A minister said the Liberal government will investigate the case of a Toronto mayoral candidate who reportedly sought advice on the vaccination from an infant.
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The candidate, state Sen. Tara Parker-Bowles, is in the running for mayor, trying to move the city out of a gridlock-crippled political impasse.
On Monday, the Toronto Star reported that Parker-Bowles sent an email to a Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America supporter asking “What’s up with your child’s #11/19#CTV.” The “CTV” of course, stands for that “vaccine sensitivity trigger.”
“I have been told that since this vaccine is so important, that a #11/19 #CTV for some reason has completely changed their menstrual cycle,” she added in the email.
In response, Erika Dira, president of Moms Demand Action, said she spoke to Parker-Bowles over the phone about the questions she raised. Dira said it was a “baffling exchange,” because Parker-Bowles asked specifically about all the children whose vaccines have had some sort of medical effect.
Dira, who was first quoted by the Toronto Star, said, “She didn’t know what 11/19 was, nor why the medical community wouldn’t include it as a trigger, nor the families that experienced it. I also asked her why she asked about having the CTV challenged or neutralized, and she indicated it would not be appropriate for her to publicly discuss that topic.”
A spokesman for Dira, Zac Taylor, told The Baltimore Sun that Dira would have liked to have met with Parker-Bowles to clarify her comments.
“We shared with her that 11/19 has an inflammatory, all-encompassing name, but has no medical or scientific connotation,” he said. “This email – and the other campaign literature she distributed with it – got the short end of the stick.”
Taylor added that Moms Demand Action “encourages public officials to learn more about reproductive health issues such as reproductive-related diseases and methods of contraception.”
Ron Paterson, director of St. Mary’s University of Edmonton and Canada Research Chair in Sexual Health Science, said the email from Parker-Bowles was “alarmingly invasive.”
“I can’t tell you what messages would make a public official wonder,” he told The Toronto Star. “If there’s this thought there’s a vaccine causing this, which seems really unlikely, that’s problematic because I think there’s an element that’s going to try to make the concept of ‘vaccines have no value’ more palatable.”
Last month, mothers and fathers across Canada fought back against a campaign by the Canadian Medical Association that would allow parents to opt out of vaccines for “personal or moral” reasons.
“I can’t see any reason to take the last mile out of Canada to [the U.S.],” Michael Grondin, a social justice educator in Toronto, told Reuters. “If you want to shoot your child, then come and take them with you.”
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and the Toronto Star contributed to this report.