Ottawa approves AstraZeneca vaccine

Government expects to receive another 23.9 million shots before end of September,

OTTAWA—Marking a significant boost to its supply drive for COVID-19 vaccines, the federal government now expects to receive another 23.9 million shots before the end of September after Health Canada approved the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and researchers at Oxford University.

The additional doses are enough to fully vaccinate almost 12 million people, and could mean Canada obtains enough shots for its entire population before the government’s end-of-September deadline, Health Minister Patty Hajdu said Friday.

While the government expects to receive 500,000 AstraZeneca shots before the end of March, it still needs to determine the precise delivery schedule for the remaining 23.4 million new shots it says will mostly come from facilities in the United States, as well as from South Korea and India.

“It possibly could accelerate sort of our targets and our goals,” Hajdu said of the new doses now that AstraZeneca is approved.

But she added that there “could be bumps in the road,” pointing to how production issues at manufacturing facilities in Europe delayed hundreds of thousands of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines from arriving in Canada over the past six weeks.

The federal health department approved the AstraZeneca shot on Friday, along with the version of the same vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.

After recently speaking to India’s prime minister about accessing COVID-19 shots produced there, Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand said Canada will now receive two million doses of the AstraZeneca shot produced by the Serum Institute, with 500,000 of them arriving “in the coming days.”

On top of that, Canada had already ordered 20 million doses of the AstraZeneca shot that will be manufactured in the United States, and pulled 1.9 million doses of the same vaccine from the COVAX facility, an international initiative meant to pool resources to ensure fair access to coronavirus shots around the world.

Those shots are expected to arrive between April and the end of September, but Anand said the government still needs to sort out the precise delivery schedule.

Canada is now set to receive 107.9 million doses of approved vaccines by the end of September, enough to give the required two doses to almost 54 million people.

The Canadian population is about 38 million.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford said the approval of AstraZeneca

is “absolutely great news,” but officials said it’s too early to say how it might improve the timelines in a vaccination plan revealed earlier this week for residents aged 60 and up between now and July.

Ontario is expecting to more than double its daily vaccinations to 50,000 shots by next week, said retired general Rick Hillier, who heads Ontario’s vaccine distribution task force. If any AstraZeneca doses arrive, they could increase the pace.

Ontario has been criticized for a lack of detail and speed in getting a vaccination program up and running, with an online booking portal and telephone hotline not slated to be ready until March 15, and shots for adults 80 and up starting the third week of March.

Bookings are slated to open for Ontarians 75 and over on April 15, on May 1 for people in their early 70s, on June 1 for those 65 and over, and on July 1 for those 60 and older.

Speaking earlier about the newly approved AstraZeneca shot, Health Canada chief medical officer Supriya Sharma said the vaccine is a “good option” to protect against the deadly coronavirus, even though the department concluded it is 62 per cent effective at preventing COVID-19 infections.

That’s less than the Pfizer and Moderna shots, which the World Health Organization says have effectiveness rates of more than 90 per cent.

But Sharma said evidence Health Canada reviewed indicates the AstraZeneca shot prevents deaths and hospitalizations from severe cases of COVID-19, and that its effectiveness rate is in line with that of typical flu vaccines.

The AstraZeneca shot has already been approved in more than 50 countries, including the United Kingdom, India, Australia and the European Union.