Advocates call on provinces to vaccinate long-term care residents and workers faster

Experts who advocate for improvements to long-term care in Canada say the provinces need to move faster to vaccinate residents and the people who look after them.

Canada’s overall vaccination rollout is being questioned with more than 420,000 doses now received, but only about one-quarter of those injected.

And long-term-care residents, who have paid the heaviest price for the pandemic and were to be at the front of the line, have had to wait in most provinces because the first vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech was deemed too fragile to distribute outside major hospitals, at least at first.

“It’s another tragedy,” said Doris Grinspun, CEO of the Registered

Nurses Association of Ontario.

“The reality is all the excuses used for not doing them first are just that, excuses.”

Quebec is the only province that selected two long-term-care homes as the first sites to receive and inject the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. All other provinces went with major hospitals, and two other priority groups, frontline hospital staff and long-term-care workers, were the first recipients.

Grinspun was among several longterm-care experts and advocates who participated in a virtual town hall hosted by Green party Leader Annamie Paul Monday afternoon. All of them said getting long-term-care residents vaccinated as quickly as possible is critical to ending the ongoing outbreaks that have killed more than 10,000 long-term care residents in Canada since last March.

There are about 425,000 people living in long-term care and retirement homes in Canada, or about 1.2 per cent of the total population. But residents in the homes account for 10 per cent of Canada’s total COVID-19 cases and 72 per cent of deaths.

Among two dozen of the world’s wealthiest nations, only Australia had a higher percentage, at 75 per cent. However Australia’s total death toll from COVID-19 is 908. Canada’s is now close to 16,000.

Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said there is no data yet showing specifically who received the first 120,000 vaccine doses.

But Sinha says in Ontario alone, there are more than 72,000 long-termcare residents and about 100,000 staff, and that province has administered about 42,000 doses total out of more than 148,000 doses now received.

“Frankly, we’ve had 21 days to start getting these vaccinations, rolling at a quick pace, because as soon as we vaccinate people, we’re saving lives,” he said. “And vaccines do nothing to help anybody when they’re sitting in the freezer. So we actually have an opportunity to even get ourselves out of this pandemic sooner and end this nightmare.”