TORONTO – Canada will receive more than 1.9 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines over the next seven days. The confirmation came from the Federal Ministry of Health, which stressed that from May supplies will undergo a further acceleration that will allow the country to comply with the roadmap of this national immunization campaign. This week, about one million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 350,000 Moderna and, for the first time, 300,000 doses of Johnson and Johnson will arrive in Canada. This is an extremely important fact: this latest vaccine against Covid, in fact, is the only single-dose vaccine, capable of developing the complete immune defence against coronavirus already with a dose. In addition, Pfizer has confirmed that from May its supplies to our country will be at least two million doses per week: of these, about 800 thousand will be destined for Ontario.
On the other hand, the delays for the AstraZeneca vaccine have been confirmed: for the next deliveries, we will have to wait until the end of May. And this is creating many headaches for the various vaccination campaigns at the provincial level: last week, in fact, Ontario and other provinces decided to lower the age limits for the use of the vaccine from 55 years to 40 years and this has almost zeroed the dose stocks of the vaccine produced by an Anglo-Swedish consortium.
In Ontario, meanwhile, a pilot project will start this weekend involving the administration of the Pfizer vaccine at some pharmacies in Toronto and Peel. This is, experts warn, an ambitious plan, because the Pfizer, unlike AstraZeneca, must be stored until the last moment at very low temperatures and therefore in special refrigerators.
But on the other hand, with the progressive increase in available doses, the provincial government and individual local health units must find alternatives for administration to mass vaccination centers and temporary clinics, which have a limited capacity.
Being able to fully involve pharmacies and family doctors could be the turning point in the vaccination campaign. So far, 12,159,066 doses have been administered in Canada, with just over a million Canadians also receiving the recall injection and are therefore totally vaccinated against Covid-19.
In Ontario, covid19tracker.ca, 5,248,345 doses of vaccine were received, and4,696,211 were inoculated. Yesterday, 69,308 doses were administered. Once again, according to covid19tracker.ca data, Quebec is the province that shows the greatest efficiency in the ratio of doses received by the federal government to vaccinations: out of 3,066,969 arrived in the French-speaking province, 2,871,140 were administered, or almost 94 percent.
