Will Canada approve a first-dose-first strategy now that Astrazeneca is approved?
500,000 doses expected to arrive next week
OTTAWA • Canada’s fledgling vaccine effort got another shot in the arm Friday with the approval of Astrazeneca’s COVID vaccine and an announcement the first doses would arrive next week.
Health Canada approved Astrazeneca’s vaccine, which was developed with Oxford University in the United Kingdom, is the third candidate behind Pfizer and Moderna’s to get regulatory approval in Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced Canada would get an additional two million doses of the vaccine and the company pledged the first 500,000 doses would arrive next week.
“With a vaccine now approved in Canada. Our first shipments of half a million of these doses will arrive within weeks. Remaining doses are scheduled for delivery over the next couple of months,” he said.
Astrazeneca’s vaccine is less complex to manufacture than the other candidates and is being produced in several sites around the world. The Serum Institute in India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, has a special license to create its own version of the vaccine and that’s where Canada’s first two million doses will come from, imported by Canadian firm Verity Pharmaceuticals.
According to a statement from Verity, another million doses from the order will arrive in mid-april and another 500,000 will arrive in May.
Canada has a separate deal with Astrazeneca to receive up to 20 million doses over the second and third quarter of this year. Those doses will be produced in the U.S. The U.S. signed an exclusive contract with Pfizer and doses of that company’s vaccine made in the U.S. are not shipped outside the country.
But Trudeau said he is confident there will be no interference with the Astrazeneca shipments.
“All of our indications are the vaccine doses are going to be arriving in Canada as scheduled during the second quarter,” he said.
The third pathway for Astrazeneca doses is through the international COVAX facility, which sees rich countries pool orders with developing ones to ensure poorer nations get vaccines. Though contractually entitled, Canada has been criticized for taking vaccines from that facility while developing countries struggle to get any doses.
Canada expects between 1.9 million and 3.3 million doses of Astrazeneca’s vaccine to be delivered through that path by the end of June. The shot requires two doses, spread between four and 12 weeks apart, but it can be stored in a standard refrigerator, making it easier to administer than Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccine.
Despite the new vaccine in the mix, Health Minister Patty Hajdu said it was too early to move up the government’s goal of having everyone vaccinated by the end of September.
“Obviously, doses arriving earlier than we expected and in greater volume is a good news story and possibly could accelerate our targets and our goals,” she said. “But of course, we’ve seen that there can be bumps in the road.”
Canada’s vaccine deliveries plummeted last month when both Pfizer and Moderna ran into manufacturing issues. Hajdu said those are the sorts of bumps that could materialize again.
“Unexpected challenges on the manufacturing side can arise, there can be a number of other challenges from an export perspective.”
Astrazeneca’s vaccine is 62 per cent effective in preventing people from contracting the virus, lower than the Pfizer and Moderna shots that provided more than 95 per cent coverage.
The vaccine was also not tested in clinical trials widely enough to know if it provides strong protection for all age groups. A separate group, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, is set to provide recommendations next week on where and how the Astrazeneca vaccine should be used and individual provinces will make the final call on who receives the shot.
Dr. Supriya Sharma, Health Canada’s chief medical adviser, said it’s important to factor in that these aren’t apples to apples comparisons and the vaccines were tested in different countries and at different times.
She said real world results, from the U.K. and Europe where the shot has already been approved, are showing the vaccine to be safe and effective and approving this shot gives Canada something else to use in the vaccination effort.
“I think Canada is hungry for vaccines. We’re putting more on the buffet table to be used.”
Sharma said Health Canada also has the majority of the information it needs to judge Johnson and Johnson’s one-shot vaccine and hopes to make a decision there soon and is waiting for more trial results from Novavax, the fifth vaccine in the queue.
She also said the three vaccines the government has approved and the two it is considering all have excellent results in the most important statistics.
“The number of cases of people that died from COVID-19 that got the vaccine was zero. The number of people that were hospitalized because their COVID-19 disease was so severe was zero. The number of people that died because of an adverse event or an effect of the vaccine was zero.”