A photo of Florida residents Jim and Elaine Minichino, a place set for their 32-year-old son Adam, killed by the virus. From the cover of today’s New York Times Magazine.
More photographs are here. They’re hard to look at – chronicling, as they do, a year of horror and loss.
This investigation by the Globe‘s Grant Robertson is shocking. It shows that Canada’s federal government consciously destroyed our pandemic-alert system.
Do they have blood on their hands? Read these excerpts, or the whole story, and decide for yourself.
More than 10,000 Canadians have been killed in this pandemic. How many of those deaths could have been avoided?
Ottawa’s ability to independently know what was going on in China – on the ground and inside hospitals – had been greatly diminished in recent years.
Canada once operated a robust pandemic early warning system and employed a public-health doctor based in China who could report back on emerging problems. But it had largely abandoned those international strategies over the past five years, and was no longer as plugged-in.
By late February, Ottawa seemed to be taking the official reports from China at their word, stating often in its own internal risk assessments that the threat to Canada remained low. But inside the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), rank-and-file doctors and epidemiologists were growing increasingly alarmed at how the department and the government were responding.
“The team was outraged,” one public-health scientist told a colleague in early April, in an internal e-mail obtained by The Globe and Mail…
…the Public Health Agency, which was created after the 2003 SARS crisis to bolster the country against emerging disease threats, had been stripped of much of its capacity to gather outbreak intelligence and provide advance warning by the time the pandemic hit.
The Global Public Health Intelligence Network, an early warning system known as GPHIN that was once considered a cornerstone of Canada’s preparedness strategy, had been scaled back over the past several years, with resources shifted into projects that didn’t involve outbreak surveillance.
However, a series of documents obtained by The Globe during the past four months, from inside the department and through numerous Access to Information requests, show the problems that weakened Canada’s pandemic readiness run deeper than originally thought. Pleas from the international health community for Canada to take outbreak detection and surveillance much more seriously were ignored by mid-level managers inside the department. A new federal pandemic preparedness plan – key to gauging the country’s readiness for an emergency – was never fully tested. And on the global stage, the agency stopped sending experts to international meetings on pandemic preparedness, instead choosing senior civil servants with little or no public-health background to represent Canada at high-level talks, The Globe found.
…Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he is unsure what role added intelligence could have played in the government’s pandemic response, though he regrets not bolstering Canada’s critical supplies of personal protective equipment sooner. But providing the intelligence to make those decisions early is exactly what GPHIN was created to do – and did in previous outbreaks.
…Concerns about Canada’s readiness for a pandemic weren’t limited to scientists inside the Public Health Agency.
Internal documents and e-mail correspondence obtained by The Globe show senior officials at the WHO had also been growing increasingly frustrated in recent years with the direction Ottawa was taking.
This included the government’s oversight of GPHIN, which the WHO had praised as a “foundation” of global outbreak response.
The [Trudeau government changes] changes alarmed the WHO.
Senior officials at the Geneva-based organization – including Philippe Barboza, a manager of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme – urged Canada not to let its home-grown pandemic warning system falter. The highly specialized unit wasn’t merely a benefit to Canada – it had grown to fill a critical international role, providing the WHO with one-fifth of its epidemiological intelligence. It was too important to be curtailed.
But those efforts failed. There had been numerous turnovers among senior management at Public Health over the years, and the people who understood the intrinsic value of the early warning system were no longer in charge.
On Nov. 2, 2018, Abla Mawudeku, an epidemiologist who helped build GPHIN into a system respected around the world, wrote an e-mail to a group of colleagues in the international pandemic surveillance community, informing them that the WHO’s bid to change Ottawa’s mind had fallen short.
“I would like to let you know that, sadly, we have not been successful in convincing management of the critical value and role of GPHIN within and outside of Canada, and the indispensable relationship with the WHO,” Ms. Mawudeku wrote in e-mails that were obtained by The Globe from a third-party source.
