But his patience, if not his sense of humor, is wearing thin. They say they still have no idea when they will have that important “shot in the arm” and a chance to have a normal life again.
“On the one hand, you try to be reasonable and on the other, you’re screaming like crazy saying … you know, ‘what’s wrong here, why aren’t we doing something else’, you know?” said Carol as her husband David nodded at his home in Stouffville, Ontario, just outside Toronto.
The Canadian government thought it might be worthwhile to participate in the global race to vaccinate the way back to normal life. But as vaccine supplies dwindled in February, Canada remains on the sidelines of this race, despite buying more doses of vaccines per capita than probably any other country on the planet.
Canada apparently started buying vaccines in April last year, although the government says it has failed to convince any company to produce them on Canadian soil. And, ultimately, it was the timeline – the fact that manufacturers did not prioritize Canada for doses this winter – that sealed the fate of millions of Canadians still waiting to get a vaccine.
“We just didn’t hear anything about what the near future holds for us, except that we may see some supplies arriving in the country in April, and that is a very frustrating thing for me,” David told CNN.
To date, Canadian authorities claim to have administered nearly 1.2 million doses, vaccinating less than 3% of its population – a fraction of the doses administered in the United States and the United Kingdom – and is now lagging behind in most countries Europeans. We will.
In comparison, the United States vaccinated at least 10% of its population and the United Kingdom almost 20%. Canadians have close ties to people in both countries and many have started hearing from friends and family who have received a vaccine or have an appointment to get it.
As a retired nurse, Carol is well aware that the new and highly communicable variants are chasing the elderly and that the need for vaccines is growing more and more dire.
“This pandemic is such an immense thing and nobody has ever had to do it before, and it’s just, just solving it all the time, and I understand it from a logical point of view,” said Carol. “But there is an emotional part to that and that is difficult – it is really difficult, because you are questioning yourself, you are questioning other people in power and saying, ‘well, how are they doing better there and we are not doing better here and why aren’t we getting the vaccine? ‘”
Carol says that while they are in relatively good health, it is getting harder to accept that there is no precise deadline for when they will receive the vaccine.
Where are Canada’s vaccines?
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is keeping his promise: every Canadian who wants a vaccine will receive it in September.
To fulfill that promise, Canada says it has purchased nearly 400 million doses from seven vaccine manufacturers. To date, only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been authorized for use in Canada.
Although Canada says it has spent nearly a billion dollars to buy these vaccines, the country has not been at the front of the queue to receive these vaccines.
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, to restrict vaccine exports subject to European approval.
Canada did not attempt to obtain any doses of vaccine from the U.S. after the Trump administration indicated that it would not allow the export of any vaccines.
“The turbulence that we are seeing week after week is worrying, we are watching closely and continuing,” Trudeau said last week during a news conference. “But let me reassure people that we’re still on track, as promised to get those six million doses by the end of March, because that’s what the CEO of the vaccine keeps telling me, and I’m happy to reassure Canadians about this.”
For Canada, vaccines may be plentiful in the spring, but months delayed to help vulnerable people who are still taking shelter and afraid of new variants of the virus.
“The bottom line is that every delay means lost lives, and that is the tragedy of it all,” said Jillian Kohler, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and an advisor to the World Health Organization. “This is not something where we can just sit and say, ‘oh, we didn’t think about it’ or ‘we didn’t know that vaccine manufacturing is complex and delays happen’, but the reality is when we slow down (in vaccines) we have lives that are unnecessarily lost and that is unacceptable. “
With the few vaccines that have been delivered, Canada has prioritized long-term care centers, places where Covid-19 has had a deadly impact.
The government has also made an impressive effort to vaccinate remote and indigenous communities where health services are lacking. The government indicated this week that in some northern outposts, more than 90% of the adult population had already been vaccinated.
This may actually save lives, but in the short term it will not change the lives of most Canadians.
Professor Kohler says that instead of “accumulating” vaccines, the Canadian government should have realized months ago that, without any national manufacturing capacity, it would be at the mercy of manufacturers and fierce global competition for doses.
“Having the sovereignty of the vaccine is essential. To rely on exports for critical health needs does not frankly make sense when we look at trends in nationalism,” she said.
Canada signed a provisional agreement with the American vaccine company Novavax to produce millions of doses of its candidate vaccine Covid-19 at a facility in Montreal. But that production is unlikely to begin before the end of this year.
The Greens say they are reading all the headlines and understand the complexities, but they will miss their granddaughter’s 8th birthday this month and say “it hurts”.
“Yes, yes, absolutely, because I feel like we’re really behind the hay wagon, so to speak, you know?” Carol said, adding that, like Christmas parties, they will celebrate their birthday virtually.