Canada's 'gamble' on delaying, mixing and matching Covid-19 vaccines paid off
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
This was decided in March 2021 but the UK introduced a three month delay between vaccine shots in January 2021. What was it about the UK data (btw I'm British) that meant it didn't count as "real world" despite being months ahead of Canada?
Don't get me wrong, the UK was laughed at for doing that so it genuinely was bold for Canada to do the same (as they added a fourth month onto the three the UK was already doing). It just seems a little dismissive of the UK who took the decision months earlier and had all the international flak (including from the manufacturers) for doing so.
I'm not saying that's a fair analysis and it probably isn't but it is a very widely held one. I know the UK is pretending the herd immunity strategy of encouraging everyone to go to football games because they only infect 5 people actually never happened and was never policy despite the press conferences etc. It seems pretty unlikely to me that people from across the political ideology spectrum got that idea because of a unified Johnson smear.
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Aside it is possible it's a unified smear, of course. We've seen unified smears (nobly or ignobly motivated) of Sanders, Trump and Corbyn to name just 3. (And do you like /any/ of those politicians? A smear is still a smear when you dislike them with vigor.) It's harder to see it here. Johnson's charm works about as well outside of the UK as Trump's in the big coastal cities and Europe.
[1] I have a strong visceral dislike for Trump. The man makes my blood boil and reason hard to cling to. Yet the Russian bounties story in Afghanistan is one place I can look at a man I utterly loathe and note there was a unified smear taking place in the media. I'd be interested if someone has a similar case concerning Johnson. There don't seem to be many consequences for reporting, publishing and repeating utter falsehoods which makes sensible, reasoned, policy analysis by those of us who merely want to vote in a sensible manner increasingly challenging.
When the regulating body permitted cross-vaccinations with mRNA vaccines for people already vaccinated with Astra the recommendation for cross-vaccinations was only four weeks and I ended up waiting a little over five instead of eight.
The German government is also shutting down the free testing centers (which means unvaccinated people will have to pay upwards of €25 out of pocket or get a PCR test which costs upward of €80 and can take 24-48 hours for a result. Additionally politicians have been talking about excluding unvaccinated (or not fully vaccinated) people from benefits like paid sick leave during quarantine.
All in all these measures seem to be designed to rush the population through vaccination even if it means having to do boosters (which have already been greenlit for people aged 70+ or vaccinated with the single-dose J&J vaccine) and punishing the unvaccinated to force them into compliance.
Delaying your second shot by up to four months would not only have been unthinkable in Germany, it would have been framed as carelessness, laziness and negligence. The government really doubled down on framing COVID as a personal responsibility issue and overpromised "freedom" through vaccination ("restoring civil liberties") while indiscriminately punishing the unwilling.
The fact the mixed vaccines gives good protection is more luck than anything. Canada was forced into that decision before there was any solid data.
But hey, i do the same thing when I do interviews. My mistakes becomes “prescient” when they just happen to work.
Canada was one of the first countries to pre-order vaccines, signing massive agreements with just about every candidate maker. I'm aware of literally a single deal happening with another country prior to Canada's orders.
What thwarted Canada's efforts was that the US defacto nationalized the medical establishment in that country, while Canada had basically become beholden to larger centers courtesy of an over reliance on free trade. With the US production nationalized, Canada, and truly the rest of the world, had to rely upon manufacturing in Europe. The EU at times lurched towards protectionism but never did, and Canada is in its debt.
Though in the wake of it Canada has committed to no less than four vaccine manufacturing plants, including mRNA vaccines. Lesson learned.
`"Bold” strategy? Canada had no option if they wanted to vaccinate quickly.'
Yes, it was a strategy. The manufacturers were dictating a timeline for shots that would have meant that the number of people fully vaccinated would be quicker, but the number of people partly vaccinated would be much slower. People much smarter than you or I did an analysis and decided on another approach, including mixing shots. And yes, of course it was because of a supply constraint (for reasons mentioned elsewhere, but having positively nothing to do with Canada "dragging it's heels"), otherwise such approaches wouldn't be necessary, no?
