Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos assures that stocks of vaccines against COVID-19 continue to be managed “in the most responsible way possible”, despite tens of millions of doses lost because they have expired.
“We know that in any vaccination operation, there are necessarily, as in any other management of drugs and treatments, things that are not used or usable. But we minimize that while protecting the health of Canadians and Quebecers, ”said the minister in a press scrum in Ottawa on Tuesday.
the Montreal Journal revealed Tuesday morning that Canada must dispose of 32 million doses of anti-COVID vaccine because they did not find a buyer in time, including 22.5 million which were stored in the central reserve of the federal government.
This total loss is estimated at around $680 million.
Mr. Duclos cited several reasons why these doses had not been sent to other countries, in particular the difficulty for certain countries to manage the stocks, but also “a certain misinformation in relation to the importance of vaccination, including in developing countries.
He estimates that Canada has donated nearly 60 million doses around the world.
Here as elsewhere, the pace of vaccination has slowed considerably, in particular due to better protection against the more serious consequences of COVID-19, the result, ironically, of mass vaccination.
Canada’s “bet”
Dr. Johanne Liu, an authority on pandemic emergencies, said Canada took a “gamble” at the start of the pandemic by placing orders for nearly 400 million doses initially.
“At that time, it was unclear which vaccine was to come to the end of the race to be effective. We can understand that approach. That said, it was fairly clear and fairly quickly that we had too many vaccines in our treasury and that […] it would be nice to start sharing,” she said in an interview with Mario Dumont at LCN.
The lesson to be learned to prevent such a situation from happening again is to share the doses with the countries that need them “upstream” rather than “downstream”, because Canada “always has the means to have a regular supply.