While there is no official word yet on how the new Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be distributed in Northern Ontario, there is the possibility that Health Sciences North (HSN) in Sudbury will become one of the distribution hubs as described by the Ontario government.
There is also the possibility that Northerners might have to wait for the Moderna Vaccine.
Initially two pilot vaccine sites, the University Health Network in Toronto and the Ottawa Hospital are to be set up, followed by several hospital locations, said the COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Task Force in a document released last week.
Also last week Public Health Sudbury and Districts (PHSD) was discussing the vaccine distribution plan for this area and indicated that HSN is a likely choice.
"Vaccine storage is also co-ordinated locally with Health Sciences North as it has been identified by the province as a potential site for the distribution of the Pfizer vaccine," said part of the PHSD news release.
Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre announced on Dec. 15 that it had been selected as the Pfizer vaccine distribution site in Northwestern Ontario.
The distribution plan was also discussed briefly Monday during the daily Queen's Park COVID-19 briefing with Premier Doug Ford and retired Gen. Rick Hillier, who heads up the vaccine distribution task force in Ontario.
The question was whether long-term care home residents in the Ottawa area would be getting the Pfizer vaccine anytime soon, partly because Ottawa is still considered a COVID-19 hotspot (restricted orange zone).
Hillier responded that the priority is to get the vaccine to the people who are most vulnerable, but he said that would not work with the Pfizer vaccine, which must be kept at an extremely cold temperature during storage and transportation.
"As of this movement we cannot move the Pfizer vaccine from the sites where we receive it," Hillier told the briefing.
He said the provincial vaccine task force has decided to bring the long-term care workers to the vaccine site instead.
"We can get the workers in those long-term care homes that we really want to protect those in the most vulnerable circumstances to come to the vaccination site. But we have made a decision that to try and move residents from those long-term care homes to the vaccination site increases the risk so dramatically that we would not want to do it," Hillier said.
"We've been told by the medical professionals that by doing the essential workers, the staff at the homes, the essential visitors and the health-care workers that go in there, we can probably increase the protection by over 90 per cent because that's the vector that carries the virus that causes COVID-19 into the homes," he added.
Health Canada's chief medical advisor Dr. Supriya Sharma said her department is moving toward a formal approval of the Moderna vaccine in the near future.
Canadian Press quoted Sharma on Tuesday as saying things looked positive for Moderna and that Health Canada only had to review documentation before giving approval.
Hillier told the Tuesday briefing that the Ontario task force is eagerly waiting for Moderna vaccines, which does not have an extreme cold temperature requirement.
"The Moderna is going to be our first go-to vaccine to allow us to go into long-term care homes. We may receive some greater flexibility on the Pfizer vaccine in the weeks to come. We don't know that for sure. But we remain hopeful that will change," Hillier said.
"And thirdly, there may be another vaccine beside Pfizer and Moderna approved in the near future that could also give us that same kind of flexibility. In the interim, as soon as we get Moderna we are going to start with vaccination sites in those long-term care homes," Hillier added.
He also commented on the need to get vaccines to smaller and remote communities in Northern Ontario. Hillier said First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities are priorities.
"We've got to look at the North. We started a planning operation this morning to shape how we would look at those kinds of operations and get to those vulnerable populations in the North," he said.
"For example we looked at some of the communities on the James Bay that get flooded out every single spring and obviously, in a really good world, we would want to be able to get a vaccination program in place for them in case any kind of flooding and movement was to take place in the spring again, so we don't put them into an even riskier, more vulnerable situation," he added.
Len Gillis is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter at Sudbury.com, covering health care in Northern Ontario. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the federal government.