'He's in our hearts': Family and friends still seek answers one year after Nathan Wise’s disappearance
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
When most parents decided to have kids, they probably thought some of their bigger parenting decisions would be about sleep-training, extracurricular activities or the right age to get a phone.
Few probably thought ahead to the best way to protect their kids from a global pandemic that shows no signs of slowing down after nearly a year and a half.
Soon parents might get to decide whether to vaccinate their young children against COVID-19, and according to Canada's top doctor they'll have to consider more than just the safety data.
"It is a complex set of factors," Dr. Teresa Tam, the said chief public health officer, said in a news briefing Friday.
There are no COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in children under 12 in Canada right now, but Pfizer announced earlier this week positive results in its trial for kids aged five and up.
The company said the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was safe, well tolerated and showed robust neutralizing antibody responses in kids aged five to 11, with results for children six months to five years old expected as early as later this year.
Once the company submits its findings to the government, Health Canada and the National Advisory Committee on Immunization will look carefully to determine if the vaccine is safe and effective for children.
But with the virus posing a smaller risk of serious illness and death in children, Dr. Nazeem Muhajarine expects parents to have more trepidation about vaccinating their kids than they did getting the shot themselves.
The same is true of long-standing routine vaccines that babies have been getting for many years, said Muhajarine, a professor of community health and epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan.
"If you extrapolate from that to COVID-19 vaccines, I think there will be an even greater concern among some parents about getting their kids inoculated against COVID-19," he said in an interview Friday.
He said parents should consider other factors when weighing the risks and benefits of the vaccine, including the unknown effects of "long COVID."
"Some kids have shown symptoms and signs and challenges, including cognitive challenges, months and months after that initial recovery," he said. "I think we don't know much about long COVID, and we have to keep that in mind."
Rare incidents of serious illness and even death in kids can also become more common as the virus spreads through the population, Tam warned parents.
"We will see children in the hospitals, as well as some rare but serious cases, and the numbers of those can be significant if there's a lot of viral activity," she said.
In Ontario, kids under 11 years old accounted for more than 20 per cent of new COVID-19 cases in the province over the last two days.
That's up from just 12.6 per cent in the last week of August.
Parents and policy-makers will also have to consider which option is most likely to keep kids in schools, Tam said.
In Britain, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) could not recommend universally vaccinating healthy kids age 12 to 15 on health grounds alone, because the margin of benefit was small, and there was evidence of a link to extremely rare cases of myocarditis -- an inflammation of the heart.
In Canada there have been 774 reported instances of myocarditis and pericarditis, inflammation of the membrane around the heart, as of Sept. 17, out of 54 million vaccines administered so far.
Tam said government agencies are watching the situation carefully because though instances of myocarditis after vaccination are rare, they appear more commonly in young adults.
"This has got to be weighed against significant social, educational, developmental and mental health impacts on children for missing schools," Tam said.
Ultimately the U.K.'s four chief medical officers opted to offer vaccines to that age group anyways, in part because of the importance of kids being able to stay in their classrooms.
The National Advisory Committee on Immunization and the Public Health Agency of Canada will provide more official advice when they receive and analyze the safety and efficacy data from Pfizer and other vaccine manufacturers.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2021.
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
Amazon's paid subscription service provides free delivery for online shopping across Canada except for remote locations, the company said in an email. While customers in Iqaluit qualify for the offer, all other communities in Nunavut are excluded.
The fire burning near Fort McMurray grew from 25 hectares to 5,500 hectares over the weekend.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin began a Cabinet shakeup on Sunday, proposing the replacement of Sergei Shoigu as defence minister as he begins his fifth term in office.
Police are searching for a male suspect after a man was “slashed in neck” on Sunday morning in downtown Toronto and died.
There were some scary moments for several people on a northern Ontario highway caught on video Thursday after a chain reaction following a truck fire.
Health Canada announced various product recalls this week, including electric adapters, armchairs, cannabis edibles and vehicle components.
English, history, entertainment, math and geography: high school trivia teams could be quizzed on any of it when they compete at the Reach for the Top Nationals in Ottawa in June.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.