TORONTO -- More front-line health care workers received the COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday morning as the mass immunization effort to end the coronavirus pandemic in Canada continued.
In Ottawa, a personal support worker named Jo-Anne Miner was the first of a planned 100 people to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the nation’s capital on Tuesday.
She told reporters that she “feels fine” and hopes everyone who can gets immunized “to protect our most vulnerable.”
In Toronto on Monday, five personal support workers from a long-term care home were the first in the province to get vaccines from an initial Ontario batch of 6,000 doses. Camera crews captured the landmark moment as Anita Quidangen became the first in the group to receive the potentially life-saving shot at the University Health Network.
“Thank you very much… I’m excited,” Quidangen said to applause from colleagues.
Last week, Canada became the third country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for use, and by Sunday the first shipments arrived in Quebec. Since then, 14 sites across the country have started to receive shipments and immunize the first Canadians, prioritizing front-line workers.
In Ottawa on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined Canada’s Minister of Health Patty Hajdu to discuss the initial delivery of doses to the Ottawa Hospital, where Trudeau was born.
“It is a good day to be back,” he said. “We were worried six, 10 months ago it might take a really long time to develop a vaccine. Obviously 10 months is long when you’re in the middle of a pandemic, but the fact that we’ve got it and the fact that there are so many different vaccine makers using different approaches that are very, very promising, gives us good optimism for being able to cover Canadians, because we have so many different potential vaccines and so may potential doses.”
Though a pivotal moment in efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19, the vaccine remains a "scarce product" at this stage, stressed Dr. Bruce Aylward, the senior advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organization.
“This is the light at the end of a very long tunnel," he told CTV News Channel on Tuesday. "But this is a really important part of the way forward... I think it just makes it easier for everybody now to accept the other measures and do everything they can to control this disease.”
By the end of the week, the number of people vaccinated at the University Health Network should reach 1,500, according to Dr. Bradly Wouters, the executive vice-president of science and research at the hospital network. His team has received 3,000 doses, but half of them have been earmarked for each person’s second dose, which is required 21 days after receiving the first. It’s just one of the various logistical challenges facing the Canadian immunization effort, not the least of which are the storage needs of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The inoculant must be transported and stored at -70 C, a requirement that led to the government ordering shipments of ultra-cold freezers and dry ice to manage the product.
Other vaccines that are likely to arrive in Canada in the coming months have fewer barriers to their transportation. The Moderna candidate, which Wouters expects to be approved by Health Canada this month, requires a storage temperature of just -20 C. That will allow the Moderna vaccine to be transported to a broader range of locations, including rural communities that might not have the freezing capacity of urban health networks. That means some high-risk Canadians aren’t likely to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech shot for now, at least, added Wouters.
“The Pfizer vaccine may have logistics in place, have freezers in place in more remote communities to make it available too as more doses become available,” Wouters told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday. “But it’s likely the Moderna vaccine will be ahead of that and the very first vaccines available to those more remote areas will very likely be that one.”
As vaccinations continue this week in Canada, an end to the COVID-19 pandemic is still a long way off, experts warn. But this remains a landmark week marking the hoped-for beginning of the end to the global health crisis.
“That’s what we’re all really excited about is how this will end community transmission and make it safe for everyone to go back to work and live a more normal life,” said Wouters.
When Canadians can expect to see COVID-19 infections drop is a difficult question, said Aylward, but other disease outbreaks clearly show it won't be a quick process.
“What you see is a curbing of that curve and then a slow decline and a skewing of it. We’re still going to be dealing with this disease well into 2021," he said. While the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is an important step, a vaccine was never the only answer to ending the pandemic.
"In the long-term, this is the right answer, but we still have tools and knowledge that could have made a much bigger dent in this disease."