Earlier this week, the Toronto Star’s Alex Boyd asked: “Is delaying second COVID vaccine doses a ‘half-baked solution’ to supply woes?”
 
Her article provides an excellent summary of the ongoing debate over whether, in light of the paucity of available COVID-19 vaccines, it might be worthwhile to hold off on administering the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine in order to provide more people with their first shot more quickly.
 
As Boyd notes, the argument in favour “is that it’s better to give more people the limited protection a single dose appears to deliver [52% rather than 95%] and they can still get their second shot, just a little later.”
 
I am more convinced by the arguments against, and there are plenty.
 
Dr. Alan Bernstein, a member of Canada’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, offers eight, ranging from the dangers of tampering with “vaccines based on RNA technology that have never been tried on humans before,” to providing individuals with insufficient protection, to undermining faith in the integrity of public health recommendations, to upsetting Pfizer to the point that the company refuses to ship us more product.
 
Regrettably, Bernstein’s list of reasons does not appear to be sufficiently compelling to prevent some of our provinces, not to mention a number of Canada’s major allies, from planning to experiment.
 
So here is one more reason worth considering:
 
The global vaccination effort is no longer just a public health challenge; it has also become part of an ongoing diplomatic competition between China and the Western world.
 
For years, Beijing has tried to reshape the international order to better align with its interests.
 
To oversimplify, Chinese foreign policy has aimed to convince members of the global commons that Beijing’s illiberal approach to domestic and world affairs is superior to the liberal, democratic model typically championed by the United States and much preferred by the rest of the West.
 
And it seems to be working. Global confidence in democracy has been waning.
 
Most recently, Beijing has pointed to how its heavy-handed lockdowns and intrusive contact tracing methods have largely held the virus at bay, allowing the Chinese economy to rebound while the West continues to struggle.
 
So far, however, Beijing has not come close to demonstrating superiority in terms of its vaccines.
 
A recent article in The Economist details a Chinese approach to immunization that has included risky mass inoculations of untested products, inconsistent data, and a failure to match the 95% efficacy of Pfizer or the 94.1% efficacy of Moderna.
 
For now, then, it remains possible that when this pandemic finally ends, Western scientific discoveries could help discredit the Chinese model.
 
In that context, experimenting with the Pfizer vaccine – never a good idea in the first place – becomes an absolutely terrible one.
 
Against an adversary like China, we need all the soft power we can get.
 
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I don’t follow a lot of people on Twitter, but I’m really impressed by the way that Lieutenant-Commander Amber Comisso (@cdnnavylady) uses her account. The tone and content of her tweets should make the Canadian Navy proud.

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Our World in Data, an outstanding website that provides up-to-the-minute reports on global efforts to solve the international community’s biggest problems, is now producing a handy chart that tracks cumulative COVID-19 vaccination doses administered by countries around the world.
 
The data are what have caused a public fixation on Israel’s thus far unsurpassed effort to vaccinate its population.
 
I fully support Our World in Data’s mandate: transparency is critical to effective public policy.
 
Nonetheless, all data must be understood in context, and I am concerned about the way critics of Canada’s vaccine roll-out have responded to the numbers.
 
As of this past Saturday, Canada ranked 10th in terms of the cumulative COVID-19 vaccination doses administered per 100 people.
 
We were behind Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, the US, Denmark, the UK, Italy, Slovenia, and Lithuania, but ahead of – presumably – well over 150 other countries.
 
Moreover, at 0.78 doses per 100 Canadians, our numbers were more than 2.5 times the global average of 0.3.
 
Still, according to the Globe and Mail’s Konrad Yakabuski, a growing number of Canadians are likely to be concerned that our vaccination campaign “has not kept pace with those under way in Britain and the United States.”
 
I don’t doubt that Yakabuski’s views reflect the thinking of a good portion of our population, but I struggle to understand why Canadians would expect us to be able to keep up with these two states in the first place.
 
The United States is the wealthiest country in the world, with a purchasing power that Canada could never dream of.
 
And while the United Kingdom has four National Health Service systems, Canada has ten independent provincial health systems along with three territories, each of which is difficult to access at the best of times, let alone in the middle of winter.
 
Both the US and the UK also have higher population densities than Canada does, which helps when the vaccines available are difficult to transport.
 
The challenge with charts is that they tend to lack such context.
 
Even worse, since this global vaccination effort is unprecedented, we have no real way to judge what an acceptable pace of vaccination might even be.
 
This difficulty doesn’t mean that we absolve our governments from their responsibility to serve the public interest responsibly, but I fear that we are using the wrong metrics to gauge success.
 
I would suggest that accountability be measured by (1) whether our officials are true to the vaccination schedule that they have already promised; (2) whether we understand how the speed of that process – including the prioritization of the recipients of the vaccines – has been determined; and (3) whether measures are being taken to enable open and transparent reviews of the national and provincial responses to this pandemic when we are finally past it.
 
It is too soon to pass judgment on number one. Information on part of number two is accessible here. Good work by the national media has added further detail.
 
I’m not yet satisfied about number three, but I remain hopeful.
 
In sum, there are lessons to be learned from other countries’ vaccination successes, but managing the COVID-19 vaccination roll-out is not a competition.
 
So let’s use the valuable information offered to us by The World in Data to improve our vaccination efforts, not to complain about our ranking on a list.
 
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Over the last year, I’ve been really impressed by the work that Michael Garron Hospital has been doing in the Greater Toronto Community. I pay particularly close attention when anyone from Michael Garron has something to say about COVID-19.
 
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