The safety and importance of vaccines took centre stage at an education town hall last week.
Foothills School Division hosted its Foothills Town Hall on Feb. 1 with updates from leading doctors in the Calgary health zone who have collaborated with the division throughout the pandemic answering questions and concerns as well as giving an update on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccinations.
“One of the big questions was ‘if I’m a healthy, young individual with absolutely no medical diseases or illnesses or asthma or anything like that, why should I get this vaccine?” said Dr. Yunan Liu, a resident physician in High River. “It’s because that’s how we can get out of this pandemic lockdown so that we can protect people in our community who are unable to receive this vaccine, mainly children, people who have a lot of medical illnesses or comorbidities that prevents them from getting this vaccine.
“It’s the only way that we can achieve herd immunity, which is 70 per cent of the population getting this vaccine.”
By the numbers, Alberta has a population of 4.3 million and with 70 per cent of that nearly 3 million people will need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, she added.
“The vaccine has been trialed with over 70,000 volunteers across the world, all different age and gender gaps and has been deemed safe,” Liu said. “It’s not an experimental thing that we’re handing out. Currently, over 40 million doses of this vaccine have been administered across the world so it is definitely safe to receive.”
The presentation used questions gleaned from a survey of parents from Spitzee School and Joe Clark School, many of which dealt with the COVID-19 vaccines, whether they were rushed and if the short and long-term effects are known at this time.
“These are extremely valid and reasonable concerns,” said Dr. Finola Hackett, a resident physician working in High River and part of the 19toZero community outreach team. “We recommend the vaccine, but everyone deserves to make an informed decision and have their questions answered.”
Fielding questions regarding the regulatory approval process for the vaccines in Canada, Hackett noted that Health Canada made everything go as quickly as possible in reviewing the research.
“The actual medical parts of vaccine approval were not fast-tracked,” she said. “It was the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the safety part was not fast-tracked.”
Hackett outlined how an mRNA vaccine, the type developed by both Pfizer and Moderna that has been rolled out and approved, works by describing it as “a blueprint that your body can use to identify this protein that’s on the surface of the COVID virus. The protein itself doesn’t cause infection, doesn’t cause symptoms, can’t kill you or anything like that, but it allows your body to identify the virus if you become exposed to COVID later on.”
She added the mRNA vaccines are very unstable which is why they require the cold temperature storage with the doses only able to be used within a few hours removed from the freezer.
“It’s not going to stick around in your body for a long time,” she said. “Just long enough to build those antibodies.”
Hackett noted that vaccines do tend to give some effects such as fever, fatigue and feeling unwell and this is the body’s immune response to having a virus.
“If you get very mild flu-like symptoms after a vaccine, that’s a sign your body is mounting an immune response which is actually a good thing,” she said. “The most common side effect is a sore arm and some people get those mild flu-like symptoms, but you can’t actually get the infection from the vaccine.”
Many of the doctors were in a position to speak on the impact of the vaccine first-hand as some of the first in the province to receive doses. Dr. Adam Vyse, a family physician in High River who’s also the Calgary Rural Primary Care Network board chair and works in long-term care, has received both doses and is fully immunized.
“I’ll say with the second one, my arm was more sore. I got some soreness up into my neck, the second day I kind of felt like I slept funny the night before,” Vyse said. “I think the immune response was a lot stronger on the second one, but otherwise no problems.
“I have an anaphylactic wasp allergy so I’m supposed to carry an EpiPen with me when I go out, and I had absolutely no problem. The advice is if you have an allergy to anything other than the ingredients that are on there it’s very unusual (to have an effect).
“At one point I’d read in Alberta we had a few cases and none of which required any adrenaline and that’s after tens of thousands of injections. It’s really, really uncommon.”
The vaccine has not yet been approved for children. Dr. Jia Hu, medical officer of health for the Calgary zone, suggested he’s quite confident the results of trials will show it’s perfectly safe for those kids.
“There are studies happening in kids and I’m almost sure they will be safe in kids,” Hu said. “I think they will probably get the vaccine near the end of the list of people who get it, so summer of this year assuming all the vaccines we’re supposed to get come.
“We are using a risk-based approach to prioritizing immunizations and kids do in general seem to do much better with COVID than the adults or older people.”
Vyse suggested the transmission in schools, which in kids is largely asymptomatic, is likely more than what we see in the active case numbers, basing that on how other viral diseases make their way through schools and into households.
“From my point of view, if I was on the vaccine committee I would be lobbying for teachers to be right up there with dental hygienists as frontline workers that need to be vaccinated in a priority fashion,” he said. “So we can keep the kids at school and minimize the transmission from kids to the adults that are around them. There’s two ways to look at this and sometimes it’s a different view when you look at the grassroots and you see actual evidence of transmission within schools and yet you look at the big picture and sometimes the stats don’t show it.”
