QUESTION: I’ve heard that there’s been a summer surge in COVID-19 cases. Should I get a booster shot now or wait until the fall for the new updated COVID vaccine?
ANSWER: It’s true that there’s been a recent rise in COVID levels in Canada, according to data from waste water collection sites across the country as of the end of July.
Not so long ago, many medical experts assumed that COVID would eventually turn into a seasonal infection – similar to influenza.
Comments closedThe US Food and Drug Administration is poised to sign off as soon as next week on updated Covid-19 vaccines targeting more recently circulating strains of the virus, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as the country experiences its largest summer wave in two years.
The agency is expected to greenlight updated mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech that target a strain of the virus called KP.2, said the sources, who declined to be named because the timing information isn’t public. It was unclear whether the agency simultaneously would authorize Novavax’s updated shot, which targets the JN.1 strain.
The move would be several weeks ahead of last year’s version of the vaccine, which got FDA signoff on September 11.
Comments closedToronto is reporting a “spike” in mpox cases and health officials are urging eligible residents to get vaccinated to contain the spread.
In a news release issued Tuesday, Toronto Public Health said it has seen 93 confirmed cases as of July 31. This time last year, the city’s case count stood at 21.
The latest numbers indicate that there were 13 new cases confirmed in Toronto over the last two weeks of July.
According to TPH, mpox cases have been reported across the city, however a higher concentration of infections has been observed among residents in the downtown core.
Comments closedBritish Columbia’s top doctor has ended the COVID-19 public health emergency, which began nearly 1,600 days ago on March 17, 2020.
Declaring COVID-19 a public health emergency gave provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry the ability to issue mask mandates, travel and gathering restrictions and vaccination requirements for health-care workers to curb the spread of the virus.
While experts The Tyee spoke with agree the public health emergency may no longer be needed, they stressed that COVID-19 still poses a serious and potentially deadly threat to the general public.
“COVID is still a major, ongoing health issue and crisis,” said Tara Moriarty, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, an infectious disease expert and co-founder of the COVID-19 Resources Canada database.
Comments closedThe National Institutes of Health (NIH) yesterday announced the launch of a phase 1 trial of a nasal vaccine against COVID-19, which also marks the first National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) trial conducted as part of the government’s Project NextGen—an effort designed to advance the development of next-generation vaccines against the disease.
In an NIH statement, NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo, MD, said first-generation COVID vaccines have greatly mitigated the toll of the disease and are still effective for preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death. She added, however, that they aren’t as good at preventing illness and battling milder disease.
“With the continual emergence of new virus variants, there is a critical need to develop next-generation COVID-19 vaccines, including nasal vaccines, that could reduce SARS-CoV-2 infections and transmission,” she said.
Comments closedFinland plans to offer preemptive bird flu vaccination as soon as next week to some workers with exposure to animals, health authorities said on Tuesday, making it the first country in the world to do so.
The Nordic country has bought vaccines for 10,000 people, each consisting of two injections, as part of a joint EU procurement of up to 40 million doses for 15 nations from manufacturer CSL Seqirus (CSL.AX).
The European Commission said Finland would be the first country to roll out the vaccine.
Comments closedComments closedThe issue is not that there is a difference of opinion here. It’s that there is a huge amount of science that shows that these vaccines save lives and they are overwhelmingly safe so to claim otherwise becomes a statement of misinformation.
A young child has died of measles in Ontario, marking the first death in the province from the highly contagious virus in more than 10 years, a Public Health Ontario report confirms.
The child, who was under the age of five, was not immunized against the virus, according to the report, which was published on Thursday.
The report also confirms this is the first measles death in the province in more than a decade.
Public Health Ontario says that there have been 22 confirmed cases of measles reported in the province in 2024. Of those individuals, 13 were children and nine were adults. Four of the adults were previously immunized, two were unimmunized, and two had an unknown immunization status.
