Provinces are working with outdated vaccine tracking systems, hindering national data

2021/02/23 Leave a comment

Canada’s patchwork system at its worst:

As Canada prepares for a massive increase in vaccine doses from abroad, some provinces and territories are using outdated technology to record their vaccination data and not fully participating in a system Ottawa created to manage infectious disease outbreaks.

The results of a Globe and Mail survey sent to every province and territory found a patchwork of systems for recording vaccine information that will be crucial in monitoring supply, adverse reactions and population immunity across the country, and for booking appointments. Some provinces reported that they had not enabled core pieces of the technology, called Panorama, that the federal government designed for campaigns like this one.

The SARS epidemic of 2003 highlighted the fact that Canada lacked a modern public-health database to manage all the information related to outbreaks of infectious diseases. Ottawa funded the creation of Panorama for all provinces and territories to use. The platform is actually a suite of technologies and databases for vaccine and infectious disease tracking. But more than a decade of delays and the increasing cost of participation led some provinces to opt out of some parts, revert to their previous systems, or adopt other technology platforms.

The end result is 13 different vaccine-tracking systems, many of which do not communicate with each other or Ottawa.

Shannon MacDonald, an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta faculty of nursing and a researcher with the Canadian Immunization Research Network, said the situation gives the federal government an incomplete picture of the national vaccine program.

“We can’t look at immunization coverage nationally,” Prof. MacDonald said. Some provinces and territories, she added, will struggle even to track their own programs.

Panorama has been in use for several years to track immunizations. The federal government obtained new technology in January to address some of the gaps, and that platform came online on Feb. 2.

Every province that responded to The Globe confirmed it has yet to plug in to the new system.

Representatives of some provinces said health officials still use paper or basic Excel spreadsheets to track vaccines and vaccinations.

The Globe survey found that Quebec, British Columbia, Yukon and Saskatchewan use Panorama, or some version of it, for various aspects of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Ontario and Manitoba have their own systems. Other provinces did not respond or did not indicate what technology they use.

In light of COVID-19, Ontario hired the accounting company Deloitte Canada to develop a new system. COVaxON, once it comes online, will manage “scheduling, client management, recording administered doses, site inventory management, receipt of vaccination” in a platform that is easy to use, Ministry of Health spokesman David Jensen wrote in response to the Globe survey.

Since December, Canada has received just over a million doses of two types of COVID-19 vaccines. In the next six weeks, four million are scheduled to arrive, and tens of millions more before the end of summer.

The shelf life and storage requirements of each vaccine must be closely monitored. Dale Hunter, a spokesperson for Saskatchewan’s Health Ministry, said the state of the province’s vaccine cold storage is “reported and tracked manually,” meaning the data are sent to the ministry via e-mail or fax. Panorama can be used to manage inventory, but several provinces and territories, including Saskatchewan, said they had not enabled that feature.

The Northwest Territories is using Excel spreadsheets and “specially trained logisticians” to ensure that “no dose is wasted,” Health Ministry spokesperson Andrea Nilson said.

Panorama includes a feature that allows health authorities to scan the barcodes on pallets and doses to keep track of the vaccines and who needs a second dose of which one. None of the provinces or territories that responded to the survey said they had enabled that feature, meaning health authorities enter the data manually.

In Ontario, government employees enter lot numbers into COVaxON when vaccine shipments arrive. Nurses and doctors who administer the vaccines can select the identifying serial numbers on their computers from a drop-down list. This helps clinics track doses both used and unused. Quebec does something similar, Health Ministry spokesperson Robert Maranda wrote.

Mr. Jensen wrote that Ontario’s system could be more efficient if the federal government provided lot numbers in advance.

Many provincial and territorial health systems are accessible on only a limited number of hospital and clinic computers, raising the question of whether they could be used more widely, such as in pop-up clinics or pharmacies.

The Globe asked provinces how they would deal with data entry for vaccinations in makeshift clinics or pharmacies. Manitoba, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec said their systems are designed to be accessible in all clinics and pharmacies. Saskatchewan reported that only public health facilities and some First Nations communities have access to Panorama. Data from pharmacies will be entered manually.

Prof. MacDonald said most provinces and territories have “good enough” systems to manage the vaccination programs. But she said that if any continue recording data with pen and paper, “we’re in a lot of trouble.”

There’s also the question of how provinces and territories will book vaccination appointments.

Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan are finalizing their booking systems. The Northwest Territories is leaving that issue to health authorities and hospitals. Booking systems for Quebec and Ontario are online.

Health authorities will need to monitor for adverse reactions and the possibility that some people who received the vaccine still contract COVID-19 – which could indicate a defective batch, a more potent variant, or that the patient is among the few for whom the vaccine is not effective.

Quebec’s system is designed to identify defective batches based on reports of adverse reactions and to notify those who received doses. Ontario is tracking adverse reactions with a system that has not been integrated into COVaxON. Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories have not activated Panorama’s adverse-reaction module, and submit their reports manually.

The Public Health Agency of Canada is the main body responsible for monitoring adverse reactions. However, some provinces told The Globe they report to Ottawa on that manually or infrequently.

As the vaccinations continue, provinces will want to know what proportion of their population is immune at any given time. A 2016 study found the majority of provinces and territories lacked the ability to do a complete analysis of a mass vaccination campaign.

New Brunswick spokesman Shawn Berry said the province’s technology can “obtain near real-time immunization data for COVID-19 vaccinations.” Quebec said its system allows good population surveillance for infectious disease outbreaks, which includes vaccination data. While many provinces and territories that responded did not provide much detail, most told The Globe that, even if they can analyze their data, they do not automatically share the results with the federal government.

Most provinces and territories provided complete answers to the Globe survey, but British Columbia spokesman Devon Smith wrote that “confidentiality and safety” issues prevented the province from answering. Manitoba spokesman Brian Smiley said the province was unable to respond to most questions. Newfoundland and Labrador spokesperson Erin Shea indicated the province was still struggling with a recent outbreak of COVID-19 cases and could not fulfill the request. Nunavut, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island did not send responses.

