Health Canada asks Oxford-AstraZeneca for more vaccine info: In The News for March 30

In The News is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to kickstart your day. Here is what’s on the radar of our editors for the morning of Tuesday, March 30…

What we are watching in Canada …

Canadian provinces suspended use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in people under age 55 on Monday as Health Canada demanded the company do a detailed study on the risks and benefits of its vaccine across multiple age groups

Use of the vaccine was suspended as the provinces acted on an advisory committee’s concerns about a possible link between the shot and rare blood clots.

Dr. Shelley Deeks, the vice-chair of Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization, said its recommendations was updated amid new data from Europe that suggests the risk of blood clots is now potentially up to one in 100,000 — much higher than the one in one million risk believed before.

“As a precautionary measure, while Health Canada carries out an updated benefit-risk analysis based on emerging data, NACI recommends that the vaccine not be used in adults under the age of 55 years,” Deeks said.

She said most of the patients in Europe who developed a rare blood clot after vaccination with AstraZeneca were women under the age of 55, and the fatality rate among those who developed clots is as high as 40 per cent.

The blood clot condition is known as Vaccine-Induced Prothrombotic Immune Thrombocytopenia. Deeks said it is treatable, and the fatality rate could go down now that it has been identified and symptoms are communicated.

The federal government is expecting around 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the United States on Tuesday, which will arrive by truck and represent the first to come from south of the border.

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Also this …

Global shipping prices will be pushed up by the ship blocking the Suez Canal but it will have a marginal effect on Canadian consumers, aside from potential delays for certain shipments, experts say.

The global supply chain was already under strain because of the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating a shortage in container space that has seen shipping prices soar over the last year.

“I think the bigger issue will be delay,” said Mary Brooks, a professor emerita at Dalhousie University’s Rowe School of Business. “If you’re the Home Depot store in Toronto, and you’re waiting for a product for your shelf, and it was coming from Singapore through Suez, it might be a week or a week and a half later and your shelf could be empty.”

Salvage teams on Monday freed the Ever Given, a massive container ship that became wedged in the side wall of the canal for nearly a week, blocking off traffic in one of the world’s most vital waterways.

More than 10 per cent of global trade flows through the Suez Canal, including shipments from India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia to Canada, experts said. The six-day incident at the canal held up almost $60 billion of global trade, according to data from TD Economics.

“The long-term trade impact of these disruptions is likely to be small given that the global trade in goods amounts to $18 trillion a year,” said Sohaib Shahid, senior economist at TD Economics. “However, the delays will have a domino effect, which will reverberate across global supply chains for weeks or months to come.”

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What we are watching in the U.S. …

The video of George Floyd gasping for breath was essentially Exhibit A as the former Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee on the Black man’s neck went on trial Monday on charges of murder and manslaughter.

Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell showed the jurors the footage at the earliest opportunity, during opening statements, after telling them that the number to remember was nine minutes, 29 seconds — the amount of time officer Derek Chauvin had Floyd pinned to the pavement last May.

The white officer “didn’t let up” even after a handcuffed Floyd said 27 times that he couldn’t breathe and went limp, Blackwell said in the case that triggered worldwide protests, scattered violence and national soul-searching over racial justice.

Chauvin attorney Eric Nelson countered by arguing: “Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over his 19-year career.”

Floyd, 46, was fighting efforts to put him in a squad car as the crowd of onlookers around Chauvin and his fellow officers grew and became increasingly hostile, Nelson said.

The defence attorney also disputed that Chauvin was to blame for Floyd’s death, saying he had none of the telltale signs of asphyxiation and had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system. He said Floyd’s drug use, combined with his heart disease, high blood pressure and the adrenaline flowing through his body, caused a heart rhythm disturbance that killed him.

The downtown Minneapolis courthouse has been fortified with concrete barriers, fences and barbed and razor wire. City and state leaders are determined to prevent a repeat of the riots that followed Floyd’s death, with National Guard troops already mobilized.

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

Fierce fighting for control of Mozambique’s strategic northern town of Palma left beheaded bodies strewn in the streets Monday, with heavily armed rebels battling army, police and a private military outfit in several locations.

Thousands were estimated to be missing from the town, which held about 70,000 people before the attack began last Wednesday.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility Monday for the attack, saying it was carried out by the Islamic State Central Africa Province, according to the SITE extremist monitoring group.

The rebel claim said the insurgents now control Palma’s banks, government offices, factories and army barracks, and that more than 55 people, including Mozambican army troops, Christians and foreigners were killed. It did not provide further detail on the dead.

Earlier this month the United States declared Mozambique’s rebels to be a terrorist organization and announced it had sent military specialists to help train the Mozambican military to combat them.

Palma is the centre of a multi-billion dollar investment by Total, the France-based oil and gas company, to extract liquified natural gas from offshore sites in the Indian Ocean. The battle for Palma forced Total to evacuate its large, fortified site a few kilometres outside of the city.

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On this day 1972 …

Canadian sailors got a daily rum ration for the last time, ending a navy tradition dating back to 1667.

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In entertainment …

A graphic novel for children that was a spin-off of the wildly popular “Captain Underpants” series is being pulled from library and book store shelves after its publisher said it “perpetuates passive racism.”

The book under scrutiny is 2010’s “The Adventures of Ook and Gluk” by Dav Pilkey, who has apologized, saying it “contains harmful racial stereotypes” and is “wrong and harmful to my Asian readers.”

The book follows about a pair of friends who travel from 500,001 B.C. to 2222, where they meet a martial arts instructor who teaches them kung fu and they learn principles found in Chinese philosophy.

Scholastic said it had removed the book from its websites, stopped processing orders for it and sought a return of all inventory. “We will take steps to inform schools and libraries who may still have this title in circulation of our decision to withdraw it from publication,” the publisher said in a statement.

Pilkey in a YouTube statement said he planned to donate his advance and all royalties from the book’s sales to groups dedicated to stopping violence against Asians and to promoting diversity in children’s books and publishing.

“I hope that you, my readers, will forgive me, and learn from my mistake that even unintentional and passive stereotypes and racism are harmful to everyone,” he wrote. “I apologize, and I pledge to do better.”

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ICYMI …

Laurie Metcalf smiles and laughs when she thinks of her character Jackie and her assorted misadventures on the “Roseanne” spinoff, “The Conners.”

Dating back to her introduction in Roseanne Barr’s 1988’s sitcom, Jackie has reinvented herself many times over. She’s been a cop, a truck driver, a factory worker, co-owner of The Lanford Lunch Box (which was reopened on “The Conners”), and was for a time, as the character describes it, “Lanford’s leading life coach.”

The role earned Metcalf three Emmy Awards while “Roseanne” was on the air, but she’s content with Jackie being a supporting role.

“A little bit of Jackie goes a long way, so I’m always the weirdo B storyline. Too much of Jackie would be just overdose.”

While the character’s overall persona has remained unchanged through both series, it’s provided a chance to grow as an actor. When “Roseanne” started, Metcalf was a theatre actor with no experience in television.

“Everything was new to me. I had a big learning curve to jump into a multi-camera sitcom,” Metcalf recalled.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 30, 2021

The Canadian Press