COVID-19 vaccine news: Canada’s place in the queue, AstraZeneca’s setback and Denmark’s dead mink are back. Here’s what you need to know this week

Considered one of the few ways to finally get the pandemic under control, searching for a COVID-19 the vaccine is moving fast.

Teams around the world are working on dozens of potential vaccines in the hopes that one, and possibly more, will crack the code in the coming months: pass clinical trials and gain regulatory approval.

Thousands of people are already rolling up their sleeves for clinical trials, while debates are ongoing on issues such as: who should get a vaccine first? How will it be distributed? How do we make sure that parts of the world are not excluded?

From why long-term vaccine leader AstraZeneca was quick to explain his findings to what we actually know about Canada’s place in the vaccine line, here are the big stories of the week.

Where is Canada online?

Most of the other vaccine news this week has been drowned out by questions about Canada’s place in the global queue. As the sparks continue to fly in Ottawa, here’s what you need to know to understand what’s going on:

The uproar began on Tuesday when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted during his daily press conference that Canadians were likely behind the Americans when the vaccine doses were distributed.

This sparked a protest from the opposition who wanted to know why Canada was not the first and, if not, why the federal government had not negotiated for what is called a vaccine license, which would have given us the right to produce these vaccines here at home.

Critics fear that nations like the United States and the United Kingdom may have an advantage in delivery dates, as each hosts a company with a major vaccine contender, to which they have given public funds.

The official counter-argument is this: it is not yet possible to know a date, as none of the vaccines have been made or approved. The government is sticking to its long-standing window, saying vaccines are likely to arrive in the first three months of next year.

Furthermore, Trudeau says we have enough purchase contracts – seven, to be exact – to still have a very good chance of receiving vaccines early, if not the first.

He added on Friday that most Canadians are likely to have a stroke by September, which is new.

Experts, meanwhile, seem mostly to agree with the idea that Canada is missing from the vaccine manufacturing department.

Andrew Casey, the head of BIOTECanada, a national association representing Canada’s biotech sector, told Star that vaccine facilities, which deal with live organisms, are very difficult to build.

Throwing another keystone into things, flagship vaccines, made by Pfizer and Moderna, are using a brand new technology that uses mRNA. While Canada can make some vaccines, it can’t, Casey said.

“It’s like saying, wine and cola are both liquid, you bottle them and you can drink them from glasses,” he said.

“But you can’t take a coke factory and make wine and you can’t make coke in a cellar.”

Canada calls the army

Trudeau also announced Friday that it had intercepted Maj. Gen. Dany Fortin, the commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command, to manage federal logistics in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.

This will be “the largest mobilization effort Canada has ever seen since World War II,” Trudeau told reporters on Friday.

AstraZeneca has some good news, and then some not so good news

The British-Swedish pharmaceutical company got the week off to a great start, with the release of promising early results from its final phase of testing – the third vaccine company to do so – but it ended with the head of the company vowing to do a new global trial, those same results suddenly in doubt.

Back on Monday, early data from the company suggested that its vaccine, which is in development with the University of Oxford, could be up to 90% effective. The doses are also cheaper and can be stored in a regular refrigerator, which would be a win for poorer countries.

Compared to the two candidates developed by Moderna and Pfizer using the newest mRNA technology, AstraZeneca’s vaccine is the leading candidate based on a more traditional technology. (They are using what is called a viral vector, where they hide some coronavirus protein inside a different virus that is usually found in chimpanzees.)

The press release revealed that AstraZeneca had actually tried two different doses, which led to two different results.

A group of nearly 9,000 volunteers received two full doses of the vaccine one month apart. The vaccine was 62% effective for them.

A second smaller group of volunteers – about 2,700 of them – received only half a dose, then a full dose a month later. For them the vaccine was more effective, demonstrating that 90% efficacy rate.

(Some places have reported the effectiveness of 70% – obtained by averaging the results of the two groups – which some experts have pointed out makes no sense since it was two different doses.)

The responsible scientists were reportedly unsure why the vaccine appeared to be more effective in smaller quantities. In fact, giving some people a small dose was a mistake, albeit a lucky one.

Critics immediately wondered whether or not the vaccine should be considered 90% effective, a number that would put it in the same league as Pfizer and Moderna, when that result was only in a relatively small group of participants who accidentally received the dose. smaller.

Some scientists have also claimed that key information is missing. For example, it was revealed that the reduced dose group did not include anyone over the age of 55, raising doubts that it would work in the elderly too. Adding fuel to the fire, the age issue was first revealed by American officials, not the company, according to the New York Times.

Questions about efficacy and transparency have sparked enthusiasm for the vaccine, which has long been considered one of the most promising in the world.

AstraZeneca defended its methods and said Thursday it would conduct a new global human trial specifically on the low-dose regimen, but that it would not affect the timing for approval in the UK and Europe.

But hopefully scientists will be able to decide for themselves.

According to the Guardian, Sir John Bell, an Oxford professor of medicine and the British government’s life sciences advisor, said Thursday he hoped the full data would be published in a scientific journal called the Lancet over the weekend.

Minks rising from the dead. A type of

Two weeks ago this very round of news mentioned the millions of Danish minks that were awaiting death. Bred for fur, they were infected with a mutant form of the coronavirus that, if spread to humans, would derail vaccine efforts, experts feared.

An update.

It turns out that the bodies of those slaughtered minks were buried in shallow pits. But the gas created by the decaying bodies pushed some of those dead minks back again.

Farmers have reportedly culled 10 million minks so far. According to Euronews, local politicians accused the government of using the land as a landfill and demanded that the bodies be dug up and incinerated. Someone on Twitter has declared 2020 the year of “zombie mutant killer minks”.

The Danish parliament will discuss on Monday whether incineration is possible or not.

Until then, officials say they plan to build a fence.