Ottawa: Hundreds of trucks and thousands of people blocked the streets of central Ottawa on Sunday as part of a self-titled "Freedom Convoy" to protest vaccine mandates required to cross the US border.
Flying the Canadian flag, waving banners demanding "Freedom" and chanting slogans against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the truckers were joined by thousands of other protesters angered not only by Covid-19 restrictions but by broader discontent with the government.
An enormous clamor rang out as hundreds of big trucks, their engines rumbling, sounded their air horns non-stop. Closer to Parliament, families calmly marched on a bitterly cold day, while young people chanted and older people in the crowd banged pots and pans in protest under Trudeau’s office windows.
Canadian media said the prime minister and his family had been escorted out of their home and taken to a secret location in the capital, with much of the protesters’ wrath directed at Trudeau.
"I want it all to stop -- these measures are unjustified," said one demonstrator, 31-year-old businessman Philippe Castonguay, outside the Parliament building. He had driven seven hours from northern Quebec province to make his feelings known: "The vaccination requirements are taking us toward a new society we never voted for," he said.
The protest originated last week in western Canada, where dozens of truckers organized a convoy to drive from Vancouver to Ottawa to demonstrate against Covid-related restrictions, particularly a vaccination requirement for truck drivers.
Both Canada and the United States imposed that requirement in mid-January, affecting drivers who cross the 5,500-mile (9,000-kilometer) border -- the world’s longest. The movement rapidly gained steam as the original cross-country convoy was joined by others en route to the federal capital.
Their rallying point was Parliament Hill, in the heart of Ottawa. Stephen Penderness, an unvaccinated 28-year-old trucker from Ontario, said he was protesting for all Canadians, not just his fellow drivers.
"It’s actually for every single person... everybody on the road," he said. "It’s all about your free choice." Angela Bernal, a 67-year-old retired teacher said she wanted "governments to lift the measures," adding that "maintaining the restrictions is useless."
With a strong police presence around the federal capital the protest went off without major incident despite initial fears there could be violence. The zone around Parliament was closed for the weekend, and Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly described the situation on the ground as "unique, fluid, risky and significant." Police said they fear some demonstrators will stay beyond the Sunday protest, snarling traffic further.
Trudeau, who is currently in isolation after a Covid exposure, on Wednesday defended the vaccination mandate, noting that 90 percent of drivers are already vaccinated. He called the truckers headed for the city a "small fringe minority" who do not represent the majority of Canadians.
Meanwhile, Bhutan’s success in avoiding coronavirus is almost unrivalled but a rare patient death -- just the kingdom’s fourth -- shows more work was needed to fight the pandemic there, its leader says.
The remote Himalayan nation of around 800,000 people, sandwiched between China and India, has recorded fewer Covid fatalities than almost anywhere else in the world. The only places with lower official tolls are a small handful of remote Pacific islands and countries that do not publish coronavirus data, such as North Korea and Turkmenistan.
But Bhutan’s Prime Minister Lotay Tshering -- a physician who still conducts surgeries on the weekend as a "de-stresser" from the pressures of office -- said this week’s death was "a bitter reminder that we need to do more".
Tshering said in a Facebook post late Saturday that "it felt like a bullet-hit to learn that one more precious life died with Covid-19. "I grieved with the nation and continue to offer my prayers for our dear friend," he added.
The prime minister said Bhutan remained committed to completely eliminating the disease and said the nation could not afford "to lose our people to something that is preventable". Bhutan, like much of the world, has seen a surge in infections linked to the highly contagious Omicron variant.
The kingdom has still seen fewer than 5,000 cases overall since the disease emerged two years ago, and Bhutan had already vaccinated nearly all of its adult population by the middle of 2021. Meantime, a Chinese study has shown that having a different vaccine as the booster shot can increase the protective effect against the Covid-19 virus.
In the study, adults who had received two doses of the inactivated vaccine CoronaVac in the past three to six months were vaccinated with Convidecia, the adenovirus type-5 vector-based Covid-19 vaccine or a third dose of CoronaVac. The post-vaccination geometric mean titer (GMT) is a key immunological parameter adequately expressing antibody response after vaccination.
According to the study published in the journal Nature Medicine, the GMT of neutralising antibody against SARS-CoV-2 was 197.4 after Convidecia was given as the booster shot, while the GMT was 33.6 when the third dose of CoronaVac was given.
In a related development, Russia has registered 121,228 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, the highest single-day increase to date, taking the national tally to 11,737,007, the official monitoring and response center said on Sunday.