Hurry up in care homes
When it came to deciding who would get precious and scarce vaccinations first, Ontario clearly set the right priority.
It put long-term-care homes, whose residents account for nearly two-thirds of the province’s COVID-19 deaths, at the very top of the list for phase one of its vaccination campaign.
“Early doses will be available for: residents, staff, essential caregivers (including family caregivers) and other employees in congregate living settings for seniors,” it said.
Yet more than five weeks after Ontario started injecting vaccines into arms, as the Star reported last week, it had reached only about half the 72,000 long-term-care home residents. That’s despite having received more than enough doses to have inoculated them all. Several times over, in fact.
It’s a terrible failure and one with tragic consequences as the death toll in these homes rises daily.
There are challenges to getting vaccines into care homes. The cold storage and transport requirements of the Pfizer vaccine, for one.
But other provinces face those same challenges and Quebec has already managed to vaccinate more than 75 per cent of its long-term-care home residents. Alberta has reached more than 90 per cent of its publicly funded care facilities.
So Premier Doug Ford should be outraged by Ontario’s poor vaccination rate of long-term care residents. He should be vowing in his colourful language to fix this.
But he’s not. Instead he’s focusing on the wrong thing, as usual, and looking for someone else to blame.
Ford railed at Pfizer over its decision to cut expected shipments to Canada in the coming weeks as it retools a plant so it can produce vaccines faster. He said it was “crap” and “unacceptable.” He demanded Pfizer meet its obligations “because lives right now are in jeopardy if you continue screwing up.”
Ford also railed at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, keen to shift blame when it comes to vaccines onto federal shoulders. Certainly there is blame to be placed there in terms of securing supply, but provincial decisions on administering the doses matter greatly, too.
Ford always says he’s doing everything he can to protect long-term-care residents but his government’s actions, including the vaccine rollout, have never gone far enough.
On Dec. 14, Ford boasted that a personal support worker in a Toronto long-term-care home was the first person in Ontario to receive a shot. That same day, Quebec used its first vaccine on an 89-year-old woman living in a Quebec City care home.
Ontario set up its first vaccine sites in hospitals; Quebec started in long-term care homes.
Quebec found a way to use the Pfizer vaccine in long-term care from its first shipments in mid-December; Ontario didn’t decide to use Pfizer in long-term-care homes until Jan. 5, more than three weeks later. (Until then, Ontario had relied on Moderna, the easier-to-transport vaccine that wasn’t approved until later in December, for long-term-care residents).
The cost of Ontario’s phase one focus on vaccinating health care workers and its relatively go-slow approach for the actual residents of care homes was vividly demonstrated by the outbreak that ripped through a Barrie facility. Nearly every one of its 130 residents were infected and more than two dozen died of COVID —just days before the vaccine was scheduled to reach that home.
Since the start of the pandemic, Ford has liked big numbers that demonstrate government action, even if they’re not necessarily evidence of the best public health practices.
When Ontario came under fire for not doing enough testing, Ford’s answer was to drive up the numbers by urging anyone and everyone to get a test, whether it made public health sense or not.
The push for big numbers, even at the expense of a more thoughtful targeted approach, has also reared its head in the vaccine program.
After being stung by criticism that Ontario had vaccines sitting in freezers and halted clinics over Christmas, the Ford government put a lot of pressure on hospitals to get vaccines into arms.
At times it has felt as though just about any arm related to health care would do given reports of hospital executives, researchers and health-care workers on leave receiving vaccines — ahead of long-term care residents, staff working in those homes and other front-line staff.
Ontarians need to be confident that priority list guidelines are being followed, that connected people aren’t jumping the cue and, most importantly, that the very limited supply of vaccines get into the arms where it will do the most good. That is clearly long-term care residents.
It’s time Ford took his own advice about meeting obligations and ensured that Ontario makes it a priority to get vaccines to the tens of thousands of people living in care homes who have already waited too long.
“Because,” as Ford himself has said, “lives right now are in jeopardy if you continue screwing up.”
Ford always says he’s doing everything he can to protect long-term-care residents but his government’s actions, including the vaccine rollout, have never gone far enough