Prof. MacDonald said the COVID-19 crisis should inspire provinces to modernize their health infrastructure. “God forbid it takes a pandemic for us to get moving on this,” she said. “But let’s make hay.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-provinces-working-with-outdated-vaccine-tracking-systems/

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The Book That Should Change How Progressives Talk About Race

2021/02/23 Leave a comment

Helpful suggestions to reduce polarization and build more shared narratives:

When Heather McGhee was a 25-year-old staffer at Demos, the progressive think tank she would eventually lead, she went to Congress to present findings on shocking increases in individual and family debt.

“Few politicians in Washington knew what it was like to have bill collectors incessantly ringing their phones about balances that kept growing every month,” McGhee writes in her new book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”

Demos’s explanatory attempts failed. When Congress finally took action in 2005, it made the problem worse, passing a bankruptcy bill that made escaping unsustainable debt harder than ever. For McGhee, the disaster was an education in the limits of research, which is often no match for the brute power of big money. But as she was walking down the hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building, she learned something else.

Stopping to adjust her new shoes near the door of a Senate office, she wrote, she heard “the bombastic voice of a man going on about the deadbeats who had babies with multiple women and then declared bankruptcy to dodge the child support.” She doesn’t know whether the man was a Democrat or a Republican, but when she heard him she realized she and her allies might have missed something. They’d thought of debt and bankruptcy primarily as a class issue. Suddenly she understood that for some of her opponents, it was more about race.

She wondered how, as a Black woman, she’d been caught off guard. “I hadn’t even thought to ask the question about this seemingly nonracial financial issue, but had racism helped defeat us?” she wrote.

McGhee’s book is about the many ways racism has defeated efforts to create a more economically just America. Once the civil rights movement expanded America’s conception of “the public,” white America’s support for public goods collapsed. People of color have suffered the most from the resulting austerity, but it’s made life a lot worse for most white people, too. McGhee’s central metaphor is that of towns and cities that closed their public pools rather than share them with Black people, leaving everyone who couldn’t afford a private pool materially worse off.

One of the most fascinating things about “The Sum of Us” is how it challenges the assumptions of both white antiracism activists and progressives who just want to talk about class. McGhee argues that it’s futile to try to address decades of disinvestment in schools, infrastructure, health care and more without talking about racial resentment.

She describes research done by the Race-Class Narrative Project, a Demos initiative that grew out of her work for the book. McGhee and her colleagues, she writes, discovered that if you “try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree … right up until they hear the countermessage that does talk, even implicitly, about race.”

But McGhee, who leads the board of the racial justice organization Color of Change, also implicitly critiques the way parts of the left talk about white privilege. “Without the hostile intent, of course, aren’t we all talking about race relations through a prism of competition, every advantage for one group mirrored by a disadvantage for another?” she asks.

McGhee is far from an opponent of the sort of social justice culture sometimes derided as “wokeness.” But her work illuminates what’s always seemed to me to be a central contradiction in certain kinds of anti-racist consciousness-raising, which is that many people want more privilege rather than less. You have to have an oddly high opinion of white people to assume that most will react to learning about the advantages of whiteness by wanting to give it up.

“Communicators have to be aware of the mental frameworks of their audience,” McGhee told me. “And for white Americans, the zero-sum is a profound, both deeply embedded and constantly reinforced one.”

This doesn’t mean that the concept of white privilege isn’t useful; obviously it describes something real. “What privilege awareness does, at its best, is reveal the systematic unfairness, and lift the blame from the victims of a corrupt system,” McGhee said. “However, I think at this point in our discourse — also when so many white people feel deeply unprivileged — it’s more important to talk about the world we want for everyone.”

So McGhee is trying to shift the focus from how racism benefits white people to how it costs them. Why is student debt so crushing in a country that once had excellent universities that were cheap or even free? Why is American health care such a disaster? Why is our democracy being strangled by minority rule? As the first line of McGhee’s book asks, “Why can’t we have nice things?” Racism is a huge part of the answer.

McGhee describes a “solidarity dividend” gained when people are able to transcend racism. Look at what just happened in Georgia, where the billionaire Kelly Loeffler, in an attempt to keep her Senate seat, waged a nakedly racist campaign against Raphael Warnock, who ran on sending voters $2,000 stimulus checks. He still lost most white people, but won enough to prevail. He did it by appealing to idealism, but also to self-interest. In the fight for true multiracial democracy, counting on altruism will only get you so far.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opinion/heather-mcghee-racism.html

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Dependent on foreign students, Canada universities risk revenues as vaccines lag

2021/02/22 Leave a comment

More on the impact on university revenues from COVID-19 travel restrictions and a reference to how Canada’s currently lower vaccination rate may affect Canada’s relative competitiveness in attracting international students:

Public universities have become increasingly dependent on foreign students, who pay far higher tuition than domestic students, to boost their profits. International enrollment jumped 45% over the last five years, advocacy group Universities Canada said, but it fell 2.1% this year amid coronavirus restrictions.

Reuters Graphic

That decline, coupled with a sharp fall in revenues from campus services like conferences, dorms, food halls and parking, has hit the schools hard. Canada’s slow vaccine campaign – it currently lags well behind global peers on inoculations – and the emergence of new variants, could extend the slump in enrollment and campus revenues into the next year school, experts warn.

“Overall, we are expecting universities to post consolidated deficits this year,” said Michael Yake, a senior analyst with rating agency Moody’s.

It is still too soon to know the final impact of COVID-19 on the current year. The University of British Columbia, for example, is projecting a deficit of C$225 million ($177.2 million) this year compared with a C$60 million surplus budgeted pre-COVID-19. And the uncertainty will continue.

“We’re not assuming the vaccine is going to be in place for the fall,” Yake added. “Even if in Canada the vaccines are available, that doesn’t means it’s going to be available for the international students.”

BIDEN EFFECT

While most of Canada’s universities are well positioned to weather the COVID-19 storm, an unexpected move by Laurentian University in Ontario to file for creditor protection this month has sparked concerns. Experts says that while Laurentian’s situation is unique, other schools also face cost pressures and some may be too reliant on foreign tuition.

International students brought in almost C$4 billion in annual revenue for Canadian universities in 2017/18, the most recent data from Statistics Canada showed. On average, they pay five times the tuition of domestic students and account for nearly 40% of all tuition fees.

