The COVID-19 vaccine has been a topic of discussion for quite some time now. Are they good or bad? What are the adverse effects? Is it the right choice for me? All valid questions that are slowly being answered as the government quickly administers 90% of its citizens. Shouldn’t the following questions and concerns be addressed prior to the approval and public release of the vaccine, let alone the mandate. According to vaccine regulations in Canada, the answer is yes.
Upon further research on the government of Canada’s website there’s an article called Regulating Vaccines for Human Use in Canada. And as you can see, every measure that is supposed to be taken by vaccine manufacturers, is being overlooked for broken. So what’s the point? One of the sections states that “when developing a vaccine, scientists must collect scientific and clinical evidence to show that it (vaccine) is : Safe, Effective, and manufactured to the highest quality”. However, there are enough adverse reactions to the vaccine that the FDA had to put warning labels on the vaccine variants. The warnings include, likely association with reported cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in young adults, deaths due to blood clots and cases of neurological disorder, Guillian-Barre Syndrome. Vaccine manufacturers are supposed to submit a mandatory report to the Canada Vigilance Program if adverse reactions occur.
On the brighter side of things, Canada has implemented a Risk-based lot release program for all vaccines authorized for sale in Canada. The program continually tests and monitors the quality of the vaccine. To sell vaccines in Canada, each manufacturer must submit the results of their own tests and samples for Health Canada to test independently.
Since the adverse effects of the vaccines were becoming more common, people started questioning how it got approved in the first place. This led to the request of the vaccine documents from the FDA under the FOIA act. Surprisingly, Pfizer included in their documents that there were 1,123 fatalities in their clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine. Yet the FDA approved it for full production the following month. The major issue here lies in the truthfulness of the government, which seems to be at an all time low. It’s unfortunate that the government would approve this vaccine without further trials and early treatment.
At the end of the day, it’s important and necessary to have regulations such as the vaccine regulation in place to monitor the effectiveness, safety, efficacy and quality of the vaccines BEFORE they are released to the public. Hopefully with all the data being released on the vaccines, people will be better informed and make decisions that better fit their situation.