Yesterday evening on “As it Happens” on CBC, Fabien Paquett - Pfizer’s Canada’s vaccine lead said:
Right now we are providing increased volumes of vaccines. And actually, if you take the month of May, we will be delivering over two million doses in Canada per week.
In June, we will be delivering 2.4 million doses per week for a total of 12 million. So basically, by the end of June, there will be 30 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines delivered in Canada.
BC is looking to vaccinate kids over 12 now, and they are also hoping to get second shots into everyone faster than initially thought.
(From CTV News May 4:) Increasing supply means B.C. residents may not have to wait 4 months between COVID vaccine doses
In re-reading this part of your post, I have become more puzzled. I wonder if you could comment on:
I’m confused as to how the federal government screw-ups (acknowledged) have anything to to with ALBERTA’S current covid situation? Did the feds somehow not help Alberta as much as the other provinces? Withhold vaccines? Not give as much in Covid payments to Albertans? Anything?
Do you think that a Conservative government would have managed to create a Canadian home grown vaccine fast enough that it would be getting 2 million doses PER WEEK out to the provinces this month? (And that’s just Pfizer, not counting the others). From what I’ve read, this was not possible.
What is it with Conservatives and Trudeau? As far as I know, he is not the entirety of the federal government. There are others who actually do stuff. Does it have anything to do with the Conservatives last campaign, which consisted of mainly (IMO) “We Hate Trudeau And So Should You”?
Incidentally, you seem to write off the anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers and anti-government folks in Alberta as a bunch of stupid rural rednecks who think that 5G towers cause Covid. My experience with A LOT of people I know in Alberta belies this caricature. I know a lot of people in Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer and Lethbridge that blame Trudeau for Covid, think that masks are an affront to their freedom, and are breaking health rules regularly. These are not stupid people. But they have bought into the complete and utter bullshit that is being fed to them.
Kenney and his party created this. They rode the bullshit train in the early days with the best of them. “Just like the flu.” “It will be gone soon.” “Best summer Alberta has had soon”. He suckered a bunch of people in. Good people. And apparently, the thing to do now is to blame Trudeau, because that’s their only go-to policy now.
Given that you’re the one asking the question, I expect you want the answer to be “yes”. But your point is well-taken: we just don’t know why some places have major outbreaks of COVID while other places don’t. Who’s doing fine and who isn’t is constantly changing, and doesn’t even really depend on the population’s behaviour or the government’s measures. It’s almost as if it’s totally random. But people sure do love to fight the culture war and to pretend that the COVID numbers have proven them right about everything.
I’ve got nothing against Quebec. My favorite politician in the country is in Quebec. I don’t like all of Quebec’s policies, but that’s about it.
For quite a while Alberta was doing a lot better than other places in Canada, and I heard lots of Albertans crowing about it. And within Alberta, for quite a long time Edmonton was doing much better than Calgary, and my Lefty Edmontonian friends were crowing about how superior they were to the ‘Rednecks’ in Calgary. Then the situation flipped.
Brazil didn’t lock down, and Bolsonaro was proclaiming their superior approach and how smart they were. Then Covid hit them really hard.
My attitude then as now was that if you don’t know why your numbers are out of control, and you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, mayb you should keep your mouth shut and have a little humility.
Anyone going on a tear now about we Alberta troglodytes and how we’ve failed Covid had better really hope that the tables don’t turn as they have many times already. But some people just can’t help themselves from using a pandemic as a political weapon.
I always wear a mask outdoors. I don’t go anywhere I don’t have to. I wash my hands constantly and I got my shot the minute I could sign up for it. And yet, I’m not willing to berate people who think lockdowns are a bad idea, because quite honestly the cost-benefit is just not clear.
I can make arguments for both cases, and maybe it’s a good thing that we have people who resist joining the herd on principle sometimes because it helps keep the debate alive, which is a valuable thing to do. Because sometimes the herd is wrong - especially in complex, emotional situations involving a novel virus we don’t fully understand.
I just got my first Moderna (modified RNA) shot last Saturday. I didn’t even feel it till the next day. My sister in BC got her first shot a few days later. But she can’t get her second shot for 4 months. I thought: “However, your second dose may be given up to 6 weeks (42 days) after the first dose, if necessary” https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/second-shot.html#:~:text=•%20If%20you%20received%20the,)%20after%20your%20first.
Second shots are going to happen significantly sooner than four months, except for the relatively few people who got their first shots in February. We have enough vaccine coming in May to approach 75% of adults with their first shot by the end of the month. Some time around then demand for first shots will start dropping and they’ll start in on second shots. At that point scheduled deliveries are quite a lot higher than they were when we started the first shots first strategy, and so the round of second shots will happen on a shorter timeframe than the first round. People getting first shots this month probably won’t wait much over two months for their second shot.
I have no idea why “up to four months if necessary” is being taken by so many people as “will absolutely be a full four months.”
Based on developments to date, this definitely appears to be the case. Vaccine supplies are definitely ramping up fast, especially Pfizer, and to some degree Moderna. My major concern is how effectively the provincial bureaucracies will handle the necessary rescheduling. So far, though, my experience with the scheduling website for Ontario and the email and text notifications has been excellent. I got email and text notifications within seconds of booking my first appointment, and another email with an official vaccination record just after getting the shot, in addition to the paper record I was provided with. So hopefully they can stay on top of the rescheduling.