Reuters Graphic

At Canada’s top three ranked universities, foreign students make up at least a quarter of the student body. Many stay in Canada after graduation and contribute to economic growth.

Canada did stave off a feared enrollment plunge this year, in part because the federal government made it easier for international students to get work permits after graduation, but the huge gains in foreign students of the previous five years are likely over.

Indeed a trend that saw many international students choose Canada over the United States in recent years could reverse as U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration overhauls the U.S. immigration.

“Something that’s benefited Canada for some time is the political environment in the U.S., as it drove more international students to Canada,” said Travis Shaw, a senior analyst at rating agency DBRS Morningstar.

The change of administration “probably means we’ve got more competition for those international students in the years ahead,” he said.

An increase in domestic students could offset some of the need for new foreign students, but their lower tuition fees will create a significant financial gap. Other cost-saving alternatives might include reducing course offerings and consolidating smaller schools.

And while international enrollment is expected to stabilize as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, the longer the pandemic drags on, the greater the risk that more international students will go elsewhere to study, particularly if competitor campuses are able to safely reopen before those in Canada.

“Most students want to come to Canada for the student experience. If a student experience does not seem viable over the term of the course, it is sure to be a deterrent,” said Aditi Joshi, an analyst at DBRS Morningstar.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-education/dependent-on-foreign-students-canada-universities-risk-revenues-as-vaccines-lag-idUSKBN2AF189?rpc=401&

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‘It’s so unfair’: life on the streets of the French town branded as ‘lost to Islam’

2021/02/22 Leave a comment

Good profile of the reality on the ground compared to the polemics:

The HairCoiffure salon on Rue Jean Jaurès, a short walk from Trappes station, is offering a cut-and-blow-dry for women at €18 (£15.50) and €15 for men, a banal observation at the centre of the latest battle in France’s toxic debate over religious extremism.

Hairdressers and their clients hit the headlines after local teacher Didier Lemaire claimed there were no mixed salons in Trappes – suggesting the town was in the stranglehold of Islamic radicalisation. He also claimed schoolchildren were banned from singing and some women barred from cafes. Lemaire has since been placed under police protection following alleged death threats.

The accusations came on the eve French MPs voted on a controversial bill to combat Islamist extremism, put forward after the brutal murder of teacher Samuel Paty last October.

But the claims have sparked anger and indignation from locals known as Trappists – the most famous of whom are the actor Omar Sy, footballer Nicolas Anelka and popular French comedian Jamel Debbouze. In an interview with the Observer, town mayor Ali Rabbeh hit back.

“We are being stigmatised,” he said. “Many of the people spreading lies, exaggerations and unjust accusations about Trappes have no idea what happens here. They have never set foot in the town.

“Yes, there are problems with drugs, delinquency and radicalisation. I have never denied that. But we’re working to resolve them and these sort of attacks don’t help. And of course our children sing: they sing in nursery, primary and secondary schools. We even have school choirs.”

Trappes, in the western suburbs of Paris near Versailles, holds a grim national record after more than 60 local young people left to join Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, making it a soft target in this political and ideological conflict.

It is also in the Yvelines department where Paty was beheaded last October. So when philosophy professor Lemaire, 55, claimed the town was under the yoke of Salafism and “definitively lost” to the republic, he had a captive audience. “There are no more mixed hairdressers, north African women can no longer go to cafés, there’s pressure on women over the veil … Trappes is no longer in France,” Lemaire told French TV. He claimed locals were “living in fear” and laicité – France’s cherished separation of religion and state – was defeated. (Lemaire later admitted his comments on hairdressers were “approximative” but doubled down on the rest).

Rabbeh, 36, the son of Moroccan migrants, responded angrily, accusing Lemaire and the media who gave him airtime of stoking division and making life even more complicated for locals. “Young people taking the baccalauréat this year tell me they’re worried sick about how they’re going to get places at good colleges and universities when they say they’re from Trappes,” Rabbeh said. “It’s so unfair on them. It’s as if every single time we get our head out of water, someone pushes us back under.” Like Lemaire, Rabbeh has also been given police protection.

On a chilly recent Friday, the snow-dusted streets of Trappes were calm. On one side of town, a cluster of men drank outside a bar near the station, on the other worshippers clutching prayer mats streamed from the local mosque. Yards from the Lycée La Plaine de Neauphle where Lemaire taught for 20 years, the window of another hairdressers, Saint Lou Coiffure, was clearly marked “Masculin – Feminin”. The town boasts a modern music and dance school, with subsidised classes for low-income families; the Trappes magazine carries pictures of December’s “Magic of Christmas” illuminations.

Inside the town hall, Rabbeh was fuming: “We know there is a problem with Islamism here but we have made progress. We are working to resolve these problems and someone comes along and attacks us with lies, exaggerations and unjust accusations. Sometimes I despair.”

He added: “Would a mayor with a different name be faced with this? Trappes is part of the French republic. It’s absolutely untrue to suggest otherwise.”

It would be easy to dismiss Trappes as yet another rundown, problem-riddled Paris suburb were it not for the fact that it has benefited from a vast urban renewal programme. Most of its dilapidated 1970s high-rise tower blocks have been demolished and the council estates renovated. More mixed private and public housing with flower beds and children’s playgrounds are gradually replacing low-rent housing. The streets are clean, local facilities modernised and Lemaire’s own lycée boasts the best results in the department. Unemployment is running at 5.6% of the active population – half of whom are under 30 – compared with 6.7% for Paris.

The picture is not all rosy, though: more than a quarter of Trappists live under the poverty line and Rabbeh says the Islamic radicalisation problem is “complex” and fuelled by a sense that the republic has abandoned local communities like Trappes.

When a TV crew made an unannounced visit locals crowded round to defend their town. Jacques Michelet who runs the Trappes basketball club rejected the suggestion it had been abandoned to Islamic extremism: “We’ve seen all ideologies, we’ve seen extremists and not just Islamists … but it’s a marginal phenomenon in Trappes.”

Father Etienne Guillet, the local Catholic priest, contested Lemaire’s suggestion that non-Muslim inhabitants have fled. His congregation boasts up to 700 people from 45 different countries. “When there are tensions, I meet with the local imams and we sort things out,” said Guillet. “It’s not easy for everyone to live together and there ’s always the temptation for communities to withdraw, but what I see in this town is things going well.”

