Updated COVID vaccines coming to Sask. this fall, Shahab tells Gormley

Saskatchewanians who are interested will be able to get jabbed with an updated COVID-19 vaccine this fall.

Dr. Saqib Shahab, the province’s chief medical health officer, told Gormley on Wednesday that public vaccination clinics in places like shopping malls will open on Oct. 10.

“The good news is for most people five and over … it’s very simple now. It doesn’t matter if you got your previous COVID vaccine or flu vaccine. None of that matters,” he said. “You show up and you can get both your influenza vaccine and your COVID vaccine at the same time.”

Even though some people may prefer to get one of the vaccines and then wait before getting the other one, Shahab said it’s perfectly safe to get both shots at the same time.

“As the influenza and updated COVID vaccine (start) arriving over the next two to three weeks, some physician’s offices (and) pharmacies may start offering both toward the end of September (or) early October,” he added.

This is the first year people will have access to an updated monovalent COVID-19 vaccine: Moderna’s Spikevax XBB.1.5 COVID-19 vaccine.

“We had the original strain vaccine for the first year and a half, then we had the bivalent last year in the fall that many of us got,” Shahab said. “This year we (will) have an updated monovalent vaccine that is optimized for the current variants that are circulating; that is the Omicron XBB strain.”

Looking back to the last 12 months, Shahab noticed the return of seasonal viruses, adding there was hardly any influenza two years before that.

“Influenza will come every year predictably in fall and winter,” he said. “COVID, you know, we used to have all those waves in the past. We’re not seeing those waves anymore, thankfully, but we’re not seeing a typical seasonal pattern either.”

Even though there was hardly any influenza over the summer, there were fall levels of COVID activity, Shahab added.

“The general opinion is as it gets colder (and) we’re getting together more indoors, we will see a bit of an increase in COVID,” he said.

The latest Community Respiratory Illness Surveillance Program report, released by the Ministry of Health on Aug. 17, noted that the number of lab-confirmed COVID cases had fallen month over month, but the test positivity rate was increasing. The next such report is due out Thursday.

As for recent suggestions from some experts that people should return to wearing masks, Shahab acknowledged that masking is a personal choice, but recommended anyone with symptoms should wear one where they’re in a health-care setting.

“Certainly I think some people may choose to wear a mask indoors, especially when (it’s crowded) indoors,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of people say that, ‘You know, a mask protects me against COVID and (other) respiratory viruses, so I’m going to use it more frequently in those closed indoor environments when there’s poor ventilation.’ ”