“If Canadians are content with mediocrity, we have certainly achieved it.”

On Tuesday, Canada reached a milestone in the fight against COVID-19: we now have administered vaccines to over one per cent of the population. But it's hardly the time to break out the Champagne and start planning summer vacations.

The two vaccines that have so far been approved for use in Canada — developed by Pfizer and Moderna, respectively — require two shots. So although around 438,000 Canadians have received the vaccine, only 20,500 or so have the maximum amount of immunity they can provide. If we continue at this pace, it would take until 2036 to inoculate the entire population.

That's obviously not good enough. Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who's heading the federal government's vaccine task force, said last week that supplies will be “limited and steady” through March, but deliveries will ramp-up after that. Earlier this week, both British Columbia and Ontario announced that the next phase of their vaccination campaigns will begin in April.

But these timelines were thrown into doubt on Friday, when Procurement

Minister Anita Anand announced that production issues at Pfizer's plant in Europe will temporarily reduce shipments to Canada. Nevertheless, the federal Liberals have been maintaining that, by September, the government will have procured enough doses to inoculate the entire population.

However, this claim seems questionable given global supply issues and the fact that Anand has waffled between saying that other vaccines will need to be approved in order to achieve that goal, and suggesting that we will be able to meet demand with the two that are already on offer.

Yet securing an adequate supply is only part of the battle. Each province and territory is responsible for rolling out its own vaccination program, and so far there have been pretty wide disparities in their effectiveness. Prince Edward Island, for example, has managed to administer at least one dose to 2.65 per cent of its population, while Nova Scotia has only reached 0.39 per cent of its residents.

Alberta has used up its entire supply, and then some, while vaccines are sitting on ice in the North, with over 90 per cent of the doses in the territories still waiting to be administered. Problems in the North are to be expected, given how large and sparsely populated it is, plus the fact that the Pfizer vaccine needs specialized cold-storage equipment. These problems are far less pronounced in the rest of Canada, yet Manitoba and Nova Scotia are still sitting on around twothirds of their doses.

Given the uncertainty of supplies at this point in time, the sweet spot is probably around 50 per cent, which would allow the province to guarantee a second dose to everyone who has received the first. Provinces like B.C., which has burned through its initial supply of vaccines, and Quebec, are already running into dangerous territory by stretching the amount of time between doses.

The two doses of the Pfizer vaccine are supposed to be administered 21 days apart, while the interval for Moderna's is 28 days. This is the schedule that's recommended by the manufacturers, and the only way to guarantee that they will work as expected. Yet the Quebec government is considering spacing out the doses by as much as 90 days, and B.C. is allowing 35 days to elapse between shots.

Both vaccines do offer some level of protection after the first dose. Reviews conducted by Public Health England and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found that they may be over 80 per cent effective within a couple weeks after the first dose is administered (though a study published in The BMJ found Pfizer's to be only 52 per cent effective). There has therefore been a lot of debate within the medical community about whether it's better to provide some protection to a lot of people, or to fully protect a few.

The National Advisory Committee on Immunization did say this week that doses can be spaced out by a maximum of 42 days, but even this has many health professionals on edge. The fact is that there is still a lot we don't know about the effectiveness of the vaccines, including how long their protection will last. The last thing we want is for a large number of vulnerable Canadians to go out into the world thinking they're safe, only to find out that they're not because their government treated them like human guinea pigs.

After Pfizer came out with the preliminary results of its clinical trials in November, we wrote that the vaccine rollout will be the final test of how well our governments “can come together to stage a final offensive against this virus.”

On the whole, we are doing better than many of our peer nations, having vaccinated a greater percentage of our population than Germany, France, Norway and Sweden. But we are lagging far behind countries like Israel, which has administered at least one dose to nearly a quarter of its population, the United Kingdom (five per cent) and the United States (three per cent). Florida already has started vaccinating Canadian snowbirds, months before they would have any chance of getting it here at home.

If Canadians are content with mediocrity, we have certainly achieved it. But given the number of lives that are at stake, we sincerely hope the federal and provincial governments up their game — and fast.

IF WE CONTINUE AT THIS PACE, IT WOULD TAKE UNTIL 2036 TO INOCULATE THE ENTIRE POPULATION.