A long-running study into COVID-19 immunity has unearthed promising insights on the still-mysterious disease, one of its lead researchers says — but she’s concerned its funding could soon dry up.
The Stop the Spread project, a collaboration by the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa, has been monitoring antibody responses to COVID-19 in hundreds of people since October 2020.
For the first 10 months of the project, about 1,000 people sent in monthly samples of their blood, saliva or sputum — a mixture of saliva and mucus — for analysis.
The researchers then winnowed that group to about 300 and kept following them as vaccines were developed and new variants emerged.
While there are other longitudinal COVID-19 studies underway, Stop the Spread is notable because it launched so early in the pandemic that some participants hadn’t even fallen ill yet, said Dr. Angela Crawley, a cellular immunologist with OHRI and one of the project’s co-investigators.
That gave them access to cells and plasma untouched by the COVID-19 virus — a unique baseline, Crawley said, from which they’ve since tracked changes in immune responses and antibody levels.
But with the pandemic approaching the four-year mark, she and other researchers worry enthusiasm to fund COVID-19 research like Stop the Spread is waning — and that could have implications for how Canada tackles future outbreaks.
“Research funding has dwindled, and, you know, things change,” she said. “So a lot of what we’ve built is under threat of collapse.”
Stop the Spread is one of nearly 1,000 projects that has received funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, or CIHR, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Associated Press/Ted Warren)
Biological sex and antibodies
Stop the Spread got roughly $2 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the country’s health research granting agency, to follow that first 10-month cohort, and then leveraged that initial work to keep the money flowing for several more years.
For instance, Crawley said they’ve uncovered “pretty compelling” evidence of a link between one’s biological sex and one’s ability to generate and maintain antibodies.
Across all age categories, the data seems to suggest women are slower to shed antibodies than men, Crawley said. The distinction is sharpest in younger age groups, with rates of antibody loss gradually converging the older people get.
That sort of data, Crawley said, can help “fine-tune” future public health responses to COVID-19, which could include vaccines that better account for those differences in age and sex.
“How sophisticated our antibody response is relates to how well we can neutralize the virus,” said Crawley. “We’re not talking about protection against infection — that’s a different conversation — but protection against disease severity, which means a lot when you talk about respiratory infections.”
In addition to the CIHR funding, Stop the Spread also got money from the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF), which was established by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) in the pandemic’s early days.
Its mandate is — among other things — to fund research into COVID-19 immunity that would help Canadian policymakers make “evidence-based decisions.” According to PHAC, It’s handed out nearly $230 million to support scientific endeavours since launching in 2020.
It’s definitely a labour of love, but there’s so much to learn from this.– Angela Crawley
But there’s increasing worry among researchers who study COVID-19 that the overall pot of money is evaporating, said Dawn Bowdish, a professor at McMaster University and Canada Research Chair in Aging and Immunity.
“But there’s just no appetite to acknowledge that this is still a problem, and it’s incredibly frustrating, because the work that we do applies to all sorts of different infections.”
Christine and Jim Bonta, two longtime Stop the Spread participants, say a premature end to the study would mark a lost opportunity to learn more about pathogens like COVID-19. (Trevor Pritchard/CBC)
‘Breaking our hearts’
The federal government has invested $430 million through CIHR into nearly 1,000 COVID-19 research projects since the start of the pandemic, said PHAC spokesperson André Gagnon.
The agency still acknowledges the virus “poses a grave health threat,” Gagnon wrote in an email to CBC, with CIHR now home to a research centre focusing on pandemic preparedness and other health-care crises. And while it’s still funding projects on topics such as COVID-19 misinformation and long COVID, it also “recognizes the need to shift funding priorities to respond to current events.”
“[CIHR continues] to run 100+ funding competitions every year to invest research into other priority areas for people in Canada, such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, the opioid crisis and ways to strengthen Canada’s health-care systems,” he wrote.
The CITF, meanwhile, is slated to wrap up its work in March 2024, Gagnon added.
Bowdish says her research only has funding until the end of this year. Crawley, meanwhile, says Stop the Spread’s CIHR funding is running out in March, and they’re trying to stretch that out to follow a smaller cohort of about 100 people until mid-2025.
(Crawley is conducting parallel research into T-cells and immunity that’s only funded through CITF until the end of this year. With all the work they have ahead, she says there’s no way they’ll get that done to her satisfaction.)
“It’s literally breaking our hearts. We hope that we can find a way to sustain this for Canadians,” she said.
Ending the Stop the Spread project would make for a missed opportunity, said participants Jim and Christine Bonta, who’ve been part of the cohort since 2020 and recently signed on to continue into 2024.
“It would be knowledge lost, in particular about the effects of long COVID,” said Jim Bonta. “I don’t have long COVID, but I guess I would be [part of] a comparison group.”
“COVID is still circulating. And we don’t know when this is going to go away, if it will go away, and what else is going to emerge,” added Christine Bonta, a retired nurse.
“We need to be prepared to deal with that, [because] in 2020, we were not prepared.”
Crawley says her team has uncovered ‘pretty compelling’ evidence suggesting a link between one’s biological sex and one’s ability to generate and maintain antibodies that fight the COVID-19 virus. That work is now being submitted to a ‘high-impact journal,’ she added. (Trevor Pritchard/CBC)
The ideal scenario
For Crawley, the ideal scenario would be to get enough funding to continue Stop the Spread beyond 2025 while also establishing a truly national “biobank”: a physical facility with samples stored in freezers, with back-end infrastructure that would allow other researchers across Canada to easily access the data and share their own findings.
