Ontario hospitals still denying care to mask-exempt individuals

When the province of Ontario implemented a mask mandate, it was rarely noted that the directive had exceptions built into it to accommodate those who may struggle with universal masking. Throughout the COVID narrative, the mask mandate has been arbitrarily applied and heavily enforced with near-total disregard for the exceptions built into it.

On June 11th, the remaining health sectors had their provincial mask directives revoked.

Thunder Bay resident Kim Berly, however, is still being denied entry both for her own urgent care needs and to accompany her children/grandchildren to their medical appointments. Berly is often seen by specialists in Toronto and thus flies often between Thunder Bay and Toronto to attend her scheduled appointments.

After an incident on an aircraft in the Spring of 2020 that left Berly unconscious after attempting to mask during a flight to a medical appointment, one of her specialists wrote her a medical mask exemption on the advice of the aircrew. She has this note renewed every 3 months.

Although Berly has always been forthcoming with her documented exemption, two hospitals have denied her care and, most recently, entry – Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) and Toronto General Hospital.

At TBRHSC, Berly was denied care on several occasions, even after Vice President Stewart Kennedy sent her a letter stating that “The Hospital will not deny your access to this hospital for your urgent medical needs.” At Berly’s last visit, where both she and her grandson were attempting to be triaged, the hospital “let her sit in emergency for five and a half hours with a lot of people but they wouldn’t let us in the back, in a small room, with my grandson.”

More recently, at Toronto General, Berly was told that because her note did not come from a doctor at their location, it was invalid. They threatened to call the police and have her trespassed as she tried to accompany her anxious daughter to her heart monitoring appointments.

The two instances where Berly accompanied her grandson and daughter to the hospital, she notes is a post-Pfizer injection coincidence.

Berly says that she hopes there will be no ill health repercussions for being denied medical care and mentions that this opens the hospital(s) up to lawsuits.