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The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Wednesday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
8:45 a.m. The European Union’s dispute with AstraZeneca has intensified with the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker denying the EU’s assertion that it had pulled out of talks on vaccine supplies.
AstraZeneca says it still plans to meet with EU officials in Brussels later in the day. The talks will be the third in as many days. AstraZeneca rejected the EU’s accusation that the company had failed to honour its commitments to deliver coronavirus vaccines.
The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker said last week it planned to cut initial deliveries in the EU to 31 million doses from 80 million. AstraZeneca says the amounts in its contract with the EU were targets that couldn’t be met because of problems in expanding production capacity.
The EU, which has 450 million citizens, is lagging behind in its roll out of coronavirus vaccine shots for its health care workers and most vulnerable people.
8:40 a.m. The Sundance Film Festival thought it had evaded COVID-19 last Feb. 1, when it confidently announced Tabitha Jackson as its new director, succeeding the outgoing John Cooper.
The British-born Jackson, 50, is the first woman and person of colour to head the annual celebration of indie cinema, which was founded more than 40 years ago by Hollywood icon Robert Redford.
Jackson’s appointment came at the close of Sundance 2020, after another successful fest of packed theatres in its mountain locale of Park City, Utah. COVID at that point was mainly elsewhere in the world — the first U.S. case, a traveller from China, had been confirmed just 11 days earlier.
Everybody assumed that by the time Sundance 2021 arrived the following January, the virus would be yesterday’s news. How wrong they were.
Read the full story from Peter Howell
8:18 a.m. Sanofi will produce millions of doses of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s coronavirus vaccine to speed the European Union’s lagging immunization efforts.
A standoff between the EU and drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc over vaccine delivery delays, meantime, turned from bitter to chaotic on Wednesday, with the two sides disagreeing over whether a planned call to resolve the issue would take place.
COVID-19 cases surpassed 100 million globally, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The U.K. became the first nation in Europe with 100,000 deaths.
8 a.m. The University of Guelph has boosted security and is considering a curfew to help curb student parties after unauthorized gatherings led to a COVID-19 outbreak that has now hit 49 people.
Ontario Colleges and Universities Minister Ross Romano said he has discussed the outbreak and its cause with president Charlotte Yates.
“I had a conversation with President Yates about that (Monday) and the situation is being monitored and under control,” he said following an unrelated, livestreamed announcement Tuesday. “Of course, that was an unsanctioned event that occurred and the institution is addressing it.”
Despite the outbreak there, and others that have occurred on a number of campuses, Romano said the government does not play a role in deciding whether student housing should remain open or shut down.
Read the full story from the Star’s Kristin Rushowy
7:45 a.m. Simcoe Muskoka’s top public health official warned Tuesday that travel within Ontario should be restricted and school reopenings could falter if community transmission of extra-contagious COVID-19 viral variants takes hold — a reality that may be already be underway after a rash of new positive results.
Samples collected from 99 more people in the region screened positive for a “variant of concern,” the health unit said Tuesday. Two of those cases have no known links to the devastating outbreak at Barrie’s Roberta Place nursing home, where the presence of the U.K. variant was confirmed Saturday in six swabs.
Read the full story from the Star’s Kate Allen
7:40 a.m. The Ontario government computer specialist fired after the alleged theft of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief funds has about $12.4 million in cash in Indian banks, the Star has learned.
While Sanjay Madan helped the province recoup $11.6 million in COVID-19 aid allegedly funnelled to hundreds of Canadian bank accounts, he testified in a sworn affidavit he has money in five accounts in India.
Combined with his real estate holdings, the ex-bureaucrat, terminated in November from his $176,608-a-year Ministry of Education job has assets worth about $28 million.
In documents filed with the Ontario Superior Court, the government alleges last spring “some or all of” Madan, his spouse, Shalini, their adult sons, Chinmaya and Ujjawal, and associate Vidhan Singh perpetrated “a massive fraud” to siphon $11.6 million in Support for Families payments to numerous TD and Bank of Montreal accounts.
