virus

Friday November 5, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday November 5, 2021

Ontario and Quebec bow to anti-vax hospital workers

Chalk up two big points for the nation’s anti-vax brigade. And two ridiculous own-goals by the governments of Ontario and Quebec.

August 31, 2021

In a dispiriting display of spinelessness, both provinces decided Wednesday against requiring their health care workers to do the morally right and medically necessary thing — and be vaccinated against COVID-19. While Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced he would not proceed with a vaccination mandate, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dube actually scrapped a vaccination edict already in place.

Both decisions will worry and, yes, endanger patients. They won’t know whether the person treating them has had the jab and whether, if unvaccinated, that individual might put them at heightened risk of catching COVID-19. Both decisions also do a profound disservice to the overwhelming majority of health care workers who’ve acted responsibly by taking their jab. They should have the right to work in the safest environment possible, something only possible after mass vaccinations.

April 1, 2021

So why did it come to this? In both provinces, the decisions were motivated by the unsubstantiated fear that vast numbers of hospital workers would quit rather than be vaccinated. Ford cited “the potential departure of tens of thousands of health-care workers” if his government mandated vaccinations instead of leaving the decision to individual hospitals and health organizations, many of which have imposed their own vaccine requirements.

But the Ontario Hospital Association and the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario both pleaded with the premier to set down a consistent approach across the entire provincial health care system. Instead, Ford has, by default, saddled Ontarians with a confusing, far less effective, patchwork of rules. As for the premier’s numbers, they’re outdated. His own health minister, Christine Elliott, said so. And while she agreed the number of potential staff losses would have been “significant” she failed to provide precise numbers to back up her assertion.

September 15, 2021

To be fair, it’s true that at least some health care providers would be stubborn enough lose their jobs rather than be vaccinated. But rather than cave in to their threats and irrational, irresponsible behaviour, the governments of Ontario and Quebec should have stood firm and called their bluff. No health care worker would ever be forced to have a vaccine injected into their arm. But those who refused would deal with the consequences.

In marked contrast, Air Canada has stuck to its vaccine-mandate guns and suspended 8,000 of its 27,000 employees for refusing to get the jab. Its planes are still flying. The Toronto District School Board has put nearly 800 workers on unpaid leave because they failed to disclose their vaccination status. The schools remain open. If an airline trying to protect its customers and staff and a board trying to guard its students and employees are willing to go to these lengths, so should the Ontario and Quebec governments when the integrity of their hospitals is at stake. Their health care systems would have gone on, too, likely with more fully vaccinated workers.

January 27, 2021

Ford’s decision is especially puzzling considering that another branch of the provincial government, the Ministry of Long-Term Care, has mandated COVID-19 vaccines for anyone working in care homes. Workers in these facilities face termination unless they show proof of vaccination by Nov. 15. Go figure. Why do some of our key leaders seem incapable of running a mass vaccination initiative?

It now seems only a matter of time before Canadian children aged five- to 11-years-old will be eligible for a COVID vaccine. But parents aware of Ford’s laissez-faire approach to vaccinations might erroneously conclude it’s no big deal to spare their children from the jab. If that happens, the hope of reaching the 90-per-cent vaccination level that would make this province truly safe will have faded. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Friday September 17, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday September 17, 2021

‘Mad Max’ and why his party is on the rise

August 17, 2018

In 2018, after a falling out with his party and amid a backlash over statements he made about immigration and multiculturalism, then member of Parliament Maxime Bernier quit the Conservatives and formed his own federal party.

Mr Bernier, a former Canadian foreign minister, is a populist with a libertarian bent who supporters have nicknamed “Mad Max”. He has previously described his upstart party, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), as a coalition of people “disenchanted with traditional politicians”.

The PPC has a wide-ranging platform that includes limiting immigration, an end to corporate welfare, a pro-firearms stance, and a rejection of what it terms “climate change alarmism”.

April 27, 2021

However, one issue above all has come to the forefront in the 2021 election: vaccine mandates and lockdowns.

Mr Bernier, 58, has been a vocal opponent of the what he calls “authoritarian” restrictions, claiming in an August rally, for example, that vaccine passports “will create two kinds of citizens, some with more rights than others”.