Fun fact, Canada was the home of Connaught labs, a publicly owned laboratory which was the first lab to produce the Salk's Polio vaccine, and went on to produce the Smallpox vaccine.
In the 1970s, however, Canada went on a privatizing spree (incidentally, the same gov't that ratified NAFTA), and Connaught was privatised and sold many time since.
More info here https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/03/11/the-...
A big part of that was little interest in supporting the industry from the government.
Apparently a vaccine manufacturer approached the government a while back and got a tepid response so decided to invest elsewhere.
Vancouver-based Acuitas Therapeutics developed the lipid nanoparticle delivery mechanism for the Pfizer vaccine, for example. There are others as well. This article lists three Vancouver companies:
https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-suppl...
And that's not even mentioning Vancouver biotech unicorn AbCellera, which has developed an antibody treatment.
Canada had no local production. There was literally nothing they could do but wait. Its of course a problem not to have local production. But it’s not a lack of orders that was the issue, everything was ordered early in 2020, there was just no doses available.
”Israel cast a wide net last year when trying to secure vaccine doses at the height of the pandemic and pre-ordered from a number of companies.”
By April of 2021 it was already giving excess doses away.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/with-enough-suppli...
If you were a rich nation, it was eminently possibly to get early delivery dates written into your contracts. Canada decided not to for some reason (cost?) and in actual fact deeply regretted it.
In a different timeline if the AZ vaccine hadn’t been associated with rare blood clotting, if Pfizer/Moderna hasn’t been able to scale manufacturing as well that strategy would be looking very good.
It’s interesting to think that Canada and other nations that instead depended on international supply chains ultimately did much better though.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2021-04-26/university-que...
Blood clot risk is much higher the younger you are[1]. It would have been far better to continue using AstraZeneca, but limit it to a certain age and older.
[1] For example, 1.1 of the specific clots per 100 000 vaccinations of people in their 20s, falling to 0.2 per 100 000 in their 60s. https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/communicating-pote...
Until recently it was the only vaccine available for over 60s even.
Also FWIW. The risk of blood clots seems to be significantly higher in women than men. I think they should have focused on giving AZ to men and Pfizer to younger women.
For a while though some states were giving Pfizer to men in their 40s and 50s working from home, while recommending young women go and get dosed with AZ.
Israel was one of the first to vaccinate most of their population - and they are a tiny country with no domestic manufacturing of the vaccines.
Although Israel quite openly stated they paid a premium to get early access to vaccines. So basically, it was simply a question of commercials, and ponying up the cahs.
Singapore did likewise - basically bought out every vaccine they could on the open market, and rushed to vaccinate their population.
I live in Australia, and it does appear our nation's leaders dragged their feet on the vaccine.
Our Prime Minister even publicly stated "It's not a race", regarding vaccinating the population.
A letter leaked recently, which showed Pfizer's managing director requesting an urgent meeting with our health minister, so we could get millions of doses. Pfizer was then told that the health minister wasn't available to talk with them, it got fobbed to some underlying in his department, then the deal got adragged out for six months after that - in the meantime, the UK and US signed up:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/12/in-hi...
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/canada-has-reserved-more-vaccine...
Israel was an extreme outlier. It is not a counterpoint whatsoever. Israel got priority first shipping before Canada, and even the European countries that hosted the factories.
Many of these comments are weird in that they seem to hold Canada's vaccination effort as some sort of failure. In reality it was one of the most rapid on the planet, dramatically faster than just about every other OECD country outside of the US (courtesy of nationalizing production) and the UK (courtesy of protectionism), and then testbed Israel.
I'm not sure what you don't buy -- the fact that Canada signed up early and for massive quantities is very well accepted fact. The reality that Pfizer and Moderna's European factories became massively oversubscribed (while US factories were basically off limits to everyone else) is also accepted fact.
[1] - Even if Canada was suitable as a testbed (e.g. it's too large and distributed), healthcare is run at the provincial level. There are 13 sovereign healthcare agencies, and this is constitutionally decreed, so it was unlikely to have been possible even if the country agreed to do it.
But some countries were too inflexible to do the smart thing, so more people died.
