Canadians deserve answers on COVID-19 vaccine shortage.
Right now, Canada isn’t receiving shipments of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. So as Parliament resumes today, the questions before elected officials are what led to this shortage, and how do we fix it?
Pfizer itself is an easy target to direct the blame at. Its recent decision to upgrade one of its facilities in order to produce a higher volume of the vaccine has resulted in lower amounts of the vaccine being delivered in the next few weeks.
It would be quite easy to explain away Canada’s shortage on this circumstance. But the situation is more complicated and deserves more scrutiny.
It would be one thing if other countries were experiencing similar extreme shortages that we are. The reality is Canadians are watching people in other countries get vaccines — from both Pfizer and other companies — while they don’t. France is receiving 520,000 units per week in spite of Pfizer’s announcement. Spain is receiving 370,000 of the same. The united Kingdom has approved the easier to store and distribute Astrazeneca vaccine and has begun to deliver it to its population.
And companies that produce the vaccine were warning countries back in december that they were going to be experiencing challenges associated with the scale up of production. This fact was extensively reported, as was news that the united States government was willing to put up millions of dollars to fast track these upgrades and speed up vaccine production capacity. Our federal government would have been aware of this situation.
Even if the Liberals somehow missed this, logic should have prevailed in making plans. The COVID-19 vaccine is an entirely new product for many companies. Even for experienced biomanufacturing companies like Pfizer, this was always going to require a serious investment of capital and infrastructure. Pfizer, Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies are to the fight against COVID-19 what General Motors and rollsroyce were to the Second World War. And they didn’t go from producing sedans to outfitting the entire Allied war effort overnight.
Bottom line, production delays shouldn’t have been unforeseen, and should have been accounted for by the federal government during negotiations, and in its instructions to the provinces as it pertains to making plans for delivery.
Expectations with the public should have also been better managed. But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now learning that it’s hard to fudge your way through a promise made in a situation where a tangible product that every Canadian needs to have just isn’t there.
The reality is that every time complications with the government’s vaccine strategy have come up, the prime minister has tried to deflect the blame to someone else. He tried to blame the Opposition when he suggested that it was wrong for us to ask questions about his procurement strategy. Then he suggested it was because Canada didn’t have manufacturing capacity, blaming that on previous governments, but that excuse didn’t hold water, either. Israel lacks capacity, too, and placed its Pfizer orders later than Canada did, but has vaccinated more than four times as many people than Canada. So, running out of options, the next easiest and most available scapegoat for Trudeau could easily be the companies that manufacture them.
That said, maybe Canada’s vaccine shortage is Pfizer’s fault, and they’ve reneged on the terms of their contract. But right now we have no way of knowing, and subsequently no way of knowing if remedy is available to us or how to fix the broader problem of the shortage. For that matter, we have no clue what terms the Liberals negotiated with any vaccine manufacturer. And, last year Trudeau went as far as to have his minister of procurement make the claim that releasing this information would prevent Canada from getting the vaccine at all.
This lack if information also means we have no idea what the Liberals are banking on regarding other currently unapproved vaccine candidates when it comes to whether or not their promise of vaccinating every Canadian by September is remotely feasible. We need more information, and a plan to overcome the shortage, now.
Everyone wants the Liberals to succeed in getting vaccines to Canadians. Millions of Canadians are suffering both from COVID-19 and the devastating impact of lockdowns, and our case count is still climbing.
As Parliament returns, Canadians can get their questions about the vaccine shortage posed to the federal government. This can’t come fast enough.