Tank: Pandemic still casts its long shadow over Saskatchewan

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As the five-year anniversary of COVID-19’s arrival in Saskatchewan approaches in March, some people here are already preparing for the next pandemic.

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But the societal schisms created, exposed or exacerbated by the pandemic remain.

The wizards at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, more commonly known as VIDO and located on the University of Saskatchewan campus in Saskatoon, received a $24-million grant this week to develop a better vaccine to protect against coronavirus.

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The grant came from a global organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which helps develop scientific responses to epidemics and pandemics.

Dr. Nicole Lurie, the coalition’s executive director of emergency preparedness and response, said at an event in Saskatoon that the vaccine could serve as the “holy grail” to protect against future coronavirus strains.

A few years ago, some in Saskatchewan staged a holy — or unholy, depending on your perspective — crusade against science and vaccines that included a protest at a Saskatoon hospital that attracted more than 200 people.

The Leader-Post’s Brandon Harder reported this week on a Regina doctor who prescribed the quack cure Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 and must agree to be retrained if he wants to continue to practise medicine.

Most people will likely feel gratitude that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan is taking action to ensure people practising medicine in the province are qualified and not operating based on social-media-fuelled misinformation.

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Others will undoubtedly see the actions of the college — which included finding that Tshipita Kabongo “does not have adequate skill and knowledge in the practice of medicine” — as part of a global conspiracy involving vaccines.

Next door in Alberta, the organization that represents the province’s doctors has slammed a controversial report commissioned by the government of science skeptic Premier Danielle Smith that questions measures taken to stop the spread of COVID-19 and the efficacy of vaccines.

Alberta Medical Association president Dr. Shelley Duggan called the $2-million report, which was produced by critics of pandemic restrictions, “anti-science,” “anti-evidence” and guilty of “advancing fringe approaches.”

Saskatchewan, meanwhile, failed to conduct any sort of inquiry into its pandemic response, which seems odd, given how the reverberations from COVID-19 are still being felt. The disruption it caused in the global supply chain precipitated the inflation that affects our daily lives.

That means this province has decided there’s nothing to learn from its COVID-19 response. Perhaps some restrictions were unnecessary and others did not go far enough. But never mind. We don’t want to rile up the conspiracy theorists.

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Instead, Saskatchewan, which became the first province to remove all restrictions in early 2022, after activists took to complaining to members of Premier Scott Moe’s government, has taken the nothing-to-see-here approach.

Yet the province is still collecting and compiling data, which reveals that COVID-19 continues to spread and continues to kill.

In the four weeks leading up to Jan. 11, 520 people in Saskatchewan were diagnosed with COVID-19, despite very limited testing, and nine outbreaks were recorded. Over the same period, 413 cases of influenza were diagnosed and 1,027 of RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) were recorded.

Of the COVID-19 cases, 104 people wound up in hospital, 11 needed intensive care and four died. Fewer people with the flu wound up in hospital or an intensive care unit over this stretch and more than twice as many with RSV were hospitalized or received intensive care.

But nobody died from the flu or RSV over those four weeks. COVID-19 has now claimed 2,090 lives in Saskatchewan, nearly as many people as live in Maple Creek.

Despite those sobering numbers, less than 14 per cent got their updated COVID-19 vaccinations this past fall. Yet Saskatchewan continues to track adverse effects after immunizations. Nearly 3.3 million doses were injected in Saskatchewan up to the end of 2024; a fraction of one per cent were followed by reports of adverse effects.

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So you must admire the folks at VIDO who continue to toil to try to prevent future pandemics, in a province determined to pretend the last one never happened.

Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

[email protected]

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