Don’t let the two-dose summer fool you — there is a long battle ahead against COVID-19

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It’s the year of the tortoise in Canada.

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The COVID-19 vaccination strategy was a shambles in the beginning, and a country with little capacity to make sophisticated drugs found itself where you’d expect: the back of the pack.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau compensated by going to market. The government shamelessly placed orders with every pharmaceutical company that looked like it had a shot at developing a vaccine. It wasn’t enough to overcome vaccine nationalism, but once AstraZeneca Plc, Moderna Inc., and Pfizer Inc. had satisfied their home countries, Canada was next in line. Now, it looks like slow and steady might win the race. Canada recently overtook Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States in delivering at least one dose to its population; as of July 23, about 53 per cent of Canadians were fully vaccinated, compared with about 49 per cent of Americans.

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But what if the race against COVID-19 is only beginning? And what if our “two-dose summer” becomes a gateway back to the collective complacency that turned Canada into that rarest of things: an advanced, $2-trillion economy that lacked the wherewithal to reproduce a sophisticated vaccine?

The stakes are bigger than being ready for variants of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and the economic challenge is almost certainly more complex than a central command from the Prime Minister’s Office to “build back better.” The more time health experts spend with the disease, the more they become convinced that COVID-19 isn’t a one-and-done infection like a winter cold. Long COVID is real, if still ill-defined; and “long haulers” are at risk of chronic brain fog, fatigue and breathing problems, among other things.

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Yes, anyone who develops COVID-19 and survives was lucky to have survived a disease that kills people. But that isn’t a reason to ignore the reality that COVID refused to let go of some of its victims. Aon Plc, the insurance company, observed in a recent report that there were “notable” increases in the cost of medical, disability and life insurance in Canada over the second half of 2020. The firm said the gains probably have something to do with “uncertainty” over the long-term physical and mental effects of the pandemic.

The Financial Times recently suggested that Long COVID could be this generation’s polio. That’s right, polio; the infectious disease that crippled tens of thousands of Canadians before a vaccine was discovered in the mid-1950s. It also triggered a condition called post-polio syndrome (PPS), which afflicted survivors with muscle weakness, severe fatigue and joint pain years after they fought off polio.

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“We focus on the death rates from COVID-19,” said Inez Jabalpurwala, global director the Viral Neuro Exploration, or VINEx, an initiative backed by billionaire Kenneth Irving’s life-science startup, Rocket Science Health. “We focus not at all about the quality-of-life impacts.”

VINEx and Rocket Science Health are in the vanguard that is preparing for a long struggle against COVID-19, not one that ends when a critical mass of the population has received its second jab.

Irving told New York-based journalist Alison Hall earlier this year that he started Rocket Science after he nearly overdosed on ketamine, which he had been prescribed to offset symptoms of mental illness. He said he took a closer look at the inhaler and decided there must be a better way to deliver pharmaceutical drugs to the brain than blasting molecules into patient’s noses.

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Rocket Science has since “figured out how to get the payload to where it needs to go,” he told Hall, who hosts a podcast called Between Headlines. But part of the mission was also deciding who would benefit most from the device. Irving reckoned their work could help with the treatment of conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Combat was another focus, as wounded soldiers often die because it’s too difficult to deliver anesthesia effectively on a battlefield. The company also decided to prepare for a pandemic, as experts were growing increasingly concerned that the world was due for an epidemic of some kind, and it was understood that viral infections could harm the nervous system.

All that planning happened before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Rocket Science didn’t predict something like the Spanish Flu outbreak was imminent, but it was better prepared to assess what was happening than most. “The coronavirus does cross the blood/brain barrier,” Irving told Hall. “It’s quite possible that it might have long-lasting effects,” he added. “We need to make sure that (long-haulers’) health is not forgotten.”

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That’s where Jabalpurwala comes in. She was the founding CEO of Brain Canada, the Montreal-based foundation that underwrites cutting-edge brain research. VINEx is on a similar mission, but with a focus on pulling scientists together to understand the extent to which viruses threaten the nervous system. COVID-19 brought a level of urgency that the effort might have lacked without having a real-time pandemic to confront.

“The brain is not this hermetically sealed system,” Jabalpurwala said in an interview. “We’re understanding now that it is impacted by the environment. It is impacted by other systems of the body. Maybe this is the time we are going to learn about how some of these things happen.”

Long COVID isn’t the only thing VINEx is working on, but it has become a priority. The group commissioned a survey of about 1,000 Canadian long-haulers, one of the few attempts in Canada so far to define the condition. The results show that brain fog was among the most common symptoms, and headaches, dizziness and anxiety also showed up prominently, suggesting the virus has the potential to harm the brain.

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The survey also showed that more than half of respondents were still experiencing symptoms eleven months after initial infection; nearly half had visited a clinic for treatment at least five times; and six in 10 said their symptoms forced them to leave work for weeks at a time.

“There is something here,” said Jabalpurwala. “It’s not a question of certain individuals who have tendencies toward hypochondria. It’s real and it’s happening to a lot of us.”

A long period of complacency left us unprepared for the acute phase of the crisis. There will be no excuses for failing to address the chronic issues that already have set in. “Two-dose summer” is a breather, not the finish line.

Financial Post

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: carmichaelkevin

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