Vaccines
Canada approved the AstraZeneca vaccine and a version made in India! This is good news. Canada has ordered 20M doses from AstraZeneca and 2M from Serum Institute of India (which makes the AZ under license), 500,000 doses of which are supposed to arrive on Wednesday 3 March.
I have heard people grumbling that they don’t want the AZ vaccine because it is not as good (and pretty useless against B.1.351). However, it is waaay better than nothing against the strains that are currently a problem, more vax is coming, and the government does not want you to get sick. (It costs the health system, and it’s bad for the economy.) Thus, if the AZ vax isn’t effective enough, the people who got AZ will get booster shots.
We’ve ordered enough of Pfizer and Moderna to give every Canadian adult two shots of an mRNA vaccine. Chill, it’s going to be okay.
The Johnson&Johnson COVID vaccine is undergoing review in the USA right now, and one piece of info that has come out is that J&J is aggressively planning more trials:
There is yet more data saying that the mRNA vaccines reduce asymptomatic disease. This study says that after 12 days after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccinate, people are one fourth as likely to get COVID as an unvaccinated person.
Messaging
There’s a good article in The Economist about pandemic risk messaging which is really good and has too many good points to summarize.
Eyeglassses
A Medium essay calls bullshit on the study which says that people who wear eyeglasses get COVID less often.