Four days of testimony brought injured Canadians, bereaved families, and medical experts to Parliament Hill. Health Canada did not testify.
For years, vaccine-injured Canadians have described being ignored, gaslit, and left to navigate serious illness with little help or compensation. Their questions extend beyond their own medical care: Who knew about the risks? How were reports of injury investigated? And who is responsible for helping them now?
Other countries have opened their pandemic decisions to public scrutiny. According to the Allison Inquiry’s organizers, more than 30 democracies have held some form of inquiry into their pandemic response. Though those proceedings have differed in scope and conclusions, Canada has yet to hold a national public inquiry of any sort.
Conservative MP Dean Allison decided Canadians should not have to keep waiting.
With lawyer Shawn Buckley as inquiry counsel and a volunteer team behind him, Allison organized four days of hearings on Parliament Hill focused on COVID-19 vaccine injuries. More than 1,400 people applied to testify. From September 8 to 11, roughly 50 witnesses took the oath, including injured Canadians, bereaved families, physicians, and researchers.
The hearings had limited powers. They could not compel witnesses or subpoena records, and their terms prohibited findings of fact or conclusions. Even within those limits, witnesses could explain publicly what had happened to them and what they wanted investigated.
Health Canada did not testify.
CBC published a report on the final afternoon. Global News aired a segment two days after the hearings closed. The testimony itself deserves attention: families describing lives upended, physicians recounting their attempts to report injuries, and researchers questioning how those reports were handled.
IMA readers will recognize several participants, including Senior Fellow Dr. Jessica Rose, Senator Ron Johnson, and Dr. James Thorp. Below are eight witnesses and excerpts from their testimony. For those seeking help with symptoms after vaccination, IMA’s free post-vaccine treatment guide offers a resource to discuss with a treating clinician.
What They Said Under Oath
Every one of the roughly 50 witnesses is worth your time, and the Inquiry has posted all four days of hearings in full. What follows is a curated selection of eight, chosen because each one shows a different way the system failed the people it was supposed to protect. Watch the clip, then follow the link to the full testimony.
- Sen. Ron Johnson: he brought the record with him
- Dr. Jessica Rose: Canada isn’t counting its injured
- Constable Helen Grus: the infant deaths
- Dan Hartman: thirty-three days
- Carrie Sakamoto: they sold the forever home
- Dr. Charles Hoffe: fourteen reports, then the College
- Dr. James Thorp: the pregnancy data
- Dr. Peter McCullough: the closer
1. Sen. Ron Johnson: He Brought the Record With Him
The only lawmaker from outside Canada in the room, and the first witness called. Johnson spent more than three hours walking the panel through the record he has spent five years building in the U.S. Senate: the safety signals FDA officials were shown and set aside, the injured Americans his committee has heard from, and the Fauci document trail IMA covered this summer.
👉 Watch his full testimony. IMA’s coverage of the Johnson investigation: Fauci Took the Fifth and Fauci Hid Texts About Miscarriage Risk.
2. Dr. Jessica Rose: Canada Isn’t Counting Its Injured
IMA Senior Fellow Dr. Jessica Rose holds a PhD in computational biology, a master’s in immunology, and postdoctoral training in molecular biology and biochemistry, and she has spent five years inside the adverse-event databases. She told the panel that Canada’s reporting rate for COVID vaccine injuries is a fraction of the U.S. rate under VAERS, and argued the gap is the reporting system, not the injury rate: Canadian physicians’ reports pass through local medical officers of health, who can decline to forward them. She also walked through the federal no-fault compensation numbers and argued the agencies had enough signal, early enough, to open investigations they never opened.
👉 Watch her full testimony.
3. Constable Helen Grus: The Infant Deaths
Helen Grus was a detective in the Ottawa Police Service’s Sexual Assault and Child Abuse unit, which investigates every death of a child under five. In January 2022 she told her chief she was seeing an unexplained doubling of sudden infant deaths and wanted to know whether the mothers had been vaccinated. Weeks later she was suspended.
She testified that some of the files she reviewed had been closed before autopsy results came back, and that the standard questionnaires for sudden infant deaths had not been completed. In 2025 a police tribunal found her guilty of discreditable conduct, ruling that she had conducted an unauthorized investigation and accessed case files without authority, and demoted her for two years. She told the panel that when she returned from suspension, she asked police executives to sit down at a table and talk. They declined.
👉 Watch her full testimony, and visit the Grus Justice Project.
