Canada has already purchased 12 million doses of Moderna's version of the Omicron vaccine,which includes converting some existing orders for the original Moderna vaccine so that the newly adapted version will be delivered instead.
Prof. Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University, said the development of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 gives clues as to what might come.
Health Canada's chief medical adviser says variant-specific vaccines can be approved faster than the general ones first issued to combat COVID-19, but one targeting the Omicron strain still likely won't be ready in time to help with the latest wave.
Canada’s health minister believes provinces and territories will likely discuss mandatory vaccine requirements in the coming weeks and months, he said Friday — a comment that came one day after federal Conservative Party Leader Erin O’Toole told media that “reasonable accommodations” should be made for unvaccinated Canadians.
The federal NDP critic for economic development has written to the heads of Canada's biggest supermarkets asking them to restore "pandemic pay," which was brought in after COVID-19 first struck but was then cancelled.
Provinces are putting new measures in place to deal with an Omicron-fuelled rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, including delaying in-person schooling in Ontario by two weeks and bringing in the military to help Quebec speed up its third-dose vaccination program.
The Greek alphabet arrived on the global stage and into everyday lexicon riding on waves of the novel coronavirus as the World Health Organization began naming variants in the Glagolitic script.
