Can’t afford more stumbles on vaccination

Just before Christmas, the Trudeau government pulled off a coup: it arranged for the first COVID vaccines to be administered in this country weeks ahead of schedule.

It was a joyous moment, a shaft of light in the pandemic gloom. For the government, it fulfilled the first rule of political management — under-promise and over-deliver.

Seven weeks later, though, the vaccine rollout is running into the sand. Vaccines are arriving late, or not being delivered at all. We’re falling further and further down the chart of countries racing to inoculate their people. The government’s credibility is fraying. It turns out that when it came to the crunch, it over-promised and is under-delivering.

The government insists it will still hit the big targets it has set out publicly. First, to vaccinate three million Canadians by the end of March. Then, to make sure every person who wants a shot will get one by the end of September.

We should all hope the current problems are temporary stumbles, and the government does indeed meet those targets, which by comparison with similar countries are decidedly modest.

But right now public patience is running out, and for good reason. Week by week we are falling further behind and the distance we have to go to catch up gets larger and larger. The delays in delivery of vaccine doses from Pfizer-BioNTech have been well publicized. And this week deliveries from

Moderna, the only other company with a vaccine approved for use in Canada, were cut by up to 25 per cent — and there’s a big question mark over the next scheduled delivery later this month.

What’s worse, the man in charge of vaccine logistics, Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, now admits that “we do not have visibility at this time” for delivery of Moderna doses in March. That’s management-speak for “we don’t have a clue what’s going to happen” — and it makes it impossible for the provinces to plan how and when to get needles into arms. Rick Hillier, Ontario’s vaccine czar, says flatly: “We’ve lost confidence in the supply chain.”

The result of the delays is there for all to see in the international comparisons of which countries are managing to protect their people quickly, and which ones are failing.

The leaders are Israel, which as of Thursday had vaccinated 60.4 per cent of its population with at least one dose. Then the United Arab Emirates (36 per cent); Britain (15.5 per cent) and the United States (10.2 per cent). Canada trailed far behind, at just 2.63 per cent.

Seen another way, out of the 32 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called developed countries we like to compare ourselves with, Canada ranks a dismal 24th in vaccine doses administered per capita. Behind the likes of Poland, Romania, Estonia and Turkey.

That’s a terrible performance, and it’s even worse given we were about 10th a couple of weeks ago. We aren’t making progress; in fact, we’re slipping backwards.

This is a political problem for the Liberal government, but more to the point it’s an enormous problem for all of us. There won’t be any normality until a critical number of people are vaccinated and we’ve got COVID under control.

We know the problems, at least in broad outline. Canada let its domestic capacity for vaccine production wither over the past several decades, and only this week did Ottawa roll out a plan to rebuild it. But that won’t kick in until the end of the year, at the earliest, so we have no choice but to wait for others to deliver the vaccines the government contracted for last year.

Could the government have done better on that front? It certainly should have tried. Britain built capacity starting last year and is now ready to produce doses for its own population. Australia contracted with AstraZeneca to produce its yet-tobe-approved vaccine in Melbourne as early as next month.

Could Canada have done something similar? Tonda MacCharles and Alex Ballingall of the Star report that a Calgary company, Providence Therapeutics, says it was ready to develop a made-in-Canada vaccine last spring but was frustrated by lack of timely support from Ottawa.

At the same time, Procurement Minister Anita Anand said this week that the government asked the companies it reached deals with if they would license production of their vaccines in Canada, but all said no. The issue was the facilities available in this country but it begs the question: if Australia could figure this out, why couldn’t we?

Another question: did the government screw up its negotiations with Pfizer, Moderna and other vaccine makers? The contracts it signed reportedly commit the companies to delivering only on a quarterly schedule, allowing them to skimp on deliveries right now — resulting in the current vaccine drought that is so frustrating to Canadians.

We should know more about those contracts. The U.S., European Union and Israel have all released some details of their agreements with manufacturers, despite confidentiality provisions, and Canada should do the same. Are there, for example, any penalties for failing to meet delivery targets?

This is indeed the winter of our pandemic discontent. Canadians have sacrificed much for many months, and they rightly expect their leaders to get it right. If the Trudeau government keeps stumbling on this front there will be hell to pay — and the government will deserve it.

It turns out that when it came to the crunch, the government over-promised

Canada is slipping backward in getting the vaccine to residents. That’s not just a health problem. That’s a political problem for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.