Hugh Mackenzie
Huntsville Doppler
We have had some good news this week when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has been approved by Health Canada and it appears that with four different COVID-19 vaccines now approved for use in this country, COVID needles in people’s arms will finally begin to speed up.
We are still behind the eight ball of course, and most of the vaccines we badly need are not actually here yet. But progress has been made and Canadians are beginning to feel more comfortable with projected timelines for getting vaccinated and for getting this pandemic behind us. National polls reflect this, as respondents are easing up on their anger at the Trudeau Government.
But in spite of an atmosphere of relief, there is one question, and I believe an important one, that must be asked and answered, and that is whether the federal government’s poor record, compared to most other jurisdictions, of actually obtaining COVID-19 vaccines will potentially affect the quality of protection Canadians will receive. Here is why I say that.
Pfizer, whose COVID-19 vaccine is the one that is still primarily injected in Canada, recommended that individuals receive two shots about 21 days apart. The Moderna vaccine injections, also used in Canada, are recommended 28 days apart. Subsequent studies have shown that it may be safe to increase the period between shots if necessary, but there has been no hard evidence about how long this period should safely be, and to the best of my knowledge the pharmaceutical firms are standing behind their recommendations.
In an effort to get as many people inoculated with COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as possible, the Trudeau Government is allowing provinces to accept a recommendation from its National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) to allow a delay of up to four months between shots of COVID-19 vaccines that require two injections. According to the Toronto Star, Ontario has recently announced that they will do that.
Two important things to remember here. First, NACI is an advisory committee appointed by the Trudeau Government. It is not Health Canada. Second, its initial recommendation was to allow this delay between injections “when supplies are limited”.
The reason for the recommendation from the National Advisory Committee on Immunization is their belief, supported by many in the scientific community, that the first priority must be to boost the number of Canadians being vaccinated as quickly as possible in order to provide them with at least a degree of immunity. This, of course, makes sense because Canada is well behind other countries when it comes to actually acquiring COVID-19 vaccines. But the hard question must be asked: why is it necessary to take this chance in Canada, when it has not been needed anywhere else in the world?
Dr. Brad Wouters is executive vice-president of science and research at the University Health Network, one of the most prestigious hospital complexes in Canada. He is not a physician. He is an engineer, a researcher, and a scientist. He has this to say about waiting up to four months for a second COVID-19 injection: “This decision is not based on evidence. No one in the world has been waiting four months for a second dose.”
It has also been noted that there has been no four- month data released by anyone for peer review, a common practise when making scientific findings.
There has been a significant degree of concern raised about extending vaccination intervals beyond those recommended by the vaccine manufacturers. One commentator recently suggested that Canada would be launching a nationwide experiment no other country has attempted.
Some Canadians will not have to wait for a second dose of COVID-19 vaccine because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine which will be available in Canada does not require one. But many others will, and with them, if time between injections is extended, especially up to four months, we will simply be rolling the dice. Many Canadians will be treated as guinea pigs.
As polling numbers are improving, rumours that Justin Trudeau may force a spring election are heating up again. He may do so, or he may wait for the fall, still only two years from the last election. And when he does, my guess is that Canadians, being quick to forgive and forget and tired of being cranky, will give him another mandate. Even if it is again a minority, he can look to the NDP to continue to prop him up.
But there is one thing Canadians should not forget. That is that some of their fellow citizens will be at risk because the Trudeau Government failed to get COVID-19 vaccines here as quickly and efficiently as the vast majority of other countries in the Western world.
And now they want to catch up. Indeed, they need to catch up. But in order to do that they will now take chances with timelines that have not yet been scientifically authenticated and are contrary to recommendations from vaccine manufacturers and that no other country in the world has attempted. Consequently, they are taking chances with other people’s lives. There was no need for that.
And for that, surely, they should be held accountable.
Hugh Mackenzie
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Ms. Kear
I’m not suggesting that all inspectors are cut from the same cloth. As in any profession, there are people with varying degrees of expertise and compassion. My view is simply that if all these people working to oversee long-term care had concerns about inspections not being adhered to, why are there not more people shedding light on the situation. It should not have taken twenty years and countless deaths to get to where we are now. Everyone screaming how could this happen in our own country with all the checks and balances we have in place. The answer is easy it’s obvious to me that it took a concerted effort by all those responsible. Judging by the number of lives lost due to covid in LTC during the first and second wave it’s also obvious to me that we are failing the most vulnerable members of our society.
That Ladies and gentleman is the real crime being perpetuated on a fragile segment of the population. So it’s ok in Canada to pay out vast sums of money and pretend to provide a service to protect vulnerable individuals. And if people die due to neglect, dehydration, starvation, abuse, abandonment issues, confinement and various other methods that increase your risk of dying then welcome to Canada.
