Manitoba stops booking Pfizer shots due to delivery snafu
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/01/2021 (1168 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Manitoba suddenly stopped booking new COVID-19 vaccination appointments on Friday because a disruption in Pfizer’s delivery schedule means shipments of vials will only trickle in during February.
Dr. Joss Reimer, the province’s vaccination task force medical lead, broke the news on Twitter late Friday afternoon.
“We are pausing new vaccine appointments due to Pfizer supply disruptions announced today,” she wrote.
Friday morning, Ottawa had announced that Pfizer would alter its shipments to Canada and other countries, as it expands the Belgium lab that manufactured most of the doses.
Next week’s shipments to Canada are expected to arrive in full, but deliveries over the following four weeks will be half of what was originally scheduled.
Shipments will be ramped up in March and should make up the difference.
In terms of numbers, roughly 20,000 fewer doses will arrive in February than originally planned. In March, Manitoba is expected to receive four times the number of doses, to make up roughly 80,000 shots.
Meanwhile, Moderna is expected to continue ramping up its shipments to Manitoba.
Reimer wrote that all appointments made to date will be honoured, and that Manitoba might change course once it gets more information. “We anticipated these issues and have contingency plans in place,” she wrote.
Manitoba’s record on vaccinating people against COVID-19 has been one of the slowest of all the provinces, partially due to stricter protocols on how it reserves and administers second doses.
Yet Dr. Anand Kumar, an infectious disease specialist, questioned Friday’s decision to halt appointments given those precautions.
“If it was my call, I would take that first dose and broadly distribute it to anyone who’s in a long-term care facility or who’s aged 70 and over in the city,” he told the Free Press.
Kumar, who is a an intensive-care physician at the Health Sciences Centre, said delaying the booster shot presents the risk of limited immunity. But he said even more deaths could result from leaving so many doses in cold storage.
“Even if their second dose is going to be substantially delayed, the estimate is you get 80 per cent protection with the first dose,” he said. “I think that is how you’re going to get the greatest impact on the health system and on the number of deaths.”
On Parliament Hill, the head co-ordinator of Canada’s vaccine rollout said officials have been bracing for supply-chain problems.
“This is a bump in the road, and we’ll continue to cruise forward after that,” Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin told reporters.
“We would like to have more predictability (and) assurances that the plan will unfold as we wish it to be, but there’s a global demand of unprecedented proportion.”
Meanwhile, Manitoba had administered 40 to 56 per cent of its received COVID-19 vaccine doses (of both Pfizer and Moderna) as of Thursday.
The province reported having 13,539 jabs in arms, including 11,401 first doses and 2,138 second doses.
(This doesn’t include data on the number of doses administered by First Nations, which have received 5,300 doses of Moderna.)
As of Thursday, Manitoba had received 33,625 doses of both vaccines in total.
The province said all personal care home residents will receive their first dose of vaccine by mid-February, instead of the original target of late January.
So far, only 281 care home residents have been immunized.
“This is a fight where every day counts,” NDP leader Wab Kinew told reporters.
“This failure to get the vaccine out as quickly as possible could, unfortunately, have some real-life impacts on people in our province. The flip side of that is the government still has time to turn things around and get it right.”
dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca