“China eats weird animals disease”

The Ontario government will announce on Thursday that it will lower the age of eligibility for COVID-19 booster shots to people aged 50 and older this year, sources say.

Two sources told CBC Toronto that the expansion of eligibility is expected to begin around mid-December. The news was first reported by the Globe and Mail.

Those presently eligible for a booster in Ontario are people aged 70 and older, health-care workers or essential caregivers in congregate settings, people who received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine or one dose of Janssen, and First Nations, Inuit and Métis adults and their non-Indigenous household members.

The Omicron variant has fuelled a “worrying” surge in coronavirus cases in South Africa and is rapidly becoming the dominant strain, local health officials have said, as more countries including the US detected their first cases of the new strain.

The United Arab Emirates and South Korea – which is already battling a worsening outbreak and record daily infections – also confirmed cases of the Omicron variant.

Can we nuke China now?

Covid has been a revelation and an accelerant

Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just blind prejudice, but when I wake to the news that the Austrian government has interned an entire third of its national population as a danger to public health, a chill runs down my spine.

I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says there “may be more” Canada needs to do as it reckons with the newly discovered threat of the Omicron variant.

Five cases of the Omicron COVID-19 variant have been confirmed in Canada to date.

“Obviously, we’re watching very, very closely the situation with Omicron. We know that, even though Canada has very strong border measures now — we need vaccinations to come to Canada, we need pre-departure tests, we do testing on arrival,” Trudeau told reporters as he walked into a Tuesday cabinet meeting.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Financial Times) — The chief executive of Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling omicron than earlier strains of Covid-19 and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies can manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale.

Stephane Bancel said the high number of omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa, suggested the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.

“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level … we had with delta,” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It’s been almost two years since COVID-19 struck, and the origin of the virus remains a mystery. Did the virus jump from animals to humans in a natural spillover event, or was it the result of a laboratory leak? A new book explores these and other questions on the source of the coronavirus that has killed more than 5 million people worldwide to date.

“We don’t come to a conclusion, but we do lean towards the lab leak being slightly more likely at this stage,” said UK science writer Matt Ridley, who co-authored “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” with Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in gene-therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.

Back in March, the president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, died, very likely due to complications from COVID-19. Ironically, the autocratic ruler of the east African nation had been a staunch COVID-19 denier, refusing to vaccinate his country’s population and instead recommending traditional cures and prayer.

It’s a problem many Toronto-area car dealerships don’t appear willing to talk about.

With new car lots becoming more sparse by the week, dealerships contacted by th e Toronto Sun over the past several days either declined comment or refused to return phone calls when asked about inventory shortages.

Got my snow tires on Saturday. The dealer lot had a fairly wide selection of used cars, very little new of anything else, half a dozen pickups, a couple of Vettes in the showroom. A couple of months prior I was in for an oil change and it was pretty much the same. They love my little car, relatively new at 3 years, very low pandemic mileage, keep asking me to sell it to them.