Delta Transmission Among U.S. Unvaccinated

Crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in late July. The Delta coronavirus variant is driving record-breaking case counts in Louisiana and other states.  Kathleen Flynn/Reuters

"The bottom line is this: We have the scientific tools we need to turn the corner on this pandemic."

"Vaccination works and will protect us from the severe complications of COVID-19."

Centers for Disease Control Director Rochelle Walensky 

"This moderate decline [diminishing effectiveness against hospitalizations among adults 75 and older] should be interpreted with caution and might be related to changes in the virus that causes COVID-19, weakening vaccine-induced immunity as more time passes since vaccination, or a combination of factors."

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report

"We've been patient."

"But our patience is wearing thin and your refusal [to be vaccinated] has cost all of us."

U.S. President Joe Biden

"The vaccines remain very protective against severe disease."

"I think we set our expectations too high for vaccines, thinking they were going to prevent people from getting infected and transmitting the virus."

William Moss, executive director, International Vaccine Access Center, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Medical staff treat a COVID-19 coronavirus patient at a hospital   AFP via Getty Images

 

The CDC estimates that the highly transmissible Delta variant is accountable for over 99 percent of new coronavirus infections. But this is a reality not only in the United States, but globally, where new waves of mass infections are bedevilling government agencies and medical communities who had speculated that with the mass inoculation of populations vulnerable to contracting the novel coronavirus, spread of the virus would decelerate and come to a halt, the viral spread coming under control.

Even countries like Australia and New Zealand which had formerly served as an aspirational success story in stopping the spread of the virus by stern lockdown measures that not all countries were prepared to emulate, are now in the throes of spreading waves of COVID-19, straining their abilities to cope. Neither country however, was in the forefront of mass vaccinations. The toll of the virus in the United States has been spectacularly awful.

Over 650 thousand Americans have died from having contracted COVID-19, racking up an average 1,500 daily deaths in the past several weeks. Over 99 percent of new coronavirus infections are now attributed to the Delta variant. Those Americans who shunned full vaccinations were seen to be over ten times likelier to be  hospitalized, eleven times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those fully vaccinated. This from a newly-released study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The largest study to date of the effectiveness of the three vaccines cleared for use in the U.S. involving 32,000 patients from hospitals, emergency departments and urgent care clinics across nine states assessed the Moderna coronavirus vaccine to be moderately more efficacious in preventing hospitalization than Pfizer-BioNTech's and Johnson & Johnson's. Collectively, the study indicated, all three were 86 percent effective but a significantly higher rate was seen among Moderna vaccine recipients (95 percent) than Pfizer's (80 percent) or Johnson & Johnson (60 percent).

 

Sweeping vaccine mandates were announced by the Biden administration mandate to curb the surging infection rate of the Delta variant. A rate of infection expected to increase and with it the pressure exerted on the tens of millions of Americans resisting vaccination. Most federal government employees are required by mandate to be vaccinated. Large employers are mandated as well to have their workers inoculated or to be tested weekly. A regulation that would impact close to two-thirds of all U.S. workers.

 

Concerns of waning immunity and the efficacy of protection through the vaccines against a more contagious variant are uppermost in mind within the U.S. medical community, reflected by the recently released CDC studies, reflecting broadly consistent data whose findings from other studies are that the vaccines continue to provide strong protection for most people against hospitalization and death, Delta surge included. With the exception of adults in the highest age brackets, those in particular with underlying medical conditions.

 

These concerns have led the CDC to advise the administration now preparing to roll out boosters, awaiting the word of the health authorities advising government. The first brand approved as a booster by the Food and Drug Administration is Pfizer, given its timely submission of data on the safety and effectiveness of boosting its two-shot regimen with a third shot, with other vaccines' approval expected to follow.  

 

Amir Hamja ... Bloomberg ... Getty

"After a steady decline in cases earlier this year, Delta caused a troubling rise in cases of COVID-19 and an increase in hospitalizations around the country. The variant has turned out to be more than twice as contagious as previous ones, and studies have shown that it is more likely than the original virus to put infected people in the hospital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). People who are not vaccinated are most at risk, and the highest spread of cases and severe outcomes is happening in places with low vaccination rates."
"In the U.S., there is a disproportionate number of unvaccinated people in Southern and Appalachian states including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, and West Virginia, where vaccination rates are low. (In some of these states, the number of cases is on the rise even as some other states are lifting restrictions because their cases are going down)."

Yale Medicine

Canada's Prime Minister's Unreciprocated Love Affair With China

"Threats, censorship and intimidation will continue as long as companies, not-for-profits academia, politicians, media and other institutions with vested interests are fearful of angering Beijing."

"Beijing is effectively exporting their authoritarianism overseas."

"Dissidents are not safe. Not at work, not in their homes, not in civil societies, and not in Canada."

"[There is a] persistent lack of knowledge and understanding of these networks of influence within Canadian institutions, politics and society [which permits Chinese infiltration to influence Canada to go under the radar]."

Cherie Wong, executive director, Alliance Canada Hong Kong 

"[China has also expanded its influence through academia, particularly in the area of research and development, often through] ludicrous funding opportunities that trap academics and researchers into long-term coercive relationships [funded by foreign actors]."

"Inadequate federal regulations [have allowed such partnerships to continue]."

"Beijing aims to influence the next generation of technologies to disrupt, dominate, and silence democratic nations, making it clear they do not intend to follow the international order or be a fair and transparent global partner."

