The federal public health agency takes over the management of a compensation program for people who have suffered adverse effects linked to vaccination, and undertakes to re-examine requests which had been rejected by a third-party manager on the grounds that they had been filed too late.
The Vaccine Injury Support Program began accepting applications in June 2021, following the widespread rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Canada.
People who suffered “serious and permanent harm” following the administration of a vaccine authorized by Health Canada after December 8, 2020 can submit a claim for compensation.
This program has also been the subject of complaints from applicants who denounce the slowness of the process and the lack of communication.
The government signed a contract with a third-party administrator, Oxaro, to manage the program with an initial budget of $50 million over 5 years.
That contract expired Tuesday and a news release said the Public Health Agency of Canada will take over the now-renamed Vaccine Relief Program. An additional $17.6 million has been allocated for the transition.
Applications submitted under the old program will automatically be transferred to the new one. Quebec has a separate compensation program that will continue to be administered by the province.
More than 105 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered in Canada between December 2020 and December 2023, and data shows that adverse reactions have been extremely rare.
Health Canada reported that 58,712 adverse reactions were reported during this period — or 0.056% of all injections — and that 11,702 of them were considered serious — or 0.011% of vaccines administered.
Kayla Pollock, 39, is one of the people who claim to have suffered after-effects following vaccination.
This Ontarian said she was sporty and outgoing before receiving her COVID-19 booster dose in February 2022. Today, she is paralyzed from the chest down and has only limited mobility in her arms.
He was diagnosed with acute transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord that can cause sudden and irreversible damage.
Ms Pollock filed a claim for compensation in 2022 and stressed that her case had still not been finalized. She has dealt with several agents handling her case since then.
“I thought my case would be very simple to handle, because my case is really serious,” she explained.
But Ms Pollock is not convinced the government will do better.
New criteria
Officials at the Public Health Agency of Canada said they did not have service standards for the new claims processing program and that it would take several months to collect and process data from Oxaro to better understand how it works.
In the future, the program will have more relaxed eligibility criteria, so the applications of 225 people who had been rejected due to a 3-year statute of limitations will now be reconsidered.
The Public Health Agency of Canada stressed that this will allow people whose symptoms have developed gradually to seek compensation.
A survey conducted last year by Global News revealed that Oxaro was unprepared to handle the influx of claims and that two-thirds of the funds had been spent on administrative costs.
In a written response to questions from an MP last fall, the office of Health Minister Marjorie Michel indicated that she had asked the Public Health Agency of Canada to expedite an audit of Oxaro’s management of the program in May 2025, “following allegations of mismanagement by the third-party company.”
A spokesperson for Ms Michel clarified that this audit had not yet been completed, but that a summary would be made public later this year.
The government’s response to Parliament also highlighted that the public health agency had commissioned Dr Kumanan Wilson to analyze similar programs implemented by other countries in 2024.
This evaluation revealed that the other G7 countries — as well as Quebec — managed their programs without resorting to a third-party administrator.
Data from the Vaccine Victim Assistance Program shows that 3,557 people had filed claims for compensation as of December 1, 2025.
Of these, 451 were deemed inadmissible and just over 3,000 requests were sent for medical examination. More than 850 people were still gathering medical records as of December, and the medical review board had evaluated just over 1,400 applications.
The 252 people whose claims were approved received more than $21 million in compensation.
The program’s website does not provide information on wait times, but says it can take a long time to collect medical records.