BTW miraculously we have several openings in LTC now.
Mr. Logagianes;
I too, look at the past decisions made by former governments as in some way contributing to where we find ourselves in the present and have lived long enough to get a picture of party ideologies and their long term consequences in the province especially.
My experience with LTC inspectors is much different than you portray.
Please don’t assume that because any group is unionized that they are all the same – my limited experience is that they are not. Many of these inspectors are professionals, accountable to their Provincial Colleges (e.g. the College of Nurses). Ideally, they make their unions work for them, not the other way around.
My interactions with inspectors from public health, LTC, and accrediting bodies has been one of respect and on occasion, admiration. I have often found the guidance, direction, even clinical leadership provided from these folks has been much more than satisfactory.
It is a very, very difficult and serious step to take to shut down a nursing home, considering the disruption to the lives of residents, their families, and staff. That is Not to say that this should never happen.
However, if the direction from the provincial top curtails comprehensive, regular, and surprise inspections and has not the political will to penalize, then there is room for abuses. If regulations change to suit a for-profit home sector, it is a matter of time before real concerns surface.
I agree with you about health care priorities in the province and country. If we don’t have individual and community health, we don’t have/need a business to run.
Health Canada has approved changing the timelines between doses against the advice of the drug manufacturers. Health Canada still does not recognize lyme disease after 20 years of documented cases. Their inaction to recognize this disease has forced numerous Canadians to suffer immensely and seek medical options out of country in order to survive. Lyme disease is increasing at and alarming rate but their is currently a vaccine being developed in the USA, thank goodness. A dear friend of ours went to the USA recently for treatment for lyme disease. Her health deteriorated quickly, she was lucky to survive. The pain and suffering this poor sole and many others have experienced has fallen on deaf ears in Canada.
Just in – Lab mice around the world are rejoicing over the continuation of the covid 19 human trials.
Mr. Mackenzie; Perhaps I am just plain tired of hearing one perspective emphasized of your commentaries, when there could be three or four more. I rely on other commenters to fill out facts, associated factors, and bring more balance in some of your work. Your writing and viewpoints do generate responses – either some sound discussion, a reaction – pushback, and “pile on” responses.
I think opinions are important, the ones I value more are those with more questions, and those with more small and big picture focus.
At the very least, two sides of a discourse may result in some real learning for me. To be fair, some of your writing is more balanced at times.
Perhaps I am just tired of emotional outrage! Imagine! Especially when I can generate my own!?
Thank you for listening.
There is logic in some of these comments which I appreciate. However some facts are just that and cannot be denied and should not be ignored. As of today, Canada is still in 60th place world-wide on a per capita basis when it comes to having vaccines here, in this country. It is true that we have contracted for more than enough vaccines for our needs, but THEY ARE NOT HERE at a time. when other countries are able to actually have them, in their possession, to put in people arms.. Why is this? Since SUNDAY, the United States has innoculated 3,340,,848 people. Since DECEMBER Canada has innoculated 2,543,253 people. Surely there is something wrong with this picture.. Now that it appears that vaccines will finally be flowing to Canada, we will catch up, but the delay has been unnecessary and to do so, chances will be taken regarding safe intervals between vaccines that require two injections., The manufacturers of these vaccines have stuck by the timelines they believe are appropriate. We have faith in their vaccines, why are we prepared to play fast and loose with their recommendations related to the best before dates for second injections? No other country has had to experiment on their people. That, to me, is the issue here.
Let’s be honest free trade and the outsourcing of all the good paying jobs is the reason Canada is at the back of the pack. Remember when Brian Mulroney and Ronald Regan signed the North American Free Trade Agreement and created the GST . He was defeated by the Chrétien Liberals in the next federal election. Their platform consisted of eliminating the GST and cancelling the North American free trade agreement. After winning the election both policies were adopted despite the empty promises. So if all you Liberal apologists want to keep deflecting to protect King Justin you are failing to address the real problem with Canada. The left right paradigm has worked well for the spin doctors and political opportunists but not so well for every day Canadians. We feel the need to reward mediocrity, never call it like it is and unorganized health care disaster.
Neglecting Health care for the last 30 years knowing the baby boomer tsunami would one day cripple health care in Canada is not a coincidence. Ignoring all the documented studies from the fight against H1N1 and SARS is coming back to haunt us. Sadly all of this could have been avoided if someone actually had the political will to do the right thing. It took a concerted effort by all to achieve this milestone in our history. Will they keep repeating the mistakes or actually make healthcare a priority in Canada finally before more innocent lives are lost. And if no one is held accountable for all the needless deaths then things will never change.
The unionized inspectors in LTC are all employed by the government, well here’s a good place to start pointing the finger. Can you imagine receiving and indexed pension to ignore what you see every day at work. But don’t blame the unions or the government.