Moderna: August 5th, 2020 [1]
Pfizer: August 5th, 2020 [1]
AstraZeneca: September 25th, 2020 [2]
Moderna: November 25th, 2020 [3]
Pfizer: November 11th, 2020 [4]
AstraZeneca: August 27th, 2020 [5]
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
[2] https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2020/09/25/new-agreem...
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
[4] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
[5] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
However, the overall procurement strategy was a success even in comparison to the EU. Canada's total dose administration rate caught up with the EU's by April at 25 doses/100 people, and during the spring/summer when vaccines became available to the general public Canada had greater availability.
From contemporaneous reporting, it seemed that in summer 2020 Canada believed manufacturers' assertions that they'd have vaccine production ready by 2021Q2.
In general, Canada's vaccine procurement strategy was successful, and the 'gamble' on second-dose delays discussed in this article proved useful at expanding availability among the general population. Complaints otherwise tend to focus on the US comparator (neglecting its effectively nationalized industry) or come from partisan political attacks.
[1] -- https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
No. Canada made some bad bets on where they would be getting vaccine. Canada assumed that a particular person would still be in the white house and that early US vaccines would not be available for export. So Canada threw in largely with European suppliers. That gamble was wrong. The certain person lost and US vaccination rates were lower then expected. US vaccines were available for export earlier than predicted. Canada had not pre-ordered sufficient US vaccines. A mistake? Yes, but still a reasonable judgement call given the US political situation at the time.
The US nationalized production in that government decree made it illegal to ship to anyone else unless US contracts had been satisfied in full (NOTE: I am not judging this at all. The merits of it are arguable, but it does point out a weakness in a reliance on free trade). The change of government didn't change this an iota.
The defense production act dictated that 100% of production was for the US until the government said otherwise. Moderna and Pfizer were both forced to supply Canada from the European factories as a result, even long after US vaccine manufacturing far exceeded consumption.
I see an awful lot of whitewashing to cover mistakes going on.
b) Israel agreed to the extraordinary term of sharing their data with Pfizer, in exchange for getting doses early, something Canada almost surely won't be willing to do
c) The Israeli PM Netanyahu was facing significant electoral challenges and desperately needed a win, so there was a lot of political will
There's just a lot of willingness to go for "good enough" solutions in emergency situations, and forget the rules for the duration.
Civil defense culture also helps, in that it's trained people to reason about countermeasures that are not 100% ("hermetic" in the local lingo) - you still get in the stairwell to protect from shrapnel, even if a direct hit will kill you anyway. People don't have the gut reaction of betrayal when a 90% countermeasure fails sometimes.
Bibi's career at this point was up against a wall, and he was willing to do anything to 'be first'. Israel has a cagey foreign policy apparatus, I have no doubt they went 'all in' on this, calling in favours, applying pressure in addition to the regular negotiations.
"The first question is how Israel was able to get that many vaccines when supply is short? It is not because—according to reports—Israel paid about $30 per dose, almost double what other nations did. [...] The answer: Israel is a great pilot country for the pharma companies—small and able to put together a massive vaccination program quickly and effectively." https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/05/the-secre...
And Canada isn’t the only one: Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. Vietnam really screwed itself over trying to get domestic production going (homegrown and in-licensed). Once Delta got hold they saw a 400x increases in cases. Once it dawned on them vaccines were the only out, then acquired whatever they could by begging and borrowing. Now they are looking at a loss of foreign investment and a possible recession.
Except that, now, Canada (78%) has a higher vaccination rate than most western nations, including the US (65%). And there is zero talk about loss of foreign investment.
The only other production locations were in Europe, so guess where the vaccine manufacturers thought Canada's doses would come from?
Please don't fall for the obvious obfuscation from the US government.
That may be true in hindsight, but at the time Canadian officials prediction that a second Trump term would be less friendly to vaccine exports. That wasn't an unreasonable estimation of the US political landscape at the time.
