Catch-up clinics underway as provinces report lags The results won't be publicly available until 2024, the Public Health Agency of Canada told CBC News in an email. The Childhood National Immunization Survey, conducted by Statistics Canada every two years, is currently underway - and those numbers will indicate the extent to which the pandemic had an impact on routine vaccine uptake. School closures, limited resources and some public hesitancy to attend health appointments were primary factors. School-based programs were reportedly the most negatively affected, the study said, drawing on interviews with public health leaders from 11 provinces and territories (representatives from New Brunswick and Yukon did not participate). In 2020, MacDonald and a team of researchers from universities across Canada conducted a pan-national study to determine how the pandemic had impacted routine vaccine programs. Meena Dawar, a medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health. 'Our public health staff were brought back and diverted to the COVID case and contact tracing work, which was essentially more urgent at that point,' said Dr. So that whole school year of 2020-2021 was a bit of a loss as well." So then public health was stretched again to try and deliver COVID vaccines. "Then we had the COVID vaccine program that rolled out in December. "School-based vaccines are a totally different animal," said Shannon MacDonald, the lead researcher of the study and an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing and School of Public Health at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. School programs negatively affected, study saysĪbout two months into the pandemic in 2020, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recommended that school-based vaccine programs, including those for teens, could be deferred until schools reopened.īut the on-and-off nature of in-person learning during the 2020-2021 school year - with some students learning virtually or in a hybrid format - meant that not everyone would be in school for a vaccine catch-up. Experts say that improving access to routine vaccines will make all the difference. Public health units are now hustling to catch them up - but there's still work to be done, with multiple provinces reporting insufficient vaccine uptake. (Submitted by Chantell Plunkett)īetween school-closures, personnel shortages and public health units stretched thin, Canadian children and teenagers are lagging behind on routine shots that prevent various cancers and sexually transmitted diseases. They "haven't really finished off their series with us," Plunkett said.īrampton-based nurse Chantell Plunkett says that the Peel region is behind in catching kids up on vaccines against HPV, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease. In Ontario's Peel region, where Plunkett is a clinic supervisor for public health, those who missed scheduled shots in Grade 7 have now gone on to high school. Then, the pandemic hit - and with schools shut down, in-school vaccination programs were suspended across the country, leaving many kids to fall behind on their scheduled immunizations. Since 2017, Chantell Plunkett has worked on in-school vaccination programs in Brampton, Ont., immunizing kids against preventable illnesses like HPV, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease. The CBC News series Learning Curve explores the ramifications of COVID-19 for Canadian students and what they'll need to recover from pandemic-disrupted schooling. Repeated pandemic pivots have left students out of practice with classroom learning, impacted their mental health and distanced them from peers. Some young learners are struggling to build early reading skills, while others stumble over math concepts.
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