Juno News - May 09, 2021


Jason Kenney on vaccine rollout and lockdowns

Topics
at-home transmission
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Jason Kenney Jay Chaudhry Kretchen Trudeau Pfizer
Jabs and Jobs Another Canadian professor cancelled, but she’s fighting back

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

168.13

Word count

3,546

Sentence count

218

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Vaccines are now available to anyone 12 and up in Alberta, but there are still some restrictions in high-populist areas of the province. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In this episode, we talk to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney about the situation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A lot of things are happening in the country right now, and we'll get to as many of those as we can,
00:00:14.380 but I want to first hone in on the province of Alberta.
00:00:18.160 We've had a pretty significant development coming in the next few days here.
00:00:23.100 Vaccines will be available to anyone 12 and up.
00:00:26.740 Also, we had this week the announcement that Alberta cross-border truckers will be able to get vaccinated in Montana,
00:00:33.880 but at the same time, we also have a new wave of restrictions in high case count regions,
00:00:39.860 and that includes much of the province, certainly most of the cities.
00:00:43.360 I want to talk about this with Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.
00:00:46.720 Now, Premier Kenney, last time you and I spoke, you actually had to leave the interview rather early to go and greet,
00:00:52.440 I think it was the very first batch of vaccines.
00:00:55.020 So here we are coming full circle with a pretty significant expansion of vaccine eligibility.
00:01:01.240 Yes, so it's so unfortunate that it's taken this long for Canada finally to start getting enough doses
00:01:08.120 that we can expand it to the general population.
00:01:10.860 But we are finally there.
00:01:12.800 Andrew, if we had had the same kind of security of supply as the UK, United States, Israel,
00:01:20.680 and many other countries, I think we'd be broadly open by now.
00:01:24.980 We could have largely, not completely, but largely could have put COVID behind us, like so many of those places have.
00:01:32.360 But Canada has been three to four months behind the curve when it comes to vaccines.
00:01:37.660 As you know, that was the federal government's responsibility.
00:01:41.980 And we have constantly trying to remind people that they flubbed it.
00:01:48.960 And it wasn't just the Trudeau government, but the Kretchen government that, frankly,
00:01:54.760 in some left-wing populist politics in the 1990s,
00:01:58.640 they drove out the brand name Pharmaceutical Manufacturers by radically changing the patent protection laws.
00:02:07.140 And so here we are, victims of vaccine nationalism.
00:02:09.160 But the good news is that we are finally starting to turn the corner.
00:02:12.400 We vaccinated about 40% of our population with at least one jab.
00:02:18.160 We are the highest with double doses that's protected the seniors in nursing homes.
00:02:22.440 And we've vaccinated about a third of people over 16.
00:02:27.680 We'll be able to do another million.
00:02:29.420 So by the end of May, we should be at about 60% to 65% of the population vaccinated.
00:02:36.400 And with that protection, we hope that we'll be able to move forward to start lifting some of these restrictions.
00:02:43.100 Are you confident that enough of the people who really need vaccines have gotten them already,
00:02:48.500 that you aren't going to have otherwise healthy, low-risk 12-year-olds competing for the same appointments
00:02:53.600 as people that might be in a bit more of a risky category,
00:02:56.700 either by virtue of their health or even their job, if they work on a front line in some way?
00:03:01.500 Well, we've been very careful about that.
00:03:03.000 We follow the scientific advice about the different risks.
00:03:06.900 I mean, when we're opening it up to the general population,
00:03:09.080 we're starting bookings with those who are 30 and above.
00:03:12.740 And then about a week later, we're going to those who are 12 to 30.
00:03:15.300 So there is a staggering here.
00:03:16.600 But we're at a point where we have vaccinated 85% of those over 75.
00:03:25.080 Frankly, we're having a hard time finding the other 15%. 1.00
00:03:27.760 We're working at getting to them.
00:03:30.360 We have vaccinated 85% of those with chronic conditions that could lead to COVID sickness.
00:03:37.020 And so we've really almost maxed out, I would say, the most vulnerable categories.
