By Canadian Press

Pfizer-BioNTech cutting back vaccine deliveries to Canada due to production issues

Jan 15, 2021 | 9:23 AM

OTTAWA — Global supply issues are temporarily delaying Canada’s vaccine shipment from Pfizer-BioNTech, but Procurement Minister Anita Anand says they will be made up with accelerated deliveries in February and March.

Anand said Friday that production issues in Europe will temporarily reduce promised doses to Canada, as well as all countries that receive vaccines from Pfizer’s European facility.

While the company assured Canada it will still be able to deliver four million doses by the end of March, Anand admitted that is no longer guaranteed.

“This is unfortunate. However such delays and issues are to be expected when global supply chains are stretched well beyond their limits,” Anand said at a news conference Friday. 

“It’s not a stoppage.”

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Canada has received about 380,000 doses of the vaccine so far, and was supposed to get another 400,000 this month and almost two million doses in February. 

The news comes as Ottawa released federal projections that suggest the pandemic may soon exceed levels seen in the first wave, rising to 19,630 cumulative deaths and 10,000 daily infections in a little over a week.

The modelling shows total cases could grow to nearly 796,630 from about 694,000, and that another 2,000 people could die by Jan. 24.

Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam urged sustained vigilance as a long-range forecast suggested rapid growth would continue without “quick, strong and sustained” measures.

Tam said that’s especially so in national hot spots of Quebec and Ontario, where a steady increase in hospitalizations has strained the health system’s ability to keep up with critical care demands. The projections do not take into account Quebec’s recently implemented four-week curfew or Ontario’s new stay-at-home orders.

Tam emphasized the need to reduce community spread to help relieve some of the pressure on hospitals and long-term care homes. 

“The vaccine alone is not going to make a dent in some of that,” she said.

“As the older population in long-term care receive the vaccines we’re going to look very carefully to see if the serious illnesses and the deaths go down, but that’s also a factor of what’s happening in the community.”

It was an especially deadly day in Ontario, which reported 100 deaths linked to COVID-19, although that took into account a data entry error in one of its public health units.

Middlesex-London added 46 deaths to the province’s daily tally that actually occurred earlier in the pandemic.

Ontario also reported 2,998 new cases of COVID-19 with 800 of those new cases in Toronto, 618 in Peel Region and 250 in York Region.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 15, 2021.

The Canadian Press