Roundup: The meltdown over NACI

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There was a collective meltdown yesterday as the National Advisory Committee on Immunization delivered its most recent recommendations, saying that they recommended that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine be deployed for those over 30 (even though the current supply in the country is currently on hold pending a review of its quality control), and then cited that mRNA vaccines remained their preferred candidates – and everyone lost their minds.

This is not really unexpected if you have been paying attention, where the chair of the committee in particular has said that because of the “safety signal” attached to AstraZeneca related to the particular blood clots (which are very serious – there is a reasonably high fatality rate related to them) that it would be preferable to get mRNA vaccines, but if someone could not wait for them, then they should get the first available vaccine, even if it’s AstraZeneca. In their minds, it’s about being transparent around the risk factors associated, and they’re right. It’s just that this makes it harder for governments and public health officials to carry on with message that the best vaccine is the first one you are offered. Both are correct, and NACI has a lot of nuance in their guidance that is difficult for people to parse effectively, which is a problem, but it’s a question of whether the problem is NACI’s in how they communicate their guidance, or a problem in particular with media who are supposed to be able to take complex issues and translate them to the public, and yet are not very good at it (often walking away from these releases citing that they are “more confused than before,” which they shouldn’t be if they paid attention). It especially isn’t helped when certain journalists, talking heads, and especially certain MPs conflate the very different roles that NACI and Health Canada have, and try to assert that they should always be “on the same page” when they have different roles. Health Canada determines the safety of the vaccines, NACI offers guidance on the best way to deploy them, factoring in the current local epidemiology and vaccine supplies – guidance which provinces can accept or reject. It’s also why that guidance is always changing – they are reacting to current circumstances rather than just offering a simple recommendation once and being done with it, which most people are not grasping. And they have operated pretty much invisibly for decades, because there hasn’t been the kind of public attention on new vaccines up until now, which is why I really dislike the calls by people to “disband NACI” after yesterday’s press conference.

I get that people want clear binaries, and simple instructions, but that’s not NACI’s job, really, and expecting them to change their way of communicating after decades is a difficult ask. There is a lot of nuance to this conversation, and I will point you to a couple of threads – from professor Philippe Lagassé here and here about this kind of advice and how it’s communicated to the public; as well, here is hematologist Menaka Pai, who talks through NACI’s advice and what it means.

Good reads:

  • The budget implementation bill contains a section on changing the Elections Act to restore the wording to that makes it illegal to “knowingly” make false statements.
  • Marc Garneau plans to set a good example and stay in a quarantine hotel for the requisite three days after returning from the G7 meeting in the UK.
  • Steven Guilbeault is promising more changes to Bill C-10 to make it clear that the CRTC won’t be regulating individual social media posts.
  • The Special Forces commander under fire for writing a letter of recommendation about a convicted sex offender in the ranks has been placed on paid leave.
  • The Competition Bureau is supposed to get new funds in the budget, but there are questions if that is enough to ensure it can be more robust in its enforcement.
  • The Conservatives are calling on the prime minister to fire his chief of staff over the handling of the Vance allegations, and ministerial responsibility is where? FFS.
  • The federal government has indicated it will do its own assessment of a proposed highway project in Ontario, citing federally-listed species at risk.
  • While Alberta COVID cases keep climbing, Jason Kenney is contemplating releasing new measures later today.
  • Michael Petrou sees problems with the planned apology to Italian-Canadians interned during WWII, because the ones interned were mostly fascist supporters.
  • Kevin Carmichael suggests that the Bank of Canada needs to do a better job of communicating around the inflation situation.
  • Susan Delacourt wants the government to release its guidelines for what people can do once they’ve been vaccinated, and she wants it now.

Odds and ends:

My Loonie Politics Quick Take video explains why the Conservatives are lying with statistics when it comes to inflation.

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: The meltdown over NACI”

  1. The actor Alan Alda of “M*A*S*H” fame founded a nonprofit organisation called the Centre for Communicating Science to help fix what he (correctly) saw as a profound decline in scientific literacy in the U.S., caused in part by a cultural hostility to scientists by successive Republican governments but also, in turn, by the seeming inability of scientists themselves to effectively communicate their findings in layman’s terms to the public and especially through the mass media. Or as you say, “they can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag.” The press then picks up clickbait headlines devoid of nuance and churns out op-eds about them, and the public reacts accordingly.

    Canadian universities and scientific/public health agencies would do well to start something like that here, or partner with Alda’s organisation to aid health officials and government scientists in media training. With a specific focus on how to get ahead of the hardcore denialist media apparatuses like Postmedia and Fox News (and, now, the social media vomitorium that Postmedia ideologues and libertarian ivory-tower sociopaths like Geist and Peterson are hell-bent on not regulating for the public good, because they benefit handsomely from lying and gaslighting with impunity).

    “Americanitis” is unfortunately the latent pandemic affecting much of Canadian life, but there are some imports that might be of public service: is the CBC so bereft of resources that it can’t do a talent search for the Canadian version of, i.e., Bill Nye the Science Guy? On civics and other matters (which it’s clear even elected officials themselves need remedial training in), including science, where’s the CBC’s version of Schoolhouse Rock?

  2. The university I worked for had a hard stop of 50 words for course descriptions for our Course Calendar and it was tremendously difficult sometimes for our faculty to write these descriptions — the tendency was to do either 4 uninformative words (“an introduction to biology”) or 400 convoluted ones (“Week One will include a descriptive synthesis of the concretive inelegant paradigm……..”).
    So its not surprising now that epidemiologists can’t figure out how to describe their nuanced vaccine and immunization findings in the most user-friendly way.
    And maybe this helps explain how desperately some are clinging to something easy and simple (“its all Bill Gate’s fault” or “its no worse than a cold”) rather than accept that the scientists don’t have all the answers immediately and their advice on this damned virus is still a work in progress.

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