4. Dan Hartman: Thirty-Three Days
Sean Hartman was 17 and played hockey. He got the shot, developed a rash and dark circles under his eyes, sought medical care, and was sent home with a prescription for Advil. Thirty-three days after the dose, his father found him dead beside his bed.
Dan Hartman has spent five years asking for the truth about his son’s death and is pursuing a wrongful-death lawsuit. Asked by MP Glen Motz what justice would look like for his family, he said he has only ever asked for the truth.
👉 Watch his full testimony.
5. Carrie Sakamoto: They Sold the Forever Home
Carrie Sakamoto is an Alberta mother of three. After an AstraZeneca dose and a Pfizer dose she developed swollen lymph nodes, what she described as fire in her brain, and Bell’s palsy that paralyzed half her face. Her family sold their businesses and their home to pay for treatment. The federal Vaccine Injury Support Program eventually paid $62,000, after years of the red tape she described to the panel.
She is a named plaintiff in a class action against Theresa Tam and Justin Trudeau, and she chairs community outreach for CANrise19, a patient-led support group for the injured.
👉 Watch her full testimony.
6. Dr. Charles Hoffe: Fourteen Reports, Then the College
Dr. Charles Hoffe has practiced in Lytton, British Columbia, a small and mostly First Nations community, since 1993. After the rollout he filed 14 adverse-event reports for his roughly 900 patients: one sudden death, two anaphylactic reactions, and three people he believes are permanently disabled. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC then spent years investigating him over his public statements about those injuries, before dropping the case in February 2025. He told the panel that Health Canada draws most of its budget from the industry it regulates.
👉 Watch his full testimony. The disciplinary case: Hoffe v. BC College of Physicians and Surgeons.
7. Dr. James Thorp: The Pregnancy Data
Dr. James Thorp has 47 years in obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine, more than 250 published papers, and a slot on the speaker list at IMA’s inaugural conference in October 2022. In Ottawa he brought 55 slides. By his analysis, the U.S. adverse-event system shows far more miscarriage reports after COVID vaccination than after influenza vaccination. The figures he cited compare reports, which is how a safety signal gets flagged, not measured rates. He also criticized the 2021 New England Journal of Medicine study used to declare the shots safe in pregnancy, arguing that its early-pregnancy evidence cannot carry the safety claim built on it. IMA covered the Fauci texts on that exact risk.
👉 Watch his full testimony.
8. Dr. Peter McCullough: The Closer
Dr. Peter McCullough was the last witness of the four days. Internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, he led the first published sequenced multi-drug treatment strategy for COVID outpatients. He told the panel that the evidence already justifies withdrawing the products, and asked how Canadian authorities can keep offering them to healthy children while injured Canadians still cannot get a diagnosis, treatment, or compensation. When he finished, Allison told the room the Inquiry had shattered the ceiling on silence about vaccine injury in Canada.
👉 Watch his full testimony. Dr. McCullough’s own account: The Inquiry They Never Wanted on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
If You Were Injured, Start Here
The people in that room were told for years that what happened to them was not happening. IMA wrote the early-treatment guides the health authorities wouldn’t, and when the injuries came, we wrote a treatment guide for those too. IMA Senior Fellow Dr. Mary Talley Bowden posted a chart of reported adverse events alongside treatment options the morning the Inquiry opened. Everything below is free:
- Treatment Guide: I-RECOVER: Post-Vaccine Treatment
- Webinar: Inside the VAERS Data
- Post: Senate Hearing Exposes Study Showing Vaccinated Children Have 2.5x Higher Rates of Chronic Illness
- Post: Fauci Took the Fifth. Our Doctors Never Had That Option.
- Post: Fauci Hid Texts About Miscarriage Risk. Our Doctors Were Saying It Out Loud.
- Post: Dr. Angus Dalgleish on COVID Boosters and Cancer
The Record Now Exists
The Inquiry could not compel a witness, subpoena a document, or reach a conclusion. Buckley reminded the room of one reason the injured have so few options in court: an Ontario Court of Appeal decision held that Health Canada owes no private duty of care to individuals when it approves a vaccine, which forecloses negligence claims against the regulator over its approvals.
What the Inquiry could do, it did. Fifty sworn accounts are now on the public record, on Parliament Hill, on video, with names attached. That is the kind of record later proceedings get built from. Our longtime friends and partners at React19, who have carried this fight for the vaccine-injured in the United States, weighed in on why the Inquiry matters beyond Canada:
The full recordings of all four days are on the Inquiry’s site. IMA’s coverage of the Inquiry continues on X at @Honest_Medicine.
