OTTAWA --
With 2020— a year like no other—now in the rearview mirror, CTV’s Question Period convened a series of guests to dive into the political year ahead and offer their forecasts for 2021.
From high-profile partisans to a former leader and those with their finger on the pulse of the ongoing health and economic crises, here’s CTV Question Period’s panelists’ assessments of the challenges ahead, and advice to the parties and their leaders.
The vaccine rollout
“I think there's many challenges. I think the first challenge that is pretty obvious is the logistical challenge. The front-runner vaccines right now are still dual dose vaccines, so we're going to require people to be vaccinated at 21 or 28 day intervals. Being able to manage that and having some sort of a tracking system or a registry of some sort I think is a big task when we're looking at potentially millions of Canadians who are going to be getting this vaccine. The other is in clearing up all of the misconceptions and misinformation, or lack of education out there regarding vaccine efficacy and safety… It's going to be a monumental task to make sure that that lingering element of vaccine hesitancy or doubt is removed so that we can look at the prospect of herd immunity as being a tangible reality. We don't want to hold back our society from any more damage and loss than this pandemic has already wreaked upon us,” said CTV News infectious disease specialist, Dr. Abdu Sharkawy.