For most vaccines, the time between doses is measured in months, not weeks. Those vaccines were tested slowly over years, and the tests focused on finding the most effective timing between doses. Covid-19 vaccines were developed in a hurry, and the priority was getting them approved as quickly as reasonably possible. Testing therefore focused on the shortest time between doses that was expected to produce good enough results. Even if longer spacing was expected to be more effective, testing it would have delayed the approval by months.
Mixing vaccines also makes theoretical sense. Exposing the immune system to a more diverse range of threats may provide a more robust response when the virus mutates. Testing mixed vaccines is just more difficult in practice, because each company develops and tests its vaccines independently.
But that’s by no means a guaranteed outcome. Mixed vaccines could have resulted in mediocre immune response to two different spike protein profiles.
The truth is the exact opposite. But don't let that get in the way of a good jab, eh?
Headline from Dec 7, 2020: "Canada has reserved more vaccine doses per person than anywhere". https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/canada-has-reserved-more-vaccine...
However, given the hysteria of what passes for news outlets and social media, it was quite bold. People were convinced that the 2 week interval initially specified for Pfizer vax was bedrock truth. Any departing from that ONE TRUE WAY could only be bad. In such a political climate, actually following the known science was difficult.
Giving 1 shot to everyone and spreading out the shots to a more normal interval allowed a lot more people to get immunity. Gettin the 2nd shot at a longer interval allowed those people to get a better long term immunity.
Tbis is not an earth shaking discovery. If it worked differently than this, people would be asking why is this vax different?
There was a reason people complained about the government’s funding of media.
CBC used to be good, it’s pretty bad nowadays.
Anyways, the vast majority seem perfectly happy with the CBC.
Fewer than 1 in 5 Canadians want CBC funding decreased: poll https://ipolitics.ca/2019/05/13/nearly-80-of-canadians-want-...
Thanks tips.
While that part of the strategy 'panned out', the government was ineffective in securing vaccines despite early 'deals', all the while the CBC was not particularly hostile to this fact.
That fewer that 1 in 5 Canadians want CBC funding decreased is a populist issue.
That said, the information being provided here is in accord with known science of vaccination, and is based on voluminous data. If you have a legit complaint about what they're saying, you'll need to provide some legit data that backs you up.
The actual thing that happened? Canada(mainly federal) completely screwed up. Trudeau was busy trying to get a manufacturing plant built to produce. That is to say, Trudeau was spending big $ on his own riding in montreal. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/vaccines-will-be-produced-in-mon...
And because of that... we were really far behind for a long time. you might also notice... we never actually produced any novavax vaccines. We are pfizer and moderna. So where'd the money go? Oh right... Trudeau and corruption... basically the same thing.
https://nationalpost.com/news/u-s-vaccine-rollout-vastly-out...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/04/04/live-c...
Very clear that the CBC article is basically propaganda.
1. Hey, you need the vaccine to go in there to visit your relative!
2. OK. Woman walks to the other part of the hospital to get vaccinated.
3. Woman returns 10 minutes later and is able to visit the relative.
Why? I thought the vaccine takes time to work. Plus, I thought asymptomatic people have a next to none chance of transmitting, vaccinated or not. So, is it about health & safety?
I’m not sure the asymptotic part is correct or not but consider that people can lie about not having symptoms.
We do body temperature checks.
Vindicated in their "first doses first" advice yet again.
Bet my life that's what's gonna happen.
I'm curious what the impact of anti-vaxxers is. I know they're more likely to catch and spread COVID, but can the constant low-grade COVID situation be blamed on them entirely or are they just exacerbating it and to what degree?
It really feels like we need to quantify that in order to make a call on how far we're willing to go to force compliance. If COVID would be largely gone without them, perhaps extreme measures are in order. If COVID is only 1% worse because of them, do we all want to make that sacrifice to force compliance?
The reality is likely somewhere in the middle and far more murky. I still think it's worth considering that there are a spectrum of options, and extraordinary measures should be justified by commensurate extraordinary circumstances.
Canada has approved the J&J vaccine, but it has not distributed any such shots. The first shipment it received came from the troubled production facility that operated off-spec, and the shipment was ultimately rejected (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/world/canada-jj-vaccine.h...). Canada has only distributed AZ, Pfizer, and Moderna shots.
