theBreaker.news Podcast: Overcoming Operation Slowpoke

A month after it began, British Columbia’s coronavirus vaccination program hit a roadblock last week.

A sudden change of leadership. The December-announced Dr. Ross Brown was demoted. Dr. Penny Ballem, the chair of Vancouver Coastal Health, was anointed the executive lead for the mass-vaccination program.

Todd Hauptman

B.C. is vaccinating more than 2,000 people a day, but will need to increase exponentially in order to reach herd immunity by the end of September. Officials expect bulk shipments in the spring. In the meantime, B.C.’s health authorities ran out of Pfizer doses and federal officials revealed that Pfizer shipments would be temporarily delayed in the weeks to come while the company expands a factory in Belgium.

This week’s guest is Todd Hauptman, a higher education communications professional who received a kidney transplant in 2010. Hauptman, who is on the board of the Transplant Research Foundation of B.C., is reaching out to government officials and health authorities. He advocates for priority immunization for those who have received new organs and/or live with compromised immunity. 

“It’s a very nerve-wracking time, in some ways I’d say this period of waiting is much similar to how I felt in the final months before I had my transplant,” Hauptman told theBreaker.news Podcast host Bob Mackin. “I saw that light at the end of the tunnel, but I wasn’t quite there yet.”

Hear the full interview with Hauptman and learn more about the challenges of being a transplant patient in the pandemic.

Plus headlines from the Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest. 

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