Scientific director Peter Jüni resigning from Ontario’s science table

Peter Juni, the epidemiologist and professor of medicine who has spent most of the pandemic offering unvarnished advice to the provincial government as scientific director of Ontario's COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, is resigning to take up a research post overseas.

The Swiss-born Juni was appointed in July 2020 to the science table, an independent, voluntary group of researchers providing advice and recommendations to the Ministry of Health and the cabinet based on domestic and international pandemic data.

He is moving to England in June to take up a tenured professorship in clinical trials and medicine at the University of Oxford. His last day with the science table will be in late spring.

While widely respected in scientific and academic circles, Juni went from a relatively unknown epidemiologist as director of the Applied Health Research Centre at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto before the pandemic, to a frequent media commentator who for all intents and purposes became the face of the science table over the last 20 months.

Personally and professionally, this move to Toronto was the best thing that could ever have happened to me and my family," Juni told the Star on Friday. From the beginning, I was actually really scared to take on the job of scientific director but I feel privileged to have been able to use my skill set to contribute to resolve the difficulties of this pandemic. I will be heartbroken to leave."

News of Juni's coming resignation comes as the province is signalling a near-return to pre-pandemic normalcy with the recent lifting of indoor-capacity limits and vaccine passport requirements, as well as the dropping of masking requirements in most public places next week.

Health Minister Christine Elliott tweeted Friday that she would no longer tweet daily COVID numbers after that day with key indicators continuing to improve or remain stable."

Over the course of his time with the science table, Juni developed a reputation for straight talk, providing blunt, sometimes politically inconvenient commentary about what the data was telling his team about the direction of the pandemic.

Juni says when he was first approached about taking on the role as scientific director of science table in June 2020 by Steini Brown, dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the table, he told his boss he would do it as long as he had complete freedom to speak his mind.

I said I would always be truthful. In a situation like that, there's just no space for beating around the bush."

That approach sometimes found him at odds with the official stance from Queen's Park, where provincial leaders were faced with the task of balancing competing interests from those calling for less stringent public health measures and some calling for even tougher restrictions.

One such moment came in mid-April 2021, when the science table called for increased sick days for essential workers disproportionately affected by COVID and better on-the-job protections amid rising case numbers and increased ICU occupancy.

The province responded by extending the stay-at-home order in effect at the time, closing playgrounds and giving law enforcement the controversial power to stop and question people who went out of their homes. A day later, facing widespread public backlash, the province reversed some of the new measures, reopening playgrounds and saying police would only be allowed to stop people suspected of breaking social gathering rules.

But before the province did its walkback, Juni says he considered resigning.

I wondered what had gone wrong," he recalled. I felt like we hadn't communicated clearly and that if there was such a breakdown in communication, I was probably not up for the job."

In the end, after hearing from his colleagues and family, he opted to stay on.

Juni says his relationship with the province, and more specifically Ontario's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, who began his job last June, has been respectful and productive. The two communicate almost every day, Juni says, which he says he believes helped the province navigate the worst of the Omicron wave through the fall and winter.

Juni does admit, however, that the province's recent decision to lift masking mandates in most public spaces took him by surprise.

I would have waited for the data to see where we actually are before moving ahead with next steps, but I realize our role is to just advise," he said. The science table's job is really about bringing in the scientific perspective, what does Ontario's data tell us, what does the clinical evidence say, and what is happening internationally. The expectation was never that elected decision makers would always follow what we said."

Assessing Ontario's overall weathering of the storm to date, Juni is confident that the province did much better than most other western jurisdictions.

If you look at how well Ontario did compared to other provinces, the United States and other countries in Europe, we did remarkably well," he said. There were very few places in the Northern Hemisphere in the western world that did as well as we did."

Kenyon Wallace is a Toronto-based investigative reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @KenyonWallace or reach him via email: kwallace@thestar.ca