Read the full story from the Star’s Robert Benzie
7:35 a.m. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government is working to avoid further disruptions to the flow of COVID-19 vaccines as politicians in Europe — where Canada’s entire current supply of approved shots is made — discuss controlling vaccine exports to prioritize their own citizens.
Asked Tuesday about the situation, Trudeau said he understands the European concerns relate primarily to AstraZeneca shots — one of the vaccines Health Canada is still reviewing — and that he is reassured Canada’s supply of incoming vaccines is in “good shape.”
“We will continue to work closely with Europe to ensure that we are receiving the vaccines that we have signed for, that we are due,” Trudeau told reporters outside his residence at Rideau Cottage on Tuesday.
Read the full story from the Star’s Alex Ballingall
7:30 a.m. Greater scrutiny of travellers, prompted by COVID-19, has yielded new instances of women from other countries coming to Canada with what officials say is an unspoken plan to deliver their baby here, documents obtained by the Star show.
Some observers have repeatedly cautioned that the practice controversially dubbed “birth tourism” — which is legal — is being overblown and that focus on it has been driven as much by racism as real concern.
The federal government, meanwhile, has said it is studying the issue in an effort to understand the scope of what is happening.
An August 2020 report, obtained through an access-to-information request, offers a look at some of the information the government is getting.
Read the full story from the Star’s Douglas Quan
7:20 a.m. A member of Ontario’s Science Table is facing scrutiny in the wake of reports that he did paid consultancy work for a teachers’ union while pushing back on school reopening plans, a potential conflict that a statement from the office of Premier Doug Ford calls “deeply concerning.”
As a member of the table of experts tasked with providing guidance on the province’s COVID-19 measures, Dr. David Fisman, a physician and professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto, has emerged as a high-profile face of the pandemic response.
But a Toronto Sun story pointed out earlier Tuesday that it wasn’t his only advisory position. Fisman has also consulted for the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. In an email, Fisman said he “helped them think through issues related to ventilation, masks and kids and COVID.”
Read the full story from the Star’s Alex Boyd
7:12 a.m. Pension funds around the world have invested more than $44 million of retirement savings into Ontario’s for-profit nursing homes, where severe outbreaks of COVID-19 have killed aging residents in staggering numbers.
At least two of these pension funds, including the Canada Pension Plan, have divested millions from the companies since the pandemic began, selling at a loss. The moves highlight ethical questions for seniors whose livelihoods rely on dividends from companies accused of scrimping on seniors in their care.
The Star has also confirmed two major European funds are reviewing their substantial stock holdings in Ontario long-term-care (LTC) chains Extendicare, Sienna Senior Living and Chartwell Retirement Residences to determine if they contravene their ethical investment guidelines.
Should these funds decide to divest, they would have to sell almost $30 million in stock.
Read the full story from the Star’s Marco Chown Oved
6:48 a.m. AstraZeneca says it has not pulled out of talks with the European Union and plans to meet with EU officials later Wednesday in Brussels.
The comments came after EU officials said that the company had pulled out of the meeting to discuss delayed vaccine commitments to the bloc. The talks were slated to be the third in in as many days.
The spat between AstraZeneca and the EU has raised concerns about vaccine nationalism, as countries desperate to end the pandemic and return to normalcy jockey to make sure to obtain as many of the precious vaccine shots as possible.
The latest disagreement between the two sides came after AstraZeneca rejected the EU’s accusation that the company had failed to honour its commitments for the delivery of coronavirus vaccine. The company says figures in its contract with the EU were targets that couldn’t be met because of problems in rapidly expanding production capacity.
AstraZeneca said in a statement that they “understand and share in the frustration that initial supply volumes of our vaccine delivered to the European Union will be lower than forecast.”
6:19 a.m. For nearly a year it was the Trump show. Now President Joe Biden is calling up the nation’s top scientists and public health experts to regularly brief the American public about the pandemic that has claimed more than 425,000 U.S. lives.
Beginning Wednesday, administration experts will host briefings three times a week on the state of the outbreak, efforts to control it and the race to deliver vaccines and therapeutics to end it.
Expect a sharp contrast from the last administration’s briefings, when public health officials were repeatedly undermined by a president who shared his unproven ideas without hesitation.