It is a fairly ridiculous situation and if you need to travel it's definitely an issue given a lot of countries are moving towards "green pass" type actions where unless you are "fully vaccinated" (with the approved vaccine) life will be very difficult for you.
There really should be a better solution about at least the most common vaccines being cross recognized everywhere and not used to artificially block people from moving (why should AZ manufactured in the UK be treated any differently from AZ manufactured in India)
In one province, the government has given itself vast power to perform warrantless search, confiscate property and conscript any person to the cause of "managing the emergency". Our courts uphold the measures because of the 'unprecedence' of a global pandemic of a disease with a median survival rate of 99.8% where the VAST majority of deaths are in people over 60 and in many places we have vaccination rates higher than 95% in that demographic.
The federal government is about to implement a no-fly or rail policy for unvaccinated people - whether you are a citizen or not. If you're a foreign national from overseas you better get out while you still can - the Berlin Wall is going up.
CBC is the state funded broadcaster, take everything they write with a grain of salt, like you would with RT for example.
Frankly, the checks and balances on our government have completely failed.
Children, babies and pets get needles all the time. It's literally a fact of modern life.
You know what isn't a fact of modern life? Polio.
If the excessive hysteria comes from anywhere, it's from regulatory bodies, politicians and supportive members of the public who are using this pandemic as an excuse for measures that most people would have flatly rejected in other circumstances. 99.4% of the population recovers from Covid normally, young people are barely touched by it compared to the mortality rates for so many other things, and despite the really vulnerable segments of the population being largely protected at this point, and having easy access to said protection, now no matter your age above 12, you're essentially forced to comply with something that no government should have a business of imposing like this. Piss off.
Good rant though. Complete with childish swearing even!
It’s not a subjective term.
But go ahead and keep using it for oh-so-dramatic effect. The rest of us will just keep rolling our eyes and laughing at you whining babies.
Edit: Here's the entire legal definition -
Invasive procedure means a procedure involving puncture or incision of the skin or insertion of an instrument or foreign material into the body including, but not limited to, percutaneous aspirations, biopsies, cardiac and vascular catheterizations, endoscopies, angioplasties, and implantations. Excluded are venipuncture and intravenous therapy.
You see that last sentence?
Source: https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/invasive-procedure
The criticism in response to the article is not out of place. The article gushes about how wonderful a job the vaccine has done. Well, it hasn't done a wonderful job for freedom or rights has it?
For my demographic, the moderna vaccine is no longer recommended - we are told to get Pfizer instead even though the vaccines are basically the same (including the risks moderna is being advised against for). The Astra Zeneca vaccine was suspended because of blood clotting risks and Jansen is not available yet.
I do not believe that your freedom and civil rights should be contingent on getting an invasive medical procedure using a product from a profit seeking corporation trying to sell as much of its product as possible. Especially one as corrupt as Pfizer.
My doctor has advised me to wait on vaccination because I already had Covid. I trust my doctor more than I trust the government telling me what medical interventions to get, coercion or not.
I also do not believe any random person should be allowed to coerce medical information from you that would typically fall under doctor patient confidentiality.
I don't believe you should have the freedom to spread around an infectious disease that has already crippled the health care system in many provinces and killed thousands of people. Your rights end where others begin. Your free to not give your vaccine status (vaccinated or unvaccinated) as well but you just have to live with the consequences of not attending restaurants and hockey games.
It's people like you dragging this whole thing on.
Of course infectious diseases aren't the only way to burden a health system
Obviously, I presume you don't smoke and never have smoked.
Never drunk alcohol.
Nor are overweight and never been overweight.
And done everything in your power to reduce risk of cancer, stroke, heart attack, etc.
And you never leave your house because it's very risky being outside and you might break a leg.
And inside your house, you never use boiling water or stoves, in case you burn yourself.
And when you have colds/flu, you isolate yourself for 10 days. You never think about heading to the shops for food or medicine, in case you make someone else sick.
Children are big spreaders of disease, so if you have children, I presume you home-school them?
And you don't drive an ICE car and never have, because of all the pollution and the health problems and deaths that causes.
