The first doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine will arrive in Canada on Sunday night, with more to follow on Monday, according to the military commander leading the national vaccine distribution effort.
Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who is in charge of logistics at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s national operations centre, told CBC’s Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton that he is confident provinces are prepared to receive and administer the first batch of approximately 30,000 doses.
“The delivery schedule is unfolding exactly as planned,” Fortin said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live.
“Some flights will arrive tonight, some flights will arrive tomorrow, some trucks will cross the border tomorrow. So it’s all coming in the coming day or two.”
The impending delivery will set in motion a national immunization program of unprecedented scale that many hope will bring the coronavirus outbreak to an end and an eventual return to normalcy. The pandemic has killed more than 13,000 people in Canada and infected another 450,000.
“The provinces will be in a position to administer the vaccines in the coming days,” Fortin said.
Logistical dry-runs
Fortin led a series of dry-runs last week to make sure everyone involved is comfortable handling the heat-sensitive shots — which must be stored at temperatures between –80 C and –60 C.
Because the Pfizer product is so temperature-sensitive, Pfizer contracted UPS to ship the doses directly from its plants to 14 point-of-use sites throughout Canada in order to limit movement and keep the vaccine stable. Most of those sites are at hospitals in major urban centres that have freezers capable of meeting the vaccine’s storage requirements.
Doses will be distributed on a per-capita basis, although Pfizer’s vaccine will not be sent to the territories for the time being as they currently lack the capacity to safely store the product.
Fortin said he expects provinces to increase the number of delivery sites capable of receiving vaccine shipments in the coming days.
“It depends per province — they might add one or two or three,” Fortin said. “When we’re at full speed, we’re probably going to have a couple of hundred sites for Pfizer-BioNTech product.”
Once the doses arrive, provinces will administer the vaccine to people in priority population groups, including front-line health-care workers, as well as residents and employees at long-term care homes.
First Toronto doses going to long-term care workers
Dr. Kevin Smith, president and CEO of the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, said he expects doses of the vaccine to arrive at the hospital around midday Monday. UHN is one of two point-of-use sites in Ontario, along with The Ottawa Hospital.
The first 3,000 or so doses bound for Toronto will inoculate personal support workers and other employees at hard-hit long-term care homes in the Greater Toronto Area, Smith said. Employees are being given priority over residents because they can travel to the hospital to receive the vaccine.
“There is concern about the volatility of movement, so it’s been recommended that we not transport the vaccine until we have more experience with it,” Smith told Barton. “We’d likely use the Pfizer vaccine for long-term care workers and the Moderna vaccine would first go to long-term care residents.”
WATCH | CBC’s Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton interviews Dr. Kevin Smith of University Health Network in Toronto:
COVID-19 vaccines are expected to arrive in Toronto midday Monday. Dr. Kevin Smith, president and CEO of the University Health Network, is overseeing next week’s vaccinations in Toronto. He says the first group that has been targeted to get the vaccine are long-term care facilities. 9:11
The Pfizer-BioNTech is a two-dose vaccine, with the second dose required 21 days after the first. According to data from clinical trials, immunity starts building 12 days after the first dose, but full protection isn’t in place until 28 days after the first shot.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Dec. 7 that up to 249,000 doses of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be delivered before the end of the year. Officials have said they expect a total of six million vaccine doses from a variety of vaccine makers to arrive by the end of March 2021.
Details on upcoming shipments from Pfizer — including arrival dates and the number doses — are still being worked out with the company, Fortin said.
“The intent here is to ensure that we continue to have a regular drip feed of vaccines in the coming coming weeks,” he said.
Moderna vaccine next in line for approval
Canada became only the third country to give the green light to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine when Health Canada authorized use of the vaccine for people over the age of 16 last Wednesday. The regulator concluded the vaccine was safe and approximately 95 per cent effective after a two-month review of the companies’ clinical trial data.
Three other vaccines are currently under review by Health Canada as part of a “rolling review process” that allows companies to submit data from clinical trials even as those trials are still underway.
The vaccine candidates still under review are from U.S. biotechnology company Moderna; British pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca in collaboration with Oxford University; and Janssen Inc., a pharmaceutical subsidiary of U.S.-based multinational Johnson & Johnson.
WATCH | CBC’s Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton interviews Dr. Supriya Sharma of Health Canada:
Dr. Supriya Sharma with Health Canada is at the centre of the vaccine approval process. She says it’s now about the logistics and getting the COVID-19 vaccine out to the different sites in the country. 6:33
Dr. Supriya Sharma, Health Canada’s chief medical adviser, said Moderna is furthest along in the approval process, but the regulator still needs some data from the company before it can reach a decision.
“We have some additional information on manufacturing of the Moderna vaccine that’s expected to come in sort of mid, late this week,” Sharma said. “We will be in a better place to give more accurate predictions in terms of the ending of the review once we get that information in.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a meeting on Thursday, during which independent public health experts will discuss whether to grant emergency-use approval to Moderna’s vaccine. The FDA authorized Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine on Friday, just over 24 hours after a similar meeting.
