Vaccines waiting in freezers for rollout
Pressure on provinces to speed up inoculations
OTTAWA • Canada’s COVID19 vaccines are hitting a bottleneck with provincial governments, which have stockpiled more than three times the number of doses they have administered.
The federal government has delivered 420,450 doses of COVID vaccine, split between the Pfizer and Moderna candidates, but only 117,768 doses have reached the arms of health-care workers, long-term care residents and other priority groups. The rest is still in storage freezers across the country, according to a report Monday from the COVID-19 Canada Open Data group, a joint project between researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph.
Isha Berry, a PHD candidate in epidemiology at the University of Toronto and one of the researchers leading the project, said there is definitely a significant gap between what provinces have received and what they have delivered.
Berry said it is hard to be sure what is causing the delays, but the federal government had initially said vaccines would arrive in January, before reaching agreements to receive some doses in December.
“Canada hadn’t anticipated getting vaccines until sort of 2021, so they came a bit early,” she said.
Ontario faced criticism after slowing its vaccination campaign over the holidays to give health- care staff a break. Retired general Rick Hillier, who is overseeing Ontario’s rollout, apologized, admitting it had been a mistake.
Berry said January will be the real test of what provinces can do.
“What will be more telling is seeing what happens the next couple of weeks, the holiday season has passed, as things are ramping up and getting back into normal swing,” she said. “That’s when we’ll be able to better see how well- oiled the machine is to deliver these vaccines.”
On Monday, Ontario began administering the second shot to those healthcare workers who received the first doses of the vaccine last month. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses for a person to be fully vaccinated.
Premier Doug Ford, who was present as the five workers received their shots, acknowledged there have been “a few bumps in the road” in the province’s immunization campaign but said he is confident in Hillier’s plan.
“We’re ramping it up and you’re going to see a significant difference over the next few weeks,” the premier said.
In total as of Sunday, Ontario received 148,350 doses and administered 37,551, Quebec received 88,075 and administered 28,762, Alberta has been shipped 46,150, but put just 17,244 doses into arms and B. C. received 54,625 doses, while administering just 17,510.
Late Monday, a spokesperson for the Ontario ministry of Health said they had administered nearly 50,000 vaccines as of the end of Monday and they expected to be through their available doses within a few days.
The Pfizer vaccine had gone to hospital and longterm care workers and the spokesperson said they would be using the Moderna vaccine to reach long- term care residents.
Last week, Maj.- Gen. Dany Fortin, who is overseeing the federal distribution effort, said the government expected 124,000 more Pfizer doses to be delivered this week, and 208,000 doses per week for the rest of January, along with an additional 170,000 doses of Moderna’s vaccine due in January.
Fortin said by the end of the month he expected Canada would cumulatively have received 1.2 million doses, enough to fully vaccinate 600,000 people.
The government expects to receive six million doses in the first three months of this year, followed by a significant ramp-up that would allow Canada to vaccinate everyone who wants a vaccine by September.
Health Minister Patty Hajdu was unavailable Monday, but last week said she expects provinces will step up and get the vaccines out, because the public will demand it.
“It’s Canadians that expect that we get on with vaccinations quickly as possible,” she said. “Every day that we delay, in fact, is another risk for a person in a long- term care home, for a person who works in a longterm care home facility, or other people that are connected to those folks.”
As of Sunday evening, Canada had seen just over 600,000 cases of the virus and more than 15,000 deaths. Hospitals and ICUS across the country were also starting to feel the strain with some provinces seeing levels of new cases higher than at any point in the pandemic.