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The hard part about vaccines is that you have to convince people to get them when they are healthy. Reports of side effects shake people’s confidence. That’s why many parents are worried about vaccinating their children after hearing about a link between the Pfizer vaccine and myocarditis in young men. What most news reports failed to mention, though, is how rare and mild these cases actually were.
Myocarditis literally means inflammation of the heart muscle. It is not a common condition, nor is it rare. In any given year, there are four to six cases per 100,000 people. It can be caused by many different things, but it is often due to a viral infection that causes swelling and inflammation of the heart. Most cases resolve and heart function often returns to normal. A small number of people are left with long-term cardiac dysfunction.
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How effective is a single dose of a COVID vaccine? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control data in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report suggests that one dose is not as good as two doses. However, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has stated that only a tiny minority of Canada’s COVID-19 cases involved people who had received only one dose of vaccine, compared with no vaccine. Meanwhile, a study conducted in Qatar suggested that one dose was only 30 per cent effective against COVID-19 variants. If true, that would be disastrous in our current situation. People are understandably confused about just how much protection a single shot of Pfizer’s, Moderna’s, or AstraZeneca’s vaccine truly provides.
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In the Quebec City region, one of the province’s hardest-hit areas during the pandemic’s third wave, all residents in long-term care centres have now received their second COVID-19 vaccine dose.
In Montreal, that number is hovering around 20 per cent, but authorities are confident it will climb over the next 10 days until each resident is fully vaccinated.
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And across Quebec, despite vaccine delivery delays, the province says it’s on track to meet its timeline of getting every CHSLD resident their second dose by May 8 even if doing so will now require mixing and matching vaccines.