't fully gone through the approval process because at this time all of them were under emergency use authorization. Or there might be a different term for that in Canada. But but yes, in my opinion, according to to promote safety of any pharmaceutical product, we should report any new or worsening symptoms after after receiving that product, because sometimes you don't expect things. Sometimes, even if it's car accidents, if if there's an increase in car accidents after getting a vaccine, you'd say, oh, there's no way that's related. But what if they're getting seizures? Or what if there's something else that is medical that's leading people to get into car accidents? So that's why even things that seem innocuous should all be reported. It doesn't mean necessarily that it's 100% caused by that product, but it needs to be reported so that it can be analyzed on a large scale. So even even if it doesn't seem to be related, it's important to report, in my opinion, and I think that's what the Health Canada regulations seem to affirm. But what's even more concerning about this, so so I was I was pretty dismayed by this.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
And I was I was upset by it. And so I actually published that letter, which, again, doesn't have any patient information on it at all, because I thought it was important public information for people to know that these adverse events are not getting reported, even when doctors are reporting them. So I actually have confirmation of this as well because my public health officer actually wrote to the so so he actually wrote a few things. So, one, he actually submitted a complaint to the so. And in that complaint, he says he actually initiated regulatory action against me. So Dr. Phillips has reported six adverse events following immunization. To date, all six forms had at least one significant error, including a lack of clinical information, adverse event information section on page one, not completed and or misdiagnosing an adverse event of special interest. Furthermore, if only one of six submissions met AESI diagnostic criteria all patients or their family. Remember, we're contacted as part of our assessment and all agreed that their symptoms were not consistent with an adverse event following immunization, and all were advised that they can undergo a booster dose as scheduled. So that's what he sent to the CPSO, and the CPSO launched an investigation into me. As part of that, I was able to receive basically the totality of his correspondence with the CPSO, and in that he actually sends a follow up email where first on June 1st, he states that he, despite the fact that he didn't believe there are causal, he said he sent it into the the public public health office.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
But he later sends a clarification on June 11th. So in this. He says. I then reached out to the public to to review the situation and met with them on June 4th. The advice they gave is while there is no expectation for local medical officer of health to determine causality. If during the investigation of the AEFI, the MOH determines the incident does not meet a AEFI criteria. The medical officer of health can then decide not to submit the form. My my CNO and I have reviewed the original submissions that were referenced in my original letter to Dr. Phillips, and my assessment continues to be that they do not meet AEFI criteria. Hence, to clarify my June 1st email, while I have reviewed these AEFI in generic terms with the public health office, many of them have not been submitted as AEFI. So that's that's confirmation there that they got censored at that level and they did not make it to to Health Canada for this surveillance. On top of this. So that I think on its own is very concerning that there isn't surveillance that goes beyond these very like this little handful of conditions with very strict time requirements.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
So there's not broad surveillance and it's getting censored on that level. So our our vaccine monitoring system for safety is, in my opinion, marginal, if not just non-existent. But I think things actually go beyond this because on top of just censoring those reports, I am now sanctioned with professional misconduct for reporting them. So. So if we look, I'm reading here from the allegations that are going to the tribunal for discipline. So I'm accused. And to clarify, actually, those those clerical errors or the missing information patients, when they come into the emergency department, they don't have their their lot numbers. They don't necessarily have the dates completely correct. So as an emergency physician, I don't have access to their entire chart. So I'm not able to fill in those forms entirely if the patient doesn't have the information on them. So when they say that the chart, the pages are not fully completed, that's often what it is that the patient didn't have the lot number. I'm not their family doctor, so I don't have that information. So of course I'm going to be missing some information. But they're using that in my opinion. I don't know. That's what they're using to to kind of accuse me in reporting these.
