Canada to donate 17.7M AZ shots

OTTAWA — The federal government announced Monday it will donate 17.7 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, and asked Canadians to give their own money to help poorer countries get needles into arms.

Procurement Minister Anita Anand said after talking to provinces, it was determined these COVID-19 doses were excess supply, as demand for this vaccine had been met.

She says the AstraZeneca doses to be donated were supposed to flow into Canada through an advanced purchase agreement and be produced in the United States. Anand says the shots will be made available to lower-income countries through the global vaccine-sharing alliance COVAX.

National Advisory Committee on Immunization says mRNA vaccines, such as the ones by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, are preferred over the viral-vector vaccines produced by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, even for people who received AstraZeneca as a first dose.

Viral-vector vaccines are associated with a rare but sometimes fatal blood-clotting disorder, which was found to occur in one in 60,000 AstraZeneca recipients in Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was among the Canadians who got AstraZeneca for his first dose and Moderna for his second. While at the G7 last month, Trudeau pledged Canada would give back 13 million doses it was set to receive through a contract with COVAX, on top of millions of dollars already set aside for the global vaccine effort.

Canada is on track to receive 68 million doses by the end of July, which would be enough to inoculate most Canadians.

At Monday's announcement, Anand says 44 million doses of Moderna and 51 million shots from Pfizer-BioNTech are expected to have arrived in the country by the end of September. With a population of nearly 38 million people, Canada would need about 76 million shots of two-dose vaccines to make sure everyone is vaccinated.

It's unclear when, or if, Canadians will need to get a third dose of vaccine. Pfizer said recently it has seen a dip in antibodies in Israel six months after vaccination and intends to ask the U.S. and Europe to approve giving a booster shot.

Few people in this country would hit six months fully vaccinated until closer to the end of the year.

Health Canada and the federal public health agency issued a joint statement last Friday saying the duration of protection from COVID-19 vaccines is still being studied but current data "shows good immunity in most people out to 9 months after receiving 2 vaccine doses.”