Province taking another look at health-care workers prioritized for COVID vaccines

After hearing from health-care groups, Premier Scott Moe says Saskatchewan is going to reassess which groups are included as a priority for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Moe didn’t make any promises that more will be included when he discussed the topic Thursday, just that the Ministry of Health will evaluate again if there are other groups that are a high risk and come into contact with COVID patients.

Moe said there will be a number of health-care groups that will end up in the mass vaccination category.

As well as health-care workers, Moe said he has heard from other groups who want to be considered a priority for the vaccination.

“I understand totally why they might feel that way, and if we had more vaccines available from the federal government, we would be able to look at getting everyone vaccinated a lot more quickly than we have thus far,” Moe said.

But Moe defended the current plan to give most of the province access to vaccines on the basis of age. He said there’s a scarce supply of vaccines and going by age is the best way to vaccinate the population quickly while also reducing severe outcomes for those who get COVID.

If the country is still going to get six million vaccine doses delivered by the end of the first quarter, Moe said by the middle of March the province is hoping to be up to 4,000 doses a day, and 7,000 by the middle of April.

“That is why we have a plan that is primarily focused on age, to reduce the negative outcomes of those who contract COVID, but also focused on capacity so that we can ensure that we are prepared to deliver the vaccines that the federal government has indicated they will be providing,” explained Moe.

A made-in-Canada vaccine

On Thursday, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister announced his government has bought two million doses of a COVID vaccine from Providence Therapeutics, a vaccine that is still in the clinical trial phase.

“It’s not off the table for Saskatchewan as well, to engage on that option,” said Moe.

However, Moe also pointed out Saskatchewan has put a good chunk of money into VIDO-InterVac at the University of Saskatchewan. The lab there also has a COVID vaccine that just entered the clinical trial phase, and the lab is also building a production facility.

A vaccine drought in the southwest

While some parts of Saskatchewan are getting their second doses, there are some areas that haven’t received any doses, including southwest and south-central Saskatchewan.

Moe said the plan had been for those areas to get a shipment of vaccine but because there were reductions in shipments to Saskatchewan, those vials had to be used for second doses for other people “as we were going to be beyond what was (manufacturers’) recommended time frame for second doses.”

The premier pointed to that as a consequence of a lack of access to vaccine in the first two months of the year.

Moe said the province is hoping to get vaccine to those areas as soon as it can, but didn’t say when. He did say that if the federal government’s expectations of six million doses by the end of the first quarter come though, the province would start to get a large number in the last two weeks of March.

Queue-jumping

In other jurisdictions, when vaccines have rolled out to the wider population, there have been some instances of queue-jumping — people getting the vaccine before they’re technically supposed to.

Moe is asking people to not even entertain the thought of jumping the queue.

Moe said when people do that, it means vaccine won’t be available to someone else who’s older and who’s more at risk of severe health outcomes if they contract the virus.

“We’re better than that in this province,” said Moe. “We need to prioritize those that are at risk of having the most severe outcomes from COVID-19 and ensure that we make what has been to this point a very scarce supply of vaccines available to them as quickly as possible.”