Canada negotiating contracts to secure COVID-19 booster shots for next year
OTTAWA
Canada’s procurement minister says she is in the midst of negotiating new vaccine contracts to nail down supplies of vaccine booster shots if they’re needed next year.
“We are actively planning for 2022,” Anita Anand said in a recent interview with The Canadian Press.
She said Canada’s first priority remains getting doses now, and while the country remains well behind the United States, United Kingdom and several other countries, its vaccination pace has picked up significantly in the last month.
Canada expects to get every adult vaccinated fully - with both doses of the PfizerBioNTech, Moderna or Oxford Astra Ze ne ca vaccines or one shot of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson - by the end of September at the latest.
Teenagers likely will be vaccinated by then as well, but vaccines for kids under 12 aren’t expected to be authorized until at least the fall.
Still, many experts believe additional booster shots are going to be necessary, either to remind the immune system what it needs to do, or protect against some new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Most of Canada’s current vaccine suppliers are already testing new versions against variants, including Pfizer and Moderna.
Health Canada has initiated a plan to authorize boosters without the same extensive testing required to approve the original vaccines, similar to how flu shots are authorized each year after being adjusted for the new strain of flu virus believed to be dominant.
Canada has already purchased 117.6 million doses of the four vaccines authorized, which could fully vaccinate all Canadians once, and about half the population twice.
Another 124 million doses would be available if Canada approves vaccines from Nova vax, Medic ago or San ofiGlaxo Smith Kline.
And there are options for up to 180 million additional doses, though some of those have already expired.
Anand said getting booster shots isn’t as simple as just extending existing contracts.
“In some cases, we are amending contracts, in other cases, we are negotiating additional contracts,” she said. “So it is very intense at the current time in terms of planning for the 2022 buy.
But the key is to make sure we have the flexibility in place in our contracts to ensure that we can have the doses needed for 2022 and beyond.”
She said Canada could also seek vaccines outside of the existing suppliers, if that is recommended by the national task force advising the government on what vaccines to go after.
Most of those talks will still require Canada to import vaccines made elsewhere. Medicago plans to make some doses in Canada, and Novavax is signed up to make up to two million doses a month at a National Research Council facility in Montreal, starting late this year or early in 2022.
Being 100 per cent reliant on imports has hurt Canada’s vaccine program thus far. All the suppliers have said Canada asked them to make doses domestically, but they didn’t think Canada had the facilities available to do it quickly enough.