Black Bata Black Art32:37While Dr. Theresa Tam takes a step down, urges Canada to stay firm in public health
As Dr. Theresa Tam retires as the main doctor in Canada, she is asking for a national vaccine registry.
Tam says that the Covid-19 pandemic, which began at the beginning of 2020 and killed at least 60,000 Canadians, showed how bad it is needed to track vaccines and protect vulnerable communities.
A national vaccine registry, he says, could help prevent and manage crisis such as the resurgence of measles that the country now faces.
Tam says that it is in favor of a “network of interoperable vaccine records nationwide” that connects all provincial and territorial health systems and helps identify pockets of the population where there is a poor vaccine coverage.
While most measles cases have so far occurred in communities that are not historically vaccinated, he told Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC. Blanca Pata, Black Art“We don’t really know exactly where the situation is found with vaccine coverage.”
Tam spoke with OTTAWA Goldman for an interview with a characteristic that reflects his career as the country’s public health director.
Pandemia showed that technology for a record is there, he says, since almost all provinces and territories made COVID-19 vaccine records available electronically during that time.
Although it was the pandemic that made it a family name, and an objective for hate, Tam reached the role of the best doctors three years before, in June 2017, after occupying a series of other leadership positions within the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), including the attached chief. He has also served as an expert in several committees of the World Health Organization.
The former director of Public Health of Canada looks back in the lessons learned during the turbulent years of the Covid-19 pandemic. She left her role as the country’s main doctor on June 20.
Leading the public health response of Canada to Covid-19 was both a personal and professional challenge, since Tam was also at the end of racist and sexist vitriolo during that time.
“What I try to do, certainly at that time and even now, is just to concentrate on the work I am trying to offer,” he said.
These attacks were even more difficult in their staff, those who monitored the channels where the messages would enter and who tried, as much as possible, protect it from the worst, says Tam.
“And a member of my staff also used to read the incredibly charming cards and messages that the public sent to encourage me to continue. It was like the antidote of the other messages too. That really helped.”
One of the provincial counterparts of TAM, Dr. Robert Strang, medical director of Health in Nueva Scotia, says he has “great respect for Dr. Tam.”
“Certainly working with her during Covid, we were all together in this type of team. Having it as the directors of doctors was a real pleasure and a privilege.”
Obtain support between Canada for registration
The challenge to obtain a network of vaccine records that operate to help with measles and other crisis of infectious diseases in the future, says TAM, is to make all the jurisdictions sign and cooperate so that their systems are talked to each other.
“In fact, there is enough work on the way at this time to develop those agreements with the provinces, as well as the most technical aspects of this,” he said.
A national registry, he says, will do things “much easier” for public health departments, doctors, patients and parents.
“That is the most important thing, which will know if their children obtained the vaccine and that their health provider can also have that information.”
Strang says that there is an agreement on the principle, but “the devil is always in details.”
There are several groups, including Phac, who work for the Federation to do a better job by sharing health data, he says.
“There is certainly support and agreement between medical directors and public health leaders of this as a priority,” Strang said.
But Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, a doctor and researcher at Toronto’s family, says that he suspects that political considerations are behind some of the provinces “literally accumulate their medical data.”
“When politics stands in the path of science that health is prioritized or prioritized, it becomes a serious and potentially deadly problem,” Gorfinkel said, who is also the founder of Primehealth clinical research.
Some provincial governments may be afraid that voters didn’t like to share their health data, she says.
But that should not be a factor, given how easy it is to eliminate the details of identification of the information so that no one apart from an individual and his medical care provider knows his vaccine status, says Gorfinkel.
We are already paying a heavy price, in lives and dollars, for not having a national registry, she says.
“First, there is a tremendous vaccine waste,” Gorfinkel said. We saw that during Covid-19, he says, when Canada bought the vaccines and fought to manage them before they expired, eventually Drawing of international criticism To do so while other parts of the world were left without.
In the case of measles outbreaks, she says: “If we don’t know where they are happening and we cannot send vaccines where they need, then what that means is that we are not going to make the best use of the vaccines we have.”
And, of course, people and health systems pay when hospitals are filled with people who have become ill from preventable vaccine diseases, says Gorfinkel.
Looking abroad
Other countries have done this work, including Sweden, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.
In Norway, for example, a national registry that began in 1995 and at the beginning only tracked routine childhood vaccines, expanded in 2011 to require mandatory reports for all vaccines and age groups.
Gorfinkel says that some of these countries better adopt the feeling that “what happens to my neighbor affects me.”
Public Health expert Amir Attara, a vocal critic of TAM and Phac during the pandemic, says that much more at the federal level could have been done to obtain a national registry in this country as well.
Dr. Theresa Tam, who finished her mandate as director of Public Health of Canada on June 20, speaks with the white coat, the black art presenter Dr. Brian Goldman about increasing measles cases and what can be done to reduce infections.
Professor in the Faculties of Law and the School of Epidemiology and Public Health of the University of Ottawa, Attara will say that experts in infectious diseases such as TAM have known since the sars sprout in 2003 that the country was not prepared to track and respond properly to an outbreak due to a bad data exchange.
“And due to the experience of the SAR in Canada, we should have been very active about this,” said Attara, who has a law title and a doctorate in biology.
He says that the Canada Statistics Law empowers the Federal Government to “demand that the provinces cough statistics”, and that is exactly what public health data are.
Canada’s public health culture is self -destructive, says Attara, because it recognizes the need for precise and timely data, but proceeds “under this false assumption that they cannot obtain that data unless everyone agrees and everyone is happy with them. And then you cannot put the political energy to achieve that consensus through the agreement or coercion.”
Masking controversy
Although the pandemic highlighted the need for a national registration of vaccines to better manage shoots, it also presented challenges in public health communication.
One of the most discussed themes was to mask.
Attara were among those who said that Tam shook the advice on masking in the early stages of pandemic, for example.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, she told people: ‘No, you don’t need to mask,” he said. However, by then, the virus had been identified as SARS-COV-2, and we had already learned from the 2003 Sars crisis that required masking, he says.
But in New Scotland, says Strang, the information with which scientists were working from the beginning suggested that the virus behaved like an influenza, which spread through drops, not in aerosols. “We do not recommend widespread masking, necessarily, for all for influenza.”
Tam says that public health leaders “need to do a better job by explaining to people how scientific information is reached, how we analyze it and how we turn them into guidance.”
