At a news conference on Friday, Trudeau repeated his expectation that every Canadian who wants a vaccine will receive it by September.
Trudeau told reporters that Canada has secured two million additional doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through Verity Pharmaceuticals and the Serum Institute of India. The first shipment of 500,000 vaccines is expected to arrive within weeks.
This shipment will expand to the 20 million doses that the country has already obtained from AstraZeneca, said Trudeau.
Canada also received 643,000 doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this week, said Trudeau.
Both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have significantly reduced deliveries to Canada after a combination of manufacturing delays and demands from Europe, where Canada acquires its doses.
New variants spreading
Canada has reported 858,217 cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s director of public health, who informed reporters on Friday.
There were 21,865 deaths from Covid-19, she said.
Last week, there were an average of 97,120 Covid-19 tests completed daily with a positivity rate of 3.2% and a daily average of 2,960 new cases of Covid-19 and 52 deaths, said Tam.
Last week, there were 2,269 Covid-19 patients in hospitals and 564 patients receiving intensive care, Tam added.
As of Friday, 964 cases of variant B.1.1.7, 44 cases of variant B.1.351 and two cases of variant P.1 have been reported in Canada, Tam said.
Tam warned that as new, more communicable variants spread, “controlling the epidemic will be much more difficult.”