TORONTO -- NOTE: Now that several vaccines have been approved and deployed in Canada, this article is no longer being updated. You can follow the vaccine rollout through our interactive vaccine tracker, and get information on how to access vaccination programs in each province and territory.
The vaccines have arrived.
Despite early skepticism that a vaccine for COVID-19 could be developed, properly tested and approved faster than ever before, an unprecedented effort from scientists, governments and pharmaceutical companies has brought two vaccines to the rollout stage in Canada less than one year after the novel coronavirus was first reported to the World Health Organization.
Several other vaccines appear to be close to similar approvals, which is welcome, because the realities of producing enough doses to vaccinate the entire world in short order mean that if several vaccines are found to offer similar effectiveness, governments will take whichever vaccines they can get their hands on.
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To that end, Canada has paid to secure access to as many as 414 million doses of potential COVID-19 vaccines, as of late November, with an estimated six million doses expected to arrive in the country by March 31. The federal government has said that it has a $1-billion fund available to use for purchasing vaccines.
Most of the vaccines that appear likely to be used in Canada require two shots to be fully effective. Some of them require complicated ultra-cold storage. All of them will have gone through a well-established scientific testing process and then been assessed separately by Health Canada before they are deployed here.
CTVNews.ca has compiled a guide to the vaccine candidates that have been approved for use in Canada or appear to be on that track, as well as others that have made headlines, are touted by prominent backers or are being developed and studied right here in Canada.
Can't see the interactive? Click here for the full experience.
Interactive by Jesse Tahirali and Mahima Singh