VISP aimed to curb vaccine injury lawsuits. Now, people are suing in 3 provinces
Carrie Sakamoto left her family’s beloved dogs outside in the freezing cold. She started fires in her kitchen, and she fell down the stairs of her Alberta home — several times.
These incidents all occurred since 2021, when Sakamoto was injured and rushed to hospital after a rare adverse reaction from a COVID-19 vaccine.
Sakamoto was hospitalized for 17 days. For a time, she could not walk, talk, chew or focus.
The federal government announced a program in 2020 to help people like Sakamoto, pledging timely and fair support to the unfortunate like her who were seriously hurt after immunizations.
The program was supposed to spare the injured and fragile the cost and stress associated with litigation.
In Sakamoto’s case, the program, called the Vaccine Injury Support Program, or VISP, did neither.
Instead of providing Sakamoto, of Lethbridge, Alta., with timely and fair financial support, she says that VISP and the outside consultants who were selected to administer it for the federal government — Oxaro Inc. — have only exacerbated her physical and psychological suffering.
Sakamoto made those comments in a sworn statement she filed in a class action lawsuit launched in the Alberta Court of King’s Bench in 2024. She is a lead plaintiff against the federal and provincial governments in this Alberta court case.
Both Oxaro and the Public Health Agency of Canada, which hired Oxaro to run VISP in 2021, declined to comment on Sakamoto’s case, allegations or criticisms of the federal program.
In response to a 15-page list of questions from Global News about its VISP administration, Oxaro Inc. sent a series of written statements.
“The VISP is a new and demand-based program with an unknown and fluctuating number of applications and appeals submitted by claimants,” the company said.
“The program processes, procedures and staffing were adapted to face the challenges linked to receiving substantially more applications than originally planned,” Oxaro added. “Oxaro and PHAC have been collaborating closely to evaluate how the program can remain agile to handle the workload on hand while respecting budget constraints.”
“We aim at providing a process that ensures that all cases are treated fairly and with the same care, respect, and due diligence,” the company added.
Read Oxaro’s statement here.
In an interview with Global News, Sakamoto said she does not think Oxaro should have been hired to administer VISP.
“I don’t think they realized how many injured people were going to apply. And I think they’re overwhelmed,” she added.
Lawyers representing Sakamoto and a group of plaintiffs alleged that the two governments provided the public with false, misleading and/or incomplete information about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, preventing the public from making an informed decision regarding vaccination.
The case and allegations against VISP highlight the depth of despair and frustration thousands of Canadians feel after being promised they would be taken care of if their immunizations triggered rare adverse reactions and they were injured.
Injured applicants like Sakamoto say they also face a revolving door of unreachable VISP case managers and arbitrary and unfair decisions.
The Alberta class action case remains before the courts. A hearing to determine if the class will be certified has been scheduled for mid-2026.
Both the federal and provincial governments have tried unsuccessfully to have the case dismissed. The Attorney General of Canada called the lawsuit “frivolous, irrelevant, and improper.”
A Global News investigation into VISP published earlier this month revealed that Oxaro Inc. has received $50.6 million in taxpayer money, including $33.7 million spent on administrative costs, while injured Canadians received only $16.9 million.
(Payouts to the injured have since increased to $18.1 million in the latest reporting period, ending June 1, 2025. But Health Canada was unable to say yesterday how much more money Oxaro was paid above the $50.6 million tallied during the last reporting period.)
Global also found that PHAC and Oxaro underestimated the number of injury claims VISP would get, initially predicting 40 per year and then up to 400 valid claims annually. More than 3,317 applications have now been filed to June 1 — of those, 1,738 people are still waiting for their claim to be decided.
The government launched VISP as “a no-fault system” in 2021, which was supposed to compensate injured and fragile Canadians without them having to pursue costly, stressful and time-consuming litigation against vaccine manufacturers and public health officials.
However, a Global News investigation has found that five Canadians have now launched lawsuits against governments and manufacturers for injuries they allege are the results of the vaccinations, amid allegations that VISP has failed to support them.
They include Sakamoto and several of the injured and ill people featured in Part 1 of this investigation, including Ross Wightman of British Columbia and Ontario residents Kayla Pollock and Dan Hartman, whose 17-year-old son died suddenly in his room in the middle of the night after his vaccination. Read more about their stories here.
Victoria lawyer Umar Sheikh represents several vaccine-injured people and others across Canada who claim they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines.
Sheikh argues that pushing people to file lawsuits for damages is contrary to the rationale of VISP, which intended to keep sick and vulnerable people out of courtrooms.
“These cases will cost between $20,000 and $40,000 in fees and costs. You’re dealing with clients who are injured, who have no money, and they’re not working,” added Sheikh, who represents Pollock.
