One dose almost as effective?

It’s not just what you write, but linking to or reposting defamatory material might put you in legal jeopardy

OTTAWA — There is compelling evidence that a single dose of COVID-19 vaccines may provide almost as much protection as giving two doses, Canada’s deputy chief public health officer said Thursday.

Dr. Howard Njoo said the advisory committee of federal and provincial public health officers is having an active discussion about whether Canada would be better served to delay the second doses of vaccines in a bid to give protection to more vulnerable people quicker.

“These are what I would call early data in terms of a vaccine effectiveness or studies,” he said. “And the indications are that there’s a good level of protection after just one dose.”

Canada intends to vaccinate three million people with two doses by the end of March.

More than 990,000 Canadians have received at least one dose, and about one-third of those have also received their second doses.

Quebec’s immunization committee went as far Thursday as to recommend nobody get a second dose until a first dose is injected into everyone in six high-risk groups, including people over 70, health-care workers, and people who live in long-term care homes and retirement residences.

The committee reported that single doses have been 80% effective at preventing COVID-19 so far among long-term care residents and health workers who were vaccinated.

Questions about delaying the second doses arose almost as soon as vaccinations began in December, prompting a whirlwind of debate among scientists about the ethics of “going off label.”

Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines — the two currently authorized in Canada — were tested by giving two doses, 21 days and 28 days apart respectively.

But Dr. Danuta Skowronski, the epidemiology lead for influenza and emerging respiratory pathogens at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, said data show two weeks after one dose of either vaccine, the protection against COVID-19 was almost as good as what was found after two doses.

Skowronski and Dr. Dr. Gaston De Serres from the Institut national de sante publique du Quebec made the case in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

Moderna reported itself that two weeks after one dose, those who got the vaccine were 92% less likely to develop COVID-19 symptoms.

Pfizer and BioNTech, whose vaccine uses similar genetic technology to Moderna’s, said their vaccine was 52% effective after one dose, but 94.5% effective after two.

Skowronski said Pfizer started measuring illness as soon as the injections were given, which she said is “unreasonable.”

“It’s basic vaccinology that you don’t expect the vaccine to activate the immune system instantaneously,” she said, in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Skowronski said if you wait two weeks to start counting infections, there were 92% fewer infections of COVID-19 among those who got one dose of the vaccine, compared with those who got the placebo.

At that level of protection, she said “we need to get a first dose into our priority populations, and the most vulnerable of those at greatest risk of severe outcomes and the precious resource of our front-line health-care workers.”

She said the second dose should eventually be given but said there isn’t a maximum time she would put on how long to wait.

Pfizer has issued caution about adjusting the dosing schedule but said the decision to do so rests with local authorities.

“We at Pfizer believe that it is critical for health authorities to carry on surveillance on implemented alternative dosing schedules to ensure that vaccines provide the maximum possible protection,” the company’s statement reads.

Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization said in January that the recommended schedule should be followed wherever possible but that delaying a second dose up to six weeks could be beneficial, particularly with a shortage of supplies and a fast-spreading virus.

Skowronski said waiting six weeks instead of three or four for a second dose won’t do much.

“That’s not maximizing coverage that we need to undertake with the scarcity of the vaccine that is available now.”

Several provinces have been delaying the second doses a couple of weeks, particularly as deliveries of both Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine and Moderna’s slowed to a crawl in mid-January.

Those delays appear to be over. Pfizer says it will ship nearly three million doses over the next six weeks, and Moderna promises to ship more than 1.4 million.

With the two authorized vaccines, and the two-dose schedule followed, Canada expects to vaccinate 14.5 million people by the end of June and all Canadians who want to be immunized by the end of September.

A new vaccination schedule issued Thursday shows if the other three vaccines currently being reviewed get approved by Health Canada, 24.5 million Canadians could be vaccinated before Canada Day.

Technology has changed the way we adults, and more importantly, our kids, interact with each other.

Researchers tell us that Canadian users of various forms of social media, on average, spend 40 minutes daily on Facebook and that 87% of Facebook users were aged 18-29.

That’s why ethics of technology, in recent years, has increasingly addressed the transitional shift in a society where personal computers provide users with an easy and quick way to transfer information — and misinformation.

Ethics seeks not only to describe moral principles influencing conduct, but to focus on the actions and values of people in society — what people do and how they believe they should act in the world.

Communication via the internet challenges ethical consumer behaviour because it is instantaneous, seamless, interactive, blunt, borderless, impersonal and far-reaching in fundamental ways.

This free expression of opinion, unlike the traditional letter to the editor, allows comments on social media to be posted instantly, often in the heat of emotion. Many users who post comments do so under the mistaken belief that they will remain anonymous.

For these reasons alone, every schoolbased technology course, every semester every year, should include a unit on the ethical uses of technology, if only to keep youthful users out of trouble by teaching them to recognize the dangers of using social media to attack others.

Reviews of recent “defamation by social media” cases reveal that Canadian courts seem to be moving in a direction that acknowledges not only the dangers of unedited and uncurated content, but also the potentially viral nature of a social-media post.

Courts have found that merely re-posting a hyperlinked article or comment on a user’s own social-media profile may, ipso facto, constitute a re-publication of the defamatory comment. Should a post or repost of the original defamatory comment go “viral,” that will only complicate the impact of the defamation.

And it is not just online social media that has become the primary source for malevolent rumour-spreading, misinformation, innuendo and, on occasion, outright indefensible lies.

Other more traditional forms of media, including TV “news” and “news commentary” presentations, have also been front and centre in blurring, if not eradicating entirely, the previously clear line between truth and fabrication, with few if any consequences.

One company that has decided enough is enough — and that has the financial resources to make its displeasure felt at being the victim of the Trump-fuelled, widely proliferated “stolen election” lie — is the technology company Smartmatic.

Fox News commentator Lou Dobbs and others had been having a field day accusing Smartmatic of helping to rig the 2020 U.S. federal election results.

Smartmatic, in a long-overdue and what may be landmark response, has now filed a US$2.7-billion lawsuit against Dobbs and several other Fox News hosts, and the channel itself.

Apparently Fox, despite the fact that it had been turning a blind eye to the damage Dobbs and other were inflicting on the technology company, discovered a lawsuitfuelled conscience somewhere in its media policy book and fired Dobbs the day after the lawsuit, which threatened to bankrupt the organization, arrived at Fox offices.

Of greater interest to students of media ethics is the fact that up until that point, Dobbs had enjoyed, without apparent interference from any of his current or previous employers, including CNN and Fox, a long history of unfettered lying about anything and everything.

Over the years of his media celebrity, Dobbs had, without any evidence or any attempt by his employers to restrain him, claimed that an invasion of illegal aliens was threatening the health of many Americans with leprosy, that former U.S. president Barack Obama was not a naturalborn U.S. citizen and that the “many” undocumented immigrants who voted in the 2018 mid-term elections had an immense impact on the outcome.

In a recent Tyee piece, Michael Harris, suggests that Fox News has certainly not been alone in creating the smorgasbord of lies that some consumers find more palatable than a tedious diet of everyday truth.

Harris, in the piece, opines that study after study shows that readers and viewers have been abandoning mainstream news and shedding their respect for the journalists who produce it while getting more and more of their information from dodgy social media and internet websites.

And the dangers of that are well worth discussing with a classroom full of social-media savvy next-generation political and social policy makers.