It is with great relief that Canada is starting to receive a vaccine for COVID-19.
While the doses landing this past weekend are just a start, and will only be given to those who are most at risk, you can feel people sigh with relief—cautious optimism firmly in place nonetheless.
You would have to be a hermit not to understand the impact the pandemic lockdowns have had on the medical system, the economy, the mental health of all Canadians—just about every facet of our lives. And so seeing a light at the end of this tunnel is welcome indeed.
Both the provincial and federal governments are working on the plans for public distribution, and with vaccines on the horizon needing specific rollout protocols all of us will need to be ready to follow them.
One thing is clear; the majority of Canadians will need to be vaccinated (you get two doses) before this version of a coronavirus can be considered no longer a threat. And mask-wearing will need to continue for many months to come until our infection rates are way down.
I think we have seen that COVID-19 is not like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed 44 Canadians in Eastern Canada in 2003. While it did make many of us sit up, take notice and consider what this pathogen meant for us, in the end perhaps a false sense of security was imagined, as SARS didn’t transmit as easily as we have found COVID-19 does.
Then in 2009 H1N1 hit the headlines. Again, nationally there was real concern, and this time it filtered down in the population and thousands lined up outside vaccine injection sites to get immunized when it became available.
I well remember the sense of urgency as my family drove down to Vancouver to get immunized. We all felt stressed. Our kids absorbed this from us and by the time we were sitting with a public health nurse our youngest, then nine years old, wasn’t remotely feeling like rolling up his shirtsleeve.
I wouldn’t say we were feeling panicked, and I remember the long, long, long lineup outside the school building that was being used as the vaccine centre being very quiet and solemn. But there were a lot more smiles on the faces of those leaving the building than going in (there was not a mask in sight as I recall). By December of 2009 there had been 42 deaths in B.C. from H1N1.
As I write this there have been 668 deaths from COVID-19 in our province and 13,744 nationally.
This coronavirus is part of the family that has spawned both SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)—they are a species of coronavirus that infects humans, bats, and camels. Though long on the watch list of international virologists, no coronavirus vaccine had been developed for the most part by the time COVID-19 hit us because pharmaceutical companies did not see how to make money off of it. Both SARS and MERS are deadly, but not contagious enough to warrant the investment.
With COVID-19, however, many people are transmitting the virus before symptoms appear, making it far more dangerous, a more widespread pathogen, and therefore worth the investment into vaccine development.
That’s not to say research hasn’t continued on coronaviruses since 2003 (and earlier)—it has, but mostly in academic settings with nearly all of them underfunded.
On Dec. 14, the latest Angus Reid poll found an eight-per-cent rise in the number of people who want to get vaccinated immediately (up to 48 per cent), with 61 per cent of those 65 and over eager to be immunized. The percentage of those not wanting to be vaccinated remained static at seven per cent.
Today, it feels like we are on the edge of our start toward a recovery, but this will not happen if people do not get vaccinated.
B.C.’s Dr. Bonnie Henry tells us this, Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam tells us this and we hear the same thing from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease specialist in the United States.
Interviewed on CBC this weekend he said: “We’ve got to convince as many people as possible in this country and worldwide to get vaccinated when it becomes available.
“Because … if we get the overwhelming majority of the population vaccinated, we can actually get a degree of herd immunity in this country and elsewhere that could actually crush this epidemic.
“When you get a veil of immunity among the population, to a high degree, the virus has no place to go and cannot spread readily.”
Some people may feel a hesitancy about getting the vaccine given its short development period, but, said Fauci: “It’s not reckless speed, and it doesn’t compromise safety, and it doesn’t compromise scientific integrity.
“I believe, when the people who are skeptical about getting vaccinated appreciate the independence and the transparency of the process, as well as the high degree of efficacy of the vaccine, I hope that that skepticism that we see will disappear and a lot more people will get vaccinated.”
Please, let science and those who are informed on this topic guide you, and get vaccinated.