Carrie Sakamoto shares Pollock’s plight. Once a healthy and vibrant mother, she, her husband, and their three boys lived on a dreamy seed farm in the foothills near Lethbridge, Alta.
Now, she says her life is one in which the physical, psychological and emotional toll has been immense.
Everything in Sakamoto’s life and family situation changed after her second COVID-19 shot during the pandemic.
Within a few hours of her vaccination on June 18, 2021, Sakamoto developed flu-like symptoms that worsened daily. Her health rapidly deteriorated. Her husband was sick, too.
While her husband, Shawn, got better, Sakamoto never recovered and ended up in hospital. She suffered from Bell’s palsy, with severe head pain that still requires medication.
A Health Canada adverse reaction injury database shows Sakamoto is not alone: 216 people like her reportedly suffered Bell’s palsy-like facial paralysis after vaccinations in the pandemic.
As a result of Sakamoto’s injuries, VISP decided she was entitled to a $62,500 injury indemnity.
Though Sakamoto’s hearing loss was acknowledged as a vaccine injury, VISP has denied her $2,000 claim for a new hearing aid. It also denied her $1,300 bill for psychological counselling to help her deal with how her appearance has been disfigured by the palsy. VISP also nixed claims for prescription pain medicines and glasses.
Today, Sakamoto continues to suffer from other health problems she links to her vaccine injury.
“I also have trouble sleeping and suffer from anxiety and depression. The lack of support has been profoundly demoralizing,” Sakamoto’s affidavit states.
Sakamoto says she had to pay out of pocket for physiotherapy and other expenses during her recovery. Eventually, because her family’s debt was too high, she says, she stopped physiotherapy.
She says her family also had to sell their farm to pay for her ongoing medical and financial needs, and because she was no longer able to live independently there due to her memory issues.
The family racked up so much debt that her husband, at 53, made a career change, according to Sakamoto.
“So, he went back to school and learned how to drive a semi truck, and now he’s on the road driving semi,” she told Global News. “The job he has right now, he is able to be home at night, and that’s really important because I make bad decisions when I’m home alone.”
Perhaps the most painful challenge involves the family’s finances.
Sakamoto used to manage them. Not anymore.
“I had to go and take myself off all of our accounts except for one, because I kept spending money out of the wrong accounts. I can’t keep numbers straight,” Sakamoto said.
Sakamoto had intended to return to full-time work later in her life, as many mothers do when their children become older and more independent.
Yet Sakamoto says VISP made no allowance for her loss of future earnings, although its policies permit this.
VISP inquired about her employment leading up to her injury to determine her eligibility for income replacement, she said. But she says case managers did not take into account her part-time work in 2017 and 2018 at a Home Hardware when calculating her eligibility. She says she received none.
Sakamoto says she submitted all required documents to get her additional claims approved and requested a reassessment of her case in 2023, but her file did not appear to advance until Global News asked VISP about it in mid-June.
VISP then denied her bid to reassess her injuries on July 8. In its response, VISP suggested that unidentified physicians decided that all her ailments following her vaccination were unrelated to her COVID-19 vaccine.
Sakamoto now has until early September to appeal.
During her ordeal, the Albertan said she has dealt with nine different VISP case managers.
“For no reason. All of a sudden, they’re gone,” she said. “It’s incredibly frustrating. They lose documents. They don’t know what you’re doing, what things are required. They repeat things. It’s like you’re starting over again every time you get a new person.”
Sakamoto recalled the 2020 throne speech from the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the pandemic, which suggested that its response to the crisis would leave no one behind.
“Do we move Canada forward, or let people be left behind? Do we come out of this stronger, or paper over the cracks that the crisis has exposed? This is the time to remember who we are as Canadians … The Government will continue to have people’s backs just like Canadians have each other’s backs,” the throne speech promised.
Sakamoto noted that the government repeatedly vowed that people would be supported.
“I think that if we were supported the way we were told we would be supported, it would go a long way towards (reducing) vaccine hesitancy,” Sakamoto said.
READ MORE OF OUR COVERAGE
PART 1 : Canada set up a $50M vaccine injury program. Those harmed say it’s failing them
PART 2: ‘Nothing was ready’: Inside Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program
READ OTHER RELATED STORIES:Federal auditors target vaccine injury program amid surprise Oxaro office visit
‘Breach of trust’: Critics slam Ottawa’s vaccine injury program ‘failure’
Is VISP an independent administrator? Here’s what some documents say
Vaccine injury programs elsewhere also face challenges, criticism
Want to contact us? Email: [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also reach Andrew at 416-550-4684.
globalnews
