Canada’s Procurement Minister, Anita Anand has said that a batch of over 855,000 doses of vaccine from Moderna is on its way to Canada,
The delivery of 855,600 doses of vaccine was initially scheduled for last week, but was stalled because of a backlog in quality assurance checks at Moderna’s production lines in Europe.
Anand said that the doses had been picked up by FedEx in Europe and would arrive in Toronto soon. Innomar Strategies, the company that was awarded the contract to handle all vaccine distributions except for Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, will receive them, and they will be distributed to provinces and territories.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Anand said: “The provinces will receive the Moderna deliveries this week.”
A shipment of around one million Pfizer doses was expected on Monday. Once that comes, the total number of new doses for this week will be 1.9 million.
Major-General Dany Fortin, the military officer supervising the federal government’s vaccination distribution, said last week that there could be a delay in the delivery of 1.2 million doses from Moderna next week.
Fortin said: “It’s prudent planning on our part right now to bank on the last week of April.”
It should be noted that Pfizer-BioNTech has been steadily delivering over 1 million shots to Canada every week for over a month, a trend that will continue for a long time.
The Public Health Agency is not anticipating any shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine this week. Also, Canada has approved a vaccine manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, but it remains unclear when the first set of these doses will be delivered.