Report, Alliance Canada Hong Kong

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

The most recent egregious Canada-China interaction has a sinister air of confidence, marked top secret in a country whose prime minister once infamously and naively stated his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, able to 'turn on a dime'. Justin Trudeau recalls fondly when as a child he accompanied his father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to China, opening Canada up to the CCP, just as he had taken the current prime minister Justin Trudeau in those long-ago days to Cuba to meet with 'Uncle Castro' for whom he long retained a fondness.

As prime minister, Justin Trudeau makes decisions that impact the entire country. As he did, when the novel coronavirus escaped China's borders to make deadly inroads globally, by making the decision that Canada would seek a vaccine in collaboration with a Chinese pharmaceutical company, CanSino, whose CEO and founder had attended a Canadian university and worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical enterprise before returning to China.

Prime Minister Trudeau in tandem with the National Research Council underwrote CanSino Biologics by providing it with Canadian intellectual property on which to base its vaccine for Ebola and SARS-CoV-2. Under the agreement reached with CanSino, Canadian technology would be used as a scaffold on which to build a successful COVID vaccine which was meant to be tested at Dalhousie University, with the NRC helping to produce it in Canada if successful. Beijing decided,  however, to block the vaccine from being shipped to Canada.

Leaving Canada in a vacuum of vaccine acquisition, since no contracts had been signed with reliable pharmaceutical companies capable of producing vaccines. Scrambling, in a late start to acquire vaccines, Canada was late in their use since it was back-of-the-line in contracting for doses to inoculate Canadians against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But there is far, far more to the Canada-China 'collaboration'. A connection between Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, both high-security labs involved in research with highly lethal pathogens.

 

The head scientist at Winnipeg's Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program lab was Xiangguo Qiu, a Chinese virologist. In July of 2019, she and her husband Keding Cheng, as well as several of her Chinese students were escorted out of the lab by the RCMP. No explanation was given while officials stated only that a procedural investigation was underway. There were rumours in circulation of unauthorized shipment of deadly viruses from the laboratory to China; otherwise known as purloined intellectual property.

The two top scientists were eventually fired when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service called for revocation on national security grounds of their security clearance. Another Chinese scientist, Feihu Yan involved in the Winnipeg lab as a researcher with the Chinese military's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, made heads swivel. Andy Ellis, formerly with CSIS noted it was "madness" for the Public Health Agency of Canada, responsible for the Winnipeg laboratory, to cooperate with the People's Liberation Army.

"It is ill-advised. It is the top lab in Canada. It is just incredible naivete on their part", he emphasized. The Public Health Agency of Canada refuses to disclose anything relating to the firing of the two Chinese scientists much less about the lab research or the relationship of the National Microbiology Laboratory with the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, much less the third skeleton in the closet, the involvement of the Chinese military.

In this 2017 file photo, Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli works with other researchers in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory postulates that researchers may have been studying or even modifying such viruses to better understand them, and that a lab accident allowed the virus to escape. (Associated Press)

New life has lately been breathed into the theory of the Wuhan Laboratory studying bat viruses, its close geographical proximity to the fresh wild animal market in Wuhan where suspicion was that the strange new pneumonia-causing virus that had surfaced in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, later identified as a novel coronavirus that moved swiftly to infect large swaths of people in Wuhan, in China, and gradually but quickly the rest of the world, emerged. And COVID-19 was born. Was it a rare virus that crossed the species barrier from animal to human? Or a lab-escapee?

 

Prominent scientists are now insisting that the theory is no longer in the realm of conspiracy, that it is a feasible explanation for the presence of a new and deadly SARS virus. That the Wuhan Virology Laboratory was insufficiently secure and a virus that had been synthesized in the laboratory had somehow escaped, an escape with horrendous consequences -- and that Beijing was irresponsible in trying to hide its noxious presence and in so doing introduced a global threat to human existence.

 

The problem for Canada now, is its links with the laboratory and its obviously compromised position. While U.S. President Biden has authorized a deep investigation of the matter which Beijing most certainly will not cooperate with, in permitting access to the laboratory, to the market confines, to witnesses, to its scientists, to the records that it refused the WHO investigative team access to, the truth will somehow emerge, and Canada's role in the disaster will also emerge, damning its reputation, thanks to a prime minister with ambitions for a robust trade agreement with Beijing and a lack of common sense.

Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal. While initially dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, now credible scientists are saying a proper investigation needs to be done. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

 

COVID's Elusive Origins : WHO Report

 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

"Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy."

"[The international expert team had] expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data [while in China]."

"[The report also] raises further questions that will need to be addressed by further studies."

"I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization

 

Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus arrive by car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP)

"I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory escape."

"Other people don't believe that, that's fine, science will eventually figure it out."

Robert Redfield, virologist, former head, Centres for Disease Control

"[The Institute saw] no disruptions or incidents."

"[A formal audit of the laboratory was] far beyond what our team is mandated to do or has the tools and capabilities to do."

"The fact that we assessed this hypothesis [that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab] as extremely unlikely doesn't mean it's ruled out."

Peter Ben Embarek, WHO investigative team

"We were allowed to ask whatever questions we wanted, and we got answers. The only evidence that people have for a lab leak is that there is a lab in Wuhan."

"A thousand samples [of animals sold at the Huanan market when the WHO investigative team took samples from 188 animals of 18 species at the market, all of which tested negative] is a great start, but there’s more to do."

