Mitigation Measures
This article talks about $7.4B in relief spending that the Government of Canada has announced. All three of these programs will go until 7 May 2022.
- Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will be replaced by the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit and will provide $300 a week to eligible people.
- The Tourism and Hospitality Recovery Program and the Hardest-Hit Business Recovery Program will give 75% of revenue loss.
- The Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, and the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit will be extended by two weeks – moving the sickness benefit from four to six weeks and the caregiving benefit from 42 to 44 weeks.
This article reports that the Government of Canada has lifted its blanket “uh, don’t travel to any foreign countries right now” advice.
This article talks about the new Canadian federal vaccine passport.
This article says that the Federal Conservatives are whining about the new vaccine mandate for anybody (yes, anybody) to enter the Parliament Hill complex, but also they don’t want hybrid sessions to be available.
Vaccines
This article says that Pfizer is ready to ship pediatric vaccines to Canada just as soon as Health Canada approves it. I actually wish that Pfizer would send doses to poor countries first. I mean, yay that more Canadians will get vaccinated, yay protecting kids… but vaccinating health care workers in poor countries will save a lot more lives than vaccinating kids under 12 in Canada.
I hope that the Government of Canada will at least ship out some of the THIRTEEN FUCKING MILLION full-strength adult doses it’s sitting on.
This study from France didn’t give vaccine effectiveness numbers, but found that people with Pfizer+Pfizer were twice as likely to get infected as those with AZ+Pfizer. That’s a lot!
Note, however, that the first Pfizer dose was only four weeks before the second dose, while the first AZ dose was twelve weeks before the second dose.
This article says that Pfizer’s booster is 95.6% effective against symptomatic infection in a randomly controlled trial against a placebo. In other words, people with two shots, were about twenty times more likely to get an infection than people with three shots.
This 20x unvaxxed/vaxxed factor is about the same as what this tweet reports the Israel Ministry of Health reports for serious disease as well.
This article says that Novavax’ production problems relate to purification: that they are only able to get their formula to 70% pure, and they really need to get it to 90%. (I, having worked in the semiconductor industry, was appalled that the purity standard is only 90%. My initial reaction is that things that get injected into my body ought to be 99.9999% pure. I recognize that I have eaten hot dogs before, but the digestive system is an incredibly hostile place to bad things.)
Pathology / Long COVID / Treatment
This preprint says that SARS-CoV-2 kills capillaries in the brain by killing host protein nuclear factor (NF)-κB essential modulator (NEMO), which is involved in many things, including interleukin-1 regulation. The good news is that the authors believe that they know how to stop SARS-CoV-2 from killing NEMO with a ; the bad news is that it sure sounds to me like the damage is permanent. 🙁
Recommended Reading
This article talks about vaccine mandates for other illnesses (like measles) and how successful they have been.