Up to 124,500 could get shots by the end of December
CANADA TO RECEIVE 249,000 DOSES OF PFIZER COVID-19 VACCINE BY END OF DECEMBER, TRUDEAU SAYS
Up to 124,500 Canadians could receive doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the month so long as it is approved by Health Canada shortly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday. “Our objective is to provide a safe and effective vaccine to Canadians the earliest possible,” Trudeau said during a press conference in which he announced that Canada would receive “up to 249,000” doses of the vaccine developed jointly by Pfizer and BioNTech by the end of December.
Since the Pfizer vaccine requires two doses to be effective, this means that only up to 124,500 Canadians might be at least partially vaccinated by the end of the month. Pfizer has said that the second dose must be administered three weeks after the first.
This first wave of vaccines is just a drop in the ocean when compared to the total of 20 million doses Canada has already purchased from Pfizer (with the option of ordering 56 million more), but Trudeau promised that millions of additional doses would arrive by early 2021.
Trudeau's vaccine rollout has been coming under increasing fire from critics and opposition parties, particularly since the U.K. government was the first to approve the Pfizer vaccine last week. The U.S. has also promised that vaccination would be well underway by the end of December.
The prime minister had even warned Canadians that they would have to be prepared to watch citizens of other countries get vaccinated before them.
“Did you instruct (Procurement Minister Anita Anand) to go out and negotiate this deal to get a comparatively small number of vaccine doses, because you were concerned about political optics of seeing other countries getting vaccinated first?”, a reporter asked Monday.
In response, Trudeau said he knew that Canadians considered vaccines to be a lifeline, so he didn't want to get people too excited at first.
“We know that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of which vaccines were going to arrive first, which ones were going to be able to be manufactured quickly,” Trudeau explained. “We wanted not to get people's hopes up.”
But any December vaccine rollout is contingent on Health Canada's approval of Pfizer's product, which could come within the week.
If that happens, the first shipment from Pfizer would be delivered to Canada as early as next week, Trudeau said.
Distribution of the Pfizer vaccine — which must be stored in ultra-cold temperatures of -80 C — would then be the next step.
And that will be far from an easy task.
“From a logistical and delivery standpoint, this is the largest mobilization of vaccines in Canada's history,” Trudeau said.
He said that once approved by Health Canada, those initial vaccine doses will be distributed among 14 different vaccination sites throughout Canadian cities.
They would then be administered by the provinces, which will prioritize Canadians who are part of the four key groups as determined by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.
Those are long-term-care home staff and residents, Canadians over the age of 80, health-care workers, and remote or northern Indigenous communities.
But that last group will likely have to wait for the second potential vaccine candidate, by Moderna, to be approved before they receive doses.
Their leaders have expressed a preference for that vaccine because it is easier to transport and store, since it only needs to be kept at -20 C.
Ontario also signalled Monday that the first wave of vaccines would likely be given to priority Canadians who can come to one of the country's 14 central vaccination sites Trudeau said would soon be put in place.
“There will be one (vaccination site) in each province, and two in our country's largest provinces,” Trudeau explained, referring to Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta.
“The decision on distribution to provinces and territories, it was agreed, is going to be done on a per-capita basis.”
That means that roughly 48,500 Ontarians (based on its proportion of the population, or 38 per cent), 27,500 Quebecers (23 per cent), 18,800 British Columbians (13 per cent) and 14,500 Albertans (11.5 per cent) could be vaccinated by the end of this month.
According to Maj.- Gen. Dany Fortin, whom Trudeau appointed to oversee vaccine rollout, it could be a matter of just a couple of days between the moment the vaccines arrive and the moment they're distributed.
The prime minister said Monday's announcement confirms an acceleration of the government's initial vaccine rollout plans, which initially planned for the first vaccine doses to arrive in Canada in the first months of 2021.