New Brunswick auditor general says province failed to give any evidence for 33 COVID-era decisions
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New Brunswick Auditor General Paul Martin has stated that the province’s Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health was unable to provide evidence-based data to justify 33 different COVID-related decisions it made.
(LifeSiteNews) –– The Auditor General for the Canadian province of New Brunswick has released a critical report highlighting that provincial health officials could not give any evidence-based documentation to support 33 COVID-related decisions it made during the so-called pandemic.
New Brunswick’s Auditor General Paul Martin, in his recently released 2023 Auditor General’s Report – Volume II, under the heading “COVID-19 Pandemic Response,” noted that despite the public health department having multiple COVID systems in place, he found “areas for improvement.”
Martin’s office selected 33 public-related recommendations from the province’s Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health, and then asked the department to back up these recommendations with evidence.
“The department was unable to provide requested documentation, acknowledging that they ‘did not create a compendium or a repository of all of the scientific articles, papers, publications and analyses it consulted during the pandemic and therefore we cannot provide a fulsome and detailed list of all of the evidence consulted and used when recommendations were being formulated,’” noted Martin while speaking to the legislature’s public accounts committee.
Although the department was able to support some of its infection protocol decisions, Martin noted that these were internal, and not “public-facing.”
The department was able to provide evidence to support 31 of 35 infection prevention and control policy decisions, which Martin described as being related to internal operations, rather than “public-facing.”
“These records should be retained. People want to know — you, the public, they want to know that [they were] being heard in their [the Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health’s] decisions that were being referred to government. They want to know there was no political interference,” said Martin.
“I have no evidence that there was, or wasn’t.”
Province’s chief medical officer’s emails show she was looking to back up COVID decisions
When it came to the 33 decisions that lacked evidence to support them, Martin’s office did not give details as to what they were, or why they were the focus of his audit.
The province’s former chief medical officer of health, Dr. Jennifer Russell, according to some of her emails that were made public, revealed she was looking for evidence to back up the health decisions made by her department, according to Liberal health critic Rob McKee, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.