Trudeau announces more vaccine coming as provinces run through supplies

Article content continued

According to Maj.-Gen Dany Fortin, who is overseeing the federal deliveries, Pfizer will deliver 208,000 doses per week for the remainder of January and then ramp up in February to approximately 366,000 doses per week.

Moderna will deliver 171,000 doses next week, a similar delivery in the first week of February and then upwards of 250,000 late in February. Before the end of March, Pfizer is set to deliver a total of four million doses to Canada and Moderna will deliver two million. Including the doses delivered in December, the government expects 1.2 million doses to be delivered by the end of January and an additional 1.9 million in February.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has been criticized for a slow rollout of the vaccines, said his province has now picked up the pace and will need more doses soon.

He is working his back off. He is trying his very best

“All of Ontario will be out of Pfizer vaccines by the end of next week, my friends, we are all hopeful that the federal government will get us more vaccines.”

Ford said hospitals in Toronto and Ottawa were already running out and would have to cancel appointments to vaccinate people this weekend. According to information complied by the COVID-19 Open Data Working Group, Ontario has received approximately 148,000 doses of the vaccines so far and administered 87,000 of them.

The working group comprises researchers from the University of Toronto and University of Guelph. They estimate the federal government has distributed 436,000 doses so far, and  the provinces have injected 234,000 of them into high-priority groups.