New Brunswick Government Turns down Pharmacists' Offer to Vaccinate against Whooping Cough
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New Brunswick Health Minister Madeleine Dube has rejected the idea of funding pharmacists to administer pertussis vaccine, to help fight a significant outbreak of whooping cough in the province. The New Brunswick Pharmacists' Association (NBPA) had proposed that qualified pharmacists be authorized and funded to vaccinate against whooping cough in their pharmacies. New Brunswick pharmacists were given immunization authority in 2010 and have administered influenza vaccine through 2 flu seasons; there are currently 200 immunization-certified pharmacists across the province. Ms. Dube, however, has turned down the offer, saying the current providers — physicians and public health clinics — have sufficient resources to handle the outbreak. The minister's response is both disappointing and difficult to understand, according to the executive director of the NBPA, Paul Blanchard. “We are struggling to understand why the government wouldn't look to pharmacists as an ideally placed health care professional to help deal with the outbreak,” says Mr. Blanchard. “Frankly, we don't think the minister's response represents the gravity of the situation.” New Brunswick's pertussis cases have skyrocketed in 2012, he points out. “Our province, which has less than 3% of Canada's population, has more than 50% of the 2000 reported cases of whooping cough in the country this year.” Around 1100 cases have been reported so far this year and the province has recommended that adults in regular contact with children get the vaccine. Physicians and public health offices aren't available to deliver vaccines in the evenings and on the weekends, whereas pharmacists are much more accessible, says Mr. Blanchard. “We have a lot of people coming in now and asking pharmacists if we have the vaccine, if we can provide this service or help them find their way through the system,” he says. “A lot of them are complaining that it is difficult to get an appointment with their family doctor — and right now quite a few doctors are on vacation, so it's even more difficult. “We have grave concerns about where this disease is going and we find it difficult to understand why the government feels it doesn't need additional help from pharmacists in the face of this outbreak,” Mr. Blanchard adds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.051 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".