WHO team member Peter Daszak

Animal markets like this one in China could be a source of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the WHO report.   Credit: Eric Lafforgue/Art In All Of Us/Corbis via Getty

The World Health Organization's investigative team of ten travelled to Wuhan, China for the express purpose of conducting an unbiased, scientific survey of any available evidence in an attempt to determine the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that swept the world when it first surfaced as a strange new pneumonia-like pathogen deadlier and more infectious than most viruses that erupt from time to time in the East and spread eventually worldwide. The WHO team had plenty of local assistance in their diligent search for answers during their two-week stay.

There were quite a few interviews and on-site examinations, bearing in mind that the team had to first isolate on arriving in China before they could proceed. With them throughout their investigative exercise was a matching team of Chinese scientists to give them aid and direction, some 17 in number. The People's Republic of China was deeply and sincerely invested in the search for the origins of the novel coornavirus, making certain that at all times the WHO researchers were escorted by Chinese officialdom.

WHO microbiologists and medical researchers fully intended to do a thorough and creditable job of searching for answers while conducting interviews under constant supervision in the presence of government officials. Needless to say every individual who was questioned to gain a wider and more full understanding of what had occurred would have been under a certain level of constraint, testifying under the fixed scrutiny of government agents. In their minds no doubt, the fate of Li Wenliang accused of 'spreading harmful rumours' when he first alerted his colleagues to the presence of a threatening new virus. Before he himself died of COVID.

"It's essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour ... this group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see", explained Jamie Metzl, former senior adviser to then-U.S.President Bill Clinton. What is known is simply that a novel coronavirus erupted from some source within walking distance of the high-security laboratory under the aegis of the Wuhan Institute of Virology specializing in the study of coronaviruses. It is also known that the laboratory is located not far from the wild animal 'wet' market where both domestic animals and exotic animals were sold, dead and alive.

And it was the market that Chinese authorities pointed to as the unfortunate source of cross-species, animal-to-human viral vector. These wet markets exist throughout Asia where an insatiable appetite for exotic animals like bats, snakes, pangolins and many other creatures can be satisfied. Crossing the species barrier for pathogens is rare, but it does happen. It did with AIDS and we know what agony that led to throughout the world.

"We could show the virus was circulating in the market as early as December 2019."

"A lot of good leads were suggested in this report, and we anticipate that many, if not all of them, will be followed through because we owe it to the world to understand what happened, why and how to prevent it from happening again."

Peter Ben Embarek,  co-leader, WHO investigative team

Long before the novel coronavirus was identified, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had come in for lax safety regulation criticism when a U.S. team of scientists had visited the premises and felt alarm at the situation prevailing there. That very same laboratory is involved in a security breach that took place in Canada's own National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg when a high-profile Chinese scientist and her husband, both employed there, were escorted from the lab never to return. Involved in an unauthorized transfer of highly sensitive biological samples from there to the Wuhan lab.

The team of WHO investigators appear to have reached the conclusion through a joint report that a lab escape of the coronavirus was to be regarded as "extremely unlikely" following a brief examination of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Four hours were spent at the facility by the WHO team, the investigation limited to interviews with laboratory staffers where the investigators were informed that no disruptions or incidents occurred, and nor did the WHO investigators request collaborative documentation.

The Beijing government appears to have withheld case data from outside investigators, the WHO team no exception. China, it would appear, deigned not to honour a request to turn over 174 health records from the first patients in Wuhan to contract COVID-19: "They showed us a couple of examples, but that's not the same as doing all of them, which is standard epidemiological investigation", explained Dominic Dwyer of the WHO team.

What the WHO team reported was that 92 cases of Wuhan patients exhibiting COVID-like symptoms were documented in October of 2019, quite a few weeks before the officially recognized first cases were reported by the Chinese government. The investigators were given Chinese assurances that serological tests indicated no link to COVID-19.

 

 

India: Rescued by Herd Immunity

"It was totally overwhelming. November was the worst. We could only accommodate the number of patients we could discharge."

"We were managing very, very sick patients in the ward, as there was no room in the ICU."

"To our relief and surprise, the number of cases have started to come down drastically."

"If the situation continues like this for a month, we can say we have achieved sustained low numbers because of immunity and vaccination."

"But we have to keep our fingers crossed. These good times may not continue forever."

Dr.Sushila Kataria, Medanta hospital, New Delhi  

A mural in New Delhi is part of public health messaging in India. The country has seen a dramatic decline in new cases since the fall, but researchers aren't sure why.  Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

"What we seem to have done is let the virus run its course. By not flattening the curve in the beginning, India went through the herd immunity threshold and the epidemic seems to be naturally coming down."

"We will never know how many people died -- no one is counting."

Jacob John, virologist, retired professor, Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu state

"I am hopeful the worst is over. In certain areas, like large cities, we may have come close to achieving a good amount of immunity -- if not herd immunity, close to it."

"The estimates are that 30 to 50 percent of individuals may have had asymptomatic or mild infections and not gotten tested. Many who had developed mild symptoms may have had COVID-19 without realizing it."

Dr.Randeep Guleria, director, All India Institute of Medical Sciences

"We are seeing a lot less severe disease than the rest of t he world, and a lot more asymptomatic infections."

"Part of the reason might be prior exposure to lots of other pathogens. We live in an environment where we are exposed to all kinds of pathogens all the time and we learn not to react too much."

"It looks like the virus has really spread widely in the country. Maybe the reason the numbers are crashing is that most people have been infected and infection gives you at least 80 percent protection for months at a time."

"If you look at the places that did well with control early on, they are the ones [that] have a high level of infection now."

"And if a variant comes along that escapes immune responses, then everyone is in play again."

