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‘We do not stockpile vaccine’: City blames supply shortage as some local Toronto vaccination clinics close, cancelling thousands of appointments

Thestar.com
April 15, 2021
Francine Kopun

A vaccine shortage is to blame for the fact that local clinics in some COVID-19 hot spots in the city have had to close, Toronto city officials said Wednesday.

In fact, twice as many Toronto residents could be vaccinated at the city’s nine mass vaccination clinics if there were more supply from the province, said Chief Matthew Pegg, speaking at Wednesday’s COVID-19 update from city hall.

Currently, the city is administering 56,322 doses of vaccine each week across the network of nine city-operated mass vaccination clinics.

Pegg said that if vaccine availability increases in the future, as the province has said it will, the city could vaccinate as many as 122,000 people a week.

Responding to accusations that Toronto Public Health is stockpiling vaccines, Pegg said that in fact, any unallocated doses of the Pfizer vaccine that are not used in city-operated clinics as a result of missed or cancelled appointments are provided directly to Toronto hospital and health-care partners running clinics.

“In summary, we do not stockpile vaccine,” said Pegg, who is head of the city’s emergency operations and the city’s vaccination task force.

The city said Wednesday that vaccines that are allocated to hospital partners are shipped directly to hospitals by the province, and that any changes or delays to the shipments are the result of issues in the Moderna supply chain -- no shipment was received this week, for example.

A shipment of Moderna vaccine, originally scheduled to arrive on April 19, is now expected to arrive on April 29, according to the city.

“We’ve never been anywhere close to full capacity,” said Coun. Joe Cressy (Ward 10 Spadina Fort-York), who chairs the city’s Board of Health.

“Since Day One, across the entire city, we’ve never had enough supply.”

Mayor John Tory said he and other mayors and chairs of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have appealed to the province to send more supply to the region, which is a hot spot for COVID-19, driven by the more contagious B.1.1.7 variant, which first emerged in the U.K.

“They are definitely listening and understand that we need more vaccine supply,” Tory told the Star.

“I have had good, constructive discussions with Premier Ford about this and I’m confident that when there is additional supply available, he will work with us to make sure more doses are allocated so that we can get more people vaccinated in Toronto hot spots.”

It’s a move Cressy supports.

“It’s just based on risk. Where is the highest concentration of cases and the most vulnerability? That is where the vaccine needs to go. That’s the GTA right now,” Cressy said.

Another 1,332 cases were reported in Toronto on Wednesday, and that figure could rise to 2,500 a day if current trends continue, Dr. Eileen de Villa, the city’s medical officer of health, warned Monday.

Meanwhile, an emergency room physician at Scarborough Health Network (SHN) says supplying vaccine to the city’s nine mass immunization clinics has forced the closure of two local clinics, which had been operating longer, and smoothly.

The last of the city’s nine mass vaccination clinics opened Monday, and on Wednesday, SHN announced it was closing its Centennial College and Centenary hospital clinics.

SHN emergency room physician Dr. Lisa Salamon said at least 10,000 appointments will have to be cancelled between Wednesday and Sunday as a result of the two clinics closing.

Salamon said the hospital clinics, which deliver Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, were functioning at half capacity when all nine of the city’s mass immunization clinics were opened, and now the mass immunization clinics are only operating at half capacity as well.

She says the mass vaccination clinics are duplicating ongoing efforts in certain areas of the city, including Scarborough.

“It would have been way more efficient to give the vaccines to the clinics that were already up and running,” said Salamon.

Pegg said the city’s nine mass immunization clinics, which administer the Pfizer vaccine, receive supplies from the province of Ontario on a weekly basis.

Pegg said there is currently enough supply to operate the nine city clinics until the end of the day on April 19, when the next shipment of Pfizer is scheduled to arrive, which will supply the nine clinics for another week.

Vaccines are manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and doled out to countries around the world. Federal governments either pass their doses along to other countries requiring extra assistance or to their provinces, territories or states.

Once they arrive in Ontario from the federal government, Toronto gets some, which it passes on to the nine mass-immunization clinics it runs. Right now, the mass-immunization clinics are primarily responsible for inoculating people 60 and older, as well as people 50 or over who live in hot spot areas.

The provincial government keeps the rest of the doses, which it gives to local hospitals a bit at a time.

Ontario keeps some doses in storage -- about 1.2 million as of Wednesday morning -- or about 27 per cent of what it has received thus far.

The stored doses are meant to provide a buffer in case of supply issues.