Health
B.C. groups concerned over lack of compromise in COVID-19 vaccine card plan – Sooke News Mirror
A group of British Columbia community organizations wants changes to the province’s COVID-19 vaccine card, saying it fails to account for the needs of people who face legitimate barriers to getting a vaccine or proof of immunization.
A joint letter to Health Minister Adrian Dix and provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says the plan could restrict access to services for people who can’t get a shot for medical reasons, as well as people without government identification.
It was released by Vancouver-based Pivot Legal Society this month and says B.C. has failed to identify a workaround for people without ID, which could include women fleeing violence, people who are homeless and undocumented migrants.
The vaccine card system requires patrons to show proof of at least one vaccine dose by Monday and two doses by Oct. 24 to access certain indoor settings, including ticketed sports events, concerts, restaurants, gyms and movie theatres.
The card will not be required at grocery and liquor stores, pharmacies, fast food restaurants, salons, barbers, hotels, banks, retail stores, food banks and shelters.
B.C. residents need a personal health number to order a paper copy of their vaccine card or to download the card online for display on a smartphone. The card will be checked alongside government identification.
“If you’re homeless and living outside, carrying around a piece of paper is just not going to work out,” said Rowan Burdge, director of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition and a signatory of the letter. “We’ve seen encampments where people’s belongings have been taken away.”
The letter says the province hasn’t done enough to follow the advice of organizations that understand how best to navigate public health guidelines for those living in poverty or with a disability, for example.
Disability Alliance BC, which also signed the letter, said in a separate statement that mandating so-called vaccine passports without accommodating people who cannot get vaccinated due to their medical condition is “blatant discrimination.”
The Health Ministry said in a statement it appreciates the groups’ feedback and it has “been doing what we can to address some of these challenges.”
Asked about accommodation for people who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons, the ministry said there will be an exemption process “for extremely rare circumstances.”
“Dr. Henry has said that if you are unvaccinated, for whatever reason, these kind of indoor settings with lots of people are high risk right now,” it said.
Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba have also introduced vaccine passport programs.
Burdge said she doesn’t want requests made in the letter to be conflated with anti-vaccination rhetoric.
“We absolutely are supporting people to get vaccinated. … But we’re worried about the systemic barriers that are going to come from this particular policy.”
READ MORE: Here’s what you need to know about B.C.’s new vaccine card
A number of B.C. communities have seen protests against the vaccine card, including outside hospitals.
Dr. David Naylor, co-chair of Canada’s COVID-19 immunity task force, said there’s a widespread sense that COVID-19 has “hijacked our lives,” leading some people to scapegoat the public health measures adopted to protect the health-care system and those who are too young to receive a vaccine.
But Naylor said those measures, including achieving a higher rate of vaccination, are the “only way to restore normalcy in the months ahead,” particularly as the highly contagious Delta variant makes up the majority of Canada’s COVID-19 cases.
Vaccine passports have a role to play in curbing the fourth wave by encouraging immunization among people who may be late getting their first shot, but who aren’t staunchly opposed to vaccination, said Naylor, who led a review of Canada’s public health system after the outbreak of SARS in 2003.
Those opposed to vaccination or vaccine cards are “simply inviting continuation of some of the measures that everyone would like to avoid,” he said in an interview.
Naylor said even staunch libertarians, or those who believe in maximal freedom of choice and minimal government regulation, acknowledge that one person’s civil liberties stop when they lead to harm or encroach on the liberties of others.
“The notion here that you have people who could do harm to other people is relevant in considering the constraints on the civil liberties claim by people who choose to remain unvaccinated in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic.”
The Canadian Press
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Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.
The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.
The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.
However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.
But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.
Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.
“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.
“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”
Mima echoed that sentiment.
“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“So immunization is very important.”
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.
The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.
“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.
FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”
The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University
“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.
Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.
Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.
Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.
To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.
Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.
She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.
She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.
Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”
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