Where Canada went wrong with vaccines (so far)
Canada lags behind much of the world - yes, even the USA - in vaccinating its people against COVID-19.
As the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on, I’ve adopted the verbal tic of adding “for now” or “so far” whenever I talk about how a government has handled it. Yesterday’s well-prepared hero in flattening the curve can become today’s hopelessly befuddled, ineffective failure who allowed the virus to spread unchecked.
And sometimes, of course, the media just notices this when it becomes politically convenient.
Here in Canada, despite my own partisan leanings, I’ve held off criticizing the Trudeau government for its COVID response for two reasons: I thought they’ve been doing their best when faced with an unprecedented public health crisis that caught governments all over the world flat-footed, and at least we’ve done much better than our neighbors to the south. (Contrary to popular belief, our national sport isn’t hockey nor lacrosse, but smugly comparing ourselves to the Americans.)
Our infection and death rates have been much lower than that of the United States. But our vaccination rates? Um, not so much:
Tristin Hopper, in the National Post, explains Canada went wrong. You will not be at all surprised to find out there’s a connection to a Chinese state-controlled company:
At first, Canada seemed to have vaccine-acquisition under control. The Chinese pharma company CanSino had developed what was then one of the world’s most promising vaccine candidates, and Ottawa struck a deal to have it undergo human trials in Canada, with Canadian laboratories free to reproduce and manufacture the shot.
But only days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the arrangement, China shut off all shipments of the CanSino vaccine to Canada in what is believed to have been a spiteful retaliation for the continued imprisonment of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver. In hindsight, it may have been a bad idea to bet the country’s pandemic recovery on one of Canada’s top geopolitical enemies.
Right now, Canada is technically the world’s most prolific “hoarder” of COVID-19 vaccine doses. The federal government has signed massive pre-orders for at least six approved or pending COVID-19 vaccines, with the result that Ottawa has effectively signed up for nearly nine vaccine doses per Canadian.
But with many of these contracts being inked after the collapse of the CanSino plan, Canada is lingering at the back of the line on these orders. It wasn’t until August 5 that Canada announced a plan to secure doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and as of this week both companies have delivered a mere 1,157,940 vaccine doses to Canada, with further deliveries delayed. In the U.K., by contrast, 10 million people have gotten their first vaccine dose as of Feb. 3, including 90 per cent of the over-75 population in England, which has significantly blunted the deadliness of the pandemic.
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After the collapse of the CanSino plan, Ottawa poured $126 million into the Biologics Manufacturing Centre, an under-construction National Research Council facility that, when complete, would be able to produce millions of vaccine doses per month. Unfortunately, it won’t be complete until 2022 at the earliest.
In December, it emerged that Ottawa had stuck to this plan despite offers from a Montreal company to manufacture millions of doses by the end of 2020. PnuVax, a Montreal biomanufacturer, runs a Health Canada-approved facility just down the street from the Biologics Manufacturing Centre, and has an established pedigree of manufacturing Ebola and pneumonia treatments. Multiple industry sources told the Globe and Mail that it was indeed plausible for PnuVax to have been cranking out truckloads of vaccines by Christmas.
Calgary’s Providence Therapeutics had a similar story, saying that although it had developed a vaccine that successfully blocked COVID-19 transmission in mice, Ottawa ignored their appeals to have the treatment proceed to human trials.
As this pandemic has shown more than once, Canada has outsourced vast quantities of its ability to respond to public health challenges. Despite being a leading global supplier of wood and paper fibre, at the outset of COVID-19 we lacked even the rudimentary ability to turn those fibres into face masks. And so it is with the manufacture of vaccines. The U.S. and U.K. are currently out-vaccinating us primarily because they can make the shots themselves, rather than relying on foreign factories.
Of course, give it a few months and we could be leading the world in vaccinations. Like I said, the story of this pandemic twists and turns on a dime. And hindsight is always 20/20.
But there’s a reason the federal election widely predicted for this spring may not happen after all.
The Epoch Times: a newspaper run by a cult.
The Washington Times: a newspaper run by a cult.
The New York Times: a newspaper run by a cult.
The New York Times on Friday forced out its lead pandemic reporter, 45-year* newsroom veteran Donald McNeil Jr., because the Grey Lady's management, under public pressure from more than 150 employees, decided that when it comes to speaking certain radioactive words, not only does intent not matter, any utterance is potentially a one-strike offense.
"We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent," Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn explained bluntly in a memo Friday.
McNeil, 67, went as a representative of the Times on a 2019 trip with American high school students in Peru. There, according to his farewell note to colleagues—which, tellingly, was the first time the context of his career-ending comments had ever been reported during the 8-day life cycle of this journalism-world controversy—McNeil "was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself."
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This week, the newsroom revolted via a remarkable group letter in which more than 150 staffers at one of the country's leading newspapers argued that word-choice intentions are "irrelevant," because "what matters is how an act makes the victims feel." Signees, declaring themselves "outraged and in pain" and "disrespected," demanded a reinvestigation of the 2019 incident, an apology to the newsroom, and an organizational study into how racial biases affect editorial decisions. They also alleged that the controversy had surfaced new internal complaints about McNeil demonstrating "bias against people of color in his work and in interactions with colleagues over a period of years."
Rather than blanch at that suggested new journalistic standard—if the paper is no longer recognizing the linguistic use-mention distinction, then all it will take to prompt a vast scrubbing of the archives are enough offended "victims" of articles like these—The New York Times Company leadership (Baquet, Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Chief Executive Meredith Kopit Levien) responded to the letter with anguished obsequiousness.
"We welcome this input. We appreciate the spirit in which it was offered and we largely agree with the message," they wrote. "We are determined to learn the right lessons from this incident and take concrete actions to improve our workplace culture, ensure the integrity of our journalism, and examine the way we manage behavioral problems among members of the staff."
Two key takeaways from the “open letter” signed by 150 anguished Times employees: mens rea is completely irrelevant when accused of using certain words; and, they demand punishment first and then a further investigation to justify it.
If" “intent is irrelevant,” does that mean using the N-word is also a firing offence if an African-American person uses it to make a political point? Or is that a completely kind of situation? In which case, isn’t that an admission that intent is in fact relevant?
As usual with viral outrage stories on the internet, maybe there’s more to this than we’re being told. Maybe McNeil has been going around using casual racial slurs for 45 years, and it’s only now that people are noticing.
Or maybe it’s a game of Calvinball in which the rules are subject to change without notice and they keep being tweaked so there’s no way to win.
Meanwhile, it is not at all surprising to see the Times’ Taylor Lorenz trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet witch-hunt action:
The “days since a state Republican Party promoted conspiracy bullshit” sign can be reset to “zero” again.
Intent needs to matter. Otherwise, the main focus of any discussion that might still happen is going to be whether one is saying anything that could be reinterpreted at a later time, rather than the actual issues being discussed.
Also, if this is serious enough to warrant job loss, what specifically prevented it from being reported sooner?
In general, perhaps consequences should be proportioned to the actual offence, rather than to the outrage of the accusers.