Gagandeep Kang, microbiologist

India has recorded some 10.7 million Covid-19 infections so far   Reuters

 

Exhausted doctors in New Deli whose non-stop reaction to the COVID pandemic left them overworked, isolated for fear they would transmit a virus to their families, and anxious to see the end of the nightmare of the SARS-CoV-2 viral epidemic are incredulous but thankful to recognize that daily new infections in India's capital have seen a sharp drop in recent weeks. This is a trend that has extended well beyond New Delhi where India's new confirmed coronavirus infections nationally have fallen suddenly from a peak of close to 100,000 new infections daily in September to an average of 13,000 to 14,000 each day at the present time.

Health surveys reveal that much higher public exposure to the virus than was previously understood to have occurred was the reality. While many other countries all with infinitely smaller populations are struggling through second and third waves and recognizing the emergence of troubling new variants of the coronavirus, India's precipitous drop in infections seems to indicate that their version of the pandemic is well on its way to burning out in India. 

Speculation has led to the conclusion that this is the result of the nation's crowded cities and that the level of communication of the virus has led to natural "herd immunity" having arisen even before vaccines have been widely used in mass inoculations. The most reasonable hypothesis to the surprise drop in infections is seen to focus on the virus spread losing steam, a situation leading to cautious optimism that the pandemic's shadow is slinking off, allowing the country to begin repair of its collapsed economy resulting from a strict lockdown, restrictions and public fear.

The Reserve Bank of India recently issued a bulletin alerting to the "increasing probability" of a stronger-than-anticipated economic rebound in lock step with COVID receding. "Barring the visitation of a second wave, the worst is behind us. The recovery is getting stronger in its traction, and soon the winter of our discontent will be made glorious summer", the bulletin poetically crowed.

Back in March when India began reeling under the certainty that the first few hundred coronavirus infections would soon balloon out to hundreds of thousands, a draconian nationwide lockdown was imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for which he apologized as a necessity to avert complete disaster. The purpose, he explained, was to break the chain of viral transmission. Public transport was suspended for months, people could only buy food, medicine and cleaning products while India's economy contracted 24 percent year on year.

In a country where millions live in tight proximity sharing community toilets and water taps in congested slums, lockdown failed to accomplish its purpose. The pathogen spread from the cities into the hinterlands carried by laid-off migrant workers who returned to their far-off villages. Over 10.7 million confirmed coronavirus infections were reported in all of India, the second-highest number following that of the U.S. Even so, experts feel the real case total to be much higher; most infections not recognized nor recorded.

Photo: PTI

"The reported cases are not even remotely a reflection of true cases -- they only reflect people who got tested. For reasons that we don't fully know, the virus has spread like wildfire in India -- more than in any other country in the world", stated Vikram Patel, professor of global health at Harvard Medical School. Over half of residents in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Pune have been exposed to the virus according to seroprevalence studies. An estimate of 31 million infections by mid-August in Karnataka state, included 44 percent of the rural population and 54 percent of the urban population.

Over 154,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported in India, but the actual death count may never be known, since most Indians tend to die at home without a cause of death ever formally determined. Some researchers, despite that reality, feel that India's COVID mortality rate has in all probability not been as high as many other regions given the relative youth of the country's population with just 6.5 percent over 65 years of age in comparison to Europe's one-fifth.

Health economist Rijo John, based in Kerala, feels the virus strain that has swept through India is a less virulent one than has inundated populations elsewhere. "It's pretty generally accepted that in India, we have a very mild form of the virus. But the future is hard to predict." For the meanwhile, however, India's pandemic appears to be in steep decline.Most of the country's 270 million schoolchildren have been out of class since March. White-collar professionals work from home and have done so for almost a year, with most elderly people remaining exclusively at home, susceptible to infection.

An ambitious vaccination campaign has been launched by the government with an aim to inoculate 300 million Indians by August's end. A number that includes health-care workers and the elderly. Roughly 3 million people have been vaccinated once the drive began two weeks earlier indicating that reaching the total of 300 million will probably become a slow, protracted process.

"A lot of this is in the rear-view mirror but that doesn't mean we are done and dusted yet."

"We have an artificial situation in which we've reached an equilibrium, but if we went back to normal, there is still a lot of room for cases going up."

Ramanan Laxminarayan, director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy

Cumulative severity of COVID-19 and proportionate mortality from top causes (percent)   Source: Johns Hopkins University; World Health Organization.

Alaska, A Vaccine Delivery Success Story

"Boats, ferries, planes, snowmobiles -- Alaskans will find a way to get it there."

"I love the pictures of vaccination distribution in Alaska. Recipients expressed  how grateful they were that even though they are so remote, they are getting this vaccine. They are not forgotten."

"The stories have lived on. One chief told me how his grandmother took his mother out to the wilderness for a year so that she would be safe. When they returned, they learned that most of their village had died [during the 1918 flu pandemic]."

"We are stronger as a state because of that history. For me, the way that villages were able to recover from that trauma speaks to what we need to do to keep moving forward."

Anne Zink, Alaska chief medical officer

"We land in the isolated tundra, and they'll be lined up waiting [the native residents]."

"If you turn around the last two seats in the plane, it works out perfectly [the plane interior to be used as an inoculation site when inclement weather prevails]."

"Some places have up to 30 people, and some have only one."

Ellen Hodges, physician from Bethel, Alaska

"You have to be resilient and self-sufficient to live in Alaska. We have a lot of multi-family households, so we're extremely grateful to see these vaccines arrive."

"People here look out for each other."

