It’s really looking as though the North American economy is on track to shake the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic by the end of this summer if not before.
As noted elsewhere in this issue, economists expect markets to normalize soon, with an IHS Markit researcher predicting the U.S. economy to expand by 5.7 percent in 2021.
Such predictions come with a lot of caveats most having to do with uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. As this went to press, however, three million or more U.S. residents were receiving COVID-19 vaccines each day. That put the U.S. well on the path to immunizing every American who wanted a vaccine by the end of May, as President Biden had promised.
Most of those vaccines are the miraculous messenger RNA types from Pfizer- BioNTech and Moderna, which have proven to be over 80 percent effective with just one dose and over 90 percent effective after the second shot.
Canada is lagging behind but is starting to catch up and should meet Prime Minister Trudeau’s stated goal of a vaccine for every Canadian who wants one by the end of June.
Now, some trouble has emerged with the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which use a more traditional adenovirus viral vector formulation. In very rare instances, patients taking the Astra- Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have developed blood clots. It wasn’t clear at this writing how many of those were cases of causation or correlation. But health authorities have changed their guidance on using those vaccines until that can be sorted out.
Let’s hope that happens soon because initial reports indicate that the chance of getting a blood clot from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is about a million to one. That’s around 1,000 times greater than the risk of dying from COVID-19, which has already killed more than 550,000 U.S. residents and nearly three million globally.
Unfortunately, too many people already have an irrational fear of the vaccines even before the minuscule threat of blood clots emerged. So a very real worry is that this unfortunate development will hamper efforts to immunize enough people to stop the pandemic in its tracks.
Actually, that shouldn’t worry the United States, which has access to enough Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to maintain a vaccination pace of three million doses a day. The two mRNA vaccines make up most of the COVID-19 vaccines administered in the U.S. with Johnson & Johnson accounting for 6.8 million, with most of the latter presenting mild or zero side-effects.
AstraZeneca hasn’t been approved in the U.S. But it has been administered widely in the U.K. and been approved in Canada. However, when reports emerged of rare instances of blood clots, Canadian authorities changed their approach to rolling out that vaccine. British Columbia, for example, had begun making it available for public facing workers like police officers, teachers, and grocery clerks. But the province then decided to restrict its use to people ages 55 to 65 with the rationale that for that age group the risks of COVID-19 far outweighed the risks of blood clots.
Yes, it’s all very confusing. But it’s just a sign that this pandemic doesn’t follow neat and tidy lines. Another sign is the emergence of pesky variants that are more transmissible and potentially vaccine resistant.
The U.S. and Canada probably won’t even need the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines to reach herd immunity. However, the alternatives, in particular the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, are going to be crucial in getting the pandemic under control in the rest of the world. That’s because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine doesn’t require storage and transport under the ultracold temperatures needed to preserve the mRNA vaccines. Johnson & Johnson also has the added advantage of being single dose. It’s almost tailor-made for poorer countries that lack the infrastructure of wealthier ones like Canada and the U.S.
With enough people receiving shots of those miracle mRNA vaccines, Canada and the U.S. should be able to reopen their border for leisure travel, allow full attendance at sporting events, and enable people to dine without fear at their favorite restaurants. But until COVID hotspots like Brazil and India get the disease under control, limits on international travel will remain.
And that would put a damper on optimistic projections for a global economic recovery.
