(Ryan Flanagan/ CTV News) — Essential workers and others who face increased risks related to COVID-19 should be vaccinated against the disease before everyone else, according to new recommendations submitted to the federal government.
Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that all Canadians will be able to get an approved COVID-19 vaccine for free, the immunizations will not happen all at once. It is expected that several months will elapse between the first doses of the vaccine being made available and a full rollout to everyone who wants to be immunized.
This leads to an obvious question: Which Canadians or groups of Canadians should be prioritized? Who should get to move to the front of the line, and who should have to wait?
One group of medical, pharmaceutical and public health experts is used to considering these questions, although not on this scale. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) is a long-established body that makes recommendations to the Public Health Agency of Canada on vaccines and vaccine-related issues. They’ve weighed in on vaccines covering more than a dozen different diseases over the past decades, and their advice helped create the push to expand human papillomavirus vaccine programs to include boys. (…)