After a dismal start, vaccine rollout looks ... even more dismal
Vaccinating Ontarians against COVID -19 is the most important challenge the Ford government will face this year and, one would have thought, one of the most straightforward.
There aren’t that many moving parts. Federal government buys vaccine. Federal government distributes vaccine to province. Provincial government determines vaccine priorities and distributes vaccine to inoculation sites. People get vaccinated.
Vaccinating the majority of the adult population of a province as large as Ontario is a significant logistical task, but both governments have had months to figure this out. Despite that, progress so far is dismal, and Ontarians haven’t been given a clear message on who will get the vaccine and when.
Start with the federal government. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chastised provincial governments this week for being too slow to administer the limited vaccine supply his government has procured. He should be glad they haven’t gone faster. The slow provincial pace has somewhat masked the severe vaccine shortage facing the country. As of Monday, Canada has received about 424,000 doses of vaccine, with 148,000 doses going to Ontario. Considering that each person requires two doses, that’s a ridiculously small number.
Premier Doug Ford said Wednesday that Ontario could run out of the Pfizer vaccine this week and will have used all of the Moderna vaccine by Friday of next week. The premier was echoing a point made earlier in the day by Retired Gen. Rick Hillier, who heads the provincial vaccination effort.
It’s fair to say that a speedier vaccination program from the provincial government would just have meant that Ontario ran out of vaccine more quickly, but the
Ford government shouldn’t get off that easily. A media briefing earlier this week with the main bureaucratic players in the vaccine rollout revealed a plan that is less than half- formed and already mired in complexity.
The good news is the plan shows that the provincial vaccination team has visualized the entire month of January and hopes to vaccinate all long- term- care residents by about January 21. Other priority groups include health- care workers, retirement home residents and Aboriginal people. After that, well, who knows?
The provincial approach reveals the typical bureaucratic fascination with process rather than progress. The media were informed at some length of the unique challenges of developing a “risk matrix” to determine which health- care workers get the vaccination first. Who cares? Give it to them all. Indigenous people are a priority, but they won’t be inoculated until a broad engagement takes place, leading to a “culturally appropriate” vaccination program.
The province’s vaccination bureaucrats are relying on 18
hospitals to deliver inoculations. As the month goes on, a few more hospitals and a couple of public health units will be added. These are the organizations the bureaucrats are comfortable dealing with.
There was vague mention of physicians, pharmacists and paramedics helping at some future date, but in a tone that suggests the bureaucracy considers these folks well- meaning community volunteers rather than professionals.
Curiously, the information the key vaccination bureaucrats doled out this week was considerably less detailed than what Hillier released last week. Who’s in charge?
Whether it’s politicians or bureaucrats, there seems to be little sense of the speed with which vaccination will have to proceed if it is to be done this year. Wednesday,
Ford said the province was vaccinating 10,000 people a day, like that was a pretty good clip. At that rate, Ontario will be able to give every resident two doses of vaccine in just eight years.
The provincial government is confident that it can pick up the pace. About 350,000 additional doses of vaccine are expected this month and the government says it will use all of them and could use more. If so, that will mean that more than 200,000 Ontarians will have received two doses of vaccine. It’s a very modest start.
Hillier says the province hopes to vaccinate 8.5 million Ontarians by the start of July, if vaccine is available. That’s the story that Ford should be talking about.
The provincial government has been so slow to flesh out its plans that at least one public health unit
has gotten well out in front. Ottawa Public Health has already released a plan to vaccinate 134,400 Ottawans monthly at four public sites, as soon as sufficient vaccine is available. That’s exactly the kind of detail the public should be seeing in every community.
If Ontario hits the 8.5-million vaccination target, the province will be well on the road to safety by summer. Anything less is unacceptable. Both Ford and Trudeau are facing elections in the not- too- distant future. Voters will judge them on how they managed the vaccination program. Surely that prospect will spur them on, if nothing else does.