> EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all.
Ouch. Reading this from Canada hurts.
(We are way behind EU and I would be very surprised if we get ahead of them at any point).
Ouch. Reading this from Canada hurts.
(We are way behind EU and I would be very surprised if we get ahead of them at any point).
You don't appear to be behind the EU in any substantial way. (2.61 doses/100 administered for EU, 2.49/100 for Canada)
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
----
You've purchased more vaccine relative to population than basically anyone else in the world and you appear to be higher than the EU in terms of the line for deliveries.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
It has been an unfolding story for the past couple of weeks. I wish I know of an article which summarized everything with a timeline, but I do not. The gist of it is that, Canada has purchased many vaccines, but they will not be coming soon enough. It also lacks the leverage that US, UK, and EU have in terms of the production being domestic. So when Pfizer ran into production issues, initially they planned to cut Canada's deliveries by ~50% for 4 weeks but EU's by a 8% for 2 weeks. Of course the issue has developed since then, but the central issue remains the same: Canada is not a priority for getting vaccines, and does not have the leverage to make itself the priority. I am deeply concerned that EU would simply block exports to Canada to make up for the shortfalls in its share of the vaccines. Even before the new laws, that was close to what was happening in practice, with deliveries to Canada being affected most and to EU the least.
Also, Canada's not being far behind is because we started earlier. We have seen our vaccine doses administered per capita ranking go from 6th to 21st. Most of the countries that got ahead of us are the EU countries. And every day, we fall behind more and more EU countries, as our deliveries have been deprioritized compared to EU's. Or at least so it seems. We won't know the full truth until the dust settles. Probably a year from now.
This is simply because of different contractual obligations to the different parties. If I owe you $100 by the end of year, but owe someone else $20 by end of month, I'm going to give full priority to repaying the other person.
> I am deeply concerned that EU would simply block exports to Canada to make up for the shortfalls in its share of the vaccines.
Unwarranted: they've explicitly said they won't. Lots of articles on your news source of choice. one random example: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/01/28/news/eu-health-o...
As a fellow Canadian, it simply doesn't seem to be a big deal yet. May become one, but whatever.
I am not so sure. Canada was the 4th country to sign a contract with Pfizer. We were ahead of the EU. The initial statements by the Canadian government about the reduction in Pfizer production capacity was that they expect all countries will be affected similarly, but the next day we learned that Canada will be affected an order of magnitude more that Europe. It's unlikely that the government did not know what their contract said when they made those statements. In retrospect, Pfizer probably calculated that pissing off Canada is preferable to pissing off Europe and acted accordingly. Now we see that Canada accepted the slowdown gracefully, but Europe threw its weight and started changing the rules. Politically, they made the most expedient decision. But it was and is unfair to Canada.
I'm just not that concerned about it personally. There'll be a political price to pay if it doesn't work out, as well as a contract violation price for the manufacturers. I don't expect I'll be able to get a vaccine until August at the earliest anyway.
I wish addressing climate change was covered with the same urgency by media (mainstream, niche, social, all of the above)
So if there is a need for a new vaccine, we can likely deploy it with a shorter interval to availability and much larger initial volume.
We can also become more disciplined. We don't need to go all the way to a strictly enforced lock down to improve on the social distancing that we've done the last year (at least, not in the US). And we can try to get people to more widely accept contact tracing/tracking.
I'm saying there's reason to be optimistic that we will be able to respond successfully even if the current vaccines don't end the pandemic (and it likely would be reasonably quick too, our tools are much better now than 12 months ago).
At some level of production capacity, convincing people in high risk areas to social distance and convincing people to get another vaccination are the hard parts.