A B.C. lawyer wants health authorities to grant his son an exemption from the requirement to wait 28 days between COVID-19 doses, after the son was denied a vaccine card after waiting only 16 days between doses.
Darcy Lawrence says his son, Andrew Flockhart, was initially “vaccine hesitant,” but eventually realized he needed to get his vaccines, so he went to the Northern Health clinic at the Quesnel Seniors’ Centre and got his first Moderna shot on Oct. 20.
The Sechelt lawyer says that his son, who is employed by the forests ministry as a wildfire technician and faces a mandate from the provincial government requiring him to be fully vaccinated by Nov. 22, went back to the clinic on Nov. 5 to find out when he could get his second shot.
He says that the clinic told Flockhart, 26, that he could get the second shot immediately, despite the fact that the minimum wait time between COVID shots is currently 28 days. Flockhart got the second shot on Nov. 5, just 16 days after the first shot.
Lawrence, a longtime criminal defence lawyer, says that nobody told his son that he needed to wait 28 days for the second shot.
His son was “violently ill” for three days after getting the second shot, he said in an interview Monday.
“Whether that’s because he got it early or not, I don’t know,” said Lawrence. “But most importantly, now he cannot only not comply with the provincial government mandate that he has to be fully vaccinated by Nov. 22, he also cannot get his vaccine passport.”
Lawrence said that from what his son tells him, the situation at the Quesnel clinic was not unique to Flockhart.
“People in his (age) cohort are talking about how they go there and nobody asks them any questions at all,” he said. “It’s unbelievably irresponsible and terribly concerning for me and I would like someone to interview the people who know, or should know, about this.”
Lawrence said that when his son applied online for the vaccine card, the system notified him that his first shot was fine but that his second shot was “invalid” and therefore he needed to get a third shot, which Lawrence believes he cannot safely get for a number of months.
“So it may be that his employer will recognize this ‘invalid’ second vaccine shot, or maybe they won’t. And if they won’t, he’s going to have to go on administrative unpaid leave waiting for the booster,” he said.
“Someone is going to have to make an exception for him, and there’s my concern. Through no fault of his own, he is now double-vaccinated, but he is ‘invalidly’ double-vaccinated.”
The lawyer said he contacted Dr. Jong Kim, chief medical health officer for the Northern Health region, and several other medical health officers last week but has not received a response.
Asked to respond to Lawrence’s concerns, Eryn Collins, a spokeswoman for Northern Health, said in an email that officials were “following up directly with the individuals involved to address and resolve their concerns.”
