SCARBOROUGH – Ontario Premier Doug Ford has not publicly committed to a timeline to provide the AstraZeneca vaccine to Thunder Bay pharmacies.
Asked on Monday about where his government’s promised addition of 350 pharmacies to a pilot project announced earlier this month will go, Ford said nothing of Ontario’s north.
“We’re going to double the amount of pharmacies up to 700,” Ford said. “We have 350. We really want to focus on the Peel Region, York and Toronto. I’ve used this example all the time. Yes, we have bush fires all around the province and we need to address those. But we’ve got an inferno happening in other regions, be it Toronto and Peel and York to a degree.
“So we’re going to make sure we focus on those regions.”
Earlier this month the province announced 327 pharmacies in three public health units – Toronto, Windsor-Essex County and Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington – would be able to start administering doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Anyone born in 1961 or earlier is eligible.
Thunder Bay, which has been in Grey-Lockdown for three weeks, has one of the highest case counts per 100,000 in the country, and though that number has dropped from a high of 277 on March 13 to 161 on Monday, that’s still four times the threshold to return to Red-Control.
The 350 additions to the pharmacy programs have yet to be announced.
Ford said the biggest obstacle is a lack of doses.
“We don’t have a guaranteed supply chain,” Ford said.
The premier added the province was supposed to get 300,000 vaccine doses this week, but that number has been reduced by more than two-thirds, to 90,000.
There is also uncertainty surrounding when more doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be arriving. The United States last week promised to loan Canada 1.5 million doses.
