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Nurses at the Humber River Hospital Mobile Vaccine Clinic prepare coronavirus vaccines for Moderna at Apotex pharmaceutical company in Toronto on April 13, 2021.
Carlos Osorio / Reuters
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Moderna will send two million COVID-19 Vaccine doses to Canada in the first three weeks of June, but that number will have to double in the second half of the month if delivery targets are to be met.
The federal government announced Thursday that it had received a delivery schedule for the first half of June, after last week asking the company to set a precise schedule for June and July.
In a statement posted on Twitter on Thursday, Procurement Minister Anita Anand said that next week Moderna will send 500,000 doses of injections, and in the week beginning June 14, it will send another 1.5 million doses. According to calculations by The Globe and Mail, this means that Moderna will have to deliver 4.6 million doses in the last two weeks of June to meet its goal of delivering 10.3 million doses between April and June.
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This goal has already been lowered from a previous commitment to deliver 12.3 million doses in that time frame.
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“Moderna indicated that it will continue to increase deliveries in the second part of June, with millions of additional doses,” Anand said in a statement posted on Twitter. However, Ms. Anand did not disclose the total number of deliveries for the second quarter.
Last week, the US company told The Globe that it is “working to meet its vaccine delivery commitments in June.”
At a vaccine briefing on Thursday, Joel Paquette, Canada’s Managing Director of Public Services and Procurement, did not explain why our company only offers short-term deadlines. “We provide the information we have when it is available,” he said, adding that the company “is committed to providing doses to Canada as soon as possible. We continue working with them to improve the delivery schedule ”.
Ms. Paquet said Moderna has faced delivery disruptions and is struggling to ship larger shipments due to “some difficulties” it has encountered in increasing production.
Moderna is expected to play an important role in the country’s vaccination campaign. The federal government bought 44 million doses of the company and 48 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech. But while Pfizer shipped large shipments regularly and reliably, Moderna’s supply was less predictable.
Pfizer has already submitted a weekly delivery schedule to the federal government for shipments through the end of July. Throughout June, the company will ship 2.4 million doses per week, and in July, it will ship about 2.3 million doses per week.
