At the beginning of last December, the government announced it would start administering vaccines to stop the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vaccine Bulletin, Dec.9,2020 https://news.gov.mb.ca/news/?archive=&item=50009
Manitobans would receive one of three expedited
vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, Astrazeneca) that had been given provisional
approval on an interim basis, two of which worked best for some age groups and
not others.
Vaccines were the answer, we were told. If enough
people got vaccinated, the lockdowns, face masks, social distancing, and travel
restrictions could be eliminated and society could get back to normal.
The goal to reach herd immunity was as low as 40
percent of the population vaccinated by some estimates, but more often cited as
70 percent.
"Trust the science," they said.
*****************
"Screw
the science," was the message delivered in early March,
three months later, by National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) and
here by Manitoba's Vaccine Implementation Task Force.
https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/manitoba-to-start-delaying-second-dose-of-covid-19-vaccine-1.5332191
Health Canada's authorizations for the expedited
vaccines given provisional approval on an interim basis stated that the time
between first and second doses of Pfizer should be 21 days, of Moderna, 28 days
and of AstraZeneca up to 12 weeks.
NACI now said provinces could delay the Pfizer and
Moderna second doses up to four months---12 weeks.
That's six times longer than the manufacturers of the Pfizer vaccine tested their vaccine for, and four times longer than Moderna testing.
Alarmed, Pfizer issued a formal letter to the government
of Canada. Read it in full:
Statement:
Pfizer position on dosing intervals of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine
23/03/21
We
recognize that recommendations on alternative dosing intervals reside with
health authorities and may include recommendations due to public health
principles. However, as a biopharmaceutical company working in a highly
regulated industry, our position is
supported by the label and indication agreed upon with Health Canada and
informed by data from our Phase 3 study.
Pfizer
and BioNTech’s Phase 3 study for the COVID-19 vaccine was designed to evaluate
the vaccine’s safety and efficacy following a 2-dose schedule, separated by 21
days. The safety and efficacy of the
vaccine has not been evaluated on different dosing schedules as the
majority of trial participants received the second dose within the window
specified in the study design.
Data
from the Phase 3 study demonstrated that, although protection from the vaccine
appears to begin as early as 12 days after the first dose, two doses of the
vaccine are required to provide the maximum protection against the disease, a
vaccine efficacy of 95%. There are no
data from this study to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is
sustained after 21 days.
We
remain committed to our ongoing dialogue with regulators, health authorities
and governments, and to our continued data sharing efforts to help inform any
public health decisions aimed at defeating this devastating pandemic.
Manitoba ignored Pfizer's warning and went ahead with the delayed doses.
*********************
May, 2021 ... two months later…
The first reports of blood clots in people who got the
AstraZeneca vaccine. Health authorities rushed to say this was a rare
occurence, extremely rare, super rare. One in a million, they said.
Which, as more reports came in, became one in half a
million.
Then one in 250,000, one in 60,000, and finally they
gave up counting and just slapped a warning label on AstraZeneca vaccine saying
'side effect: blood clots.'
In Manitoba, the concern was that people who got an
AstraZeneca shot would refuse their second shot.
* So
Manitoba became the first province in Canada to encourage the mix-and-match of
vaccines.
https://ca.style.yahoo.com/manitoba-allow-mixing-vaccine-doses-035125838.html
May 31, 2021 — Manitoba becomes the first province to allow people who got a first dose of the ... COVID-19 vaccine to get a second dose of Pfizer or Moderna.
* Not all scientists thought that was a good idea.
Canadian
officials are defending Canada's mix-and-match approach to vaccinations after the World Health Organization warned Monday
about “dangerous trends” in individual vaccination strategies, including mixing and matching.
In
an online briefing, the WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan suggested to
reporters that mixing and matching is dangerous because there is not currently
enough data to support it.
"It's
a little bit of a dangerous trend here. We are in a data-free, evidence-free
zone as far as mix and match,"
Swaminathan said in response to a question about booster shots.
* Canada said it wasn't worried about the lack of data.
While
there have not been any studies specifically examining mixing and matching
Pfizer and Moderna, the NACI said it was basing its recommendation on sound
principles of vaccinology and the fact that both vaccines have very similar
efficacy and side effects and function in a very similar way.
“No
data currently exist on the interchangeability of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines,” the
NACI said in its recommendation. “However, there
is no reason to believe that mRNA vaccine series completion with a different
authorized mRNA vaccine product will result in any additional safety issues or
deficiency in protection.”
* You could find Canadian scientists who supported the Canadian approach.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/mixing-vaccines-canada-1.6123155
"It's not unusual to mix and match," said
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist with the Vaccine and Infectious Disease
Organization in Saskatoon."Combining vaccines is nothing new," she
said. "There's no reason to expect that it wouldn't be safe."
"It is already accepted around the world for other vaccines," she said. "Do you ask what flu vaccine you get every year? They're made by different manufacturers."
* But Manitoba medical leaders confessed it wasn't that simple.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/manitoba-vaccine-lead-says-mixing-vaccines-is-part-of-pandemic-s-big-human-experiment-1.5457570
OTTAWA
-- Dr. Joss Reimer, medical lead for
Manitoba’s Vaccine Implementation Task Force, says that new vaccine
recommendations from the National Advisory Committee on Immunization on mixing
mRNA vaccines will be a form of trial and error.
“Well in some ways, during a pandemic everything we do is a big human experiment,” she said in an interview with CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday. “Because we're all having to learn together at the same time, about what works the best.”
So, seven months after announcing that vaccines were the answer to the Covid pandemic:
- Canadians were receiving a first dose of one of three expedited vaccines still only given provisional approval on an interim basis, one of which vaccine was linked to causing blood clots;
- They were getting a second dose of a vaccine given only provisional approval on an interim basis which was possibly being administered well outside the tested limits of the manufacturers of any of the three vaccines; a practice unsupported by data and which the World Health Organization said was dangerous;
- Manitobans were first to get that second dose of an
expedited vaccine being used under provisional approval on an interim basis
which was possibly of another expedited vaccine given provisional approval on
an interim basis and which was developed under a different principle and was
untested as a safe replacement for the first.
Just following the science.
***********
Then came August, 2021.
It turned out that a lot of the "science"
being followed in Canada could be summed up with "what's Israel doing,
let's do it too."
Israel was the model, with 78 percent of residents
over 12 double vaccinated (mostly with Pfizer vaccine). But by August there was
trouble. The protection offered by the vaccine after six months was dropping. Waning,
was the word being used.
Israel said it had begun experiencing high infection
rates, actually one of the world's highest, with more than half of those
infections in fully vaccinated people.
Israel was going to start giving its citizens booster
shots. Then came news Monday that Israel's national coronavirus spokesman said
people should expect to get a fourth vaccination soon, with new vaccinations
every five or six months.
"This is our life from now on, in waves,"
said Salman Zarka, coronavirus czar.
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