How Ottawa utterly botched Canada's COVID vaccine acquisition - NP
05 Feb 2021 EWR Online
The COVID-19 vaccine rollout has not been going well for Justin Trudeau's government. Photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Despite spending more money on this pandemic than anyone else, Canada is lagging behind almost every other developed nation in vaccination numbers.
It’s now becoming increasingly clear that as the world mobilizes to immunize itself against COVID-19, Canada is falling seriously behind. At a time when more than half of Israelis have gotten the jab, Canada has only two per cent of its population vaccinated. Recent analysis by The Economist found that while virtually all of Europe will be fully vaccinated by the end of this year, the earliest Canada can hope for is mid-2022. And in one of the sharpest rebukes to Canada’s pandemic performance yet, the federal government has tapped into a global vaccine-sharing pool initially meant for developing nations.
The coming months will reveal much of the failures and oversights that allowed this to happen, but below is a primer on why you’re going to be vaccinated much later than if you were an American, Brit or even Serbian.
Betting our vaccine hopes on a deeply questionable Chinese plan At first, Canada seemed to have vaccine-acquisition under control. The Chinese pharma company CanSino had developed what was then one of the world’s most promising vaccine candidates, and Ottawa struck a deal to have it undergo human trials in Canada, with Canadian laboratories free to reproduce and manufacture the shot.