Sharma said distribution plans are already being drawn up.
“Our reviewers are reviewing the [Moderna] vaccine, and the planning is taking place simultaneously so that everyone is ready when an authorization comes and the company is able to ship quickly — that the whole system is ready to be able to distribute and administer the vaccine,” Sharma said.
Fortin said his team is working with provinces and territories to be ready to receive doses of Moderna vaccine by the end of next week, although delivery isn’t expected until early January.
VANCOUVER – Contract negotiations resume today in Vancouver in a labour dispute that has paralyzed container cargo shipping at British Columbia’s ports since Monday.
The BC Maritime Employers Association and International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 514 are scheduled to meet for the next three days in mediated talks to try to break a deadlock in negotiations.
The union, which represents more than 700 longshore supervisors at ports, including Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Nanaimo, has been without a contract since March last year.
The latest talks come after employers locked out workers in response to what it said was “strike activity” by union members.
The start of the lockout was then followed by several days of no engagement between the two parties, prompting federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to speak with leaders on both sides, asking them to restart talks.
MacKinnon had said that the talks were “progressing at an insufficient pace, indicating a concerning absence of urgency from the parties involved” — a sentiment echoed by several business groups across Canada.
In a joint letter, more than 100 organizations, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Business Council of Canada and associations representing industries from automotive and fertilizer to retail and mining, urged the government to do whatever it takes to end the work stoppage.
“While we acknowledge efforts to continue with mediation, parties have not been able to come to a negotiated agreement,” the letter says. “So, the federal government must take decisive action, using every tool at its disposal to resolve this dispute and limit the damage caused by this disruption.
“We simply cannot afford to once again put Canadian businesses at risk, which in turn puts Canadian livelihoods at risk.”
In the meantime, the union says it has filed a complaint to the Canada Industrial Relations Board against the employers, alleging the association threatened to pull existing conditions out of the last contract in direct contact with its members.
“The BCMEA is trying to undermine the union by attempting to turn members against its democratically elected leadership and bargaining committee — despite the fact that the BCMEA knows full well we received a 96 per cent mandate to take job action if needed,” union president Frank Morena said in a statement.
The employers have responded by calling the complaint “another meritless claim,” adding the final offer to the union that includes a 19.2 per cent wage increase over a four-year term remains on the table.
“The final offer has been on the table for over a week and represents a fair and balanced proposal for employees, and if accepted would end this dispute,” the employers’ statement says. “The offer does not require any concessions from the union.”
The union says the offer does not address the key issue of staffing requirement at the terminals as the port introduces more automation to cargo loading and unloading, which could potentially require fewer workers to operate than older systems.
The Port of Vancouver is the largest in Canada and has seen a number of labour disruptions, including two instances involving the rail and grain storage sectors earlier this year.
A 13-day strike by another group of workers at the port last year resulted in the disruption of a significant amount of shipping and trade.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
The Royal Canadian Legion says a new partnership with e-commerce giant Amazon is helping boost its veterans’ fund, and will hopefully expand its donor base in the digital world.
Since the Oct. 25 launch of its Amazon.ca storefront, the legion says it has received nearly 10,000 orders for poppies.
Online shoppers can order lapel poppies on Amazon in exchange for donations or buy items such as “We Remember” lawn signs, Remembrance Day pins and other accessories, with all proceeds going to the legion’s Poppy Trust Fund for Canadian veterans and their families.
Nujma Bond, the legion’s national spokesperson, said the organization sees this move as keeping up with modern purchasing habits.
“As the world around us evolves we have been looking at different ways to distribute poppies and to make it easier for people to access them,” she said in an interview.
“This is definitely a way to reach a wider number of Canadians of all ages. And certainly younger Canadians are much more active on the web, on social media in general, so we’re also engaging in that way.”
Al Plume, a member of a legion branch in Trenton, Ont., said the online store can also help with outreach to veterans who are far from home.
“For veterans that are overseas and are away, (or) can’t get to a store they can order them online, it’s Amazon.” Plume said.
Plume spent 35 years in the military with the Royal Engineers, and retired eight years ago. He said making sure veterans are looked after is his passion.
“I’ve seen the struggles that our veterans have had with Veterans Affairs … and that’s why I got involved, with making sure that the people get to them and help the veterans with their paperwork.”
But the message about the Amazon storefront didn’t appear to reach all of the legion’s locations, with volunteers at Branch 179 on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive saying they hadn’t heard about the online push.
Holly Paddon, the branch’s poppy campaign co-ordinator and bartender, said the Amazon partnership never came up in meetings with other legion volunteers and officials.
“I work at the legion, I work with the Vancouver poppy office and I go to the meetings for the Vancouver poppy campaign — which includes all the legions in Vancouver — and not once has this been mentioned,” she said.
Paddon said the initiative is a great idea, but she would like to have known more about it.
The legion also sells a larger collection of items at poppystore.ca.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