00:03:41.900 Andrew, we are suffering the highest total number of active cases and daily case counts in the entire 14 months of the pandemic in Alberta.
00:03:50.880 As you probably know, while most provinces are going down in their numbers,
00:03:55.180 we're the only one that's going up very, very aggressively right now with the numbers.
00:03:59.860 But that's the bad news.
00:04:03.160 That's why we've had to put in some new restrictions.
00:04:04.580 But the good news is that the ratio of those who are diagnosed with the disease, who test positive,
00:04:12.720 who end up in a hospital or worse yet, end up passing away, is coming down, coming down pretty significantly.
00:04:20.080 So we see in that the protective effect of the vaccines on the most vulnerable.
00:04:27.880 We'll get to some of those restrictions in just a moment, Premier.
00:04:31.100 But regarding the vaccines, if you've got such an abundance, if I can use the word,
00:04:36.000 are you going to look at shortening that four-month interval for people when you start expanding it a little bit?
00:04:41.500 This has been something that has been repeatedly questioned as to whether it's the most effective way of doing it.
00:04:46.820 And the best answer seems to be that it's only good if you have a scarcity problem,
00:04:51.180 which it sounds like Alberta doesn't have. 0.76
00:04:53.440 So people that had their first dose in February that are supposed to be getting a second one four months after that,
00:04:58.880 are you going to start shrinking that gap?
00:05:02.160 As soon as we can.
00:05:03.380 Look, I think that the science is pretty clear, based on the UK experience,
00:05:07.380 that getting wide coverage with the first dose for the general population
00:05:12.160 has a more protective effect than doubling up on the doses, with one exception,
00:05:18.400 and that's for the very vulnerable.
00:05:19.480 Now, on that front, as I say, Alberta has, I think, done double doses with 7%, 8% of our population.
00:05:26.180 So those would be the very elderly and the most frail. 0.90
00:05:29.820 And we're the only province that's gone long on that.
00:05:32.100 I mean, Quebec is like 1% on the double dose.
00:05:34.840 I think Ontario is 2% or 3%.
00:05:36.400 So we've done, we have focused more on double dose full protection for the most vulnerable.
00:05:43.340 But frankly, if you're a healthy 30-year-old, we just want to get a jab in you.
00:05:48.140 And that will, on the Pfizer, for example, reduce your risk of serious outcomes by 80%.
00:05:54.600 But you're not anticipating at this time, you know, rebooking four-month gapped appointments at this stage?
00:06:00.980 Well, we don't have a plan yet because, again, we're driving.
00:06:03.660 We think we'll get, we'll exhaust our first dose administration by the latter half of June.
00:06:13.340 And then we can roll forward with the double dose for the balance of the population then.
00:06:17.840 So the four months is not, the 16 weeks is not set in stone.
00:06:21.160 It's the maximum protocol here.
00:06:23.240 And we hope, and I do believe we'll be able to bring it to tighten up that duration.
00:06:26.680 I will point out that there has been a study out of, out of the UK that at least with the AstraZeneca, that there is a greater protective effect with a longer duration between the two.
00:06:39.040 So we're following all the science on that.
00:06:41.860 Let's talk about that trajectory you mentioned with Alberta's cases going up.
00:06:46.020 I know that you've been in a very tricky position in the past, and I think you and I spoke about this in December, where you've got a constituency that wants any and all restrictions possible, and you've got another that wants none.
00:06:58.400 And you, like, you know, so many of your colleagues across the country have to find a way to keep both sides happy, which oftentimes ends up angering both sides.
00:07:06.660 But you've prided yourself on having, generally speaking, laxer restrictions in Alberta than other parts of the country.
00:07:14.760 Do you think that is something that can be blamed for you going up when other provinces are seeing their cases go down?
00:07:21.960 Well, I get asked that question every day, and I don't think that's fair.
00:07:25.640 It's a fair question, but I don't think it's true.
00:07:29.160 And I'll give you a couple of examples why.
00:07:31.180 Our neighbouring provinces of Saskatchewan and B.C. have had broadly similar restrictions and policies in place for the past few months through, let's say, 2021.
00:07:41.540 And yet their numbers are dropping pretty quickly, and ours are going up even faster.
00:07:47.840 You know, similarly, Montana, just to our south, our neighbours in Montana lifted all restrictions in the third week of January, and they have almost no new cases now.
