COVID in Canada

 

Canada is preparing to roll out an immunization response, which will provide Canadians with access to safe and effective vaccines to protect against COVID-19. This ambitious plan will be delivered through a principled and evidence-informed approach that puts protecting the health and safety of Canadians first.

Governments recognize that Canadians have made great sacrifices to minimize the harmful effects of COVID-19 on our communities and that many Canadians are anxious to know where, when and how they can receive a vaccine. Extensive work has been done over the last several months to secure strong vaccine options and to have the measures necessary to deliver vaccinations to everyone in Canada. Immunizations will be free to everyone in Canada and available over the course of 2021.

Until extensive immunization is achieved, public health measures will continue to be essential to minimize the spread of COVID-19 in Canada and save lives.

Canada's immunization response involves collaboration between the Government of Canada, provinces, territories, First Nations, Inuit and Métis leaders, municipal governments, public health and logistical experts, manufacturers, and all Canadians.

Source: Government of Canada

 

Justin Trudeau at NRC. CP/Graham Hughes

As of Feb. 5, Canada had administered 2.7 COVID-19 vaccination doses per 100 people compared to 61.7 for Israel and 16.2 for the United Kingdom. By contrast, Canada has signed contracts with seven different companies for a total of 234 million doses with options for tens of millions more.

Canada’s first attempt to ensure domestic production was a deal with the Chinese manufacturer CanSino Biologics  in May 2020. Had that deal gone ahead, it would have involved trials at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University and, if successful, subsequent domestic manufacturing. But within days of the agreement being announced, there were already troubles as the Chinese delayed sending the seed material for the vaccine and, ultimately, it never arrived. 

The failure of the CanSino deal and the delay in building the new NRC facility left Canada reliant on foreign sources of vaccine. The contracts for the vaccine were negotiated based on advice provided by the 18 member COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force  set up by the NRC in June 2020.

On top of having no domestic production and the delays, Canada is facing vaccine nationalism from other countries. U.S. President Joe Biden is sticking to an America-first position and not allowing the Pfizer plant in Michigan or the Moderna plant in New Hampshire to export any of their vaccines to Canada until all Americans have been vaccinated.

The European Union is also threatening to block the export of vaccines possibly affecting exports from Belgium, as it too is confronting delays in being able to vaccinate its citizens

The Conversation

There we have it, the Government of Canada's confident assurance to Canadians that it has the matter of responding to the epidemic in Canada, part and parcel of the global pandemic, well in hand. Canadians can be justified in having confidence in their government, the necessary vaccines have been ordered -- even if at a late date, placing Canada behind all other advanced nations due to the tardiness of the ordering because that same government decided to put all its eggs in the wrong basket initially = signing a contract with CanSino Biologics, a Chinese pharmaceutical company under the direct control of Beijing -- and losing precious time until it looked about in desperation to find other reliable sources.

Two of those sources, the only two vaccines to be approved by Health Canada to date, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, have run into production and delivery delays, leaving Canada in the lurch with a gross insufficiency of vaccine doses and the inability to inoculate the most vulnerable in its population. Canada now stands at a sad 57 in the world of vaccine implementation in its feeble efforts to inoculate its population. When Canadians celebrated in January that vaccines would finally be available, they were brought back to jarring reality when their prime minister promised that every Canadian that wanted to be vaccinated would be, by September of 2021. That far off in time?!

Well, since then that far-off date has been extended to the middle of 2022. And even then, there are no guarantees. While other developed countries have gone about efficiently and purposefully protecting their own, Canada turned in desperation to COVAX -- aUN-sponsored sharing program to ensure that developing and poor nations of the world are able to procure vaccines for themselves -- drawing from their stores and in the process depriving poor nations to the extent that they will have to wait longer. The situation has become cut-throat; every nation for themselves.

Brazil, so hard hit by the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19, is now sending out medical teams to the most remote areas of the Amazon basin, using Chinese vaccines to inoculate their vulnerable populations, just as Alaska, a far richer state in a wealthy and powerful country, producing its own vaccines, sends out its medical teams to isolated and hard-to-reach remote indigenous villages. And Canada -- well, bringing up the rear. Because its government has failed to secure timely vaccines to protect its own. One quarter of Israel is fully vaccinated, the U.K. has administered 13 million doses, the U.S. is on track with its vaccination program.

Should Canada fail to address the pathogen's deadly spread which has killed 21,000 to date, that number could well accelerate, and rise to 46,000 by year's end even as some public health researchers feel that left unchecked, COVID could begin to dry up once 66 percent of the population has been infected. Of course by then the most vulnerable; the health-impaired, those with chronic health conditions, and the elderly will have been decimated in numbers. Numbers could rest at 24.8 million cases in total.

The World Health Organization's estimates are that COVID's fatality rate is 0.27 percent, so that simple math tells us that unchecked, COVID-19 could infect 76 percent of a population relating to 67,000 Canadian deaths in total. Pandemic models at the University of Washington forecast Canada to reach under 30,000 deaths by the first of June. Their September projects of Canada's death count happened to be an underestimate. Since March and the first lockdowns Canada-wide, an average of 1,900 people died monthly from the disease.

Economist Christopher Cotton led a Queen's University team to quantify the effect on the
Canadian economy by continued lockdowns, reaching the estimated conclusion that Canada's economy would be hit on a scale of between eight to 14 percent, representing roughly between $176 billion and $308 billion. Put another way -- between $500 million and $850 million in missing revenues daily. Canada has outspent any other country on COVID emergency initiatives, building debt accordingly to astronomical heights.

 

Although the global pandemic has been a year in its destructive predation on the world, it is still early days, a long way from control. And like any virus SARS-CoV-2 has mutated and will continue to mutate; for the most part harmlessly, but as recent variants have proven in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, in increasingly threatening forms, far more insidiously contagious, and with as-yet unknown qualities with respect to lethality. And with those mutations and more to come until COVID has finally been put to rest, even greater threats will emerge from those variants.

Those mutations and their incipient threats have galvanized governments and health authorities in countries where vaccines are available and being used expeditiously to exert even greater efforts to control the disease's spread and impact. Canada's government will continue to smile and assure its population that it has everything under control and is doing all that can be done to protect them and those they care about. In the meanwhile, of course, the coronavirus raging in Canada has ample opportunity to mutate at leisure.

 

Paramedics transport a resident from Midland Gardens Care Community in Toronto. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)