Mr. Holland, Mr. Jordan; your insights are appreciated. Thank you.
From the Wikipedia entry regarding the Connaught Laboratories of Canada: “In October 1988, the Canadian government [Mulroney Conservatives] rejected the initial bid on the ground that the offer could not be judged as being of “net benefit” to Canada. At this time, Connaught was the world’s largest manufacturer of influenza vaccines…
The Canadian government [Mulroney Conservatives] approved the bid for Connaught in December 1989. The move was criticized by many… no other industrialized country … would permit the takeover of its leading biotechnology firm.
Connaught was sold to Mérieux… Since ownership of Connaught had been transferred, “Connaught Biosciences Inc.” was formally dissolved in 1990.”
Canada has been treated as a light weight country in spite of it’s contracts by the drug manufacturers.
Secondly, my understanding for the idea of inoculating the most people possible now and doing second doses later is this: The amount of antibodies in the blood stream of those with only one dose approaches that of people who have had both doses AND while some people who have had only one dose have contracted Covid the severity of the symptoms is highly reduced. I can’t find the source for this but read recently that again, while people who have had only one dose do contract Covid not a single person worldwide has died as a result.
I would love to have a single dose now.
We have all become armchair epidemiologists, but everything should not be political. I won’t mention who privatized Canada’s vaccine manufacturers so they could be bought and moved out of the country. New capacity is being created here, but that very sophisticated facilty takes time to build.
Just to set the record straight, here are some non-political facts about the Covid-19 vaccine rollout. There are 42 countries ahead of Canada and 179 countries behind us, so our glass is way more than half full. Of the 42 countries ahead of us; 8 are very small in population and geography, 25 are EU countries with death rates 2 and 3 times higher than Canada, so naturally the EU manufacturers are giving priority to their own before they supply Canada. At least they are selling to us now which the USA will not do until all their people are vaccinated.
There are 5 outliers at the top of the list. The CEO of Pfizer gave priority to Israel (at the top of the list) because his parents were holocaust survivors and Israel paid twice the going price. The UAE and Chile are getting their vaccine from China who cut Canada off because we arrested Meng at Trump’s request. The USA and UK are both making their own vaccines.
After these top 5 countries, the difference between the other 37 and Canada is too small to worry about. 70% Herd immunity is established by 2 things, letting a lot of people get sick and die which thankfully Canada decided not to do, and by mass vaccination. When this pandemic started, the experts were talking in terms of getting a vaccine in two or three years rather than 2 or3 months. At the end of the day, being a few percentage points behind the leaders for the understandable reasons stated above, will make only a week or two of difference in achieving herd immunity.
We have good people in Ottawa and Queens Park that have been working very hard to navigate uncharted territory for over a year. I hope people remember THOSE facts at election time. It is the job of opposition parties to prod the government, but it is highly unlikely they could have done any better.
Mr. Mackenzie;
1] you look at the federal government’s performance but not the provincial roll-out plan and abysmal communication of the same (“what’s good for the goose …”).
2] I continue to point out the obvious long term benefits of having a Vaccine producing lab in Canada – a terrible lesson to be learned in this experience. Mulroney sold Connaught in Toronto. Can you imagine how much better our outcomes might be if such a facility was operating and maintained?
3] if comparisons are to be made to other countries, factor in geography and vaccine production capacity
4] I have seriously thought for some time that biannual, if not more frequent, boosters may be needed. We need to be ready for “normal” in society to continue to look different.
5] I have continued to be thankful that Stephen Harper Conservatives are not in power. Under these circumstances, I have faith in a minority government. I wish I could say the same thing for the Ford government. So many professionals have and continue to sound the alarms from the front lines, including family physicians left out of the roll out plan, to date. Is the plan the problem OR deficiencies in our public health system infrastructure?
Mr. Whillans, we owe you a deep debt of gratitude for your greater balance in this commentary.
Regarding the science and epidemiology, I commend all who continue to monitor, evaluate, study our health interventions and outcomes. Yes, there will be perspective differences – however, these may be more in line with what degree of risk (based on data) that one takes on behalf of the citizenry. We have unfolding science, math, and trajectories, daily.
And today we open lockdown again after having 11 cases in huntsville in the last 4 days. Brilliant. For heavens sake gthis is pathetic.
I am not so sure that the delays in procurement of ordered vaccines are due simply because the Federal minority Government is currently led by the Liberals. I very much doubt that any other political party could do much better in vaccine procurement efforts just because they are of different political leaning. Politics has nothing to do with the actual problem.
The delays in deliveries of the vaccines are due to the failures of the manufacturers to fulfill their contracts.
Above all, the whole situation is due to the failure of the successive governments to establish and develop our own Canadian national pharmaceutical industry. Our brothers “down under” are in the same boat.