> I don't believe you should have the freedom to spread around an infectious disease
See, what you're saying is: I don't believe you should have freedom.
Were all the low paid workers in factories, forced to work else starve/be made homeless, exercising "freedom to spread around an infectious disease", or where they trying to live?
>See, what you're saying is: I don't believe you should have freedom.
Save the drama, special snowflake. What we're saying, very clearly is "do your part to save lives".
If you're too selfish to do that, the rest of us don't want to be around you. Not because we think you're jerks (we do), but because you might kill us. Is that unreasonable? Honestly?
Your rights end when they threaten the safety of others. It's been that way since the concept of "rights" came into existence. This isn't a new concept. It's a basic tenet of a working democratic society. It always has been.
Every single winter he NHS is on the brink of collapse. You can easily find the stories.
> do your part to save lives
I know that’s what you’re saying. So what’s your diet? How much does your car pollute?
And the statistics are stacked well against you in your accusation that an unvaccinated person will kill you. Save the drama
You know very well the load on the health system is not the same now as it was pre-covid. Just stop with the word games, it's embarrassing (as is the whataboutism for that matter).
For example: My dad's cancer treatment was never delayed pre-covid. It was after. That's entirely unprecedented.
>your accusation that an unvaccinated person will kill you.
Surprise! There you go with more words games instead of honest debate (changing what I said from "might kill" to "will kill").
Listen, this arguing style might work in your circles but not with actual informed grown ups. Do better. This is laughable.
I never claimed it was.
Listen, this arguing style might work in your circles but not with actual informed grown ups. Do better. This is laughable.
You are ignoring everything in my replies and not engaging
You think the reader doesn't notice stuff like that? You think the reader doesn't notice when you disingenuously equated the current "overwhelmed" health care system with the pre-covid "overwhelmed" health care system? And then in your latest reply, never claimed that's what you did?
It's right there for anyone to read: You're not engaging in the conversation honestly.
Don't bother replying - I'm looking to converse/debate with only capable, intelligent people.
The difference in will vs might is of no significance in my sentence. You just saw saw red, picked a tiny little thing to go off the rails about as an excuse not to engage.
I said: "the statistics ... that an unvaccinated person will kill you". If I had written "the statistics ... that an unvaccinated person might kill you" the meaning is exactly the same. The 'statistic' we're /both/ referring to is the statistic of spreading, someone catching, and dying. Not "might die", the actual incidence of dying. Studies wouldn't measure the incidence of "might" deaths. But you know that
So now that's cleared up: what is the chances of the unvaccinated "might" killing you? Which statistics have you seen? (I'm double vaccinated btw ;-)
What is it about that sentence you are debating exactly? Are you saying it's false, or that me and my loved ones have too low risk of death tolerance? Those are the only two options.
Understand: The degree to which this risk is acceptable is not up to YOU to decide.
Go ahead, put yourself at risk all you want, you have no right to put the safety of others at risk. So do what you want. But we, the rest of society, would like you to stay away from us until this boils over.
You aren't even the person I originally replied to.
You went straight for an ad-hominem ("snowflake", "selfish", "jerk")
Troll, nothing more. Just pure troll :-)
It’s not a subjective term.
Not everyone that that isn’t vaccinated is infected by default, and people that are vaccinated can spread the disease as well.
The problem isn't the virus, it's the wholly inadequate socialized system.
I've not heard of that. Which province?
https://sun-nurses.sk.ca/pub/docs/member-resources/COVID19/M...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saskatchewan-covid-...
> the government has given itself vast power to perform warrantless search, confiscate property and conscript any person
Is entirely misleading if not outright false. The "emergency powers" are written to support fighting natural emergencies (primarily). Read the entire thing for context (warning:PDF) https://www.saskpublicsafety.ca/-/media/project/spsa/documen...
Besides, this act does not supersede Charter Rights.
Nobody is entering my property without a warrant.
Did you actually read the legislation? Do you understand under what conditions officials are allowed to enter your property?
2. The justification for the tracking system will be that the vaccine isn't good enough to protect people without mandatory vaccinations.
