With the provincial government looking to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, one local pharmacy believes they can do their part if given more doses than they’re currently receiving.
At Wednesday’s news conference that announced the new provincial stay-at-home order, Premier Doug Ford said he hoped to have 40 per cent of Ontario adults vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of the month-long order.
“And that’s when things start to change dramatically in our favour,” Ford said on April 7. “But the decisions we make now, how we handle the next four weeks (and) what we do until we start achieving mass immunization will be the difference between life and death for thousands of people.”
On April 2, the province announced the expansion of its vaccine rollout to include more pharmacies in regional health units. Seven locations in Barrie were selected and among them was PureHealth Pharmacy, located at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH).
PureHealth pharmacist Joe Kamel told BarrieToday he had a waiting list of 900 people last Thursday who were looking to get the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“We’re the only independent pharmacy in the city who received vaccines and we got 200 and gave out 130 the first day. We were all out the next day,” Kamel said. “We can do two and a half times that with our eight pharmacists.”
PureHealth received 100 additional doses today (April 9) and they were able to distribute all of them before the end of the day, he added.
With a waiting list more than 1,600 people, Kamel said has not heard when they will get more doses.
“We have had no communication on when the next shipment is coming in,” he said. “We are trying to communicate that we need more doses than we are getting, and we should get them because the government keeps saying they want to get needles into arms. We can do that.”
BarrieToday made several attempts to contact Health Minister Christine Elliot’s office about the situation Kamel is facing, but had not received answers any response as of publication time.
In the meantime, Kamel said his pharmacy has cleared space to allow more people to get the vaccine.
The feedback from those vaccinated was positive, he added.
“Everyone was very happy with how we were able to distribute quickly and efficiently," Kamel said. "Even though we can’t reach the proper authorities on how to get more, we use the government portal as we’re supposed to. Through that, you would think they would see the progress we made in two days.”
