TORONTO – More than a million doses of covid-19 vaccine, delivered by federal authorities to Ontario health authorities, are ready to be administered but still unused. This is shocking given that it summarizes the flop, at least for now, of the immunization campaign against coronavirus in our Province. Every day Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Christine Elliott continue to reiterate that the most significant obstacle in the vaccination campaign continues to be the lack of sufficient doses.
The official data of covid19tracker.ca, on the contrary, present us with a very different scenario. The doses are there, but the logistics and organizational machine set up by the Province does not work: it is not possible to distribute in a timely manner the vaccines that arrive and that are already ready for administration.
Yesterday’s official figures speak of 4,506,495 doses delivered by the federal government to the provincial government since last January: of these, 3,422,974 doses have been inoculated. The appeal is missing 1,083,521 doses, ready to be used immediately. Yesterday, 112,817 doses were inoculated across Ontario.
In the face of this situation, which is becoming really embarrassing for the government, there are new setbacks and misunderstandings in the vaccination campaign in Ontario. As recently as Tuesday, the premier had opened a temporary clinic in Etobicoke North for the vaccination of all adults residing in one of the identified hotspots in Ontario, one of those areas where the contagion runs faster.
Yesterday, after just an hour, the clinic stopped taking reservations for vaccination due to a lack of doses. The same goes for two mass immunization clinics run by the Scarborough Health Network: Centennial College and Centenary Hospital even had to cancel 10,000 vaccinations that had already been booked previously.
Problems of this kind have also occurred in recent days in the York Region and peel region.
But vaccinations are also at the heart of the particularly bitter political debate at Queen’s Park.
Yesterday, on the basis of a service broadcast in recent days by the CBC, NDP leader Andrea Horwath officially asked the Provincial Auditor General to launch an investigation into the criteria used by the government to assign the definition of hotspots to some areas of Ontario compared to others. According to the opposition, there are other areas of the province where the transmission rate and the number of infections are higher.
The allegation was strongly rejected yesterday in Queen’s Park by Minister Elliott herself, who reiterated that the executive’s decision to establish hotspots in Ontario was not political but purely medical, based on recommendations from health authorities.
In short, the situation on the vaccine front is becoming more and more explosive, without taking into account that we are in the most alarming phase of this third wave, with the need to give a decisive acceleration to vaccinate as many people as possible.