Canada’s lack of domestic vaccine production is at the root of the problem, forcing the country to depend on foreign companies with production abroad.
Canada now ranks about 40th in the world in per capita vaccinations, according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data. Liberals now lead Conservatives only by one point, Abacus says.
“We don’t know if we’re really going to get all the promised doses... I‘ll believe it when I see it,” opposition Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said on Tuesday during question period in parliament.
Fewer than 3 percent of Canada’s 38 million people have received the first of two shots.
Ramping Up Production
The lack of manufacturing capacity became a hot-button issue after Pfizer Inc reduced its deliveries in January and February in order to boost production capacity at its plant in Belgium. Moderna Inc cut shipments, too.Canada is making investments in domestic production, including to produce the U.S.-based Novavax Inc vaccine in Montreal; it’s also investing in an inoculation being developed by Quebec-based Medicago. Neither is expected to be available soon.
Critics say the government moved too slow to gear up domestic production and some provincial leaders now want to place their own vaccine orders and bypass the federal government.
Canada had to create manufacturing “from a standing start that is decades and decades old,” said a senior government source, who declined to be named in order to speak frankly, adding it takes time to ramp up production.
Biden has not reversed an executive order signed by former U.S. President Donald Trump that blocks vaccine exports.
“You could throw a snowball from (Pfizer’s Michigan) plant and hit Canada, and yet we’re not getting vaccine from the plant, we’re getting it from Belgium,” said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, infectious diseases specialist at Toronto General Hospital.
Officials on both sides of the border have said they have discussed vaccines together, but there has been no indication that the United States is ready to share with its northern neighbor.
Both Pfizer and Moderna have boosted planned deliveries for the second quarter, when 23 million doses are expected, and 84 million are due by September. Three other vaccines await regulatory approval and could accelerate inoculations.
It is a race against time. Canada is beginning to open up as case numbers from the second wave come down. But more contagious variants could cause a third wave before most people get vaccinated, Bogoch said.
“We’re walking on a bit of a knife’s edge right now,” he said.