Canada looks longingly at US, frustrated by unexpected vaccine shortage

ONTARIO.- In this border town of Canadaacross the Niagara River from New York State, televisions are receiving signal from Buffalo channels and, in recent weeks, news from United States they showed irritating pictures.

Earlier this month, in Erie County, New York, anyone over the age of 16 is eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine. Meanwhile, on the Canadian side, vaccinations have been largely limited to those over 55, Aboriginal adults and other priority groups. And also, for now, they will only receive the first dose.

“It’s a source of frustration in Canada and the Niagara region,” he says. Wayne Redekop, Mayor of Fort Erie. “The neighbors are starting to find out who got the shot and where they got it … It looks like if you’re in the US and want to get the shot, they get you shot.”

After a start of strikeouts, the vaccination campaign in Canada has accelerated in recent weeks. Yet the image of the United States – a neighboring country to which Canada is often compared – teeming with vaccines and far ahead in immunization fuels this frustration.

Ontario, the most populous province in Canada, it is also the hardest hit by the pandemic. The current number of cases far exceeds the peak reached in January, in the middle of the boreal winter, and today intensive care units are so overcrowded that children’s hospitals are admitting adults.

The Governor of Ontario, Doug Ford, attributes the current boom in cases and hospitalizations to the federal government, who he accuses of not having given him enough vaccines. Its restrictive measures, meanwhile, sparked anger across the province. And epidemiologists accuse him of relaxing the restrictions prematurely, against the advice they gave him at the time.

Here in the Niagara region at the southern end of Ontario, about 26% of residents have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and 2% have received both, according to official data. Across the border in the US counties of Erie and Niagara, nearly 45% of people have received a dose and 30% have already received both.

This Monday, and at the request of President Biden, all states in the United States had widened the age range allowed for get the vaccine for anyone over 16. For his part, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that all Canadians who wish to be vaccinated will receive their vaccine by the end of September.

Connor petersA 21-year-old student from Thorold, Ontaraio, has not been vaccinated, and neither has his 56-year-old mother. But several of his friends across the border are already.

“When we see Biden saying he’s finished 100 million doses in 100 days and he wants to go one step further and break that mark, when we have 25% of the population vaccinated here in Niagara with just one dose, it’s pretty depressing, ”says Peters.

The global immunization campaign has been defined by inequality.

High-income countries, which represent only 16% of the world’s population, have reserved more than 50% of the vaccine supply in the short term, according to researchers at the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Duke University.

Canada had reserved enough doses to fully immunize its population, making surprising advance purchase agreements with several labs at the same time, including Pfizer and Moderna, but struggling to actually get them delivered.

One of Canada’s problems, unlike the United States, is that it has a very limited local capacity to manufacture vaccines, and for the moment, it depends entirely on shipments from foreign manufacturers.

Severe global shortages, unforeseen production delays, poor communication about the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine by officials at all levels of government, and contracts requiring delivery of most doses for during the second and third quarters of this year. year, all these factors have been added to end up complicating the campaign.

The responsibility for managing and deciding which priority groups will receive doses sent by the federal government to Ottawa rests with the provinces, and in many of them the campaign has been so chaotic it has discouraged people.

Residents of Ontario, for example, must go through a labyrinth of online pages to register for a campaign which has been severely criticized for not targeting those most at risk of contagion. And with few people ready to receive AstraZeneca’s, the province announced that starting this week, everyone over 40 is eligible to receive this vaccine at any pharmacy.

With a few exceptions, the Canadian provinces continue to immunize almost exclusively the elderly, a few middle-aged people and priority groups, but not the general population. As of Friday, the province of British Columbia will allow the registration of adults of all ages.

The United States applied more than double the per capita dose of Canada. Almost 40% of those living in the United States have received at least one dose, according to the data site Our world in data at the University of Oxford, compared to just 24% in Canada.

And the chasm among those who received both doses is staggering: 25% of Americans, compared to 2% of Canadians.

Many Canadians wonder why the United States – which, like Canada, has set aside hundreds of millions of doses more than it needs – isn’t sharing some of its surplus. And it doesn’t make much sense that the Pfizer-BionTech vaccine is produced in Michigan, but the doses Canada receives are from Europe.

Last month, the Biden administration announced it would “loan” Canada 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be licensed in the United States. There are tens of millions of additional doses of this vaccine in the United States inventory.

Redekop, the 71-year-old mayor of Fort Erie received his first dose last week, and says the United States is willing to share: lifting restrictions on non-essential travel to the land border between United States and Canada will likely be linked to vaccination rates.

In this area, the cross-border links are deep. Neighbors are fans of the same sports teams and mixed marriages are numerous. The Americans have cabins on the Canadian side. Before the restrictions, locals frequently passed each other to work, shop, or visit loved ones.

Canada registered significantly fewer deaths from Covid-19 than in the United States, and the vast majority of Canadians supported the restrictions. But this month, Canada’s weekly average per capita daily cases surpassed that of the United States for the first time, an increase due to new variants sweeping across several provinces.

Overall, Canada has held up better than the United States against the coronavirus, but its vaccination campaign is far behind.

In Fort Erie, “closed” signs abound in stores along the Niagara River, people are mobilizing only to get to the shore, and the end of the pandemic still seems far away.

the respected Cheryl wood, 50, a pastor at St. John’s United Church in Stevensville, says she was vaccinated several weeks ago because religious leaders had priority, but is upset because her 28-year-old daughter years, who also works for the church, is “very, very low on the list.”

“I don’t know if I’m jealous,” Wood says, referring to the rapid vaccination campaign in the United States. “What I feel is frustration.” And this feeling is repeated along the almost 9,000 kilometers of the border.

John powellA double citizen who lives in Windsor, Ont., He became so impatient with the vaccination rate in Canada that he crossed the Michigan border several weeks ago to get vaccinated at a pharmacy outside of Detroit.

“Seeing on Facebook how my friends and colleagues were vaccinated, my classmates, I was outraged,” said Powell, 55. “I thought it was wrong.”

Powell says several people with dual citizenship have done the same.

“Detroit is right there, it’s basically an extension of our backyard,” says Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens. “It’s like our neighbors have an advantage and we don’t.”

Translation of Jaime Arrambide

The Washington Post