Clock ticks for Toronto pharmacies to administer Astrazeneca doses
Race to use before vaccine expiry dates
It will be a race against the clock to get second doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine into Ontarians’ arms before they expire, following a delay in their delivery to Toronto pharmacies.
Last week, Ontario announced it would start giving out second doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine to those who received their first shot between March 10 and March 19. Although the recommended interval between vaccines is at least 12 weeks, the injection is being offered earlier in a bid to use up the province’s stockpile before its expiry.
Yet, a prolonged quality assurance process has caused a holdup in the delivery of Astrazeneca vaccines to pharmacies in Toronto, leaving only a few days for pharmacists to administer them.
“We did hear from the Ministry of Health that 99 pharmacies in Toronto will receive 50 doses each, starting this afternoon,” said Jason Bates, CEO of the Ontario Pharmacists Association, in an interview with National Post on Thursday. “That’s good news, (but) it’s under what we had hoped.”
According to Bates, pharmacies in the city had been expecting a minimum of 100 doses per store — with some even pre-ordering quantities of up to 300 doses. More of the vaccine could be delivered to the pharmacies Friday, so long as they’re deemed safe.
In an email, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Health, Christian Hasse, said due to “incomplete temperature storage data” and out of an “abundance of caution,” a quality assurance process is still being undertaken to ensure the “safety and efficacy” of every single dose of the Astrazeneca vaccine in the province.
So far, participating pharmacies and primary care physicians in Kingston and Windsor, as well as Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacies in Toronto, have received about 26,600 doses of Astrazeneca, wrote Hasse.
A stockpile of 45,000 doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine are set to expire on Monday, with another 10,000 doses expiring at the end of June.
“As time goes by and there’s not vaccines into arms, then that raises the risk of (vaccine) wastage,” said Bates. “But I know we can do it.”
Besides the ticking clock, the delay has posed multiple challenges for Toronto pharmacies, he added — from having enough staff available to administer the vaccines, to dealing with a flood of calls from the Ontarians who are looking to book an appointment, but are unable.
“Then, there’s the challenge of just the timing. We’re going to be entering into a weekend, not all independent pharmacies are open on Sundays, so they have to look at … whether they can find the staff and open,” he added.
Ontario stopped giving out first doses of the Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine earlier in May after saying it was linked to an increased risk of a rare but serious blood clotting disorder. The province started offering second shots of the vaccine this week to the first cohort of Astrazeneca recipients to use up the doses that expire soon.
While 325 pharmacies participated in doling out doses of Astrazeneca vaccine in March, only 162 will be administering the soonto-be-expired second doses because there isn’t enough inventory available.
“There’s 254,000 Astrazeneca, new batch, of vaccines sitting in the central depot in the province, that will go out to pharmacies over the next couple (of ) weeks,” said Bates. “So, it’s not an ‘I have to do it now, over the next four days or I’ll never get it,’ this was just an additional opportunity.”
The federal government urged provinces not to waste the thousands of doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine that are set to expire over the next few days.
In a letter to her provincial and territorial counterparts, Health Minister Patty Hajdu encouraged provinces that can’t get the vaccine into residents’ arms by the end of the month to give them to those that can.
“We have a shared objective with the government to avoid wastage, and we’re going to do everything that we can to mobilize quickly and get those shots into arms,” said Bates. “We are working on a very short runway.”