Trudeau seeks to reassure Canadians on vaccination efforts

By: Levon Sevunts

Despite hitting a snag in Pfizer-BioTech vaccine deliveries to Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to reassure Canadians on Tuesday that the overall vaccination strategy is still on track and that every Canadian willing to take the vaccine will be offered one by September.

“This situation with the Pfizer delay is temporary. Our vaccination objectives for the first quarter of the year, January to March, are not changing,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa. “The total number of doses committed to us is still the same.”

The U.S. pharmaceutical company announced Friday it will temporarily reduce deliveries of its COVID-19 vaccine to several countries, including Canada, while it upgrades production capacity to 2 billion doses per year.

Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, the military commander leading vaccine logistics for the federal government, said that Canadians should expect only 50 per cent of the promised Pfizer-BioNTech doses the government was promised for the remainder of January.

In fact, Canada won’t be getting any Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines next week, Fortin said Tuesday.

“We are now seeing that our entire expected shipment is deferred for next week, and then the numbers start to pick back up in the first weeks of February,” he said.

Canada is expecting the delivery of 1.4 million Pfizer doses in February. As of Jan. 14, Canada had received 765,100 vaccine doses. Of that total, 588,900 were from Pfizer-BioNTech and 176,200 were from Moderna.

“Numbers are expected to go back up to what we had originally planned and Pfizer continues to tell us that they expect to be able to deliver up to four million of doses of Pfizer vaccine by the end of this quarter, so by the end of March,” Fortin said.

Moderna is expected to deliver up two million doses by the end of the first quarter.