Rabbeh said last week he was stepping back from the row, posting a quote by French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, whose statue stands outside Trappes town hall, on social media. It reads: “Courage is to seek the truth and tell it; it is not to be subjected to the law of the triumphant lie that passes, and not to echo, from our soul, mouth and hands to foolish applause and fanatical booing.”

Source: ‘It’s so unfair’: life on the streets of the French town branded as ‘lost to Islam’

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Canada’s record-setting invitation to immigrants after COVID shortfall an ‘absolute shock’

2021/02/22 Leave a comment

More reaction to the minimal Express Entry score of 75 and essentially opening to all with work experience in Canada. Money quote: “The draw transforms a well-structured and predictable system into a lottery ticket,” said [immigration lawyer Sergio] Karas. “It makes the system look worthless and game-able.”:

If you’re an immigrant living in Canada and looking for permanent residency, this might be your lucky year.

Canada has set a record for the number of skilled migrants invited to apply for permanent residence on a single day, as the government scrambles to make up for an immigration shortage caused by COVID-19 and the resulting travel restrictions.

On Saturday, Feb. 13, the immigration department held its latest draw from a pool of candidates and issued 27,332 invitations — five times more than its previous high of 5,000 people — to hopeful candidates already living in the country.

The news caught immigration experts and applicants by surprise and created a buzz on social media, with pundits tagging it #SaturdaySurprise from Canada.

“It was an absolute shock to everyone. We all thought there was a glitch on our screens and the numbers were incorrect,” said Kareem El-Assal, managing editor of immigration news site CIC News and policy director at CanadaVisa.com.

The plan is not without its critics, however, who say the strategy could open up the program to people with limited qualifications who would have been out of luck had it not been for Ottawa’s attempt to meet its immigration targets in the middle of a pandemic.

Applying for permanent residency is usually a long and competitive process.

Skilled immigrants who are interested must create a profile in a government management system called Express Entry, where they score points for things such as age, language skills, educational attainments and work experience.

The highest rankings are then invited via routine draws to apply for immigration. While an individual typically needs a minimum score of 400 points or above to make the cutoff, the lowest-ranked person invited in the latest round only had a score of 75. (The immigration department posts the results of each draw on its website.)

This latest draw applies to people in what’s called Canadian Experience Class, meaning they’ve worked in the country.

The instance of requirement loosening means some applicants, with scores too low to normally be considered, are now being encouraged to create a profile and try their luck, experts say.

“Between now and the next draw, you are going to have more Canadian Experience Class candidates entering the pool,” said El-Assal.

“If I’m in Canada right now and I meet the minimum requirements, I will be rushing to submit my profile ASAP because there’s a very good chance that I will be invited.”

Given the challenges presented by the travel restrictions and reduced processing capacity, El-Assal expects the immigration department will continue to prioritize immigration candidates from within Canada before it looks further abroad.

Canada had set to bring in 340,000 new permanent residents in 2020, but ultimately only 180,000 landed here, the lowest annual immigration intake since 1998, according to El-Assal.

This year, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino planned to bump up immigration levels to 401,000 in order to make immigration part of Canada’s economic recovery post-COVID-19.

But as the pandemic continues, international travel remains slow, and immigration with it.

“They’ve got these massive (immigration) levels that they have to hit and they took a real beating last year. They thought the border would be more open now but they are not. They’re scrambling to find a way to meet those targets,” said Alberta-based immigration lawyer Mark Holthe, chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section.

“This was a really wonderful development. So many people have invested so much time and effort in getting here in the first place, whether it’s the hundreds of thousands of dollars that (foreign) students have paid and worked here. They’re paying taxes. They’re contributing. It’s not like they’re on handouts.”

In a news release, the immigration department said 90 per cent of the 27,332 people invited in this round are already living in Canada, with at least one year of Canadian work experience.

“This means they’re unaffected by current travel restrictions and won’t face the same barriers as overseas applicants when gathering the required documentation and undergoing criminality and medical screening,” it said.

“Those invited to apply who are not currently living in Canada will be able to travel once restrictions are lifted.”

However, Toronto immigration lawyer Sergio Karas said trying to meet the immigration target by lowering the bar is a “terrible” way to make policies.

The latest draw unfairly rewards the low scorers, who “took a flyer” and entered the pool, he said, even if they have poor qualifications, poor language skills and poor job prospects while qualified applicants who are still collecting documentation and not yet in the system lose out.

“The draw transforms a well-structured and predictable system into a lottery ticket,” said Karas. “It makes the system look worthless and game-able.”

Since immigration employees are still working from home, he questioned whether the department has the processing capacity for the flood of applications coming from this draw without compromising the processing time or quality of decisions.

Independent immigration policy analyst Richard Kurland said the system is nimble and flexible as it’s supposed to in adapting to the challenging environment under the pandemic.

“Due to COVID, fewer people registered in the system, resulting in a lower pass mark,” he said. “Now, the publicity (of this news) will flood the system with new candidates. You’ll likely see a lot more people registering just in case immigration lightning strikes twice, increasing the pass mark again.”

Source: Canada’s record-setting invitation to immigrants after COVID shortfall an ‘absolute shock’

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Farmers’ mass protests in India cut deeply across Canada

2021/02/22 Leave a comment

Diaspora politics in play between Sikh and Hindu Canadians.
Although South Asian Hindus are 3.9 percent of the population compared to 1.1 percent South Asian Sikhs, Canadian Sikhs are more concentrated in a number of ridings thus increasing their political weight (14 ridings with more than 10 percent Sikhs, four with more than 20 percent, 10 ridings with more than 10 percent Hindus, with no riding more than 20 percent, 2011 NHS):
Surrey’s Harjit Singh Gill visits his family’s ancestral farm in India almost every year.

The farm, like most in India, is small, with crops of wheat and rice. Some of it’s leased to his brother-in-law, Parminer Singh Rangian, and others in the 3,400-person village of Maksudra in the state of Punjab.

“Punjab feeds the tummies of the rest of India. Punjab feeds 500 million people,” says Gill, standing in his large yard in the Panorama Ridge neighbourhood. This is where he began 25 years ago as an immigrant taxi driver, before becoming a builder and eventually constructing his own mansion.

