The Bill Kelly Show Podcast:

The Jane and Finch campaign is part of a “hotspot” strategy that experts say is Canada’s best shot at reducing COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions and deaths in the third wave – not just for those living in communities with high infection rates, but for everyone.

With vaccine supplies increasing but still inadequate to cover all adults, the idea is to rush outbreak-dousing vaccines to neighbourhoods burning with COVID-19, rather than sprinkling the jabs evenly among places that are on fire and those that aren’t.

That age-first approach made sense at the start of Canada’s vaccination campaign, when scientists didn’t know how effective the shots might be at reducing spread of the virus. But that understanding is evolving.

GUEST: Kelly Grant, Health Reporter for The Globe & Mail

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In February 2021, OSPE called on the provincial government to immediately address airborne transmission of COVID-19. It is widely understood by health experts that aerosol transmission of the virus is a reality, particularly in indoor settings where people gather for long periods of time. OSPE believes the need for proper ventilation to stop the spread of infected aerosol particles is not being properly addressed. Recommendations called for actions to focus on air quality in schools to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Today, these recommendations apply to all indoor workplaces, such as factories, warehouses, and offices, where many engineers work. We urge the government to:

GUEST: Sandro Perruzza, CEO of the Ontario Society Of Professional Engineers

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Close to 6,300 of Hamilton’s affordable housing units will be restored as a result of an investment in last week’s federal budget.

CityHousing Hamilton is receiving two loans over a nine-year period, totalling $145.6 million, through the National Housing Co-investment Fund.

Hamilton's wait list for affordable housing stands at 5,000 households -- and it's been estimated that 7,000 of the city's units date back to the 1950's, 60's and 70's.

GUEST: Chad Collins, City Councillor, Ward 5.

Trillions for COVID-19 relief. Trillions more for an infrastructure initiative. Yet another burst of US$1.52-trillion for “discretionary” programs such as housing and education. A boost in corporate taxes. An offensive against firearms. The first elements of a comprehensive plan to address climate change.

It is a breathtaking agenda, a veritable trill of the trillions, laid out at a breathtaking pace, positioning Joe Biden to record a First Hundred Days unlike any presidential predecessor except Franklin Delano Roosevelt and perhaps Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, all coming amid a pandemic, a frantic drive to vaccinate a profoundly divided country against a deadly disease and a gathering crisis at the border with Mexico.

GUEST: Elliot Tepper, Emeritus Professor of Political science, Carleton University

The Bill Kelly Show Podcast:

In Ontario, there are dozens of different ways to book a vaccine, depending on your age, health status and location. Unfortunately, many of them are frustrating, confusing and inefficient.

Nova Scotia has one centralized booking system through which residents can choose from a list of all available vaccine appointments in the province, including community health clinics, primary care practices and pharmacies.

CANImmunize, the company hired to build Nova Scotia’s vaccine booking and management system, is an Ontario-based company. But despite having worked with the provincial government here in the past on a globally recognized digital immunization tracking app, they were not asked to work on the COVID-19 platform.

The end-to-end system covers everything from appointment bookings to setting up clinics to autobooking second doses. CANImmunize has a similar contract with Yukon, and has been hired by P.E.I. to provide digital immunization records to its citizens.

GUEST: Katherine Atkinson, Chief Operating Officer of CANImmunize

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Biolyse is a small pharmaceutical manufacturer in Canada with a simple proposition: provide a recipe for a coronavirus vaccine, and it will produce 20m doses for nations in the global south. It has approached AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, and even asked the Canadian government to help it with compulsory licensing – which would give it the authorisation to produce another company’s patented product for emergency use – but so far no one has taken up its offer.

The situation is dire, and we need more vaccines. At the moment, there is no worldwide joined-up effort to expand production. As incredible as it sounds, after all the public money that went into vaccine development, making and distributing them has been left entirely up to the market. Each company has its own – totally secret – recipes and supply chains, and they insist no other approach is possible.

Many governments and organisations back the idea of opening up production. India and South Africa have asked the WTO to suspend patent protections to allow other companies to produce existing vaccines and drugs – but they have been blocked by rich nations

GUEST: Dr. Nancy Olivieri, Physician and a Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine and Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and a Senior Scientist at Toronto General Hospital

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A new poll suggests Canadians are mostly giving a collective shrug to the latest federal budget, which has also barely affected the Liberals’ chances of winning the next election.

The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News found 62 per cent of Canadians who responded didn’t have a positive or negative opinion of the budget. An equal number of those surveyed — 19 per cent — gave the budget a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

GUEST: Darrel Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs