A Toronto doctor made $427,500 selling fake Covid vaccine-exemption letters
Her medical licence has been revoked
A Toronto doctor had her medical licence revoked by the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal last month, because she wrote nearly 1,500 Covid exemption letters “without adhering to medical standards and guidelines.”
In 2021, the tribunal found, Dr. Celeste Jean Thirlwell provided 1,425 letters to get patients out of Covid-related vaccination, masking and testing requirements—critical measures that were in place to support public health.
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“She did so for profit and without adhering to medical standards and guidelines,” the tribunal concluded.
Thirlwell maintained a word-of-mouth network of patients looking to sneak their way around the rules. She charged $300 for their first exemption letter, and offered discounts to patients who required multiple letters or who referred family and friends. She did not bill through OHIP.
Thirlwell is said to have coached patients on what to say when filling out forms that described their supposed reasons for seeking exemption. She told them to pretend they had anxiety, inflammation, an autoimmune or heart condition, blood clotting, difficulty breathing or an allergy to the vaccine.
According to the decision letter, Thirlwell was running quite a successful business. On one day in October 2021, she saw 116 patients.
Though she’d carefully tried to hide any record of the letters by storing documents in a personal account that was separate from her professional online storage, a passenger on a Via Rail train overheard her discussing the scheme on phone calls in which she audibly used her real name.
The tribunal estimates she earned $427,500 through the scam over the three-month period.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