Despite the states of Punjab and adjacent Haryana forming the breadbasket of India, many of its farmers make meagre livings and are in debt, Gill says. Things are even worse for farmers in other parts of India, where 60 per cent of the population of 1.3 billion relies on agriculture to make a living. But the sector only accounts for one-sixth of the country’s GDP.

Three free-market reforms proposed in September by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — designed to end government-guaranteed crop prices and ostensibly improve productivity — have provoked hundreds of thousands of farmers from the state of Punjab and Haryana to take their tractors and set up continuing protest camps in Delhi, the capital of India. Some confrontations have turned violent.

International celebrities — including U.S. pop singer Rihanna, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and lifestyles entrepreneur Meena Harris, a niece of U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris — have proclaimed support for the farmers and called out Modi. In turn, the majority-backed Indian government has labelled them “foreign individuals” trading in “sensationalism.”

Tensions have been high across Canada, which has a Punjabi-Canadian population of 700,000, most of whom are Sikhs and many of whom have farming origins. They’ve helped organize large motorcade demonstrations against the Indian government in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Chilliwack, Surrey and downtown Vancouver, outside the consulate of India.

The frequent outcries have forced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into a complex, changing dance. He’s trying to balance hundreds of thousands of Indo-Canadians who support Modi, a Hindu nationalist, against the many Punjabi-Canadian voters and others who back the aggrieved farmers.

While Punjabi-language newspapers in Canada express outrage over Modi’s proposed reforms, other Indian-language media outlets in Canada have highlighted counter-protests praising Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. One recent pro-Modi demonstration brought 350 vehicles, many bearing the flag of India, to the Indian consulate in downtown Vancouver.

In December, Trudeau, appearing to take sides, came out supporting the Indian farmers’ “right to be heard.” B.C. NDP Premier John Horgan also tweeted he “understands the anguish” of Canadians sympathetic to the farmers.

But Modi’s allies have responded by accusing Trudeau of “legitimating extremist activism” in protesting in front of India’s consulates in Canada. This month, Trudeau, who has more than a dozen Sikh cabinet ministers and MPs in his government, reduced escalating animosity by asking for desperately needed vaccines from India. In turn, Modi let it be known he’s happy to help out his “friend.”

What does Gill think of all the high-level political machinations?

He is uncompromising. The protests aren’t only a fight for justice for farmers, Gill says, they’re also a crusade to safeguard Punjab, population 30 million, from Modi and his agribusiness cronies, who are keen to gobble up small farms.

“Modi has said to the farmers of Punjab: ‘We need your grain to feed the country.’ But really he wants complete control,” says Gill, comparing Modi with populist U.S. President Donald Trump.

The battle over guaranteed produce prices is “not all about farming. It’s about protecting Punjab,” the birthplace of Sikhism, says Gill, a popular talk-show host for Sher-E-Punjab Radio AM 600 who ran in 2019 for the federal NDP.

Even though Gill says he isn’t an advocate for a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan — “because it’s not realistic to create a sovereign country within another country” — he would like India’s leaders to treat Sikhs in Punjab like Quebecers, who have distinct status within Canada.

Getting to the root of farmers’ conflict

Given the vehemence of the protests and a recent Indian high-court ruling, Modi, whose right-wing party handily won re-election in 2019, has offered to compromise by putting the reforms on hold.

But that hasn’t satisfied suspicious farmers in India, who want the proposals revoked. Nor has it quieted protest organizers across Canada, including in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, such as Pindia Dhaliwal.

The Punjabi diaspora, from New Zealand to California, Dhaliwal says, is determined to: “Ask India why they’re killing us? Ask India why they are oppressing us, why they’re silencing us, why they are persecuting minorities?”

Modi seeks to loosen strict regulations around the pricing and storage of produce, which have protected India’s farmers from the free-market system for decades. The government currently exempts farmers from income tax and crop insurance, guarantees a minimum price for 23 crops and regularly waives off debts. But the system disappoints all sides, with critics saying it’s rife with shady middlemen.

Along with many economists, Modi has argued that offering farmers a guaranteed minimum support price (MSP) for crops prevents them from bargaining for better prices.

Opponents in Canada, including Gill, are by no means alone in mistrusting Modi’s motives.

They say his reforms were poorly conceived, not to mention pushed forward during a pandemic without consultation.

Sanjay Ruparelia, a political scientist at Ryerson University in Toronto, says advocates of Modi’s three reforms say farmers would be able to sell their harvest to a much wider range of private actors, raising their incomes and reducing food prices.

“Yet, consider the fine print,” Ruparelia says. “There is also a very real risk that agricultural deregulation will lead to farmers being paid less than the minimum support price.’’

Interviewed while travelling in India on work, University of B.C. adjunct public policy Prof. Shashidharan Enarth says the guaranteed MSP system for selling crops in India is riddled with a lack of transparency, caste conflicts and corruption.

Still, it’s better than Modi’s plan, says Enarth, who has worked for the World Bank.

“The MSP policy should be considered a public good,” he says, because it provides some stability. “The focus should be on removing corruption rather than removing MSP itself without an effective alternative.”

Although Modi promotes a free market, Enarth says it can only “work well when there is rule of law. India may be an electoral democracy, but we have rule of muscle running most institutions.”

Similarly, Surrey’s Gill says he’s appalled by the way banks, working with Modi’s government, have encouraged millions of farmers to become indebted.

Some, says Gill, have overextended themselves with mortgages to build big houses in Punjab. Others, Gill says, are borrowing too much from banks to send their offspring to Canada as students or temporary workers, in hopes they will eventually immigrate, including to Surrey, where one-quarter of the population speaks Punjabi.

Despite widespread problems with the status quo, Enarth — who has spent 15 years organizing small-scale, often illiterate farmers in India into collectives so they will gain more bargaining power — says he’s been several times to Punjab, but his organizing efforts aren’t particularly needed there.

“Punjabis are well organized, with more political muscle, and relatively wealthier than other Indians. Farmers from other states could not have sustained a 90-day protest on this scale.”

Data shows Indian farmers’ suicides rates are even higher outside Punjab and Haryana.

