There is a sentence about halfway through this conversation that I have not been able to put down. Unscrew The News Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Michelle Worton is describing what it takes to get a doctor to believe her. Not to treat her — just to believe her. And she says: “Every doctor’s appointment I go to, I feel like it’s a court case. I’m just presenting a court case. Please believe me. Please believe me.” She is a twenty-year healthcare professional. She sat on her own regulatory college’s board. She built the first independent dental hygiene clinic in northern British Columbia from the ground up in 2015 — the first one north of Kelowna and west of Edmonton. She knows how to read her own labs and her own imaging. And she still has to go into every appointment like a defendant. Here is how she got there. By November of 2021 the emails were arriving from Bonnie Henry. Michelle was sitting at the college board table when mandatory vaccination came across the agenda. She had already been asked for her vaccine status by members of the public and by her own patients before they’d confirm an appointment. Her employees were being asked too. She was being called irresponsible. She raised her concerns at the board table — the product wasn’t stopping transmission, vaccinated people were still getting COVID — and the direction came back that it was an order from the Provincial Health Officer. The order itself described the unvaccinated as a public health hazard. She and one other hygienist resigned from that board. Within an hour of the first dose: racing heart, blood pressure irregularity, chest tightness, shortness of breath. Within forty-eight hours of the second: her life, in her words, changed forever. Neurological symptoms, vision changes, tinnitus, vertigo, loss of temperature regulation, loss of bladder function, a short hospitalization. She went to a doctor and described her symptoms and was told it was menopause. She was 42. She had no pre-existing conditions. She backcountry skied with a sixty-pound pack and coached her kids’ soccer. Five years later she is bedbound most of the time. She has permanent vision loss. She reports eighty to ninety percent sensory loss in all four limbs — she can’t feel her feet on the ground and can’t tell when her fingers are touching. She describes pins, needles, burning and electric zaps through her entire body every minute of every day, for five years. The part I keep coming back to is the geography. She took her Canadian imaging to the United States. A leading neurosurgeon looked at it and told her she had brain compression. Canada had looked at the same imaging and told her migraines. She had brain surgery in the States. By the time she got there she had lost sight in her right eye. The surgery alone was just under $148,000. All in, with the three-month follow-up, roughly $205,000. A later American visit ran about $30,000. She sold her dental practice. Her community in Fort St. John and people across Canada crowdfunded the rest. In 2024 she went back to the US and got the full diagnostic picture in thirty-six hours, because somebody ran the right tests. She came home with a treatment plan and was told it isn’t British Columbia policy to work with international doctors. The treatments exist here. She describes them as heavily gatekept. She was denied the last one on the list in mid-July of this year. And then there’s the program. Michelle applied to VISP. Two of the three medical experts on the panel agreed there was a temporal relationship between her injections and her conditions. She was rejected anyway. She has been in appeals since September 2024. When the program was pulled from Oxaro and handed to the Public Health Agency of Canada, her accepted appeal was transferred to the new program — and she had to wait for letters in the mail and then argue, again, from a hospital bed, why an appeal that had already been accepted should be considered. Five years in, she says the new federal portal still doesn’t work. Part of why she can’t get a Canadian doctor to write it down, she says, is what happens to the ones who do. She points at Dr. Charles Hoffe — the Lytton family physician the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC issued a citation against in February 2022 over his public statements, and didn’t drop until February 2025. Three years of process. Her American records say COVID vaccine injury in plain language. In Canada, she says, good luck getting a doctor to put that on paper. She explains the mechanism plainly, and it’s the coldest thing in the hour: if a condition wasn’t reported during the clinical trial, there’s no established causation. No causation, no support. Some people injured in the trials themselves, she says, were treated at the NIH — and their outcomes never made it into the trial data. CANrise19 came out of that. She co-founded it with Julie Woods, who is also injured, after the two of them turned out to have been treated at the same American medical institute. Registered nonprofit, July 2024. Free membership, no barriers. Formal support groups running eight to ten weeks, confidential, camera optional — you can show up in bed and cry for the hour and nobody will judge you, because everyone in the room has been there. A private list of doctors willing to listen, which they will never publish, to protect the doctors. Around two thousand people and growing. They’re waiting on charitable status so they can build a medical care fund modelled on React19’s, which has issued $1.8 million for private care in the States. CANrise19 is the Canadian member of the COVID Vaccine Injury Alliance — twenty-plus organizations worldwide, Australia, Scotland, the UK, Denmark. She also told me something about censorship I hadn’t heard put that way. She only found the peer-reviewed literature on post-vaccine syndrome after she got a VPN — in an American medical office, filling out intake forms. Papers published in 2021 that she had never once seen from inside Canada. For years she thought she was the only one. She’ll be in Ottawa. Michelle is testifying at the Allison Inquiry, September 8 to 11, in a parliamentary committee room. Roughly 800 Canadians have applied to tell their stories; about 40 will get to do it in person. For most of them it will be the first time anyone with lawmaking power has been required to sit and listen. She was blunt about the cost of getting there: many of them do not know what their lives will look like next year. She is grateful, on the record, to Dean Allison, and to Shawn Buckley and Teresa Buckley for carrying it. One last thing she said, and I’m going to leave it here, because I’ve been chewing on it since we stopped recording: “Many of us are called anti-vaxxers. That’s insulting. I wouldn’t be in this situation if that was the case. No one wants to be in this situation. This isn’t a career choice.” There is a gaping wound in this country and it is five years old. Acknowledgement would go a long way. The Allison Inquiry press conference is tomorrow — August 13, 10:00 a.m. Eastern — at allisoninquiry.com/live. The inquiry itself runs September 8–11 in Ottawa. You can still register to submit your story at allisoninquiry.com. September 9 in Ottawa — CANrise19 and Rainey Media are screening the documentary Why Can’t We Talk About This? at Capital City Church. Michelle and Julie will both be there. Injured Canadians and anyone who wants to understand this are invited. CANrise19 — canrise19.com. Free membership, support groups, and a story registry. If you’re injured, you are not alone and you are not crazy. Sponsor — NuggetStacker. Protect your family’s wealth with gold and silver. I’m not your investment advisor, but I do think every family should hold some. Free shipping across Canada on orders over $600. Use the link at unscrewthenews.com for a discount. Sponsor — Snoot Spray. A shower for your nose. QR code is in the top left corner of the video, or snootspray.com/UTN for 30% off, which helps with the shipping from the States. Coming up — Capitalism & Morality Calgary, September 11 (VIP dinner) and September 12 (full-day program), Croatian Cultural Centre. Speakers include Frances Widdowson, Amy Eileen Hamm, Tamara Lich and Nadine Wellwood. Prices go up September 1. 10% off with code UTN10. I’ll be there on the media panel and selling merch — come say hello. The views expressed by guests on Unscrew the News are their own. Nothing in this episode is medical advice — talk to a physician about your own health decisions. Share this out. Get more eyeballs on it. We’ve got to wake Canadians up. Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel. — Bruce This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unscrewthenews.substack.com/subscribe
