Pandexicon by Wayne Grady

Author:Wayne Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rollout / The process by which Covid-19 vaccines were made available to the public.

Although it sounds military, the term “rollout” originally referred to the rolling out of a red carpet for the pope. In 1947, however, it was skyjacked by the aeronautics industry to refer to the time in which an aircraft rolls along a runway between landing and coming to a complete stop. More recently, it has referred to the unveiling of a new aircraft: when an airplane or spacecraft prototype is literally rolled out of the hangar for public viewing. In all of its meanings, a rollout has had as much to do with publicity as it has with motion.

“Vaccine rollout across the country,” noted Canada’s CTV News on February 15, 2021, “has been off to a rocky and slow start.” Shortages of vaccines in December 2020 arose when the two companies with which Health Canada had contracts—Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna—sent only a small percentage of the agreed-upon doses, claiming difficulties with production. The doses that were received were rolled out to the provinces and, within each province, distributed according to vulnerability and the severity of the pandemic in a given region, with health-care workers, the elderly, and the immunocompromised at the front of the line.

By July 30, 2021, 68 million doses of three vaccines—Canada had approved a third vaccine, AstraZeneca, for citizens older than eighteen—had been administered across Canada, and 42.7 percent of the population had been fully vaccinated—at the time defined as having had two doses. In the US, 48 percent of the population had received second doses. Although these figures varied in different parts of both countries, and the average was far short of the herd immunity threshold of 70–80 percent, it meant that the virus’s reproduction number was below 1 in some places. In Ontario, the R0 was 0.84; in all of Canada, only Nova Scotia, at 0.33, and Nunavut, at 0.015, were lower. With the coming of the Omicron variant in December 2021, those R0 figures went way up.

Elsewhere in the world, the figures were startling. In August 2021, the Journal of Travel Medicine published a survey of more than 13,000 studies that had calculated Delta’s R0 and found that it ranged from 3.2 to as high as 8, with a mean value of 5.08.

Despite such high reproduction numbers, Canada began easing international travel restrictions; by July 2021, fully vaccinated Canadians and permanent residents returning to Canada were allowed to skip the fourteen-day quarantine period, although they still had to show the results of a negative PCR test that was fewer than three days old. The ban on discretionary travel between Canada and the US by fully vaccinated travelers was lifted on August 9.

In June 2021, BBC News ran the headline “What’s Gone Wrong With Australia’s Vaccine Rollout?” Although early lockdowns, stay-at-home regulations, and border closings had kept Covid-19 from spreading throughout the country—by then “fortress Australia,” with a population of over 25 million, had had 30,274 cases and 910 deaths—only about 3 percent

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