Punjabi farmers tend to do better than others, Gill says, because they’re industrious, have embraced modern technology and lobbied governments to build irrigation systems. They strongly advocate the secure price system for wheat, rice and barley, he says, because they have benefited from it — more than farmers from other regions, where the system has been spotty.

Even though having taxpayers guarantee how much farmers receive has often led to an excess of certain crops that go wasted, Enarth says the MSP’s value lies in the way it combats price-fixing by cartels.

India’s agriculture sector, however, is in trouble in general, says Enarth. “Reforms are needed to address the root cause of poverty among rural Indians, which is farm labourers’ very low productivity.”

At least half of farm workers in India should be helped to move into another field of work, he says.

Indo-Canadians seek to sway Indian politics

How did complex farm legislation become the focus of street activism in Canada?

“Punjabi Canadians,” says Enarth, “have very close ties with their families back home — and therefore they are exerting whatever leverage they have in terms of influencing local politics in Punjab, and among non-resident Indians elsewhere.”

Asked how some of the roughly 800,000 Indo-Canadians who aren’t Punjabi are viewing the protests, Enarth suggests many are from middle- to high-income families far removed from agriculture — and many are fans of Modi. “They’re therefore likely to be indifferent, if not befuddled.”

Some Indian and Indo-Canadian media outlets have been critical of the pro-farmers’ protests in Canada. The Vancouver-based Hindi-language outlet CanAm News is among those aiming to counteract the anti-Modi protests, according to Mirems, which translates ethnic-language media reports in Canada.

Some Indo-Canadians “believe the agenda has largely been hijacked by pro-Khalistan elements in Canada,” according to CanAm News, echoing a common view in India’s media. One article quoted the organizer of a recent pro-India car rally in Vancouver, Neema Manral of Delta, who has been a candidate for the B.C. Green party.

“There was so much anger within the community here” over anti-government protests that “we had to do something,” Manral says. While most Indo-Canadians respect the protesting farmers, Manral was determined to help organize the 350 vehicles that took part in a Feb. 6 “tiranga rally,” referring to displays of the orange, white and green flag of India.

In response to the cascade of accusations flying around the world and Canada, Ajay Bisaria, India’s High Commissioner in Ottawa, this week lamented the “flood of misinformation, blatant lies and distortions being circulated.”

“There has been an increase in rhetoric promoting violence in India. Such disinformation is aimed at defaming and harming the image of India and Indians, as well as to sow distrust and promote hatred between different communities of Indian origin in Canada.”

He called on everyone to be vigilant against propaganda and hate speech.

Now in their sixth month, the protests have become one of the biggest challenges ever faced by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party government.

Source: Farmers’ mass protests in India cut deeply across Canada

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Veteran Canadian Olympic officials dismiss ‘silly’ calls to move 2022 Games from China

2021/02/22 2 Comments

Not a “silly” call but an unrealistic one, and thus more virtue signalling than effective. Only realistic option is a boycott with as many countries involved as possible:

A number of Canadian politicians have called for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, China, to be relocated to another country, but Dick Pound, a Canadian member of the International Olympic Committee, says such a move is unfeasible at this late date.

“What the politicians are doing with this kind of a request of moving the Games with less than a year to go is silly,” said Pound, a former president of the Canadian Olympic Committee. “If they give this 30 seconds of thought, they know it’s not possible.”

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole and other politicians, including Green Party Leader Annamie Paul and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, have called for the relocation of the Games, pointing to the Chinese government’s treatment of its Muslim minority population.

Source: Veteran Canadian Olympic officials dismiss ‘silly’ calls to move 2022 Games from China

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Ibbitson: Ottawa needs an aggressive immigration plan

2021/02/20 2 Comments

Will be interesting to see how this largely opening the gates to anyone already in Canada will affect overall economic integration and outcomes.

This fixation of meeting the target level in the middle of a downturn and at a time of ongoing travel restrictions has an element of unreality, given the recent RBC report predicting only 275,000 new Permanent Residents compared to the target of 401,000 (less than 70 percent) and what I am seeing in observing monthly data.

Many of his points are, of course, valid, particularly greater recognition of lower skilled/paid essential workers, increased competition to attract immigrants by the USA and European countries, and a possible decline in potential interest in emigration from current source countries given their declining birthrates.

His commentary is, like so many, silent on the anticipated impact of automation and AI on the economy and labour force:

If you are studying or working in Canada on a visa, if you are here as an asylum claimant, even if your visa has expired and you are an undocumented resident, the odds have never been better that you could soon be on the path to citizenship.

In order to maintain immigration targets, the federal government is aggressively courting non-Canadians who are living here to apply to become permanent residents.

This may stoke resentment among some old-stock Canadians who don’t like the change, literally, in the complexion of the population. But there is no alternative, if Canada is to grow and prosper.

Because borders were closed by the pandemic, we accepted only 184,000 new permanent residents last year, rather than the target of 341,000. Most of those granted status were already in the country when the pandemic hit.

To make up the loss, the Liberal government has set goals of 401,000 new permanent residents this year. But with borders still closed, a recent Royal Bank report predicted we’ll be lucky to get to 275,000 in 2021.

“With the effects of the pandemic looking more likely to remain into the spring and summer, the headwinds … will keep immigration into Canada low throughout most of 2021,” wrote senior economist Andrew Agopsowicz.

There are between a million and a million and a half people in Canada who are here on work or student visas, who are seeking asylum, or who are undocumented because their visa expired or for some other reason.

To show it’s serious about converting as many as possible to permanent residents, the federal government greatly lowered the entrance requirement in its most recent call for applications under the Express Entry system, which fast-tracks economic-class applicants.

“It’s a catch-all draw, meant to transition many of those who are eligible to be permanent residents and who are currently residing in Canada,” explained Kareem El-Assal, director of policy at Canadavisa.com, the website of an immigration law firm.

Mr. El-Assal believes that Canada can meet the target of 401,000 new permanent residents this year by drawing on the pool of people already here and by bringing in family-class immigrants, who are permitted to enter Canada under pandemic rules.

I would argue that Ottawa and the provinces should also look for qualified workers from the pool of asylum claimants and undocumented workers as well, subject to the appropriate background checks. Right now we need workers more than we need to enforce bureaucratic rules.