I am unaware of any experts who believe this. And there have been studies showing that places that locked down did better economically.
The reason a lot of us respond like we do is that so, so many people are willing to ignore the science and the experts. The idea that we should ignore the expert consensus because some non-expert might be right is bad logic. This is very, very rarely the case—the accepted wisdom only gets challenged by other scientist.
I have not encountered anyone who questions the general consensus about masks, lockdowns, social distancing, etc. who are doing so because they’re following some scientist. It’s always a political choice, based on something they read on Facebook or something.
That said, I would not attack Albertans any more than I would want people to attack Arkansans. I will go after our government, the antimaskers, the ones who post the laughing emoji at deaths, but not the whole state.
I do understand how that feels. And I frown upon the idea of broadbrushing a group of people.
Of course there’s general rural/urban split that matches party affiliation. But that’s not universal. You can normally find liberals in rural areas and conservatives in cities, and you still can. I just meant the split between lockdown advocates and not is even more split rural/urban than political preference. And it’s pretty obvious why. Rural people feel less threat from the virus, and the exposure to others they get is usually in small groups anyway.
If we could do lockdowns more granularly we’d recognize this and have different protocols. Meeting up with someone who rarely meets more than say 10-20:people per week is a much lower risk than meeting someone who is exposed to hundreds or thousands. One-size-fits-all lockdowns are probably overkill for rural folk, or if they are not they are not stringent enough for city people, because they can’t possibly be optimized for both. Either way, rural people tend to feel over-controlled because of their lower perception of risk.
Here’s a decent paper reviewing various cost/benefit studies of lockdown policies:
It’s not easy to get a real handle on either the cost of lockdowns or their benefits. There are many variables, including the willingness of the populatiin to take preventative measures without a lockdown, or their willingness to disobey lockdown orders. It also matters what kind of local economy there is, the age of the population, population density, etc.
To be clear, I’m not taking a position against lockdowns. But I’m open minded about it, as I think it’s complex and may be different from region to region.
how does any fuckup in national vaccine supply translate into ALBERTA having more cases? Did the federal government deliberately send less vaccine to Alberta in particular?
what is the likelyhood of getting a quick Canadian home-grown vaccine by re-starting vaccine production from scratch, versus contracting for supply from a wide variety of companies? At that point in the pandemic, we didn’t even know which kind of vaccine would work the best, and which area of worldwide research would bear fruit. And instead of hedging our bets by contracting from a variety of companies that were researching, you think starting a lab essentially from scratch would have been a good idea?
Especially since the type of lab would depend on the type of vaccine. As far as I can tell, the production line for the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine is quite different from the production line for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. The production facilities couldn’t be built unless it was known with certainty which one would be successful. Turns out these four are, but they have different production methods.
Starting a lab from scratch IS what Trudeau did, rather than re-opening facilities already set up to make vaccines. Instead, he chose to build a brand new facility in Montreal. Now it’s a year late, and we are paying a price for that.
As for Alberta, there is still much we don’t understand about the virus. Yes, non-compliance may be a problem, but other places have been non-compliant without the spike we are seeing.
I notice you weren’t incensed at all when Quebec was having a terrible outbreak, and you don’t seem remotely bothered by the fact that for some reason almost three times as many per capita in Quebec have died from Covid as in Alberta.
For the record, Quebec has had 1,296 deaths per million people. Alberta: 484. Ontario: 572. Manitoba: 728. Quebec is a real outlier in deaths per capita, and Alberta is actually below the Canadian average of 657 deaths per million
But I’m not going to criticize any province, because there is still a lot we don’t understand about this pandemic. The fact that these numbers vary so much should cause you to have a little humility when throwing shots at the residents of a province during a novel pandemic.
The facilities you refer to could not be simply “re-opened” as simply as you postulate. Virology and vaccine labs don’t just sit there waiting for someone to unlock the door. I suggest you analyze your source of this information a little more carefully. Vaccines were sourced from a variety of different companies who were researching them, before we even knew which one, if any would work, or go into production. This was a prudent course of action, rather than just imagining that there was a vacant lab, equipped and staffed, all ready to go.
And please answer this one:
how does any fuckup in national vaccine supply translate into ALBERTA having more cases? Did the federal government deliberately send less vaccine to Alberta in particular?
Per the Alberta Minister of Justice, the people at fault are the provincial NDP and federals Liberals…oh and the media for good measure.
“My point is that I don’t think it will be responsible to simply wait until we have a disaster on our hands. That’s what the NDP, the media and the federal Liberals were looking for and want. We simply couldn’t allow that to happen.”
So he’s saying directly that the media and opposition political parties WANTED expressly to wait until there was a disaster.
This is the “blame others” rhetoric coming from the highest levels of Alberta government. This is not the rantings of a rural person who feels “over controlled” or a crazy rural conspiracy theorist. This is the person responsible for law enforcement in the entire province.
But your point is well-taken: we just don’t know why some places have major outbreaks of COVID while other places don’t. Who’s doing fine and who isn’t is constantly changing, and doesn’t even really depend on the population’s behaviour or the government’s measures. It’s almost as if it’s totally random. But people sure do love to fight the culture war and to pretend that the COVID numbers have proven them right about everything.