The large quantities of Pfizer vaccines that landed from a factory in Belgium, Canada this week could be a turning point for the vaccination of the country, even if the winter storms delayed the arrival of the transport.
When Pfizer and Moderna reduced the delivery of their vaccines to Canada due to manufacturing problems – and when Pfizer briefly stopped shipping, the companies began a nationwide wave of hand-wringing and an avalanche of heated political rhetoric. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insists that by the end of March, the government will still reach its target of six million doses, enough for three million people.
[Read: Delays Turn Canada’s Vaccination Optimism Into Anxiety]
Anger, anxiety, and general dissatisfaction about the rate at which vaccinations begin are not limited to Canada. My colleagues in Europe reported similar sentiments there.
[Read: France Stalls Between Stubbornly High Infection Rates and Slow Vaccine Rollout]
[Read: Vaccine Shortages Hit E.U. in a Setback for Its Immunization Race]
For my article on Canada, published on Thursday, I spoke to people in various fields, including vaccine development, epidemiology, infection control, and medical supply chains. Everyone said they understood the frustration of Canadians. But none of them were the least surprised that the first wave of vaccines did not take place as planned. According to them, this is the nature of new vaccines.
They also mention two factors in the slow start: the lack of an established vaccine manufacturer headquartered in Canada and the country’s modest ability to manufacture vaccines. But they said there was little the government could do to get such plants up and running now.
Until last summer, Mr. Trudeau and other members of his cabinet repeatedly suggested that by the end of 2020, they would try to get vaccines from Canadian factories. But the testimony this week at the parliamentary committee, Mark Lievonen, the vice chairman of the federal vaccination task force, said there was never a Canadian manufacturing option that could speed up delivery. And in earlier testimony, Anita Anand, the minister whose division did the vaccine trade, said the government was unable last year to persuade one of the top vaccine makers to set up shop in Canada.
There will be native vaccines, but that will only happen after September, the government’s target to get all Canadians vaccinated. Federal-funded plants in Montreal and Saskatoon are expected to be by the end of the year, which is also the expected delivery date for Canada’s first vaccination to be made in the home country. Its developer, Providence Therapeutics, a biotech company in Calgary, is in the early stages of testing the vaccine and has signed an agreement to manufacture the end-of-year groups for Manitoba, assuming legislation is in place.
Canada may also need less vaccination than first thought. Four studies now suggest that people already infected with the coronavirus require only a single ingestion of the otherwise two doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for immunity.
What remains to be seen now is whether Pfizer and Moderna are able to increase production, and how many of the five other companies Canada has placed their vaccinations on the market.
After reading Dan Bilefsky’s Canada letter last week about travel restrictions between Canada and the United States, a number of you wrote and asked why vaccinated people should not cross the border into Canada again or be exempted from Canada’s quarantine measures.
While the rules now allow for extended family members, including people in appointments and grandparents, they can enter Canada for visits, but many of you have pointed out that the two-week quarantine is impossible for many people. And I’ve been hearing for months about Americans owning vacation homes in Canada who are unable to visit them right now.
There are several reasons. But one big answer relates to the continued recommendations of public health officials in Canada and the United States to avoid any travel. Early data from Israel show that the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine is indeed very effective in protecting the people who receive it. But there is a blind spot in the research: it is still not known whether people who have been vaccinated can be contagious.
[Read: Help! I’m Vaccinated, but What Do I Need to Know to Protect Others?]
On top of that is the issue of proof of vaccination. While Denmark proposes a digital vaccination passport and the International Air Transport Association a digital vaccination passport, there is no broad international agreement on dealing with this issue.
False documentation is already a problem with the Covid-19 test results that passengers must show before fleeing. Transport Canada said Thursday that it fined one person $ 10,000 and another person $ 7,000 for climbing from Mexico to Mexico last month after testing positive. The couple, who have not yet been named, presented a false test result indicating that they were free of infection.
Trans Canada
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Brian Boucher writes that an exhibition by Winnipeg artist Divya Mehra in Los Angeles ‘contains only one work, but it’s a big thing: nearly 20-foot-high inflated versions of the golf and urnemoji, giving expression to a’ tsunami of grief ‘; when the exhibition opened in mid-January, two million people had died from the coronavirus. ”
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Comprehensive changes to Canada’s gun laws will support municipal firearms bans with federal penalties, including jail time. It will also make it easier to take away gun licenses.
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A family in suburban Montreal is part of the “speakeasy hockey” movement.
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Two tech giants made moves this week that could be a preview of what will happen when Canada enacts laws to regulate digital giants, likely later this year. Google has agreed to make payments to news organizations in Australia, while Facebook restricts the sharing of news articles by users in that country.
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was trained in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has been reporting on Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
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