Comments closedThe first study of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in a large population of adult heart-failure patients suggests that vaccinated participants are 82% more likely to live longer than their unvaccinated peers, according to an analysis presented over the weekend at the Heart Failure 2024 scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in Lisbon, Portugal.
Comments closedOne of the most polarizing figures to gain notoriety during what became known as the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa more than two years ago will stand trial Monday, signalling the tail end of criminal proceedings that have dogged hundreds of individuals who participated in the historic protest.
Pat King, from Red Deer, Alta., is facing charges of mischief, intimidation, obstructing police, disobeying a court order and other offences for his role in the protest that gridlocked downtown for nearly a month in early 2022.
Arrested and jailed for five months before his release that summer, King is unlikely to serve more time behind bars if he is found guilty, given laws around credit from time served.
Comments closedThe United Conservative Party’s board is urging Premier Danielle Smith to reform COVID vaccine policy because the directors are worried about the safety of mRNA vaccines for kids, the party president says.
“We have serious concerns about them for children,” Rob Smith, the UCP president, told CBC News in an interview Friday.
“I would say that the board of directors’ position is that if parents are going to get their children vaccinated, they need to be very, very sure that they know what they’re doing.”
Comments closedAn international team of health and medical researchers including workers at the WHO, working with economists and modeling specialists, has found that the use of vaccines to prevent or treat disease has saved the lives of approximately 154 million people over the past half-century.
In their study, published in The Lancet, the group used mathematical and statistical modeling to develop estimates for lives saved due to vaccines and then added them together to find the total.
Comments closedAfter trending downward for several months, COVID-19 is on the upswing in Alberta once again.
The province’s respiratory virus dashboard shows a number of key indicators, including case counts, hospitalization numbers and positivity rates, are ticking up.
“Many jurisdictions in Canada have seen a slight bump in late April in the number of COVID cases, the positivity rate and also in their wastewater monitoring,” said Dr. Dan Gregson, an infectious diseases specialist in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary.
Comments closedThe National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) released its updated guidelines on Friday on the use of COVID-19 vaccines during the upcoming fall season.
Although COVID-19 rates are currently low across the country, NACI said it anticipates a surge in activity during the fall and winter months, aligning with patterns seen in previous years and consistent with the behaviour of other respiratory viruses.
“As COVID-19 activity is expected during the upcoming fall and winter months, and COVID-19 disease can compound the impact on the health system of other fall and winter respiratory viruses, NACI continues to provide early guidance on the use of COVID-19 vaccines to facilitate planning by provinces and territories,” the guidelines state.
Comments closedAs H5N1 bird flu spreads rapidly through livestock and other animals across the U.S., Canadian officials are exploring stockpiling “pre-pandemic” H5N1 vaccines as a precaution.
The highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) has not been detected in any Canadian livestock and the risk of transmission for the general public is considered low, but the recent rapid spread of the virus through livestock and elsewhere in the U.S. has public health officials around the world on high alert.
Health experts are urging people not to drink raw, unpasteurized, milk and to make sure meat is thoroughly cooked, but they say the real potential risk from bird flu is not from food, but from the possibility that changes to the virus enable it to jump from animals to humans. That could create a potential influenza pandemic because human immunity to the virus is expected to be minimal.
Comments closedMichael Gordon Jackson, a Saskatchewan man accused of abducting his daughter to prevent her from getting a COVID-19 vaccine, has been found guilty for contravention of a custody order.
Following two weeks of proceedings, the jury’s verdict handed down Friday found Jackson, 55, withheld his then 7-year-old daughter from her mother in late 2021 to early 2022. Police eventually found the pair in Vernon, B.C.
While the motive was undisputed, Crown prosecutor Zoey Kim Zeggelaar said the results of Jackson’s actions were in direct contravention of the Order.
Comments closedHamiltonians at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 infection are eligible for vaccination this spring.
In an April 19 news release, Hamilton public health services announced it’s joining forces with the Ontario Ministry of Health to administer vaccine doses to high-risk community members.
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