Questions for Dr. Alex Patel

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This Thursday we’ll be welcoming Dr. Alex Patel back on the show to discuss the latest with COVID-19. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, leave them here and we’ll do our best to incorporate them into the interview.

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What are your thoughts on Canada waiting 4 months to give people their second shot? I had gotten to he point of feeling more comfortable about getting the vaccine, but now I’m not so sure.

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  1. Working on the front lines, how are you starting to think about the wave of people who may opt not to get the vaccine and later wind up being the cause of future waves? This is something that concerns me greatly when it comes to how future waves post-vaccine roll out will impact policy decisions, workplace, and health care systems (the front line heroes) which I’m hoping gets a reprieve post-mass vaccination.

  2. How much do you personally pay attention to headlines vs. medical journals and data backed studies when it comes to variants and vaccine effectiveness. I find myself completely confused by conflicting headlines and stories and can only imagine the impact it has on parts of the population more skeptical than I. Where do you recommend turning for good information about Variants & vaccine effectiveness against them, as well as in general.

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What are your thoughts on the COVID zero strategy? And would it have been more effective for Canada considering we’re a year into the virus and have made such little overall progress?

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Questions for Dr. Patel’s show:

  1. In order for vaccines to be hit the market they must undergo extensive testing. Why is it that companies do not require the same levels of testing when updating vaccines to better deal with variants?

For context. We’ve seen how much damage Covid can do with just a couple of tweaks to the sequences of the virus. So why can vaccines undergo a couple of tweaks and yet we simply assume they are reasonably safe on humans without proper double blind phase 3 testing?

  1. Should states/provinces push for continued mask wearing post-covid given the positive impacts we’ve seen on flu season 2020?

For Context. Early on during Covid I remember seeing comparisons to flu. People posting yearly flu deaths to covid in an attempt to make people think its not all that bad. My response to this wasn’t that covid isn’t that bad…but rather it was an understanding that flu is far more severe than I realized. With that in mind I understand flu was way down in 2020 in part to the masks. This got me thinking…when life fully returns to its new normal in a couple of years (hopefully) would it be wise to continue promoting mask wearing for flu season? Or do we suspect flu season was only mild because of the combination of all factors at play and wearing a mask alone would not actually save the lives of 10,000’s of people a year.

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In Canada; more specifically, in Ontario, the vaccine roll out has been horribly underwhelming. Is this situation going to change soon?
What long term effects do we think all this will have on society going forward?
Thank you for everything you’ve done for us here, and thank you for all you have dealt with. This cannot have been easy.

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What’s your opinion on the AstraZeneca vaccine being shelved in many places, even though the blood clot issue seems to be less than in the normal population.

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Dr. Patel, is there still no data on how long immunity lasts? Is there a way to test for a person’s immunity after they received the Vaccine? Do the people who participated in the vaccine trials still have immunity?