00:07:58.740 And they're not that far ahead of us on vaccinations.
00:08:03.420 They're about 50%.
00:08:04.280 We're at 40% of population.
00:08:05.740 Now, one caveat there, they had, like most U.S. states, much higher natural immunity through antibodies because there was a lot more viral spread.
00:08:12.680 But the point is that, you know, if you look at the three western provinces as a case study, broadly similar policies, they're going down, we're going up.
00:08:23.860 And that, you know, I have to infer a couple of things.
00:08:28.380 First of all, we have lower levels of compliance.
00:08:30.560 And I think that may just be because Alberta has more of a freedom-loving libertarian political culture, which I think is a good thing.
00:08:36.360 But it does, unfortunately, mean in this context that there is a larger share of people, I think, who have just moved past all of this, and they're just not paying any attention to the measures.
00:08:47.580 Secondly, we have the youngest population by far in Canada.
00:08:51.140 And this disease, as you know, spreads most easily and rapidly amongst younger people.
00:08:55.680 That's not to blame them.
00:08:56.740 It's just younger people are more likely to be out and about and socializing.
00:08:59.660 That's just the nature of people in their 20s and 30s versus those in their 50s and 70s.
00:09:05.140 Thirdly, we have by far the biggest workforce as a share of population, the highest workforce participation rate.
00:09:14.080 So there's a larger number of people relatively out and about in the workforce encountering others and therefore open to infection.
00:09:22.900 So, and finally, we've had pretty crappy spring weather, which has kept people homebound, I think, a lot more than normally would be the case.
00:09:30.520 So I think when you add up all of those factors, that may explain why we've had different outcomes compared to our neighboring provinces.
00:09:39.380 But when you mention that libertarian spirit, are you sympathetic to people that have said,
00:09:44.700 listen, I don't want to play by these lockdown rules, because a lot of these people have settled in Alberta precisely because they think that Alberta is the province that isn't going to use that heavy hand of government against its citizens?
00:09:56.220 Yes, I could not be more sympathetic to people who jealously guard their freedoms and are skeptical of government overreach.
00:10:02.840 I always say I'm proud and happy to live in a province where there is a good number of people who jealously guard their freedoms.
00:10:13.640 But in this situation, I think there is some people have, and I say this with respect, have a misunderstanding that if they take the risks, it's only about their own chances of illness and that they, as grown as mature adults, should be able to make those choices for themselves because it's only going to affect them.
00:10:35.540 And what that view misses, Andrew, is that this is a contagious, virulent, transmissible disease.
00:10:44.260 And so the conduct of each one of us can and often does affect those around us.
00:10:50.880 And the collective action in our society can have devastating impact, whether we like it or not.
00:10:57.620 You just cannot deny that fact.
00:10:59.200 And so, you know, later today, I'll be doing my own interview with a friend of mine, Jay Chaudhry, who was one of the first people to get COVID in Alberta 14 months ago.
00:11:11.520 Healthy, middle-aged father who attended a prayer meeting.
00:11:16.020 And there was, you know, no one had any expectation they'd be making each other sick there.
00:11:20.840 But most people at that meeting got sick.
00:11:23.060 Some sadly passed away.
00:11:24.420 My friend spent two months, I believe, in ICU in an induced coma, nearly lost his life.
00:11:31.940 There were people at that event.
00:11:34.240 There was somebody at that event who worked at a long-term care facility, unwittingly brought the virus, we think, into that facility.
00:11:41.600 There were dozens of deaths that followed from that.
00:11:43.940 There was somebody at that meeting who was, I understand, married to somebody who worked at a meatpacking plant,
00:11:49.440 which ultimately resulted in one of the biggest outbreaks in the province.
00:11:53.020 So I'm just giving you an example of how totally innocent behavior, well-intentioned, good people who at that time, we didn't know about, you know, we were still very early in COVID.
00:12:07.100 We didn't have in place the appropriate protections.
00:12:10.560 But if we'd had restrictions on basic things like that at the time, that alone might have saved many lives.
00:12:18.880 So my point is simply this.
