Expectations for vaccine distribution were unreasonable

We did not expect a COVID-19 vaccine would be ready in 2020. Due to improvements in science, drug manufacturers avoided many of the traditional steps in drug development. The U.S. poured $2 billion into coronavirus vaccine research. The profit motive is exceedingly high. Vaccines have received preliminary approval from several nations, including Canada.

We understood we would begin to receive doses of vaccines approved late in the first quarter of 2021. The usual suspects howled in protest. On December 7, our Prime Minister announced that our government had secured an initial supply of 249,000 doses in December. That is enough to provide 0.8% of our adult population with one shot of a two-shot vaccine, a minuscule fraction of what is needed, but it raised unreasonable expectations.

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The head of Manitoba’s COVID-19 vaccination task force says the province is currently not making any new appointments for vaccinations due to supply chain issues with bringing the vaccine to Canada. Read on

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There is no shortage of vaccines. Supplies for January will be meagre but steady. It will be April before we receive a million doses a week, and vaccinations are fully under way. Canada is one nation of many wanting large supplies of vaccines immediately. That cannot happen. Our governments do not recognize that we have facilities to produce vaccines in-house under license.
     We need governments to stop the PR presses and tell the truth. Availability of approved vaccine doses governs the rollout. That is not in our control. We are not first or last in line. Without facilities to produce vaccines in-country, we cannot speed the immunization process. It is one more defect we need to fix.
     Pfizer delayed expanding its European factory until its vaccine was approved for distribution in key nations. Claims that we will have people vaccinated by some future date are noise to fill a void and not real.
     The fuss and feathers over vaccines and availability hide other defects of the virus containment effort. We were appalled that 80% of spring fatalities were in long-term care (LTC) facilities. We knew that a second wave was highly probable. We did not take steps to avoid a recurrence of the spring fatalities. There is no excuse for this failure.
     We worried about our health care system being overwhelmed during the spring infections. We did nothing to increase staffing, bed spaces and qualified personnel to deal with the fall resurgence in COVID infections. The pressures on our health care system were predictable and preventable. Why did we fail to address this predictable event?
     We don’t have enough data on COVID to make reliable predictions, and the available information in smaller provinces is useless for modelling. Pretending that we can identify hot spots within a province is nonsense. 706,619 COVID-19 cases (as of January 17) sounds like a lot, but it is only 1.86% of our population. The data is inconsistent from province to province and covers about ten months, which is not nearly enough data to put any credence in other than national totals.
     There has not been an exponential increase in infections at any point in 2020