Doses run short at city’s new clinic,
Facility, which was meant to be open for six weeks, to shut after five days
Toronto’s highly publicized COVID-19 vaccination clinic, which opened Monday morning at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, will close on Friday due to a shortage of the Pfizer vaccine caused by production issues in Europe, said the head of the city’s Immunization Task Force on Monday.
“We have been advised by the province that we will only be able to operate this proof-of-concept clinic for an initial five days, due to the lack of availability of the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Toronto Fire Chief Matthew Pegg, who also leads the city’s emergency operations.
Pegg was speaking at Monday’s regularly scheduled COVID-19 update from city hall, alongside Mayor John Tory and Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health.
Pegg said that the province had only approved a clinic in Toronto that would administer 250 doses of the vaccine daily, to health-care workers, because that is how many vaccines the province felt it could reliably deliver. It was meant to operate for six weeks.
The clinic was launched as a so-called proof-of-concept facility, to be studied and used a blueprint for other clinics, in preparation for mass immunizations in less than three months.
“As anyone knows who may have been watching the NFL playoffs over the last few days, you need a good playbook, it is the only way to win,” Tory said.
The MTCC location is the country’s first non-hospital-operated vaccination clinic. A hospital-operated clinic in York Region was opened in early January in a recreation centre and 1,000 health-care workers were vaccinated on its first day in operation.
“We now know that the delivery schedule for the Pfizer vaccine has been slowed by the need to retool Pfizer’s principal vaccine production facility,” de Villa said.
“I can tell you that even with the best plans, there are bumps along the road. We should all prepare ourselves, mentally and emotionally, for those bumps.”
She said deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine are expected to catch up through February and
March, in time for the planned launch in April of mass vaccination operations.
Additionally, Health Canada is reviewing data on the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and the federal health minister said recently that a decision on the AstraZeneca vaccine is in the near future, de Villa said.
At a board of health meeting earlier in the day, de Villa said that at current rates of infection in Toronto, the number of COVID-19 patients could swamp ICU capabilities before the end of January.
The reproductive rate is currently at 1.01, meaning the outbreak remains growing locally because one person with the virus will, on average, infect more than one other person. The reproductive rate needs to be at 1.0 for the situation to be considered stable and at less than 1.0 for it to begin dying down.
This is despite the fact that mobile phone data from the week ending Jan. 9 shows residents seemed to be responding to public health appeals to remain indoors — they are staying home at levels close to March 2020 lockdown levels, de Villa said.
“It will take time to bring this down,” she said, referring to the reproductive rate, adding that there is a lag between new behaviours and infection rates.
De Villa said it’s too early to say how school closures may have contributed to the improved data.
Tory said he has also asked for an analysis of the city’s traffic data, for additional detail on the impact of stay-at-home measures.
Pegg said everyone who gets the first dose of the vaccine at the MTCC this week will be able to get a second dose.
It only took one day to identify weaknesses in the system — according to Pegg and a press release from the City of Toronto, some people who did not qualify for a vaccine at the MTCC were able to register for one.
The city has since added additional checks and verifications to the process.
In all, 77,327 Toronto residents have been diagnosed with the virus and 2,206 have died, according to de Villa.