The first 30,000 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrived in Canada from Belgium early Monday morning (Dec. 14) — the vaccine was then sent to injection sites in each of Canada’s 10 provinces — in a move that marked the official launch of the largest vaccination campaign in Canadian history.
On Tuesday, the Canadian federal government announced an agreement with Moderna to receive 168,000 doses of the company’s new crown vaccine by the end of the year, once it is approved by health Canada.
The federal government has now committed to a schedule for the New Crown vaccination that will allow all Canadians to receive the vaccination free of charge by the end of next September.
“A milestone event”
As a result of the New Crown outbreak, Canada officially implemented a national quarantine and home-based measure in mid-March of this year. For ten months, the public experienced a mixture of disappointment, anxiety and worry, most notably because of uncertainty about when the outbreak would draw to a close. The rapid development of the new crown vaccine and its official launch are certainly encouraging.
The first person to receive the vaccine in Canada was Gisele Levesque, an 89-year-old woman from a local home for the elderly in Quebec. She seemed calm throughout the vaccination process.
Dr. Gaynor Watson-Creed, deputy chief health officer for the Canadian province of Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast, said at a press conference, “I think it’s really a landmark day.”
And Howard Njoo, deputy minister of Public Health Canada, lamented at Wednesday’s press conference, “Never in my career have I seen anything like the response to the new coronavirus, where the entire international community of health agencies united in a really unusual pace of technology and innovation.”
Song Ge, a nurse at a nursing home in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, was one of the first people to receive the New Crown vaccination. In an interview with the Voice of America, he said directly, “I’m really thankful for the development and advancement of human medicine, which was unbelievable before, and, it’s the first vaccine in human history to be made with mRNA (information ribonucleic acid) technology.”
Earlier this year, the Canadian federal government sent a special task force to book neo-coronavirus vaccines globally with seven vaccine manufacturers that have the potential to be successful. The total number of neo-coronaviruses scheduled in Canada exceeds 400 million doses to ensure that its nearly 38 million people are vaccinated in a timely manner. Canada is considering donating any potential excess vaccine to countries in need.
Which populations are given priority for vaccination?
In Canada, health and wellness matters are under the jurisdiction of individual provincial governments. Who will be given priority for vaccination once the new vaccine arrives?
The consensus between the Canadian federal and provincial governments is that in the first phase of vaccination, priority will be given to nurses and seniors in long-term care homes/nursing homes, seniors over the age of 80, and front-line health care workers in the New Crown outbreak.
Nurse Song Ge told Voice of America that the nursing home where she works has had multiple outbreaks in the past few months and has endured a lot psychologically. So she felt “eager” to be among the first to receive the new coronavirus vaccine. However, she also admitted that some of her colleagues were concerned about the safety of the vaccine.
As for how she felt when she received the New Coronavirus vaccine, she said easily, “Nothing special, we as nurses need to get the flu shot every year, it’s the same as getting the flu shot.”
In addition, Aboriginal communities are included in the priority vaccination population because those communities are remote and have poorer medical care, but the number of people infected with the new coronavirus is rising.
The second priority group recommended by the Canadian government to receive the vaccine includes people who provide essential services such as police officers, firefighters, and food store employees, as well as homeless people and people serving prison sentences.
Putting vaccine safety first
The rapid development and launch of Pfizer and Modeno’s new coronavirus vaccine has raised concerns about its safety.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau handed out a big reassurance to the public in response, saying at a press conference, “I assure Canadians that any vaccine passed in Canada is both safe and effective.”
Wang Pui-chung, a professor of epidemiology at Memorial University in Canada, also repeatedly emphasized in an interview with Voice of America that the New Crown vaccine is very safe.
He explained, “The mRNA vaccine technology has actually been around for a number of years, and was developed into a vaccine by Modeno back when the Zika virus emerged in South America. But clinical trials could not be done at that time because the outbreak was contained. And this time, there is a second major outbreak (of the new crown) — which is a bad thing, of course, but also significantly shortens the time to test the vaccine.”