Crystal Collier, president, CEO, Seldovia Village Tribe

Plastic surgeon Daniel Suver receives the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine from Andrea Castelblanco during a vaccine clinic on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020 at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. (Loren Holmes / ADN)

When Curt Jackson who hires himself and his 32-foot aluminum landing craft as a water taxi to convey people across the bay from the small city of Homer to villages across Kachemak Bay where no roads make the remote villages accessible by land was asked to take three nurses to Seldovia, a 450-person town, because of bad weather keeping planes out of the air that morning, he agreed despite that the trip would be in unusually rough water conditions.

It was dark when the trip began. One of the women among the three was carrying a bright blue cooler. Which led Jackson to comprehend that the women were on a mission to deliver vaccine doses. "I asked them, 'Is that the vaccine'? and they told me it was", he said of the nurses tasked to vaccinate a group of medical workers in the village. The 15-mile trip to cross the bay was extended to an hour though it normally takes 30 minutes, as a result of strong winds and four-foot waves that early morning.

 

Curt Jackson, Captain of Water Taxi, the Orca

 

"With a strict time frame (for the Pfizer vaccine), there was no option for us to postpone vaccinations."

"On any other day, the rough ride would not have been as nerve-wracking if (the) vaccine hadn't been involved", said Candace Kreger, a licensed nurse care coordinator from Homer, Alaska.

 

Sarah Lind, a nurse with Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp., Southwest Alaska's tribal health care provider, vaccinates James Evan in December. They're standing on the tarmac in the village of Napakiak, where Evan works for YKHC at the clinic. Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp.

As far as Dr.Hodges from Bethel was concerned, the coronavirus vaccination effort is the most important project she has ever been involved with.She had flown to several villages in a six-seater plane for the purpose of vaccinating medical workers and elders. Medical crews frequently upgrade to ten-seater planes when the weather is particularly icy, the larger planes enabling the interior to be used to inoculate people inside the plane, protected from the elements. The sensitivity of the state in its creative approach to delivering the vaccine by resorting to planes, sleds and snowmobiles impresses tribal elders.

Alaska is leading the U.S. in per capita vaccinations with about 13 percent of the state having been inoculated while another high-delivery state, West Virginia, has inoculated 11 percent of its population. For Alaska the challenge is how to manage to convey vaccines to people living in difficult, frigid terrain, awkward to access in remote corners of the state. Where people end up being inoculated on fishing boats, inside 10-seater planes, and frozen landing strips -- with medical personnel taking parlous trips to towns and villages to serve the health of remote-dwelling Alaskans.

The population of the state with the nation's largest land mass is 732,000 with a large number of veterans at high risk for infection, along with native populations whose vulnerability to infection is also high. This is a state well practised in delivering cargo by transport unusual in nature, even by sled. An all-female medical crew of four had used a sled hauled by snowmobile to deliver vaccine to the village of Shungnak in the remote Northwest Arctic Borough.

Canada's Gross Mismanagement of Vaccine Procurement, Distribution and Inoculation

"We've been clear from the start. Canada is strongly determined to vaccinate Canadians while making sure that the rest of the world isn't getting left behind." 

"Our  participation into COVAX is a concrete example of that."

"At this point in time, the idea was always with COVAX that you would have developed countries and developing countries participate so that you would have global buy-in and support for the process." 

International Development Minister Karina Gould

"The COVAX vaccines were a way the developed countries, like Canada, were helping poorer countries have access to vaccines."

"The very fact that Canada is the only G7 country asking the COVAX consortium for vaccines is a demonstration that we have no plan, and Canadians need vaccines to get the country working to secure our future."

"It’s hard for me to divorce the inaction of the government over the last 10 months with what I would do today. We would not be in this position today."

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has faced pressure to roll out vaccines faster, after delays    Reuters

The World Health Organization, in a bid to ensure that underdeveloped nations of the world not be left behind while their wealthier counterparts received life-saving vaccines against COVID-19, arranged a global pool to assist in the supply of vaccines to poorer countries unable to afford protection by procuring their own vaccines for their populations. The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is nothing if not prepared at all times to leap into a project with overtones of doing good, and virtue signalling compels the man to announce such a commitment to a universal do-good cause.

Accordingly, among other announcements he is so fond of promulgating to ensure that Canadians are aware that their government is hard at work on their behalf while at the same time not neglecting the obligation to scatter the fairy dust of good works elsewhere in the world, news of hundreds of millions being donated to such charitable good works enables the media to gush over the compelling news of Canadian charity, making Canadians proud of their collective wisdom and caring. 

 

Canada's investment in the COVAX pool under the auspices of the WHO and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (Gavi) represents a vote-winner for Trudeau at the next election.

Particularly when tallied atop this government's unquestioned expediting of taxpayers' lavish funding of financial aid during the COVID epidemic to Canadians in dire economic need. A need no Canadians not requiring government assistance find fault with, only the sloppy manner in which it has been administered so that people with robust incomes intact, teens, and others who shouldn't qualify have received payments upon application, which process had deliberately loose registration guidelines.

Like most things this government initiates and/or involves itself with, there are jarring realities involved serving to diminish the 'good' the government accomplishes and few things illustrate that more shockingly than the revelation that Canada has requested allocations of millions of vaccine doses through Gavi, a source meant to buy vaccines for poor nations, 92 low- and middle-income nations unable to afford purchasing of vaccines on their own.

 

The Advanced Market Commitment facility through COVAX fulfills that role. Canada made a contribution of $440 million to the COVAX fund, half earmarked to secure doses for itself. The fact of this matter is that Canada's current government decided to place its vaccine eggs in the wrong basket; an agreement with China to take part in research toward a COVID vaccine and share in its trials and production. Which fell through when Beijing decided to stop the export of its military-research-linked CanSino vaccine to Canada, permitting the vaccine to be shipped abroad elsewhere.