The government’s determination to meet its immigration targets coincides with a lesson many have learned about the value of so-called low-skilled work in areas such as agrifood and health care.

“The pandemic revealed that many people who were described as low-skilled were really essential workers,” said Usha George, director of the Centre for Immigration and Settlement at Ryerson University. When many Canadians were forced out of work or had to work from home because of lockdowns, “they contributed to keeping us all going,” she said.

Our immigration system is geared to attracting high-skilled workers in the professions and trades. But our economy also depends on people whose work we undervalue, and they too should be welcomed to Canada as permanent residents.

Surveys show a significant minority of Canadians believe that immigration levels are too high. There is plenty of evidence on social media that some Canadians of European background resent high levels of non-European immigration.

But Canada’s fertility rate has been declining since the 1970s, and is now more than half a baby shy of replacement rate. Without immigrants, our population would soon start to decline.

Meanwhile, India and the Philippines, two major source countries of immigrants to Canada, have brought their fertility rates down to replacement rate, or very close to it. And factoring in the robust economic growth they were enjoying before the pandemic, there could soon be fewer people available – or interested – in coming.

Aging societies across the developed world need immigrants to fill vacant jobs and to pay taxes to support the elderly, whatever nativist know-nothings may think.

In the not-too-distant future, rather than the federal and provincial governments choosing which applicants get to come to Canada, we will be begging potential newcomers to pick us over the American and European competition. The sooner we get used to that idea, the better.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-needs-an-aggressive-immigration-plan/

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Human rights adviser presses Trudeau to call out China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide

2021/02/20 Leave a comment

Right call:

Irwin Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister and a leading voice on human rights, is urging Justin Trudeau to take steps to recognize that China is conducting acts of genocide against its Muslim minority.

Mr. Cotler said the federal government could either ask the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on whether China is committing genocide or have Parliament adopt a resolution on the issue.

MPs are preparing to vote Monday on a Conservative motion to recognize China’s conduct as genocide. The NDP, Bloc Québécois and Green Party have indicated that they would support the motion, which says Beijing’s actions contravene the UN Genocide Convention.

The Prime Minister, who said this week that he was reluctant to describe China’s conduct as genocide and that the matter required more study, recently appointed Mr. Cotler as his special adviser for Holocaust remembrance and combatting anti-Semitism.

The Montreal lawyer said he’s confident that what is taking place in China meets the test of genocide.

“I have looked at all the evidence and I have no doubt that, in fact, there are mass atrocities that are constitutive to acts of genocide under the Genocide Convention,” Mr. Cotler said in an interview.

The Biden and Trump administrations have both said Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region meet a credible definition of “genocide.” Allegations include mass incarceration, destruction of religious sites, forced labour, forced sterilization and other forms of population control, as well as torture.

Mr. Cotler said forced sterilizations and abortions and holding more than one million Uyghurs in what he called “concentration camps” violate the Convention.

“This constitutes the largest detention of a minority since the Holocaust … and you have witnesses testifying about forced enslavement, torture, mass rape, disappearances, murder,” he said.

A growing body of evidence from human-rights monitors, Western media outlets and testimony from Uyghur survivors themselves has documented China’s actions.

Media reports have detailed how China has forced intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands in Xinjiang. Birth rates in Hotan and Kashgar, Uyghur-majority areas of Xinjiang, fell more than 60 per cent between 2015 and 2018, an Associated Press report says.

Beijing defends its conduct by saying that it’s trying to stamp out extremism and calls the camps re-education centres.

The Conservative motion would not be the first statement from Parliament on the issue. In October, a House of Commons subcommittee, dominated by Liberal MPs, also labelled Beijing’s conduct in Xinjiang as genocide.

Arif Virani, the parliamentary secretary to Justice Minister and Attorney-General David Lametti, later told the Commons that he believed “it is genocide that appears to be taking place today in China.”

The federal government has previously said it wants an independent investigation into China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. And Mr. Trudeau said earlier this week that Canada would like to be part of such an investigation. Human-rights advocates have pointed out that it’s extremely unlikely China would ever allow it.

When asked if he is reluctant to describe China’s conduct as genocide in case it leads to repercussions for jailed Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, Mr. Trudeau said Monday that his primary concern is making sure the term genocide is not misused.

“There is no question there have been tremendous human-rights abuses reported coming out of Xinjiang, and we are extremely concerned about that.”

But he said that when it comes to calling it genocide, “we need to ensure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed in the process before a determination like that is made.”

Mr. Cotler said he knows the Prime Minister is worried about the fate of the two Michaels but added that a parliamentary determination of genocide would allow “the government to say they are responding to the will of Parliament, which is reflective and representative of the will of the people … or they can go the Supreme Court route.”

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Green Party Leader Annamie Paul have said they believe Beijing is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. Ms. Paul has urged Ottawa to consider diplomatic and economic sanctions against China.

The Conservatives have said that other consequences should follow a recognition of genocide, and they have already urged the government to press Olympic organizers to move the 2022 Winter Games out of Beijing. The Conservative motion to be voted on Monday was amended during debate Thursday to also urge the relocation of the Games from Beijing.

Paul Evans, the HSBC Chair in Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, said Canada is “not on strong moral and political ground” to lead on the issue of genocide, given this country’s painful history of residential schools for Indigenous children.

“There do appear to be parallels between our residential-school history and what Beijing is attempting to do with some of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang,” he said.

“We would be on a firmer ground, and more likely to attract others to the cause, if we labelled Chinese actions in Xinjiang as ‘cultural genocide,’ a horror we are very familiar with in our own story.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeaus-holocaust-adviser-says-canada-must-recognize-chinas-actions/

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India’s Vaccine Rollout Stumbles as COVID-19 Cases Decline. That’s Bad News for the Rest of the World

2021/02/20 Leave a comment

Of note:

India’s COVID-19 vaccination scheme looked set for success.

For the “pharmacy of the world,” which produced 60% of the vaccines for global use before the pandemic, supply was never going to be a problem. The country already had the world’s largest immunization program, delivering 390 million doses annually to protect against diseases like tuberculosis and measles, and an existing infrastructure that would make COVID-19 vaccine distribution easier. Ahead of the launch, the government organized dry runs, put up billboards touting the vaccines and replaced phone ringing tones with a message urging people to get vaccinated.

