Time to mix it up to get us out of pandemic
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/06/2021 (708 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
It was nice to see common sense prevail.
This past week, the province made a small but significant change to its vaccine protocol when it started allowing parents to transfer Pfizer second-dose appointments to their children age 12 to 17.
Pfizer shipments to Canada have slowed considerably in recent weeks. Although that is not as much of a concern for adults, who are eligible to receive Moderna for their second shots, it has been a deal-breaker for the 12-to-17 crowd.
Currently, Health Canada has only approved Pfizer for this cohort. So, as Pfizer stocks dwindled, most 12- to 17-year-olds found they could not get a second-dose appointment anywhere.
Most remarkable about the change in policy was how little effort the province put into publicizing it. It was included in the fine print of Wednesday’s vaccine bulletin but not discussed openly by public health officials until the next day.
Why would the province downplay this clearly clever move? There is increasing evidence that some of the people who willingly got Pfizer as their first dose are quite reluctant to use a different vaccine for their second dose. So reluctant that they are actually refusing or delaying their second dose until they can get the same vaccine.
This reluctance is, at first blush, a bit irrational.
Both Pfizer and Moderna were developed using the same vaccine technology; Manitoba officials have gone as far as to describe them as “essentially the same vaccine” and safe to mix and match. Even in those instances where someone is forced to mix a first dose of AstraZeneca and a second dose of Moderna or Pfizer, studies show the immune response to be better than if the person had received two AstraZeneca shots.
It’s also quite curious that anyone would balk at switching vaccines when you can currently get an appointment for a second dose of Moderna at pharmacies and clinics within two or three days.
Notwithstanding all those facts, concern about mixing vaccines has been reported across the country. In Ontario, where the government started swapping Moderna for Pfizer to address supply issues, some people have walked out when they got the news.
Manitoba has not started unilaterally swapping vaccines without warning; if you got a Pfizer appointment, you will get Pfizer. However, Johanu Botha, co-lead of the province’s vaccine implementation task force, said some Pfizer first-dose recipients have declined their second dose at walk-in appointments when they found out it was Moderna.
“This is clearly not an easy decision for some folks to make,” Botha said.
If you have a child in the 12-to-17 cohort (and for the record, I do), giving up your Pfizer and accepting Moderna is actually a pretty easy decision. For others, the whole scenario is a slippery slope into a corollary of vaccine hesitancy, a place where some people would rather delay their second dose than mix vaccines.
If we were still dealing with the original strain of the novel coronavirus, that wouldn’t be such a big deal. But the variants have changed all that.
Long considered a leader in vaccine coverage, Israel has been forced to re-introduce restrictions including an indoor mask mandate after recording hundreds of new Delta variant infections.
The variant threat can be broken down into three incontrovertible facts.
First, variants are considerably more contagious than the original virus. Second, some variants are considerably more likely to cause serious illness requiring hospitalization and death.
And finally, even though one dose was enough to provide significant protection against the original coronavirus, the latest scientific data confirms a single dose offers minimal protection (about 30 per cent efficacy) against variants. Two doses, however, bring that efficacy back up over 90 per cent.
Despite this knowledge, governments in this country and around the world, and their chronically misinformed supporters, continue to promote a non-scientific, unproven theory that if we get to 70 per cent or more people vaccinated with a single dose, it’s safe to start lifting social and economic restrictions.
That is simply not true.
Countries that have a much higher proportion of fully vaccination citizens than Canada are buckling under the threat from variants. The United Kingdom — which has repeatedly delayed its reopening plans — is among that shortlist of countries. But, so too are unlikely places like Israel.
Despite this knowledge, governments in this country and around the world, and their chronically misinformed supporters, continue to promote a non-scientific, unproven theory that if we get to 70 per cent or more people vaccinated with a single dose, it’s safe to start lifting social and economic restrictions.
Long considered a leader in vaccine coverage, Israel has been forced to re-introduce restrictions including an indoor mask mandate after recording hundreds of new Delta variant infections. Most alarming is the revelation that, according to Israeli health officials, about half of the new infections involve people who were either partially or fully vaccinated.
Although Canada has thankfully become a world leader in first doses at nearly 70 per cent, we are lagging behind in second dose coverage, which currently sits at about 23 per cent. Manitoba has done a little bit better than the national average: 72 per cent with at least one dose and 32 per cent fully vaccinated.
Given what we know about the threat posed by the variants, anyone who argues that single-dose vaccination is a magic bullet for public safety is guilty of the worst kind of irresponsibility, at the worst possible time in the evolution of the pandemic.
The good news is the solution to this new threat is well within our reach. We need to get fully vaccinated, as quickly as possible, using whatever combination of vaccines are available. That, and only that, is our key to escaping the pandemic.
dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
Dan Lett
Columnist
Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.