Trish Wood:
But also, I just want to talk about some of the other things that have happened to you, because you've been kind of you've experienced a lot of things that other doctors have complained about. Right. So so aside from this good faith effort on your part to to to report vaccine injuries, you also came into the spotlight for other things that happened around your practicing in the age of COVID 19. And I would really like to I'd like to get you to tell those things, but I also want to get a bit of the human side of that from you, too. You're a young guy. You went to medical school. You're you're reasonably new in your career. So I want to talk a little bit about that, too. So just tell me the other ways you ran afoul and then we'll maybe talk a bit about the the effect on you and we'll get I know the panel is keen to is keen to ask you some questions to.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah. So yeah, this my, I think it would take hours to really go through all the, all the ways that I've kind of run up against the system and, and gotten into trouble for it. But I'd say.
Trish Wood:
Generally you were prescribing meds off label and that sort of stuff, right.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
You were. Yeah. So I mean, I prescribed actually not that much for COVID treatment because we had very little COVID here in my area, especially while I was working still in the emergency department. But I did prescribe some some treatments for vaccine injuries, some for COVID itself, like early treatment or hospital treatment. And often those were I am sanctioned for those as well. Actually, every prescription that made for Ivermectin is currently ended up as a charge for professional misconduct. Every treatment of a vaccine injury with some of those same treatments on an off label basis as well as been I've been charged with incompetence and. And failure to meet the standards of the profession, is what they're saying. Um, what else? I've, I've also had so many patients actually coming to me who are being forced and coerced against their will to get COVID vaccines. And I wrote for them exemptions or or letters of support, saying that they're being coerced. And therefore, I believe that they they could not give valid legal consent to the vaccine. Most of those notes that I wrote were on that basis. I didn't write medical exemptions in the sense that I didn't say that they have a medical condition that therefore makes them exempt. I stated in pretty much all my letters, their letters of support for their autonomy, which I see as the number one priority of any physician in medical ethics, is to protect patient autonomy as much as it's awful to kind of make mistakes on a medical level. In my opinion, there's nothing worse than a patient being forced against their will into a medical treatment that they don't want. My position as a physician is to help people in the ways that they want and to meet their goals and and their intended outcomes. So…
Trish Wood:
OK, Patrick, I know the panel wants to drill down a bit, so I'm going to throw to the panel.
Preston Manning:
Do you want to? Well, thank you very much for what you've said and what you've gone through. I'll get right to the point where not only trying to get testimonies to what has happened, but what could be done differently. How could this be prevented? So really, my question is what would be a better system for defining adverse events, vaccine injury, for adjudicating alleged events if and when they occur, and for responding to them? It seems there's there's no fair system for handling that type of thing. And is there something you could suggest as to a sort of a future system that could handle your case and the things you're talking about better?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah. So I think for adverse event reporting, I think there should be very low criteria that anything that happened that's at least temporally associated with receiving a vaccine or any new product should be reportable. So that means if you got a heart attack a week or three weeks after getting the vaccine, that should be reportable, whether you think it's related or not. Because what we're looking at is did the numbers actually go up? So I don't think we should we should differentiate and be like, oh, do I think this is from the vaccine or not? Because that's so subjective, right? One doctor will say that it's related and another one will say that it isn't. But if we report all of them and then we see, whoa, there's a spike in heart attacks. As an example, after getting this vaccine and you're using cumulative data from everybody, then then that that gives us suspicion to to look into this and see, whoa, is this coming from the vaccine? But you shouldn't be.
Preston Manning:
Who do you report that to? That would give an objective assessment. If you report that to a public health officer, that's got a different conception of what constitutes an adverse event. That that doesn't help. Does there have to be some adjudicating body ahead of.
Trish Wood:
That, above that?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Well, I think there should be just an open, transparent system that all reports are published. Like removing identifiable patient information. All reports can be seen by the public. Kind of like the various system, though. There is some filtering there. And if there is some filtering, then that that list should also be public. But then then they should have a list of unverified reports and then verified reports, both of them open to the public so that you can see anything that was submitted to the system and then the ones that were improved as well. So if we submitted directly in there, we knew that it was going to be gauged and and publicly viewable then. That's a transparent system. There's no reason why that shouldn't be in there, especially if identifiable information is removed. So we should just have a website, you put it in there and automatically it's covered. And it doesn't mean you necessarily you can rule out information later, but at least report is in there and it's transparent and it can't be filtered like it is now.
