Less than half of Canada’s promised vaccine donations delivered

Canada has delivered about a quarter of the direct doses of vaccines it promised to help less wealthy countries and cannot say when more doses will come out.

In 2021, Canada pledged to donate 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from its own contracts and at least 150 million more through financial contributions to the COVAX vaccine exchange alliance.

To date, Canada has donated 12.7 million direct doses and $ 545 million in cash to purchase an additional 87 million.

COVAX says it cannot yet report details on the doses purchased because it is still negotiating prices with vaccine manufacturers.

Canada’s promise was that all doses and cash donations would be delivered by the end of 2022, but critics, including World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, say countries like Canada have been stockpiling vaccines. at the expense of the poorest countries.

“Ending health inequity remains the key to ending the pandemic,” Tedros said in late December.

Throughout 2021, experts warned that the more the virus that causes COVID-19 spreads, the faster it will mutate, potentially leading to a new variant that will evade already administered vaccines.

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That risk became a reality in November with the discovery of Omicron, a variant with so many mutations that it is causing millions of infections in fully vaccinated individuals. While vaccines appear to be working well against the serious disease, the explosion of new cases has still stressed hospitals and sent Canadians back to school closures they hoped would be left behind.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told The Canadian Press during an end-of-year interview in December that Canada “continues to do more than its fair share” in vaccine donations.

“As people know, unfortunately, Canada no longer has the capacity to produce vaccines in our country, so we don’t have a national production that we can direct to the world,” he said.

“But what we are doing with the contracts and the supply of vaccines that we have obtained from other countries is to send those vaccines that we buy, that we pay for, that we are not going to use, to the world.”

Adam Houston, medical policy and advocacy officer for Doctors Without Borders Canada, said Canada is doing its best when it comes to monetary donations, but cannot say the same about vaccine donations.

He said Canada needs to exert the same kind of pressure on companies to deliver doses for donation as it did to speed up deliveries to Canada last year.

“When these doses were destined for Canadian weapons, Canada has often been able to increase the delivery of these doses,” he said. “Somehow, when the exact same doses from the same contracts are shipped elsewhere, we don’t seem to have the same knocks on the table to make sure the doses get to other people.”

He also noted that Canada allowed more than 10 million doses to remain in a federal reserve for months, and nearly the same amount in provincial freezers, rather than sending them to places where they could be used immediately.

“These doses could have been saving lives for months and months,” he said.

Canada turned to that reserve in December when Omicron’s success and reinforcement campaigns took off. But Canada had already signed contracts with Pfizer and Moderna to deliver 65 and 35 million booster doses in 2022, and it is also owed at least 17 million doses from its 2021 contracts with Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, vaccines that Canadians decided I don’t want to

COVAX expected to deliver two billion doses to low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021, but achieved less than half due to slow donations from rich countries and delays in deliveries directly from vaccine manufacturers.

WHO’s goal was to vaccinate 40 percent of the population of all countries by December 31, but more than 90 countries fell short of that goal. At least 36 countries did not even reach 10 percent.

The new goal is 70 percent for July.

There is hope that more doses will be available in 2022 to ease the supply shortage with more vaccines ready for approval, including Novavax. Canada has a contract to purchase 52 million doses of that vaccine, and Houston said it must act quickly to donate all of them.

This Canadian Press report was first published on January 5, 2021.