Canada is on the verge of throwing away more than half of its doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, as it has found no takers either in Canada or abroad.
He has also not yet explained how he plans to handle the millions of doses of the Novavax and Medicago vaccines he has purchased, but is unlikely to use them himself.
A statement from Health Canada says 13.6 million doses of the vaccine expired in the spring and will be discarded.
Canada had signed a contract with AstraZeneca in 2020 to obtain 20 million doses, and 2.3 million Canadians received at least one dose of it, mainly between March and June 2021.
In the spring of 2021, following concerns about rare but life-threatening blood clots from AstraZeneca and a larger supply of RNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, Canada stopped calling on AstraZeneca. A year ago, Canada announced it would donate 17.7 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to low-income countries.
In an emailed statement, Health Canada said “Canada has done everything possible” to keep that promise, but 13.6 million doses earmarked for that purpose have expired.
As of June 22, nearly nine million doses have been delivered to 21 different countries.
But demand for AstraZeneca’s vaccine is limited, according to Health Canada, which has been unable to find more takers for the available doses.
“Due to the limited demand for the vaccines and difficulties encountered by recipient countries in distribution and uptake, they were not accepted,” the statement said.
Donations to keep their promises
Dr. Bruce Aylward, an infectious disease specialist from St. John’s and now a senior adviser to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), told The Canadian Press in a recent interview that Canada’s lack of trust towards AstraZeneca has contributed to global vaccine hesitancy.
He mentioned that countries like Canada first hoarded all the vaccines, then rejected AstraZeneca and offered it to low-income countries to fulfill their pledges. Often these donations were made in large quantities as they approached their expiration date.
A glut of doses of a vaccine that people were hesitant to get in countries lacking the health personnel and infrastructure to run a rapid and complex vaccination campaign was the perfect storm for rejection and expiry. .
“They made it incredibly difficult for political leaders in low-income countries to get vaccination coverage,” Aylward said.
About 85% of Canadians are considered fully immunized, compared to 61% of the world’s population and only 16% of people living in the world’s poorest countries.
The head of medical policy and advocacy for Doctors Without Borders in Canada, Adam Houston, said it is “extremely disappointing” that the 75% doses of AstraZeneca that Canada has pledged to donate are being thrown away.
“It underscores how vaccines in press releases don’t translate to vaccines in the arms,” Houston said.
“Today, the global supply of vaccines is no longer the main problem,” he continues. But a year ago, he absolutely was. If the actions of countries like Canada had lived up to their rhetoric of vaccine equity from the start of the pandemic, fewer vaccines would have been wasted, and more importantly, more lives would have been saved. »
Canada has also pledged to donate 10 million doses each of the Johnson & Johnson and Moderna vaccines. The first had production problems, and Canada did not donate this vaccine.
Canada also donated 6.1 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine out of the promised 10 million doses, but it threw away 1.2 million doses of that vaccine.
New Democratic Party (NDP) health critic Don Davies said it was “unacceptable” that doses were expiring when millions of people still have not had a single shot. “There is no excuse for such waste,” Mr Davies said.
He called on the federal government to finally release all the details of its vaccine contracts and its dose utilization plan.
Canada has also signed contracts to get 52 million doses of the vaccine from Novavax and 20 million from Medicago, but now relies almost entirely on Pfizer and Moderna.
Canada has received 3.2 million doses of Novavax so far, and no further shipments are expected. He hasn’t received anything from Medicago, but a spokeswoman said Canada is working with that company on a delivery schedule.
The WHO authorized Novavax’s vaccine for emergency use in December and Health Canada in February. The contract allows Canada to donate doses of both vaccines, but Canada has not confirmed that it will donate them.
Medicago’s donation is more complex, as the WHO does not approve its use by COVAX due to Medicago’s financial ties to tobacco giant Philip Morris.
Neither Novavax nor Medicago responded to media inquiries Tuesday.