Preston Manning:
Yep. Thank.
Dr. Susan Natsheh :
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Patrick. I have a few questions for you and comments just following up on that point. Can we flip the question and what exclusion criteria do you think are justified for an adverse events reporting system?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
So I think I honestly think the only one should be temporal. So meaning that if something came on before you even got the vaccine and clearly it's not related in any way. But other than that, I think anything that happened after that, any worsening new or worsening symptoms after getting the vaccine should be reportable. And I'm not saying here that that definitely means 100% it was caused by the vaccine. But it allows us to catch all of it and we can see trends in the data. If we make it any more strict than that, then we're excluding things that we weren't necessarily expecting and that that, in my opinion, impairs safety, especially for any novel treatments that we we don't know much about.
Dr. Susan Natsheh :
Perfect. Thank you for clarification. When the complaint was made to the college or even before the complaint was made, sorry, were you asked to provide more information? Were you given that option or opportunity to provide more patient information?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
They didn't ask. They basically they pulled all the charts. Oh, so also for the public health officer. Yes. So, no, he did not ask for any of any more information from me. Interestingly, actually, I took that letter and wrote a reply and fax that back to him as soon as I received it, I believe was May 4th asking Why were these rejected? Is there please let me know what the missing information is so that these aren't just rejected for the missing information. And I'll be more than happy to provide that because I wrote detailed notes in my patient charts, so I'd be more than happy to send that off to him. I did not receive a reply to that Fox OC.
Dr. Susan Natsheh :
We hear a lot of people comment that their physicians or other health care workers are not reporting adverse events that the patients feel they're experiencing. Can you elaborate on what factors you think contribute to that hesitancy for reporting?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Well, yeah, definitely. I mean, part of it is a large culture of this safe and effective mantra that is being put around. The biggest crime, especially in the beginning of this vaccine rollout, was questioning the vaccine in any way that was seen as as the number like that's that's a risk to public health by sowing vaccine hesitancy. And so because it was so strong in the culture, people did not want to even believe it. But more so, I think what's even more concerning, especially in my case here, is that I've been charged with professional misconduct for reporting these adverse events, pretty much all of them. I've been told that I'm incompetent and failed to meet the standards of the profession. So even if the fact is a doctor, if they report your adverse event, they can lose their license. Like that's even if even if I was wrong in that adverse event to have that kind. This is now public record, right? That I'm a physician. I recorded these adverse events and I am now being charged with and disciplined for reporting them. So of course, doctors don't want to report. And I can say for myself, after I received that letter, I toned down my reporting. And after I received the complaint and the college investigation for reporting this, I stopped reporting. I did. I saw adverse events. Like if somebody insisted, I would probably do it. But I make sure it was like there was no question whatsoever. But all of this more liberal reporting, I had to stop because I knew that my licence was at risk for reporting adverse events. And that's that's a major problem. Of course, no doctor is going to want to report when this can happen to.
Dr. Susan Natsheh :
Thank you. And just one more quick question. Are you able to quantify in some way the impact that your loss of being able to practice has had on your community and your hospital?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
I'm not really able to quantify it. I know our hospital's kind of filled in. I'm no longer in the hospital. I wasn't before I actually started a family practice more recently, but that I just started about three months, five months ago. And yeah, it was one about 200 patients that I had just getting started who lost their family doctor with no ability to to help them in any way after. So I wasn't able to do any prescription repeats to try to get them to their specialists or whatever or to finish up investigations into their problems that were not complete. So cancer workups and referrals that these patients needed for very concerning findings on their tests. I wasn't able to do anything for them and they're basically left on their own. So the college has the ability to have a delayed suspension. So they could give me a warning, say, hey, look, I'm going to suspend you beginning in two weeks or beginning in four weeks. And that would have allowed me to finish up a lot of these things and get my patients off to other places. But instead they immediately suspended me and left those patients without any help.
