Healthcare & Medical: 1)Ontario hospitals told to find savings; ministry doesn’t rule out service cuts; 2)COVID-19 vaccines may help some cancer patients fight tumours

1)Ontario hospitals told to find savings; ministry doesn’t rule out service cuts

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Allison Jones, October 20, 2025

The Ontario Hospital Association has said that hospitals ended last year $360 million in the red and need an additional $1 billion in funding this year to keep pace with population growth and inflation.

However, government guidance to hospitals on the balanced budget plans, obtained by The Canadian Press, suggests belt tightening is on the way.

For the financial planning exercise, hospitals were told to assume annual funding increases of two per cent — half of what they have received in the past three years. The parameters are not confirmation of funding intent, the government says in the document, but the hospital sector is reading the tea leaves.

“It was quite clear to us when the Ontario budget was handed down after the general election that the province was no longer in a position to meet our full revenue needs as a sector for the current fiscal year,” said Ontario Hospital Association president and CEO Anthony Dale.

“(This budgeting exercise) is a prudent thing to do, given the realities facing the province today, which is our economy is under direct threat from the trade war initiated by the United States. It’s quite clear, based on the report of several weeks ago from the financial accountability officer, that Ontario faces a very large deficit stemming in part from that trade war.”

The FAO projected that impacts of the tariffs will have Ontario in deficit at least until 2030, and that the province’s plan to balance in 2027-28 is based in part on “significantly lower” program spending growth.

Hospitals were told that any “low risk” cost-saving moves, with “no or minimal clinical front-line reductions, achieved primarily via attrition,” should be implemented immediately. Low-risk examples include looking for more non-ministry revenue, optimizing the use of operating rooms, and consolidating services across sites of a hospital network where it has little or no impact on patient access.

Any potential plans that are deemed high risk would be assessed by regional and provincial planning tables. That would include measures that do have service impacts for patients, and should only be considered if all lower-risk options are exhausted, the guidance says.

“Maintaining patient access to hospital services is a top priority for the Ministry of Health,” the government writes in the document.

“Service changes and/or reductions are within the context of the hospital’s local and regional environments, with consideration for regional solutions that could result in better outcomes, access, continuity of care and patient experience. Any service reductions and bed closures should be clearly communicated in the plan and will only be considered when there is a case where it would be an opportunity to provide services more effectively.”

Tim Vine, president and CEO of the North Shore Health Network, with sites in northern Ontario, said this planning process has been unorthodox and has him concerned.

“Given the growing population of Ontario and demands of an aging population, I worry that on the current trajectory Ontarians will have fewer health services available to them in 12 months’ time,” he wrote in a statement. “And even more difficulty accessing them.”

Lee Fairclough, the Liberals’ hospitals critic and a former hospital president, said hospitals have already been finding efficiencies for decades and have very little in the way of “low risk” moves to make.

“I think it’s always good to do due diligence around your budgeting and how you’re spending and are we using taxpayer money to the very best purpose,” she said.

“But I feel that they are ignoring the way that these deficits have accumulated over the last several years…Hospitals in Ontario are the most efficient by far in the country, so I’m not sure they’re going to get to the result that they want here.”

A spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones did not directly answer how many hospitals contemplated service reductions in their balanced budget proposals, which were submitted last month.

“It is not only appropriate, but responsible for the government to ask hospitals to plan for long-term stability,” Jackson Jacobs wrote.

“This ensures that each community’s needs are reflected in the province’s broader health system planning as we continue to strengthen and modernize hospital care across Ontario.”

Kevin Smith, the president and CEO of the University Health Network, said he doesn’t believe this government will cut access to care.

“No one has given anyone permission to reduce clinical care, but I feel as though it was a, ‘How bad could this look if we had a really, really cataclysmic economic circumstance…what would that look like?” he said.

“I don’t think that’s different, frankly, than what we’d done pre-COVID annually.”

2)COVID-19 vaccines may help some cancer patients fight tumours

Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press

By Lauran Neergaard, October 23, 2025

The most widely used COVID-19 vaccines may offer a surprise benefit for some cancer patients – revving up their immune systems to help fight tumours.

People with advanced lung or skin cancer who were taking certain immunotherapy drugs lived substantially longer if they also got a Pfizer or Moderna shot within 100 days of starting treatment, according to preliminary research being reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

And it had nothing to do with virus infections.

Instead, the molecule that powers those specific vaccines, mRNA, appears to help the immune system respond better to the cutting-edge cancer treatment, concluded researchers from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Florida.

The vaccine “acts like a siren to activate immune cells throughout the body,” said lead researcher Dr. Adam Grippin of MD Anderson. “We’re sensitizing immune-resistant tumours to immune therapy.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has raised skepticism about mRNA vaccines, cutting $500 million in funding for some uses of the technology.

But this research team found its results so promising that it is preparing a more rigorous study to see if mRNA coronavirus vaccines should be paired with cancer drugs called checkpoint inhibitors — an interim step while it designs new mRNA vaccines for use in cancer.

A healthy immune system often kills cancer cells before they become a threat. But some tumours evolve to hide from immune attack. Checkpoint inhibitors remove that cloak. It’s a powerful treatment – when it works. Some people’s immune cells still don’t recognize the tumour.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is naturally found in every cell and it contains genetic instructions for our bodies to make proteins. While best known as the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind COVID-19 vaccines, scientists have long been trying to create personalized mRNA “treatment vaccines” that train immune cells to spot unique features of a patient’s tumour.

The new research offers “a very good clue” that maybe an off-the-shelf approach could work, said Dr. Jeff Coller, an mRNA specialist at Johns Hopkins University who wasn’t involved with the work. “What it shows is that mRNA medicines are continuing to surprise us in how beneficial they can be to human health.”

Grippin and his Florida colleagues had been developing personalized mRNA cancer vaccines when they realized that even one created without a specific target appeared to spur similar immune activity against cancer.

Grippin wondered if the already widely available mRNA coronavirus shots might also have some effect, too.

So the team analyzed records of nearly 1,000 advanced cancer patients undergoing checkpoint inhibitor treatment at MD Anderson – comparing those who happened to get a Pfizer or Moderna shot with those who didn’t.

Vaccinated lung cancer patients were nearly twice as likely to be alive three years after beginning cancer treatment as the unvaccinated patients. Among melanoma patients, median survival was significantly longer for vaccinated patients – but exactly how much isn’t clear, as some of that group were still alive when the data was analyzed.

Non-mRNA vaccines such as flu shots didn’t make a difference, he said.