00:12:20.860 I totally sympathize with freedom-minded people.
00:12:25.960 I share their frustration and even their anger at everything that's going on here.
00:12:31.500 But I just beg them to understand that the conduct of each of us can affect others.
00:12:36.340 And right now, if we don't get this spike under control, it will force us, the government, to do mass cancellations of surgeries in order to open up more ICU beds.
00:12:46.980 And so I just say to those people, thank you for being focused on freedom.
00:12:55.240 But please understand, you might have a loved one, a friend, a neighbor who needs that hospital bed, needs that surgery.
00:13:01.680 We don't want to turn them away.
00:13:03.300 We don't want to hurt them.
00:13:04.620 Please, let's just pull together and protect those folks right now.
00:13:07.100 You mentioned the lack of knowledge and understanding we had about COVID and about the pandemic 14 months ago.
00:13:13.480 That's changed dramatically in the last year and a bit.
00:13:16.920 You've had restaurants that have put huge amounts of money into installing plexiglass barriers, spacing out tables.
00:13:23.540 You've got other businesses as well, like nail salons. 0.89
00:13:26.440 Businesses that were, in a lot of ways, sold a bill of goods, that their jobs were going to be protected, that they could find a way to safely operate.
00:13:34.420 And these are now, in much of the province, shut down.
00:13:37.040 So, I mean, why can we not learn from COVID and allow businesses that have made these changes, that can offer some restricted service, to stay open?
00:13:46.260 It's a totally fair question.
00:13:48.280 I would say that we have.
00:13:49.720 In fact, I've been viciously attacked because our government significantly relaxed public health restrictions in areas like that through most of 2021.
00:14:00.700 We had a big spike in the winter.
00:14:02.100 We had to bring in some restrictions.
00:14:03.280 I started repealing those in February.
00:14:05.280 Exactly for that reason, because, you know, I think most of those, the vast majority of those businesses were extremely conscientious, made investments, and took great care to do everything possible to limit spread.
00:14:21.200 And we did not see, we didn't see explosive growth coming from any one of those businesses or sectors in particular.
00:14:29.440 But here's the problem, we've now ended up in a situation where we're experiencing, we're now pushing 3,000 daily cases, we have 26,000 active cases, by far, we are over twice the Canadian average.
00:14:48.160 And if we don't hit the brakes right now, we are going to zoom past the maximum capacity of our healthcare system by early June.
00:14:56.680 And so we're at a point where targeted restrictions, like what you're talking about, are no longer effective.
00:15:06.520 We simply have to stop general social interaction.
00:15:09.820 But we're still doing that with a lighter touch than your province and Quebec and most other provinces have, most European countries, many U.S. states.
00:15:17.400 We have never brought in curfews. 0.98
00:15:19.020 We've never brought in a stay-at-home order.
00:15:22.800 We have fought hard to keep the schools open.
00:15:25.260 And they're on a two-week pause now because we're running out of teachers who are on self-isolation.
00:15:28.640 But they'll be open in two weeks.
00:15:30.020 They've been open since last August.
00:15:32.700 We've always kept the vast majority of businesses open.
00:15:35.400 Right now, at least 90% of businesses are able to operate.
00:15:38.780 That is no small comfort to the hair salon or the restaurant that's largely suspended right now.
00:15:48.200 But we've tried our best to keep a balanced approach.
00:15:51.660 But is there any data suggesting that patio spread is a big problem, that hair salon spread is a big problem?
00:15:58.960 Is there any data suggesting that these are at all sources of significant transmission above and beyond what you'd get in workplaces like meatpacking plants or in household social interaction?
00:16:10.480 Well, it's absolutely clear that household interaction is the driving factor for spread, at least here.
00:16:16.880 I think in Ontario, the data suggests there's more workplace spread.
00:16:20.280 Here, as of two weeks ago, based on all of our traceable cases, about only 5% were coming from workplaces.
00:16:28.100 So that begs the question, Premier, why are we shutting down workplaces?
00:16:31.280 Well, I'll just finish it, because 30% of the cases we cannot trace.
00:16:35.360 So it's clearly a higher number than that.
00:16:37.640 But the point is, and that's why we resisted suspending any additional workplaces with much criticism.