“We’re bringing back the pros to talk about COVID in an unvarnished way,” Biden told reporters Tuesday. “Any questions you have, that’s how we’ll handle them because we’re letting science speak again.”
The new briefings, beginning just a week into Biden’s tenure, are meant as an explicit rejection of his predecessor’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.
5:50 a.m. Remember the word: Playbook.
This is the rule book that the IOC and Tokyo organizers are set to roll out next week to explain how 15,400 Olympic and Paralympic athletes and tens of thousands of others will try to safely enter Japan when the Olympics open in just under six months.
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Organizers and the International Olympic Committee are finally going public with their planning, hoping to push back against reports the Olympics will be cancelled with Tokyo and much of Japan still under a state of emergency with COVID-19 cases rising.
The rollout at Olympic headquarters in Switzerland is planned for Feb. 4, with Tokyo likely to present on Feb. 5.
“We created four different scenarios, one that had travel restrictions, clusters — to one where the pandemic was nearly gone,” Lucia Montanarella, head of IOC media operations, explained Tuesday for a panel discussion held by the International Sports Press Association.
5:11 a.m. Hundreds of Holocaust survivors in Austria and Slovakia were poised to get their first coronavirus vaccination Wednesday, acknowledging their past suffering with a special tribute 76 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where the Nazis killed more than 1 million Jews and others.
“We owe this to them,” said Erika Jakubovits, the Jewish Community of Vienna organizer of the vaccination drive. “They have suffered so much trauma and have felt even more insecure during this pandemic.”
More than 400 Austrian survivors, most in their 80s or 90s, were expected to get their first coronavirus shot at Vienna’s largest vaccination centre set up in the Austrian capital’s convention centre. Some were being brought by shuttle or by ambulance, while others were being brought in by their children. The fittest among them were even planning on taking the subway.
Though organized to take place on what is known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, vaccinations were not just being offered to survivors of the Shoah, but also all other Jews in the area older than 85.
Some survivors from Vienna’s 8,000-person strong Jewish community already received the vaccination in December, when residents of the community’s Jewish nursing home were vaccinated, Jakubovits said.
More broadly, a majority of elderly Austrians living in nursing homes have already received the first shot of a vaccine against COVID-19, the Austrian news agency APA reported.
5:09 a.m. South Korea has reported new 559 cases of the coronavirus, its highest daily increase in 10 days, as health workers scrambled to slow transmissions at religious facilities, which have been a major source of infections throughout the pandemic.
The figures released by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency on Wednesday brought the national caseload to 76,429, including 1,378 deaths.
The agency said 112 of the new cases came from the southwestern city of Gwangju where more than 100 infections have so far been linked to a missionary training school. An affiliated facility in the central city of Daejeon has been linked to more 170 infections.
Nearly 300 of the new cases came from the Seoul metropolitan area, home to half of the country’s 51 million people, where infections have been tied to various places, including churches, restaurants, schools and offices.
5:05 a.m. China has given more than 22 million coronavirus vaccine shots to date as it carries out a drive ahead of next month’s Lunar New Year holiday, health authorities said Wednesday.
The effort, which began six weeks ago, targets key groups such as medical and transport workers and has accelerated vaccinations in China. About 1.6 million doses had been given over several months before the campaign began.
“The carrying out of vaccination has been ongoing in a steady and orderly manner,” Zeng Yixin, vice chairman of the National Health Commission Said at a news conference.
He said that 22.76 million doses had been administered as of Tuesday. It’s not clear how many people that represents since the vaccine is given in two doses, and some may have received their second shot.
5:01 a.m. French drug maker Sanofi says it will help manufacture 125 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine developed by rivals Pfizer and BioNTech, while its own vaccine candidate faces delays.
Germany-based BioNTech will initially produce the vaccines at Sanofi facilities in Frankfurt, starting in the summer, according to a Sanofi statement Wednesday. The company did not reveal financial details of the agreement.
The French government has been pressing Sanofi to use its facilities to help make rival vaccines, given high demand and problems with supplies of the few vaccines that are already available.
