Thursday September 16, 2021 | NATIONAL
by Mary P Brooke, B.Sc., Editor | Island Social Trends
Health Canada has authorized changes to the brand names of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
The announcement was made today by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will now be named Comirnaty, the Moderna vaccine will be named Spikevax, and the AstraZeneca vaccine will be named Vaxzevria.
These are only name changes. There are no changes to the vaccines themselves, says PHAC.
COVID for the long haul:
Putting a marketing spin on the brand name (and thereby taking the focus away from the name of the manufacturers) indicates that these commercial pharmaceutical products are very much here to stay.
“All COVID-19 vaccines authorized in Canada are proven safe, effective and of high quality,” said the PHAC in a Tweet today.
Vaccination in BC:
As of September 15 there had been 7,643,973 doses of COVID-19 vaccine administered in BC.
As of today, September 16, now 78.8% of British Columbians age 12+ are fully vaccinated (two doses).
The official interval between doses in BC is presently 28 days (four weeks), but Dr Henry has said in recent months that 6 to 8 weeks is a suitable interval, and back in April to June 2021 the desired interval was 11 weeks.
Because of how the age-based (descending) immunization program was rolled out in BC, older people got two doses with a longer interval in between, while people in their 20s and 30s are falling within the 28-day interval in many cases (especially with the push to get people vaccinated before return-to-campus this month).
During August 31 to September 13, 87.3% of people hospitalized with COVID-19 infection were not fully vaxxed, according to the BC Centre for Disease Control in their stats released on September 15.