All the countries which are continuously listed as vastly more successful than Canada in inoculation of their population, such as the USA and the UK for example, have their own manufacturers of the vaccines against COVID-19.
Bev Belanger…… The thing that the author repeatedly omits in his rants against the Federal goverment is that since November, Canada has signed contracts for up to 414 million doses of vaccines. He also fails to tell his readers that in spite of the 3 week delay from Pfizer, Canada is back on track for everyone to be fully vaccinated (if they chose and if the provincial governments can roll it out) by the end of September.
Having said that, lockdowns will continue for at least another year (UK has also set March 2022 as the date , they feel things may return to normal). The issue is not the vaccines, the issue is that the provincial government has unreasonably left it up to the discretion of citizens many of whom have no knowledge of exponential growth (and against a cultural backdrop where science is not respected and every opinion is given equal weight on social media), to make the behavioural changes necessary to control this pandemic.In the absence of these behavioual changes, lockdowns are the only thing that works (i.e. a sledge hammer approach to behavioural change)
This provincial government has had the tools to enforce mask wearing, social distancing and travel restrictions without lockdowns. And they are woefully behind on testing and tracing capabilities even a year later.
Had the provincial government(s) used the constitutional and legislative tools at their disposal, this would have been over last July.
What was that story about our vaccine production facility? Isn’t that what we should really be talking about. The future will have more viruses and we should be ready to make them!
I wonder if The We brothers got there vaccine before many elderly citizens ?
74 & Waiting !
It has been assumed that the end goal for this pandemic management has been to reach “herd immunity”. The level of a population which can not be infected with Covid due to having been vaccinated or via having already been recently infected. Once herd immunity is reached the virus can not transmit efficiently enough to sustain itself and the pandemic dies away.
Public Health Ontario has published a list of current estimates of the size of herd immunity in Ontario. The estimates range from 43% to 82.5%. But upon inspection you can see the most estimates are in the 60% range. I will use that number for the purposes of this work.
Then we can assume that to reach herd immunity in Ontario, 8.5 million citizens need to be immune from Covid. Currently 312,000 have had Covid and thus probably have a temporary immunity (probably for 6 months to 1 year as Covid antibodies have a half life of between 180 and 360 days). So that leaves about 8.2 million that need to be vaccinated. But children under the age of 16 can not be vaccinated but still can spread the virus (that is about 2.28 million Ontarians). So the final number of “adults” that need to be immune via vaccines is 69% of all 11.9 million adults.
Considering Pfizer or Moderna with a 95% effectiveness after 2 doses (BTW Pollack et al reported in the peer reviewed New England Journal of Medicine (Dec 31) that a single Pfizer dose was 52.4% effective). So the final tally is that 72% of all adults must be vaccinated with a 95% effective vaccine to reach herd immunity in Ontario. (J&J’s vaccine is 66% effective against all forms of Covid but 85% effective in the most severe……So J&J vaccine could not even get us to herd immunity considering spread but it could reduce hospitalizations if more than 80% of adults were vaccinated).)
Will 72% of Ontario adults be vaccinated to create herd immunity???
Then we have the latest news…..Davies et al (Feb 2) in Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases estimates that the UK variant (B1..1.&) is 50 to 70% more transmissible. On Feb, 14, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and also Imperial College reported preliminary findings on all UK variant cases in the UK could be 30 to 70% (depending on the age of the infected person)more deadly that the non variant strains…….BTW it has been this shocking news that caused the sudden lockdown of Simcoe Muskoka in February.
Lastly, and most recently, the news that the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine was 2/3rds less effective in creating antibodies against the South African variant (note: this is not precisely the same as saying that it was 2/3rds as effective at preventing the disease….but it is suggestive.).
I offer this list of uncomfortable truths, not to discourage or depress. But to point out what should be made obvious, in the short term we will not be saved by vaccines (maybe with boosters 6 or 12 months in the future). They may slow the spread but without real behavioural change by the citizens, lockdowns will continue. They will be shorter in duration but more frequent. This is entirely because with all the tools at their disposals, lockdowns are the only tool that the provincial government has found that works.
We need to demand better.
Maybe we should’ve negotiated with Russia for SputnikV? Just a thought….
Whilst taking to friends in England today, they indicated all adults over the age of 18 will have received their first Covid19 vaccination by the end of May and the second vaccine by end of July!
Meanwhile we here in Canada will accept a decision to delay our second vaccine by four months in order to increase the number of Canadians receiving our first vaccine.
Seriously…….my only hope is we remember this come election time…..at times I think we couldn’t organize a pi** up in a brewery…..but of course we couldn’t because we are in lock down…..
As always thanks to all front line workers for all they have done during this pandemic….and stay safe!