Canada To Receive 1.5 Million Extra Pfizer Vaccine Doses This Month

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada will get an extra 1.5 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine delivered this month.

Another one million doses will arrive in both April and May.

Those doses were originally set to arrive in the summer.

“We are expecting far more doses by September than there are Canadians, even given that we’re only talking about doses from four different approved companies right now,” Trudeau said Friday.

“We have reasons to be optimistic.”

The federal government had a contract to buy 40 million doses of the vaccine, which requires two shots for full effectiveness.

The news from Pfizer that it will speed up deliveries comes after a marked delay in the national vaccination effort in January and February, when the company decided to upgrade production lines at a major factory in Belgium.

The Liberal government had originally set a target of the end of September for every Canadian “who wants one” to get a vaccine.

Despite the new vaccines coming online and accelerated timelines, the government has not yet formally moved up that schedule, having been burned by production and delivery delays last month.

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