Pfizer to rush Canadian vaccine order, PM says

Country is now on track to receive 84M doses of various vaccines by fall

OTTAWA—Nine million doses of COVID-19 vaccine — enough to inoculate 4.5 million people — will arrive in Canada months earlier than expected, after the federal government clinched faster shipments from PfizerBioNTech, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday.

Following weeks of delays and accusations of failure from opposition parties, Trudeau said Canada is now on pace to receive 84 million doses of approved vaccines within the next seven months, bolstering his claim that everyone in the country will be able to get one by the end of September.

Canada was previously expecting about 71 million doses from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna by then, and nine million doses of the Pfizer vaccine were set to arrive in the last three months of the year.

But now Pfizer has agreed to push those later doses earlier. The government said Friday 2.8 million of them will now come between April and the end of June, and 6.2 million will arrive between July and the end of September.

Trudeau said Ottawa has also purchased another 4 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, boosting the country’s total order from that company to 44 million doses — all set to arrive by the end of September, the prime minister said.

That means Canada should now receive 84 million doses by then, more than enough to have the required two doses for the entire population of about 38 million people.

“That’s part of the reason why we can say with confidence that everyone who wants a vaccine in Canada will get one by the end of September,” Trudeau said outside his official residence at Rideau Cottage.

Christina Antoniou, Pfizer Canada’s director of corporate affairs, confirmed the faster delivery for the Star. “Pfizer and BioNTech are working relentlessly to support the further rollout of the vaccination campaigns worldwide, and this is part of our efforts to deliver the vaccine to Canadians as quickly as possible,” she wrote by email on Friday.

Canada remains far behind countries leading the global race to inoculate populations against COVID-19. According to Friday’s rankings from Our World in Data, an Oxford University initiative tracking vaccination statistics worldwide, Canada trailed 40 countries — including G7 peers United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy — in shots administered per 100 people.

Several of those countries are making vaccines within their own borders. But Canada was forced to order vaccines produced in other countries, after — according to Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand has said — manufacturers declined to licence them for production in Canada because the country lacks the capacity to build them.

This opened up Canada to delayed vaccine shipments through the winter, as both Pfizer and Moderna dealt with production issues at their European facilities and slashed deliveries to Canada by hundreds of thousands of doses in January and February. It also raised questions about the reliability of Canada’s COVID shot supply, after the European Union imposed export controls to monitor vaccine exports from bloc countries.

In a statement to the Star on Friday, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole repeated his party’s criticisms of the government’s vaccine efforts, but did not specify what he would do differently.

“We know that every single day that the Liberals fail to address the delays in vaccines and cancelled deliveries, Canadian businesses continue to shutter, and families are forced to be apart,” O’Toole said.

“Canada needs the government to succeed in getting COVID-19 vaccines, that’s why Canada’s Conservatives will continue to advocate for greater transparency and a real plan to get needles in the arms of Canadians.”

Trudeau said Friday that the government has confirmed with Pfizer that its shipments will increase over the coming weeks so that the company fulfils its agreement to send 4 million doses to Canada before the end of March. He also said the government continues to “get assurances from Moderna” that they will also send the 1.3 million doses remaining in their order of 2 million for the first quarter of the year.

Speaking to reporters later in the day, Anand also revealed for the first time that Canada’s supply of 20 million AstraZeneca vaccines will come from a manufacturing facility in the U.S. The company signed a manufacturing partnership with a firm in Maryland last June.

Canada has also pulled 1.9 million AstraZeneca doses from the international COVAX stockpile that will be manufactured in South Korea.

Officials from Health Canada said earlier this week that they are in the “final stages” of their review of that vaccine, which is already in use in the U.K. and elsewhere.

In early December, then-U.S. president Donald Trump signed an order that would give Americans priority access to vaccines made in the U.S. Asked whether that could prevent Canada from getting its AstraZeneca vaccines, Anand said she believes it doesn’t apply to direct contracts between vaccine-makers and other countries.

“Our understanding is that doses that are subject to a contract between a supplier and another jurisdiction, those doses are able to leave the United States,” she said.

Anand also confirmed she is in “ongoing discussions” to purchase more vaccines with the Serum Institute of India, which signed a contract last year to make 1 billion doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine for “low- and middle-income countries.”

“Everyone who wants a vaccine in Canada will get one by the end of September.”

PM JUSTIN TRUDEAU