There’s a moment about forty minutes into this conversation where Carrie Sakamoto says something almost in passing, and then apologises for repeating herself: “I don’t know how many times I have to say it. We were promised care and it’s not happening.”
That sentence is the whole episode.
Carrie grew up in an Air Force family. Both her parents served — that’s where they met. She was raising three kids with her husband on an acreage outside Lethbridge when COVID hit, the country school shut down, and her mother moved in because her apartment building wouldn’t let residents into the hallways. She watched the news like everyone else. She had taken vaccines her whole life for travel. She got the flu shot. When the Prime Minister said on television that everything coming into Canada was safe and effective, she had no particular reason to doubt it.
She took AstraZeneca on April 21, 2021. Sore arm, nothing more. Then Alberta pulled AstraZeneca, and the messaging pivoted overnight: mixing was fine, mixing was good, here are all the reasons mixing is actually better. On June 18 she took a Pfizer dose.
Her health fell apart that day.
What follows is a sequence most Canadians have never heard described from the inside. A burning sensation in her brain that triggered uncontrollable vomiting — a sensation she still lives with, medicated, five years on. An emergency room that treated her for a migraine and sent her home. Four hours later, back where she started. A drive back to the hospital where she caught her own face in the side mirror and thought she was having a stroke. Bell’s palsy, steroids, fluids, sent home again with an assurance it would pass in a few weeks.
Then the other side of her face started going numb.
The third time, they admitted her. Seventeen days. She couldn’t swallow, so they put in feeding tubes. She was in and out of consciousness. Her doctor brought colleagues in on a laptop to look at her, because none of them had seen severe Bell’s palsy presenting like this. On the fifth day he sat down with her and her husband and told them what they believed had happened, and that they were required to report it to Ottawa.
She could not see her children for seventeen days. COVID rules: one visitor per day, adults only, chosen from a list of two. Her kids watched her get sick and then watched her disappear.
The part nobody plans for
Carrie is careful to say she received good care in hospital. What she wasn’t prepared for was everything after.
The acreage had to go — she couldn’t help run it, and her husband couldn’t leave her alone in it. He was a music promoter, and nobody was promoting concerts in 2021, so he got a trucking licence. They moved into town so the kids could get around without her driving, because she couldn’t drive. She lives with fatigue from the Bell’s palsy and from the medications, and short-term memory loss from being on those medications for five straight years. She was on nothing before this. She’s now on five or seven a day; she isn’t sure which, and says so on air, and then loses her train of thought mid-sentence and names exactly why.
The federal Vaccine Injury Support Program accepted her claim. It then denied the medications, the treatments, the hearing aid for her hearing loss, the glasses, the psychologist. She has been handed between twelve different case managers. She ended up in an appeal caused by the program’s own error. The program has since changed hands and, in her words, it hasn’t helped at all — she doesn’t know a single person it has actually helped.
The out-of-pocket costs get covered by a GiveSendGo a friend suggested she start.
On the show, Bruce recalls figures from his earlier conversation with MP Dean Allison and Shawn Buckley: roughly $55 million allocated to the program, something on the order of $35 million absorbed by administration, and a share reaching injured Canadians reported at around 2%. Carrie’s response is the one that stays with you — the government doesn’t seem especially curious about where the rest of it went.
The label
The moment she spoke publicly about what happened, she was called an anti-vaxxer.
She took the vaccine. That’s how she got here. She says it out loud and laughs at how little sense it makes, and then gets angry, then talks herself back toward generosity: people are frightened of things they don’t understand, and she’s found that sitting down and talking with them works.
She started a TikTok account at a friend’s suggestion, mostly so that other injured people could find her rather than to convince the doubters. Twenty-five thousand followers in two months. She woke up one morning and it was gone — misinformation. She’s lost several accounts since.
What she found instead was CanRise19, a Canadian non-profit built by and for the vaccine-injured, founded by Michelle Worton and Julie Woods. Free support groups, weekly, running about nine weeks. Zoom rooms large and small. A newsletter. Carrie now holds the chair of community outreach there and volunteers her time helping other people through the VISP paperwork — the same paperwork that has consumed five years of her own life. When Bruce asked whether anyone was helping people navigate the program, her answer was one word: “Me.”
Ottawa, September 8–11
The Allison Inquiry is a citizen-led inquiry taking testimony from injured Canadians in a parliamentary committee room in Ottawa, September 8 through 11. Carrie is speaking on the first day. Around 800 people have applied to testify. CanRise19 will be on the ground supporting the witnesses.
Her argument for it is simple and hard to argue with: “Any time that we’re given space to tell our stories, it’s a step in the right direction.” Documented. On the record. Real, not rare.
She’s also looking forward to something more human — meeting, in person, people she’s only known through a screen for five years. She doesn’t leave her house much. Most of her functioning happens at a computer.
Bruce’s addition: for five years, every parliamentarian now dismissing this inquiry could have listened to these Canadians at any point, anywhere in the country. They chose not to. Injured Canadians have been writing their MPs and MLAs asking them to be in that room. You can write yours too. That’s the ask this week.
The lawsuit
Carrie is the class representative in a proposed class action against the Government of Canada and the Province of Alberta, filed by Rath & Company. It began as her individual claim in 2023 and was expanded. The court has not yet certified it as a class action — that decision is what she’s waiting on now.
If it’s certified, Albertans injured after a COVID-19 vaccination are covered without having to do anything. And as Carrie puts it: when they win, it becomes precedent, and it opens the door for the rest of the country.
Everything on the file is public at rathandcompany.com under the class action section.
Reach her
Carrie is on X and on Facebook under her own name, and can be reached through canrise19.com.
Allison Inquiry | Listening to Canadian Covid-19 Vaccine Injured
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Coming up — Capitalism & Morality Calgary, September 11 (VIP dinner) and September 12 (full-day program from 8:00 am), Croatian Cultural Centre. Speakers include Frances Widdowson, Amy Eileen Hamm, Tamara Lich and Nadine Wellwood. Prices go up shortly. 10% off with code UTN10.
Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel.
— Bruce