 

The investment Canada made in the CanSino vaccine was misdirected; those eggs produced no benefit for Canada, and only once that realization sunk in did the government hastily reach out to other pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Britain to sign procurement contracts, at a date much later than other countries in the G7 had seen fit to do, some of whom have their own vaccine-producing installations in place, which Canada did not.

 

Of over one hundred countries on Gavi's COVAX Interim Distribution Forecast list, Canada is present as one of a handful of wealthy participant countries along with New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore. Not all countries capable of producing the funds to enable ordering their own vaccine supplies participated in the Gavi program; Canada participated and expressed interest in the COVAX supply facility; hedging its bets to obtain sufficient vaccines as a late-starter, for its population. Canada is well behind a steady supply of vaccine volumes struggling behind peer countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Israel.

 

Canada garnered criticism from public health authorities elsewhere and human rights groups for vastly over-ordering vaccines in a desperate measure to 'keep up' with other wealthy countries vaccinating their populations, complicated by the fact that the two Health Canada-approved vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna have run into production-and-delivery problems. Canada is now in the position of being the only wealthy country in the G7 hoping to procure vaccines through a fund whose purpose is to provide vaccines to poor nations.

 

Canada continues to lag behind dozens of countries in taking delivery of vaccines and administering them, even to its most vulnerable population demographics. And when the World Health Organization recently begged wealthy countries urgently to begin donating surplus vaccine orders to COVAX for developing countries, the Canadian government responded that it is 'too early' to commit to any such donations where vaccination rates are  among the world's lowest.

 

 

Beijing, Vindicating Itself

Mr Zhang's father (Supplied: Zhang Hai)

"Very important site visits today -- a wholesale market first & Huanan Seafood Market just now."  "Very informative & critical for our joint teams to understand the epidemiology of COVID as it started to spread at the end of 2019."

Peter Daszak, zoologist with U.S. group EcoHealth Alliance, member of WHO team

 

"The government's first priority is to protect the people's health and safety, but it failed to inform the public as soon as the coronavirus outbreak happened."

"My father, a very patriotic soldier, had devoted his youth to the nation … but he was killed by COVID-19 in his later life."

"The epidemic would never happen if the government had truly put the people's interest [as their] first priority."

"[He wouldn't trust visits organized and limited by the Chinese government, and thought the information patients gave could be] highly suspicious."

"They could have been trained many months ago, and been ordered to stage and repeat the government's narrative."

"I am highly concerned that the WHO experts in Wuhan are not a match for these counterfeiters."

 Zhang Hai, 51, Wuhan resident

 

The WHO team visits an exhibition about the Government's successful response to contain the coronavirus in Wuhan on Saturday.   (AP: Ng Han Guan)

"[I had] police interviews, cameras pointing at home, and dismissal from work. They pressured my families, stalked my activities, which is completely unscrupulous."

"[I am told] don't contact the foreign media, because it will be used by anti-China forces, which is detrimental to our country."

"I just want everyone to know that the government is a murderer for hiding the epidemic."

 Parent who lost an only child

Government propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party officially denies it was in any way irresponsible over its handling of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, over charges that it waited too long to warn the international community and the World Health Organization of its discovery of a strange new pneumonia-like illness that was plaguing people in Wuhan City. Its assurance when it did alert the WHO that person-to-person transmission was unlikely was inaccurate and harmful to the world's understanding of what was unfolding.

Not only does Beijing deny that it acted in anything but a responsible manner, but it also denies that the virus itself first emerged in Hubei Province, northern China. Rather, the propaganda slyly insists it emerged elsewhere, abroad, and was imported to China. That happened in one of two ways, they claim; either through infected frozen meat exported by a European country into China, or it was deliberately brought to China by U.S. agents. 

Beijing's inexcusable attempts to hide the presence of a new, highly contagious and lethal-to-the-elderly virus, its silencing of physicians in Wuhan hospitals who raised the alarm, threatening them and accusing them of spreading 'false news', also did not happen, but represents a malicious attempt on the part of the West to smear China. Casually speaking of the virus as the 'Wuhan virus', or the 'Chinese virus' sends Beijing into paroxysms of fury, but not a word is murmured by the WHO about racism when the media speak of the new 'U.K.' mutation', or the 'South African' variant.

Beijing screamed bloody murder and called it racism when other countries began to close their borders to China, and the World Health Organization chastised those that did, wagging a finger of racism at them as well. Yet once China succeeded during the first wave of the coronavirus to achieve a measure of control, it closed its borders to entry from abroad, where Italy and Spain in particular were experiencing a crisis in runaway COVID infection rates overwhelming their health care systems.

A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. The WHO team is investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has visited two disease control centers in the province. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

American authorities and some U.S. bioscientists raised the possibility that the virus was an escapee of a biohazard laboratory located not far from the Wuhan live meat market which sold pangolin, wolf cubs, bats, snakes and other live animals for slaughter for the human palate and where the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first said to have emerged. To this day there is no consensus of opinion over that hypothesis; eminent scientists declare it to be hugely unlikely while others retain suspicion.

China delayed the entry of the WHO team of investigators to Wuhan City although it had initially agreed that it would cooperate with their mission to study the breakout of the virus that had crossed the species barrier from wild animals to human victims, not an entirely rare occurrence and invariably difficult to control. But after delays and controversy, the team, having undergone a 14-day mandatory isolation period on arrival in China, is now into its third day of a two-week investigation.

