Arthur: Vaccines are on the way. But be prepared for it to be a messy rollout,
Vaccination was always going to be messy, because just as COVID-19 isn’t the flu, COVID-19 vaccination is not the flu shot. It’s more people, new vaccines, created on the fly, and everyone wants one. There are going to be bumps.
And in important ways, it’s not as bumpy as it looks. Public health units should be the ones handling local planning, under a standardized provincial umbrella, because PHUs have actually done vaccination before, check. Some have been preparing for months, check. We will need vaccines: they’re coming, check. Vaccination is essentially a solvable problem. It’s just how well it gets solved, as it unfolds.
It just looks messy, and that is only because some of it is. For instance, take retired Gen. Rick Hillier, please. Every time he speaks there is a good chance of a mess that will need to be cleaned up, which when you want to project a sense of transparency and honesty is not ideal. Wednesday the general gave timelines by age on when vaccination will begin: the third week of March for 80 years old and up, May 1 for 70-plus, June 1 for 65-plus, July 1 for 60-plus. Sounds slow, right?
But the timeline was based on only having access to the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, and nobody expects Canada to be limited to those. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are expected to be approved in the near future: Johnson & Johnson’s early results look stellar, and it could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Friday; AstraZeneca has been approved by the European Union and the World Health Organization, and both of those vaccines are in Canada’s pipeline. Novavax is also on the list, but further out.
And the difference between only Moderna and Pfizer and those additional vaccines would be approximately 10 million vaccinated Canadians between April and June: from 14.5 million to 24.5 million, cumulatively. There are about 30 million Canadians over the age of 19, so that would mean vaccines for about 82 per cent of everyone else arriving by the end of June. That possibility doesn’t translate to only vaccinating Ontario’s 3.5 million 60-and-older population sometime after Canada Day.
Hillier did keep saying the vaccination campaign depends on vaccines, but that’s as obvious as a sunrise. If you are going to give Ontario’s seniors dates that they will be given a freaking COVID force field after a year of holding their breath, you should be crystal clear. It’s one thing not to disclose where vaccination centres will be, even though public health units have already set aside hockey rinks and community centres, and pharmacies and family doctors will be heavily involved. It’s another thing not to have a website built until mid-March, though Alberta opened its website on Wednesday and people were calling 911 to get vaccines after the website crashed.
But be clear about timelines, the plausibility of each one and the factors involved. Dr. Isaac Bogoch, infectious diseases specialist at the University of Toronto and Toronto General Hospital, and a member of the province’s vaccine task force, shouldn’t have to get on Twitter and clean up the communications mess after the fact. (He did.)
It is hard to cut through the noise, because there is a lot of dumb noise. Premier Doug Ford keeps boasting about how Ontario has vaccinated more people than any other province, which mostly shows contempt for his audience: vaccines are distributed by population, and Ontario is 40 per cent of the country; Ontario ranks 7th per capita among provinces in vaccinations, and lags behind on its schedule for seniors in the community because it has chosen healthcare workers instead. That’s a choice, and one that happens because we have to make vaccine choices until more vaccines are here. So is opening up most of the province, though.
Vaccines are coming, and you can see Canada’s impatience — and frankly, entitlement, with so many poorer and more vulnerable countries waiting in line — shining through. Some people truly deserve to be impatient, because they are the ones who have suffered most in the pandemic: those in homeless shelters, the essential workers without paid sick leave, the women vulnerable to domestic violence, the low-income workers who have lost jobs, the long-termcare patients locked in their homes, those most at risk of hospitalization or dying, the health-care workers who are trying not to crack. The list is longer than that.
But vaccines are coming. Earlier would have been better, but provinces better be ready now.
“The federal government has made this so that even if the province f---- this up, we’ll be OK,” said one non-federal source familiar with the province’s pandemic response. “You can screw up distribution, but just because of the sheer number of vaccines we’re going to have access to, starting in April, we’ll be fine.”
Which is what makes Ontario’s simultaneous gamble on the more transmissible variants so maddening. Variants currently make up approximately 20 per cent of all Ontario cases. That share is doubling every 12 days — this reporter erroneously said eight days last week, through my own mistake, and I would like to correct that — and that was under a stay-at-home order for the entire province, with most kids not in school. Now Thunder Bay is rising, and Ottawa too, and Toronto medical officer of health Dr. Eileen de Villa said Wednesday the city’s reproduction rate had climbed from 0.8 to 1.1, which is back in exponential growth. The only big change in the past week has been the variant moving, and the kids back in schools.
The province, meanwhile, has opened several taps: schools everywhere, restaurants, bars, casinos and gyms in some places. People are travelling between regions. Some are gambling, and not just in casinos, because a lot of people will do what they are allowed to do.
Ontario could have waited, but there are enough reckless yahoos in the provincial government that we didn’t, and now we wait to see whether the ice cracks. As de Villa said, “We’re getting close, right? We’re almost there. Vaccines are coming in the next several weeks ... if we can just keep pushing ourselves a little bit more.”
Those who can push yourselves, try to push, and stay home a little longer. Vaccines are coming. Variants are here. How messy it will be is only partly up to us.