EDMONTON — Alberta's wasteful purchase of children's pain and fever medicine three years ago helped inform the province's decision to charge some people $100 for a COVID-19 vaccine shot this fall, Premier Danielle Smith said Saturday.

Smith told her provincewide call-in radio show that a large portion of the approximately 1.4 million medicine bottles from Turkey, which Alberta paid $70 million to secure in 2022 during a national shortage, had to be donated this year to war-torn places around the world. Front-line health staff had said the medicine’s thicker consistency risked clogged feeding tubes.

She said the off-loading made the government think, 'What else is going to waste?'"

"People were really, really angry at the thought that there might be $20 million worth of product that went

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