Such statements are “a huge part of the story behind the surge [for the PPC]”, said Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, a political studies professor at Queens University.

“A lot of this has been generated by the party seizing on the sense that anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine passport sentiments exist in the population.”

September 15, 2021

Polling data suggests that this message is gaining momentum among some Canadian voters even while the country has some of the world’s highest vaccination rates – over 80%.

Recent tracking poll numbers from CBC, for example, ranked the PPC in fourth place nationally at 6.5% – ahead of the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois, which only runs candidates in Quebec. (The Liberals and the Conservative are in a statistical tie at around 30%).

In the 2019 election, by comparison, the PPC earned just 1.6% of the popular vote and Mr Bernier lost his own seat.

A significant portion of the party’s swelling support base comes from first time or irregular voters, as well as siphoning support from the Conservatives in parts of their western Canada political strongholds, said Prof Goodyear-Grant.

Federal Election 2021

“They are taking some support from all the other parties as well, which suggests there are people across all parties that are opposed to some of the [pandemic] measures that have been put in place,” she said.

Provinces like Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia have all in recent weeks brought in vaccine passport systems that limit access in certain settings as cases rise in a fourth pandemic wave. (BBC News) 

 

Thursday May 27, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday May 27, 2021

Ford solicits advice on reopening Ontario schools

Premier Doug Ford took the unusual step of publicly soliciting advice from medical experts, children’s hospitals and health organizations on how Ontario could go about reopening schools before the end of the academic year next month.

April 8, 2021

In a letter addressed to 55 different groups and people, Ford reiterated that his government has struggled to find consensus on school reopenings, and that it needs input before moving forward with a decision.

Why Ford waited until May 27, and gave the recipients until 5 p.m. Friday to answer, is unclear.

“In recent weeks, there has been a wide range of advice and commentary around the reopening of schools in Ontario,” Ford said in the letter.

“There is consensus in some quarters on how, when and whether schools should reopen, and diverse and conflicting views in others.”

November 12, 2020

He added that new modelling expected in the coming days will show that, if schools were to reopen, there could be between 2,000 and 4,000 more cases of COVID-19 by the end of July compared to if they remain closed.

Ford went on to once again express his concerns about virus variants of concern, particularly the variant first identified in India, and its impact on children. He also pointed to emerging evidence that suggests COVID-19 vaccines are potentially less effective against the variant found in India.

According to Ford, only 41 per cent of teachers and education workers have received a first dose of vaccine, compared to about 62 per cent of Ontario adults in the general population.

August 6, 2020

“Ultimately, this is our government’s decision, but in light of the foregoing, and the diversity of perspectives on the safety of reopening schools, I am asking for your views on a number of issues,” Ford said.

Sketch

Earlier this week, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health — who is also listed as a recipient of Ford’s letter — said he would like to see students back in class before the province begins its formal reopening process in mid-June.

Dr. David Williams said most public health units in the province support the reopening of schools, which have been shut to in-person learning since early April.

“My position has been always like our public health measures table and our medical officers of health, that feel that schools should be the last to close and the first to open,” Williams told a news conference on Tuesday. It was the same day that a group of researchers studying how the pandemic has affected children warned of a “generational catastrophe.” (CBC) 

 

Tuesday May 4, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday May 4, 2021

Ontario government needs to wake up and make nursing homes a top priority

May 16, 2020

The people of Ontario didn’t need two new reports to tell them Doug Ford’s government was missing in action when COVID-19 hit the province’s nursing homes last year.

The deaths of nearly 4,000 long-term-care residents and 11 employees during the pandemic had already spoken for themselves. And that grim message amounted to a scathing indictment of governmental ineptitude at the highest levels. 

Yet for all this, Ontarians really did need Friday’s report from the Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission along with the one from Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk two days earlier. They’re essential for telling us what we should — make that must — do for the sake of the 115,000 of the province’s most vulnerable citizens who live in nursing homes today.

According to the commission, the Ford government was completely without a comprehensive plan to protect nursing homes when the pandemic hit. Then, not only was its response “slow, unco-ordinated and lacking in urgency,” it failed to heed the lessons of the first wave. As a result, more residents died in the second wave than the initial one.