"The team plans to visit hospitals, laboratories and markets. Field visits will include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Huanan market, Wuhan CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] laboratory."

"All hypotheses are on the table as the team follows the science in their work. They should receive the support, access and the data they need."

World Health Organization statement

 

"It is now that the actual field work can begin, and it is my expectation that for this part of the mission we will have unhindered access to the requested destinations and individuals."

"But it is important to remember that the success of this mission and origin-tracing is 100 percent depending on access to the relevant sources."

"No matter how competent we are, how hard we work and how many stones we try to turn, this can only be possible with the support from China."

Thea Fischer, Danish team member

China's foreign ministry for its part said the WHO team is scheduled to participate in seminars, visits and field trips, and it is no doubt hoping that it can de-politicize the assumptions some of the WHO members come equipped with, while carrying on its own politicization of a topic so overwhelmingly pervasive throughout the world and so deadly that millions of lives globally have been lost to the viral predator. Beijing, by setting its own program for the visit before the investigators, likely seeks to diminish the time allotted for the WHO members' own agenda while consuming that time in 'meetings'.

 

Beijing has also made it abundantly clear that it has complete control over where the WHO team will be escorted, always in the presence of handlers. And the many Chinese who are intent on being interviewed by the WHO team while Chinese authorities harass and threaten their outspokenness, is simply yet another facet of a lost cause; try as they sincerely will, with the obstacles placed in their path to fulfilling their mission, it is highly unlikely the WHO will come away with anything but Beijing's approved narrative.

 

A worker in protective overall passes by a warehouse at the Baishazhou wholesale market during a visit by the World Health Organization on the third day of field visit in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Protecting Canadians from SARS-CoV-2 Transmission

"This is how the first wave started, it came from other countries, and some people who were clearly not observing the quarantine recommendations."
Dr.Jeff Kwong, public-health professor, University of Toronto

"The honour system is a halfwitted Canadian farce which all but guarantees that we will be reinfected from outside the country, and quite often, I should think."
"I have requested government do one of these three things [test all arrivals for COVID before entry; quarantine arrivals immediately in hotels; install an app to trace whereabouts for 14 days]."
"Government has never answered me."
Dr.Amir Attaran, public health policy professor, University of Ottawa

"Flattening the curve" provides an opportunity to significantly reduce deaths from COVID-19. MATTHEW MCQUEEN / Director, Public Health Program, University of Colorado Boulder

As far as Dr.Attaran is concerned, from his post as a Canada Research Chair in health policy, what bothers him particularly is the "total absence" of any measure of enforcement to ensure that people entering Canada take the 14-day isolation requirement seriously. Government doesn't appear to take  protection of the Canadian public seriously enough to go beyond taking people's promise to accede to the rules as a point of public policy overcoming private unwillingness for the greater public good, so why should individuals?

Close to three million people have entered Canada since the borders were officially closed on March 25, a marked decrease of the numbers that generally crossed from the United States in Canada. The representative number reflects a roughly 90 percent decline in border crossings, as opposed to the usual numbers, according to Canada Border Services Agency statistics.

The issue of maintaining closed borders for all but essential workers and services is key to the ability of the country to shield its citizens from rampant SARS-CoV-2 contagion. And experts have been quick to point out that international travel introduced COVID-19 to Canada to begin with. Which meant that mandatory border closures should have been implemented, and taken seriously, with all the tracking required to ensure that those entering the country took the required precautions of self-isolating to protect the public much earlier than it did.

Canada has relatively low numbers of COVID-19 infections, with both Quebec and Ontario the two provinces with the highest infection rates, reaching a level of control and diminishing cases. Given the situation in the United States over the southern border, maintaining that closed border is critical. The U.S. reported 77,000 new COVID cases nationwide on Thursday, the seventh time this month record high cases were reported. Roughly half of the 50 states have mandated the wearing of masks, the other half not.

In total, 3.6 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, the highest count of any country. Over 138,000 Americans have died from the effect of the disease, a staggering figure of lost life. Florida, Texas and South Carolina all reported record COVID-19 death numbers for a single day, on Thursday. Texas announced over 15,000 infections for a single day. Infection rates altogether for Canada's neighbour have been trending upward.

Trucks prepare to cross the Peace Bridge, which runs between Canada and the United States, over the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York, July 15, 2020. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Border restrictions are broadly supported by the Canadian public, approving of the extension to mid-August of the mutually-agreed-upon closure of the Canada-U.S. border. The fly in that ointment is not that the Canadian government claims that anyone entering Canada from abroad must go into a two-week quarantine, it is that the regulations are too lax. Of over 80 percent of the three million arrivals since late March, most have entered under exemptions whose category includes truck drivers, fishermen, soldiers, airline crew, critical infrastructure technicians and students working in health care.

Fewer than 380,000 out of the total of three million entrants have been "non-exempt", expected to isolate themselves for the required two-week period. Robo-calls and automated emails to remind the non-exempt of their obligations, augmented by live calls to check up on their commitments do occur through the Public Health Agency of Canada or through Service Canada officials. Yet hundreds of people with no intention to self-isolate or who have indicated they plan to, but fail to, have been answerable to follow-up by police.

Vancouver International Airport. (Hana Mae Nassar, NEWS 1130 Photo)

There have been scant fines resulting for violation of these critical rules. "How effective the measures are cannot be judged by how many tickets are issued. Since March -- when travel restrictions were implemented by the government of Canada -- COVID-19 cases associated with international travel have decreased substantially, from 21 percent (3,703) of all cases in March to two percent (173) in June", advised Tammy Jabreau speaking for the Public Health Agency. "This (international travellers entering Canada) is how the first wave started, it came from other countries, and some people who were clearly not observing the quarantine recommendations", pointed out Dr.Jeff Kwong.

