Canada – Page 2 – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

With a coronavirus vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, the United States became the third highly developed Western country, after the UK and Canada, to approve such a shot, and it is expected to start vaccinating people within a few days becomes.

However, the three countries have very different health systems. And they face different challenges in the race for the vaccine for millions of people.

Here are some similarities and contrasts.

Is It The Same Vaccine?

First yes.

The first vaccine to be approved by American regulators and the first to be approved by their British and Canadian counterparts was developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a small company, BioNTech. It could get European Union approval within a few weeks.

A few others are close, however, notably a vaccine developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health, and another by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. It could well be that half a dozen or more vaccines will be approved in the coming months.

Throughout 2021, the shots (most vaccinations would require two injections weeks apart) can vary greatly by country, depending on the speed of regulatory approvals, government agreements to buy supplies, and the cost of the vaccines. Even within a country, there can be differences based on how easy it is to distribute and use a particular vaccine.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIH vaccines are of a new type that has never been used before. They require ultra-cold storage and are more expensive than likely competitors. The Pfizer shot needs to be kept extra cold, at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which most healthcare facilities aren’t equipped for.

How central is the rollout?

In the UK a lot. Not in the United States. Somewhere in between in Canada.

With a strong central government and a National Health Service that covers all people, the UK, which started vaccination last week, is running the process from London. The national government selected the 50 hospitals that should receive the vaccine first and made sure they were prepared. decided how much each would get; and drafted the rules that stipulated the order in which people were entitled to receive them.

The Trump administration has shifted much of the decision-making to the states. The federal government will not need the vaccine distributed to each state based on population size, but some states have complained that they don’t know enough about the regulations.

It will be up to states to decide how the doses will be divided among hospitals, clinics, and ultimately drug stores and doctor’s offices, but first the vaccine will at least get to hospitals with ultra-cold storage.

A committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention establishes a list of priorities, starting with medical staff. But this work is still ongoing and the guidelines are not binding. The states are expected to differ somewhat in their approach.

Canada, like Britain, has a universal health system, but like the United States, it has a federal government. The Canadian health system is decentralized and administered by the provinces and territories.

For the distribution of vaccines, the central government plans to work through these regional governments. Ottawa will play a huge role in steering the process.

How many people will get it first?

That remains a bit cloudy.

Canada had ordered enough Pfizer BioNTech vaccine for all of its people, Britain enough for 30 percent, and the United States enough for 15 percent.

However, these numbers reflect shipments that are expected to take months to complete, and Pfizer, like other companies, is struggling to ramp up production. In addition, all three countries have also pre-purchased from other companies, so the pace of vaccine approval could have a significant impact on the pace of adoption.

Updated

Apr. 14, 2020 at 12:21 am ET

This speed is also influenced by the need to equip vaccination sites with proper freezers, staff to prepare the exposures, and enough syringes and protective equipment.

The first deliveries make up a small part of the pre-purchases: 800,000 cans to the UK and an estimated 249,000 to Canada this month.

US officials said they hope to have 40 million doses of the vaccine by the end of the month, which could be optimistic. That would be enough to vaccinate 20 million people.

Rural areas where hospitals are not equipped to keep vaccines at the correct temperatures or do not have the staff to prepare them for injection will not receive Pfizer images. This is more of a barrier in the US and Canada, huge countries with huge, sparsely populated regions, than it is in the UK, which is much more compact.

In Canada, where the military plays a pivotal role in vaccine distribution, the government broadcasts to all ten provinces. The three northern areas will have to wait.

In the US, FedEx and UPS will ship vaccines from distribution centers to all parts of the country. But the holiday season is the busiest time of year for delivery services, which could slow things down.

How soon will most people get vaccines?

That is even darker.

The UK, Canada, the United States and the European Union have all followed similar strategies, pre-ordering large numbers of doses – more than enough to vaccinate them all – from multiple manufacturers and hedging their bets in case some of the vaccines are banned or others Manufacturers have production downtimes.

The United States has ordered far fewer doses relative to its population than Canada or the UK, and last summer they turned down an offer to increase their pre-order from Pfizer. Administration officials say the numbers are misleading because the government has signed options to buy far more vaccines if it deems it necessary.

However, given the strong global demand, it is not clear how quickly pharmaceutical companies can fill their orders, let alone additional orders.

Again, the speed of development, approval, and production affects how quickly deliveries get to people. A country that places a bigger bet on one vaccine might be a lot better off than one that is more reliant on another.

Megan Twohey and Ian Austen contributed to the coverage.

