A group of volunteer scientists and public health experts who have provided independent advice on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic say that their work is being discontinued, even as the Ford government insists that is not the case.
The Ontario Science Advisory Table has released a statement confirming that it was told by Public Health Ontario last week that it will be dissolved as of Sept. 6.
Premier Doug Ford, however, told reporters during a news conference in Niagara Falls on Friday that the work previously undertaken by the table will be “absorbed” by Public Health Ontario and will continue in some form.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health also told CP24 that the “the work of the Science Advisory Table (SAT) will continue” and that the “transition” currently tasking place “will help bolster its provincial resources, and ensure it can continue its strong connections with the broader academic community.”
“We aren’t dissolving it,” Ford insisted. “They are going to have a fulltime home over at public health working with (Chief Medical Officer of Health) Dr. (Kieran) Moore.”
The move to shut down the 35-member table and create a new structure under Public Health Ontario comes less than five months after the arms-length provincial agency announced that it was assuming “operation and oversight” of it. The table had previously been hosted by the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
It also comes on the heels of the resignation of Science Advisory Table Co-Chair Dr. Adalsteinn Brown earlier this month.
In a memo sent to Public Health Ontario President and CEO Michael Sherar and released publicly on Friday, the remaining members of the table said that they would aim to complete their existing work ahead of Sept. 6.
They then cited several “key principals” of their “original mandate,” including an ability to “identify and study any scientific question that our members felt would help Ontario fight COVID-19” and to “communicate publicly and openly about the results of our investigations.”
The table also shared several lessons that they said they learned throughout the pandemic.
Those lessons were as follows: science matters, equity counts, transparency is critical, independence must be both perceived and delivered and timeliness and relevance are essential.
“I think the table the way it exists right now will cease to function within the next couple weeks. My understanding is that Public Health Ontario and other parts of the government will be creating a new advisory group. I don’t know many details about it. But it will be a different group than what has existed the last two-and-a-half years,” the table’s scientific director Dr. Farhad Razak told CP24.
The Ontario Science Advisory Table is made up of dozens of scientists and other experts, who have volunteered their time to study numerous aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, often providing blunt advice to the government on the need for public health measures to limit spread.
The table also had a separate modelling group, which were responsible for frequent COVID-19 projections which often provided an early warning about impending waves of the pandemic.
In a statement released earlier on Friday, Razak noted that it was a “great privilege” to serve on the table since its inception and said that he hoped some of the “difficult” advice it provided ultimately “helped to reduce suffering” during “the worst public health crisis in a century.”
Razak, however, warned that the “pandemic will remain a daunting challenge for the foreseeable future” and expressed hope that the “principals the table was based on” will live on in some form.
“I think we are in a significantly high risk period. I hate to say it because nobody wants to hear that but if you look at where we are right now we have never seen this kind of strain in hospitals (in August), which is typically a recovery period before you go into a very tough fall and winter season,” he told CP24. “There is a very high probability that we will be facing both influenza and COVID waves this winter with a really, really constrained resource in terms of our staff and hospital capacity. I just hope we have the will despite our exhaustion to pull together and get our health system through what is probably going to be a really tough fall and winter.”
Advice was often ignored by government
The science’s table’s advice often differed from the actions taken by the Ford government throughout the pandemic, with its former scientific director Dr. Peter Juni frequently taking to the airwaves to forcefully urge Queen’s Park to act more aggressively.
He also, on occasion, found himself at odds with some of the decisions made by the Ford government, particularly over its decision to close playgrounds and other recreational amenities during a devastating wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2021.
The dissolution of the table, at least in its current form, comes with case loads trending down in more than half of Ontario’s public health units, even as experts warn of a fall wave of the pandemic that could put further strain on Ontario’s already overburdened healthcare system.
Students are also set to return to classrooms next month, with mask mandates no longer in effect and many other temporary public health meatuses, such as cohorting and mandatory physical distancing, no longer in place.
At this point it is not clear what form the advisory group could take under Public Health Ontario.
In a statement provided to CP24, the arms-length government agency said that the terms of reference are “currently being finalized.”
It said that once complete the new mandate for the group would allow for “continued provision of credible and independent scientific and technical public.” It also said that membership “will continue to be comprised of independent experts.”
For his part, Razak expressed optimism that the principals of independence that defined the science table’s work through the first two-and-a-half years of the pandemic can be transferred to whatever new working group might be formed.
“I think we need to give this a fair chance,” he told CP24.
