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Alberta seeing a high number of second doses

Posted on June 14, 2021 by 40 Mile Commentator

By Justin Seward

Commentator/Courier

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney hosted a rural roundtable discussion with weekly newspapers on June 11.

Sandra Stanway of the Brooks Bulletin has asked Kenney about why southern Alberta had the lowest rate of vaccination and what can be done about the issue.

“We do have the lowest levels of first doses, but we have the highest level of second doses,” said Kenney, in response to her question.

“We as a province made a decision to go deeper on the second doses back in the winter than the other provinces did. We covered off more of seniors and vulnerable people with second dose vaccines. I think that proved to be wise in retrospect because those are the folks by far most vulnerable to COVID.”

Kenney said the average age of death in Alberta from COVID is 82.

“Right now, we’re approaching 80 per cent second dose full vaccination coverage of Albertans over the age of 75—well ahead of other provinces,” said the Premier.

Kenney did confirm it’s true that Alberta is seeing a first dose demand beginning to diminish.

With that, the province was expected to announce incentives to get the first dose of a COVID vaccine.

“We’re also rebooting our ad campaigns and hopefully you guys are getting placements in your papers across the province,” he said.

“Let me be frank about this. We do want to focus that on rural because we are seeing significantly lower vaccine uptake in many parts of rural Alberta compared to metropolitan areas.”

Kenney has some suggestion as to why the vaccination rate is lower in the south region

“I think we see two things here,” he said.

“We have  what I would call one thing is vaccine hesitancy—which tends to be stronger among older, rural folks. And maybe they think just because they live more distant or they’re not in a crowded neighbourhood that they’re safer from COVID. Maybe some people have heard misinformation about the safety of the vaccines as well.”

The Premier thinks the second challenge is within younger men.

“I think younger men just often you know they imagine that they’re completely immune to any kind of sickness,” he said.

“And it’s true, younger healthy people are pretty much unaffected by COVID. But they need to understand that if they’re not vaccinated, they can still transmit it to other people.”

Alberta has administered over 3.2 million doses and over 634,000 are fully immunized as of June 9.

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