Canada primed for 249,000 doses
Pfizer, BioNTech vaccines to arrive by December’s end
TORONTO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday Canada will get up to 249,000 doses of the vaccine developed by American drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech before the end of December.
The vaccine is expected be approved by Health Canada as soon as Thursday.
Trudeau had come under criticism from opposition parties for saying Canadians won’t be among the first to get a vaccine against covid-19 because the first doses will likely go to citizens of the countries they are made in. Canada doesn’t have mass vaccine-production facilities.
Trudeau said Canada recently amended the contract with Pfizer so that it would deliver up to 249,000 doses this month. That will mean about 124,500 of the highest risk Canadians will get vaccinated at first as two doses are required per person a few weeks apart.
“We are now contracted to receive up to 249,000 of our initial doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s covid-19 vaccine in the month of December,” Trudeau said. “Pending Health Canada approval, the first shipment of doses is tracking for delivery next week.”
Canada has contracts with six other vaccine makers as well.
Trudeau said 14 distribution centers will be located in large Canadian cities initially. There will be one in each province and two each in Canada’s four largest provinces.
He said millions of more doses will be on the way.
“It has been a difficult year, and we are not out of this crisis yet,” Trudeau said. “But now, vaccines are coming.”
Retired Gen. Rick Hillier, who leads the covid-19 Vaccine Distribution Task Force in Canada’s largest province of Ontario, said he expects Ontario to get about 85,000 doses this month for roughly 42,500 people. Hillier said seniors and workers in longterm care homes are among those expected to get the vaccine first.
And he expects Ontario to get at least 1.2 million people vaccinated in the first three months of next year. Ontario has a population 14.5 million.
Additionally, Pfizer and AstraZeneca have applied for emergency use authorization in India, according to the
Press Trust of India, raising the likelihood that mass inoculation efforts could begin within weeks in the country of 1.3 billion people.
Pfizer India has applied to India’s drug regulator for permission to import its experimental mRNA vaccine for sale and distribution without the requirement for local clinical trials, said the Press Trust of India, citing an unidentified official.
Meanwhile, Serum Institute of India Ltd., AstraZeneca’s India vaccine partner, has applied for emergency use authorization using data from Phase III trials that were conducted locally, as well as in Brazil and the U.K., said the Press Trust of India citing unnamed officials.
The applications mean that a mass vaccine effort could be shortly underway in
India, which has the world’s second-largest outbreak after the U.S. and faces significant challenges in distributing inoculation shots across its vast territory. Pfizer’s shot requires deep-freeze storage and transportation, which rules it out for much of the country’s sprawling hinterland. But its extraordinary efficacy of over 90% means that the nation’s well-to-do elite will likely clamor for access.
Separately, South Korea’s health minister said Monday that the Seoul metropolitan area is now a “covid-19 war zone,” as the country reported another 615 new infections and the virus appeared to be spreading faster.
The country has recorded more than 5,300 new infections in the past 10 days and Monday was the 30th day in a row of triple-digit daily jumps.
Most of the new infections were detected in the Seoul metropolitan area where health workers are struggling to stem transmissions tied to various places, including restaurants, schools, hospitals and longterm care facilities.
“The capital area is now a covid-19 war zone,” Health Minister Park Neung-hoo said in a virus meeting, pleading for citizen vigilance.
He said the country may have to further increase social distancing to prevent the resurgence in the capital area from “exploding into a major outbreak nationwide and collapsing the health-care system.”
While South Korea managed to contain a major outbreak in its southeastern region in spring by channeling nationwide health resources and personnel, it’s less clear where the reinforcements will come if the virus wreaks havoc in the densely-populated capital area, where half of the country’s 51 million people live.