Ontario Premier Doug Ford said the province is “running out” of COVID-19 vaccines and that it’ll be out of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses by the end of next week.
At a press conference Friday morning, Ford said he spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday night about the need for a more reliable vaccine supply.
Ford said Toronto’s University Health Network will run out of its vaccine supply on Friday. He also said Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket, the Ottawa hospital and “others” will run out of vaccines by the end of the week.
While Ford said Ontario will exhaust its supply of the Pfizer vaccine by next week, a provincial technical briefing released on Tuesday said Ontario will receive about 80,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine during the week of Jan. 11. It also said the province would receive that amount of Pfizer vaccine doses both during the weeks of Jan. 18 and Jan. 25 respectively.
Tuesday’s briefing also said about 56,000 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine are expected to arrive in Ontario on Jan. 11. This is on top of the 53,000 vaccine doses the province received from Moderna during the week of Dec. 28.
Moderna is being used for residents, staff and essential caregivers in long-term care homes in hotspot regions and in the north due to its ability to be transported more easily.
“Ontario has administered more vaccines than any other province in the country,” Ford said Friday.
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“We’re all hopeful the federal government will get us more vaccines. Without them, hospitals will have to start canceling appointments and all the progress we’ve made getting our daily vaccine numbers up will be lost.”
As of 8 p.m. Thursday, the province said 4,053 people have been fully vaccinated with two shots. Ontario has administered 87,563 doses so far.
According to a coronavirus vaccine data tracker website, Ontario has 196,125 doses available and has administered about 44.6 per cent of its current supply of vaccines.
On Friday, Ford said the first phase of Ontario’s vaccine plan is “well underway.”
The first phase, which began on Dec. 15, is seeing limited doses of the COVID-19 vaccine available to health-care workers in hospitals, long-term care and retirement homes, other congregate settings and remote Indigenous communities.
The second phase of the province’s novel coronavirus vaccine plan is slated to begin sometime this winter.
On Tuesday, the Ontario government said it hopes to have all residents, health-care workers and caregivers in long-term care homes in Toronto, Peel, York and Windsor-Essex immunized with at least a first dose by Jan. 21.
The University Health Network’s president said his organization will run out of the COVID-19 vaccine on Friday.
He said the hospital system has 3,000 people booked to be inoculated per day on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
“We have a long, long way to go before enough vaccines arrive for everyone,” Ford added. “Until then, the best and only defense against this terrible enemy are the public health measures.”
— With files from Global News’ Gabby Rodrigues
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