November 19, 2020

For its part, the auditor-general’s report denounced not only the current provincial government but governments stretching back over a decade. Not one of them followed up on the recommendations made by an expert panel after the 2003 SARS outbreak to prepare long-term-care facilities for a future health-care crisis. 

Not one of them addressed the concerns about the litany of long-standing weaknesses that had been identified in the nursing-home system. And so the province’s nursing homes, which consume seven per cent of the health-care budget, became pandemic disaster zones.

For some Ontarians, this may all sound painfully familiar, something they’d just as soon forget after they condemn the current government. 

But these two reports are important for more than putting on the record a precise diagnosis of what went so badly wrong in the province’s nursing homes over the past year. Their greatest, and hopefully most lasting, value will be in the prescription they offer for what should be done now.

May 27, 2020

The best way forward will demand more funding, more and better-paid staff, an end to overcrowded wards, better coordination with the rest of the health-care system and — for goodness sake — a pandemic plan. Ontario also needs a new model for building and managing new nursing homes, and the Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission came up with a promising proposal for one. 

It recommends constructing new homes that are paid for upfront by private investors who receive a return on their capital with profit over time. However the homes will be operated and the residents cared for by a mission-driven organization. It could be public, not-for-profit or for-profit. But the sole focus of those running the homes must be the care of the residents and certainly not returns for investors.

January 27, 2021

What matters now is what the Ford government and the people of this province commit to doing with this and all the other ideas in these reports. Ontario Long-Term Care Minister Merrilee Fullerton promised Monday to adopt many of the recommendations from the commission’s 332-page report. But what else could she say?

Governments and the public have notoriously short memories. Premier Ford will face many expensive demands for all kinds of changes coming out of this pandemic.

The only way to ensure Ontario’s nursing homes never experience another catastrophe like COVID-19 is to make the homes an absolute, non-negotiable priority. The government will say they are. But only the people of Ontario, the people who vote and pay taxes, can guarantee the government acts. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Tuesday March 30, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday March 30, 2021

Canada falls behind on barcode technology for COVID-19 vaccine tracking

Millions of COVID-19 vaccines set to pour into Canada will carry a tiny barcode that would allow the package to be tracked all along the supply chain, and could even help to connect a patient’s digital vaccination record to a specific dose. That level of tracking is taking place in other countries such as the United States – but won’t happen in Canada because the country lacks the technology to scan those barcodes.

February 25, 2021

It’s a frustrating gap for those who have been pushing for such an ability since the 1990s. As a recent Deloitte report on the COVID-19 vaccination campaign pointed out, these barcodes can go a long way to “reduce errors and improve efficiency and safety.”

The technology is available – cellphones and tablets can scan these barcodes with the right software. But the barcode issue reveals larger problems with Canada’s fragmented and outdated health infrastructure – it involves 14 jurisdictions doing 14 different things, sacrificing efficiency for independence.

December 21, 2016

Currently, some provinces are tracking supplies by manually updating spreadsheets and logging by hand the lot number of administered vaccines. Ontario and Quebec have devised a more advanced database of their available vaccines, but it still relies on someone manually entering the serial numbers of vaccine shipments.

Other countries have figured this out: Vaccinators in the U.S. are scanning COVID-19 vaccine shipments and individual doses, allowing states to build accurate and timely databases of who has been vaccinated. Ireland and Turkey are also relying on these barcodes. The World Health Organization is encouraging every country to use them to promote efficiency and fight counterfeiting.

June 13, 2019

n Canada “should have been written in the pandemic plan.”

There was a plan to make these barcodes central to Canada’s public-health system, and there was a time when Canada was ahead in digitizing its health system “by a decade,” Dr. Van Exan said. Canada’s 1998 vaccine strategy first proposed barcoding vaccines to promote efficiency and accuracy. The 2003 SARS epidemic, and the creation of the Public Health Agency of Canada, hastened that work.

In normal times, Canada administers millions of vaccines a year for diseases such as mumps and influenza. Provinces slowly adopted digitized immunization records in the early 2000s, but continued entering all the data manually: Audits of some provincial systems found fully 15 per cent of immunization records were incomplete, nearly a quarter had inaccurate information, and crucial data was missing from one in five adverse-reaction reports. (Continued: Globe & Mail)