Quebec to require ‘vaccine passport’
Needed for places such as gyms and bars
MONTREAL • Quebec will impose a vaccine-passport system in September in areas where COVID-19 outbreaks occur, requiring people to prove they are vaccinated to enter places such as gyms and bars, Health Minister Christian Dubé said Thursday.
The system will apply for specific periods of time in parts of Quebec where COVID-19 transmission is high, Dubé told reporters, adding that proof of vaccination will be required only to access non-essential services.
Dubé said the proposed health order will allow the government to avoid imposing fresh lockdowns if cases begin to rise in the colder months, and he said it would permit businesses to operate despite having outbreaks.
“It’s an extra tool in our management of cases and contacts,” he said. “We found an alternative to a generalized lockdown.”
Should an outbreak at a gym occur, Dubé said, “we’re not closing the gym, we’re saying that for a period, only the people that have a double dose can go to the gym. It’s a risk-management approach.”
The government is waiting until September to impose the passport system because everyone over 12 should have been able to receive two COVID-19 vaccine doses by then, Dubé said.
Details of how private businesses will be expected to verify proof of vaccination and how the state will manage an exemption system for people who can’t receive a COVID-19 vaccine for medical reasons still have to be worked out, Dubé said.
Quebec public health said 42.7 per cent of residents over 12 are considered adequately vaccinated.
The province reported 64 new cases of COVID-19 Thursday and 10 more deaths, nine of which occurred before July 1. Health officials said hospitalizations dropped by two, to 101, and 23 people were in intensive care, a drop of two. Montreal reported 25 new cases while no other region had more than 19 new cases.
Meanwhile, federal chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam says the latest variant of interest has popped up in Canada in small numbers, but it’s too early to know how widespread it is or what impact it could have.
Tam said 11 cases of the Lambda variant that was first identified in Peru last year have been reported to Health Canada. However, the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec said Thursday it has confirmed 27 cases already, all in March and April.
Lambda is just one of a “whole slew” of variants the Public Health Agency of Canada is keeping an eye on, said Tam, and watching how much is it spreading and how it will respond to vaccines.
“We’re just trying to gather up some information on who it is that’s having the Lambda variant right now, but there’s very few cases at this point,” she said.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, said there has been a pattern of panicking that vaccines won’t work every time there is a new variant.
“It’s like ‘Oh no, new mutations,’ but actually Lambda doesn’t really have new mutations, it just has new combinations of mutations that we’ve already seen before,” she said.
Early studies, including one from New York University published July 2, suggest Lambda may be a bit resistant to antibodies produced by the MRNA vaccines from Pfizer-biontech and Moderna, but concluded it is not by enough “to cause a significant loss of protection against infection.”
Rasmussen also said most vaccine tests on variants are done in labs, not people, and give an incomplete picture of how immunity from vaccines work, including T-cells, which are separate from antibodies but help kill viruses.
Rasmussen is part of a new network of Canadian scientists that launched this week specifically to collaborate on studies of COVID-19 variants.
The Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network, known informally as COVARR-NET, is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Information. It has already launched eight different studies to see how variants are spreading in Canada, including wastewater monitoring for variants in four major cities, and closer looks at how they are responding to vaccines.