Toronto’s Medical Officer, Dr. Eileen De Villa’s husband has financial relationships with major vaccine manufacturers – is this a conflict of interest?

From June 12-13th, there was an event held titled the CVUPDATE/2020 – the CV referring to cardiovascular. Although Dr. Eileen De Villa’s husband’s name is scrubbed from the agenda of the symposium – you can still find Dr. Richard Choi mentioned in the pdf from the event. That pdf is now circulating its way around the web and even in a video can be found on the event’s website. What has everyone up in arms though is Dr. Eileen De Villa’s husband’s declared financial relationships.

(Dr. Richard Choi in yellow shirt)

Dr. Eileen’s husbands Relationships with financial interests

In the symposiums speaker disclosure section from the event, Dr. Richard Choi has the following listed:

Relationships with financial interests:
Research Support: AstraZeneca, Bayer
Speakers Bureau/Honoraria/Consulting fees: AstraZeneca, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim/Lilly, BMS/Pfizer, HLS, Novartis, Sanofi, Servier

Is this a conflict of interest?

Although based on the current knowledge we have it would be impossible to say for sure that this is a conflict of interest – but the optics look bad. It’s not a good look when you lock down your city when you don’t have to and your husband has financial interests with AstraZeneca and Pfizer. The point is we don’t know what those financial relationships look like – but consulting fees and even research support were declared.

This calls into question the motives of Dr. Eileen De Villa as she continues to lock down Toronto when she only has to be in the red zone. Do her husband’s financial interests play into this decision for Torontonians? These questions need to be asked to Toronto’s Medical Officer – Dr. De Villa. How much is her husband receiving in compensation and for what specifically?

Dr. Choi’s name is off of the event website – by why?

Between 6-7 pm, ET on June 12th of 2020 Dr. Richard Choi, Dr. Eileen De Villa’s husband spoke at the event. However, on the website’s agenda – it shows this as an “unaccredited” portion of the event. This doesn’t change the fact that relationships with financial interest were declared at the event and Dr. Choi had quite an extensive list of relationships I’m sure the general public would have questions about if they were aware of them.

We’ve reached out to Dr. Eileen De Villa on the matter as well as the creators of the CVUPDATE/2020 event directly. We will update our readers as soon as we are notified of any updates or changes.

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