Canada to receive first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine before the end of December

Canada to receive first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine before the end of December

FPJ Web DeskUpdated: Tuesday, December 08, 2020, 11:08 AM IST
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Pfizer and BioNTech will deliver the first doses of their COVID-19 vaccine to Canada before the end of December, reported Reuters.

According to a report by Reuters, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday said that Canada will get up to 250,000 doses of the vaccine developed by American drugmaker Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech before the end of December. He said the first shipment could arrive this month, and a further three million doses should be delivered at the start of 2021.

The vaccine is expected to be approved by Health Canada as soon as Thursday. “There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of which vaccines were going to arrive first ... we wanted not to get people’s hopes up,” he told reporters.

Trudeau had come under criticism from opposition parties for saying Canadians won't be among the first to get a vaccine against COVID-19 because the first doses will likely go to citizens of the countries they are made in.

Trudeau said Canada has contracts with six other vaccine makers as well. Seniors and workers in long-term care homes are among those expected to get the vaccine first.

The Canadian government has contracted with several pharmaceutical companies — including AstraZeneca, Pfizer and BioNTech, Sanofi and GSK, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Medicago and Moderna — for COVID-19 vaccines.

As the Pfizer vaccine must be kept at ultra-cold temperatures, to ensure vaccine safety, batches will be delivered to 14 urban centres across Canada, with systems for delivery and storage currently under test.

On Monday, Canada reported 6,499 new cases and 84 fatalities, which increased the overall infection tally and death toll to 423,054 and 12,777, respectively.

The total number of coronavirus cases has breached the 67.5-million mark globally, as per the latest updates by Johns Hopkins University (JHU). As per the COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at JHU, the global tally stood at 67,535,605 as of 6.56 am (IST) Tuesday. As many as 1,543,237 patients worldwide have succumbed to the pathogen so far. The live dashboard reported that 43,435,568 patients have recovered from COVID-19 worldwide.

(Inputs from Agencies)

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