Canada’s deliveries from COVAX join growing list of vaccine confusion
Procurement Minister Anita Anand said this week she is confident Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine deliveries will only get better going forward but just hours after she made the remark, Canada’s vaccine purchases got slammed again.
“The worst week was last week,” Anand said in an interview with The Canadian Press Tuesday night.
Canada’s vaccination program was just starting to move past first gear in mid-January when production slowdowns from Pfizer, and then a delay expanding production from Moderna, suddenly saw Canada’s vaccine deliveries plummet.
Canada got no doses at all last week, and this week is getting only 20 per cent of what was previously promised from Pfizer and 80 per cent of what had been promised from Moderna.
Provinces and territories, which in mid-January got close to vaccinating 50,000 people a day, only vaccinated 5,000 people Jan. 31.
Then Europe, in a battle with AstraZeneca over delays to those shipments, imposed export controls on all European-made COVID-19 vaccines. But European Commission officials told Canada the controls wouldn’t affect Canada’s shipments. A spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed Canada’s shipments were approved, and that the controls will be used “only in very limited cases.”
This week Anand got confirmation that Pfizer and Moderna had been authorized to send the doses to Canada and the shipments had been sent.
Tuesday afternoon, she received confirmation from the global vaccinesharing initiative known as the COVAX Facility, that Canada would be shipped at least 1.9 million and as many as 3.2 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID19 vaccine by the end of June.
Canada invested $440 million in COVAX last fall, half to secure up to 15 million doses of vaccine for Canada, and half to help buy vaccines for lowand middle-income countries that can’t afford to buy vaccines on their own.
Canada was told of its first allocation in a letter Jan. 30, subject to regulatory approvals and the available supplies of vaccines. The figures were confirmed Tuesday when COVAX shared with Canada a draft document that COVAX planned to publish to its website the next day.
When the document went live Wednesday morning, the higher end of the range had disappeared, and Canada was allocated 1.9 million doses by the end of June, with no mention at all that it could go up to 3.2 million.
Canada is not alone in dealing with a change. Jamaica and the Philippines both published their expected range of deliveries, only to see the COVAX document list the lowest end of the range Wednesday.
Cecely Roy, a spokeswoman for
Anand, said COVAX hasn’t explained why.
With two doses required per person, it could be the difference between vaccinating another half a million Canadians before Canada Day.
Canada is also feeling heat from critics who argue Canada is contributing to vaccine nationalism, using its wealth to buy up vaccine doses privately, and not doing enough to ensure vaccines get distributed equitably worldwide.
International Development Minister Karina Gould said that is why Canada joined COVAX. But Gould balked at the idea that Canada should forego deliveries from COVAX in favour of letting the facility send more doses to the world’s poorest places.
“At this point in time, the idea was always with COVAX that you would have developed countries and developing countries participate so that you would have global buy in and support for the process,” Gould said in a separate interview Tuesday.
Canada is currently the only country in the G7 to accept shipments from COVAX, and one of seven in the G20.
Independent MP Jody Wilson-Raybould, a former Liberal justice minister, expressed shock Wednesday that Canada would take deliveries “from poor countries.”
“How can this be true!” she wrote on Twitter.
Opposition leaders and provincial governments are expressing exasperation at the vaccine rollout.
“We knew over a year ago that the way through this pandemic, one of the key tools we needed to fight this pandemic would be the vaccine,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said.
Trudeau said Tuesday “we knew there would be some hurdles along the way with unpredictability and increased demand for production,” which is why Canada tried to get as many different vaccines purchased as possible.
The Liberals are banking on that effort eventually working, promising repeatedly that all Canadians who want to be will be vaccinated by the end of September.
It has secured 40 million doses each from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which together should be enough to vaccinate everyone. But three more vaccines - from AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson and Novavax - are likely to be approved within the next two or three months, adding another 82 million doses to the pile.
Gould said Canada is still working on a strategy to donate excess doses through COVAX.