Sanofi and British partner GlaxoSmithKline will start a new phase-2 trial of their COVID-19 vaccine next month, Sanofi said. The two companies said last month that their vaccine won’t be ready until late 2021 because the shot’s effectiveness in older people needed to be improved.
4:53 a.m. Quebec’s director of national health said he’s still not sure when the province will begin administering COVID-19 booster shots — 43 days since officials started injecting people with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Dr. Horacio Arruda said Tuesday that while he doesn’t want Quebecers to wait more than seven weeks to receive a booster shot, he said he was still waiting to hear back from government scientists studying the efficacy of the vaccine among those who received their first of two injections.
Quebec has taken a different approach from other provinces, focusing on giving a first dose to as many people as possible before giving anyone a second, a strategy that Arruda maintains will save more lives and keep more people out of hospital at a time when vaccine supplies are limited.
“We did it because we don’t have enough vaccine,” he told reporters.
Vaccine maker Pfizer has said the second dose of its vaccine should be given within 21 days. Moderna, the maker of the other vaccine approved for use in Canada, has set the date for the second shot at 28 days. Ottawa’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization, however, has said the second dose of both vaccines can wait up to 42 days.
Relatives of long-term care residents say they don’t believe the government is making a science-based decision.
4:41 a.m. There’s a race between COVID-19 and the rollout of vaccine as researchers and health officials in B.C. warn of two faster-spreading variants.
The number of variant cases may start low, but increased transmission could only be a few weeks away, just as delivery of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is delayed, said Caroline Colijn, theCanada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Infection, Evolution and Public Health at Simon Fraser University.
Colijn’s lab released modelling data this week showing public health rules in several provinces, including B.C., would not be sufficient to prevent exponential growth in cases starting around March if a COVID-19 variant with a 40 per cent higher transmission rate became established.
“By established I mean some cluster doesn’t get stopped and takes off and we don’t notice or we don’t act and we are unable to stop those chains of transmission and so they take off the way the current COVID has,” she said.
Colijn added she would expect public health officials to enact further restrictions before such exponential growth in variant cases.
4 a.m. Newly released documents show federal officials have been aware since the fall that some new parents might be receiving a smaller amount of money than they would have if not for a change in the way COVID-19 pandemic benefits are delivered to Canadians.
That is due to a shift in late September, when the employment insurance system kicked back into gear and three new benefits rolled out to replace the Canada Emergency Response Benefit that was supporting Canadians who had lost income since the spring.
On Sept. 27, eligible recipients started moving on to the decades-old EI system where the minimum weekly payment was set at $500 in line with the three “recovery” benefits.
Prior to that date, benefits were calculated based on earnings, meaning any new parent that started their EI claim before the change could receive less than $500 a week.
The documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act note the policy created inequities, and point to a similar effect for parents who will start claims after Sept. 25 this year, when the temporary rules are set to expire.
Tuesday 9 p.m.: Ongoing tensions between the provinces and the federal government over the management of the COVID-19 pandemic pivoted back Tuesday to the question of whether and how border controls can be tightened to slow the spread of the virus.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Canadians to cancel any non-essential trips they have planned abroad or even within Canada in the coming weeks, as new travel restrictions are on the way. What shape they might take remains up for discussion.
“The bad choices of a few will never be allowed to put everyone else in danger,” he said.
The premiers for Ontario and Quebec, however, suggested new measures could be implemented swiftly, including mandatory quarantine in hotels for returning travellers, flight bans from countries where new variants of the novel coronavirus are circulating and mandatory testing upon arrival in Canada.
“We aren’t the first country to require this and we won’t be the last,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said during a visit to Pearson International Airport, where a pilot project testing some incoming travellers is underway. “I can’t figure out for the life of me why we aren’t testing every single person that comes through this airport … and the land crossings as well. We have to lock down.”
Click here to read more of Tuesday’s COVID-19 coverage.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRoZXN0YXIuY29tL25ld3MvY2FuYWRhLzIwMjEvMDEvMjcvY29yb25hdmlydXMtdXBkYXRlcy1jYW5hZGEtb250YXJpby10b3JvbnRvLWd0YS1qYW4tMjctMjAyMS5odG1s0gEA?oc=5
2021-01-27 11:34:11Z
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