No room for error on shots
If things go according to plan, Canadians should very soon start to see pictures of people getting what everyone wants most this year — a vaccination shot to protect them against COVID-19.
In the United States, Britain, Germany, even in Mexico, governments are promising to roll out the first shots as soon as mid-December. By Christmas for sure.
But not in Canada, at least not quite yet. That won’t start happening until at least January, and officials are cautioning that even once it does start the roll-out in this country will be pretty slow.
According to Canada’s deputy chief public health officer, Dr. Howard Njoo, the best estimate is that if all goes well with the two leading vaccine candidates, we should get six million doses in the first quarter of 2021, i.e. by the end of March.
Since everyone will need two shots, that means three million Canadians are expected to be immunized by then. Which will leave some 34 million Canadians, the vast majority, still waiting for a COVID shot as winter rolls into spring.
It’s not hard to foresee that by then, the demand will be tremendous. As eager as people are now for relief from COVID-19 and the restrictions it has imposed on us, think how much more impatient they will be for that “light at the end of the tunnel” four months from now, at the tail end of a long Canadian winter.
All that means governments absolutely must get this right. No doubt there will be hiccups along the way, but any government that comes up short in acquiring, distributing and administering vaccines once they are approved will be mercilessly judged by its citizens — and will deserve to be.
That applies to both the federal and provincial governments. As the months of the pandemic grind on, it’s clear this country’s response has been very uneven. Ottawa can set a tone and roll out whatever money is needed, but it’s up to each province to enact the health policies that make a difference on the ground.
On vaccines, the Trudeau government boasts that it has finalized contracts with five big drug makers and is working on two more to acquire some 358 million vaccine doses for Canadians, what the prime minister calls the “best, most diverse portfolio” in the world.
But this week, he also acknowledged the obvious: That the few countries that actually make the stuff will “obviously” give it to their own people first. Canada will not be right at the head of the line, but neither will most countries.
Nor does Canada have the capacity to manufacture COVID vaccines at home. As Trudeau noted, it used to have that ability but abandoned it over the past couple of decades. The arguments will go on over who should wear the blame for that, but at this point it’s too late to rebuild capacity in time to address this pandemic.
What Canadians need now is assurance that Ottawa, first of all, has a robust plan to actually acquire those vaccines it has contracted for. It must make sure there are no unnecessary delays in approving them for use here, and that the complex logistics are in place to distribute them swiftly and efficiently.
So far, we’ve seen lots of promises on that front but not much detail. Other countries, notably the U.S. and Britain, which has already identified hundreds of local health clinics as COVID injection sites, seem to be way ahead of us.
The provinces, too, must be all over this. The Ontario government this week named Gen. Rick Hillier, a former chief of the defence staff, to chair its vaccine distribution task force. If it takes a military leader to knock heads together and sweep away any obstacles to getting vaccines to the people who need them without delay, then fine. Other provinces should take equally strong measures.
Pandemic response has been bungled regularly by many governments; well-publicized failures in testing and tracing are just the most obvious. But getting vaccines out just as quickly as possible is one area where anything short of outright success simply cannot be an option.