The federal government has published its coronavirus vaccine delivery list, featuring forecasted shipment dates that outline exactly how many doses of each vaccine provinces and territories can expect, and when.
The webpage features three charts. The first details the total vaccine doses that have already been delivered to the provinces and territories. The other two lay out the projected timelines for the dates further doses will arrive — with one chart for Moderna’s vaccine doses, and another for Pfizer’s jabs.
The chart confirming delivered dose numbers will be updated weekly, the website explains. It also reiterates the federal government’s promised timeline: that everyone who wants a vaccine will receive their jab by September.
“Doses of the vaccines will be distributed in Canada in phases, which began in December 2020. Assuming the continued supply of safe and effective vaccines, it’s expected there will be enough vaccines to immunize everyone for whom vaccines are approved and recommended,” the website reads.
“We anticipate this will be accomplished by September of 2021.”
The published data comes after bristling from the provinces regarding the federal government’s vaccine supply. Ontario Premier Doug Ford claimed on Friday that the province was “running out” of COVID-19 vaccine doses, adding that its Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine supply is slated to run dry at the end of this week.
He implored the government to ramp up its distribution efforts.
“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,” Ford said.
However, the chart quashes some of Ford’s complaints, indicating that the province is due to receive a shipment of 80,925 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses this week as well as another 56,700 Moderna doses before Jan. 17.
In addition to that, a vaccination tracker shows the province has only administered about 62 per cent of the vaccines in its possession. That means many doses are sitting in freezers and, with the projected new arrivals this week, are not on track to run dry any time soon.
However, in a statement to Global News, a spokesperson for Ontario Premier Doug Ford said “several hospitals aren’t vaccinating right now because they don’t have vaccines.”
“Suggesting there is no supply problem is not born out by the facts when hospitals have had to pause vaccinations because they have exhausted their supply,” Ivana Yelich said. “Yes, we are receiving more at some point this week and of course we are thankful for the work the federal government is doing to secure vaccines but it’s not keeping up with Ontario’s capacity to administer, which continues to increase.”
Yelich said the province has exhausted the initial shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“We will have exhausted the 48,000 Pfizer doses received last week by the end of this week,” she said.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc hinted that this would be the case in a Sunday interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson.
“If you knew you had 200,000 in a week, how sincere is it to say, ‘Oh my God, at the end of the week we don’t have any more vaccines?’ Of course you don’t, because there are more coming next week, and then the week after there are even more,” LeBlanc said.
With the publication of the new website, Canadians can see exactly how many more doses are intended to arrive each week. The charts lay out the number of vaccine doses each province can expect to have delivered every week until the end up February, with arrivals increasing every week.
This week, Canadians can expect 380,450 doses to be delivered. Weekly vaccine deliveries will then continue to ramp up, with hundreds of thousands arriving on Canadian soil every seven days.
By the first week of February, the weekly shipment will have almost doubled, with 600,000 doses landing in Canada that week. The last week sees that number jump even higher, as 617,200 doses are expected to arrive the week of Feb. 22.
The timeline echoes LeBlanc’s Sunday remarks that the delivery schedule will keep ramping up — and, despite some criticism of a slow rollout, he added that Canada is “not actually behind schedule”
“We were able to get almost half a million doses from Pfizer in December. The Moderna doses have also come sooner than we had been expecting and that the premiers had been expecting,” LeBlanc said.
“So I’m very confident that over the coming weeks you’re going to see a very considerable scale up across the country in terms of provinces immunizing their citizens.”