Alberta is making changes to its highly scrutinized COVID vaccine program to make shots free of charge for health care workers, but the majority of Albertans will still have to pay out of pocket.

Maddison McKee, press secretary to Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services Adriana LaGrange, confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that vaccine coverage will be extended to all health care workers this fall. Ms. McKee did not say why the government decided to revise its policy.

Near the Easter Seals Camp in Squamish, B.C., dozens of children from as far away as Toronto and Montreal passed the time on Monday kicking a soccer ball around a field and singing Ukrainian songs around a fire. These are some of the summer activities the camp’s staff were using to distract the young campers – a group that includes Ukrainian refugees – from the fact that they couldn’t return home.

About 150 scouts are stuck at the camp owing to the strike by flight attendants at Air Canada, which has grounded the airline’s flights and disrupted travel for an estimated 130,000 passengers a day.

Calgarian Emi Bossio, who has been battling lung cancer for six years, spent nine days in intensive care last summer after falling ill with COVID-19. She suffered a pulmonary embolism and had pneumonia in both lungs.

“I came really close to dying,” she said.

Diana MacKay remembers accompanying her dad, Dr. Ken Walker, on his rounds at Niagara General Hospital when she was six, her little legs having to run to keep up with him as he dipped in and out of patient rooms.

She waited outside or with the nurses at their station while he did his work. It was in these moments that his colleagues would tell her how much they had learned from her father, how he was making the world a better place.

Canadian experts in vaccines and infectious diseases say the decision by the U.S. government to terminate nearly US$500-million in funding for mRNA vaccine development is not just illogical but threatens pandemic preparedness.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Tuesday that 22 mRNA-based projects will be halted and no new projects will be green lit. He claimed data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

When police in England raided a fentanyl lab outside the northern city of Leeds in early 2017, the bust sent shockwaves across the country.

The raid and subsequent conviction of three men – who made and sold around £164,000 worth of the opioid in five months – was the first major fentanyl case in Britain and it prompted dire warnings from law enforcement officers, health officials and the media that the U.K. was headed for a U.S.-style fentanyl crisis.

Quebec’s universal respiratory syncytial virus immunization program proved more than 85 per cent effective in reducing infant hospitalizations, emergency-room consultations and intensive-care admissions, according to a new study.

The province was the first in Canada to announce a publicly funded nirsevimab program for the 2024-25 RSV season. Ontario, Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories later followed suit.

Ninety-two-year-old Jean Mitchell has been active for as long as she can remember. She played sports while growing up in Saskatchewan – tennis, skating, volleyball – but admits that anything requiring hand-eye co-ordination was not where she shone.

Then she met her husband, an avid outdoorsman who believed the only way to handle a nine-to-five city job was to ditch corporate wear for outdoor gear as soon as the weekend hit. They enjoyed canoeing, overnight hiking and cross-country skiing during the nearly six decades spent together before he passed in 2014.

Most of Jasper’s firefighters, a small, mostly-volunteer crew in the Rocky Mountain community, had never battled a fire like the one that destroyed one-third of their Alberta town last summer.

The 30-person brigade helped fend off flames, protecting critical infrastructure and homes, even as some of their own residences began to burn to the ground. In the days and weeks that followed, as the damage laid bare a difficult road to recovery, other wounds began to emerge.