Western Standard - July 14, 2022


The Newsroom： Health Canada approves vaccines for kids six months to five years old

Mentioned
Jean-Yves Duclos David Kipping Tiff Macklin Grant Dunlop Dina Hinshaw Tim McClellan COVID-19 England Pfizer Corey
Jay Hill on Tamara Lich's incarceration & federal issues PPC leader Maxime Bernier on federal politics & Alberta sovereignty.

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

146.47

Word count

876

Sentence count

50

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Health Canada has approved a new version of the MMR vaccine for children aged 6 months to 5 years old, but is there any chance it will catch on? Meanwhile, Canadian health care workers are increasingly reluctant to get the new MDR-19 vaccine. The Bank of Canada has raised the base rate by a full 1% and pushed the interbank lending rate to 2.5%, and by Labour Day, they say inflation will be at 8%, which is hot in the heels of the U.S. inflation rate which is at 9%, and they should expect a slowdown in the economy by winter, which won t be a surprise to a lot of people since we're all pulling our belts tighter. Another news story unfolding is a confidential document that reveals decisions in the process used to ease pandemic restrictions in Alberta.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm going to kick off with the Health Canada has approved the Moderna mRNA vaccine for children aged six months to five years old.
00:00:08.920 That means that infants and preschoolers can now get the shot.
00:00:12.800 The dose will be a quarter of that of an adult.
00:00:17.160 The Pfizer vaccine is still under review with Health Canada at the moment.
00:00:22.680 We're expecting news on that pretty soon.
00:00:25.280 I'll be very interested to see what the uptake looks like for the vaccine, given the fact that the COVID-19 hasn't impacted children of this age group in any substantial way.
00:00:38.760 So I wonder what parents are going to feel about that.
00:00:41.360 I know it will be popular with some parents, but interests seem to be waning.
00:00:47.440 Health care workers have been found to be some of the most reluctant to get the COVID vaccination,
00:00:53.640 which may come as a surprise to some people and not really a surprise to other people.
00:00:58.980 I guess they see what's going on in the hospitals.
00:01:03.300 The information comes from a Canadian Medical Association journal article that's titled Week COVID Booster Campaign.
00:01:12.220 The results were originally from the British Medical Journal, the BMJ.
00:01:17.360 And that was a questionnaire that was sent out to more than 15,000 Canadian health care professionals.
00:01:22.560 And they responded and yes, they're reluctant.
00:01:27.900 Apparently only 55% of them, more than some people might expect, but less than others.
00:01:35.740 But that's similar to the U.S. when they were surveyed on the same questions.
00:01:41.160 And the BMJ said that most respondents cited their reason for hesitancy as being the new technology that these mRNA vaccines are using and cited also safety concerns.
00:01:58.160 So that's very interesting to see if the federal government and the provincial government can change that.
00:02:06.660 I'm sure they're going to try and give those workers lots of incentives to change their mind. 0.99
00:02:11.800 The governor of the Bank of England, Tiff Macklin, said yesterday that Canadians should expect a slowdown in the economy by winter, which won't be a surprise to a lot of people since we're all having to pull our belts tighter.
00:02:26.480 Everyone's a bit more skint than they used to be, for sure.
00:02:29.240 They should expect that slowdown by winter.
00:02:31.220 That was Bank of Canada, not Bank of England.
00:02:35.040 Did I say England?
00:02:36.080 I'm sorry.
00:02:37.020 You just let those roots go.
00:02:38.740 Sorry, Bank of Canada, yeah.
00:02:40.500 And they should expect a slowdown by winter and a continued high cost of living.
00:02:45.360 So that's not much to look forward to, including a winter, of course.
00:02:49.540 Tim Macklin raised the Bank of Canada base rate by a full 1% yesterday, and that pushed the interbank loan rate to 2.5%.
00:02:59.060 And by Labour Day, they say inflation will be at 8%, which is hot in the heels of the U.S. inflation rate, which is at 9%, I think, approximately.
00:03:10.400 And unfortunately, the economic growth rate is predicted to fall from 3.5% to 1.75% by next year.
00:03:21.480 Another news story unfolding is confidential documentation has been released that reveal decisions in the process used to ease the pandemic restrictions in the province.
00:03:34.380 So the Alberta government fought to keep the documentation from going public, and they were citing that information in the documents, the 300 pages of documents, was actually confidential, but they were overruled by Justice Grant Dunlop in the lawsuit as it unfolded.
00:03:54.240 The documentation included a PowerPoint presentation that was prepared by the Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dina Hinshaw, for Health Minister David Copping, and that offered guidance to the Alberta Health Service on phasing out, sorry, the phasing in of the reopening and phasing out of restrictions.
00:04:13.680 The last lawsuit, sorry, the lawsuit was initiated by the Alberta Federation of Labour and a number of parents of five immune compromised children against the government of Alberta.
00:04:30.860 And lastly, for my, you know, breaking news today is the Canadian government has decided in their wisdom to reinstate random COVID-19 testing.
00:04:41.140 This time it will be offsite and the testing is for fully vaccinated air travellers, and that begins next Tuesday.
00:04:48.840 So Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said that they need to keep a tab on incoming COVID positive travellers and to be able to identify variants of concern as they come in to Canada.
00:05:02.980 The random testing was only suspended a little over one month ago.
00:05:07.760 The government said that moving testing offsite means it can better support Canadian travellers, although I'm not quite sure what they mean by that.
00:05:15.260 It sounds like a pain in the proverbial to me.
00:05:18.800 But travellers will receive an email within 15 minutes of submitting their customs declaration forms,
00:05:25.380 and the email will give details about how to book an appointment and find your, you know, the local test centre where you'll need to go and have that test taken.
00:05:33.280 You know what I think, Corey? I think that the federal government has a secret ministry of frustration,
00:05:41.580 and I think it looks to me like they're doing overtime.
00:05:46.320 Yeah, there's no doubt about it. I also would just suspect and speculate there's probably some people who have some really lucrative contracts for COVID testing
00:05:54.620 that really wouldn't want to give up all those tests they invested in.
00:05:57.940 Well, absolutely.