3. Why would there need to be tracking in remote parts of rural Canada? There is basically nobody there. It is rural. How many people do you even know who live outside the range of cell phone towers?
That is... bizarre. Very bizarre. Do you have a link to read more?
Allowing people to leave their house for up to an hour of exercise: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58277503
Firing on protesters: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...
I watched the entire thing live, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The Guardian also did an expose on the instigators of those protests are accessed a group chat where the organisers were discussing how to slowly introduce the "Jewish question" to the crowd they'd managed to rile up.
The "anti-lockdown protests" have consistently attracted some very unpleasant kooks, cranks and opportunists, from the "5g mind control" lot to the "international banker conspiracy" lot. It's omni-nutty. Piers Corbyn is a regular at the UK ones. In the US, I am sure that all roads lead to QAnon and their anti-Semitic totalising conspiracy theory. The intensity and nature of crankery is shifting.
In other words, someone off the rails agreeing with a large group on one issue doesn't mean the whole group is off the rails.
No, it means that the "nazi fuckwits" and "off the rails people" are _recruiting_ and doing so where the audience is worked up and receptive to their radicalisation.
If the only ones who are listening to the disagreeing moderates are radicals, we should expect an increase in radicalization.
You'll either eject the cranks or become them. The (possibly apocryphal) tale is "As we say in Germany, if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
This dynamic has happened many many times on the left, with the far left cranks.
Half the crowd left, then the remaining crowd pumped themselves up and attacked the police after being peaceful the entire day.
Seems to me like the reasonable ones left and the remainders were assholes. The extremists were the ones being shot with rubber bullets. Anyone that wasn't an extremist and still got shot is an idiot, they had every opportunity to voice their opinion peacefully.
But all I hear from the fucking yanks on HN is them projecting their own politics onto what's happening over here. There's so much misinformation in threads like these and everyone laps it up like idiots. Like I said before, I watched the entire day live on my second monitor, from livestreams run by the protestors themselves. I got their viewpoint, which shows clearly what happened. Whereas the people trying to argue against policy brutality here are doing so with Fox News rhetoric, not with facts.
We need more eyes on the police, at all times. But we need that scrutiny to come with facts. I have no love for Victoria Police, but I'm sick of them and our liberal (small L) government being the focal point of a debate half way across the world that completely misses the mark. HN seems like it skews left on privacy and surveillance issues, but because of it's American focus, the people here just spew dangerous rhetoric that risks cutting the head off the lesser evil, when we have an ultra conservative federal government pushing the most authoritarian tech surveillance laws in the western world. They're on opposite sides here. As long as there's no realistic chance of getting the average person to vote for a third party, if it's all the same, I'd prefer if you all stop letting an American media invasion turn us into the 4th fucking reich.
From what I can garner, there are such systems on trial, though as of Sept 16 the trials were on a voluntary basis.
For example, there is a (quite small) trial of facial recognition for home quarantine of international travelers. Now that's a topic worthy of discussion - But it's an extraordinary leap to say everyone is taking pictures of themselves (i.e that's just not true at all).
It's similar for most of your assertions.
There have been quite a number of strict rules in different parts of Australia at different times. Most are now being wound back in line with vaccination rates.
These passports will remain a long time.
The app used in BC is open source and available on Github: https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android
It works just fine with the device in airplane mode, and does not maintain a record of the QR codes it has verified.
You download a QR code from the government. You are identified at this point and linked to your test results given your QR code.
Those open source clients are for BC only. Assuming the app store version matches those clients that ensures you are not being track in private businesses during a vaccine check.
This doesn't ensure the federal system is using the same clients or other provinces.
This doesn't ensure a vaccine passport check before boarding a train by a government official doesn't link your travel/location.
The only thing we are sure is this will protect tracking at the private level in BC if the business has airplane mode on and both have downloaded and built the client themselves.
There are multiple independent open source implementations of the SMART Health Card QR standard. It's really just some JSON + compression/encoding/digital signature.
The approach I have described is being used across Canada, and based on what has been indicated so far, this is in fact the intended direction of the federal government.
