Vaccine delay a chance to get rollout right this time

Ten months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Ontario finds itself trailing in the race to vaccinate its population. It was back in the summer that we heard about the first vaccinations being trialled. Unfortunately, to this day, our federal and provincial governments have not clearly articulated an effective rollout plan.

Up until last week, Ontario was vaccinating at a rate of less than 15,000 people a day. The plan is to increase this rate, but we must ask why the priority wasn’t to ramp up from the very beginning. It was only on Dec. 4 that Ontario established a Vaccine Distribution Task Force to oversee the delivery, storage and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. This task force is comprised of a multidisciplinary team who are experts in their own field to “provide invaluable insight to help the government make evidencebased decisions to protect the health and safety of Canadians during this pandemic.”

The difficulties in choosing priorities over the vaccine are incommensurable. Although such decisions having been rendered, many of our front-line workers and family doctors are still waiting for their turn to receive the shot — while many others who aren’t performing front-line duties have jumped the queue.

The choice of who to prioritize is difficult, to say the least. But even more grim are the discussions currently taking place in hospitals across the province about triaging. Once ICU capacity is reached, who will get a respirator and who won’t? Who will be given the chance to live and who will be left untreated?

For doctors who took the Hippocratic Oath, “do no harm” were not just words they uttered at their graduation, but a principle most live by. To ask a doctor to simply pull the plug without their patient’s consent is not just ethically challenging, but also morally wrong. Doctors are now talking about a mass casualty triage process where one will need to choose who will have a better chance of survival.

Those who don’t will be left to die, often alone. This all stems from lack of resources and poor planning on the government’s part. Years of inadequate investment in one of our most important institutions have culminated in this treacherous situation.

The new vaccines certainly bring a glimmer of hope and light at the end of this dark tunnel. Unfortunately, we are moving down the tracks at a snail’s pace. We should have been more prepared. The vaccination rollout is just too slow. They had a full six months to plan.

This is a crisis! Not a single dose of vaccine should be sitting unused for days in a freezer. Each vaccine is potentially a life saved. A mother, a father, a brother or a sister who will be celebrating one more birthday, one more anniversary, one more Christmas with their loved ones.

The sooner these vaccines get into people’s arms, the faster people become immune and safe. If and when the vaccine supply substantially increases, the province must be ready to administer the doses at record speed, so that not one dose sits unused.

The Ontario Medical Association compiled a list of physicians willing to help 24/7 with the rollout. Pharmacists have also expressed interest in helping to speed up the process. People are willing to go for their shot anytime, day and night. The U.S. has started drive-thru vaccine clinics and will be opening large centres, including at Disneyland, to vaccinate large numbers. Our province can and must do better. We must establish a process now to contact people when it’s their turn.

The delay in the production of the Pfizer vaccine is a second chance for the province to start over and demonstrate true leadership through a flawless vaccination rollout. Once more supplies finally arrive, expectations are immense that mass vaccination will take place at unprecedented rates.

Anything less than that will be considered an utter failure. And this is in addition to the incredible failure wrought by the feeble sourcing of vaccines up until this point, which has undoubtedly cost Ontario significant loss of life and delayed the easing of restrictions that have choked off society.