national health agency failure in planning?
supply chain constraints?
Import constraints (even though there are plenty across the border?)?
Something else?
In Canada, health care delivery is a Provincial responsibility. However, the Federal government is the one procuring the vaccine doses. The Feds are distributing doses to the provinces based on the population-based formula all the Provinces could agree to. And the Provinces are then incentivized to get into arms locally to show they're doing something.
It appears there is no political will or strong enough incentives available to change the dose distribution to be "needs-based".
The result is that we're unable to target vaccination to the cities and provinces that need it most, so those places are now responding with a 3rd wave of lock downs to prevent the spike in hospitalizations.
And demand isn't in all of the big cities. Just the ones where the provincial governments went early on removing all restrictions on high-contagion events (ie. indoor dining & church-service-like indoor gatherings). Montreal had the largest outbreak per capita of the second wave, and they're doing fine right now because they didn't do these things.
And, Ontario itself is only about 38% population of Canada. The GTA is about 18%. Large, but not close to half.
Canada is roughly in the same situation as every wealthy country that isn't usa, uk or israel (excluding tiny countries).
There has never been a US vaccine ban (see my comment elsewhere). The US did, in fact, pay every pharmaceutical company with a vaccine in development huge amounts of money for enough doses for the entire country from each company. Basically, the US was the firstest with the mostest.
>We got all vaccines from Europe.
... because Canada's bet on CanSino failed.
This is obviously a huge mistake when the vaccines basically pay for themselves.
1. We don't have enough pharma industry to manufacture our own supply. The founder and CEO of the largest Canada HQ'd pharma company was assassinated in 2017 and I'm sure that didn't help.
2. All of the U.S. supply was essentially created under the Trump admin. We were having a mini trade war and enforcing strong border control through that time. In more normal times we probably would have piggybacked on the American supply.
I think that is why our overall progress is more comparable to Europe and not the US.
>supply chain constraints?
Those two mainly. We don't have the supply to vaccinate efficiently and the health agency has had poor reaction to the virus and poor planning in the past for these kinds of events.
The supply chain around Pfizer is very difficult. Export beyond Canada in volume sounds like a tough proposition (it requires a dry ice cold chain). But.. two dose requirements don’t work for hesitant populations, which is where the US is now.
I would guess that US demand for Pfizer will drop and exports of Pfizer to Canada will happen as J&J is deployed more. (At least until kids can get Pfizer)
China's also exporting their sinovac vaccine
As I said, those are exceptions, the vast majority has no option other than to wait for the US to slowly start exporting, or use the european sources.
Canada, like many countries, does not have the capacity to manufacture vaccines at scale. Our vaccine supply comes from over seas. Up to now the United States has not allowed vaccines to be exported to other countries so most of them come from Europe.
The decisions & results reflect this.