COVID-19 vaccine mandates have worked in Canada — but they're harder than ever to justify | CBC News - Adam Miller:
February 12, 2022 - "COVID-19 vaccine mandates have worked extraordinarily well at getting more Canadians vaccinated, but they are increasingly hard to justify....
"'There's now obvious evidence that they work,' Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said during a press conference Friday. 'We saw a plateau in the uptake of vaccines after a really tremendous effort by Canadians, and then after the introduction of vaccine mandates by the various provinces and territories and jurisdictions, we did see an uptick.' Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos added that mandates worked to get 99 per cent of federal public servants vaccinated, and that over the last six months as many as three million Canadians chose to get vaccinated sooner because of them....
"But as the massive Omicron-driven fifth wave subsides across Canada and public health restrictions are set to lift, infectious disease experts and epidemiologists say two-dose mandates are no longer sufficient — and mandating boosters is not a realistic approach....
"[W]hile two doses are still effective at preventing severe illness, the highly transmissible Omicron variant has rendered them less protective against infection and transmission to others than with previous coronavirus strains....
"A recently updated Ontario study ... found that while vaccines were just 36 per cent effective against symptomatic Omicron infection seven to 59 days after two doses, with no protection after six months, that increased to 61 per cent a week after a booster.... If we were to keep the definition of 'fully vaccinated' as having had two doses, vaccine mandates will accomplish 'very little,' Dr. Isaac Bogoch,* an infectious diseases physician and member of Ontario's COVID-19 vaccine task force, said on The Current Wednesday. 'So you either say we're doing this as a three-dose vaccine series to be considered fully vaccinated — or you scrap it'....
"One key unanswered question with regard to whether we should expand or abolish vaccine mandates in Canada is how long the protection from a third dose lasts.... New data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday found booster protection waned after about four months....
"The analysis of 241,204 emergency department and urgent care centre visits in 10 states found vaccine effectiveness dropped from 69 per cent within two months of a second dose to just 37 per cent after five months. That protection increased to 87 per cent with a booster, but dropped down to 66 per cent between four and five months and fell to just 31 per cent after five or more months. The researchers stressed that the data is limited.... Still, the data shows booster effectiveness can drop in the mere months after a third dose. This calls into question the role that vaccine mandates and passports will play in the future."
Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-vaccine-mandate-passport-covid-19-omicron-boosters-1.6349038
* signatory of the John Snow Memorandum
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