Dr. Susan Natsheh :
Thank you very much.
Preston Manning:
Dr. Phillips. I'm going to zero in on a different area. Mostly because of, I guess, my own personal and professional experience. So it's just astounding to me that as a professional, that another professional colleague would make a complaint against that colleague when when the minimum criteria were already met. And, you know, in my in my mind, that speaks more to the integrity and character of the person making the complaint than it does to you. And so I and worse than that was the college's reaction that reinforced that, in my view, questionable behavior. How would you characterize your treatment from your profession relative to what you would have expected when you were a fresh graduate, for example, or perhaps when you were even considering entering medical school?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah. I mean, it's a difficult one. I would say that the culture of medicine has always been very highly conformist. Doctors are quite, quite afraid to stick their neck out in a lot of issues. But that became radically more severe during COVID, where any questioning of the status quo was considered taboo and and a major issue. So I knew I was taking myself out there. I was going against the grain. I was saying things that people didn't want to hear. And there are some things that I said that were that ended up being wrong. But I think I wanted to advance, open, open debate around a lot of issues. And so a lot of doctors, they didn't like that. I've had a lot of reports to the to the hospital or to the college about the things that I was saying online. And a lot of them didn't like it. So I, I went against the grain. I kind of did it consciously. So I knew that this was coming. The treatment wasn't great, but it's not unexpected when you're going against what the vast majority of people are doing.
Preston Manning:
Well that just because the vast majority of people are doing something. I think everyone here could agree that that doesn't mean that it's right. And so and I think the history of medicine is is that and I'm not just talking decades. I'm talking centuries. Is that is that the ones who are courageous and who speak up? I just forget the name of the guy. But it was it was a doctor who said regard. And it was hundreds of years ago who said that when we do surgeries and we don't wash our hands, we're we're causing infection and patients. I think there's a rule named after the guy now and and so you know and I think that he was he was ultimately driven insane from the harassment that. And died penniless from the harassment that came from his medical profession at the time. So what other guidance has that have public health authorities or the colleges provided to you and other doctors? And is this normal or appropriate for for professionals with the with the extent of training that that you and all medical doctors in Canada go through?
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
So you're basically asking what what other guidance is public health or the government kind of put out there?
Preston Manning:
In other words, are they are they are they prescribing exactly what thou shalt do and thou shalt not do? Or are they saying, you folks are professionals here, you're well trained, you have good clinical, good clinical practice and good clinical judgment. Use it.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah. So. Yeah, that's a good point. I think there's a number of things like a big one would obviously be vaccine exemptions in those in that kind of situation. It'd be up to the doctor in general right to to consider what kind of a reaction a patient's had or what their circumstances are and whether or not they need, especially a novel pharmaceutical treatment. And so they basically took away our ability to do that at all and basically stated that unless you meet these very, extremely specific criteria, criteria such as anaphylaxis after the first dose or or other reactions, they are not allowed to have any exemptions. And. So that's completely new to take that out of the hands. And basically what that did is it took away. Doc patients were being treated without that physician kind of intervention. But I think the biggest thing about that, about preserving that, that sacredness of the doctor, the patient relationship, the patient physician relationship is that it preserves the patient's interests because that doctor is seeing that patient, evaluating what matters to you, what are your specific situations. And then we decide whether or not you need a treatment or not. Basically what they've done is they've taken that away and just created a cookie cutter rule that it doesn't matter whether you've you've had a stroke after the vaccine, doesn't matter if you've had a heart attack or you've had a relative who's died from the vaccine. Doesn't matter. You have to get it. Your choice doesn't matter. Your values don't matter and your medical situation doesn't matter. So this is completely new that the public health, the government and the college have kind of coordinated to take away patient autonomy because it's not just trick.
Trish Wood:
I think I think that's a really good point to to end on, we've got to keep moving and we'll be reaching out to get those documents submitted to to the hearing, if you don't mind. Thank you so much and good luck to you.
Dr. Patrick Phillips:
Yeah, thank you.
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