Quote:
Originally Posted by ownedbycats
Alas, the CMA wants to re-allocate my province's share of the vaccines to Ontario. Even though they already have enough unused doses to vaccinate every adult in our province.  Meanwhile, the number of cases in N.S. has been rising and two staff members at LTCs have diagnosed positive. I am afraid. |
I had read that Canada was having trouble in getting the vaccines out. After seeing your post here, which is kind of scary I will agree, I did some research into what happened. Because a few months ago, I thought Canada was being criticized for ordering way more vaccine than they could ever use.
Apparently the decision was made to spread out those orders over a bunch of manufacturers of different vaccines. That sounds perfectly reasonable as a strategy - don't get tied into one supplier who may not be able to deliver. But what actually happened is that Canada ended up with a bunch of orders for vaccines like Astra-Zeneca, Johnson&Johnson, etc. and those vaccines have not been approved for use in Canada. So they have orders for stuff they can't use (currently).
On top of that, Canada did not trust the US to deliver vaccines, thinking Trump would implement an export ban and leave Canada hanging. So they went with European distributors. Those European distributors are having production/distribution issues of their own, and did not make Canada their priority. And some of the Europeans are making mention of possible export bans now (I heard that somewhere, but can't remember where, so consider it hearsay).
So a few months ago Canada was being criticized for ordering tons more vaccine then they could ever use, and now they can't get that delivered, or couldn't use it even if it were. They are asking others for help now since the European distribution chain is marginal.
That's quite the mess. The ways out of it that I can see, are (1) hopefully the US or Russia or China or India (the non-European suppliers that I know of) can give Canada some supply to fill in, and (2) Canada might want to put more priority on testing and approving other vaccines, especially the ones that they have outstanding (and currently unusable) orders for.
Moving shipments of scarce resources from one place to another makes sense only if those supplies would do massively more good in the alternate place. But that does not sound like what is being described by ownedbycats. It's an entire province to province move. That sounds very hard to justify - snubbing an entire province.
I'd be pissed too.