00:16:44.880 But we're now in a situation where, again, contact tracing is being overwhelmed by the number of new cases.
00:16:51.640 And the viral spread, because, look, we can't stop people from living with others at home.
00:16:56.780 We can't stop at-home transmission.
00:17:01.560 And so we have very few tools left to slow down a transmission.
00:17:07.840 We already have a prohibition on indoor socializing and have had since early December.
00:17:13.740 So if there was some lever that we could pull to mitigate at-home transmission, we would, but we can't.
00:17:19.820 I mean, we've tried, for example, Andrew, we offer free two weeks at a hotel.
00:17:24.180 We offer room and board.
00:17:26.300 We actually pay people to get out of the house and go and do that.
00:17:29.320 Very few take us up on it.
00:17:30.880 So the only interaction that we can stop are things like, at this point, some of those commercial activities where there's socializing or gyms where there's a lot of physical exertion that can be a cause for spread.
00:17:43.840 But even outdoor fitness, this is one that we've seen numerous studies suggesting it's virtually non-existent.
00:17:50.620 Why was that not at least some middle ground that you could have kept on the table that, you know what, outdoor gatherings can be a little bit more lax?
00:17:58.580 And I know you do have a different limit, but outdoor fitness activities are not allowed.
00:18:02.960 Well, they are amongst people in the same family cohort.
00:18:06.180 And I just was walking, did a walk through a park here and saw people, a group of five people doing some kind of an exercise class.
00:18:17.480 I think that's within the rules.
00:18:18.940 So there is within limits.
00:18:20.380 And I agree with you, we want to encourage people to go outside, get fresh air, get sunshine, get exercise.
00:18:27.540 That's important right now.
00:18:29.380 So, again, we have never taken the radical approach of most European countries, some Canadian provinces and U.S. states, which has been stay-at-home orders, barring people even from going outside and getting exercise.
00:18:41.660 I think that's counterproductive.
00:18:43.440 One thing I would ask you in closing here, you had under the previous restrictions in, I believe, December,
00:18:48.820 put in a fairly transparent mechanism for easing them that communities could strive for.
00:18:54.120 Is that still something you can stick to now under these new restrictions?
00:18:59.200 Well, we still have a regional approach.
00:19:02.280 And if jurisdictions are below a certain threshold in terms of viral spread and active cases,
00:19:08.260 or if they are very sparsely populated rural areas where there are not or cannot be many absolute number of cases,
00:19:15.880 then we give them a relaxed, there are a lot of restrictions that do not apply.
00:19:21.260 So there's right now about 30 communities in Alberta that have a much lighter policy setting
00:19:27.420 because we don't see them as a threat to the healthcare system individually or collectively.
00:19:33.180 But look, here's the bottom line, Andrew.
00:19:35.060 We need to end this current spike.
00:19:39.080 Our numbers have been growing at 2% a day.
00:19:42.240 If you run the math on that, we have 210 now.
00:19:47.120 It's up 215 people in ICUs, both COVID and non-COVID.
00:19:50.720 On a typical non-pandemic year, we have 190 staffed ICU beds.
00:19:55.720 So we're already above our typical maximum.
00:19:58.600 We've surged capacity.
00:20:00.140 We've tried to bring on board as many ICU nurses, anesthesiologists, respiratory therapists,
00:20:05.860 and others as we possibly can.
00:20:08.020 We've built overflow capacity.
00:20:10.360 We've stockpiled equipment.
00:20:11.940 But we define our maximum ICU capacity now at 425 staffed beds.
00:20:17.520 If we double where we're at now, then we start to run into that.
00:20:21.300 You see that this is the tyranny of exponential growth.
00:20:24.140 We simply have to avoid that.
00:20:25.840 If we can just start bending this number down, the growth down, then I am absolutely optimistic
00:20:34.100 that the vaccines will take over here, as they have in so many other places.
00:20:39.660 And we'll be able to get through this darn thing, I believe, in the month of June, if 0.57
00:20:46.640 we just buckle together here.
00:20:48.320 Premier Jason Kenney, thank you so much for your time.
00:20:51.420 Thanks for all the good work you do, Andrew.
00:20:52.940 And being an independent voice in journalism, I appreciate it.
00:20:56.020 Well, thank you, Premier.
00:20:56.800 I appreciate that as well.
00:20:58.140 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:21:00.300 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.