…The move stunned epidemiologists at the WHO. In e-mails obtained by The Globe, Dr. Barboza confided with colleagues that he was left speechless by the Canadian government’s decision, which not only affected Canada but much of the world, as well. Though others were attempting to create similar systems around the world, including government programs and for-profit enterprises, they weren’t nearly as robust.
…The GPHIN problem was a symptom of a bigger ailment inside the Public Health Agency – one where expertise took a back seat to policy, and scientists increasingly found themselves marginalized.
According to internal documents provided to The Globe in recent months, by the time the pandemic early warning system was curtailed last year, the Public Health Agency was already struggling with these concerns. The restructuring that began under the Harper government, bolstering management with senior civil servants who lacked training in public health, remained mostly unchanged under Trudeau, and the problems went unchecked.
…On Oct. 30, The Globe submitted a list of questions to the Public Health Agency. The questions included why Canada is an outlier on the committee; why the agency doesn’t send a subject-matter expert to serve on a high-level group such as GOARN; and why Ms. Gooding is listed on the website as a doctor when she is not. Neither the department nor Ms. Gooding responded, despite several reassurances from a government spokesperson that answers would be provided.
However, in early November – roughly a week after the questions were submitted by The Globe – her curriculum vitae on the GOARN website was updated.
She is no longer listed as a doctor.
What’s your take? Comments are open!
Shot this one before O’Toole blew off several toes with his insensitive and idiotic Residential Schools statement. But the comments herein still apply.
That’s crazy. I’m going to forget about politics and start doing celebrity stalking.
Who goes first?
Assuming Canada gets enough of the COVID-19 vaccine anytime soon — a big assumption, given Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s admission that we won’t — who gets to go first?
Other countries are starting to vaccinate their citizens this month. Britain, Germany and the United States have announced their plans to vaccinate millions of their people before Christmas.
Trudeau, meanwhile, announced on Monday that his government will have only enough Pfizer vaccine to inject into less than 1% of Canadians by the end of the year.
He’s also said that, “if all goes according to plan, we should be able to have a majority of Canadians vaccinated by next September.”
A first-year law student could drive a Pfizer transport truck through the weasel words in that statement. But let’s give Trudeau the benefit of the doubt, and assume a majority of Canadians — not just less than 1% — will be lining up soon to get the potentially life-saving vaccine.
Who should be in that line-up?
Unsurprisingly, other nations have devoted a considerable amount of thought to answering that question. Equally unsurprisingly, Canada’s federal government hasn’t, as much. They put out a web page.
In November, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) said the vaccine should first go to folks in retirement homes, chronic care and long-term care facilities. After that, Canadians over the age of 80 should get the shot, says the NACI.
That’s consistent with what our allies are doing. But there are key differences, still – and there’s still lots of debate raging, too. Is our goal preventing death among the vulnerable? Or is it to reduce the rate of infection, so we can all get back to something resembling a normal life?
Here are some of the flashpoints in the who-goes-first vaccine debate.
Essential workers: What is an essential worker, anyway? In the U.S., the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) says essential workers make up a whopping 70% of the work force — and include everything from tugboat operators to pest exterminators. That category is way too broad, and has too many people in it for a vaccine rollout to be effective.
Adults, age 18 to 30: This group experiences a lot less serious Covid-caused sickness and death than the elderly — but is responsible for much more asymptomatic transmission. If our objective is stopping the spread of the virus, shouldn’t this demographic get the vaccine earlier? But if they do, will we have enough left over for other groups, like…
Children: Kids are affected less by Covid, but they can — and often are — pint-sized super-spreaders. Shouldn’t we vaccinate them earlier, then? Perhaps, but here’s another dilemma: not one of the vaccine candidates has been approved for anyone under the age of 18.
Prisoners and prison guards: Nobody (with the possible exception of bad guys) wants bad guys to get the vaccine before law-abiding citizens. But when you consider that social distancing is next to impossible in a crowded jail – -and that inmates have close to a 600% greater chance of developing COVID-19 — it’s a question worth pondering. After all, in April, one in six coronavirus cases in Illinois were traced back to the Cook County Jail.
