Canada’s vaccine deployment stagnates and locks seniors home for the next few months – Boston news, weather, sports

(CNN) — Like most Canadian seniors, David and Carol Green are patient and have good humor even about the pandemic waves trapped in their homes for nearly a year.

But their patience, if not their sense of humor, is diminishing. They say they are all important “shot in their arms” and still don’t know when they will be shot again in normal life.

“On the one hand trying to be rational, on the other hand bowing and screaming …” Do you know what’s wrong here and why we’re not doing anything else? ” Carroll said her husband, David, agreed and nodded from his home in Stouffville, Ontario, on the outskirts of Toronto.

The Government of Canada believed that it would be possible to pay by participating in global competition to vaccinate people to return to normal life. However, with a slight decline in vaccine supply in February, Canada remains a bystander of the competition, perhaps despite purchasing more vaccines per capita than any other country on the planet. I will.

Canada seems to have started buying vaccines early last April, but said the government couldn’t convince any company to make vaccines in Canadian soil. And finally, what sealed the fate of millions of Canadians still waiting for vaccination was the fact that manufacturers did not prioritize Canada for doses this winter.

“I haven’t heard anything about what will happen in the near future, other than the fact that supply may come to the country in April, which is very frustrating for me,” David told CNN. ..

To date, Canadian officials have stated that less than 3% of the population (some of the doses given in the United States and the United Kingdom) have been vaccinated and given nearly 1.2 million doses, and now most European countries. Is also behind.

By comparison, the United States immunizes at least 10% of the population and the United Kingdom almost 20%. Canadians have close ties to people in both countries, and many are beginning to hear from friends and family who have been or will be vaccinated.

As a retired nurse, Carroll is well aware that new and highly contagious variants are stalking older people, and that the need for vaccines is becoming increasingly dire.

“This is a huge thing in this pandemic, and no one ever had to do this. It’s just always troubleshooting and recognizing it from a logical point of view.” Carroll said. “But it has an emotional part and it’s hard. It’s really hard because you’re guessing yourself second and others in power second. It’s not working here, why not get vaccinated? “

Carroll says it’s hard to accept that while they’re relatively healthy, they don’t have an accurate timeline about when they get their vaccine.

Where are the Canadian vaccines?

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is sticking to his promise. All Canadians who wish to get the vaccine will be vaccinated by September.

To fulfill that promise, Canada says it has purchased nearly 400 million doses from seven vaccine makers. To date, only Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been approved for use in Canada.

Canada has said it has spent nearly $ 1 billion on purchasing these vaccines, but Canada is not at the forefront of vaccination with these vaccines.

Both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have significantly combined shipment delays to Canada after restricting vaccine exports subject to European approval, combining production delays with requests from Europe for Canada to source its doses. I delayed it.

Canada refused to procure vaccines from the United States after the Trump administration announced that it would not allow the export of vaccines.

“We are concerned about the weekly turmoil we are seeing, and we are watching it carefully and maintaining it,” Trudeau said at a press conference last week. “But as the CEO of the vaccine keeps telling me, we’re promised 6 million doses by the end of March, so we’re reassured that we’re still doing very well. I will reassure the Canadians. “

In Canada, vaccines may be abundant by spring, but they are still months late to protect new virus variants and help vulnerable people who are afraid.

Gillian Kohler, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and an adviser to the World Health Organization, said: “The bottom line is that every delay is life-threatening, and that’s all tragedy.” This is what we just sat down and said, “Oh, I didn’t think about this.” Or “Vaccine production I couldn’t say, “I didn’t know that it was complicated and delayed,” but the reality is that when we slow down (with vaccines), it is unnecessarily lost and has unacceptable lives. “

Due to the small number of vaccines provided, Canada prioritized the care center, where Covid-19 made a fatal sacrifice.

The government has also launched an impressive effort to vaccinate remote and indigenous communities where medical services are scarce. The government has shown this week that more than 90% of the adult population has already been vaccinated at some northern outposts.

This may save lives, but it does not change the lives of most Canadians in the short term.

Instead of “storing” vaccines, Professor Kohler would have noticed a few months ago that the Canadian government would be at the mercy of manufacturers and fall into fierce global competition for doses without domestic production capacity. It states.

“It’s important to have vaccine sovereignty. Looking at nationalist trends, it doesn’t make sense frankly to rely on exports for important health needs,” she said.

Canada has signed a tentative agreement with US vaccine company Novavax to produce millions of Covid-19 vaccine candidates at its Montreal facility. However, its production may not start until the end of this year at the earliest.

Greens says he has read all the headlines and understands the complexity, but this month he misses his granddaughter’s eighth birthday and says, “It hurts.”

“Yes, of course. We feel like we’re behind a hay wagon,” Carroll added, effectively celebrating a birthday, much like a Christmas holiday.

The-CNN-Wire
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