It’s not hard to connect the dots between the anti-vaccine extremists, including Premier Danielle Smith, who now dominate Alberta’s United Conservative Party and the admission by a beleaguered Alberta Health Services that it is shutting down its long-COVID clinics in Calgary, Edmonton and Sherwood Park.

AHS, once a model of how to run a modern integrated provincial public health-care agency, is in the early stages of being broken up by Smith’s government, which is bent on relitigating the 2020-to-the-present COVID-19 pandemic from a MAGA perspective that denies the reality of the disease, believes life-saving vaccines kill children and views public health measures as a totalitarian control mechanism.

And it is no mere coincidence that this happened only a day after an anti-vax UCP MLA’s incoherent ramblings about how he’d like to see the vaccine banned completely caused a stir on social media. MLA Eric Bouchard has since recanted his apparent claim that an actual plan to ban the COVID vaccine was in the works.