Geography: Atlantic Canada, with its “bubble,” has had far fewer cases than other regions. Alberta, recently, has been devastated by outbreaks — and has even reportedly considered requesting field hospitals from the Red Cross to help handle the surge. Should such Canadians living in places like Alberta get the vaccine sooner than, say, PEI?
Minority communities: Minorities have been buffeted by the deadly virus — but upscale white-dominated neighborhoods less so. Should race and affluence be a deciding factor? Who decides? Politicians? Bureaucrats?
And so on, and so on. These kinds of decisions are important. And for many, they literally have life-or-death consequences.
One thing is for certain: as an exasperated-sounding Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday, Canadians need specifics about the vaccines from the Trudeau government. And a lot more of the vaccines.
And we’re still not getting either.
Kinsella is a former Chief of Staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health
A process.
That’s what the Deputy Prime Minister calls you getting the vaccine that will keep you from getting sick, or maybe even dying.
“A process.”
Chrystia Freeland, who is usually much more precise with words than her boss, actually said that this week. Here’s what she also said to a gaggle of Ottawa reporters: Canada is “well-positioned” on vaccines. And: Canadians needing the potentially life-saving Covid-19 inoculation will need to wait “a while.”
A process. A while. What, exactly, is a well-positioned process that takes a while, Deputy Prime Minister?
At her Monday press conference, Freeland also said this, in French: “Our federal government has contracts for purchasing the most successful candidate vaccines. Canada has a group of vaccines that include all the vaccines that have produced positive results and include other candidate vaccines which we believe will be successful. That is a good thing.”
And it is indeed a good thing. Pfizer and Moderna have developed vaccines that have been shown to be more than 90 per cent effective with every age group. That’s good news for humanity, generally, and Canadians, in particular.
But here’s the problem: Americans and Britons and Mexicans and Germans – and many, many other allies – are starting massive and integrated campaigns to vaccinate their citizens soon. As in, this month.
Canada? Well, it’s a process. In a while. We’re well-positioned, though.
The Prime Minister was pressed on this last week. He said: “If all goes according to plan, we should be able to have a majority of Canadians vaccinated by next September.” September. Quote unquote.
You don’t need a degree in geo-politics, or epidemiology, to get the difference. Elsewhere in the world, millions of people are going to be lining up to be vaccinated in December 2020.
In Canada? Months later, in September 2021. “If all goes according to plan.”
That ten-month difference is big. Really big. It’s the stuff of electoral defeats, and Trudeau knows it. So he has sent out Liberal proxies and fart-catchers to blame Stephen Harper and/or Jean Chretien. Free trade is to blame, claim the straight-faced Trudeau folks, because we lost our drug-manufacturing capacity to evil free trade deals.
Well, no. Check with the aforementioned Chrystia Freeland. She spent many, many hours crafting a new free trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico. Check with the many, many pharmaceutical firms in the province of Quebec who have been manufacturing drugs here for decades. Ask them.
Besides, it’s baloney. Canada had a deal with China’s CanSino to develop a vaccine. Sources tell this writer that if the Trudeau regime had been a bit more savvy in its dealings with the Chinese, that deal could have been maintained.
But it fell apart. The Canadian deal with was struck in March, when the pandemic was raging. Trudeau endorsed the deal in May – but in the very same month, the Chinese abruptly changed their vaccine export rules. They barred export of the CanSino vaccine. Given the fact that China has illegally imprisoned – and allegedly tortured – two Canadian citizens, Trudeau shouldn’t have been surprised by that. At all.
But Trudeau didn’t start looking for another deal, media have reported, until August.
And that, mostly, is why Justin Trudeau now has that deer-in-the-headlights look. He knows that a ten-month wait will enrage Canadians, and almost certainly spell the end of his minority government.
It’s not “a process,” Prime Minister. It’s not something that should take “a while.”
It’s the most important thing of all: a vaccine to free us – our economies, our children, our lives – from the shackles of the coronavirus.
We don’t want a process. We don’t want positioning. We want the vaccine.
Now.
[Warren Kinsella was Chief of Staff to a former federal Liberal Minister of Health.]