What happens after my shots?
Health measures still advised, but some experts argue for different approach
With the promise of more robust supplies and millions of more Canadians to be vaccinated by April, many are asking, “What happens after I've had my shots?”
The official guidance from Canada's national immunization advisory committee remains that “all individuals should continue to practise recommended public health measures” — distancing, masking and isolation and quarantine if exposed to the virus that causes COVID — regardless of vaccination.
But McGill University's Daniel Weinstock said what's needed is more nuanced, harm-reduction messaging around what people might cautiously do once vaccinated. “The danger is always people might end up taking chances of their own because a blanket set of prohibitions at this point, after a year, is just too much to handle.”
Telling people, “you got vaccinated, but nothing in your life is going to change” is a bit of a paradoxical message, said Weinstock, a professor in McGill's Institute for Health and Social Policy and Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy.
“The problem with infectious disease is always that, when you decide that you're ready to accept a slightly higher level of risk, you're not just making that decision for yourself,” Weinstock said.
“If it does turn out that you're still infectious, even though you're immune from getting disease, you're making a decision for other people as well”
Offering people more finegrained pointers about what they can do might help minimize risks because the alternative is that people will take risks based on their own assessments, “which are probably less reliable,” Weinstock said.
Canada's top public health leaders have warned that vaccines are “no silver bullet,” and that striving to have the fewest interactions with the fewest people at the greatest distance should be the rule while vaccine programs expand.
According to Canada's independent expert advisory panel on immunization, there isn't sufficient evidence yet to determine how long immunity from the vaccines lasts and whether the vaccines protect people not just from getting infected but also spreading the virus to other people, even if they have no symptoms themselves.
“As the clinical trials are ongoing, it is expected that this evidence will become available soon,” Dr. Shelley Deeks, the panel's co-chair, said in an email Tuesday to the National Post.
Hopeful evidence is already emerging: A new study awaiting peer review by University of Cambridge researchers, reported that a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine led to a fourfold drop in the number of asymptomatic infections among health-care workers who had been vaccinated for more than 12 days, reducing the potential for the virus to be passed on to others. Still, the vaccine doesn't give 100 per cent protection for everyone, and the authors said social distancing, masks, hand hygiene and regular testing is needed until the pandemic is under better control.
Renowned American epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm said he understands the frustrations and challenges of people who are now living in this partially, but mostly non-vaccinated world.
For people who've had two doses, when will it be safe to go back to church, have dinner with friends, hug their grandkids?
“Right now, I feel like, you know, on any given day, we move the goalpost all around the field,” Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) said in a CIDRAP podcast last week. Stressing that he was speaking personally, and that he doesn't want to appear to be undercutting public health or science, he added: “I am certain that when my partner and I are both fully vaccinated, and we have dear friends who are both fully vaccinated, no way in hell are you going to keep me from having one of the most wonderful dinners of my life with them.”
Maya Goldenberg said she understands the public health caution. They're worried about people dropping their guard once vaccinated, said the University of Guelph philosophy professor.
“But at every point in the pandemic there's been the suggestion that we need more harm-reduction messaging instead of complete lockdown or complete bubbles, which, it turns out, very few people can actually do,” Goldberg said.
TAIPEI — The de facto Canadian embassy in Taiwan on Tuesday praised the quality of pineapples grown on the island, depicting photographs of top diplomats in Taipei with the fruit after an import ban by China.
Referencing a tweet by Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu for people around the world to “rally behind the #FreedomPineapple,” the Canadian Trade Office, on Taipei's Facebook page, used the same hashtag on a picture of its chief, Jordan Reeves, posing with colleagues around a pineapple pizza.
“We in the Canadian Office like pineapple pizza, especially pineapples from Taiwan!” it wrote, adding that the idea to put pineapple on a pizza was invented by a Canadian in 1962.
The unusually flavoured diplomacy came in response to China's declaration last week it was stopping the import of Taiwanese pineapples. It cited “harmful creatures” it said could come with the fruit.
Infuriated Taiwanese authorities called the ban a political move to further pressure the island, a charge that China denied.
While neither Canada nor the United States, like most countries, has formal diplomatic ties with the Chinese-claimed island, both have their own disputes with Beijing over human rights, trade and other issues.
The Trudeau government has been at loggerheads with Beijing over the detention of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. They have been held on espionage charges since December 2018. Canadian officials have decried their detention as political retribution or “hostage diplomacy” by China, since their arrests came shortly after the RCMP detained Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive with Chinese telecom giant Huawei, on an extradition request from the United States.
Global Affairs Canada did not respond by deadline to a request for comment about the pineapple defence.
While Taiwan is best known internationally for its thriving tech companies, the subtropical island has a flourishing fruit industry. Last year, more than 90 per cent of its exported pineapples went to China.
The American Institute in Taiwan, under the hashtags #real friends real progress and #pineapple solidarity, posted Facebook pictures of pineapples on their Taipei premises, including of its director Brent Christensen with three on his desk. “Have you bought your pineapples? We have!” it wrote.
Local politicians have, meanwhile, posted pictures of themselves in fields with farmers and tucking into the fruit on their social media pages, encouraging domestic consumers as well as other countries to pick up the slack left by China.
The man who was shot while caring for Lady Gaga's French Bulldogs says he is recovering after nearly dying from the attack by assailants who kidnapped two of the pop singer's pets.
Ryan Fischer, in his first public comments since the incident last Wednesday evening in Hollywood, detailed his recollections from that night and thanked family, friends, first responders and Gaga, who has been in Italy to shoot a movie.
The two stolen dogs were turned in to police unharmed on Friday, but two men suspected of stealing them remain at large.
“I am still in recovery from a very close call with death,” Fischer, 30, wrote on Instagram alongside pictures of him in a hospital bed, including one that showed him connected to a ventilator.
Describing the episode, Fischer said he let out panicked screams as blood poured from his body from a gunshot wound. Kidnappers had taken two of Gaga's three dogs — Koji and Gustav — but a third, Asia, remained with Fischer. “4 days ago, while a car sped away and blood poured from my gunshot wound, an angel trotted over and laid next to me,” Fischer wrote. “My panicked screams calmed as I looked at her, even though it registered that the blood pooling around her tiny body was my own. I cradled Asia as best I could, thanked her for all the incredible adventures we'd been on together, apologized that I couldn't defend her brothers, and then resolved that I would still try to save them … and myself.”
Koji and Gustav were returned unharmed to police on Friday by an unidentified woman and reunited with Gaga's representatives. Gaga had offered a $500,000 reward for her dogs' return.
To Gaga, Fischer said: “Your babies are back, and the family is whole ... We did it! You have shown so much support throughout this whole crisis to both me and my family.”
“A lot of healing still needs to happen,” Fischer added, “but I look forward to the future and the moment when I get bombarded with kisses and licks (and maybe even an excitement pee?) from Asia, Koji and Gustav.”