All the contracts would be in place so that scientists, governments and industry could all get at that information — something that would “break down silos” in scientific research and foster collaboration, she said.
“When there’s a pandemic, it’s no longer about, how can my career advance?” said Crawley. “It shouldn’t be like that. It should be, how can we all work together?”
Crawley also said her team has great respect for the Bontas and everyone else who’s committed three-plus years of their lives to Stop the Spread.
They feel an almost “crushing responsibility,” she added, to eke as much knowledge as possible out of the data they’ve collected — and continue to collect, at least for another year and a half.
“It’s definitely a labour of love, but there’s so much to learn from this,” she said. “And we do feel a pretty strong responsibility to make sure that we can learn as much as possible.”
The Canadian government says it will donate up to 200,000 vaccine doses to fight the mpox outbreak in Congo and other African countries.
It says the donated doses of Imvamune will come from Canada’s existing supply and will not affect the country’s preparedness for mpox cases in this country.
Minister of Health Mark Holland says the donation “will help to protect those in the most affected regions of Africa and will help prevent further spread of the virus.”
Dr. Madhukar Pai, Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health, says although the donation is welcome, it is a very small portion of the estimated 10 million vaccine doses needed to control the outbreak.
Vaccine donations from wealthier countries have only recently started arriving in Africa, almost a month after the World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
A few days after the declaration in August, Global Affairs Canada announced a contribution of $1 million for mpox surveillance, diagnostic tools, research and community awareness in Africa.
On Thursday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said mpox is still on the rise and that testing rates are “insufficient” across the continent.
Jason Kindrachuk, Canada research chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, said donating vaccines, in addition to supporting surveillance and diagnostic tests, is “massively important.”
But Kindrachuk, who has worked on the ground in Congo during the epidemic, also said that the international response to the mpox outbreak is “better late than never (but) better never late.”
“It would have been fantastic for us globally to not be in this position by having provided doses a much, much longer time prior than when we are,” he said, noting that the outbreak of clade I mpox in Congo started in early 2023.
Clade II mpox, endemic in regions of West Africa, came to the world’s attention even earlier — in 2022 — as that strain of virus spread to other countries, including Canada.
Two doses are recommended for mpox vaccination, so the donation may only benefit 100,000 people, Pai said.
Pai questioned whether Canada is contributing enough, as the federal government hasn’t said what percentage of its mpox vaccine stockpile it is donating.
“Small donations are simply not going to help end this crisis. We need to show greater solidarity and support,” he said in an email.
“That is the biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic — our collective safety is tied with that of other nations.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
HALIFAX – The Nova Scotia government says it could be months before it reveals how many people are on the wait-list for a family doctor.
The head of the province’s health authority told reporters Wednesday that the government won’t release updated data until the 160,000 people who were on the wait-list in June are contacted to verify whether they still need primary care.
Karen Oldfield said Nova Scotia Health is working on validating the primary care wait-list data before posting new numbers, and that work may take a matter of months. The most recent public wait-list figures are from June 1, when 160,234 people, or about 16 per cent of the population, were on it.
“It’s going to take time to make 160,000 calls,” Oldfield said. “We are not talking weeks, we are talking months.”
The interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health said people on the list are being asked where they live, whether they still need a family doctor, and to give an update on their health.
A spokesperson with the province’s Health Department says the government and its health authority are “working hard” to turn the wait-list registry into a useful tool, adding that the data will be shared once it is validated.
Nova Scotia’s NDP are calling on Premier Tim Houston to immediately release statistics on how many people are looking for a family doctor. On Tuesday, the NDP introduced a bill that would require the health minister to make the number public every month.
“It is unacceptable for the list to be more than three months out of date,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said Tuesday.
Chender said releasing this data regularly is vital so Nova Scotians can track the government’s progress on its main 2021 campaign promise: fixing health care.
The number of people in need of a family doctor has more than doubled between the 2021 summer election campaign and June 2024. Since September 2021 about 300 doctors have been added to the provincial health system, the Health Department said.
“We’ll know if Tim Houston is keeping his 2021 election promise to fix health care when Nova Scotians are attached to primary care,” Chender said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Newfoundland and Labrador‘s chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says that so far this year, the province has recorded 230 confirmed cases of the vaccine-preventable respiratory tract infection, also known as pertussis.
Late last month, Quebec reported more than 11,000 cases during the same time period, while Ontario counted 470 cases, well above the five-year average of 98. In Quebec, the majority of patients are between the ages of 10 and 14.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has declared a whooping cough outbreak across the province. A total of 141 cases were reported by last month, exceeding the five-year average of 34.
The disease can lead to severe complications among vulnerable populations including infants, who are at the highest risk of suffering from complications like pneumonia and seizures. Symptoms may start with a runny nose, mild fever and cough, then progress to severe coughing accompanied by a distinctive “whooping” sound during inhalation.
“The public, especially pregnant people and those in close contact with infants, are encouraged to be aware of symptoms related to pertussis and to ensure vaccinations are up to date,” Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Department said in a statement.
Whooping cough can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccination is the most effective way to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the province has expanded immunization efforts this school year. While booster doses are already offered in Grade 9, the vaccine is now being offered to Grade 8 students as well.
Public health officials say whooping cough is a cyclical disease that increases every two to five or six years.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s acting chief medical officer of health expects the current case count to get worse before tapering off.
A rise in whooping cough cases has also been reported in the United States and elsewhere. The Pan American Health Organization issued an alert in July encouraging countries to ramp up their surveillance and vaccination coverage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2024.
