From whiskey to hand sanitizer

B.C. distillery changes direction to supply hospitals

Health-care staff at Vancouver General Hospital are grateful for their new supply of hand sanitizer, even though it smells more like a cocktail lounge than an operating room.

“When it first arrived, I saw people sniffing their hands and laughing. It smells like whiskey,” anesthesiologist Dr. Neil Ramsay joked.

“We have to tell our patients we haven’t had a morning drink. It is just the hand sanitizer.”

The free donation of 2,000 litres of hand sanitizer came from Shelter Point Distillery on Vancouver Island, which has pivoted from its usual production of fine whiskey to making this crucial hygiene product for some front-line organizations.

Ramsay said this is one of several examples he has seen during the COVID-19 pandemic of local companies offering products or materials to aid the health care system.

“All these businesses are losing so much money. Despite that they want to help,” he said.

Ramsay sits on a VGH committee that monitors supplies during the pandemic, and learned from their distributor that hand sanitizer stocks were low. He began to worry in mid-March that VGH could run out.

“We use hand sanitizer a lot, and our use for that was going up rapidly,” he said.

He reached out to his friend Chris Nelson, the owner of Pacific Sands Beach Resort in Tofino, who was an investor in Shelter Point. Within 48 hours, the hand sanitizer was delivered by the Campbell River distillery to the Vancouver hospital.

“It was phenomenal,” Ramsay said.

The distillery has paused making spirits, and Nelson and his wife, who live in Vancouver, donated $25,000 in March so it could instead produce hand sanitizer, which has now been donated to Victoria General Hospital, the Salvation Army in the Downtown Eastside, and VGH.

“We’d like to be producing spirits, but are trying to do our part given the moment we are all in,” said Nelson.

Nelson closed his resort in mid-March and offered the empty rooms to Tofino hospital health care workers who need to self-isolate from their families.