Ottawa: Canada is set to begin receiving more than 2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine each week as the two pharmaceutical firms ramp up their deliveries and begin shipping shots from the United States.
Pfizer and BioNTech have been consistently delivering around 1 million doses from Brussels each week since mid-March, but those numbers will double over the next month before increasing further in June.
This week’s doses will also be the first to arrive from Pfizer’s plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., after the U.S. government previously restricted vaccine exports to inoculate its own citizens.
There was no immediate word, however, on progress in talks with the U.S. over the provision of more doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which is in high demand across the country.
Federal Public Service and Procurement Minister Anita Anand said on Friday that Ottawa was “being very aggressive, especially with the supplier.”
U.S. President Joe Biden suggested last month that the U.S. could share its stockpile of tens of millions of AstraZeneca shots, which health officials there have not approved for use.
Demand for the shot has skyrocketed after several provinces dropped the eligible age for the vaccine to 40-plus, and Anand has said Canada will receive 4 million total doses by the end of June, but the government does not have a detailed schedule of when they will actually arrive.
The Pfizer-BioNTech doses are the only shots scheduled for arrival in Canada over the next seven days, with Moderna slated to deliver its next shipment of more than 1 million doses next week.
The feds also haven’t said when they will release doses of the single-shot vaccine from Johnson and Johnson, after the first 300,000 jabs arrived in Canada last week.
Plans to distribute them are now on hold after Health Canada learned some of them were manufactured at a Maryland facility that botched part of the production process for 15 million doses bound for the U.S.
By Lee Berthiaume
The Canadian Press
