Mobility-challenged seniors may need a ride to a vaccination centre. Who'd-a figured?

The NPC Healthbiz Weekly is here to keep on informing you through Q2 of 2021. It's your weekly briefing on topics pertinent to healthcare marketers and executives published in cooperation with Peak Pharma Solutions. 

⇒ Issue #177 (In numerology, 177 represents our ability to control and shape our own lives with our actions, choices and attitudes.)

⇒ Worldwide Covid cases as of 04/08: 133,229,961*

⇒ Worldwide Covid fatalities as of 04/08: 2,890,163*

⇒ Confirmed Covid cases in Canada as of 04/08: 1,035,242*
⇒ Confirmed Covid fatalities in Canada as of 04/08: 23,160*

⇒ Number of vaccine doses administered to Canadians as of 04/08: 6,990,144*

April 8, 2021—Welcome to the Thursday edition of the CurveFlattener. It’s your locked-down Editorial Director Allan Ryan at the keyboard, adhering to the directives issued by the Ontario government yesterday (though the measures don’t seem much different than they did before this latest announcement). Today, let’s take a look at just one example of how ordinary people are stepping up to fill care gaps that have emerged during the Covid-19 epidemic. 

Belatedly, governments at the provincial and municipal levels are acknowledging the troubles that some mobility-challenged senior citizens have experienced getting to and from vaccination centres. The failure of officials to consider this group's needs in their vaccination plans is another oversight that should have been envisioned by the planning committees long before the vaccines arrived just before Christmas.

On March 24, the mayor of Toronto stood before an assembled and physically distanced press to proclaim that the city was launching a program to help transport seniors and other mobility-challenged people to a vaccination centre for their Covid-19 jab. Mayor John Tory was, as they often say in the funny papers, busting his buttons over the announcement and congratulating the city’s decision-makers and sponsors for their unmatched cleverness. The transport program was set to begin on March 29—that’s a full two weeks after the late launch of Ontario’s vaccine appointment website and more than three months after the first vaccine became available in Canada. 

It occurred to an observer that someone with a sliver of ability to think critically might mutter under their breath: And they just thought of this now? The brain trust has known for six months that vaccines were on the way, and they leave it to the end of March to figure out a program for seniors and vulnerable people who can’t find a way to get to the vaccine sites on their own? 

Not surprisingly, it turns out the real heroes are not the stuffed shirts chuckling and back-slapping around Ontario’s science table, but private citizens like Shanta Sundarason, who is trying to fill the critical gap for seniors in her community. Her initiative, Pink Cars, https://pinkcars.ca/ has been providing rides to seniors' vaccination sites since the sites opened in York Region, north of Toronto. “I felt their anxiety and stress, and I thought, I just have to do something,” she told the news station CP24.

“That prompted me to set up a platform and to get a group of volunteers together to help reach out to those seniors that needed help and to help book appointments. And also to help offer safe rides for them to and from their vaccination sites.”

And in Orillia, Ont., a taxi firm has also provided seniors with a ride service to vaccination clinics, on the firm’s own initiative with no government involvement. “I saw some of the seniors, the fear in their eyes,” Able Taxi’s John Beck told CP24. “We didn’t want anybody to miss a shot because of either a transportation issue or a financial issue.”

The NPC Podcast is back for another season. The National Pharmaceutical Congress organizers are proud to release our new weekly podcast series, hosted by Peter Brenders. Peter's most recent guest is Sheryl Groeneweg, Director General of the Manufacturing and Life Sciences Branch of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. Listen here now, or download the episode and play it at your convenience. The NPC Podcast is presented in cooperation with Impres Pharma

COVID CHRONICLE 04/08/2021

• An article in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology suggests that glucose-lowering drugs used in the treatment of patients with diabetes—who face a high mortality risk from Covid-19 because of chronic inflammation, among other factors—might have significant positive effects on the pathophysiology of Covid-19. This could potentially affect the risk of progression to severe disease and mortality. 
  
• New Canadian research highlights the importance of specific antibodies made early in Covid-19 infection, and the study results may help assess how effective current vaccines are at conferring long-term immunity to the virus. The study, published in Cell Reports, has identified that the antibody IgM is important in neutralizing SARS-CoV-2. “What makes this finding particularly interesting is that IgM is not the class of immunoglobulin that is normally associated with strong, virus-neutralizing activity,” said Gregory Dekaban, PhD, chair of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Ont. 
  
  
• According to the new Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network team leader, annual Covid vaccines might be required as the virus continues to mutate and produce new variants. Marc-André Langlois, a virologist at the University of Ottawa, told the CBC's political affairs program "The House": "Variations of this virus will be around for a long time . . . It may even become endemic, which means that every year when we get our flu shot, we'll be getting our coronavirus shot for whatever variants are circulating at that specific time.”

STORIES CHRONICLE IS WORKING ON TODAY...

Senior Editor John Evans is writing an article about a pilot study investigating near-infrared heating of skin to potentially delineate NMSC and better identify margins of disease. Coming soon in The Chronicle of Skin & Allergy.

TONIGHT WE'RE COOKING...

One year and one day ago, yours truly penned his first instalment of the CurveFlattener, and pointed out in the post that April 7 was National Empanada Day and National Beer Day. Who could have imagined that 12 months later the cycle would be repeated? Rest assured, a selection of those items will be on the menu at the Ryan household tonight, but—fingers crossed—not next year.

HERE’S TO FRIDAY

Tomorrow, publisher Mitch Shannon will be back with the end o’ the week CurveFlattener. On Monday, watch for the Skin Spectrum Weekly e-newsletter, and on Tuesday, the NPC Healthbiz Weekly will be distributed. Wednesday is a mid-week doubleheader, with the latest NPC Podcast release and the new CJMC Fortnightly. 

That’s it. Stay in touch and stay safe, until tomorrow.