Wanted: More arms for more vaccine doses

Ever since the first, precious COVID-19 vaccines began trickling into Canada last December, the worry has been that too few doses were taking too long to arrive. But as of last week, the situation — and the worry — had suddenly reversed itself.

Suddenly there were far more vaccine doses being stored in refrigerators across the land than there were arms receiving that potentially life-saving, and game-changing, jab. And suddenly, the accusatory fingers were being pointed at the provinces, not Ottawa.

As of last Thursday, the federal government had delivered more than 10 million vaccine doses to the provinces and territories. But although nearly 7.2 million of those doses had been administered, there were still nearly three million doses —almost a third of the supply — sitting unused.

Now, with tens of millions of more doses scheduled to arrive in the coming months, the overriding concern is no longer as much about the size of the supply as it is about the speed with which the provinces can dispense the supplies they have on hand. To be fair, the disconcerting gap between vaccine supplies and the number of people vaccinated is new and something for which provincial governments and public health officials are not to blame. At least not yet.

Most of the doses the provinces had not administered last week had only arrived in the previous few days. That led Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who’s leading Canada’s logistical rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, to shoot down any complaints that the provinces were laggards sitting on vaccine supplies that could be easily administered.

That’s not to say the provincial governments don’t need to knuckle down and get more people vaccinated. The greatest barrier to vaccinating enough people to bring the pandemic under control is people themselves. There’s still far too much vaccine hesitancy in the general population.

It’s hardly reassuring to learn that recent polling found that two-thirds of Canadians are ready to be inoculated with the first vaccine they’re offered. That still leaves a third of the country who may refuse. With numbers like this, it’s no wonder that in both Ontario and Quebec, thousands of available spots at vaccination clinics are not being filled each day.

It won’t be easy to turn things around and get someone into every spot at every vaccination clinic. Provincial leaders and public health officials need to try. They need to make it simpler for those who have a hard time using the online reservation system, and that includes many elderly people, to register for a vaccination appointment. They need to ensure new Canadians whose first language isn’t English get the information they need in the language with which they’re most comfortable. They need to extend the hours of operation at large, public clinics, too.

Ontario announced last week that it will increasingly use mobile and pop-up clinics to get the vaccines to essential workers and residents in the hardest-hit neighbourhoods. The province has to build on that momentum.

And more people need to board the vaccination ship. The U.K., where more than half the population has been vaccinated at least once, is headed toward “herd immunity” and the hope that the pandemic’s worst days are finally over. Canada, where less than a fifth of the population has been vaccinated once, is still reeling from COVID-19’s third wave.

Here in Ontario, where yet another four-week lockdown has recently begun, our hospital intensive care units are again at risk of being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. The only way to awaken from this nightmare is for us all to roll up our sleeves and take that jab, whatever vaccine we’re offered.