Professor Wang Pui-chung also specifically explained that in response to the New Crown outbreak, health authorities in several countries cooperated in the simultaneous approval of the New Crown vaccine, which also shortened the speed of the vaccine launch.
He said, “In the past, the vaccine approval process waited until all the documents were available before starting to look at them, but this time, the CDCs in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. have started reviewing the documents while the clinical trials are going on, which is a synchronized process to speed up the process, so people should rest assured. At the same time, it has independent safety testing committees during the clinical trials, so there will be no neglect of safety in order to launch the vaccine as soon as possible.”
Professor Wang Pui-chung also explained the medical principles of the mRNA vaccine.
He said, “This vaccine doesn’t need to deal with the virus, it just needs to get that genetic information of the viral protein and use the human body as a processing plant to make a substance similar to the viral protein, and the muscle will mistake it for the virus coming in, and it will produce antibodies and then immunity. So, people don’t have to worry, the (new crown) vaccination won’t infect you because the vaccine itself doesn’t carry the virus.”
Vaccination action plan will be rolled out gradually
Health agencies in Canada, both federal and provincial, have been preparing for this “new crown vaccination” battle for a long time, but the difficulties encountered have been unprecedented. For example, the storage of Pfizer vaccines requires special refrigeration equipment to ensure that the temperature is between -70 and 80 degrees Celsius. Therefore, for some remote areas in Canada, there are great difficulties in storage and delivery.
The Modeno vaccine, which is expected to be approved soon, has reduced requirements for storage environment, but it also needs to be stored at -20 degrees Celsius.
Currently, the Canadian government is rapidly expanding injection sites as well as adding special refrigeration equipment.
In the meantime, both the Pfizer and Modeno vaccines require two injections to ensure the effectiveness of the vaccine, separated by three weeks. It will also be a test of coordination between community public health departments to ensure that everyone receives both injections on time.
The Canadian government expects to receive a total of 6 million doses of either Pfizer or Modeno vaccine by next April, meaning that 3 million people will be vaccinated — 8 percent of Canada’s population.
Starting next April, Canada will launch a mass vaccination of the general population.
How will the vaccination coverage be ensured?
According to experts, at least 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated in order for the vaccine to be effective in achieving herd immunity. The Canadian press has previously discussed the introduction of “new crown vaccination certificates” or employer requirements for employees to be vaccinated in order to promote vaccination rates. However, legal professionals immediately pointed out that these practices are likely to lead to lawsuits.
In response to a question from the Voice of America, Nova Scotia’s Premier Stephen McNeil described his plan for universal vaccination.
He said, “Our plan is to make sure over the next few months that the people of the province have easy access to vaccinations and easy access to the right information – we’re building that communication tool and will also keep it up to date as more information about vaccines becomes available. “
In a bit of reassuring news for health officials and experts, a national survey conducted by Angus Reid Polling after the Pfizer vaccine arrived in Canada showed that 48 per cent wanted the new crown vaccine immediately, while 31 per cent said they would eventually get the vaccine – both of which accounted for 79 per cent of those surveyed, compared to 14 per cent who actually refused the vaccine.
Vaccinated is not the end all be all
The start of the new crown vaccination offers hope that Canada will finally overcome the pandemic. But recently, medical experts as well as public health officials have repeatedly reminded Canadians that there is still a considerable amount of time before the vaccine actually produces herd immunity and that it should never be taken lightly. Moreover, there is still a side to the new crown vaccine that people don’t understand.
The past two months have seen a second spike in Canada’s neo-crown outbreak. This Thursday, the number of new infections in a single day reached 4,763. Canadian provinces with serious outbreaks, such as Quebec in the east, Manitoba in the center, and Alberta in the west, have announced stricter quarantine policies in the run-up to the Christmas and New Year holidays to avoid a spike in infections and a run on health care resources after the holidays.
Professor Wang Pui-chung, on the other hand, urged that we have gone through ten months of quarantine and now we finally see hope, but it will still take several months before the real epidemic passes, so we must persevere until the end.
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