That’s interesting. I had an idea who that might be, but just so I’m clear, you do mean current politician, not your favourite politician of all time, right?
Who does you refer to here? To @Euphonious_Polemic? I have no idea what they said during the first COVID wave and I don’t really care, but just so you know, some people definitely did accuse Quebec of being responsible for its deaths during the first wave, with language just as harsh (and maybe more) as the one you now hear about Alberta. I mean, there was that University of Ottawa professor and Twitter warrior who straight up accused premier François Legault of genocide or something.
What you need to realize, @Sam_Stone, is that “Quebec” and “Alberta” aren’t the yin and yang of Canada. If someone’s now (probably unfairly, as you point out) criticizing Alberta, that doesn’t mean they were previously “soft on Quebec”. I feel this sort of dichotomous thinking has many negative consequences, among them precluding the rise of a populist political movement in the country that isn’t completely toxic.
CBC article indicates that the data is supporting a longer gap between 1st and 2nd shots; immunity from 1st shots alone is doing well, and spreading it around for first shots is increasing population immunity generally.
Things are really proceeding rapidly, which is great to see.
In the last week my wife and all of my adult nieces and nephews have been vaccinated (1st shot), and my 15 year old daughter with asthma is scheduled for tomorrow. Today’s announcement means that my 12 year old can register in 2 weeks.
Ontario hit 60% of adults with at least one shot today. We are forecasted to have sufficient vaccine to cover 86% of the population with two shots by the end of July and the delay in 2nd shots seems to provide more immunity than the original 3 or 4 week pattern.
How does any kind of screw-up at the federal level translate into Alberta’s high case count? Were they treated differently in terms of vaccine delivery by the Feds?
Now that we have some data that says the delay in the second shot was actually a pretty good idea, do you want to change your mind here, or at least acknowledge that maybe someone in charge knew more than you did?
There’s a reason that both Canada and the UK did this. The first shot provides a lot of protection, and every other vaccine has a longer wait before the first shot and the booster than 3 week. Pfizer tested 3 weeks in a gamble to get to market faster, and the gamble paid off. But it would have been really surprising if the booster didn’t work properly after a longer wait. The risk was never “it won’t work*”, the risk was a tradeoff between stronger immunity for some sooner vs. significant immunity for more sooner. Which is preferable? Which reduces death more? Which reduces the overall spread more?
*I mean, anything is possible, and I suppose the booster might not have worked later. But that was always extremely inplausible.
Exactly right. The recommendations to delay the 2nd shots to get more 1st shots into people was based on solid scientific knowledge of vaccines and public health modelling of population dynamics. And unsurprisingly it turned out to be a good idea.
Yet some folks want to pretend it was entirely a political decision (and a poor one at that) in order to support an on-going hate fest with a particular Canadian politician. Unfortunately, this is all too common.
I’m revisiting my prediction from April 9 where I claimed we were 3-4 weeks behind the US in vaccination progress. According to CDC COVID Data Tracker the US is at 47.5% with at least one dose, while Canada is at 46.2% (both figures based on total population, not just adults). Given the current rates of vaccination, we will pass the US sometime before Friday.
Some naysayers will point out that our population is overwhelmingly single shot vs. fully vaccinated, but as others are saying, you can’t get a second shot if you never get a first shot. Our current path to 80% fully vaccinated is 93 days from now.
Given there were no vaccines until 180 days ago, I think we can be proud of both the government getting their act together and citizens getting vaccinated. I won’t forget the fumbles made at all levels of government and I will be asking my elected officials some very hard questions come the next elections about how they will fix the problems in the system.
The U.S. has fully vaccinated 38% of the population, and given at least one vaccine to 48%. . Canada has fully vaccinated 3.8%. That’s 1/10 of the number. You are cherry-picking statistics to make Canada’s response look better than it is. If we were giving both vaccines like the U.S. is in the same ratio, the number of people with at least one vaccine would be around 28% and fully vaccinated around 18%.
I agree with our policy of giving out all the first shots before administering the second, given our supply troubles, but that gives a false sense of progress. We are a little better than about halfway to the U.S.'s level of vaccination.
We will eventually catch up, but that’s mainly because as we get closer to having the population vaccinated, the remaining holdouts will become harder and harder to convince. Neither we or the U.S. will get to 100% vaccinated, and the rate will slow down dramatically as we and they approach it.