And yet, one month into its vaccination campaign, India is struggling to get even its health workers to line up for shots. In early January, India announced a goal to inoculate 300 million people by August. Just 8.4 million received a vaccine in the first month, less than a quarter of the number needed to stay on pace for the government’s goal. So far, vaccinations are only available for frontline health workers, and in some places police officers and soldiers.

And even that initial interest might be waning. India’s vaccine scheme relies on a mobile phone app that schedules vaccination appointments. On the first day doses were administered, Jan. 16, some 191,000 people showed up. But four weeks later, when those people were summoned for the second dose, only only 4% returned.

A. Valsala, a community health worker in the southern city of Kollam who spent months fighting COVID-19 door-to-door, skipped her appointment to get her first dose of the vaccine after a hectic day on Feb. 12. “I don’t feel the need to rush because the worst is over,” she says. “So there is a sense that it is okay to wait and watch since there are concerns about how these vaccines were developed so fast.”

A. Valsala’s comments point to a troubling trend—one reflected in TIME’s interviews with health workers across India. A combination of waning COVID-19 cases nationwide, questions over the efficacy of one of the two vaccines currently authorized for use in the country and complacency are resulting in growing hesitancy to get vaccinated.

“There is a reduced perception of threat with regard to the virus,” says Dr. Chandrakant Lahariya, a New Delhi-based epidemiologist. “Had the same vaccines been available during the peak of the pandemic in September and October, the uptake would have been different.”

A troubling sign for the rest of the world

Public health experts are now concerned that the sluggish start could impact the subsequent phases of the vaccination drive, especially when the vaccination scheme is widened next month to include older people and those with preexisting conditions.

“In India, people have an inherent trust in doctors,” says Dr. Smisha Agarwal, Research Director at the Johns Hopkins Global mHealth Initiative. “So when [doctors] don’t turn up to get vaccines, it reaffirms any doubts that the general public might have.”

In an effort to accelerate the vaccination drive, the government started walk-in vaccinations as opposed to allowing only those scheduled for the day to get the shots. It also set up new vaccination centers across the country.

For now, India might be an outlier: a country with a surfeit of vaccines with few takers. But its experience shows that, while the first challenge is stocking up on vaccine supplies, convincing people to take them can be its own huge task. It might be a portent for the rest of the world as the number of COVID-19 cases decline globally and vaccines become more widely available, warns Dr. Paul Griffin, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

It’s easy to be complacent about getting a vaccine when cases are declining,Griffin says, “but now, when the trajectory looks favorable, is the right time to step back and realize that this will be our reality for a long time if we don’t speed up the vaccinations at this moment.”

How India fell behind on vaccinations

Despite being well-positioned, India’s vaccination drive got off to a rough start. The hasty approval of the country’s homegrown vaccine, Covaxin, with little data available while Phase 3 trials were still underway (those remain ongoing) drew criticism from health workers and scientists. The mainstay of India’s vaccination scheme is Covishield, the Indian variant of the vaccine developed by University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, which has been approved by regulators in the U.K., the E.U. and elsewhere. However, Covaxin is the only vaccine on offer in some vaccination centers in urban areas and health workers don’t get to choose which jab they receive.

“Covaxin might be efficacious but what guides me is data,” says Dr. Nirmalya Mohapatra at the Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in New Delhi, where only Covaxin is available. “We also want vaccines faster because we have seen deaths because of this disease but that doesn’t mean we should cut corners with the data.” Mohapatra has refused to take Covaxin until more data is available.

But even for Covishield, there aren’t as many takers as expected. In the western city of Nagpur, fewer than 36% of those scheduled to take the vaccine turned up Feb. 11, as per a Times of India report. In the north, the city of Chandigarh is planning to set up counselling centres to dispel fearsabout the vaccines. In a hospital in the southern city of Thrissur, Dr. Pradeep Gopalakrishnan was the last one to get the vaccine on the morning of Feb. 8. “No one came in after me, so around 69 doses set aside for the day remained unused,” he says.

Experts say the lack of enthusiasm could also be attributed to a decline in cases. India’s daily case average has dropped to less than 12,000—down from more than 90,000 in September. At the peak of the pandemic, health care systems were overwhelmed, with shortages of hospital beds and oxygen cylinders being reported across the country. India’s official COVID-19 tally, now at nearly 11 million, surged to No. 2 in the world, behind the U.S (where it remains to this day).

In a Feb. 4 press conference, the Indian Council of Medical Research said that more than 20% of subjects over age 18 from across the country tested in late December and early January had antibodies for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, meaning they likely had the disease and recovered. Similar studies in Mumbai and Delhi showed even higher levels of antibodies—up to 56%, according to Delhi’s health minister. Several health workers interviewed by TIME said they contracted COVID-19, and were less concerned about getting the vaccine immediately because they believe they have immunity.

But health experts warn India is far from herd immunity. And many worry that people not taking vaccines seriously might not bode well for India, given that other countries’ later waves of COVID-19 were even more severe than those early in the pandemic. Already, Maharashtra, the worst-hit state in the country, has seen a COVID-19 spike in recent days, with daily casesabove 5,000 on Feb. 18 for the first in two and a half months

‘The worst is not over yet’

On a global level too, the tendency to let the guard down might hamper efforts to bring the pandemic under control. Experts say vaccination is necessary not only to get long-term immunity but to also reduce the potential for new mutations, which are largely behind recent surges in cases in the U.K and Brazil.

“High vaccination coverage rate reduces the potential for new variants,” says Griffin of the University of Queensland. “The more cases we have in circulation, the more chances there are of generating mutations that confer some kind of benefit to the virus.”

Even in countries like the U.S. and the U.K., where vaccination started during a surge in cases, there is a risk that people lose enthusiasm once cases decline. Experts emphasize the need for better communication with the public to ensure that vaccination drives don’t slow down with COVID-19 case counts.

“There isn’t any time to wait because the worst is not over yet,” says Agarwal of Johns Hopkins. “Despite the fatigue, ramping up the vaccination is the only and best weapon we have against what might otherwise be a very long winter.”

Source: India’s Vaccine Rollout Stumbles as COVID-19 Cases Decline. That’s Bad News for the Rest of the World

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