Both Pfizer and Moderna have been working for some time on a protocol for their mRNA COVID vaccines for children under the age of 5 years. The expectation is that Moderna will submit data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) some time in the next few weeks.There are numerous challenges associated with producing an effective vaccine for children under 5 against COVID, including:
a) The vaccines are designed for the original COVID strain rather than...
Amid the noisy debates around hydrocarbons and the transition to alternative forms of energy, basic physical facts are often overlooked. Fundamentally, there are the differences between hydrocarbon energy density and that of the alternatives. Perhaps equally important, other attributes including cost, transportability, storability, availability, volatility, and safety differ greatly between types of energy.
Spoiler alert – when most factors are considered, hydrocarbons are by far the most attractive all-round forms of energy. It’s not even...
Every activity, natural or manmade, from breathing to driving, generates emissions of some kind. Certain emissions are worse than others, causing pollution or, in large quantities, affecting the composition of the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases (GHGs), in particular carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), generated by modern industry, transportation, and agriculture, have been rising steadily since the industrial revolution. These emissions are implicated in manmade influence on climate. Figure 1 shows the relative proportion of...
There are at least two ways to look at just about every event, each differing significantly. Whether it is the Canadian truckers’ protest against COVID mandates, the current conflict in the Ukraine, feelings around racial issues, or any other social issue, there will never be unanimity in perception and viewpoint.
Often, disagreement is conveyed in passionate and dogmatic terms, with those on the other side of the divide being viewed pejoratively. Look no further than...
Fifteen thousand years ago, humans walked across the Bering Strait from Asia to North America. How, you ask, did humans walk across an 80-metre-deep body of water? It was not a biblical miracle; it was because the strait was dry. Sea level was more than 100 metres lower than it is today. All that water was locked in the ice that covered much of the planet at the time.
What was to become Calgary, Alberta, a city...
Am I a bad person for getting excited by the discovery that the 2020 data was available in the Alberta Death database? I was anxious to dive into the information that could put that strange year in context, and perhaps shed some light on what to expect going forward. Mixed messaging, alarming on all sides, had been propagated throughout 2020 by all types of media; headlines and commentators gravely reporting the latest cluster of...
Since the COVID vaccines were first given emergency approval in the United States, Canada, and much of the world, the question of their effectiveness has been top of mind. We showed that vaccine effectiveness (VE) is part of the rational decision to vaccinate or not in this article, Prisoner’s dilemma and vaccination as it helps define the utility of vaccinating. Most recently, we discussed the VE against severe outcomes in Alberta, Canada, for the booster (3 doses), 2...
The news media are variously reporting that Justin Trudeau has “declared a state of emergency”, “invoked the Emergencies Act”, “enacted autocratic emergency powers”, “declared martial law”, “suspended civil liberties”, along with other colourful descriptions of the Canadian prime minister’s recent announcement of the federal government’s latest response to the so-called Freedom Convoy protests occurring in Ottawa and elsewhere across the country.
What he has actually done is to declare a “public order emergency” under Canada’s Emergencies Act. This has...
In this evaluation of COVID-19 boosters, we take a deeper look into the effectiveness of each dose of mRNA vaccine in December of 2021 and January 2022 in Alberta, Canada. As discussed in this article – Ontario vaccine effectiveness nosedives amid surge in new cases – this time period is during the dominance of the Omicron variant.
We showed in this article The best missed prediction: disease severity 50% lower than we predicted that the Omicron variant appeared to...
Although new cases of COVID in Canada and the United States are dropping, as of January 31, 2022, the United States had 29,124,466 reported active cases of COVID, and Canada had 209,358 active casesMoreover, a tremendous number of booster doses of COVID vaccines have been delivered to address this surge in new cases. The United States has delivered 88.15 million doses of the booster, while Canada has delivered 15.59 million doses.All of these boosters...