But right now, we are still way behind in complete 2-shot vaccinations, and will remain that way for a significant time to come.
I repeat, I am not cherry picking. We have two metrics - first shot and fully vaccinated. If I was cherry picking I would be comparing our first shots to the US fully vaccinated and gloating about how well we are doing. Or I would compare our best province to their worst state.
Our strategy is clearly working and the evidence shows that the immune response with a 12 week gap is up to 3 times higher than a 3-4 week gap. The shorter gap was introduced to help complete the trials in the least amount of time, not to find the optimal gap. On this, we made an educated guess and beat the odds.
The US is approaching their limit of non-vaccine hesitant people and it is significantly lower than Canada. In the last 2 weeks they have only added 3.3% of the population with a first shot.
According to this, we are 25th in the world for 1st shots per capita, directly behind the US, and we are 9th in the world for absolute numbers. Of the per capita countries ahead of us 15 are TINY (Malta, Guernsey, Aruba, etc.)
I don’t know how you can still be sticking to the story that Canada is doing a poor job of this. I’d like to be #1, but not everyone can be.
The number of antibodies is about three times higher. If you read any of the studies, they all publish antibody titers on a log (base 10) scale. And the numbers spread out pretty widely. The biological significance of a factor of three is likely rather small.
I mean, it’s great news, and I agree that Canada picked a good strategy and it’s working well. And i wont be surprised if by fall they have more fully vaccinated people than the US, as we are running out of people who want it. I just don’t want to overstate the impact of the timing difference.
It’s almost like someone is starting with the premise of “Trudeau is bad”, and then is working everything around this central theme. After all, we’ve been told that it’s Trudeau’s fault that Alberta’s case load was the highest in North America for a while there. No explanation how that logically follows, but there you go.
When you replied to my post when I queried what is wrong with Alberta’s high case count, and noted that folks there seemed to be blaming Trudeau for this.
Your reply:
As for blaming Trudeau - why not? He has fucked up at almost every point in this pandemic, starting with his refusal to re-open available vaccine facilities in favor of building a new one in Montreal which won’t be ready until the end of the year, leaving us at the mercy of other governments. We’re now being told by his government that it’s totally OK to wait four months between Pfizer shots - a claim Pfizer itself came out to say had no basis in science. More likely they just worked back from when they think they can deliver the next shot, and decided to call it science.
So… I asked why Albertans were blaming Trudeau for their high case count. You agreed that it was indeed Trudeau’s fault and launched into explanations why.
Subsequently, when asked to clarify exactly how failing to instantly re-open facilities impacted Alberta in particular, we were greeted with silence.
Perhaps ‘Cherry picking’ isn’t the right term. More like framing in the best possible way. For example, it would be just as easy to say, “The U.S. has fully vaccinated 38% of the population, while we’ve only fully vaccinated a tenth as many. Our single shot stats are now up to almost U.S. levels, but we’re only doing that well because we had to use up our limited supply on the first shot.” Same facts, different spin.
The truth is in the middle. We got off to a very late start due to supply problems, but as supply is picking up so are our vaccination efforts. Had we been vaccinating at this rate from the beginning, we’d probably be doing better than the U.S., but we still have a lot of catching ip to do.
In an interview with CBC’s Power & Politics , Champagne said the federal investment is designed to reverse “four decades of decline” in the country’s biomanufacturing sector.
Once at the forefront of global vaccine development, Canada’s life sciences sector has been hollowed out after years of paltry investments by both governments and the private sector.
Champagne said Canada had trouble luring any of the big vaccine players to Canada in the early days of this pandemic because there was so little fill-and-finish capacity available here to mass produce shots. (Finish-and-fill refers to the process of filling vials with vaccine and finishing the process of packaging the product for distribution.)
When the pandemic began, Canada — unlike many other countries — lacked a facility that could be retooled easily to produce the viral vector COVID-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson, or the mRNA products offered by Pfizer and Moderna.
I can’t find any information anywhere about the “available vaccine facilities” that Sam Stone talked about earlier in the thread. The ones that Trudeau negligently failed to open up and that would have enabled Canada to produce millions of vaccines within months. Any cites would be appreciated.