MONTRÉAL, Québec (CU)_The Canadian government says it is still too early to plan the distribution of the country’s surplus vaccines for lower-income countries, despite a plea from the World Health Organisation.
Canada has signed advance purchase agreements to purchase up to 414 million doses of various COVID-19 vaccines, sufficient to vaccinate about five times more than its population.
In December last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this surplus will be donated to the COVAX fund for lower-income countries, although he has not specified if this donation would be done after the entire Canadian population is vaccinated.
The Canadian Prime minister spoke to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last week, and Trudeau’s office reported that the two leaders discussed the issue of “equitable and efficient access to vaccines” and the COVAX Facility.
Of the 28 million vaccine doses that have been administered worldwide in recent weeks, just one African country, Guinea, has managed to do any vaccinating so far, with about two dozen doses of a Russian vaccine.
Accordingly, South African officials have warned of “chasms of inequity” in the private deals between wealthy countries and vaccine manufacturers.
In the recent days, the World Health Organisation has been requesting higher-income countries to release their surplus vaccines, which could be administered to vulnerable and high-risk groups in lower-income countries.
“I urge countries that have contracted more vaccines than they will need, and are controlling the global supply, to donate and release them to COVAX immediately,” the Organisation’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a media briefing in Geneva last Friday (Jan 8).
Dr. Tedros said that rich countries have already brought up the majority of the supply of multiple vaccines, and is now making additional bilateral deals. This, he noted, potentially bumps up the price of vaccines for everyone else, which means high-risk people in the poorest and most marginalized countries don’t get the vaccine.
A spokesperson for Canada’s International Development Minister Karina Gould, said the government would make decisions about the surplus doses once it has “a better sense of which vaccines are approved and of what stage our vaccination efforts are at”.
Noting that Canada is the second-largest bilateral donor to COVAX, the spokesperson reassured Ottawa’s commitment to “equitable vaccine distribution strategies both at home and globally”.
However, some humanitarian organisations are of the view that the vaccine surplus issue is not merely hypothetical for vulnerable health workers in low-income countries.
“Surplus doses would be better in the arms of health care workers in another country that needs them, than sitting in Canadian freezers,” Jason Nickerson, humanitarian affairs adviser at Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders), told The Globe and Mail.
“We face a global reality that low-risk people in high-income countries appear poised to be vaccinated before high-risk people in low-income countries – in part because the available and limited supply of vaccines is being controlled by and directed toward countries such as Canada, who have signed bilateral purchase agreements to prioritize their populations, regardless of their risk, ahead of others,” he pointed out.
Anne-Catherine Bajard, manager of policy and campaigns at Oxfam Canada, said the pandemic cannot be brought to an end until the virus is controlled across the globe. In order to that, “rich countries like Canada should support access to vaccines globally. Only by rolling out vaccines across the globe will everyone by able to go back to a life that resembles some level of normalcy,” she told The Globe.