Vaccine passport checks are not conducted by government officials. They are conducted by the private businesses where the checks take place.
iOS 15 includes "app privacy report" functionality, and if the government were secretly submitting a different version to the app store than they claim they are (with secret reporting of scan data back to the mothership included in the app store builds), they would be trivially caught by anybody using this feature. It would show up in the network traffic logs that are available for anybody to inspect.
Mobile applications are also not that difficult to decompile to identify hidden functionality.
We can both be pretty sure that no tracking is taking place, and that it would be unrealistic for this system to be used for tracking purposes without that becoming a matter of public knowledge rather quickly.
As for tracking by private companies. At your local pizza shop your location may not be tracked through the open source clients you list but at larger venues the opportunity for information gathering/sharing is possible. Previously one could buy a ticket to a game from someone outside now everyone eventing must identify themselves.
I checked the places I've lived for the last 10 years in Vancouver, none of them are eligible for fiber optic.
Rural Canada is much better connected than major cities.
It's not easy to not be trackable in Canada, every highway of any significance has a highway cam. If you really want to live off grid in a tent I suppose you could evade tracking.
For 99% of people, they are easily tracked. Tracking isn't about 100% compliance its about 99% compliance.
Got any sources indicating that this is in the works?
This is setting the infrastructure to implement a social credit system. It is a small step from here to to full thing. The intent is the same and the tools are similar.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2021/10/manda...
[1] https://www.ohscanada.com/opinions/mandatory-vaccination-pol...
[2] https://www.hrreporter.com/opinion/canadian-hr-law/the-movem...
There is evidence in the article that the vaccines reduce the risks of COVID by 2-3 orders of magnitude, which gets it into the range of a bad flu. We know that a lot of people have already had COVID and pose a lower risk than someone who is vaccinated. These compliance systems are going to do more harm than good. It is never going to work out well when the government brings in authoritarian compliance measures to protect a majority from a minority who are being accused of causing all the problems of today. That script has been put into production before.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-v...
"The CDC researchers found that people previously infected but unvaccinated were 2.34 times more likely to get reinfected than people who were previously infected and fully vaccinated."
"The researchers saw even more variability when they looked at neutralizing antibodies—those known to bind to the virus and prevent it from infecting cells. Neutralizing antibody levels in recovered people varied over a range of 40,000-fold, and up to 20 percent of people didn't have any detectable level of neutralizing antibody."
For vaccines, we have data showing they are highly effective:
http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/Vaccine_Effec...
We have data showing reduction in transmission as a result of vaccination.
We don't have comparable data for people who have merely been previously infected, and in fact the data we do have seems to provide evidence that they pose higher risk. The immune system is not as reliable when it is having to fight off an infection while mounting its response vs when it is able to mount an immune response while not under attack from the virus.
We're quite happy here with our freedom to go to a restaurant or attend a festival without exposing ourselves to the risk of being around unvaccinated people.
And, fairly critically, it is crazy to start isolating people from social life over that low reinfection risk. You've been exposed to people who are unvaccinated for all sort of dangerous diseases through your life and nobody has tried to lock them out of society for that.
EDIT I suppose I'll throw in here this isn't about whether vaccination is good or not. Anyone who hasn't made up their mind at this point isn't persuaded by evidence. This is about how to treat people who make choices that the government disagrees with. Locking them off aeroplanes isn't the way.
I hate to tell you this. Putting restrictions on non-vaccinated people is not some Government conspiracy. It's literally what the vast majority of the people of Canada want for their safety. That includes your neighbours and (possibly) your family members.
That's what the government is supposed to do.
Sure, you could make some "tyranny of the majority" argument here but in the case of anti-vaxers, you'll be hard pressed to find any sympathy from most Canadians.
It's not a government conspiracy. It's the will of the people it represents. I know that doesn't make nearly as good a narrative, but it's the hard truth.
The worst time to do this is hastily and when people are feeling scared; these are some serious bridges being crossed. The systems being set up to deal with people who aren't scared of the coronavirus are going to be permanent and are a very decisive step in reshaping Western culture using the model trailed in China.