Health
Undocumented workers hesitant to get COVID-19 vaccines, fear deportation: advocates – Yahoo News Canada
Undocumented workers in Canada fear that getting vaccinated could mean being arrested if someone reports them to police or immigration authorities because of their lack of proper identification, say advocates.
Karen Cocq of the Toronto-based Migrant Workers Alliance for Change said undocumented and migrant workers should not be required to provide identification issued in Canada, including a health card, when they are booking appointments or attending clinics as part of a process to track vaccinations.
Cocq said many of the workers already don’t use the health-care system because they’re afraid of losing their jobs if an employer discovers their immigration status so it’s not surprising they’re hesitant to get vaccinated.
“People are very concerned about what happens with their personal information when they share it with any officials or with any authorities,” she said.
“They’ve heard stories about what happens if (the Canada Border Services Agency) is called.”
Cocq said vaccinations could be tracked using government-issued identification from a worker’s home country or, as in the case for some homeless people in Toronto, through other means, such as an email address, a library card or a letter from a food bank or community agency.
People without permanent residency status are often employed as personal support workers or care aides in long-term care facilities, and in sectors like construction and agriculture, mostly in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
Ontario alone is home to at least 500,000 undocumented workers based on data from 2016, Cocq said. The number is likely much higher now, she said, because of stricter language and education criteria for care workers, for example, which prevents some people from applying for permanent residency.
“Unequal access and barriers to getting the COVID-19 vaccine are a product of a person’s immigration status,” she said.
Anna Maddison, a spokeswoman for the Public Health Agency of Canada, said COVID-19 vaccines are available for everyone without a health card, but logistics involving identification requirements are decided by provincial and territorial governments.
Health ministries in Ontario and British Columbia said undocumented and migrant workers do not need to present medical cards before being vaccinated but they did not say whether non-government identification could be used.
The B.C. Health Ministry said information provided to public health officials for immunization will not be shared with other organizations. More details on the documents that will be asked for will be available when provincewide online registration starts on April 6, it said.
Cocq said the alliance has issued a proposal for various jurisdictions to provide clear information in multiple languages on booking websites about access to vaccinations for everyone, along with an assurance that personal details will not be shared with authorities.
Those policies should also be made available to people booking appointments on phone lines and administering vaccines at clinics so they’re not asking for medical card numbers, she said.
Judy Illes, a professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia and the Canada Research Chair in neuroethics, said governments should quickly develop transparent processes to ensure everyone who wants a vaccine can get one in a safe environment.
“To the extent that new issues are arising, like hesitancy among undocumented workers, that needs to be addressed so there is trust in the system and the chances of discrimination are mitigated as best as possible,” said Illes, who focuses on the ethics of vaccine rollout and access for vulnerable populations.
Byron Cruz, a spokesman for Sanctuary Health in Vancouver, said migrant and undocumented workers are eager to get vaccinated because their jobs put them at risk of being infected with COVID-19 and they often live in small spaces with many people.
“Our concern is that many of the construction workers live in an apartment with two bedrooms and there are sometimes 10 people there. That’s a difficult situation for them,” he said.
The grassroots advocacy group is ready to encourage workers to visit mobile vaccination clinics at their job sites if that option is available, but Cruz said they also need to give assurances that no one would be at risk of being deported based on their immigration status.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 26, 2021.
Camille Bains, 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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