When a polio vaccine was announced in 1953, the CBC reported that in Canada “the response was the same as at the end of a terrible war”. The 13,109 Canadians the Covid-19 has killed, the hundreds of thousands it has made sick, and the economic turmoil it has brought to the nation also appear to be the toll of battle. The vaccine approved by Canada this week also appeared to be a truce, if not a truce. The first shipment of the vaccine, made by the American company Pfizer and a German company, BioNTech, is expected to be on the way this weekend, and the first vaccinations could be given as early as Tuesday. Initial quantities will be small compared to the millions of cans expected to arrive in the New Year, making the first cans more of a starter than a rollout.

[Read: Canada Approves Vaccine and Could Start Shots Next Week]

Everything that has to do with the vaccine depends of course on who gets it and when. Or, as one journalist told officials during one of the vaccine approval press conferences, “How can you make sure this isn’t like The Hunger Games of vaccines?”

The province decides who gets the shots first. However, a federal body has drawn up a list of recommendations for selecting first recipients, a list of candidates, which limits officials to four groups: people over 80; Residents of nursing homes, a group that accounts for 71 percent of deaths so far, and the workers who serve them; Health care workers; and indigenous communities.

For the first few thousand cans that are on the way, plans vary by province. Quebec will focus on nursing homes while Saskatchewan will initially inject health care workers.

In the three areas – the Northwest Areas, Nunavut, and Yukon – no one will receive the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine anytime soon. Instead, governments in the far north have decided to wait for Moderna’s vaccine, which is nearing approval and will be easier to use, said Dr. Howard Njoo, the country’s deputy chief public health officer. It doesn’t require the extremely low temperatures that the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine provides.

Children also won’t get the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine right away. It is only approved for use by people aged 16 and over.

Dr. Njoo warned that decision-making would not end after officials determined which groups would receive them first. You may need to decide whether it makes sense to initially only vaccinate people who live in the cities where the 14 centers where the vaccine is delivered are located. Each province has at least one center, with two each in Ontario and Quebec, but none in rural areas.

“If you want to vaccinate health workers, where do you start?” Dr. Njoo asked at a press conference this week. “Could it be easier and more practical to do this in a facility in an urban setting? Not to say that health care workers who provide health care and direct health care in a remote or rural setting are not so important. “

Regardless of what decisions the provinces ultimately make, the plan is to only vaccinate people from the groups with the highest priority by the end of March. During this time, the federal government expects four million doses of Pfizer and, if approved, two million doses of Moderna’s vaccine. Until then, governments will have to figure out how to deal with the remaining 35 million Canadians.

It has been widely established that both the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines use radically new technology. My colleagues Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer have prepared definitive guides to help understand both.

[Read: How the Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Works]

[Read: How Moderna’s Vaccine Works]

Trans Canada

Fifty years have passed since the October Crisis was sparked by the kidnapping of UK Trade Commissioner James Cross and the kidnapping and murder of Quebec Deputy Prime Minister Pierre Laporte. Dan Bilefsky reports that a film made by the son of a leader of the FLQ, the violent extremist group that carried out the attacks, was a success and at the same time “underscores the sensitivity of the events of the time.”
On another grim anniversary, two years have passed since the Chinese government arrested Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. In their reporting, Javier C. Hernández and Dan noted that the two men “have now become symbols of the aftermath of Beijing’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and that their fate is apparently intertwined with the future of China’s turbulent relations with Canada and the United States.” .
Catherine Porter reports that Christmas broke early in pandemic Canada and Christmas trees have become scarce in some communities.
After publishing an annual report on the Arctic, a climate specialist told Henry Fountain, who reports on climate problems for The Times, that “almost everything in the Arctic, from ice and snow to human activity, changes so rapidly that none.” there is reason to believe that in 30 years much will be as it is today. “
Lynn Marchessault set off from Georgia with her two children, two dogs, and a cat to reunite 6,000 kilometers with her husband, a US Army sergeant stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska. Snow turned the passage through western Canada into a nightmare. She was about to give up when Gary Bath, a Canadian veteran, came to the rescue.
A United States-appointed committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields has concluded that the mysterious disease affecting American and Canadian diplomats known as Havana Syndrome is likely caused by “directional, pulsed radio frequency energy.” has been.
The Trump administration is on its way out, but is using the trade deal that NAFTA replaced to challenge Canada’s dairy supply management system, says Ana Swanson.
Fred Sasakamoose, who died at the age of 86, played only 11 games in the NHL but became a hero of the indigenous people and spent decades mentoring and encouraging young First Nations players.
As Pat Patterson, Montreal native Pierre Clermont played the villain in countless wrestling matches before becoming an executive in the wrestling world. In 2014, he announced that he was gay and breaking a barrier in that community. Mr. Patterson died last week at the age of 79.

Ian Austen is from Windsor, Ontario. He was trained in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has been reporting on Canada for the New York Times for 16 years. Follow him on Twitter @ianrausten.

How are we doing

We look forward to your thoughts on this newsletter and on events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.

Do you like this email?

Forward it to your friends and let them know they can sign up here.