Live calls from a trained "screening officer" who rates the person's compliance through a series of questions have reached 175,723 people, advised Tammy Jabreau, for the Public Health Agency. The Public Health Agency has passed on to the RCMP the names of about 1,500 people who failed to honour their commitments. "These measures have been essential to slowing the spread of the virus within Canada's borders."

Life and Death Under the Curse of COVID-19

"I was basically told that the government is willing to risk my life to save my life. Let me say that again, my government told me they're willing to let me die, which according to them is for my own safety ..."
"So six months later or so, time for surgery and boom, all non-essential surgeries postponed."
"Heart surgery, apparently considered non-essential. Now I know some say that's non-essential, but it's pretty goddam essential to me. Told me the surgery will bring me peace of mind and a fallback just in case something happens. Now I'm told today possibly could be a year or two?"
"So what, I'm just supposed to kiss my ass goodbye? I'm starting to freak out here. Wondering what I should do?"
"Sorry for the rant folks, just frustrated that the government gets to decide who lives or dies ... I'm willing to get sick and live than die and not get sick ..."
Jerry Dunham, 46, heart failure patient, Alberta

Jerry Dunham died in hospital from heart failure. Postmedia Network

"I vowed to him on his death bed -- with our daughters sobbing for their daddy to wake up -- that his death would not be in vain. I promised him that."
"We're all alternating between feelings of profound sadness, disbelief and total rage."
"How many have had their health deteriorate beyond repair? Why couldn't each province have left some hospitals open to deal with essential surgeries and sickness unrelated to COVID?"
"Our oldest, Reydian, got up on the bed, hugging her dad, begging him, 'Please Daddy, please Daddy, come back to us. Please Daddy, it's Reydian."
Krista Lambier, ex-wife, mother of two daughters



A year and a half ago, 46-year-old Jerry Dunham, a construction worker, hockey player, musician, living in Palmerston Ontario, population 2,500 found he couldn't catch his breath. He was soon diagnosed with congestive heart failure and informed he might need a heart transplant, but in the interim, some tests were needed, he would be put on medications and would be fitted with a defibrillator. He was living there to be close to Kitchener where his ex-wife and their children lived.

When the date came around for his scheduled surgery he was living with his parents, because he could no longer work, as a result of his serious heart issues; his special commercial driver's licence to operate large trucks and equipment had been rescinded. The medication wasn't working as hoped to regulate his heart. No work, he was unable to function and lost his home, his truck and even his residence, returning to Alberta.

At his doctor's office, a nurse informed him that despite his racing heart, the surgery to implant a defibrillator would not proceed, as a result of COVID-19 taking up hospital time and space, since all 'elective surgery' was being postponed. Jerry Dunham didn't think of his impending surgery as 'elective' but necessary, to keep him alive, given his diagnosis and medical condition. He asked to speak with his doctor.

Surgeries around the world are being cancelled due to the pandemic.

Image: Unsplash/Jafar Ahmed

He had a scheduled appointment pre-surgery with his doctor. There were no other patients during the time he sat in the doctor's office; no one coming or going. But as he sat in the office for 45 minutes, willing to wait until the doctor could see him, he was informed that the doctor was simply "too busy". It was while he was waiting that he wrote the posts above, on his Facebook page, in sheer desperation.

Two months passed. And on the seventh of June he was admitted to Medicine Hat Regional Hospital with a heart attack. He died of cardiac arrest on May 30, deprived of oxygen to his brain. A close member of his family advocated for the desperate need for surgery for Jerry Dunham, but never received any acknowledgement that anyone had taken his pleas seriously. The Medicine Hat Hospital was the closest location from his parents' home in Redcliff, Albert, a ten-minute drive away.

In the planning stages in Ontario in preparation for an anticipated tidal wave of serious respiratory cases brought on by COVID-19, modelling suggested that elective heart surgery cancellation would cause over 30 deaths by early May. But the cancellation proceeded, on the gamble that more lives would be saved coping with patients on respirators taking up hospital room in ICUs and physician time in caring for them, than devoting a part of the hospital to continuing surgery.

About 200,000 surgeries and other procedures -- cancer and heart surgeries included -- were cancelled while hospitals prepared for a deluge everyone was certain would eventuate, of COVID-19 patients. A spokesperson with Alberta Health wrote: "All urgent, emergency and cancer surgeries have been available throughout the pandemic. Albertans who need urgent surgery will get it. AHS has indicated that they are not aware of any deaths due to cancellations of scheduled surgeries."

When Jerry Dunham was taken off the ventilator his wife was informed that he would die within minutes or hours. He lived for another two-and-a-half days, before finally expiring. In the end, he had spent more time in intensive care following his deadly heart attack -- entirely preventable had his surgery proceeded -- than he would have done, with the implant of a defibrillator that was ultimately denied him.

Krista Lambier was asked did the family wish his death to be recorded as a COVID-19 death. "I said, 'no. He tested negative for COVID-19. That'd be a flat-out lie." She thinks now that perhaps the more than 8,560 deaths that Canada lists as being caused by the respiratory virus might be an over-inflated figure. On the other hand, since 80 percent of those deaths have been attributed to Canada's failure to adequately protect the health-vulnerable aged who lived in long-term care homes, perhaps not.