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Canada has secured enough potential coronavirus vaccines to fully protect every resident nearly seven times over, even as global shortages have forced poor countries to wait.
After the initial hiccups in his vaccination plan, more than 65% of Canadians have now received at least one dose, ahead of early leaders Israel and the UK, and on Friday, Justin Trudeau said 68 million doses will reach Canada by the end of July.
But Canada’s recent pledge to donate 100 million doses to hard-hit countries has highlighted persistent questions about its commitment to address such inequities.
“We’re going to be able to participate around the world where we see Canadians getting vaccinated at higher and higher levels, and we simply don’t need those doses,” Trudeau said at the G7 summit last week.
However, details of the deliveries remain unclear, and of the 100 million pledged, 87 million doses reflect previously announced funding commitments — not actual physical doses ready for shipment. Only 13 million new actual doses will be sent to countries in need.
“This isn’t new money, and the vaccines don’t seem to have started to act right away, so it looks like it’s a little bit late,” said Isha Berry, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of Toronto.
Although large orders from Pfizer and Moderna arrive each week in Canada, the Trudeau government has instead offered other vaccines.
Many of them are from Novavax, a company whose vaccine has not yet been approved for use in Canada. The rest are doses that Canada purchased through the Global Vaccine Sharing Initiative Covax: from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, the latter of which has been temporarily suspended in Canada due to quality concerns.
Experts say there is an urgent need to shift resources to countries to effectively combat the growing threat of infectious variants of the coronavirus. But many argue that the current mechanism for sharing vaccines has failed.
Kovacs was a beautiful idea, born out of solidarity. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Rich countries acted worse than anyone else’s worst nightmare,” the medical journal The Lancet tweeted.
Canada has faced criticism in the past as the only G7 country that relies on donated vaccine stocks for poor and middle-income countries.
Trudeau’s announcement also reflects a fraught context of vaccine nationalism.
According to a recent survey by Abacus Data, 61% of Canadians believe that it is “morally wrong for people living in richer countries to get their vaccines before those in poorer countries.”
But a survey by the Angus Reed Institute indicates that nearly three-quarters of Canadians also believe the government should “focus its efforts at home rather than abroad”.
Berry cautions against a mentality pitting countries against each other especially when many countries lack the ability to purchase potions directly from manufacturers.
“The current global vaccine gap is much worse than most Canadians realize,” Berry said. Officials from the World Health Organization have said the pandemic will continue until 70% of the population is vaccinated – a far-fetched goal given current pledges by rich nations.
Canada’s contributions are not close to the 11 billion doses needed globally, but Berry says Canada can nonetheless play a key role by calling for exemptions for vaccine patents and helping other countries build capacity.
“We all really want to end this pandemic. Everyone is so tired. But I think there is also a gap in our global understanding of how bad global injustice really is.”
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