Last September, we made the unfortunate observation that Canada was going to suffer a loss of 22 million doses of vaccines against COVID-19, because they had become expired. Some of these vaccines have been destroyed (or will soon be destroyed) after having expired in Canadian federal warehouses. Another part has become obsolete on the COVAX platform, the objective of which is to redistribute vaccines to less well-off countries, because there were no taker countries.
Posted yesterday at 2:00 p.m.
This week, the total volume of vaccines that has been destroyed or will be destroyed has risen to 32 million. This addition of 10 million represents the loss of vaccines at the provincial level and that anticipated with the arrival of the new bivalent vaccine against Omicron.
It is a scandal.
As a reminder, Canada had pre-ordered 358 million doses of vaccines against COVID-19, or more than 9 doses per Canadian. This is not entirely surprising or shocking: our government made bets and in the spring of 2020 chose to bet on different vaccine candidates, as it was far from clear which vaccine would prove effective in protecting us against COVID. -19. More than not enough was the state of mind. We didn’t take any risks. And wow, science has made leaps and bounds by developing several highly effective vaccines to counter severe disease in 10 months.
What is unfortunate is not to have anticipated more the surplus of vaccines that would accumulate over the months with imminent expiry dates.
The shelf life of mRNA vaccines is 6 months in the cold chain. Vaccine management, like all pharmaceutical product management, is an exercise in inventory turnover before the expiration date.
And that’s the rub. As soon as there was a deceleration in vaccination last year, an acceleration in vaccine sharing should have been urgently launched, because Canada knew that a supply chain was assured downstream. In the spring of 2021, I pleaded to “share before it’s too late”1. It is a pragmatic and united posture.
Because sharing vaccines with less well-off countries must anticipate to transform vaccines into vaccination. This transformation takes place in three stages: supply, distribution and the creation of demand. The supply must be timely, when the need is felt, and be announced in advance so that the receiving countries can prepare in advance for storage. The distribution requires an orchestration of the movement of vaccines without breaking the cold chain with trained personnel. Demand must be created through vaccination awareness campaigns so that people want to be vaccinated. Just because vaccines are free doesn’t mean people are going to scramble to get them. And this is all the more true in countries where the mere cost of transport to reach the vaccination point represents several days or weeks of wages. You have to remember that in Quebec, we even created a lottery to encourage people to get vaccinated.
But all this to say that we could have minimized these losses. Thus, to be better prepared for the next major health emergency, it will be necessary to manage “stocks” of countermeasure tools (masks, personal protection, vaccines, antiviral treatments, rapid diagnostics) not in a vacuum, but rather in intelligent inventory turnover by sharing internationally early and regularly. For example, if there were adequate personal protection for haemorrhagic fevers, one could think of offering them to Uganda which is facing an Ebola epidemic at the moment. The idea is to avoid massive losses of inventory, to keep it freshly renewed to be always ready, while being supportive.